Falla June: Winne & Bellow

WINNIE & BELLOW

Two days a week, I go to Dundee University as a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund. It’s such a grand title that I’ve been agitating to have it replaced with the title ‘Pooh Fellow’, since it is all paid for by Winnie the Pooh.

The Royal Literary Fund has been in existence since the late 18th century, helping out impecunious authors; Coleridge was an early beneficiary. More recently, the Fund inherited and then sold to Disney the rights to A.A. Milne’s work. This produced a colossal sum of money. At about the same time, there was rising disquiet about the state of writing in British universities; students didn’t seem to know how to do it. So, now, the RLF pays for professional writers to assist by seeing students individually. We will help anyone, British or foreign, from undergraduate to lecturer in any faculty, who has problems with academic writing.

And they have plenty. Some barely speak English, and need remedial surgery. It can be difficult to keep a straight face at times: a design student wrote that, “In every age, jewellers have included materials appropriate to the age, for example stone in the Stone Age and metal in the Metal Age.” Some imagine that they must sound like distinguished professors, and so load their text with indigestible dross. An economics student who came to me kept referring in essays to “individuals operating in the commercial environment.” This, I discovered, meant ‘people shopping’. “But I have to sound like an economist!” wailed the student.

There are considerable pleasures in the work, not least the great variety of humanity one meets: I have a particular liking for oil and mineral law Masters students from Kazakhstan, always bright and friendly. Exchange students – Norwegians, Dutch, Germans – on the European Erasmus programme can be very clever and sharp-witted. Some people, however, simply shouldn’t be there. Last year in particular, the University was awash with Chinese Masters candidates, many of whom could barely speak or write intelligible English. Why do they come? Because British universities need to milk the £10,000 annual fee, and the students get a certificate to take home, apparently regardless of what they comprehend. Thankfully, that influx has ended.

We RLF Fellows (there are about 150 around the UK) have a restricted access website on which we can discuss the problems we face and how to deal with them. Recently, a colleague described an MSc candidate whose dissertation was impossibly bad, and remarked how dispiriting it was not being able to help them. Other Fellows replied with stories of students offering inducements for “help” – i.e. someone to write their thesis for them.

I’ve been here before. A long time ago, in the 1970s, I was a VSO in a large city in Java, working in educational publishing. A Chinese girl called Winnie came to see me. She was studying English at one of the local universities, and she couldn’t manage the dissertation. For some reason, she had chosen to write on the novels of Saul Bellow. The subtleties of Chicago Jewish irony were completely lost on Winnie; she hadn’t a clue what he was on about. Rather reluctantly, I agreed to help her – at least, to discuss the novels with her. But as time began to run out, she was obviously still struggling; she couldn’t make head nor tail of Dangling Man, Seize the Day or Henderson the Rain King.

Winnie became desperate. The degree was terribly important to her. Her family were anxiously waiting for her to graduate, and then to find the job that would lift them all out of poverty. She could see that she was going to fail, and all she could think of was to get me to write it for her.

The presents began: it started with tins of lychees, and eventually I realised that she was offering me more intimate favours. When she came to my house, she would sit with her typewriter on the table, looking up at me expectantly; whenever I attempted to “discuss” Saul Bellow’s fiction, she would simply type out everything that I said. It became terribly clear that I was, in effect, dictating her dissertation.

At last it was done, and Winnie submitted the typescript. A week later, she was told that she’d failed, because she’d clearly had too much help. I felt foolish and responsible, and was worried about her: would the shame perhaps drive her to self-harm? Would her family shun her – or worse?

I needn’t have worried: Winnie was more resilient than I’d guessed. Very quickly, she acquired a new boyfriend. His name was Peter, and he was an Australian military attaché. Before I knew it, Winnie was married and living in Melbourne. This is not a solution open to most clients of the Royal Literary Fund in Dundee.