THE JAPANESE PEN Club had existed since before the war, and several Japanese writers, among them the great novelist Kawabata, wanted to improve contacts between Western and Japanese writers. The theme of the meeting was a discussion of the effects of one culture upon the other. Though there may have been some political implications in the background, the main point was that Japanese writers felt they were cut off from the rest of the world.
Almost two hundred speakers from abroad had been invited, and there were as many delegates from Japan, so the meeting was anything but intimate. Unfortunately, even though it turned out to be so poignant, Stephen kept no record at the time. There’s just a later reference to an occasion when he, Alberto Moravia and Angus Wilson, hiding behind the pines in one of the Zen gardens at Kyoto, tried to escape from the clutches of the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld. Eventually the three writers abandoned the meeting and slipped away for a few days’ tour of the country by train, accompanied by Shozo Tokunaga, Stephen’s translator.
My father told me a story about this episode, which he described later in his diary after Moravia died. It illustrates his idea that Italians, though outwardly cheerful, are by nature depressed. The scene is a railway carriage. Perhaps in pain because of his bad leg, Moravia ‘always seemed poised over some abyss of boredom’. For hours, they’d been travelling in silence through the most wonderful scenery. Then Moravia gave a weary sigh and said, ‘After all, it is a beautiful world.’ For some reason Dad thought this was killingly funny.
During this trip, Stephen fell in love with another man whose surname also was Tokunaga, though he wasn’t a relative of Stephen’s translator. In a later diary he calls him Masao. This affair was instantaneous and passionate. The emotions of Masao, his beauty, his incapacity to take any practical decision about his life, were expanded by Stephen into a mood which gave to the whole of Japan a kind of irresponsible dreamy freedom that reminded him of his youth in Weimar Germany. Stephen would resign from Encounter, discard his family – which surely could get on without him – and resume the life he’d had in Hamburg when he was young. Masao and the ‘floating world’ he inhabited were the perfect embodiment of that state of living ‘without guilt’ which, to Stephen, represented a calling, a vocation, a quest.
When he came back, he wrote to Reynolds:
for a week I seemed to have in Japan something I had always been looking for and never found before, with the consequence that I know now what it is I was looking for. This sounds awfully sinister, but really it was a matter of feeling – far more than I realised at the time. This has the effect that I feel I couldn’t possibly expect to find it again, and that all my previous attempts, as I say, seem in retrospect, humiliating or foolish or disgusting or importunate.
I clearly remember my father’s return from Japan. In the front hall of Loudoun Road, he gave Lizzie and me our presents. Mine was a set of woodcutting tools and three perfect blocks of fine-grained balsa wood. Lizzie received a large Japanese doll; or perhaps it was a samurai. Then we were sent up to our rooms. This was odd, but as we had presents, we obeyed.
Through the floorboards I could hear our parents passionately discussing something in Dad’s study. It seemed more of a fight than a reunion. Though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, Stephen was telling Natasha about Masao and his plan to leave us and live in Japan. The atmosphere was tense but it was hard to tell what was happening. My father seldom shouted, and as far as I can remember my parents never quarrelled about their relationship in front of us children.
Thirty years later, when this tense period of their lives was long gone, my mother was faced with a situation that brought it all vividly back.
In 1985, my father wanted to travel to America in order to see Bryan Obst, the young ornithologist with whom he was in love. It was at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic and he was worried about Bryan’s health – justifiably, as it turned out. Dad at this point was seventy-five years old and he had a heart condition, so Mum offered to come too. My father agreed, then almost immediately regretted it. So did she. But she couldn’t back down, because of the health factor.
She foresaw that the trip would land her in endless awful predicaments. She wrote in her diary: ‘I’m in despair over the California trip – I don’t want to meet B – and to be an onlooker at the immense animation of the queer scene, although Chris & Donny will be nice. But one is bound to feel excluded.’ What was she supposed to do? Sit quietly in a corner over on one side in that exclusive male atmosphere with a supportive smile on her face? Either she would be ignored, or she would be humiliated. Perhaps both.
She recalled the previous occasion when Dad had been infatuated with Masao. ‘I remember when the feeling of barrenness and desolation first descended – walking round the garden at Bruern, when S wanted to emigrate to Japan, my pleading for the family – and saying why didn’t he consult a friend who was devoted to his creative life? Why not consult Henry?’ She meant Henry Moore. Dad must have been arguing that he had to place his creative life before anything else. ‘“Henry” – said S – almost contemptuously – yet with pity for H. “Henry has no life of his own at all.” At that moment I knew that I would always have a place only on the perimeter.’
The state of being ‘on the perimeter’ raised in my mother an emotion even worse than the feeling that she was neglected. It was a sense of inadequacy. Had Stephen held true to this side of his nature because she’d failed to provide an alternative? It wasn’t only a lack of physical attraction. She felt that nothing she said would ever amuse him. No opinion of hers on art, on books, not even on music, would distract him from his interior soliloquy. Indeed, she did not have the right to contribute to that soliloquy because if she did so, it might be interrupted.
I would always have a place only on the perimeter – ‘a life of one’s own’ being central – yet [I] would never be able to opt for any ‘life of my own’ – it’s against my temperament. (– How absurd that sounds when one remembers my piano-playing years). But my temperament was to wish for a strong, vital, central, relationship – that wish now humbled to a desire to break through – out of my continual fear of saying the wrong thing, which strikes me dumb at home – knowing all the time that I cannot evoke the animation which B, or Xstopher, or Reynolds e tutti quanti [and all of them] are always able to, because they are at the centre. I am a shadow that hovers at the edge of vision – ‘perimeter vision’. To become substantial would require some positive act of mine, and that is not possible – because it would destroy the fragile, low-key, affection to which all must be dedicated, in order to help S’s work.
Mum could have argued that she’d known about the situation ever since the Wittersham Interlude, when they’d first met. He’d always been open about his emotions. That’s what she’d found so attractive about him. If Stephen needed this part of his life to continue, needed it for his work, she should not try to stop it. This is what my father wanted her to say. In an unusually blunt moment he once said to me, ‘She knew what she was letting herself in for. She has no right to complain.’ She knew what to expect, because he’d told her; and she’d accepted.
If he felt he was being attacked, my father could be tough; and that toughness included losing all sympathy for the other person’s point of view. He challenged her: stand on your own two feet. I shall not budge. It’s not quite the same as rejection, but it assumes that her grip on Beethoven, for example, was as strong and obsessive as his grip on Wordsworth.
Put like this, my parents’ relationship turns into a kind of duel, one in which my mother was at an obvious practical disadvantage. She believed passionately in his writing, he was ambivalent about her music. She didn’t necessarily feel that his writing was of a higher value than her music, because a love of art, any art, is yours; it can’t be compared with anyone else’s. But love of music is interiorized; and, because the concert comes and goes, ephemeral. The written page lasts longer.
Unable to balance my father’s obsession with a corresponding obsession of her own, she provided herself with an alternative self-image: that of a self-sacrificing nun. She would dedicate herself to contemplation and good works.
I suppose that ‘to thine own self be true’ isn’t possible because my temperament was never suited to the life I’ve had to lead. Over and above the natural dislike of the invasion of privacy, is the fact that I have never come to terms with the situation – it’s not in tune with my beliefs about the way one should live one’s life … In my heart, (whilst it is possible to try and accept that one is a bystander) I don’t believe that human relationships should be like that. So the prospect of standing up for it, when it goes on public show, is the prospect of not being true to oneself.
In spite of her misgivings, the visit to Bryan came and went without mishap. My father, realizing the risks, warned Bryan (and Christopher and Don), and they behaved towards her with great consideration. She as usual did well, though it required an effort on her part to present herself in such circumstances. Deep down, she was a nun in retreat living on a rugged peak in the middle of nowhere.
Returning to the late summer of 1957: how did Reynolds cope with the new Stephen after he’d come back from Japan?
Stephen argued that he desperately needed to create ‘a kind of space around myself’. The things he was writing – a book of lectures, a libretto for Nicky Nabokov, editorials for Encounter, book reviews – they were nothing but distractions. ‘I’m sure I can only really start writing poetry again if I get away for an interval.’ The phrase is clear, almost objective. And probably true.
A photo of Reynolds Price taken by my father in May 1959.
Reynolds was interested and supportive, but at the same time he was anxious how Masao was going to affect their friendship. Stephen tried to reassure him. ‘If you ask about our relationship, I think the answer is that we love one another but we are not lovers – and that is as it should be, surely. I should hope there is something in the love that is generous and forgiving, as well as believing and exciting.’
Reynolds insisted on knowing more. After all, if Stephen went off to live in Japan, Reynolds would be left behind along with everyone else. Stephen remained firm. ‘That we won’t be able to see so much of one another, has to do with my home, my finances, my work etc, and not at all to do with my having gone or my going to Japan.’
But meanwhile Stephen was being as helpful as possible to Reynolds’ career.
‘You have no idea how powerful your father was,’ Reynolds told me when I saw him for the last time. ‘All he had to do was pick up the phone to a publisher and a contract appeared in the post the next day.’ In return, Stephen needed Reynolds as someone to whom he could show any piece of writing and receive back a comment that was both honest and supportive. For instance, my father at this time wrote an article on the sonnets of Shakespeare – a tremendously mined quarry, from the academic point of view. He sent it to Reynolds, who gave a detailed criticism, ending with a hint that he should abandon the piece. Stephen did so, and without hurt feelings. No one else subsequently earned such a degree of trust.
According to Reynolds’ autobiography, his first sexual experience took place when he was twenty-five years old, on the island of Tresco off the coast of Cornwall, with a young man of his own age, during the Easter vacation of 1958. Thanks to Stephen, he had just published his first short story ‘A Chain of Love’ in the March number of Encounter. He was beginning to realize that he possessed the qualities of a novelist and his academic ambitions were receding.
Reynolds discovered that sex had an effect on his creative work, at the same time that non-sex was having an effect on Stephen’s.
What I knew by the spring of my third year in England was the vital relevance for me of intimate union, not only for its powers of simple invigoration through the heights of physical pleasure … but also for my own adult self-respect and the ongoing growth of my work. That pleasure affected deeply the rhythmic vigour of sentences on a page as they attended closely to the precise moral implications of my subject at any given moment in my story.
As soon as Reynolds began to have lovers of his own, his relationship with Stephen became fixed. The touching thing is that it never faded. Throughout the remaining forty years of their friendship, my father would turn up at Reynolds’ house in North Carolina, not far from Duke University, where Reynolds taught for many years. What he liked best was to sit outside on a deckchair and make drawings of the pond, or work on a long poem about his family which was never finished. Reynolds told me that it was puzzling how little Stephen wanted. He seemed perfectly happy just to be there.
After Reynolds left England in 1960, I did not see him again until several years after my father’s death. In fact it was our daughter Saskia who met him in New York. He was coming out of a taxi and she recognized him from his book on suffering, which she’d read. They made friends. I happened to arrive in New York three days later and we had supper together.
He was being given a prize and the occasion was full of distinguished people, but Reynolds made me sit at his right hand, and throughout the meal he talked to me intensely about Stephen. He wanted me to come down to Durham and continue the conversation, but I refused. I wrote to him a few days later to say that as long as my mother was alive, I would feel disloyal to her if I started examining the distant past. This letter is the last item in the Price Archive in Duke University. I’d forgotten I’d written it. It was clear and true, and it took for granted that Reynolds and I understood each other even though the last time I’d seen him, I’d been only fifteen years old.
I couldn’t start researching this book until after Mum died. She would have guessed, and it would have upset her. In Loudoun Road on the evening of the day that she died, I saw her body off the premises (a horrible moment; they used a sack with leather straps), and then I took up the telephone and rang Reynolds. The number was in her address book. I told him she was dead and that now I could finally respond to his frequent, generous invitations to speak to me about my father. He said succinctly: ‘I’m sorry to hear about Natasha. Come as soon as you can, and stay as long as you can.’
So I went to Durham, North Carolina. I read Stephen’s letters to Reynolds during the day and talked to him about them at night, after the library had closed. He said, ‘Matt, you’re the first person to read those things in fifty years.’ It was a good week. On Saturday, I kissed him on the forehead and said goodbye and drove my rented car back to the airport. It was about three in the afternoon. He ate an early supper with his brother Bill, said how much he’d enjoyed my visit and how much I looked like Stephen. He went to sleep, and the next morning he was found in a coma. He died four days later.