Ardent Spirits

THEN MY SECOND YEAR commenced with Michael’s arrival in his own two-room set at the Kirkbys’. I’ve dealt with the first year in such full detail because it was, till then, the most important year of my life—emotional, intellectual, and (surprisingly, given the slim amount of fiction I completed) likewise so far as my writing was concerned. When I recovered—in the previous autumn—from my imaginary cancer, I’d managed to get as close as I’d ever come to a final peace with Dad’s death. The terrible memories of his last two weeks, when I was with him in the hospital most of the days and all the nights, are still capable—five decades later—of replaying themselves in my mind; but they no longer bring on my old desperation at being so helpless to ease him or my still baffled guilt that, there at the end of his life, he seemed to want only me—not Mother—with him (my brother was then considered too young, by the family elders, for hospital visits in such a dire situation). And by the fall of 1956, that particular shackle had mostly dissolved from my ankle.

Mike Jordan and I, at the gate to our Headington digs on Sandfield Road. I was always mildly baffled to note the British insistence on surrounding one’s living quarters with walls, fences, and gates. However small your plot of ground, you enclosed it with an unmistakable indication of your right to privacy within your walls—and that in a country which seemed, to me in the 1950s, the epitome of safety compared with the States. The picture was taken by our landlady at my request. Mike’s papers and necktie indicate that he’s off for town to study; my open-necked shirt suggests that I’ll be reading and/or writing in our digs. My display of an incipient but unmistakable belly marks my growing addiction to the tasty Indian food (with a great deal of fried rice) which we’ve discovered. It also marks me as my mother’s son—the men in her family, the Rodwells of Warren County, were known for “the Rodwell paunch”; and I’m clearly bound in that direction, even at age twenty-three.

Meanwhile my friendship with Michael had gradually become—for me—an old-fashioned romantic friendship of the sort I’d read about in the school and college lives of Milton, Tennyson, or Matthew Arnold (with the addition of a cooling reality which those earlier men may or may not have experienced in their connections—and I’m referring to Milton’s intense friendship with Charles Diodati, Tennyson’s with Arthur Hallam, or Arnold’s with Arthur Clough). Michael’s sense of our bond was always distinctly different from mine. What we had was not a sexual relation; and all these years later, despite the fact that we live on opposite sides of an ocean—and that he’s content in a second marriage with three grown children—we meet at least annually and have still never got down to a thorough discussion of what we’ve meant to one another.

But that’s a situation with which I’ve long since been at ease. From the start I was the professional communicator; Michael was the agreeably taciturn, though frequently laughing and always strong-minded, Briton. I think there must have been times when my attachment to him was briefly onerous. But his unquestioned loyalty, over so long a stretch, and his obvious enjoyment of our times together have spoken more resonantly than any more analytic words he might have offered about the value of our friendship.

By the end of our first year together, it was clear that, outside my family, no other relation in my life had been more rewarding in so many ways; and despite occasional mild disappointments, that’s still the case, I’m glad to say. The friendship had already taught me an enormous amount about affection, love, steadfastness, wit, and patience—not at once but slowly and largely in reflection. I’d never been an especially patient person, and the necessity to learn the art of self-restraint in a close relation—and to learn it from someone who taught me equanimity by quietly stepping back from any disagreement or unreasonable expectation—proved both difficult and invaluable (and I was never expected to provide a female emotional response, whatever that might be, in our relation; I was always another man, contentious when need be but peaceful by the end of a day).

The day Michael Jordan looked into Mob Quad 2:1 and said he didn’t suppose I was interested in soccer was the most educational day, then, of my Oxford years. So far as my having, then or later, an active interest in the much-alleged homosexual crowd of Oxford undergraduates, I literally knew no other student who claimed to be queer (or appeared to be—it was some time before queer confessions became as common as weak jokes); and I couldn’t have told you, till late in my third year, whether or not there was a queer pub or other gathering place in the city. The life I lived was my own rich satisfaction. (Despite the general heterosexual drift of the university, by the way, there was very little in the way of romantic connection between male and female students—partly because all colleges were then single-gender but also because it seemed to be a long-standing Oxford custom.)

I was further supported by the seriousness with which elders like David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, and Helen Gardner received me. The very structure of Oxford education in those years—with its imposed distance between teacher and pupil—meant that I could trust the friendship those teachers offered me and, yes, the liking which the two men expressed for my fiction. But the interest of David and Nevill came from men who were themselves widely respected writers; so I felt I could trust them in ways that had made it difficult to trust the aesthetic commendations of my American teachers of literature, none of whom was such a writer. That’s not to demean the sincerity or the intelligence of my generous countrymen; it does say, however, that I’d always felt a sense that they were pushing my writing onward in at least a partial necessity to do so. I sat just under their eyes in class somewhere between three and five times per week. I was maybe the most serious student they had in a particular year, and I was so obviously hungry for affection and praise that they could hardly have refused me without overt cruelty.

* * *

Again, in Oxford I was a plainly grown man who was running his own life, though my teachers knew little about my incompetence to do so. I’d see those dons maybe six or eight times in a two-month term; and they each possessed a natural English reserve that had not come naturally to my sometimes fervent teachers at home. I knew what a small amount of good writing I’d accomplished by the age of twenty-three, I knew it was not all first-rate work, but I felt I could trust what lay just behind me and push on for much more. Now in case I seem to claim that I’d grown miraculously better in the course of a year, I’ll add that some of my American friends found it a little amusing that I’d grown hyper-British in a very short time (not so British, though, as one of my American colleagues at Merton; he’d become a virtual rolled umbrella). I can say again, in defense, that through my whole life a certain family gene for sympathetic mimicry—my father was a master mimic—had led me, unconsciously at first, to assume the voice and sometimes the physical mannerisms of anyone whom I especially liked and spent much time with.

Partly I wanted my interlocutors to understand my words, so I’d use no outlandish Americanese in those days before American accents were common on British television, but mainly—I think—I almost wanted to become them. Was it a characteristic of, say, someone bound to be a writer—or at least some brand of constant observer? In childhood, for instance, I’d assume the dialect and tones of black people who worked in our family homes. If any one of them minded, they never told me, and those men and women freely told children to correct any out-of-line behavior. At Duke I’d do it with friends from the northeast, people whom we Southerners still thought of as Yankees (the Civil War, after all, had ended only sixty-eight years before my birth).

Now I was doing it with the British—and in a variety of British accents, from various regions and social classes of the whole United Kingdom. Never mind; I’ve had far worse temptations and have yielded to many. The moment an American friend stepped into the room, I was once more from North Carolina or New Jersey or Iowa, depending on their origins. Nonetheless in two further years of Oxford life, I’d worn out or outgrown my American clothes and acquired British trousers and sweaters from Marks and Spencer—or Marks and Sparks, as people called what was then Britain’s most widespread cut-rate clothing chain.

I too owned a bamboo-handled umbrella (bought in New York two years earlier), I’d largely settled on an upper-middle-class accent, and sometimes I could feel my actual movements becoming British. I was growing less rangy and loping, more self-contained in my walk and gestures—the actions of a man on a small crowded island, not claiming excess space for himself. Never once, though, did I think of becoming a British subject. I could eventually see that my friend Jim Griffin was tilting in that direction. I loved where I was, at Merton and on Sandfield Road; but even in term time, surrounded by friends, I’ve noted how that pleasure nonetheless went through spells of missing home badly.

* * *

In my first year I’d splurged on the two long trips to Italy and the continental summer. The second year was spent almost entirely in town and at the university. Early in the first term of my second year, then, it became clear that—to do an adequate job on my thesis (and the B.Litt. was considered a two-year degree)—I’d need an unusual third year in residence. Apart from the academic reality—and why hadn’t I seen its inevitability sooner?—I’m sure that my interest in Britain (the country and the people) had grown so genuine that I wished to extend my stay so long as the Rhodes Foundation would support me. A possible third year was the previously announced extent of their largess. Michael was due to leave Oxford in the coming spring; but other friends would remain—David and Nevill lived there, plus a clutch of the undergraduates I’ve mentioned—and by now the Kirk-bys were becoming both fascinating to observe and warmhearted in their friendship. I felt more and more like a foster son of theirs, which was something I still needed to feel.

But I knew that my mother would be painfully disappointed by news of my intention to stay, and I waited till I’d settled various questions before telling her—would my application for third-year funding be successful, would Win Kirkby agree to my staying on with very little time away from Sandfield Road, was my academic work likely to prosper (I’d begun to think of turning toward work on a D.Phil. degree once I’d completed the B.Litt.); and could I find promising subjects to complete a volume with the seventy-odd pages of more or less finished stories I had in my drawer?

* * *

First, though, I plunged into the thesis. Miss Gardner met with me early in the fall term and discussed the shape of my work to date. I’m not sure whether it was her personal practice with graduate students or an overall practice of the English faculty; in any case she let me know that she’d eventually read perhaps the first third of my thesis but no more. By way of explanation, she noted that there was the real chance she might be appointed as one of my final examiners; and she didn’t want to examine a thesis which she’d thoroughly influenced throughout its length. That struck me as a healthy procedure. We sketched out a possible plan for the chapters I was likely to need in an adequate study of a poem as complex as Samson. Then we agreed to meet once a month, for sherry if nothing more; and I was on my way.

Given that the play is composed on the models of Greek tragedy as written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, I knew that I’d now have to read all their surviving plays—some for the first time. Though the surviving Greek texts are only a small proportion of what we know to have been a far larger treasury of plays by the three men, it was clear that Milton had read all the Greek tragedies we presently possess and was continuously guided by them, especially in matters of form. As far as my reading was concerned, there was one large hitch—I didn’t know classical Greek and would not have time to learn it. Nor did Miss Gardner expect me to do so (I doubt that she herself knew Greek well). As an English major at Duke, to be sure, I’d read four or five of the most famous plays in translation. Now I entered the long tunnel of consuming a variety of translations of all the surviving others.

Various prior essays on Samson had suggested that Milton was more influenced by Sophocles than either of the others. In my own reading, however, I began to see that, not only was Milton hardly subservient to any one ancient master, he had in fact invented a quite original role for his Chorus, one that lent a new emotional depth to his tragedy and made it not merely a modern imitation of an older model but a devastatingly fresh study of human failure and gradual redemption (salvation in the act of suicide).

Soon Miss Gardner declared that my findings were of considerable interest. She likewise endorsed my readiness to commence writing the thesis. So I began—and at once encountered a roadblock, one that many scholars encounter at a similar point in their work. Because I’d set out to answer a question—what’s the role of the Chorus in Samson Agonistes?—I soon discovered that, in my extensive prior reading, I’d answered the question. The fact that I now had to write a thesis of nearly two hundred pages—a watertight argument that laid out the means by which I’d come to my solution—soon balked me. The writing became harder and harder because it became more and more boring by the day. Near the end of the first term, I had few finished pages behind me; and with much relief I drove to Brighton to spend Christmas week with Michael and his mother.

* * *

The fall term had not been devoid of worldly concerns, though they seem to have had little effect on me or my friends. In late October ’56, Hungary launched a popular rising against Soviet occupation. The rising was brutally repressed by Khrushchev’s tanks but not before many young Hungarians fled the country. Numbers of their best students arrived in Oxford and promptly began to study in various colleges. One of them was named George Radda, a quiet but winning man. He was quickly absorbed by one of the groups whom I often joined for coffee after lunch. And by the kind of eventual action of a fate to which many of us are subject (often without knowing it), George would become one of the Oxford scientists crucially involved in the development of magnetic radiation imagery—the now omnipresent MRI—a revolutionary mode of soft-tissue imaging which would be used importantly by my neurosurgeon in the removal of a large malignant tumor from within my spinal cord some thirty years after George’s flight from Hungary.

Also in late October ’56, Britain joined with France and Israel to retake Suez from the Egyptian control which had ensued upon Nasser’s seizure of the canal in July. Those allies were quickly forced, however—largely by pressure from the United States—to withdraw from the canal in humiliation. Meanwhile Egypt sank numerous ships in the canal, leaving it impassable—with oppressive results on the transport of vital fuel oil to Europe. The Cold War had seldom felt colder; yet I don’t recall that I was especially depressed (why, I can’t recall, considering my tenuous relations with the American draft). The chief difference felt by any resident of Britain who owned a car was the start, soon after the Suez debacle, of petrol rationing. It didn’t affect me drastically, though I did have to apply to my local rationing board for an extra coupon to permit me to drive down to visit my Merton friend Ron Tamplin in the TB sanatorium near Windsor Great Park where he was spending a few months, dealing with a recurrence of boyhood tuberculosis.

The third important world event for Oxford Americans during that same fall was the presidential election. Adlai Stevenson was running, for the second time, against Eisenhower; and I sat up through the night with many other Rhodesters at Rhodes House and watched the slow returns on TV. With his elegant command of the spoken language and his sane liberal proposals (in the face of an Eisenhower White House that had often seemed listless, if not gravely somnolent), Stevenson had been the favorite candidate of almost all my friends in the university; but however late we sat up near radios and televisions in Rhodes House, we couldn’t hand him victory. He lost, with the same valorous grace he’d shown at the time of his loss in 1952; and only when he came to Oxford for an honorary degree the following spring and was entertained at a Rhodes House reception did I get a mild shock to my sense of his famed degree of civilized discourse (I took Auden to the party and introduced him to Stevenson; the smiling man shook Auden’s hand but gave no other sign of knowing who W. H. Auden was).

More helpfully in those externally unnerving months, Lord David invited me for the first of my high-table dinners with him in New College. Such dinners then were truly high occasions—the best kind of English cooking, followed by an actual dessert in the Senior Common Room, complete with not only dessert but numerous fine cheeses, much old brandy, and—of all things—an offering of snuff. You sprinkled it along the side of your thumb and snorted, hard. With my long history of uncontrollable sneezing, I declined (I doubt that a dinner for eighteenth-century gentlemen would have differed significantly, though the empire then would have been growing, not shrinking as now).

Till then, I’d not heard the full force of David’s conversation with his contemporary colleagues, men such as John Bayley, who’d soon marry the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch (and eventually publish eloquent memoirs of his care for her through years of premature Alzheimer’s), and most strikingly, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire who could engage David at his own level of intelligence, wisdom, and wit—many sharp edges on all sides and a great deal of laughter. I noted that, in response to some colleague’s objection to a dubious claim of David’s, his lordship’s thumbs fidgeted at hummingbird speed, his narrowed eyes blinked as fast; and he said—in a reply worthy of Groucho Marx—“Ah, but I stop at nothing!”

Earlier in the fall in New York, Diarmuid Russell had experienced a heart attack but was still able to inform me, in the midst of international bad news (and his own), that The Paris Review was accepting “A Chain of Love.” I was greatly cheered by what felt like a certified stamp on my forehead. There was no certainty when a fledgling quarterly might use such a long story, and it would hardly pay much; but maybe now I could cease the frequent dreams of acceptance letters in my Merton pigeonhole, and I could tell anyone with doubt on his face that, yes, I was now an official young writer. The other stories in Diarmuid’s hands, however, were not yet finding homes (and those were the glory days of American magazines; far more of them than now published serious fiction).