8
MY THIRD TERM began with an episode that might have proved grave. Just before I left for the Easter vac, I’d been using one of the Bodleian’s many thousand treasures—John Milton’s own copy of the plays of Euripides with marginal comments and emendations in his own youthful script (before his blindness obviously). Further-more the volume, which was in excellent condition, had later belonged to Samuel Johnson; and it bore both Milton’s and Johnson’s signatures on the flyleaf (Dr. Johnson was born exactly a century after Milton’s birth; and though the immensity of Milton’s gifts was always a demon for Johnson, he nonetheless revered him, however querulously). Such a book would, even then, have brought a considerable price at auction—or by secret sale to an unscrupulous collector. I’d been surprised to discover then that, when I decided to study the volume, I had only to submit one of the Bodleian’s routine call slips; and it was brought to my desk a few minutes later—no special security arrangements of any sort.
In those days volumes which a scholar planned to use frequently could be left overnight in a sort of cage from which they could be fetched the next day without the wait of a call slip. I’d left Milton’s Euripides in the cage at the end of each day for several weeks before the vac, but when I knew I’d be gone for at least a month, I informed the relevant librarian that the volume could be sent back to the stacks in the event of some other scholar’s need.
Shortly after my return, I submitted another call slip (I was especially interested in Milton’s proposed emendations to Euripides’s text, the only surviving record of his eagle-eyed study of the actual Greek; but since I knew almost no Greek, I’d seek the help of knowing friends like Tony Nuttall). In twenty minutes one of the usual book-fetchers—older men who’d clearly been instructed not to engage us in conversation—came to my desk and told me simply that the volume was presently in use by someone else. When I asked who, in hopes of sharing the volume, the fetcher said that it was in use by a Mr. Reynolds-Price (the class-conscious British of that era often tried to award me a posh-sounding hyphenated name—I was still then signing all three of my names, Edward Reynolds Price). The fetcher failed to smile—“Perhaps then, sir, you’d like to speak with Miss So-and-So at the desk there.”
I spoke with her at once—a youngish woman but as little amused by our problem as the fetcher. She confirmed, in a minimum of words, that the volume was indeed recorded as being in my hands. My old winter call slip was still inserted in the empty slot on the shelf in the stacks. Given the solemnity of her look, I began to realize that I might have a difficult situation on my hands. Faced with the lax security of those days, it would have been entirely possible for me to have inserted the extremely valuable Milton/Johnson volume into my satchel and smuggled it out of the building (there were no briefcase checks, merely the assumption that all the library’s users were ladies and gentlemen). I explained what I’d done—freed the book from the cage to return to the stacks some six weeks earlier—and the woman said “Then we have no choice but to wait and see what develops, do we?” The characteristic British “do we?” (or other similar question at the end of a sentence) can be alarmingly ominous.
For another month whenever I entered the upper reading room, I’d see a set of librarians lean to one another and whisper as I passed, no doubt some version of “That’s the chap who’s nicked our Milton’s Euripides.” Nothing overt was ever said to me, no imposing official called me in for a discussion of the matter, other kinds of service were never refused me, and I didn’t feel spied upon, but my own unease deepened as time passed, and once or twice I asked at the desk for any developments in the mystery of Milton’s Euripides. They’d generally shake their heads in the then-common English gesture of befuddled suspicion—“No, nothing whatever. Peculiar, isn’t it?” and when I’d agree, the librarian would almost invariably say “Ra-ther” (I record all this truthfully and with an odd affection for the even odder behavior).
At last one early summer morning, a fetcher brought the volume to my seat—no comment. When I rose to inquire at the desk, the reply was as laconic as ever—“Turned up somehow, back in its place on the shelf.” Since only employees of the Bodleian then had access to the miles of book stacks, I was left in wonderment. The book itself showed no signs of harm nor of what adventures it might have undergone in its months of silent abscondment. Well, it had survived Milton’s long life, his blindness, London’s dreadful plague epidemics, his danger of execution at the time of Charles II’s restoration to the throne in 1660, and the Great Fire of London in 1666 (not to mention the later vicissitudes of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s life and the recently avoided chance of firebombs from the Nazi Luftwaffe in the 1940s). So for as long as I used it thereafter, in the chill peace of the Duke Humfrey wing, the handy leather-bound volume—preserving, as it did, one of the three supreme epic poets’ textual comments on one of the three supreme Greek dramatists—always gave me a welcome sense of elation to be the momentary proprietor of a thing as complex yet simple as itself, as nearly eternal, though so easy to lose, as both the Bodleian and I had recently learned.
* * *
More pleasantly, summer term also began with two surprises. In April, Soviet Premier Khrushchev and his colleague Nikolay Bulganin paid a state visit to Britain, with a side trip to Oxford for a little heavily guarded sightseeing. For the day, the city was in peculiar hands. In a morning walk up the High, I could plainly see armed secret-service guards on college rooftops, surveying the streets (there’d been rumors of men from Central Europe who’d just entered Britain with the avowed hope of assassinating their prime oppressors). Late in the afternoon, when I assumed that the Russians had left town, I set out in sunlight for Rhodes House on a minor errand. I walked up Longwall Street, which runs alongside Magdalen College’s deer park; and just as I neared a small door in the high wall, a long black limousine pulled swiftly up beside me, the small door opened, and out stepped Khrushchev and Bulganin with a small covey of diplomats.
Astonished of course I froze in my tracks—careful to make no false move (but what would a false move be?)—and short plump Khrushchev looked my way with a broad grin on widely spaced teeth. I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from him; and had I been armed (and so inclined) I could easily have shot him—and no doubt been promptly gunned down in return. Instead I matched his grin and—whoosh!—he was gone, as I likewise went on my newly cheered way, being surely a man of almost infinitely less importance to world history, not to speak of any control whatever over the fate of many thousand humans still in state prisons, than the ill-dressed fat man I’d just now greeted and who’d nonetheless only just acknowledged the monstrous reign of Stalin.
The second surprise was a small flurry of interest in my longish story “A Chain of Love.” Diarmuid Russell wrote from New York to say that The Virginia Quarterly Review was interested in the story. At that point the manuscript was some twelve thousand words long; and the Quarterly wanted to give a prize in a contest it was running, but the rules had specified a maximum length of seven thousand words. Could I possibly cut it down to that length? I’d finished the first draft a year ago. Since then I’d continued with minor revisions—nit-picking—and though Diarmuid had been circulating it for less than a year, I’d experienced long stretches of beginner’s nerves—wondering why no one had yet bought it.
And I’ve noted more than one night’s dreams of going to the lodge and finding a letter from Diarmuid with a large check—my hopes and needs justified. But no, for all my impatience, the prospect of merely eliminating almost half the story couldn’t thread its way through my brain. The disappointment at the impossibility was sizable, but at least I’d been given the first whiff of professional interest in my work. And Professor Blackburn at Duke had urged me to send the story to another old student of his, William Styron. I’d not yet met Styron, but Blackburn wrote me to say that Styron had promised to read the story and recommend it to The Paris Review if possible.
That long-since famous Review had started life just three years earlier, and Styron was one of its original advisory editors. So when I wrote Diarmuid to say that The Virginia Quarterly was not a possibility, I mentioned showing it to Styron who was still a young man himself—eight years older than I but already the author of a novel that had been a critical success in 1951, Lie Down in Darkness. I didn’t know (and it was typical of Diarmuid not to tell me) that George Plimpton, the founder of The Paris Review and its chief editor for more than fifty years to come, was a client of Diarmuid’s.
* * *
As spring moved ahead with occasional dry days, I began to meet with Miss Gardner again and attempted to get myself to work on the thesis. With the initial exam behind me, I was now very much on my own. I’d need to master my time, read the necessary background texts, and begin to write the thesis. If I was planning to win the B.Litt. and return home at the end of my second year, I had a great deal of work to do. Still there were sidelines, or lanes, that pulled me elsewhere.
The fiction was clearly one. The theatre, films, and music continued to be energy-hungry for time and attention in my life. Early in the term, for instance, Tyrone Power came to Oxford in a crackling revival of Shaw’s American Revolution comedy, The Devil’s Disciple; and in early May, Michael and I went down to London to hear Louis Armstrong and his band—an exciting introduction for Michael to America’s greatest, though aging, jazzman (I’d heard him a time or two at Duke). But the sideline that became a virtual superhighway was the arrival, in late May, of my Volkswagen. With the slow increase of daylight, and a modest increase of mercy in the weather (the BBC was beginning to speak of possible “bright intervals” in our days), my car became—alas and thank God—an ever more tempting distraction from my academic work.
And two of my teachers began to become real friends. I’ve mentioned David Cecil as a teacher. Despite the fact that his wife and three children occupied his evenings at a pleasant home in north Oxford, he often invited me to meet him—for unplanned conversation—in his rooms in New College. It was there, late one afternoon that, without his knowledge, I crossed yet another of my old boundaries. He’d offered me sherry on all my prior visits, and I’d accept a small glass. But now from the drinks tray in a corner of his sitting room, he said “Whisky?” I doubt that my hesitation was noticeable; but to that point in my life—again—my family’s history had braked me. Well, surely I was in safe quarters here, with a world-famed writer who was hardly likely to lure me toward a drunkard’s doom. I quietly said “Thank you” and put out a hand to take the heavy weight of a large glass half full of Scotch whisky with no ice or water. Hard-core then, from the start. But no family gene lured me on into trouble, then or since.
* * *
It was in that third term that I showed Lord David my two completed short stories, “Michael Egerton” and “A Chain of Love.” He responded with the kind of detailed attentiveness that I’d not yet had from any other reader—none of my good teachers at Duke nor even Eudora Welty. They’d all responded with welcome enthusiasm, but it immediately became clear that David had read my stories with a fellow writer’s questioning eye. Why did such-and-such happen at this point and not another? Was the young sister too young to justify her presence in a story as necessarily brief as mine? Did North Carolinians from a rural world speak with such calm eloquence? His questions by no means always implied a desire for change; but even when they didn’t, he elicited from me a new intensity of self-examination that was thoroughly healthy for the work itself and my own involvement in it (from his generous approval, I remember a particular phrase—he said that “Michael Egerton” “went like an arrow to the target”).
Beyond that, he spoke of his own writer friends and acquaintances with a casual familiarity that made them seem real presences in the room and, further, made me feel that I might conceivably someday move in such circles with at least a sense of poise if not eminence—W. B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, L. P. Hartley, and more. And with his own always unmentioned aplomb, David discussed those eminences with no trace of braggadocio.
When we spoke (as we mostly did) of the classic works of fiction which I was then consuming wholesale—Emily Brontë, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Chekhov, Hardy, Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster—David reverted more than once to a major concern of his own: his concern for morality in art, for moral fiction. By moral he meant nothing so simpleminded as fiction which suppresses all concern with human sexuality or deals with sex in a pruned and scrubbed rhetoric. He wished only that a work of the imagination should be steadily conscious of its ultimate designs upon a reader and that its author should work to avoid secret or unconscious aims—ethical, moral, or erotic aims which advance on the reader in secret.
I’m afraid I no longer recall his examples of immoral fiction, though I do remember that he mentioned—with a smile—how Tolstoy had recorded his own condemnation of a passage in a story by Maupassant, a moment in which the author mentions soap bubbles on a woman’s skin (and thereby aroused the ever-arousable Tolstoy to immoral thoughts). When I asked him to do so, he likewise expanded upon a recent essay of his own in which—without quite saying so, at a time when homosexuality in living authors was scarcely mentioned—he implied that E. M. Forster’s novels suffered finally from an inability to portray, with ultimate degrees of success, romantic love between a man and a woman (a conclusion of David’s with which I, and many thousand others, have never agreed).
With me from the start, David Cecil discussed homosexuality and gave no suggestion whatever of disapproval or condemnation (born in 1902, and a deeply devout Christian, he lived then and for many years longer in the midst of as happy a marriage as I’ve ever witnessed). So far as I could see, homosexual love appeared normal to him, though it seemed never to have been a need of his own. He’d noticed with considerable sympathy the serious problems it presented to homosexual writers of either gender (though in our talks, I don’t recall our discussing my own particular sex life).
His oldest close friend, L. P. Hartley—the author of a brilliant then-recent novel, The Go-Between—was a repressed homosexual, and more than one of David’s woman friends was drawn in the direction of same-sex love (Virginia Woolf and, at least once, Elizabeth Bowen among them). Adrian Wright’s biography of Hartley makes it clear that, after David and Hartley met in Oxford, they developed an intense friendship; and for years after graduation (and before David’s marriage), David often stayed with Hartley in Venice. But whether the relation was ever expressly sexual, Wright has insufficient evidence to say—my own guess would be no. In any case, David never discussed with me that aspect of any living author’s life or work. We did, though, eventually begin to discuss my own growing love more candidly than I ventured with anyone else in my whole time at Oxford.
* * *
The other don who showed me special kindness in my first year was one whom I’d met when he joined Lord David in chairing my earlier class in criticism. He was Nevill Coghill who was then a fellow of Exeter College. His personal devotion was to the theatre (he directed frequent plays in Oxford); yet he most frequently lectured on Chaucer, Langland, Shakespeare, and Milton. And Chaucer was the poet whose Canterbury Tales he’d translated from the now-difficult Middle English for Penguin—a hugely successful book. I’d soon learn that Nevill had grown up in a family with various commitments to the arts.
His father was Sir Patrick Coghill, a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who’d studied art in Paris in the late nineteenth century, lived on a sizable estate in Ireland, and painted a large number of high-skilled and often beautiful landscapes (several dozens of which hung in Nevill’s Oxford rooms; I was always hoping to be offered one but alas no). One of his maternal aunts was Edith Somerville who joined with their younger cousin Violet Martin, whose pseudonym was Martin Ross, to form the lifelong writing partnership that produced, among numerous memorable works of fiction, The Real Charlotte. Nevill himself was born in 1899, served in the First War, married, fathered a daughter, then separated from his wife and lived a quietly homosexual life thereafter. He later spoke to me of several romances with men, but he apparently never established a residence with any of them; and until his retirement from Oxford, he always lived in his college rooms.
Our own friendship began when, after the late-afternoon class in criticism, Nevill asked me if I’d come to his rooms in Exeter for sherry. I went and we talked easily and pleasantly, though I recall only one moment of the hour—Nevill mentioned to me the name Antinous, the first time I’d heard of that fascinating figure from ancient history: the emperor Hadrian’s young favorite who drowned mysteriously (suicide, murder, accident?) in the Nile in A.D. 130. Nevill was a fine laughter-loving tale-teller; and he’d been the teacher of W. H. Auden and Richard Burton, the actor, among numerous others. He’d even directed John Gielgud in a London production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ten years earlier. On this first meeting, by the way, I mentioned seeing Olivier at Stratford and praised his Macbeth very highly. To my surprise Nevill said “Olivier is a thoroughly clever physical performer; but Gielgud is a very great actor, right down to the sockets!” I’m quoting from old memory, but I think the memory is true to what Nevill said, certainly to his fervor. In any case, though I then profoundly disagreed, I didn’t argue. And years more would pass before I began to understand Nevill’s meaning and how much justice was on his side, though I’ve never relented in my sense of Olivier’s very different kind of dramatic genius.
As I left that first meeting in time to race back to Merton for dinner, Nevill asked if I’d accompany him to a forthcoming evening in which the French composer Francis Poulenc would accompany the baritone Pierre Bernac in a recital of Poulenc’s songs. I joined him for that good evening (good despite the appearance of the two performers—together they looked like nothing so much as a pair of senior waiters at a one-star restaurant in the provinces). Nevill and I went back to his rooms for a drink afterward; and a friendship slowly grew, one which lasted till his death in 1980. It was never an intimate relation, but the years were increasingly full of excellent fun and mutual consideration; and I learned a great deal from him about poetry, teaching, and especially about human life.
* * *
Though Helen Gardner had rescued me from the company of Mr. Leishman, and though she treated me warmly, I was never to have her friendship. I’ve noted that we met several times each term in her rooms in St. Hilda’s (her sitting room was unusually bright, as dons’ rooms went); and she always led me in challenging discussions of Milton and his contemporaries—our talks were punctuated by laughter and distinguished by a peculiar trait of Miss Gardner’s. It was one noted by several of my male friends who likewise went to her rooms for tutorials—she generally wore some sort of pendant on a long chain; and in the course of a discussion, she was given to manipulating the pendant fairly constantly in the vicinity of her sweater-covered and quite nice breasts.
I knew, and still know, nothing of her sexual predilections beyond Stephen Spender’s unconfirmed story of her falling haplessly in love with Henry Reed. I only know that her charming face (when she wished to charm), her beautiful eyes, and the ceaselessly moving pendant could leave me at the end of an hour with the sense of having participated in a semi-flirtation. Why not? The gesture was touching and surely no harm was done to either side—a single woman, a single man, alone together. Again, other male friends have reported their own odd hours with Miss Gardner; and one has just now written me from New Zealand (our first communication in fifty years and entirely unsolicited). With no coaching whatever, he mentions that Miss Gardner “sat opposite me, her skirt on her knees, her knees apart.”
What was involved in these fairly unique gestures—a half-realized hope maybe that one of us would respond with some form of physical completion? When I took her out to dinner, toward the end of my Merton years, and brought her back to my rooms for after-dinner drinks, there was no sign of the pendant or any other form of seduction. I never heard a word of scandal about her from either her several ill-wishing colleagues or her students; and most of the male students known to me report Helen Gardner’s carefully parceled-out portions of kindness and well-deserved criticism.
Late in my third term, I learned rather dramatically that she’d grown dissatisfied with my work. The word came in a small envelope addressed in her unmistakable clear script and sent through the university mail system (a Dickensian, bicycle-powered, and usefully prompt means of intercollege communication). She said, more or less literally—and very peremptorily—
Dear Mr. Price,
When do you propose to get to work?
Yours sincerely,
Helen Gardner
I knew I’d earned her rebuke. So I busied myself preparing several brief papers arising from my Miltonic readings; and soon enough I was back in her graces with a reading list for the Long Vac soon to come. And I took her out for thoroughly pleasant dinners more than once, but she never responded with a social invitation, even to so much as a cup of tea; and when I ultimately completed my thesis, our relation ended as though at the turn of a key—an instructive student-teacher interdependency but nothing more. Admittedly I can’t recall ever telling her of my writing fiction; and when I began to publish stories, I never sent her a copy or wrote to her otherwise (I must have felt some guilt at owning up to rival pursuits).
My friendship with David and Nevill continued richly, largely by mail once I’d returned home to the States. I obviously never felt impelled to contact Miss Gardner, ever again. Perhaps she felt no particular desire to know me further. And my one receipt of a rocket from her pen, my awareness of the cool savagery of her professional pride when aroused (I recall a Times Literary Supplement public correspondence with a younger scholar about the textual editing of Donne’s poems), and her own perhaps wary pull-back from a male student’s life would eventually leave me discharged into cool outer space.
* * *
I acquired other friends among the university’s various faculties. Merton’s chief English tutor, Hugo Dyson, was a textbook specimen of his generation. Like Nevill he’d served in the Great War; and he moved slowly through the quads with a badly damaged leg, a severe limp, and a sturdy cane. I never actually studied with him; but as Merton’s senior tutor in English lit., he took a persistent interest in my well-being. He’d kindly included me, early in my first term, in a dinner-jacketed meal for all the new Merton Eng. lit. students in a private room in college; and thereafter he’d stop me in Front Quad every few weeks and grill me cheerfully in his booming baritone—Was I happy enough? Was so-and-so being generous to me? Too generous perhaps? How many times had I yet had pneumonia? Our outdoor sessions would terminate in torrents of Hugo’s laughter and a waving-off with his walking stick—he thought nothing of hailing me loudly with a personal question across the long quad. His own pupils were fond of him, and he even wound up with a small but imposing role in a popular English film of the 1960s—John Schlesinger’s Darling.
A quieter man was the college’s senior history tutor, Roger High-field. For all his restraint he possessed distinct charm, a shy but smiling magnetism. His own specialty was medieval Spanish history, but he also knew a huge amount about the earliest life of Merton, and he’d ultimately co-write a history of the college. Roger was Michael’s main tutor, the one who assigned his weekly papers and then sat and heard them read aloud. How I came to know him and, every few weeks, go to his rooms for sherry and good talk, I don’t recall; but his friendship is among my warmest college memories.
An especially winning quality of Roger’s was his ability to be right up to speed on whatever novel I’d just finished reading. With no boast or brag, he could hear you out on your own opinion of the work—Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins, whoever—then he’d nod slightly and say something that would prove memorable for decades. One evening I’d just completed a second reading of Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, a novel that lies behind more than one opera; and I noted to Roger that I’d recently concluded a fascination with a beauty just as dangerous as Manon. Roger searched my eyes for the briefest moment; then said “Ah Manon, yes. The sort of person who absolutely always lets you down.” I suspected then, and still do, that something deeply personal must have powered that perfect observation; but I’d never have asked.
His younger history colleague John Roberts would eventually become Warden of Merton (the college president) and the author of, among other books, an immensely popular History of the World. John was only five years older than I and was the Principal of the Postmasters in my time, the equivalent of a minor dean in an American college. You went to him for permission to spend a night out of college during term or to come in late (the gate closed at eleven), though you learned soon enough that climbing in was a simpler solution. You could either scale a nine-foot-high wall at the elbow bend in Merton Street and drop down into the dark interior of the college garden, or you could merely walk in illegally. That required a lengthy detour down St. Aldate’s and then—just past the police station—you grabbed hold with both hands and swung round a rickety post that supported barbed wire and overhung a deep drainage ditch. From there you were free to walk through a spooky pitch-dark Christ Church Meadow for the equivalent of two blocks, then step over a low wall into the backside of Merton (that route, I’m told, has now been balked).
Somehow John Roberts and I soon knew that we shared common interests; and I frequently had sherry with him, often turning an amused blind eye to the numerous attractive women who visited him at odd hours. As a member of the college, I never had the slightest behavioral difficulty with him. In fact my only problem with John lay in his possession of a pronounced facial tic. In any conversation he was likely at startling intervals to give a sudden, and surely unconscious, twist to one side of his face. Given my helpless lifelong tendency to mimic the accents of whomever I’m speaking with, I’d have to struggle when I was with John not to return his tic with a consoling wince of my own. I think I never did, but I can’t guarantee it. He and his first wife eventually stayed with me in my first home back in the States; and he wrote me, most thoughtfully, years later when he learned of my cancer surgery (so did a mighty host of other Oxonians).
All these older friends—with the exception of Nevill and David, who were supremely important—are recalled here not so much because they proved helpful in my graduate studies (they did) but because they illustrate so likably one of my major early discoveries in the dim Thames Valley. For all the postwar bleakness of Britain then, and for all the British reputation for stiff-upper-lipped solemnity, my experience of Oxford—from the scouts at Merton on through my teachers and other academic friends—was an experience of high wit, often mischievous or otherwise boisterous laughter, and of infallible generosity if ever I asked for help.
As for my other experiences on that remarkably small island, my visits in recent years have been rare, mainly owing to the complexities of wheelchair travel; and I can’t vouch for the atmosphere of the contemporary country, one that’s altered in some ways unrecognizably since my time. But the whole nation in the mid-Fifties—close as it was to the horrors of the Second World War—is marked in my memory, like Oxford, by a warm and constant level of intelligence, and a widespread appetite for fun, a delight in the folly of the human race (as well as the silliness of one’s friends and enemies), and above all one’s own unquenchable absurdity. Even the joking American South of my boyhood didn’t surpass that only-just-torpedoed and slowly sinking imperial center for discernment and laughter, though the players and the games were worlds apart. And no other region on the face of the planet—none known to me, including all other regions of the States—has evoked more enduring love in me than the literal ground and the class-sorted people of postwar Great Britain.
* * *
In the remainder of summer term (it ran from mid-April to mid-June), life went on much as I’ve described it, with only a few other standouts and with the added diversion of the new car. Once it arrived Michael availed himself of it for drives in the Oxfordshire countryside to ready himself for the driving-license test he’d never yet taken (those were still days when very few Britons owned their own cars). His learner status required the presence of a licensed companion in the car, and that was always me—three or four afternoons a week. In the process, rain or shine, I learned my way round a world of villages whose names I’d encountered in reading Matthew Arnold’s Oxford poems, the only great poems which are specifically Oxonian—“The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis,” the elegy on the death of Arnold’s undergraduate companion, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
In their biscuit-colored stone, many of the villages looked virtually identical to what Arnold and Clough might have seen in their student wanderings through the county. My own favorites were Forest Hill, in whose church Milton almost surely married his first wife (Mary Powell, who was half his age and who left him a few weeks after the wedding to return to her family and then failed to rejoin him for nearly three years), and Godstow (where, on the opposite bank from the eventually famous Trout Inn, Mr. Charles Dodgson—a don at Christ Church—told two young girls the story which he’d later publish as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under his pen name, Lewis Carroll). An even greater favorite was the small town of Woodstock which sported the vast Churchill family estate (presented by a grateful nation to the first Duke of Marlborough in thanks for his victory over the French and Bavarians in 1704 at Blenheim in Bavaria, hence the name of the house itself—Blenheim Palace, pronounced Blen-im in England). In those pre-tourist-flood days, the grounds were entirely open to random visitors—no tickets required. Michael could park us at one of the gates, and we’d wander the calmly natural park, designed by the apparently infallible landscape architect Capability Brown. Then we could lie by the lake with our books (weather permitting) and never be bothered by a single other human, reading till hunger or thirst compelled us into the nearby Bear Inn.
* * *
The addition of the Volkswagen encouraged thoughts of a summer trip to the Continent. Late in the term Michael got his driving license with no hitch; and given our good time in Italy, the two of us began to plan a long drive. We’d load the car on a ship to Norway, drive through Scandinavia, then down through Germany for a week with Jane and Liz in Munich, then up the Rhine to Holland and thence back to England. It was no doubt a half-insane project for a man who hoped to complete a substantial scholarly thesis by early in the autumn, then be successfully examined by a hard-nosed faculty board before I could win my degree and return home in the early summer of 1957. Well, at that point in my life, I still knew very little about my realistic rate of production in scholarship or fiction (though I’d already demonstrated my slowness during my final term at Duke when I completed my honors thesis—Milton’s entry into politics—on the morning it was due). I guessed I could accomplish all the jobs before me in the time available; and without consulting Miss Gardner or the Warden of Rhodes House who after all signed my checks, I joined Michael in planning more than a month’s wide loop round the Continent.
Meanwhile each of us also had the considerable problem of finding digs—lodgings—for the following year. In an increasingly crowded situation, Merton could only offer most undergraduates two years of in-college lodging; each grad student got a single year. We were soon to be thrown on the mercy of the city’s digs market. There were numerous widows and assorted others who advertised rooms with a central university bureau; and lists of such providers were available, as was a lively oral tradition of affable landladies who’d previously accommodated Mertonians. But each man was very much on his own in the run for space.
Although I don’t know the date of this photograph of W. H. Auden, it was taken by Erich Auerbach at what appears to be the time when I saw so much of Auden at Oxford—his Professor of Poetry years. He was in his early fifties by then; and while his face has begun its downward collapse into creasing, it’s still a face that could—until almost the end of his life—be repaired by a smile (as it so often was in the middle years before a monumental sadness—impelled by drink, daily barbiturates, and a fading of the only love he’d wanted—overcame him). Only one thing is lacking here; there’s no cigarette in his stained right hand. But isn’t the open document in his lap a musical score, and isn’t that a small piano in the left corner behind him? He and his partner Chester Kallman had written the libretto for Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress which had its premiere in Venice in 1951; and while it’s one of the very few post-Puccini/Strauss operas to have a vigorous ongoing life, none of his and Kallman’s several other libretti have met with such luck. Perhaps Auden holds another score here then, something for which he plans to write words (a complicated challenge) or a finished achievement. Above all, this is the heart and head that conceived and accomplished a quantity of poems surpassing all but a very few of the lines written by others in his lifetime—or since.
How we discovered her I no longer recall; but Michael and I quickly found an extraordinary woman at 2 Sandfield Road in Headington, an eastside—and very stellar—Oxford neighborhood (it housed C. S. Lewis who’d never moved to Cambridge, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Isaiah Berlin). Our landlady-to-be, Win Kirkby, was the wife of a New College scout named Jack Kirkby; and she had two sets of digs to offer. They consisted of two ground-floor private sitting rooms with separate bedrooms upstairs, a shared upstairs bath (shared also with the two Kirkbys, no children). All that, with full English breakfast provided, would cost us each two pounds, ten shillings per week (the equivalent of $56 today or $224 per month, a substantial sum for men on scholarships). But the rooms were likable, the street itself was remarkably quiet; and Win would be our bedmaker and breakfast cook, as well as a huge source of educational entertainment—our first meeting with her suggested that strongly. No deposit was required, only our gentleman’s word that we wanted the four rooms and would appear a few days before fall term.
* * *
Toward the end of spring term, one of the best surprises of the year saw the arrival in my pigeonhole of a small envelope—hand-addressed and bearing in the upper left corner a nearly illegible name. I thought it said W. H. Auden. I’d known that—the previous year, in a much-contested university election—Auden had been elected Professor of Poetry, a five-year appointment which required no residence in Oxford and only three lectures per year. I’d read a good deal about the controversy surrounding his election; and I knew that the fact he’d departed his native country for the United States essentially for good in 1939, as war with Hitler looked inevitable, hardly sat well with many of his former countrymen. In the interim, however, he’d become the most admired of still-working English-speaking poets—T. S. Eliot was no longer writing anything but occasional verse plays and critical essays. And despite a fierce campaign for votes, Auden’s reputation overwhelmed all opposition to his apparent disloyalty and his not especially concealed homosexuality. I’d heard him called “a traitorous bugger” more than once before I received his letter, and I’d heard of his imminent arrival.
My envelope proved to contain a brief note, saying that our mutual friend Frank Lyell had suggested he should look me up upon his arrival in Oxford. Would I join him then, for a drink in his rooms, a few days from now? I accepted at once, acquired a volume of his poems, and consumed many with great admiration (I’d known some of them for years). I also read his latest volume, published only a few months earlier. It contained the poem that gave its name to the collection, a poem that would come to be seen by many as the lyric height of his enormous output—“The Shield of Achilles.” In admiration but serious uncertainty then—I’d heard of his rudeness and, of all things, his silliness—I found my way up his tall staircase in the southeast corner of Tom Quad in Christ Church to meet a man who, whatever world-class strengths he’d attained in poetry, promised to be a strange bird.
Promptness has always been my sole major virtue, and I knocked on his door at five. Through the ensuing hour—Auden was downing a tumbler of gin; I chose sherry—it was clear that my host was as nervous as I. Was my presence the cause, or was it some disturbance in Auden’s recent life? (He’d chosen not to bring his notoriously queer partner, Chester Kallman, even though Kallman had been Auden’s serious collaborator on the libretto for Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress, one of only two or three operas since Puccini’s Turandot that has entered the ongoing repertoire of world-class opera houses). Auden had said in a recent interview that he felt, on arrival, like a new boy at a public school—a public school in Britain was an American private school. Or was he simply a poor companion for conversation? My own later experience suggests that, in attempted dialogue, Auden was hardly a companion. At Oxford he was a performer, awaiting his next moment to perform.
Whatever, I can remember only that he asked if I knew the work of M. F. K. Fisher. I confessed that I hadn’t heard of Fisher. He said that she wrote entirely about food and was the finest living writer of prose (I’d soon learn that Auden was given to eccentric claims). When I mentioned my work on Milton, he had almost nothing to say. I mentioned my love of Emily Dickinson; he nodded with no enthusiasm—“Very little-bitty at times, don’t you feel?” When he asked if I liked opera, I could honestly say I did—a lot. That seemed to get me to first base at least.
He asked for my favorite opera composer. I said Wagner; he grinned, shut his eyes in bliss, tilted his head back, and said “I’m having ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’ played at my funeral, and I long to direct a production of Tristan und Isolde with two large lesbians—no man and woman could ever carry on so fervently about one another” (a recording of the clangorous “Funeral March” would in fact be played just before Auden’s funeral, years later in a gathering of his friends in the Austrian home he’d shared with Chester Kallman; but he never directed his ideal Tristan, though I later learned he’d told the story to hundreds of friends).
As I stood to leave at the end of an hour, Auden said he meant to have his coffee each day at eleven in the Cadena Café on the Corn-market. I’d be welcome to drop by with any other students who might be interested. He also hoped we could dine together soon. Only a moment later as I was descending the stairs, it occurred to me—from earlier reading—that the nineteenth-century room and the famous rooftop photographic studio of Lewis Carroll must have been nearby. Well, Auden was at least as peculiar a fellow and at least as true a genius (in retrospect he seems to me, for all his flaws and late absurdities, to have been the greatest English-language poet since Eliot).
Unfortunately I waited too late to go to the Sheldonian Theatre on the afternoon of his superb inaugural lecture and was unable to gain entry—he’d packed the place. I did, however, take up his morning-coffee invitation more than once—well before other students were prepared to face such a formidable creature. And speaking of face, it’s realistic, if inevitably unkind, to broach the problem of Auden’s face; but since he allowed himself to be photographed often, right to the end of his life, he didn’t conceal the fact. Pictures from his youth suggest that he was a near-albino in some respects—abnormally pale and thin-skinned. Perhaps that genetic endowment, plus the fact of long decades of chain-smoking—not to mention heavy drinking and pill-taking—had left the skin of his face phenomenally creased and gullied, though when he returned to Oxford, he was only in his late forties.
More than one joke on the subject made the local rounds. Even the kindly David Cecil said “If a fly were to walk across Wystan’s face, it would break its legs.” (I can vouch for David’s invention of that one.) And Stravinsky was reported to have said “We’re going to have to iron Wystan soon.” I don’t know that Auden ever heard the jokes; but for anyone with as keen a sense of physical beauty as he possessed, even the daily shave at the mirror may have been difficult. I can report, for what it’s worth, that in numerous jokey remarks about himself, I never heard him allude to his wrinkles—maybe an indication of their painfulness.
The Cadena hours, with or without other students, were more relaxed. He’d have generally brought along a book in case no one turned up (incredibly it was often the case that Auden sat there alone amid the shopping housewives who’d paused for their own elevenses), and that lack of company gave him at least one thing he could volubly deplore, if a student appeared and nothing else surfaced as a subject for conversation. As a man who produced so much, and worked on a mercilessly regular schedule, he was addicted to midmorning and evening company.
Of all the books he brought, I remember only a volume of Rosemond Tuve’s on English metaphysical poetry (I think she was visiting in Oxford that year). He admired it and, knowing of my interest in the same subject, he expatiated on it—especially the Christian poems of George Herbert. Since I made no notes, I remember nothing more of his lecture, for it did seem a lecture. One maybe relevant memory is that, while he knew I had serious hopes of a writing career, I never asked him if he’d read any one of my manuscript stories; and he never asked to see anything (a fact I can easily comprehend, after five decades of my own teaching; but then verse was his trade, not fiction, though he endlessly consumed mystery novels—as did Eudora Welty and Diarmuid Russell).
Term soon wound down without a dinner invitation; but by then I took that as no deprivation. Dinner on the Christ Church high table, and with a social reality as daunting as Wystan Auden, would not have been an occasion I sought fearlessly. I do recall that, after the official end of term, I was sitting in my car at the Carfax stoplight when I saw Auden walking up the High with a man whom—from some book-jacket photo maybe—I recognized as Chester Kallman. Kallman was fourteen years younger than his distinguished partner, blondish and fleshy, hardly a man I’d have called handsome, much less beautiful (as Auden implied, in a number of poems). So Auden had kept his self-administered vow; but today as he was no doubt packing to depart, Chester had arrived; and they both were laughing their way down the crowded sidewalk—Auden beaming at his friend.
Were they the first admittedly queer couple I witnessed in public life? Almost surely. If so, they were for me—devoted disciple of physical beauty that I then was—a sad introduction. Yet in their own complicated way, a way that included sexual infidelity on a steady scale for both men, a loyal partnership existed and endured till Auden’s death some seventeen years later. Since the relation seemed—to many of Wystan’s old friends—a source of prolonged unhappiness for him, its continuation was hard for those friends to comprehend. But aren’t a great many enduring marriages, of whatever variety, incomprehensible to close observers? Thus Love me, love my dog is far too much for most married men or women to ask of their friends.
* * *
In any case, in my two remaining years at Oxford—and through the rest of Auden’s life—I never met Chester Kallman; so I have no informed observations of a partnership that, after all, endured for nearly forty years. I did learn, though—as the interested world did—that Auden had left the whole of his hard-won considerable estate to Kallman with the instruction that, should Chester die before Auden, the estate would go to Auden’s two nieces. If Chester should survive Auden, then the estate would be willed by Chester to the nieces. But the feckless Chester died intestate only two years later; and by default the Auden estate went to Chester’s next-of-kin—his own father, Dr. Kallman, who was a dentist in New York, a man in his mid-eighties who soon remarried a younger woman. Not a penny went to Auden’s two nieces. The absurd folly of such a conclusion might have amused the satiric Auden in his last years, prematurely exhausted with life as he was and deep in a miserable nightly drunkenness.
And to complete my own experience in the matter—the last time I saw Wystan Auden was in February 1969 when Nevill Coghill came to New York for the premiere of a musical based on his translation of The Canterbury Tales. He’d co-written the book with Martin Starkie and had himself written the lyrics. Nevill had recently retired from his long career at Oxford; and this was the first public display of a newly ongoing creative life from a man who’d done a great deal for scholarship and theatrical art and had been, above all, an endlessly encouraging teacher. For the opening night on Broadway, he invited three of his old students. The oldest was Cleanth Brooks, the critic who’d virtually invented the hugely influential, and now much lamented, New Criticism (lamented for its departure in the frequently incomprehensible wake of Critical Theory, a widespread disaster that presently blights most fields). The next was Wystan Auden, then me—I’d turned thirty-six only two days before and had flown up from North Carolina for the evening.
I arrived first at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. Wystan, whom I hadn’t seen since Stephen Spender invited us and Robert Lowell to lunch at the Algonquin a few years earlier—an extremely good-natured occasion with a keenly alert Auden still capable of leading the jokes and laughter—arrived next, huffing loudly in a thick black overcoat. He shook my hand, said a perfunctory word or two; then sat beside me, never removing the coat (he’d just turned sixty-two and would live only four more years). As ever, he proceeded next to replace his outdoor shoes with the carpet slippers he’d brought in a brown paper bag. I was shocked by his physical and apparent psychic decline in the short gap of time since our last meeting (later I’d learn that Kallman was now spending a great part of the year away from their traditional lodgings in New York and Austria and that Wystan was suffering from the separation).
Then Cleanth Brooks arrived with his usual Southern-gent courtesy, and the curtain rose on a performance that was not quite brilliant but was at least diverting—the young cast were attractive and scantily dressed when at all possible, generally a big help. Throughout the nimble stage action, Auden continued breathing stertorously. Sad to say, he also gave off the distinct odor of an old Oxonian who seldom used the facilities. We were invited to join Nevill later at a party—he’d only recently turned seventy—but midway through the first act, Wystan whispered to me a gruff “It’s my bedtime” and was off in the darkness. Whether he ever saw Nevill again, I can’t say—his departure from the theatre was inexcusably rude—but in the remaining years of Auden’s life, I never saw the grand poet again, the man who’d written poems as indelible in the history of verse as his “Elegy for William Butler Yeats,” “In Praise of Limestone,” “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love,” “The Shield of Achilles,” and dozens of shorter lyrics and a handful of brilliant long poems like “The Sea and the Mirror” and “For the Time Being.”
I’ve tried to make clear that I was never one of his friends. The innate shyness which his oldest friends frequently mention in their recollections may have been at work—a shyness often concealed by overbearing loquacity. Or maybe he just didn’t like me, yet we often talked interestingly and laughed together a good deal in Oxford. Otherwise I saw him only four times, I think, thereafter—twice in New York and twice in Washington, occasions arranged by others (he recommended me for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the late Sixties, and my application was successful). I shared in whatever sense of a barrier he may have felt with me; in my case, he was too enormous for real friendship (that seemed a general response from other of my Oxford contemporaries). Still, I never doubted for a day that he was the only steadily productive genius with whom I’ve spent real time.
Even in the most relaxed moments in his Christ Church rooms, coming to the end of our first half-quart of martinis, he’d fall silent for two long draws on his endless cigarette; and in the brief silence that fell around us, I could hear his great mind turning like the wheels of a vast locomotive. Surely the barrels of alcohol and the kegs of amphetamines were, in part, mere means of damping that motion, the heat and light it steadily induced as it did its work—not to speak of its almost constant pain in the hope of loving someone as steadily difficult as Chester Kallman (that’s of course to ignore the impossible challenge that faced Kallman daily—his attempt as a would-be younger poet to live with, and love, one of the great poets of the English language). And it should never be forgot that even the face Auden laid before us in the late photographs—that dreadful ruin—still concealed a brain that could issue, almost till the actual month of his death, the odd gorgeous poem.
* * *
In those days the British took a person’s twenty-first birthday as a celebratory occasion far more regularly than most Americans. I’d observed my own twenty-first two years before, just as Dad discovered his cancer; but Michael’s fell late in that spring term of ’56. He’d met Pamela Redmayne on several rides with me to Burford. When she learned of his oncoming auspiciousness (and she said it coincided with an unspecified birthday of her own), she sprang into her finest military-planning mode. On the day in question, she said, we’d gather a few decorative girls and a number of Rhodesters from my class, several of whom had likewise bought cars. Then we’d proceed toward Longleat House, the home of the Marquess of Bath and the ancestral seat of the Bath family since 1580. Weather permitting, we’d search out a particularly beautiful hillside near Longleat. The place, it seemed, was known chiefly to Redmayne; and there we’d eat the enormous picnic she’d provide. As ever, all participants had preliminary duties assigned to them; and Michael and I spent the previous night at Pamela’s house, performing various chores.
The great day dawned at last—gloriously sunlit, only the occasional cottony cloud lined with gray (imitating its predecessors in landscapes by Constable). As Michael and I ate Pamela’s immense English breakfast, the tableside BBC weather report could—as ever in those pre-global-warming days—only muster its weakest threat: Bright intervals interspersed with showers. So in midmorning, off we set—John Sears from Massachusetts and Balliol, Rex Jamison, Jim Griffin, and Howard Reilly from Pennsylvania and Magdalen among others—in several midget autos, each car filled with smiling youngsters roughly our age, all almost infinitely grateful for such spring weather and the bursting hampers of guaranteed fine food.
Any trip with Pamela would include some modest detour to pay a brief call on a significant historic site. She never went in for lengthy tours, knowing (as she usually did) far more about the place than any official guide who was likely to appear. That morning she led us to the circle at Avebury, a prehistoric stone ring—only eighteen miles from Stonehenge—of incomprehensible complexity, the result of a gigantic effort from perhaps 3000 B.C. It’s estimated that it took the equivalent of seven hundred men ten years to complete the task.
I regret to say that I was so involved in the beauty of the day itself—unmitigated sunlight after so much outer and inner darkness—and in Michael’s delight in our birthday plans that I registered the marvels of Avebury less indelibly than I should have (I flagged it for a later return but never made it). From Avebury, Pamela guided us farther on to our destination—a spot on the Longleat estate called Heaven’s Gate (or so she claimed; it certainly felt like a celestial entrance, and it looks that grand still in the color home movies I made at the time). The dozen or so of us sat down on a steep hillside—not in the usual picnic circle but facing Longleat House below us—and were told, briskly by Pamela, that we were in yet another nobleman’s park designed by Capability Brown. Then hungry as dogs—the males at least—we seized upon Redmayne’s first-rate chicken and salad, her English cheeses (which I still prefer to French) and homemade brown bread, all washed down with potent cider (wine and beer were mostly omitted from her battery of offerings but were seldom missed).
As we neared the point of abdominal ballistics, Pamela produced—incredibly—thirteen cakes, each made by her own hands. Then amid our oversated groans, we toasted our benefactress on her own birthday (I estimate she might have been sixty) and Michael on his newly confirmed manhood. Deeply reserved Englishman that he was, Michael laughed, then stood and bowed his formal thanks to Redmayne. I’d very likely not been happier in my life, not till then. And even now, turning back, I can think of very few days as full of harmless pleasure in the midst of an aristocrat’s expensively tended grounds, entirely free to us, surrounded by friends of proven merit and with Michael, whom I more than half suspected was now an incomparable friend.
In short I’d come to trust the fact that I was fully committed. I’d told no one and wouldn’t, for years—not even the object of my feeling. But commitment meant to me then that, so far as I could begin to foresee—since marriage and children were out of the question—I’d step forward without hesitation, if called, to lay down my life for the person in question. I don’t recall having formed such an outlandish feeling, much less so dedicated a feeling, at Heaven’s Gate; but I think it’s true to my conviction that day, that point in the year. Fifty years later I may smile at my intensity; but I know I was not deluded. I would make that offer still, if called upon. The person had already proved his own loyalty and was giving as much as his very different nature could find a way to give.
To my further delight, when Pamela and several more of us stalked down the hill and approached the main door of Longleat, there stood the present holder of the title—a pleasantly ordinary-looking man of early middle age, greeting tourists (the house supported itself now on tickets). Redmayne moved forward and presented herself, by her own name and her father’s, as a friend of the Bath family; and he greeted her with obvious recognition and welcome, waving us inward without bought tickets. After that, the interior of the house lay on the downward side of the day. Nonetheless we took the tour, with Redmayne correcting the hapless guide sotto voce but no doubt correctly. By the time we’d delivered Pamela back to Burford a few hours later and were safely back to Merton in early dark, I was more than ready for a long night’s sleep. And the blessed Bill Jackson let me have it (no open curtains and “Good morning, sir” at half-past seven—how did he know?).
* * *
Also that spring William Styron responded to the manuscript I’d sent him at Professor Blackburn’s insistence. He said at once that he was only an adviser to The Paris Review but that he’d already sent the story on to Peter Matthiessen, the fiction editor, with a high recommendation. He then went on to say the kinds of things any apprentice longs to hear from a respected professional—
I think it is a most beautiful and touching tale. The mood is set from the beginning, the tone is maintained throughout, and it all builds up, I think, to a wonderfully telling and poignant picture of life-in-death, with the background of the Piedmont South done with great accuracy, and humor, and versimilitude. (sic)
* * *
The only problem which Styron’s praise presented, of course, was the fact that it gave me a powerful impetus to get on with new fiction when a thesis was still the abyss that yawned before me.
With a few other diversions then, the term—and my first academic year at Oxford—wound to its close. Michael and I and a couple of girls from St. Hilda’s took a few Sunday afternoon drives down to Windsor Great Park to watch Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, play polo in the presence of the royal women and infants—the younger Elizabeth II and her sister Margaret, as dowdy as ever then in tweeds and head scarves, and only the Queen Mother flying her usual banner of eccentric high fashion with ostrich-plumed hats and satin handbags in the midst of high-spirited polo (the Queen’s children, Charles and Anne at eight and four, were the normal dressers of the family).
Then I went for an affable end-of-term meeting with Miss Gardner to confirm her recommendations for summer reading and writing. There was one more packing of all I’d brought to Oxford and all I’d acquired in the past eight months (Jackson had volunteered to store my trunk in his spacious pantry till I was ready to move to my digs). There were a series of coffees and sherries with my college friends—temporary farewells to tide us through the Long Vac. Then a visit to Brighton to spend a few days with Michael and his mother in her council flat—a pleasant six rooms with views of the sea and the town that had bloomed as a pleasure dome for the profligate Prince Regent (later King George IV) in the early nineteenth century.
RP with Wendy Stringer and Stella Kirk, photographed by Michael Jordan on the polo pitch at Windsor on a Sunday afternoon in June ’56. Prince Philip (the Queen’s husband) is a member of the horse melee before us; and the royal family are seated directly opposite us, some fifty yards away. Behind us is the black Volkswagen which I’d only acquired a month ago, and atop my head is the brown Borsalino porkpie hat I’d acquired in Italy sometime during the prior Easter vac. The two girls were cheerful friends from St. Hilda’s College; and Wendy—in the middle here—would eventually marry an Italian and spend her life in his country. Note the degree of dress-up clearly involved in a visit to Windsor (the nearby Queen, in tweed skirt and head kerchief, is dressed less formally than we, though the Queen Mother is reliably dressed in pale-blue silk and a hat with modified ostrich feathers). In addition to the porkpie, I’m wearing a tie, the camel’s hair jacket I bought in Venice, and—above all—the white socks that American college men of my era religiously wore. As grave as the three of us look—and Mike as well, behind the camera—we’re actually thoroughly enjoying ourselves: in another two seconds, I’m sure, we’d have faced Mike and laughed.