Never Going to Do a PhD

3 January 1990, Wednesday, Ampthill

If young-Toby has a plan, after his trip across America, it is to take a PhD at one of the universities he’d visited over the autumn of 1989 — Stanford, Washington State, Mississippi, University of Texas at Austin, Columbia.

He’d only got a 2.1 for his English Language and Literature degree, so no-one wants to give him any money. If he is thinking of a subject, it is probably be something to do with W.H.Auden, as he has contacts with the Auden community. At Columbia, he met up with Auden’s literary executor, Ed Mendelson, who suggested Toby could write on Auden and the Christian-visionary novelist Charles Williams. This is a job no-one else in the Auden community really wants to take on, as reading Charles Williams is not fun.

Toby has also met Nicholas Jenkins, who suggested the way to do an easy-ish PhD was to edit an unpublished text by W.H.Auden. There seemed to be some going begging.

January 3 1990, Wednesday, Ampthill

Today I found out from Columbia [University] that that do not finance foreign students. So that’s that up the spout. Only one functioning application left of the six possible, three attempted, two completed and one sent. The whole thing is a disorganized fiasco, best forgotten. Another blind alley that fooled me into thinking this is it. I doubt Stanford will accept me. I doubt I will accept them if they do. Made some more job gestures. Wrote quite a lot – continuing things that I wrote in my notebook on the [train] journey back from Martin’s. Did some wordprocessing of ‘Forgetfulness’ – this is the working title of the book [that became The Lost Notebook of Babel]. Received a polite and encouraging rejection from Margin.