I’D ALREADY PACKED to leave for London with Jim Griffin, Michael and his hometown date Anne, and Garry for the midmorning train. I’m an inveterate early arriver at depots and airports; but as I’d learn that day, to travel with Michael was to be required to leap onto already-moving vehicles. He firmly believed that any minute spent in waiting for transport was a minute lost. So a moving vehicle it was at the Oxford station—the train for Paddington. Once there, Michael and Anne got themselves to Victoria Station by tube for their train to Brighton. Garry lived in London, and Jim and I checked into our room at the Regent Palace Hotel smack off Piccadilly.
The hotel had opened for business late in 1915; and a recent biography of the great poet Wilfred Owen tells me that he stayed there, forty years earlier, in October 1915—at the age of twenty-two, the same age as I. He registered at the hotel some three weeks before enlisting in the British army, a fatal choice which would kill him exactly seven days before the Armistice in November 1918. Still in business as I write this, and looking very much like its old self in the Internet pictures—the Regent Palace even now offers rooms “with shared facilities”—this bustling but modest hostelry was comfortable enough for the few days we paused there. By that time both Jim and I were accustomed to shared facilities; and I at least had been taught long ago to avoid long walks down hotel corridors by peeing in my own room’s sink (followed by a careful flood of hot tap water of course). The same brand of peeing prevailed at Merton, with no coaching from me. Any male visitor to your room might well rise in the midst of tea and ask to employ your newly installed sink for a private moment.
I never quite got used to long walks down corridors to bathe in tubs available to miscellaneous strangers. Again, though, youth and penury bolstered us; and in our London pause, Jim and I were seldom in our room while awake. We were out to see the irresistible high spots—the National Gallery (unmatched, I think, for overall quality of the collection), the Tate, the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, and Westminster Abbey. More than half-empty of tourists as the great sites were so near to Christmas, none of them failed us—though Jim was less an on-the-spot enthusiast than I, a difference imposed at birth no doubt by our geographical origins: his chilly New England, my balmy South.
We began, as well, to taste the all but endless resources of London theatre. First, we saw a peculiar play called The Strong Are Lonely. Concerned with Jesuits in colonial Latin America, it starred Donald Wolfit—notorious for his stagy silent-film lurches. I’d never see his famously powerful King Lear; yet I noted that his Jesuit elder was monumental, though trapped in a boring play. Far more impressive was the first London production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, his first stage fame in the English-speaking world.
Like most other Anglo-American theatregoers, I’d never heard of the Irish-French writer till we bought our tickets; and I came out into the cold December air more than two hours later, near overwhelmed by the indescribable power of what we’d experienced. For all the Shakespeare I’d seen in recent weeks at Stratford, the towering richness and variety of Beckett’s language, wit, and architectural wisdom, the absence from a long play of any dead wood (a thing one can seldom claim for even the supreme Shakespeare plays) put new coals under my own determination to write as much as possible through the upcoming weeks in Italy. Jim had declared his intention to reread all the Platonic dialogues in the time; I’d begin a new short story—but what about?
* * *
No further fiction had suggested itself from the recent subject of my father’s death (I’d sketched out “The Warrior Princess Ozimba” but had decided to wait awhile before finishing it). Nothing from my own recent life seemed sufficiently digested to produce controlled fiction, despite the fact that I seemed on the verge of the first worthy love of my life and the further reality that I’d apparently abandoned organized religion. Till leaving home, I’d been a fairly regular churchgoing Protestant; and at Oxford—in problematic times—I’d make solitary visits for prayer and meditation to the stark beauty of Merton’s thirteenth-century chapel, but I’d abandoned ordinary services. Here I was, though, on the doorsill of Italy with just enough money from the ill-gotten gains of Cecil Rhodes to enjoy myself. Surely some good notion would come in the calm of a shared room in Florence.
Jim had London friends whom he planned to see before we departed, so Michael took a quick train back to town, and he and I went out by tube to Twickenham stadium for the annual varsity rugby match between Oxford and Cambridge. I’d gone with Michael to watch several prior rugger matches up Iffley Road in Oxford and had liked the game at once—the unpadded roughhouse and the breathless uninterrupted nature of the play appealed to my old childhood liking for neighborhood touch football. The Twickenham match (I’ve forgot who won) was played in the usual amount of London mist and mud, but being there with Michael was fun enough.
Meanwhile the only real rock in my shoe was a chiding note from Mr. Leishman, received just before my departure from college. Why had I not called on him again toward the end of term? Well, I folded the letter and buried it in my desk; I’d think about that in a warmer place. He’d certainly given me no assignments, papers to write or assigned readings. Still, why hadn’t I attended at least one of his at-home evenings? Partly because I disliked him as intensely as I’ve noted above—and with good reason, I still think. Partly because I considered myself sufficiently employed in my work for David Cecil, Helen Gardner, and the teachers of my four B.Litt. preparatory classes. And again, partly because of the full circle of pleasures and fears that had swarmed so thickly around me in the previous two months. Then of course, like many Americans I was more unprepared than I realized for an educational system that left me almost entirely in control of my studies with no older sympathetic watchdog to rein me in or lead me on. Nonetheless, I was badly at fault; and I’d ultimately pay for my negligence.
And inserting here an almost simultaneous event in a still warmer place—a place from which I was very much absent but an event which would profoundly affect not only my homeland but all the work I’d eventually do there—I note that, while I had no immediate awareness of it, on December 1, 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama a black seamstress named Rosa Parks had refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. Parks’s subsequent impeccable fame, the bus boycott which began among local black riders—warmed by the nonviolent rhetoric of a previously unheralded black minister named Martin Luther King—and the renewal of racial violence among many white Southerners were matters I’d learn of only when I returned to my Oxford fastness in January (my mail from home gave no reason to think that a major revolt had been triggered among us at last, yet the changes in my old world were hastening toward us, and I was far gone).
Since the spring of 1954—immediately after Dad’s death, the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education ruling—I’d of course known that the social order of my home and all my kinsmen would gradually undergo a mammoth upending. I was uneasily glad to know as much. One of my first published prose sketches had appeared in my high-school newspaper in 1951 and reflected an early puzzlement at the often decorous cruelty of my white world; and my gradual withdrawal from involvement in organized religion was largely fueled by a sense of bafflement at the general silence of white Protestantism on so huge a subject. But I’d never been, and would never become, a social activist—not with my actual body on any physical rampart—yet almost all the manuscript short stories I was taking to Italy involved black characters in important actions: important and admirable, or at least virtuous, acts. Still, as the civil-rights movement got initial fire in its bones with Mrs. Parks’s slender refusal to move from a bus seat in Alabama, I was a long distance off, in more ways than planetary miles. And I’d remain so, in characteristic ways, for years to come.
* * *
On December 9—John Milton’s birthday and exactly one year since Jim and I had won our scholarships—he and I flew south out of London on a British European Airways prop-jet to Milan (in those days apparently Florence had no landing strip for full-size commercial planes). My first flight over the Alps was silently and vastly beautiful, and a single image I gathered as we passed the massive Mont Blanc imprinted itself deep in me and became the final sentence of a story I’d eventually call “The Anniversary.” We reached Milan in late afternoon, a bus drove us straight to the cavernous railway station, and Jim stood aside as I went to a ticket window and made my first attempt at spoken modern Italian.
I’d never studied the language formally, but one of my history teachers at Duke had offered an evening class for six or eight students who were interested in further investigation of Renaissance literature and history. The group proceeded, oddly but effectively, by beginning on the first night to read Dante’s Commedia. Despite his archaic Italian, Dante writes with a relatively easy syntax and vocabulary (he virtually invented the language as we know it); and I made considerable headway in his Inferno before I left Duke. Then once I’d known that Jim and I were set on a visit to Florence and Rome, I all but memorized an Italian grammar that I bought at Blackwell’s.
So I felt a certain new power unfolding in my hands as I asked the ticket seller when the next train departed for Firenze. He pondered my exotic grammar and accent, then nodded, kindly took a pencil, wrote the time on a small notepad, and extended it toward me with a bleak north-Italian smile. Good—we had barely an hour to wait. We managed a snack in a coffee stand in the station and went to the platform. It was still being said of Mussolini—then only a decade after his lynching by a mob not far from where we stood—that at least he’d made the trains run on time. They still did, to the veritable moment. We climbed aboard a carriage much like the British railcars I already knew, then sped on southward into gathering night.
The Pensione Quisisana was just as Redmayne had described it—a clean, smoothly run, and almost phenomenally quiet establishment, presided over by a likable older woman who spoke reasonable English, way more reasonable than my Italian. And well she might have—her premises could have arrived intact from an E. M. Forster novel about the British in Florence more than fifty years before (in fact, the Quisisana was actually used in the Merchant-Ivory version of Forster’s Room with a View in 1985). And while the place was by no means swamped with British guests—it seemed half-empty in the midwinter lull—there were several English couples. Two or three were plainly heterosexual, though a little old for hijinks; one was unmistakably lesbian, complete with severely bobbed hair and neckties straight out of The Well of Loneliness. All gave us friendly nods in the elevator or in the dining room, where we could choose to eat only breakfast or all three meals—good pasta, lamb, fish, and a good Chianti.
Jim and I took most of our meals there, chiefly for economy’s sake; but occasionally we’d choose a more imaginative place in the city—there was even one near the central piazza that served first-class beefsteaks. After two months of no decent beef, I treated myself on at least one evening to a full-sized steak, broiled rare, and languished in the pleasure (the restaurant priced it by the gram; and I hardly ate again for the rest of the week, though I never regretted my splurge). We thought we knew no one in midtown, though I’d hear soon that my old Milton teacher, Allan Gilbert, was there—the scholar so scorned by Mr. Leishman.
I wrote him a note, and he promptly phoned the Quisisana to invite us to dinner at his own small hotel. When we went there on the appointed evening, we discovered that he was experiencing an indisposition (he’d just retired from Duke at, I think, the age of seventy); but he received us cheerfully in the room he shared with his second wife, and she led us downstairs for dinner. Only then did she explain, in a whisper, that the trouble was constipation and that he’d been greatly pleased when his local physician gave him a laxative pill described as an archibusiere (I believe)—an arquebus. Since Allan had spent much time in studying Renaissance weapons—and an arquebus was an early matchlock gun—he took the pill with relish, and it was indeed working ballistically.
Still, a chance to see Professor Gilbert—with his almost alarmingly amused bright eyes and his snow-white short beard (one of the only two beards at Duke in that clean-shaven era; a colleague once described him to me as resembling Santa Claus’s grandfather)—reminded me of the frequently preservative effects of a genuine love of scholarly pursuits; how I wished I could somehow arrange for him to supervise my thesis. Failing that, however, my Florentine hour with him—and our glass of wine—did a good deal to restore my sense of why I was at Oxford after all: to burrow a little deeper into a mind as enormous and useful as Milton’s. Like so many distinguished scholars whom I’ve since known, Allan Gilbert’s ceaseless intellectual curiosity had kept him brilliantly alive and sympathetic to such interests in others.
* * *
Blessedly quieted as Jim and I were then, we made serious headway with our original intentions for the trip. He’d spend the mornings and late afternoons in our spacious room, reading Plato in an armchair beside our window on the Arno. I’d sit at a small desk and continue revising “A Chain of Love” and attempting to build a story backward from my airborne impression of Mont Blanc. As we passed it, I’d noted on the back of my ticket stub the following simile—“like some proud mountain, yielding to the sun its flanks of snow.” And now I heard the fragment as the end of a longish story that was entirely invented but that was rising on the visible givens of several visits I’d made to the rural North Carolina residence of my beloved seventh-grade teacher, Miss Jennie Alston.
She’d retired by then and was living in her family’s ancestral home—Cherry Hill, a tall and spacious antebellum plantation house which has since been superbly restored—with her elder sister Carrie and her elder brother Ed Falc. It was that setting and especially Miss Carrie’s physical appearance that underlay what I hoped to build into a story. Though I’d bought a handsome Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter a few days after arriving in Florence, I was still writing all my work by hand, then typing it up a few days later (that practice would continue for thirty more years until word processors entered my life). And the early pages of the story were coming slowly.
There in another country, surrounded by generally friendly people who were nonetheless barely comprehensible to me—and accompanied by only one American acquaintance whom I’d known for little more than two months—I found myself immured, for the first time in my life, in a new and weighty kind of silence, almost a bathysphere of the sort that in childhood I’d seen exploring the ocean floor in my library books. And in that silence—punctuated by daily afternoon visits to the Uffizi Gallery, barely a block away—I could study such incomparable human achievements as Leonardo’s large sketch for a Visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, his Annunciation to the Virgin, and Botticelli’s prime masterpieces (the Venus and the Primavera). Then I could wander a little farther toward the north, to the Accademia with Michelangelo’s David and his late Pietà which was then in the cathedral with the face of the sculptor himself on one of the figures supporting the corpus. And in those richly loaded days, I was slowly—and very usefully—forced to accept a new fact about myself.
In sixteen years of formal education in public school and at Duke, I’d seldom heard a discouraging word about myself and my work (from arithmetic to drawing). A bright boy, I was generally recognized as such and, in one of the poorest American states, I was praised way more steadily than I deserved. Now after two months at Oxford and a few days in Florence, I was coming to realize that a career in prep school or college teaching should present me with no insurmountable problems.
But as for the second half of my aim since the age of sixteen, the joint intention to be a good writer as well as an inspiring teacher—well, though in the past year I’d completed two short stories which even Eudora Welty liked, I was realizing that (despite my excellent high-school teachers and the one undergraduate class I’d taken in imaginative writing) I truly didn’t know how to write. That’s by no means to say that I should have gone on, after Duke, to study advanced writing at what were then the only two widely respected such programs in America—at the University of Iowa and Stanford. I’m not at all sure I even knew about them.
And even now, after decades of teaching various sorts of undergraduate writing back at Duke, I never urge advanced writing-study on talented students. I’m more than convinced that the best writing of fiction, poetry, and drama is the result of intense independent work by a naturally gifted man or woman who finds the time—while working at whatever other job is necessary to pay the bills—to deepen those skills in the act of probing further down into what will prove to be his or her best subject matter, matter to which only he or she has guided him or herself, not a teacher nor a group of workshop colleagues. In long retrospect I feel that what I didn’t know, as I sat alone in Oxford or Florence, was the nature of my own creative metabolism.
What needs did my body have—of sleep, food, drink, sex, and love for instance—before it could write steadily? How fast should I expect to write well? What daily quotas should I set for myself? And what should I do if I failed to meet my quota? How best could I warm a brain that cooled or quit in the midst of some effort—or worse, at the start? And where would I go if I failed entirely? It would be another decade before I acquired reliable answers to most of those questions—and I’ve yet to meet a student who acquired them in graduate school—but at least I’d begun the process.
The story I was hoping to construct (in reverse, from my sight of Mont Blanc) was sitting, in my notes, at an upper corner of my desk in the Quisisana. I already knew that this would happen, followed by this and this and this, all the way to an ending; but when it came to managing the machine that would write that story down—the machine of my body and mind—those notes were poised in grinning refusal to enter me and move ahead.
Young and elastic as I was, I consoled myself with the thought that I was, after all, on vacation. American students are notorious for taking a hundredweight of books home for Christmas and never opening a single one. Oxford students were expected to do the majority of work for their degrees during vac time, and most of my young English friends told me how seldom that dream proved a reality. Why should I have thought that I could come to the cradle of the Renaissance and sit in a dim room, contentedly writing? Out to the streets then—and Jim often joined me—for further roaming.
* * *
The Ponte Vecchio with its tiny gold shops and the Pitti Palace, with its own great pictures and the surrounding Boboli Gardens, were nearby and unavoidable. The alarmingly green and white cathedral, with its revolutionary dome, retained not only Michelangelo’s Pietà but also the blood-smirched memory of the conspiracy of 1478 when the Pazzi family, in an attempted power seizure, succeeded in murdering Giuliano De’ Medici and wounding his brother Lorenzo near the altar. The adjacent Baptistery detained me for the better part of a morning.
Its astonishing bronze doors, with their gilded panels of biblical scenes, had not yet been replaced by the replicas that stand there now. The interior space, in its gloom, was a reminder that the infant Dante was baptized there; and the most distinguished of its adornments then was Donatello’s carved-wood statue of the penitent and toothless Mary Magdalen in rags. The nearby Medici Palace was the grim and long-dead hive of so much honey in the life of the city and of Western civilization. As boys—for instance—Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo were welcomed there for instruction and high-class dining.
The Medici Chapel, however, struck both Jim and me—and our tastes were, again, far from identical—as the city’s most imposing offering (even more so than the David, though he—even with his unhistorical uncircumcised penis—is as fine as his world-fame augurs). Like several of Michelangelo’s other gigantesque projects, the chapel—within the church of San Lorenzo—was never completed. Its austerity of space and color, an almost exclusive white and gray, may be far from his ultimate intention but is nonetheless memorably arresting in clarity and dignity. And its numerous sculptures—of Medici princes, of Day and Night, and the shyly tender Virgin and Child—have more than earned their canonical standing. The entirety may not generate a traditionally sacred air; but given the ruthless power of the family enshrined here, the chill space and its statues of such somber genius are merely characteristic.
So the two weeks rolled on toward our next destination. Looking back through more than fifty years, there’s a strange fact I can’t explain. Why did we meet no Italians, in Florence, whom we might later have wished to go on knowing? The Florentines are hardly the open-armed, big-bosomed movie stereotypes of southern bas Italia (a component, no doubt, of the city’s popularity with the English). But I was a talkative and genial-enough man, and Jim was far from forbidding. I encountered numbers of friendly-enough men and women in our pensione and in various museums, shops, and restaurants. Maybe that’s one more old-fashioned Yank tourist’s regret; but let it stand as a partial explanation of why I’ve returned only once to Florence, and then very briefly.
From the start of our trip, we’d planned to push on to Rome very near to Christmas Eve. Redmayne had given us the name of another reliable pensione, reasonably priced (though again located on a superb site only two blocks from the Via Veneto with its mischievous movie stars). Further, Redmayne’s recommendation boasted a name especially winning for me—the Bellavista Milton. Yet shortly before we departed Florence, our otherwise sedate landlady learned of our choice and urged us to switch our reservation to what she insisted was a far better place—a pensione very near the railway station in central Rome (she warned that the Milton was “distant from things”). We were so inexperienced, we’d liked her at the Quisisana, and her urging seemed so authoritative—she even said she’d phone and make the change for us—that we surrendered with no foreboding.
On December 22 then we left Florence by train. Even the third-class carriages were near empty; and all the way south, I sat by the window and read from my copy of Dante’s Inferno in the invitingly small bilingual edition published in London by Dent but purchased by me in Florence as a farewell souvenir (I have it still, much used in the interim but in good strong shape—Hell apparently resists destruction). Jim was still deep in his Plato in the old but eloquent Jowett translation, and we reached Rome almost sooner than expected—midafternoon.