* * *
But from the time I entered high school, I fixed—at a distance—on one tall classmate as my Apollonian ideal. For that whole year I literally never met him. When we chanced, though, to sit beside one another in second-year Latin, a friendship formed that survives even today in class reunions but has never shed the quality of good-natured distance that only deepened my sense of genuine awe at what seemed to me male grandeur—especially the gold-haired variety that excels in sports and courteously sheds from its shoulders, like an insignificant warm rain, the admiration of other boys and—till one of them captures him—the nervous pursuit of girls.
Though I’d had intimations from, say, age seven that men were the world’s magnetic core for me, I was fifteen before I’d begun to know enough about a person’s sexual destiny to suspect that I was more than half likely to be bound in that direction (we didn’t, in those days, speak of genetic tendencies; but I can think of no other explanation for the leaning that became a full commitment). Though I felt pleasantly drawn to several other girls, right on through college, I date the irreversible proof of my course to the year in which I mail-ordered André Gide’s book Corydon.
One of the pioneering modern European texts on the subject of homosexuality, it was written in high-toned French neoclassical dialogue by a then still-living novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. It was published in the States only in 1950, and by then I was seventeen. What I didn’t quite know, in the last year of high school, was how fiercely most Americans were then opposed to the whole reality of male homosexuality, if they knew of it at all. It was a life which was then called queer (lesbianism was more nearly the subject of comedy than of outright rejection). Nonetheless, I kept my strong suspicion undercover—and rather enjoyably so. I was after all at the I-love-a-mystery stage.
* * *
It would have been interesting had I known, so early, that my father’s closest friend, from early childhood till well past the time of Dad’s marriage at age twenty-seven, was a man who’d later be distinguished in politics and who I learned, on very credible evidence after Dad’s death, was almost surely queer. He and Dad had been close, right through the days of Dad’s worst drinking. The friend could never quit the habit; and he served as best man at my parents’ wedding—a fact that led Mother frequently to joke that she’d never been sure she was married: “Your dad’s best man cried so loudly at the wedding, I couldn’t hear the vows.”
I have many reasons to affirm that my father was strongly heterosexual; but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that, like so many men, he’d had other outlets in earlier life. In any case, the last hospital visit Dad received on the night before he underwent a lung removal that caused his death seven days later was from that best man; and I was present through the entire visit. Amazing to think that, in adult life, I might have discussed such a secret with my father. The English memoirist J. R. Ackerley—a discreet homosexual whom I’d meet in London—writes in his own brilliant memoir My Father and Myself of discovering just such a possible mysterious bond with his own father, well after the father’s death. As a young man Ackerley’s father had lived for some years with a queer Swiss nobleman.
At first I suffered almost no pain on the subject of my own sexual longing; and despite a considerable adolescent involvement with institutional Christianity, I certainly never felt condemned by God. I’d read the four gospels since childhood and noted that Jesus—who almost surely lived and died a single man, one who traveled and lived in a small group of other men, one of whom was called (in the Gospel of John) “the disciple whom Jesus loved”—was never recorded as having spoken a word against the love of men for men. On the other hand, he denounced fornication, adultery, divorce, wealth, and family loyalty (among other realities that most churches, obsessed as they currently are with homosexuality, seldom condemn). That silence of Jesus in the matter of same-sex relations is all the more remarkable, considering that his early followers could easily have invented a denunciation from Jesus if they had no recorded statement on hand.
Sexual pain came to me only in my freshman year in college, when the object of my first infatuation rejected me. Yet in April 1952—the spring of my freshman year at Duke—when that first rejection left me feeling desolate, I wrote a poem that was my one early attempt to write about private loneliness. The poem is sadly typical of a million adolescent plaints. I was nineteen, the age at which Rimbaud wrote the greatest adolescent poems in any Western language. At least mine is brief, and I set it down here—without the slightest claim for literary value—as an honest glimpse of a mainly buoyant young man’s confrontation with a possibly daunting future.
Because I am,
Because I am what I am,
I have been always alone.
Always hoping that someday
I would round some corner of my heart
And see and smile and say at last
That this is that for which I cry.
And so in each new face and always
In the old, in each new love or day
Or song, I wait to see if here
The world has broken through the colored glass to me.
And then I know, as ever over I must know,
That I am here and it is there
And between us, wide and deep, is a
Dark and winter sea.
Way more than fifty years after writing the poem, I’m not at all sure what I meant by the word it, three lines from the end. Most likely, I meant “contentment”; or more specifically, at the time I wrote the poem, “reciprocated love” must have been central to my desires. And love in those days of my early manhood surely meant “contiguous flesh” as much as anything more spiritual. Looking so far back I can see that, from my own point of view, what was truest in the poem was my realization that the force dividing my love from other human beings—or theirs from me—was deeply enigmatic, an external force. The mystery threaded its constant way through my shipboard thoughts, but I have no memory whatever of thinking I’d marry and go my father’s way with the children he loved yet who left him supremely anxious many days of our lives. I likewise don’t recall feeling guilt or any sense of omen.
Looking back from a long way, I do think my deep involvement in Dad’s death was, oddly, an unexpected means of sexual liberation. Now I’d never have to worry about what he thought of my sexual life (I still suspect he’d have been amazingly tolerant). And deeper still, our final three weeks together reminded me strongly of the nonsexual forms of physical contact he and I had in my early childhood—how he’d wake me for breakfast on Sunday mornings by lying atop my covered sleeping body and calling to me: “Preacher, Preacher, way past breakfast time. Haul yourself up.”
Whether my eventual erotic life bore any strong relation to such memories, I won’t attempt to guess; but I do know how much I honored his body and made every effort to steal into the bathroom whenever he might be drying from the shower and study his strength and amplitude. I assume that most boys, with resident fathers, have shared some early form of the same fascination with their dad’s anatomy. I suspect I was one who took that fascination further than most—and with a prevailing sense of tenderness that prevented any later interest in sex that had no substantial affectionate component. To a very large extent, I was stuck with love.
* * *
Still, another realization was rapidly overtaking love as a crucial fact of my oncoming life. At the age of sixteen, encouraged by a superb English teacher, I’d declared to myself and then to my family that I meant to become a writer of fiction and poetry who also taught English in a university. The announcement met with no objection from any of them, and I proceeded through four years at Duke with the same banner flown from my mast. I found a good many classmates to like, I enjoyed almost all my studies (mainly English, history, and world religions); for all my romantic rejections, I managed a fair amount of nonwoeful poetry and fiction above and beyond my class assignments; and in the fall of my senior y
ear, I won this scholarship that was then given to thirty-two men nationwide for graduate study at Oxford (women only became eligible years later). So here now I stood in mid-Atlantic on my way toward a life that—despite the appalling scenes of my father’s recent agony—seemed under my control, some small degree of control. The ocean itself and this lean, fast ship—a toy on the surface—were a joint vehicle bearing me onward.
The summary seems fair enough. Does it imply a self-important narcissistic bastard? One or two friends had implied as much. At times, I believed them and backpedaled for a while. I was no doubt self-important for my age and achievements; but my sizable band of friends seemed a validation of my ability to make myself an original and useful acquaintance. What was more complicated for me was the fact that, like many other human beings, I’d often been told from early childhood that I was good to look at—thick black hair, wide brown eyes, eyelashes “big as mink hearth-rugs” (according to an aunt), and an eager smile above a pointed chin that I always deplored. I can honestly recall deciding—when I saw my grinning sixth-grade school photo—that I’d try to use any degree of physical pleasantness as a means of entertaining my friends, long before I knew I had words to do the same work. I was still far from thinking of looks as a tool in the oncoming seduction events of adolescence and thereafter. Who I was seemed to me then, alone aboard the United States, not radically different from the men I was traveling with. The size of my error was bearing down on me, wider and faster than I knew.
Meanwhile, second among my seaborne pleasures was the chance to begin knowing a few of my Rhodester colleagues. I recall my quiet cabin-mate Del Kolve, who would become a distinguished scholar of medieval literature and a man who’d live his adult life with a male partner. To the best of my subsequent knowledge, Del was one of the four scholars of our class who were queer, more than confirming Kinsey’s controversial 1948 claim that ten percent of all men were homosexual for at least three years between sixteen and fifty-five. Among the most glamorous straight men of our Rhodes generation was Ham Richardson, a wealthy Southerner who was already established as a world-class tennis player and one who might well have won the Wimbledon singles title if he hadn’t been troubled by the hard demands of diabetes.
I was with Ham once—we were driving to Stratford for a play—when he began to react to an overdose of insulin. Two more Rhodesters were with us; and after a useless stop for chocolate bars and the sugar they’d provide at a roadside shop, on Ham’s directions we got him to a teashop a few yards from Shakespeare’s birthplace, ordered warm sugary water, and watched uneasily while he drank it fast. By then he’d begun to seem to us, and our sedate nearby tea drinkers, more than a little drunk; but the sugar water brought him back to sane strength in under ten minutes, and we made the play on time. Amazingly Ham made it through a busy life as a New York investor—and frequent tennis player—to the age of seventy-three. Another memorable companion on the voyage was Rex Jamison, an Iowan with an unvarnished Plains accent, an ever-ready wit, and the steady dark eyes of a man intent upon dispelling as many mysteries as the world would yield to his intense focus. Rex would become a famous renal specialist and a lifelong friend.
Jim Griffin, a recent Yale graduate who would immerse himself in the new brand of linguistic philosophy at Oxford, became the most genial of my American companions in the next three years; and of all things for such a dyed-in-the-wool Connecticut Yankee, he’d prove to be the only member of our class who eventually chose to spend his life in Oxford, teaching philosophy, marrying a British wife, and raising a family. Jim was, by the way, a welcome confirmation that all Rhodes Scholars didn’t have to fulfill—as I surely didn’t—Cecil Rhodes’s specific stipulation that his Scholars must demonstrate “a fondness for and success in manly sports.” Once at Oxford, my own sport would become—very quickly—vigorous walking. On average, even in heavy rain, I’d circumnavigate the perimeter of Christ Church Meadow at least once daily, well over a mile’s walk.
* * *
There was one night at sea when Jim and I sat beside one another in deck chairs and spoke, first of our reading and then of our futures. Jim was likewise set on the plan for a university teaching life; and he displayed, with no hint of ostentation, the chief external signs of the breed—a calm but magnetic diffidence plus a willingness to make a firm assertion and then laugh at his own solemnity (Jim’s large pipe, then firmly clamped in his teeth, is no longer a mark of the teaching clan, may time be praised).
I told him of my own intention to teach—in college or a good prep school—and to write poems, short stories, and eventually novels. As we talked on late in the mid-Atlantic dark, my hope felt realistic at least—almost in reach, if only I could close my hands around it. What I hadn’t yet learned was the ultimate charm of the sea for all eternal sailors; if you never touch land, the oceans themselves will nurture any dream you choose to harbor and spin out for any listener’s ears. There were personal qualities, of which I was then insufficiently aware, that might make my own intentions difficult if not impossible. But three years at Oxford would uncover those, even to my own presently blind gaze.
Still I knew that I must wait for any firm seizure of the way of life toward which I yearned. If I meant to teach in a good American university, surely I’d need the Ph.D. degree; and that would require at least another three years of study beyond the two years I’d already committed to Oxford. And how could I write my poems and fiction in the face of such demands? Was it merely my too self-confident nature, or the low-key air of a boy of the Fifties, that kept me moving onward with no paralyzing fears? Well, somehow I gambled on believing I’d do all I had to do, most of what I meant and wanted to do with my life. I’d just completed a crowded senior year at Duke—five courses each semester, editing the literary magazine, and writing an honors thesis on John Milton’s entry into contentious public life. So if hard work was the worst that lay before me, then stand aside. I’d somehow plow through it.
Other nights, alone, I’d think with considerable guilt of my mother and her ongoing plight. In the wake of Dad’s death and its financial devastations, she now had herself, my brother, the remaining years of a substantial home mortgage, and bits of my own life to help with. An endlessly warm and haplessly generous woman, she came to enjoy the store-time contact with old friends and new customers. But her salary was modest; and she experienced the standard exhaustions of retail sales—long hours upright on her feet, selling little boys’ blue jeans, plus the two nights a week when she was required to work till nine. And now she was fifty, lightly overweight, and a pack-a-day smoker. With her lack of higher education, her opportunities for a better-paying job seemed nonexistent. My brother had just entered high school and was aiming at college, but his summer job could do little to improve his hopes or to improve Mother’s outlook as she faced the relentless bills of middle-class life.
Despite the early deaths of her parents and growing up in a sister’s crowded home, no one was ever less selfish than Elizabeth Price; and she’d never once hinted that I could pass up graduate study and stay behind to help her. In my eventual three years away, I recall no occasion when she wrote to me of financial woes. In the nine months since receiving the scholarship, I’d improvidently assumed that the Rhodes Trust would cover my expenses abroad. I’d soon discover how wrong I was. The grant was generous but it mainly covered tuition, room and board. The rest was expected to come from my own resources, and I’d shortly be leaning hard upon that limited backing (which consisted of three thousand dollars from a now-dead bachelor cousin and a few hundred dollars in graduation gifts). In retrospect it’s hardly a mistake to say that all those concerns gathered round me in the nights at sea as I left North Carolina farther behind by the slow and rolling moment.
2
THEN LATE on the sixth afternoon—October 5—we reached our English port, Southampton. By the time we cleared customs with our old-time steamer trunks—mine was literally the size of a cabaret piano—we discovered that the War
den of Rhodes House had troubled to make the three-hour trip down from Oxford in a coach or charabanc (what we’d have called a middle-size bus). Edgar Williams was a middle-aged man of considerable eminence. The son of a nonconformist minister, he was almost forty-three when we met him—by then the equivalent of a calm and bemused college dean. But his early manhood had been far more exciting. He’d been among the architects of the North African campaign at El Alamein, a critical confrontation in which the British all but destroyed the Nazi desert tank corps under General Rommel. Accompanied now on the darkening pier by his eternal tobacco pipe, he grinned pleasantly and saw us safely boarded for the drive north. We stopped only once on the trip, for an unceremonious pee as all thirty of us stood by the roadside draining our bladders in the chilly drizzle as small cars whizzed past (a common-enough sight in the Britain of those days, devoid as it was of roadside facilities).
When we reached Oxford around nine, the sky was inky black; and the rain was pouring precisely as—since boyhood, in a thousand films—we’d all heard it should be. The coach proceeded through narrow streets, past a few miserable-looking students huddled on bikes, to deliver each of us to his assigned college (Michaelmas, or autumn, term wouldn’t begin for another week). Rex Jamison and one other fledgling got off with me at Merton, in all important ways the oldest of Oxford colleges.
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