MY STOMACH TIGHTENED. I didn’t know what to expect of Alastair when I pushed through the swinging doors of the Cross Keys Hotel that day, but I had a presentiment—the unconscious can detect these things—that my life would take an unexpected turn. I made my way to the bar, which had been a popular hangout for generations of students and staff, but there were only a few customers in evidence. A white-bearded fellow in a dirty mackintosh sat in one corner with his pint before him, smoking; it seemed that every bar in town had one of these, a lost veteran of some foreign war. There were two girls at another table, students in their scarlet undergraduate gowns, who drank half pints—this was considered the ladylike way to order—of shandy, a putrid mix of beer and lemonade. The sole figure at the bar was a man in his early forties with auburn hair above a weathered, shockingly handsome face that shone with a distinctly Celtic glow. He had high cheekbones, a tangle of blue veins close to the skin. He smoked a cigarette as he stooped over a pint.
When I stood next to him, his eyes turned in my direction.
“Jay?”
“Mr. Reid?”
“Alastair.” He reached out with a fat mitt of a hand that enclosed mine easily. “Do you like Guinness? It’s good for you.”
“Something lighter?”
A flash of disapproval crossed his face. “Lighter” was not in his emotional vocabulary.
A pint of lager appeared. The burly bartender knew Alastair by name and habits, and he put a shot glass on the bar as well. Alastair drank the whisky quickly, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. There was something a little frightening about this man, a coiled viperish energy.
“Jock has been standing behind this bar since I was a student, right after the war,” Alastair said.
“What was it like back then?”
A look of pain crossed his face. “It was a strange time, coming back, falling into this fantasy world. Unreal to wear a scarlet gown, to pretend to listen to inane lectures. They locked the residence halls at ten in those days. None of us were used to that. So we climbed over the walls, through open windows. I was nearly sent down, but I laughed at them. We all did. Couldn’t take it seriously, not after what we’d seen. I still don’t take any of this seriously. Believe nothing you see or hear, that’s what I tell my son.” He took a long sip. “And remember, this isn’t a university, it’s a film set. Don’t be fooled. The lecturers, even the students, are actors. They’re here to attract tourists.”
His frankness scared me, but already I wanted to know this man better. And I wanted his approval, for reasons I could never articulate. I wanted a father like him: a bold and irreverent man with a natural sense of authority. And I wanted to be that man, too.
Alastair continued. “You’re very silent. Not persuaded? Think about it. What is this place? A motley group of strangers. They come here to drink and fuck.”
I had the dim sense that I’d better not let him overwhelm me, not if I wanted to be his friend. “Maybe to read and think?”
“You are serious, aren’t you? Miss Wright warned me. Of course I was moderately serious at your age,” he said. “Not a bad thing. Then again, I was standing on the bridge of a destroyer in the Pacific. There were kamikazes overhead.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
He looked at me hard, as if peering into my heart, and I thought he must be wondering why I wasn’t in Vietnam. Should I be ashamed of my draft situation? Maybe he would approve of this, but I couldn’t yet be certain. Vietnam provoked odd responses in people, especially veterans, who continued to live under the illusion that we fought this war to preserve “freedom.” I knew that my own uncles, the three who had landed in the first assault on the beaches of Salerno in 1943 and somehow survived, found my antiwar sentiments distasteful, if not downright treasonous. (My mother always found it deeply suspicious that all three of them had survived that horrendous battle. “What did they know that nobody else did?”)
Alastair ordered another whisky, and Jock obliged. “Kamikazes are no fun in the moment,” he continued, gulping the drink. “Later on, though, they produce the most vivid dreams. Only last night I saw one of them coming toward me. I tried to duck, but what good would that do? It missed my ship but struck another, and I watched it break apart and sink.” He looked past me into space. “That happened. I didn’t much think about it for years. I do now.”
“Have you written about it?” I knew that many writers of his generation, such as James Jones, Mailer, and Joseph Heller, had found war a major subject for their novels. I actually worried that in sidestepping Vietnam I might have ruined something for myself. The major conflict of my generation would never be available to me as a writer.
“War is not my subject,” Alastair said.
“And what’s that, your subject?”
“Dear God, you ask more questions than Jasp.”
“Jasp?”
“My son. You’ll meet him. Everyone eventually meets him.”
“I’m just curious,” I said, taking a risk. “What is your subject?”
Alastair sipped his pint, thinking. “I’m still looking for it. Sometimes it winks into being. Sometimes, well, not so much.” He opened one of his big hands and with the forefinger of the other seemed to trace his own lifeline. “Do you have a subject?”
“I’m looking for it, too.”
“Looking where?”
There was an ironic edge to that question, and somehow Alastair’s confidence undermined my own. Even without saying much, he assumed dominion, having a natural strictness as well, a schoolmaster’s eye, and this was unfamiliar to me. My father invariably shrank from authority, preferring to have no opinion and never to question those with power over him. I, too, found it awkward and even painful to take a stance, even against the war, though I’d done this more forcefully than was typical of me. Alastair, by contrast, seemed to enjoy his stance-taking.
“You write for The New Yorker,” I said. “Miss Wright mentioned that.” That little tidbit of information had caught my attention. Here was somebody with connections and a platform.
“I’m a staff writer at the magazine,” he said. “It’s the best job in the world. You don’t have to report to an office. I don’t report anywhere, except to Mr. Shawn, the editor. I write about whatever catches my attention. And the checks don’t bounce.” He seemed lost for a moment, as if reflecting on his life so far. I wondered if, in spite of his confidence, he was a man of many worries, and not so different from me after all. The lines in his face had somehow been earned. “I’ve never held a job,” he said. “Not a real job.”
“You were a professor?”
“Anne Wright is talkative. Funny old thing, isn’t she? Never believe a word.”
“You taught at Harvard?”
“Did she say that? For the Brits, there is only one American university, and it subsumes the rest. No, Sarah Lawrence. A small women’s college. I taught Latin and Greek.”
“I did some classics in college.”
“Arma virumque cano.”
Of arms and the man I sing. It didn’t surprise me that he would leap to the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid, that song of war. Alastair was, I thought, a warrior at heart, and in this he stood before me as a contradiction of my own life.
“You seem to have avoided Vietnam,” said Alastair, as if reading my mind.
“My best friend is in Vietnam. I decided not to go. That’s why I’m here.”
“You’re dodging the draft.”
“More or less.”
“Good for you. It’s a hateful war.” Perhaps he wanted to show that he didn’t mean to criticize me.
I must have looked troubled. In any case, he took pity on me and changed the subject, asking where I’d been an undergraduate. I told him about Lafayette, which he knew a little, saying that the head of the English Department there, Bill Watt, was an acquaintance.
What did it mean that he knew an old teacher of mine in Pennsylvania? Was that even possible? I sensed his reach into many areas of experience, even my own. He must be one of those people who gobbled up experiences and moved on. Again and again. Alastair, I decided without knowing much about him, had gorged on life, even swallowed it whole.
“Sarah Lawrence was an interesting place in those days,” Alastair said, resuming the monologue style of speech I would come to savor. “Harold Taylor was president—the youngest president ever, anywhere. He hired me without an application. Better yet, he let me teach whatever pleased me. There was no set curriculum.”
“Joseph Campbell teaches there.”
“The mythographer.” He seemed to approve of my knowing of Campbell and his academic whereabouts, and I realized I could play this game myself. I could become part of this if I chose. I could make associations, forge connections. Or was it just dropping names?
“Hero with a Thousand Faces is one of my favorite books,” I said.
“Reductive, probably. But Joe’s on the right track. There’s only one story, the journey of the hero. It takes many forms.” He looked into his beer as if something important lay at the bottom of his glass. “You’re somewhere on that journey now, somewhere at the beginning.”
“I’ve read the book twice,” I said.
“Once would do,” said Alastair. “ ‘There is one story and one story only.’ Do you know that poem?”
I shook my head, feeling rebuffed.
Alastair talked on, unaware of my feelings or unconcerned. “ ‘To Juan at the Winter Solstice.’ Robert Graves,” he said. “Do you know Graves?”
“Not terribly well.” Just saying that made me feel like a fraud. What did I really know of Graves? The name graced many paperbacks in the local bookstore, and I had stood with a copy of The Greek Myths in my hand only a few weeks before. I had some ill-formed sense of Graves as one of those polymathic literary entrepreneurs that British culture throws up in a regular fashion. Was Alastair one of these?
“Read him carefully, especially the poems. Astonishing poems: simple, musical, full of layers. He wrote novels to pay the bills: I, Claudius; King Jesus.” He added, “He once said that he was breeding show dogs to support his cats.”
I guessed that Alastair did not require a response. He was on a roll, exploring his own thoughts, allowing them to find a focus and form. I just happened to be standing next to him and listening. But I found him so appealing—a man who seemed more alive than anyone I’d met. His mind—and language—crackled. He knew people, interesting people. In talking, he was framing what he knew. I could learn from him, and I wanted him to want to know me.
“After the war I wrote to Graves,” Alastair said, as if beginning a short story. “He was living in Majorca, in a stone villa overlooking the sea, with his wife and his mistresses and children.” He sucked on his cigarette, almost swallowing it, then coughed profusely. “Every day he would clamber down the rocky path to the sea and swim. A perfect life.”
“I envy it already.”
Alastair approved of my empathetic powers, I could tell, as he nodded. “You write poems?” he asked. “Miss Wright has let out the proverbial cat.”
“Not good ones. Not yet.”
“The right answer,” he said. “We’re all living in the world of ‘not yet.’ In my letter to Graves, I said I was trying to write poems, and that I was coming to Spain. Would he mind taking a look at them? It was impertinent. And that’s good. A young man with any self-respect should be impertinent.”
“Did he reply?”
“I mentioned that I had read classics at St. Andrews, and he wrote back to say he had just begun a translation of Suetonius for Penguin. Lives of the Twelve Caesars. One of the great works of fiction.”
“Isn’t it history?”
“History is a form of fiction—you must shape the facts, find an arrangement among them. Create a satisfying narrative.” He lifted the pint and drained whatever was left. “Graves offered me a job as his secretary. I was to provide a rough translation from the Latin, do the donkey work. He would refine whatever I produced. He said I could have a little hut in his garden to live in. How could I turn down such an offer?” He looked beyond me again, his eyes fixed on a high corner of the room. “Graves was badly injured in the Great War. His nerves shattered, so this was ideal for him. A peaceful limestone valley, pine trees, rosemary. A village by the sea.”
“A good place for nerves to settle.” I thought of my own bad nerves and the quest for them to settle.
“Well, my own nerves settled, at first,” said Alastair. “But Graves ruined my composure soon enough. A long story…” His pause spoke volumes.
“He was a good teacher, I assume?” I said.
“I learned to write from Graves by sitting beside him, allowing him to ‘correct’ me, as he put it. I remember the first week, when he gave me a few pages to translate. I worked intensely for hours, making what I thought was a perfect English version. And put the pages on his desk before dinner, standing beside him. He scanned them quickly and said, ‘Sit!’ I pulled up a chair. Then watched him as he crossed out sentences with his fountain pen or circled them to move to another place. He crossed out adjectives but found better nouns, ones that didn’t need propping up with modifiers. The same with my adverbs, which got swallowed into better verbs. If you need an adjective or adverb, you’re still fishing for the right noun or verb. So Graves said. I learned this. But learning hurts, as it’s ripping away something that had fit easily, that felt comfortable. All passive constructions disappeared. ‘Always prefer the active voice!’ he barked at me in that fucking public school manner. Elementary but useful advice. You must learn how to pare down your work, then build it up. Vision and revision. You prune a rosebush back to its roots. Then it flowers properly.” He paused. “Are you a gardener?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad,” he said. “You must take it up.”
It seemed bizarre that he advised me to garden! Yet I knew he was right, that I had missed out on connecting to the physical world in the tactile way of gardeners, and if I was to be a poet, I would need to learn how to touch and see and smell.
I knew at that moment with absolute conviction that I would apprentice myself to Alastair and learn as much as I could from him.
“Where did you grow up?” I asked. I didn’t care now if my questioning annoyed him. I needed to know about this man.
“My father was a minister in Galloway, my mother a doctor. They worked at home, at opposite sides of the manse. Which is why I work at home. I’ve never had a job in the sense of ‘working.’ Can’t work for anyone. Selfish bastard, my son says. Let’s say I don’t need much. Or want much. Wanting is the cause of unhappiness. I travel with no more than a bag or two. One for me, one for Jasper. He’s nine or ten. Almost eleven? I lose track.”
I knew enough already not to ask about Jasper’s mother. She was conspicuously not in the picture. But was she still, like my own mother, present by her absence? I sensed a shell of privacy around Alastair, however invisible, and I realized that if I reached out, touched him, he would shrink. He didn’t want me to probe too deeply, and I was sensible enough to resist the urge.
“It’s peculiar, coming back to Scotland after being abroad for a long time,” he said. “We were in Ohio last year. A teaching gig. Never liked Scotland when I lived here, and have mostly stayed elsewhere. I bought a small farm in Majorca some years ago.”
“To be near Graves?”
He didn’t answer. When he spoke again, it was almost with a different voice, although it completed his short story—for the moment. “After a couple of years, working with him closely, I fell in love with one of his goddesses. He had these young women—acolytes, mistresses, whatever. Mrs. Graves didn’t approve, but neither did she disapprove. One of them, a dark-eyed girl, with her hair cut across her forehead, struck me at once. I began an affair with her, under his nose. He pretended he didn’t notice, and I never mentioned it. We thought we’d not been discovered. Once, though, he was chopping wood, his sleeves rolled up. I stood to one side, but then he threw the ax at me! Missed my head by less than a foot. It stuck in a wall. Rather impressive, that he knew how to throw an ax. But Christ! I got the message, and a few days later left under cover of darkness, on a fishing boat, with the girl. Haven’t seen Graves since the day I left.”
Was this a true story? It seemed somehow unimaginable, a fantasy of some kind. But he told it with such conviction that, against my own wishes, I believed him.
Was this indeed the essence of storytelling? Did one simply have to relate a tale in a believable fashion, with the authority of the imagination?
“You’re terribly silent,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Say something.”
I realized it might be dangerous to get too close to this man. He took no prisoners, and went at you directly. For a young man of my indirection, my uncertainty in life, this was terrifying. I might have to look at myself in the mirror without flinching. I might actually have to say what I meant, even find it.
“You look like you’re thinking,” Alastair said. “Like a child about to shit his pants.”
It was time to screw my courage to that proverbial sticking place. “I was wondering if I could show you some of my work?” I asked.
“Of course. Bring a poem any afternoon. Teatime is usually good. We’ll have a cup, and I’ll correct your work.” He took out a pen and wrote the address on a bit of paper.
Stepping onto the pavement outside, I felt an elation, the opening of invisible doors and windows. At last I had met someone who could show me a way forward. Exactly what role he might play in my life could not, of course, be known at this point. But my gut told me that this had been a good meeting, and that my life was about to shift in inexplicable ways.
Minutes later, still trying to process this first encounter with Alastair Reid, I heard a chant in the middle distance on Market Street: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!”
A group of student protesters marched slowly toward me with placards in the air. Bandannas and bell-bottoms were in abundance, and I was reminded of my days of protest in Washington. I had an urge to jump in, yet withdrew. I had come to Scotland to step aside from the stream, at least visibly. The letters from my draft board were tucked safely in a drawer, and I wanted my feelings there. Unopened.
At the fountain before me, outside the Cross Keys, a sparse circle of British veterans gathered. Among them, to my shock, was Professor Falconer, who wore a kind of Napoleon-style hat. An ill-fitting uniform from his days in the Royal Navy draped his tiny frame. A ceremonial sword dangled from his belt, and there was a row of medals on his chest. But he seemed lost, dwarfed by his comrades as well as his uniform. Most of them would have fought with Falconer against the Axis powers, although two or three elderly men from the Great War joined them, one of them (in a wheelchair) wearing a regimental beret.
The professor caught my eye and a faint smile crossed his lips. And then the protesters arrived and faced off against the veterans. Falconer’s right hand went instinctively toward the hilt of his sword.
The apparent leader of the protest was a woman I’d seen before. Slender and tall, she had blond hair tinged with strawberry that was pulled back tightly in a ponytail. She wore bright red sneakers and white socks and radiated self-confidence as she shouted directions to the group, modulating their protest chant into a song as they stood face-to-face with the ancient vets. “We Shall Not Be Moved,” the protesters sang, although it seemed more like the old veterans who would not be moved. Indeed, I could see Professor Falconer’s lips moving. “Just like a tree planted by the waters,” he sang under his breath, “we shall not be moved.”