I first went to Europe on May 13, 1964. I had been told I was going to do this five months earlier by a male psychic working out of a Toronto tea shop. “You will be going to Europe in May,” he said.
“No, I won’t,” I said.
“Yes, you will,” he said, smugly reshuffling his cards.
I did.
Fleeing a personal life of Gordian complexity, and leaving behind a poetry manuscript rejected by all, and a first novel ditto, I scraped together what was left after a winter of living in a Charles Street rooming house and writing tours de force of undiscovered genius while working by day at a market research company, borrowed six hundred dollars from my parents, who were understandably somewhat nervous about my choice of the literary life by then, and climbed onto a plane. In the fall I would be teaching grammar to engineering students at eight-thirty in the morning in a Quonset hut at the University of British Columbia, so I had about three months. In this period of time I intended to become—what? I wasn’t sure exactly, but I had some notion that the viewing of various significant pieces of architecture would improve my soul—would fill in a few potholes in it, get rid of a few cultural hangnails, as it were. Here, I had been studying English literature for six years—I even had an M.A., which had gotten me rejected for employment by the Bell Telephone Company on the grounds of overqualification—and I had never even seen .. . well, things. Stonehenge, for instance. A visit to Stonehenge would surely improve my understanding of Thomas Hardy. Or someone. Anyway, a lot of my friends from college had already run to England, intending to be actors and the like. So England was my first stop.
The truth is that I didn’t have much idea of what I was really doing. Certainly, I had almost no idea at all of where I was really going, and how much it had changed since I’d last checked in via the pages of Charles Dickens. Everything was so much smaller and shabbier than I had imagined. I was like the sort of Englishman who arrives in Canada expecting to find a grizzly bear on every street corner. “Why are there so many trucks’” I thought. There were no trucks in Dickens. There weren’t even any in T. S. Eliot. “I did not know Death had undone so many,” I murmured hopefully, as I made my way across Trafalgar Square. But the people there somehow refused to be as hollow-cheeked and plangent as I’d expected. They appeared to be mostly tourists, like myself, and were busy taking pictures of one another with pigeons on their heads.
My goal, of course, was Canada House, the first stop of every jet-stunned, impecunious young Canadian traveler in those days. But before I go on, let me say a few words about those days. What sort of year was 1964?
It was the year after 1963, in which John Kennedy had been so notably shot. It was the year before the first (to my knowledge) anti-Vietnam peace march; it was roughly four years before the great hippie explosion, and five years before the onset of the early-seventies wave of feminism. Miniskirts had not yet arrived; panty hose were approaching, but I don’t believe they had as yet squeezed out the indigenous population of garter belts and stockings. In hair, something called the bubble cut was favored: women rolled their hair in big, bristle-filled rollers to achieve a smoothly swollen look, as if someone had inserted a tube into one of their ears and blown up their heads like balloons. I indulged in this practice, too, though with mixed results, since my hair was ferociously curly. At best it resembled a field of weeds gone over with a lawn roller—still squiggly, though somewhat mashed. At worst it looked as if I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. This silhouette was later to become stylish, but was not so yet. As a result I went in for head scarves, of the Queen Elizabeth at Balmoral type. Paired with the slanty-eyed, horn-rimmed glasses I wore in an attempt to take myself seriously, they were not at all flattering.
Come to think of it, neither was anything in my suitcase. (Hitchhiking backpackers had not yet overrun Europe, so it was, still, a suitcase.) Fash-ionwise, 1964 was not really my year. Beatniks had faded, and I hadn’t discovered the romantic raggle-taggle gypsy mode; but then, neither had anyone else. Jeans had not yet swept all before them, and for ventures to such places as churches and museums, skirts were still required; gray flannel jumpers with Peter Pan—collared blouses were my uniform of choice. High heels were the norm for most occasions, and about the only thing you could actually walk in were some rubber-soled suede items known as Hush Puppies.
Lugging my suitcase, then, I Hush-Puppied my way up the imposing steps of Canada House. At that time it offered—among other things, such as a full shelf of geological surveys—a reading room with newspapers in it. I riffled anxiously through the Rooms to Let, since I had no place to stay that night. By pay telephone, I rented the cheapest thing available, which was located in a suburb called Willesden Green. This turned out to be about as far away from everything as you could get, via the London Underground, which I promptly took (here at last, I thought, looking at my intermittently bathed, cadaverous, and/or dentally challenged fellow passengers, were a few people Death had in fact undone, or was about to). The rooming house furnishings smelled of old, sad cigarette smoke, and were of such hideous dinginess that I felt I’d landed in a Graham Greene novel; and the sheets, when I finally slid between them, were not just cold and damp, they were wet. (“North Americans like that kind of thing,” an Englishwoman said to me much later. “Unless they freeze in the bathroom they think they’ve been cheated of the English experience.”)
The next day I set out on what appears to me in retrospect a dauntingly ambitious quest for cultural trophies. My progress through the accumulated bric-a-brac of centuries was marked by the purchase of dozens of brochures and postcards, which I collected to remind myself that I’d actually been wherever it was I’d been. At breakneck speed I gawped my way through Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, the house of Samuel Johnson, Buckingham Palace, and the Albert Memorial. At some point I fell off a double-decker bus and sprained my foot, but even this, although it slowed me down, did not stop me in my headlong and reckless pursuit. After a week of this, my eyes were rolling around like loose change, and my head, although several sizes larger, was actually a good deal emptier than it had been before. This was a mystery to me.
Another mystery was why so many men tried to pick me up. It was hardly as if I was, in my little gray-flannel jumpers, dressed to kill. Museums were the usual locale, and I suppose there was something about a woman standing still with her head tilted at a ninety-degree angle that made solicitation more possible. None of these men was particularly rude. “American?” they would ask, and when I said Canadian, they would look either puzzled or disappointed, and would proceed only tentatively to the next question. When they got no for an answer, they simply moved along to the next upstretched neck. Possibly they hung around tourist lodestones on the theory that female travelers traveled for the same kinds of sexual adventure reasons they would have traveled, had they been traveling themselves. But in this there was—and possibly still is—a gender difference. Ulysses was a sailor, Circe was a stay-at-home with commodious outbuildings.
When not injecting myself with culture, I was looking for something to eat. In England in 1964, this was quite difficult, especially if you didn’t have much money. I made the mistake of trying a hamburger and a milkshake, but the English didn’t yet have the concept: the former was fried in rancid lamb fat, the latter fortified with what tasted like ground-up chalk. The best places were the fish-and-chip shops, or, barring that, the cafes, where you could get eggs, sausages, chips, and peas, in any combination. Finally I ran into some fellow Canadians who’d been in England longer than I had and who put me onto a Greek place in Soho, which actually had salads, a few reliable pubs, and the Lyons’ Corner House on Trafalgar Square, which had a roast beef all-you-can-eat for a set price. A mistake, as the Canadian journalists would starve themselves for a week, then hit the Lyons’ Corner House like a swarm of locusts. (The Lyons’ Corner House did not survive.)
It must have been through these expatriates that I hooked up with Alison Cunningham, whom I’d known at university and who was now in London, studying modern dance and sharing a second-floor flat in South Kensington with two other young women. Into this flat, Alison—when she heard of my wet-sheeted Willesden Green circumstances—generously offered to smuggle me. “Smuggle” is appropriate; the flat was owned by aristocratic twins called Lord Cork and Lady Hoare, but as they were ninety and in nursing homes, it was actually run by a suspicious dragon of a housekeeper; so for purposes of being in the flat I had to pretend I didn’t exist.
In Alison’s flat I learned some culturally useful things that have stuck with me through the years: how to tell a good kipper from a bad one, for instance; how to use an English plate-drying rack; and how to make coffee in a pot when you don’t have any other device. I continued with my tourist program—stuffing in Cheyne Walk, several lesser-known churches, and the Inns of Court—and Alison practiced a dance, which was a reinterpre-tation of The Seagull, set to several of the Goldberg Variations as played by Glenn Gould. I can never hear that piece of music without seeing Alison, in a black leotard and wearing the severe smile of a Greek caryatid of the Archaic period, bending herself into a semipretzel on that South Kensington sitting-room floor. Meanwhile, I was not shirking in the salt mines of art. Already, my notebook contained several new protogems, none of which, oddly, busied itself with the age-old masterworks of Europe. Instead, they were about rocks.
When things got too close for comfort with the dragon housekeeper, I would have to skip town for a few days. This I did by cashing in some miles on the rail pass I had purchased in Canada—one of the few sensible preparations for my trip I had managed to make. (Why no Pepto-Bismol? I ask myself: Why no acetaminophen with codeine? Why no Gravol? I would never think of leaving the house without them now.) On this rail pass you could go anywhere the railways went, using up miles as you did so. My first journeys were quite ambitious. I went to the Lake District, overshooting it and getting as far north as Carlisle before I had to double back; whereupon I took a bus tour of the Lakes, viewing them through fumes of cigar smoke and nausea, and, although surprised by their smallness, was reassured to hear that people still drowned in them every year. Then I went to Glas-tonbury, where, after seeing the cathedral, I was waylaid by an elderly lady who got five pounds out of me to help save King Arthur’s Well, which— she said—was in her backyard and would be ruined by a brewery unless I contributed to the cause. I made it to Cardiff with its genuine-ersatz castle, and to Nottingham and the ancestral home of the Byrons, and to York, and to the Bronte manse, where I was astonished to learn, from the size of their tiny boots and gloves, that the Brontes had been scarcely bigger than children. As a writer of less than Olympian stature, I found this encouraging.
But as my rail pass dwindled, my trips became shorter. Why did I go to Colchester? To the Cheddar Gorge? To Ripon? My motives escape me, but I went to these places; I have the postcards to prove it. Julius Caesar visited Colchester, too, so there must have been something to it; but I was driven by frugality rather than by the historicist imperative: I didn’t want any of my rail pass miles to go to waste.
Around about July, Alison decided that France would be even more improving for me than England had been, so in the company of a male friend of mine from Harvard, in full retreat from a Southern girlfriend who had brought several ball gowns to a student archaeological graveyard excavation, we took the night boat-train. It was an average Channel crossing, during which we all turned gently green. Alison bravely continued to discourse on intellectual matters but finally turned her head and, with a dancer’s casual grace, threw up over her left shoulder. These are the moments one remembers.
By the time we’d been two days in Paris, where we subsisted on a diet of baguettes, cafe au lait, oranges, pieces of cheese, and the occasional bean-heavy bistro meal, I was in an advanced state of dysentery. We were shunting around from cheap pension to cheap pension; the rooms were always up gloomy flights of stairs, with lights that went off when you were halfway up and cockroaches that rustled and crackled underfoot. None of these establishments allowed you to stay in them during the day; so I lay moaning softly on hard French park benches, in gravelly French parks, while Alison, with a sense of duty Florence Nightingale would have envied, read me long, improving passages from Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Every fifteen minutes a policeman would come by and tell me I had to sit up, since lying on the park benches was forbidden; and every half hour I would make a dash for the nearest establishment with a toilet, which featured not the modern plumbing that has taken over today but a hole in the ground and two footrests, and many previous visitors with imperfect aims.
A diet of bread and water, and some potent French emulsion, administered by Alison, improved my condition, and I dutifully hiked around to Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, and the Louvre. In Paris, the men bent on pickups didn’t bother to wait until you had stopped and were craning your neck; they approached at all times, even when you were crossing the street. “Americaine?” they would ask hopefully. They were polite—some of them even used the subjunctive, as in “Voudriez-vous coucher avec moi?"-—and, when refused, would turn away with a beaglelike melancholy which I chose to find both existential and Gallic.
When we had only a week and a half left, the three of us pooled our resources and rented a car, with which we toured the chateaus of the Loire, viewing a great many eighteenth-century gilded chairs, staying in youth hostels, and living on more cheese. By this time I was supersaturated with culture; waterlogged, so to speak. If someone had stepped on my head, a stream of dissolved brochures would have poured forth.
Then, for some reason now lost in the mists of history, I decided to go to Luxembourg. On the way there, a middle-aged conductor chased me around the train compartment; when I explained that I was not in fact American, as he had supposed, he shrugged and said “Ah,” as if that explained my reluctance. By this time I was getting somewhat fed up with the excess of dog-and-fire-hydrant male attention, and I let my irritation spill over onto the cultural agenda; when I finally got to Luxembourg, I did not go to visit a single church. Instead, I saw Some Like It Hot, with subtitles in Flemish, French, and German, where I was the only person in the theater who laughed in the right places.
This seemed an appropriate point of reentry to North America. Culture is as culture does, I thought as I returned to England, steered myself and my Hush Puppies toward the plane, and prepared for decompression.
At that moment my trip in retrospect felt a lot like stumbling around in the dark, bumping into heavy, expensive pieces of furniture while being mistaken for someone else. But distance adds perspective, and in the months that followed, I tried hard for it. Had my soul been improved? Possibly, but not in the ways I’d anticipated. What I took back with me was not so much the churches and museums and the postcards of them I’d collected, but various conversations, in buses, on trains, and with the pickup men at the museums. I remembered especially the general bafflement when it turned out that I was not what I appeared to be—an American. For the Europeans, there was a flag-shaped blank where my nationality should have been. What was visible to me was invisible to them; nor could I help them out by falling back on any internationally famous architectural constructs. About all I had to offer as a referent was a troop of horsy policemen, which hardly seemed enough.
But one person’s void is another person’s scope, and that was where the new poems I’d brought back squashed at the bottom of my suitcase would come in, or so I thought. Speaking of which, my gray-flannel wardrobe— I could see it now—definitely had to go. As a deterrent to stray men it was inadequate, as a disguise irrelevant, as a poetic manifesto incoherent. I did not look serious in it, merely earnest, and also—by now—somewhat grubby. I had picked up a brown suede vest, on sale at Liberty’s, which, with the addition of a lot of black and some innovation with the hair, would transform me into something a lot more formidable, or so I intended.
I did get to Stonehenge, incidentally. I felt at home with it. It was pre-rational, and pre-British, and geological. Nobody knew how it had arrived where it was, or why, or why it had continued to exist; but there it sat, challenging gravity, defying analysis. In fact, it was sort of Canadian. “Stonehenge,” I would say to the next mournful-looking European man who tried to pick me up. That would do the trick.