NEAR THE START of these memories, I recounted a shipboard meditation on my life as I headed for England in the fall of 1955. And while I don’t recall a similar spate of nocturnal reflection on the starlit decks of the Ile de France, it’s hardly misleading to indulge here in a parallel account of the man I thought I was as I headed home with three years of Britain and Europe packed into my skull and heart. Among many uncertainties I can guarantee that I felt huge relief at the thought of assuming a teaching job in September—an interesting-sounding commitment and a regular paycheck. And while that small sum would be gutted by the usual tax deductions, it would at least be a sum I’d earned. I could set up my own establishment, however modest, under no one else’s roof. And at least as important, I could contribute finally to my mother and brother’s expenses and begin to become—in my own eyes at least—something besides a bright and aging schoolboy.
I must also have thought of my prospects for love and companionship. I hope I’ve made it clear above that my relation with Michael Jordan had firmly, and almost painlessly, settled into the groove of close friendship, a groove that might offer its own disappointments. But even in America—where friendship between grown men seems limited to hunting parties, bowling teams, wallowing golf carts, and smoky poker nights—we seemed to have a fair chance at remaining available to one another as reliable wells of laughter, good stories, and all-but-silent support in times of trouble.
And I’ve laid out earlier here my hope that the brushfire intensity of my three months with Matyas had, near its core, so many chances for further thoughtful dialogue and—again—our frequent resorts to riotous laughter that had fueled our second-strongest mutual attraction. Surely there was a chance of turning our present separation into an eventual permanent reunion. At sea I understood the near-impossibility of my hope, but when did near-impossibility balk such hope? Whatever, deep-dyed romantic that I was—and a sexual wolverine by now—an enduring partnership was not among my immediate projects. And again, odd as it seems, I (and virtually all my few queer friends, from wherever) had way too little awareness that an overwhelmingly vital need in our lives was criminal according to the law.
Given the stack of notes for a long story, one I trusted would complete the volume contracted now with Chatto and Windus and with Random House, my urgent enterprise was the commencement of work on A Long and Happy Life. After docking in New York, I’d spend a few days in her big apartment with Nancy Jo Fox, a stunning Duke friend as given to hopeless love as I. Michael would join us briefly from Princeton for an evening or two on the town; and I’d hope to meet with Diarmuid whom I hadn’t seen for a full three years. Then I’d pass through the soon to be brutally destroyed Roman splendor of old Penn Station—grimier by now than Rome can ever have been—and board the Silver Meteor, the Seaboard’s crack express train for Florida via Raleigh.
Once semi-unpacked and well-fed at Mother’s, I’d begin my search for country quarters near Durham. I’d introduce myself to a few of my colleagues-to-be; and by the third week in September, I’d have begun to teach my first classes. I’d learned already in a letter from my chairman that my three courses were scheduled for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (Saturdays would be howlingly unheard of today)—two sections of freshman composition and a sophomore survey of English literature. If at last I could wrestle my perennially rambling attention into line, I’d have four whole days for writing (I hadn’t yet learned to take Sundays off). With any luck couldn’t I finish A Long and Happy Life, a story of—say—seventy-five or a hundred pages within six months? All provided, of course, that the draft—the government’s draft—didn’t want me.
But for all his recent denunciation of the Stalin years in Russia, Premier Khrushchev remained a formidable counter to the United States, its allies, and all its interests. The still-divided city of Berlin was a steady flash point. Our ground forces were kept at a high level of readiness for any threat that didn’t involve intercontinental ballistic missile attacks on our mainland or on any of our numerous partners in the NATO pact. My return could conceivably be the moment for my homeland to require at least two years of my life in military service. My draft board in Raleigh had the date of my return on file; and at times I could feel that reality ticking ominously. I had my flat feet and my lifelong affliction with severe hay fever as possible disqualifications. So till further notice, the plans for beginning my adult work remained in force.
On board ship with no close friends to divert me, I also looked round at the recent past and wondered what my English years had meant. How much had that investment of a thick slice of my life amounted to? I’d left home in the hopes of enlarging my abilities to write and teach. So far as the writing of fiction went, I’d completed four short stories—“Michael Egerton,” “The Anniversary,” “The Warrior Princess Ozimba,” and “A Chain of Love,” which I’d seen published with considerable reward; and now I’d started work on a fifth story, “Troubled Sleep.” More promisingly yet, I’d elaborately planned the rest of the book.
So far as the goal of teaching literature in a good university, I’d completed an intermediate graduate degree; and I’d made a reading-start on the work for a doctorate. But until I’d finished my Oxford degree and was homeward bound, I hadn’t fully considered how that hardly brutal stint of work on Samson had often felt too much like hauling a deadweight across a wide river. Granted, I still loved the poetry of Milton. Granted, I’d watched enough good teachers in my nineteen years of formal education to know that I’d almost surely love teaching (and I hadn’t yet foreseen the special rewards which annual roomfuls of students can bring to childless teachers).
Yet given the fact that what I wanted most to do—the writing—might well be compromised by the teaching, as the scholarship had compromised it at Oxford, could I bear to return home now and divide my time between teaching and writing—and all with the prospect, dead ahead, of another two or three years of doctoral work just to earn myself the essential union card for college teaching? What other choice was available, though? I had to make money, for myself and others; and surely there was no more likely job than the one that had landed unsought in my lap—three working days a week, nine months a year, at a first-rate university (even if the salary was minuscule). Well, the army would pay me a great deal less for donkey work.
* * *
I’ve mentioned coming from sanguine stock—good-humored hard workers. So for now I prowled the dark decks of the sleepless liner with the same pleasure I’d felt heading east three years ago. I seemed as sure as I’d been, in ’55, that I was headed for an outcome as promising as it was new (no doubt I’d even learn something in the army, if it spared my life). In many directions I’d changed remarkably in ways that even I could see. My hair was longer, my accent was Oxbridge British in spots (I recall my mother’s puzzled “The what?” as I announced that I was headed for the baaath; life in Carolina would soon erase that protective mimicry). My wardrobe—such as it was—was all English now, though by no means Savile Row in quality. The bamboo-handled, tightly rolled umbrella that I’d bought at the end of my Harvard summer four years ago had survived a thousand chances to be lost; for a while to come then I’d sport it as a cane (it bore no banner saying Ex–Rhodes Scholar—De Voto’s warning had stuck in my craw).
Three years in Britain had been the best time of my life till then; I’d experienced more pleasure (which can only come from acts, large or small) than in all the prior years. Yet I wasn’t Anglophile in any unreasonably altered way. I’d bear those skin-deep signs of Englishness for the months it took to settle back into a far older life—my first twenty-two in the upper South of the United States, years that followed far nearer than I yet comprehended on General Lee’s ride out of Appomattox, the murder of Lincoln, and the actual freedom of four million slaves.
That stretch of the world, which I’d loved enough to choose as the source of my early work and the ongoing scene of my daily life, was poised on the rim of a revolution at least as crucial as the war that had freed us from Britain two centuries ago and the even more devastating War between the States. The people who’d tended so many days and nights of my childhood—descendants of the African slaves my forebears had imported and owned—were stirring to a new life. With all I’d read in British newspapers and occasional issues of Time magazine, I had no real understanding of the power in the storm that was breaking and that would only grow till it wiped away many traits and tones of a world I’d cherished and begun already to preserve in fiction. Gone with the wind indeed.
Much of what I’d known, and at least silently accepted, was evil at the core. Whatever I’d learned in the ancient university I was leaving behind—an institution that, among a thousand other things, had played an indispensable role in manning the largest empire ever assembled—still, I hadn’t entirely identified the central errors in what I’d adhered to and honored in my prior life. Among the skills and understandings which lay ahead for me, that admission would be the largest and, in painful ways, the hardest since it would mean acknowledging that many of the people whom I loved most (my kin and oldest friends, not to mention myself) had been intricately incorporated into the tragic ongoing machinery of racial oppression—and worse.