THEN LATE on the sixth afternoon—October 5—we reached our English port, Southampton. By the time we cleared customs with our old-time steamer trunks—mine was literally the size of a cabaret piano—we discovered that the Warden of Rhodes House had troubled to make the three-hour trip down from Oxford in a coach or charabanc (what we’d have called a middle-size bus). Edgar Williams was a middle-aged man of considerable eminence. The son of a nonconformist minister, he was almost forty-three when we met him—by then the equivalent of a calm and bemused college dean. But his early manhood had been far more exciting. He’d been among the architects of the North African campaign at El Alamein, a critical confrontation in which the British all but destroyed the Nazi desert tank corps under General Rommel. Accompanied now on the darkening pier by his eternal tobacco pipe, he grinned pleasantly and saw us safely boarded for the drive north. We stopped only once on the trip, for an unceremonious pee as all thirty of us stood by the roadside draining our bladders in the chilly drizzle as small cars whizzed past (a common-enough sight in the Britain of those days, devoid as it was of roadside facilities).
When we reached Oxford around nine, the sky was inky black; and the rain was pouring precisely as—since boyhood, in a thousand films—we’d all heard it should be. The coach proceeded through narrow streets, past a few miserable-looking students huddled on bikes, to deliver each of us to his assigned college (Michaelmas, or autumn, term wouldn’t begin for another week). Rex Jamison and one other fledgling got off with me at Merton, in all important ways the oldest of Oxford colleges.
Founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, bishop of Rochester, it had distinguished itself in the Middle Ages as the home of numerous important philosophers and theologians. And within the past century, it had been the college of Winston Churchill’s father, Lord Randolph Churchill; the great Edwardian satirist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm, who’d also written one of the most famous Oxford novels Zuleika Dobson; and T. S. Eliot, who’d spent a brief year as a graduate student during World War I (surely an eerie and shame-inducing time for a noncombatant like Eliot, when the college was virtually bereft of healthy young Englishmen, many of whom would have their lives flung away beyond the trenches by their generals).
To increase my surprise that the Warden of Rhodes House had come all the way to meet us in Southampton, I discovered in the Porter’s Lodge at Merton that my scout stood waiting to lead me to my rooms. In those days your scout was your personal attendant. Mine’s name was Bill Jackson, an affable and immensely lean man in his early forties whose duties included waking me (by opening my bedside curtains and saying “Morning, sir” at seven each morning); then making my bed, giving my rooms a light cleaning, and washing my tea things in late afternoon.
* * *
I was delighted to learn that I had a pair of rooms all to myself in Mob Quad, just off Front Quad. First, there was a long sitting room with a wide bay window that looked out, past a tall chestnut tree, over the lush Christ Church Meadow, replete with actual cows (however much they resembled movie-prop cows); and equally prop schoolboys at their afternoon sports—the river Thames ran unseen beyond (as it flows through Oxford, it’s called the Isis). And second, I had a cubicular bedroom with a freestanding wardrobe and—crucially—a just-installed washbasin with running hot and cold water, the importance of which I’ll clarify later.
The rooms, not at all incidentally, were Mob Quad staircase 2, set 1; and to increase the enviable nature of my lodgings, I quickly learned that Mob Quad was not only the oldest quadrangle in Oxford, it was almost surely the oldest academic quad in Britain. Its immensely thick limestone walls had gone up from about 1306 on; and it had housed not only some seven and a half centuries of students but also (on two sides) the college library, the oldest portions of which were among the finest examples of early English libraries. A few of the most ancient volumes were still chained, as they’d always been, to the shelves.
Once Bill Jackson had showed me the toilets, which were called the Mob Quad bogs quite accurately—a mere line of commodes in a lean-to against the south side of the chapel—he departed, leaving me a plate of warm dinner which he’d saved from the dining hall. With no reading matter, TV, radio, telephone, or phonograph as yet, I had little to do but open my trunk and begin to skim its many layers of clothes, books, framed pictures and other memorabilia which I’d brought with an eye toward at least an unbroken two-year absence from home.
In those days airfare across the Atlantic was exorbitant and boats were slow. Barring extreme emergency I couldn’t consider returning till I’d finished the work for my degree. So in typical American college-boy fashion, I was unpacking in my underwear briefs and a T-shirt; and when there was a knock on my door—past ten o’clock—I answered it, in acceptable dormitory attire (for another two decades Merton would continue to be an all-male college; and women were not allowed, even as guests, after nine).
There before me stood my actual living introduction to the Oxford undergraduate population—a short dark-haired man in thick glasses with sizable ears and a pleasantly troll-like face. He declined to extend a hand to be shaken, but he compensated by offering his name in what I’d long hoped to hear in person—the true Oxbridge accent. He was Henry Mayr-Harting; and he suggested that since he and I were to share the same staircase landing for the coming year, I might like to come to his rooms for a cup of bedtime cocoa and a little talk. He gave no signs of alarm at the impropriety of my dress.
I did, however, fish what I’d have called a bathrobe from my trunk; and soon I crossed the ten feet of landing to Henry’s rooms. They were roughly the same ample size as my own; and in addition to the college’s supplied old desk, couch, and chairs, there was a true cabaret-sized piano which Henry had rented from a shop in town. All the next year, filtered through our dense stone walls, Henry’s skillful performances of Bach and Mozart would be my main access to music. For now he poured our cups of cocoa; and we launched ourselves upon the chief occupation, gift, and reward of Oxford life—conversation. We spoke about an astonishingly broad array of subjects—my recent voyage, recent movies (still called cinemas here), forthcoming performances of music and drama at various nearby public halls, and the peculiar behavior of American airmen who came to Oxford on weekends—it appeared—for drink and women, in that order apparently.
Finally we turned to discussing our work. Henry was beginning the second year of his three-year study of history (undergraduate history at Oxford then was mostly British history); and like virtually all Mertonians, except a sizable number who’d already done their required national military service, he was three years younger than I. I recall his giving me, first, a brisk and nimble introduction to the long and noble history of our college and then a rundown on the particular topics he’d be studying in the autumn term.
When he politely asked about my plans for study, I told him that I hoped to write a thesis on John Milton for the Bachelor of Letters degree (then the Oxford equivalent of an American-earned M.A.). Henry gave his first enormous grin—“Oh Milton”—and then embarked upon well-informed remarks and questions about Milton, a fund of knowledge which I could imagine almost no American undergraduate’s possessing. Soon I’d be accustomed to the fact that, in the 1950s in any case, almost every undergraduate had arrived at Oxford with the equivalent of at least two years of American college education. It would prove—as Henry’s did, so promisingly that first night—a fund that would not only be firmly possessed and eager to engage itself with the knowledge won by others, it was also almost invariably worn lightly and with much salty laughter in the midst of a normal young man’s life. (Though I didn’t know it for years, it may be relevant now to note that Henry indeed had been born in Prague to Viennese parents, and would eventually become the first Roman Catholic to hold the eminent position of Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford.)
By midnight I was back in my narrow scholar’s bed, lying atop—I swear—a mattress stuffed with rough straw (could any medieval scholar in this same room have retired to sleep on worse?). I slept nonetheless like the saint I surely wasn’t, even then, and woke only when Bill Jackson opened my thick blue curtains as the chapel tower—only fifty yards away—rang its quarter-hourly chime to announce the arrival of day. Since the college lacked showers, and the huge Edwardian bathtubs were a good walk’s distance from my rooms (out of doors, past the library entrance and around a corner), I gave myself what my father might have called a whore’s bath—face, pits, and fundament—in my new basin, then entered the first gray and mildly chilly English morning and walked to the adjacent hall for breakfast.
The hall covered more than half the south side of Front Quad. First built in the late thirteenth century to feed the gathering band of scholars, it was one of the college’s oldest buildings, though largely reconstructed in the nineteenth. Still it bore its enormous old door with the fanciful black ironwork (sufficient to hold off any monster from the river or any posse of enraged townsmen—there’d likely been a few in the early centuries’ war between town and gown), and its tall interior was roofed with dark wood beams in the usual inverted-boat fashion of Gothic ceilings. At the east end, a slightly raised platform bore the high table, where dons and distinguished guests dined (don was the colloquial name for a senior member of a college at Oxford or Cambridge, a title transferred from the Spanish title for a gentleman). Above them, among other portraits, hung imaginary pictures of the founder and the medieval scholar Duns Scotus who may or may not have had a connection with the college. At right angles to the high table, the students’ tables and backless benches filled the remainder of the space.
To the left as I entered, I faced a large tray of kippered herrings (one of my father’s favorite dishes—he called them salt herring) and a huge pot of glutinous oatmeal. I dodged those grim offerings and served myself scrambled eggs, cold toast, and coffee. There were few other students in sight, only those who’d come up early for various reasons. Not wishing to force my company upon three men who were talking with more energy than I possessed that early in the day, I chose their table but sat a good distance from them and began to eat.
In a matter of minutes, one of them—David Gilchrist, another historian who’d later be a boon acquaintance—turned my way and said “Good morning.”
I returned the welcome greeting and stood to offer my hand.
David kept his seat and regarded the hand as though it were the herring I’d recently declined. I’d still to learn that Britons of that era shook hands as seldom as they employed one another’s actual name in conversation—first names were then called Christian names and were almost never used in conversation (nor were surnames).
I sat back and thought I could at least offer my name.
When he heard my accent, David said “Ah, you must be the chap who called on Mayr-Harting last night in your dressing gown.” His breakfast partners chuckled and turned their square Anglo-Saxon faces and huge blue eyes toward me.
A child might have run for cover; and I felt a childish chill but reminded myself of my official maturity. More and more I was silently recalling that anyone who’d managed a loved one’s awful death as I’d done could face a few strangers who were at least guaranteed to avoid physical mayhem. So I managed a bleak smile and acknowledged that I’d indeed drunk cocoa with Mayr-Harting last evening. And that, for then, was that. The three men showed no need for a further exchange with this new Yank who owned a fancy dressing gown, and I downed my cold eggs in silence and returned to my rooms.
Bill Jackson had just finished making my bed—pajamas folded under the pillow—and was ready to talk. I’d be needing tea things, he said—a pot and sufficient cups and saucers for a few friends, a pitcher for milk and a sugar bowl. He recommended Elliston’s for those items, the main department store in town. And he couldn’t help observing that he’d noted the socks and underwear I’d rinsed out last night and left on the towel rack to dry. “I think you’ll find, sir, that in this climate, you’ll never get them dry like that.” When I told him how I hoped to save a little money by washing my own smalls, he countered promptly—having heard that line from more than one American—“You might save a very few shillings, sir, but at the expense of rheumatism in you feet and hips, not to mention piles. I’ll be quite glad to take anything to an honest laundry and bring them back by the end of each week.”
I agreed on the spot, and only later learned that Bill’s second job was at the identical laundry. It proved an honest business, all the same; and though I’d soon sustain more than one ailment, rheumatism in any organ was never among them, not to mention piles (which had tormented my mother after she’d borne two large male babies and a stillborn daughter).
* * *
I shaved, unpacked a few more layers of my trunk, and awarded myself a quick unguided tour of the college—first, a few yards away, the building in St. Alban’s Quad in which Eliot had lived. I’d spent a lot of time at Duke on a lengthy paper about Eliot’s connection with the Spanish mystic poet St. John of the Cross; and the Anglo-American writer’s work remained important for me (he was still much alive, in London, though I’d never have the good sense to ask for a meeting—he was famously approachable, if cool). Above all I was impressed by the college’s spacious garden—private for the dons and students—with its tall lines of resplendent lime trees (lindens). I’d spend many of the rare forthcoming warm hours reading here on the semi-circular bench and table that rode atop the college’s south wall, a remnant of the old city wall (the lower walk that ran along this stretch was called Dead Man’s Walk, owing to the execution here of a soldier during the civil war of the seventeenth century or—alternately—because it was the path from the medieval synagogue to the nearby Jewish burial ground, long since covered by the university’s botanical garden). The lime trees, by the way, succumbed to age and were recently felled, alas.
My years at Duke had been spent on a main campus built, near the time of my birth, with James. B. Duke’s opulent millions and designed in the then popular American taste for a form of architecture called collegiate Gothic. Though Duke’s neo-Gothic buildings were subject to occasional wit and scorn at their structural pretensions, for me they’d been a handsome place to live during my four undergraduate years (as they’ve been for some fifty years of a later teaching career). But it took me very few minutes to realize, with mounting expectation, that at Merton I’d be enclosed in an entire walled village whose oldest buildings—including my own quad—were Gothic in the pure original forms and were patently haunted by the lives of some seven centuries of students and fellows, though the soft limestone of many college walls was in a scabrous state as a result of the ruinous atmospheric acid created by a combination of rainwater and auto exhaust.
If at Duke I could sometimes permit myself fanciful moments, imagining life in small medieval quads, here at Merton I could see not only T. S. Eliot’s windows but also—facing Front Quad—the windows of the Queen’s Rooms, which had entertained Henry VIII’s hapless first wife Catherine of Aragon in 1518; Elizabeth I in 1592; and the doomed Charles I’s wife Henrietta Maria for a winter or more when Oxford was the royal headquarters late in the Civil War. She was succeeded in the rooms by William Harvey, Merton’s most illustrious warden, who first described the principle of blood circulation in the human body. Well, so much for collegiate Gothic, handsome as it might be with the backing of enough tobacco dollars.
Then with no more urgent duties, I headed up Magpie Lane to the High Street in search of my tea things and a little knowledge of the town. Despite the university’s total then of some twenty-nine constituent undergraduate colleges, most of them with their serene interior quads and gardens, all mostly walled and closed to the public, the town itself was a noisy small city with a dire traffic problem (the Morris Motor Works, a giant automobile factory, was on the outskirts—to which extent Oxford was the Detroit of England). I concentrated on recalling that British drivers kept to the left-hand side of the street and managed my first chores with no broken bones.
The lorry-crammed streets were unavoidable, as were the plump red-cheeked housewives with even plumper babies in old-fashioned wicker carriages. The city was then so safe that the babies were frequently parked outside grocery shops and left alone, apparently content behind their own startling red cheeks, while their mothers picked through a limited array of foods. So far as I could see, the array offered mostly cabbage, brussels sprouts, turnips, potatoes, lamb, mutton, and the ever-popular pork items—chops, sausages, and pies (the strict food rationing introduced at the start of the Second War had ended only a year ago, in 1954). Apart from the housewives and the clerks in the shops, there were numerous men my age, up early for the Michaelmas term.
They were all dressed in neckties and wool jackets, most of which broadcast the distinct odor of infrequent baths. And I’d soon hear a maybe apocryphal tale of a recent meeting of Merton dons to discuss the wisdom of installing showers for the students. After considerable talk, at last one elderly don lurched to his feet and said “Shower baths? But why? The young gentlemen are only here for two months at a time.” End of debate. Showers would be installed at Merton only several years after my departure when the college was approaching the 700th year of its founding (the actual date was 1264).
Finally I noted a marked visual class distinction, similar to the one I’d have seen at home between whites and blacks. Apart from the obvious students, there were small huddles of working-class men, all of whom were white and many of whom seemed to be named Alf or Bert. They might be digging up a mysteriously ailing spot in the midst of the High (students knew that it was distinctly uncool to call it High Street) or scrubbing a moldy stone wall with stiff wire brushes; and they always seemed oblivious to their social superiors—and frequently, I thought, to their jobs. The making of endless pots of tea often seemed more urgent than their assigned tasks, and their bodies often seemed stunted—was it a genetic trait in the working class or the simple result of poor nutrition in childhood?
Invigorated by my brief exploration and the gradually unfolding vast difference between this place and the one I’d left in America, I was back in college for a revealing hall-lunch of shepherd’s pie and bread, then my usual half-hour’s afternoon nap; then off to the adjacent college—Corpus Christi—for my first Oxford tea. Corpus was even smaller than Merton and was nearly as venerable, a college visited and praised by Erasmus, that beacon of the northern Renaissance—and a man who, in his portrait by Holbein, resembles nothing so much as “the direct descendant of a long line of maiden aunts,” as one of my Duke professors had said.
* * *
My shipboard friend from Yale, Jim Griffin, had acquired a tasty small cake—dark brown with raisins—at a baker’s shop in the Corn-market (which intersects the High); and as we lingered by Jim’s hearth to share our first-day’s discoveries, we managed to wash the entire cake down with numerous cups of strong tea. I didn’t quite tell Jim; but I was a little chastened to learn that he’d already met—that morning, while I was wandering open-eyed and buying crockery—with his forthcoming tutor and had acquired a detailed sense of what would be expected of him as a graduate student in philosophy.
In those postwar days Oxford was still entering the world of graduate study with some misgivings. Its undergraduate degree—laid atop the superb fullness of British secondary education—was so thorough in the required mastery of a given field that postgraduate study was still considered by many to be one more regrettable case of surrender to American excess. Wouldn’t anyone who’d won his Oxford B.A. or B.Sc. spend the rest of his life in continued self-education? So Rhodes Scholars of our generation were faced with a choice. Given that all of us had American undergraduate degrees of varying qualities, should we opt for a further and perhaps finer (certainly more demanding) undergraduate degree; or should we sign on for one of the few graduate degrees—a Bachelor of Letters, say, or the more demanding D.Phil.?
Jim and I had already gathered, in reading our way through an indispensable handbook called The Oxford University Examination Statutes, that graduate students were very much on their own. Sooner or later each of us would be assigned a tutor or thesis director with whom we’d meet, say, four times in an eight-week term. We’d be free to attend any of the university’s hundreds of public courses of lectures, many of them from world-renowned scholars; and likely we’d participate in a handful of small seminars to prepare us for our work. Then we’d undergo a rigorous written test followed by a nerve-racking oral. If we succeeded in that test, we’d be certified to begin the real work of graduate study—deep reading, thinking, and writing on whatever subject: again, very much on our own, with our thesis director standing ready to give our arms an occasional nudge to left or right but, generally speaking, little more. Thus Oxford avoided a grave and continuing danger of American graduate study—the possibility that a thesis or dissertation director might prove so controlling as virtually to write the student’s thesis.
Had I, for instance, chosen the B.A. degree, I’d have had to learn Anglo-Saxon and—in a packed two years of work—read my way through virtually the entirety of then-canonical English literature from Beowulf to the great poets, novelists, and essayists of the late nineteenth century. Anything more recent had yet to prove itself durable and was thus not studied. At least once a week, during term time, I’d have written an essay assigned by my tutor and then read it to him in his room while he listened (or occasionally dozed) and then offered his comments. At the end of my two or three years of reading, I’d have sat for the final examinations—called schools—some five days of papers and an eventual face-to-face questioning by other dons who’d award me my degree, First Class, Second Class, Pass, or Fail—to fail was called to plough, and there were sufficient suicides by schools failures to constitute an imposing warning. By now, though, I’d firmly decided to try for the graduate B.Litt. with a thesis on Milton. I wasn’t eager to restudy many texts I’d only just finished reading. I also sensed that a B.Litt.—with its freedoms—would give me far more time to spend on my own fiction, a hope that had, in the past year, been cut deeper in my mind than before.
* * *
As I walked the two hundred yards back from Jim’s rooms to Mob Quad, I underwent my first immersion in an English evening. It was only six clock, and I was stationed not that far from the south coast of Britain, yet it was already dark; and while it wasn’t raining, the air was all but drenched with the damp that Bill Jackson had so darkly warned against—Aargh, piles! Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt a dull grind from the tooth of loneliness—and worse: a maybe misguided separation from the roots of my emotions and thus my writing. What the hell was I doing here?
I’d effectively abandoned the only house that anchored me for the past eight years, the Raleigh home of my much-loved mother and brother, the actual ground of my whole past life (the rolling pine-dense landscape of eastern and central North Carolina), not to mention the numerous other kin and friends of my childhood and youth. Now they were all four thousand miles to my west, my southwest—Britain is after all on a virtual parallel with Newfoundland, whereas my home is parallel with Algeria.
A vast ocean now lay between me and mine, an ocean strewn with the ruins of millennia of human hope at least as passionate as my own. I’m not attempting to exaggerate—or elevate—a boyish emotion, only to re-create a wave of long-distant feeling. And here I was, alone as a stone, in a city and country as different from my home as, say, Germany or Poland—and I wasn’t wrong about this, not in 1955 before American economic and cultural influence radically transformed so much of British culture.
I had no proof—beyond the language I shared, in part, with the half-dozen kindly Britons I’d met—that I could manage to live on here, live and work, for at least two more years. I’d meant for six years now to be a fiction writer and poet, one who taught literature to good students. Did I have the faintest chance of being both or either, essentially sidetracked here as I feared I might be—in the country of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats—so far from everything I knew? An artist as uncannily gifted as James Dean had got only two more years of life than I and had died a week ago through an error at the wheel of a speeding Porsche. What good was likely to come to me here?