Important to Me

by Pamela Hansford Johnson

  Of course, only a minority of people act out what they have seen (or read). But I believe a great number become desensitised by being exposed to scenes of, or ideas of, violence. I have seen the young become increasingly unshockable by the screened or staged display of cruelty. What would it be like if they met with the real thing? Such as Hitler’s public humiliation of the Jews? Crowds excitedly gathered round old Jewish victims in Vienna. They were laughing.

  Are we preparing ourselves for a good laugh?

  15. Sitting on Campuses

  It is always called ‘sitting’; though of course, one does more than just sit, like a smiling Buddha, on a stretch of sunlit lawn. Indeed, we worked so hard on some campuses – lectures, seminars, teaching, that we had finally to ask for a ‘free period’ – say two hours in the afternoon – during which time, if the weather was right, we could sit beneath the trees, or if it wasn’t, sleep.

  Of the smaller campuses, I will write later. But first, Harvard, which we visited often, and where in December 1960, we flew from Berkeley for Charles to give the Godkin Lectures on Science and Government. These concerned, for the most part, the row over the bombing policy during the war, as fought out by Professor Tizard and Lord Cherwell. They were presented in three parts – Charles has his own brand of cunning – very much as a detective story. The first two lectures ended, in fact, in cliff-hangers. After the first, one professor was heard to whisper to another – ‘And did the butler do it?’

  Our experiences at Harvard were invariably happy. So far as I can remember, we did a minimum of teaching there. But it was a lovely sight, at sunset, to look at the campanile, and over the blue, green, red, white and gold cupolas of the colleges. The falling leaves on Harvard Yard. So many friends. Old Professor Arthur Nock, now a long time dead, in his incredible book-cluttered room. Harry Levin and Elena, who became close friends. The Master of Leverett House, John Conway before he moved back to Canada; with him, life was – to use my husband’s pet word – apolaustic, to say the least of it. The young Henry Kissinger at luncheon – obviously someone: but who knew what he was to become?

  At Yale, at Timothy Dwight College, we stayed with Professor Tom Bergin and his wife. All was fun. My only objection to New Haven, is that it is hard to find one’s way around: everything looks, primly, decorously, so much the same. I was always getting lost.

  I don’t know what Charles and I did there. Probably he lectured. I talked with groups of students. But one thing I do remember is this.

  It all started late at night, at a party. I was talking to a lady, who, knowing my theatrical interests, asked if I would like to see the theatre collection. I eagerly assented. Next day my appointed bear-leader called for me, and we set out on the day’s travail, which began, I think, with a Proustian talk by me to the French department. He and I then went out into the street, and – his English being fluent but imperfect – said we must now go, if I wished, to see the theatre collection. (As I thought.) But I did feel he was fidgeting. So I asked him of what it consisted. He fidgeted worse. At last he replied, ‘Of reserved books.’ Still dense, I persisted. ‘What do you mean, reserved books?’

  Then it all came out. He had been telephoned at seven in the morning to be told I was anxious to see what he took to be the Zeta Collection. Now, this is what, not to beat about the bush and confuse my readers, is Yale’s collection of classical dirty books. (Prohibited books, if I may put it more stuffily.)

  I stopped dead in the middle of the street. No, I said, there had been a misunderstanding. It was the theatre collection I wished to see. It was not my habit to dash into a university town and at once demand to see obscene literature, however worthy of its kind.

  What, then, did I want to do?

  I wanted to get my hair done. By this time he was a bright scarlet. However, we made an instant appointment on my behalf. I had only been under the dryer for ten minutes, when he came and found me. ‘Of course, I won’t say anything of all this.’

  ‘No, do,’ I said, ‘it’s a good story.’

  I might add, in all sincerity, that I should have loved to see the Zeta Collection. But for a first visit, this seemed to me too much. I do wonder what it’s like?

  Charles and I were later to make strong connexions with Yale, he as Fellow of Morse College, I as a Fellow of Timothy Dwight. We shall return there, eventually – all things being well. (As I grow older, I find my superstitions growing. Never superstitious in youth, I now touch wood, throw spilled salt over my left shoulder, and cross my fingers when passing under ladders. It does not chime with my religious ideas and I know it. But the old gods are distressingly potent. I do not choose to take risks.)

  I cannot speak of other campuses in any datal order. My diaries of the fifties and sixties are lodged in a bank, and I’m damned if I am going to unearth them, break the seals, leaf them through, and then pack them up again. I am too tired, and my methods too disorderly.

  Haverford College, in Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, was a pure delight. (It was here that we first begged for two hours off in the afternoons.) Haverford is a Quaker College, with a tradition of cricket and a ground where they still play it. The beautiful Meriden cricket ground nearby is obsolete, so far as cricket is concerned.

  Haverford was charming; flowery, bowery, as Manley Hopkins might have put it, but dry. This meant, that a drink was officially outlawed, and it led to a degree of comedy.

  Our first day, when we had been working very hard, ended in a visit to the Principal – and all there was, after a joyous sound of tinkling ice, was water. On the second day, we entreated our student host to procure for us a bottle of Scotch, which we would drink squalidly out of our tooth-glasses when the going was hard. Next day it did, indeed, seem hard. We were due at a dinner party at another faculty house, so we attempted to stoke ourselves up for a dry evening. Dry? It was like any party in New York. We made our way home across the cricket field, and I fear we were compelled to walk with even more delicacy than Agag. We never really got into phase with all this.

  This was the early fall so far as I remember: warm days, gold weather, our two hours under the trees, and students of exceptional quality – or exceptional graciousness: when we spoke to them formally, they were extremely attentive. Not a yawn showed. Yet I fancy that, on these occasions many a yawn must be suppressed. Yet where lies true courtesy, but in the suppression of a yawn?

  St Paul’s, New Hampshire, was what the Americans would call a private school: we certainly shouldn’t, though their term is more exact than ours. We, ridiculously, call such schools Public. It is the nearest American equivalent to Eton. Here, I suppose, are educated some of the richest boys in the world. There are scholarship boys, and it is a beautiful delusion that no one knows who they are. (What happens when the talk begins of where they are all to spend their vacations?) Eton, at least, does segregate its scholars unless they wish to be Oppidans, and to pay maximum fees.

  Charles and I were invited for, I think, ten days, financed by an elderly lady who never appeared and never has appeared, not once, and whom we were never able to thank. We were given a pretty house of our own with ample service – though we took our meals with the boys. Charles had one formal speech to make. For the rest, we were to be ‘available’ (this has always seemed to me a very pleasant thing to be) for any boys who liked to drop in and talk to us.

  The terrain, hilly, dropping down to the ‘ponds’ – which we should call sizeable lakes (Thoreau’s Walden Pond is an example of this) where the boys did their rowing, was very fine. I cannot say that the nearest town, Concord, was. But some American small towns, no matter what glamour is cast upon them by neighbouring institutions, can be amazingly drab: others, in New England, one thinks of with pleasure still.

  We were a trifle unlucky in our fist student contact, who turned out to be a rigorous John Bircher. However, that early impression was very shortly erased by the boys whom we met later. They were extremely courteous and – to my mind – extremely long-suffering
. Our meals with them would have been ordeals, if the boys had not been so nice: for the food was revolting. On Friday, they had, God help us, a day of ‘self-denial’. Nothing could have made the diet worse than it normally was. It was pointed out to us, though, and rather pathetically, by one of the boys, that they did eat it off very good china. That was quite true.

  All the same, food does not matter much to either of us. We enjoy it when it is first-rate, merely use it as fuel at other times.

  We met a great assortment of boys. The most dazzling, perhaps, was one of noble Hungarian descent, who actually owned a house of his own in the He de France. We were amused by the school grape-vine. We had a small party, one evening, with some of the masters. Next day, the word went round that it had been an orgy. How this rumour spread, we wouldn’t know: but it certainly had no basis.

  I have often wondered about what rich boys (by this I mean rich parents) pay for. I think it is primarily for two things: small classes, and good manners. It may conceivably include kindness of boys to one another, but obviously there are such glaring exceptions that I could not make a point of it.

  Small classes? I shall say later in this book that I wish passionately that they could be the prerogative of all children. Well, in our present circumstances, they can’t be. I believe that schoolteachers should be among the most highly paid of all social workers.

  Good manners? This has an inevitable ‘class’ ring for some: yet all it means is the consideration of one child towards another. Sometimes, it is inculcated by the home background. Sometimes, it isn’t. But it should be rubbed in from the primary school onwards. (I can hear again, the agonised outcry of teachers; ‘You should see the job we have simply to keep them quiet.’) They are right, and I have seen this. But an education to live in society, at peace, is far more than knowing the academic drill. That is why I am so dubious when educationalists come up with enormous solutions for enormous anomalies.

  St Paul’s, New Hampshire (please pronounce it ‘Saint’ – not ‘St’). A school, I think, not nearly up to the academic standards of Eton or Winchester, having less required of it: the American university course starts at a lower level than ours. But their graduate courses! They are rigorous in the extreme, and if Englishmen take part in them, they are kept running. I have often marvelled at the difference between American undergraduate and postgraduate education, and have wondered how many young men and women make the leap.

  Other campuses have seen us, all over the Continental U.S. Ithaca, in upper New York State: one of the most beautiful, built, like Rome, upon seven hills. (It probably isn’t seven.) Cornell, in the depths of winter: the appalling night-ride on the old Lehigh Valley railroad, now defunct, and a good thing too, crashing and bumping all night, as if the train had wheels, all right, but no rail-bed. Cornell, hung with icicles, every waterfall a shower of diamonds. Our friends Rosemary and Arthur Mizener (the biographer of Scott Fitzgerald). We went with Rosemary to read the unpublished letters from James Joyce to Nora, and made the interesting discovery that ‘objective’ was not really the word for Joyce. His letters to his wife, often written on paper with a little design of roses or forget-me-nots, represented a long masturbatory dream. It was when he was away from her that the fantasy would flow so easily: in some cases he actually broke off abruptly, because he had obviously come to a climax.

  As we left the vaults of the library to return across a snowfield, Rosemary was looking shaken. ‘I don’t think I shall ever forget those letters,’ she said. I told her comfortably that she soon would: it is astonishing how the brain acts as a shock-absorber.

  Kansas. It seemed to me that everything was indeed ‘up to date in Kansas City’; I liked it very, very much. One day in Lawrence, when we were staying in our small house, lent us by the university, Charles was out at a football match, and I was reading in the living-room, or rather, looking at a book of photographs by Andy Warhol, the monotony of which was utterly bemusing me. They were all the same, and if there were any variant between one and the other, I did not perceive it. I was so absorbed in wondering how a presumably intelligent man could be so ineffably boring, that I failed to notice that an earthquake was going on. Certainly the ceiling light swung wildly around, but that, I felt vaguely, might be what it was used to doing. Is this a point to Warhol? That he could hypnotise, even to indifference to an earthquake, by a display of mere emptiness?

  There was considerable excitement about the earthquake afterwards, but to this I was unable in any way to contribute.

  Texas. Houstan, Dallas, and a drive to Austin through roads lined with wild flowers, blue bonnets, Indian paint-brushes. These do not grow by accident: they are encouraged by municipal policy. At Austin, a scientific conference arranged by Jagdish Mehra, glittering with famous men, Abdus Salam, and the great Paul Dirac.

  A note on Dallas. Of course I wanted to inspect the scene of the J. F. Kennedy assassination, and here I got a jolt. I had always suspected that this was not done by Oswald alone, because, from pictures I had seen, the book repository was a large and high building, and that, even with telescopic sights, his chance of a direct hit would be small. But when I saw the building, I realised that it was not particularly high, that the road was surprisingly narrow, and that the actual feat of killing would not have been too remarkable. I am now prepared to accept the verdict against Oswald as assassin.

  But one thing still sticks in my throat. We all saw on television, not once but many times, the killing of Oswald. As Ruby stepped forward, the police appeared to force Oswald in front of them into the line of fire. Was it perhaps better that no more should have been said about the whole thing? Had this demented man been used in any way, by others? This we shall never know. But that Oswald himself could have, and did, fire that shot, I am pretty certain.

  A final campus – I shall come to California later, but I regret my many omissions. They are not deliberate. They are simply the result of a shaky memory. In the autumn of 1961, we went to Wesleyan University, Middle Town, Connecticut, as Fellows of the Centre for Advanced Studies: and here our job largely was to sit. We were presented with a house – dauntingly large – to live in, and beautifully appointed offices in which to work. At what? At our own books. We did give certain lectures – I gave a couple on Proust, and I suppose we talked to students. But we did what we were paid for, which was, write. I finished a very difficult novel called An Error of Judgment, and went on, for light relief, to an American comedy called Night and Silence, Who is Here? Among our colleagues at the Centre were Hannah Ahrendt, Douglas Cater, and our beloved friend, the American writer Paul Horgan: who should be beatified one day, for his sweetness, generosity, and absolute kindness, if ever a man should be. But he has not yet performed any miracles, except where we were concerned.

  Night and Silence, when it did appear, certainly caused a stir. Everyone took me to be satirising Wesleyan – whereas the book was an amalgam of many campuses, with Wesleyan, in some respects – notably our first weekend there – in the lead. But there is not in it a single campus character à clef. There are two, certainly à clef, well beyond campus bounds, but they both know this and I think have been much amused.

  We arrived in the late afternoon, tired, since we had spent a busy morning elsewhere, and were longing for a drink. But we were first taken on a tour of the campus, saw the graceful Faculty Club, where we were to eat (when it was open), and called on the President, with whom we drank ice-water. At last we came to our house: not quite Charles Addams, but nearly: and far too big. We decided at once, when we were left alone, that we would occupy only the first floor. We now – being hungry – made our way to the kitchen. And here in the fridge we found a bottle of milk, a carton of orange juice – stiff-frozen – two eggs, the scrag-end of a knuckle of ham, some bread: and that was all.

  The Faculty Club was shut. We walked down to Middletown: the shops were shut there. So we made the best of what presented itself. Incidentally, we had no car, so could not drive to the nearest restau
rant – several miles off.

  I must make it clear that this was an obvious failure of administration. The Americans, and the Russians, are the most hospitable people in the world so far as I know it. We had a good breakfast at the Faculty Club next morning, and adjusted to our situation. We were eventually saved by Paul Horgan, who was anxious to know when we had last had a square meal, and who promptly drove us to one. (That was his miracle.) My novel’s connexion with Wesleyan goes no further than this first comic weekend. (It was true that I had to ask for some kind of domestic help two or three times a week since otherwise I could not have done the work I was being paid for.) It is greatly to the credit of the Americans’ sporting-spirit – never lacking – that Night and Silence, Who is Here? had the best critical reception, in some places rapturous, that I have ever had on that continent, though the book did not sell particularly well. I keep these yellowing cuttings with love – even at a time when I keep very few things written about me. Somehow, nowadays, I find it hard to care.

  Now, in praise of Wesleyan. It was a college for men, but not now: it is, in fact, rich. It has a very pleasant campus, near to an ugly little town. When we were there, town and campus were safe to walk in at night: now, Paul Horgan says (he later became Director of the Centre), they are not. This seems to me miserable, but it is the way our world is going, and how we are to stop the Gadarene rush, I don’t know. It is, educationally, of the highest excellence. It has a distinguished faculty. And it has this Centre, which provides, for many a hard-driven scholar, peace in which to work. This peace it gave us, and we were grateful. Occasionally, we went to New Haven, to enjoy the fleshpots of friends near by: the Howard Sachses, the Gordon Haights. (He is the George Eliot scholar.) Mrs Sachs had a Seurat cigar-box painting, which tended to hold my eyes to the exclusion of all else. We also had the hospitality of Beecher Hogan, the great expert on English eighteenth-century theatrical history, and his wife ‘C.C.’ who is a musician. From these trips we returned feeling that our golden attire had turned to rags, and our glass slippers shuttered about our feet.