The effect of Keats, Donne and Eliot on lady students

The Grahamstown Festival of the Arts is almost upon us again. Which always makes me think of Rhodes University back in the seventies, and of poetry and young ladies.

The thing is, I was a late starter. When my high school classmates at St Benedict's were boasting of their conquests with the opposite sex, I was so terrified of women I REALLY didn't even know how to talk to them. I probably put them up on a pedestal. Bit of a romantic twat.

It took a year of national service in the Navy to beat that out of me. In the seventies, national service - especially in the Army - did a lot of things to a lot of young men, so I am eternally grateful that all it really did to me was make me "cowboy up, cupcake", as they say in Arizona.

It happened on Navy shore-leave, with a very forward girl who started the evening as a friend's date and ended up as mine. Parked outside her parent's Kempton Park home, it happened in my mom's hand-me-down old Opel Kadett with the gear lever that came out of its socket every time you engaged third - a pretty apt description of the evening, come to think of it.

Things did improve after I left the Navy and became a student. Rhodes in the late seventies was a universe populated with the likes of Andrew and Janet Buckland, Ian Roberts, Jeremy Mansefield, Shaun Johnson, and many others who went on to achieve great heights.

I, like many of them, found myself studying English, Speech and Drama, Psychology and Journalism. Unlike them, instead of paying attention when demigods of literature like Andre P Brink and Guy Butler had the lectern, I was falling for a series of remarkable young women I really didn't deserve.

It never occurred to me until many years later that this was more due to simple availability than ability. I spent the vast majority of my time in the Drama faculty, where women heavily outnumbered men, and where straight men were few and far between. So the reality was simply a matter of statistics.

I remember I never went home in the July holidays. It was the Festival of the Arts, and I tended to be cast in the festival productions. Drama students from UCT, Wits, Natal, Stellenbosch, Tuks and other faculties descended on Grahamstown to perform their Festival productions.

There was a bakery opposite the main pub where one could buy raw dough (cheaper than bread, which meant more money to make gluhwein - it's really cold in Grahamstown in July).

In between productions, the drama students would meet at various digs, and the dough would be baked in strips on a fireplace (many student digs were in old Settler houses with massive hearths and yellowwood floors), and we would discuss Pirandello, Lorca, Ibsen, Brecht, Chekov, Sartre and God knows what else over copious amounts of gluhwein and hot bread.

Among other poems, I could recite 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' by Keats, particularly when drunk, and it had a remarkable effect on young ladies.

I really did love Keats. And John Donne. And a good few Shakespearean sonnets. And if I was really far gone, then out would come a few quatrains of The Waste Land. The drunker I got, the more readily their poems tumbled from my lips. I couldn't help myself. An unanticipated side effect was it got me a fair bit of action.

Except T S Eliot.

Eliot's poems really turned girls off. Especially The Waste Land. With me, it was always a toss up between Eliot and Donne as my favourite poet of all time. It took a couple of disappointments that should have taught me to avoid Eliot, especially when la belle dame sans merci was a really interesting, bright, witty, gorgeous actress, touched by the muse with truly ridiculous amounts of onstage presence, and I ruined the moment by slurring out 'April is the cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land...'. Idiot.

Start the evening with Donne, build up through a few of the Bard's sonnets and end with Keats. Avoid Eliot. Not difficult to remember. Except when you've had an entire bucket of gluhwein chased with couple of glasses of Tassies. Then out came Eliot, and good-bye la belle dame.