When Jerusalem the Golden came out in 1967, it was described in the Guardian as a “detailed observation of the graduate predicament … tidily and wittingly and movingly expressed”.
“The graduate predicament” centred on how best to leave home, a problem also explored in 1967 by the Beatles. The novel’s heroine Clara comes from Northam, a small northern town that is “the very image of unfertile ground”. She hates it with “such violence” that she shakes and trembles. Her mother, meanwhile, is emotionally manipulative and “of the mentality” that refuses her child the opportunity to go to grammar school because of the price of the uniform.
Luckily, she relents and Clara goes to a school where she discovers that thanks to two useful, natural gifts, she has options: “The possession of big breasts, like the possession of a tendency to acquire good examination results, implies power.”
When Clara goes to university in London, we are told: “When she received her first term’s cheque for her State Scholarship Allowance, she stared at it for some time as she contemplated the fact, the printed fact before her; the final vindication of her lonely belief that there was more than one way of life in England.”
That a grammar school is there to help Clara to a better future seems strange enough in 2017 – but a State Scholarship Allowance? As Lisa Allardice wrote in the Penguin Classics introduction: “Jerusalem is very much a fairytale of its time – the 1960s – in that the grammar-school system and the Welfare State are namechecked alongside the handsome prince in helping our heroine’s dreams come true.”
Clara is able to live in a comfortable-sounding room in central London, by herself. She doesn’t have to work menial jobs like most modern students, or even during the holidays. During termtime, she seems to have endless opportunities for adventure: we first meet her at a poetry reading, attended on a whim – a typical chance to expand her horizons at leisure. London offers her escape, a future full of choices, possibility, a life that will continue “thickening up quite nicely”. She has the luxury of time, as well as the certain knowledge that her life is going to be brighter than her mother’s.
Clara is smart and amusing, and Drabble has a talent for empathy that immediately makes her protagonist’s thoughts feel close and urgent. But it’s easy to feel jealous of Clara. That’s not a criticism of Drabble or her protagonist: how could anyone have predicted Milton Friedman and the cruel repercussions inflicted by policymakers and free-market capitalism on our children? Nor does Drabble pretend that her clever, middle-class Clara is without advantages. Very few of her Northam contemporaries would be able to escape so easily. (“In those days people didn’t move very much,” explained Drabble in a 2014 interview.) Clara’s life is exceptional.
But in that same interview, Drabble also said: “Each generation finds it easier. Now you look at England and it’s such an extraordinary melting pot. The amount of mobility is just extraordinary.” That feels more debatable.
First, the melting pot. There is a beautifully described school trip to Paris in Jerusalem the Golden that does make our society seem extraordinary. You can measure progress in the way Clara’s fellow pupils quail about eating garlic and oil, and how they are told “not to talk to Arabs”. But while today’s equivalents of Clara may find it easier to get to university and leave home, it’s hard to feel that they are absolutely more fortunate than her.
Before Clara faces the complications stirred up later in the novel, her biggest worries are about how best to capitalise on the possibilities that are opening up before her – and how to escape the obligations of home. Her mother, she is aware, “has nobody” and wants her daughter home when she graduates. Clara has a hard choice to make, which builds tension. But at least she has a choice, rather than being driven home by economic necessity. Imagine her in 2017, now also facing the debt incurred from her studies, the impossibility of getting on the housing ladder, and the dearth of steady, fairly paid jobs.
Seen from that vantage point, the “graduate predicament” of 1967 starts to look luxurious. At the very least, it seems a question from a long time ago.
