Ardent Spirits

by Reynolds Price

  Jim and I had already gathered, in reading our way through an indispensable handbook called The Oxford University Examination Statutes, that graduate students were very much on their own. Sooner or later each of us would be assigned a tutor or thesis director with whom we’d meet, say, four times in an eight-week term. We’d be free to attend any of the university’s hundreds of public courses of lectures, many of them from world-renowned scholars; and likely we’d participate in a handful of small seminars to prepare us for our work. Then we’d undergo a rigorous written test followed by a nerve-racking oral. If we succeeded in that test, we’d be certified to begin the real work of graduate study—deep reading, thinking, and writing on whatever subject: again, very much on our own, with our thesis director standing ready to give our arms an occasional nudge to left or right but, generally speaking, little more. Thus Oxford avoided a grave and continuing danger of American graduate study—the possibility that a thesis or dissertation director might prove so controlling as virtually to write the student’s thesis.

  Had I, for instance, chosen the B.A. degree, I’d have had to learn Anglo-Saxon and—in a packed two years of work—read my way through virtually the entirety of then-canonical English literature from Beowulf to the great poets, novelists, and essayists of the late nineteenth century. Anything more recent had yet to prove itself durable and was thus not studied. At least once a week, during term time, I’d have written an essay assigned by my tutor and then read it to him in his room while he listened (or occasionally dozed) and then offered his comments. At the end of my two or three years of reading, I’d have sat for the final examinations—called schools—some five days of papers and an eventual face-to-face questioning by other dons who’d award me my degree, First Class, Second Class, Pass, or Fail—to fail was called to plough, and there were sufficient suicides by schools failures to constitute an imposing warning. By now, though, I’d firmly decided to try for the graduate B.Litt. with a thesis on Milton. I wasn’t eager to restudy many texts I’d only just finished reading. I also sensed that a B.Litt.—with its freedoms—would give me far more time to spend on my own fiction, a hope that had, in the past year, been cut deeper in my mind than before.

  * * *

  As I walked the two hundred yards back from Jim’s rooms to Mob Quad, I underwent my first immersion in an English evening. It was only six clock, and I was stationed not that far from the south coast of Britain, yet it was already dark; and while it wasn’t raining, the air was all but drenched with the damp that Bill Jackson had so darkly warned against—Aargh, piles! Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt a dull grind from the tooth of loneliness—and worse: a maybe misguided separation from the roots of my emotions and thus my writing. What the hell was I doing here?

  I’d effectively abandoned the only house that anchored me for the past eight years, the Raleigh home of my much-loved mother and brother, the actual ground of my whole past life (the rolling pine-dense landscape of eastern and central North Carolina), not to mention the numerous other kin and friends of my childhood and youth. Now they were all four thousand miles to my west, my southwest—Britain is after all on a virtual parallel with Newfoundland, whereas my home is parallel with Algeria.

  A vast ocean now lay between me and mine, an ocean strewn with the ruins of millennia of human hope at least as passionate as my own. I’m not attempting to exaggerate—or elevate—a boyish emotion, only to re-create a wave of long-distant feeling. And here I was, alone as a stone, in a city and country as different from my home as, say, Germany or Poland—and I wasn’t wrong about this, not in 1955 before American economic and cultural influence radically transformed so much of British culture.

  I had no proof—beyond the language I shared, in part, with the half-dozen kindly Britons I’d met—that I could manage to live on here, live and work, for at least two more years. I’d meant for six years now to be a fiction writer and poet, one who taught literature to good students. Did I have the faintest chance of being both or either, essentially sidetracked here as I feared I might be—in the country of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats—so far from everything I knew? An artist as uncannily gifted as James Dean had got only two more years of life than I and had died a week ago through an error at the wheel of a speeding Porsche. What good was likely to come to me here?

  3

  WITHIN THE NEXT WEEK, other than several other social events with my fellow Yanks and endless knockings on my door by people trying to sell me memberships in everything from the Film Society to the Communist Club, there were two important meetings. The first occurred when an undergraduate tapped on my door, advanced a step, took one look at me at my desk as late afternoon light crept through my Meadow window, and with no particular scorn in his voice (though with a slightly wry smile) said “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in soccer.” It was not a question. At that point his smile became a grin as he stood on in my doorway, in case I chose to surprise him. Did I look that hopelessly unathletic; and after my first Oxford haircut, was I still that ineradicably American looking (he’d said soccer, not the more British football)?

  I said I probably wasn’t interested, though in high-school gym I’d played it without the shame I earned in baseball and basketball. By then I’d turned my chair to face him. His was, again, another unmistakably English face but a markedly well-shaped one, topped with blond hair in unarranged rings as in one of Leonardo’s late drawings of floodwater. So I repeated that he probably didn’t want me on the college team—it was the Merton team he was promoting. Then I stood and invited him in for coffee—powdered coffee but still a beverage that seemed to connote manly vigor more nearly than the tea for which I was only just equipped.

  The Hon. Secretary of the Football Club accepted, took a seat; and before we finished our first cups, we were further along toward a mutual liking than I’d so far anticipated with an Englishman. His name was Michael Jordan (not a relation of the later basketball star). Like Mayr-Harting and Gilchrist, Michael was also in the second year of history. He’d lived in Canada with his mother’s sister for a year in early adolescence, and he was “very keen indeed for classic jazz.” With his likable baritone speaking-voice (which became a bass when he laughed) and an accent that, while not supremely Oxonian, was clear and mildly upper-class, he had the poised cool I’d expected of my college friends.

  My trunk contained no record player and I owned few jazz records—though I’d already liked both Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in concerts at Duke—but I tried to wing my way here with Michael, pretending to more jazz expertise than I possessed. He lightly corrected my errors, knowing the details right back to King Oliver and beyond. We talked our way on in to glasses of sherry; and then he trotted off to his room in Rose Lane, beyond the college garden, to don his gown and meet me at the steps of the hall for seven o’clock dinner. We sat amid a cluster of his history and football friends, and much welcome laughter consumed us as they consumed rapidly (to my amazement) a monumentally awful dinner of tasteless fish, brutally roasted potatoes, and sodden gray cabbage. I ate enough to insure survival, then went to Michael’s smaller but unusually orderly rooms for after-dinner coffee and more talk—this time about movies, I think—on into late evening when I found my way through the towering dark trees, and the mumbling spirits, back toward my straw bed.

  * * *

  The second important early meeting soon followed the first when I received a crabbed handwritten note from my potential thesis director, a man named J. B. Leishman (he had presumably been assigned by some member of the English faculty, as it was then called). He was inviting me to call upon him, very soon, in his home in the Victorian awfulness of nineteenth-century north Oxford. I’d hoped to work with the famed C. S. Lewis, a distinguished Miltonist—among other things. But though Lewis had spent virtually his whole life at Oxford, he’d only just accepted a post at Cambridge. Though Leishman was not a member of Merton—he was a lecturer at St. John’s—he’d published numerous essays
and books in the field of what was then called Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. I’d heard of him in yet another of his connections. For a year I’d owned and attempted to comprehend the translation of Rilke’s exciting but obscure Duino Elegies which he’d made with the poet Stephen Spender.

  When he answered my diffident knock then, I expected a scholar in the picturesque Oxford mold—a tangled mane of rusty white hair, Benjamin-Franklin-style half-glasses, and dandruff-dusted clothes. Not at all. With virtually no pause for introduction, Mr. Leishman led me toward a large sitting room on the ground floor, motioned me toward a chair, then stepped to his mantel and continued standing as he proceeded—before anything else—to note my origins at Duke and then commence deploring a book on Paradise Lost by one of my professors there. That was Allan Gilbert, an admired American Miltonist with whom I’d studied in my senior year; his enthusiasm had proved especially contagious. Young as I was, in under two minutes Leishman’s continued and inexplicable attack had begun to rile me. In another few minutes it became clear that Leishman had reviewed Gilbert’s book in a professional journal and had satisfied himself that the volume was therefore buried forever (along with any enduring Gilbertian allegiance which I might be nursing).

  Later years have let me see that Gilbert’s book is a little dotty but is also usefully provocative and never boring—considerably more than can be said for a great deal of the work of J. B. Leishman (an immensely learned scholar, in six languages, his work is almost uninterruptedly dull; and his Rilke translations are astonishingly poor). As an introduction to me, however, Mr. Leishman had—pompous as it may sound in the mind of a scholar as young as I—stepped off on a very wrong foot (eight years later he would die by stepping off a mountain in Switzerland). And as I continued to sit beneath his tirade, which included further deplorings of “you Americans,” I had ample time to take him in.

  Far from the dusty geezer I’d expected, he was a man in his early fifties, dressed entirely in shades of brown—a thorn-proof brown tweed jacket with a brown pocket handkerchief, brown knickerbockers (our men’s knickers) with brown stockings, and a brown silk scarf (what Americans call an ascot). I wondered if he’d somehow devised this costume for my visit, but The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that this was his “inevitable” dress, and The Oxford Magazine described his appearance as that of “a genial and benevolent witch.” On first encounter, those adjectives failed to occur to me, though his get-up did strike me as entirely original, winningly comic, and no doubt memorable. I’d soon deduce that he was a bachelor gentleman who kept open house on Thursday evenings for his male students.

  At the time I was too impressed by the consistency of his attire and the fervor of his tirade to release the laughter that rose in me in increasingly powerful waves. I kept my seat and, given a chance at last, I told him a little about my intent to write a thesis on Milton’s play Samson Agonistes. He grumbled for a while longer about the unlikelihood of my being prepared for such an effort, especially if this Professor Gilbert had taught me; but we somehow got to near-dusk without an untoward external incident.

  Then he showed me back to the door with a final insistence that I begin to attend his “Thursday evenings” for “wine and good talk.” I never did. In fact, I saw him only once more in the course of that whole term—a second meeting when he went on cranking his hurdygurdy’s repetitive “you Americans,” as though a twenty-two-year-old Yank was too simpleminded to realize that his own lower standing in the hierarchy of this till now infallibly courteous institution was being justified by this brown-knickered witch.

  Strangely enough, my first meeting with Mr. Leishman failed to depress me. In all my years of formal education in America, I’d encountered only one really bad teacher, a woman in the fourth grade. Too many arresting British novelties were breaking round me by the hour for a single bizarre academic to cause grave discouragement—not yet. Furthermore in the first two or three weeks of the eight-week term, I was discovering that—far from living up to their reputation as icily reserved and culturally superior pricks—the Brits I’d met (with the exception of J. B. Leishman) were generally proving to be no more chilly or superior than the run of Americans in any sizable town.

  They were helpful and pleasantly curious about me and my needs (young Americans were far scarcer at Oxford than now, and even Mr. Leishman had his evenings). From my student colleagues, their teachers, and their world, I was learning a dozen facts and skills per day—not to mention the acquisition of a virtually new language and accent, or a dialect of English that amounted to a far more distinct language than I’d anticipated from the courtly but emotionally resourceful language of the upper American South that I’d spoken for two decades and in which I’d begun my written fiction, poetry, and critical essays.

  At least half my conscious mind, then, was beginning to be rewarded by thought of my oncoming work, by most of my new teachers, and several promising friends. So my bout of uncertainty as to the wisdom of being here had retreated for now. And soon I’d learn that the elastic rules of the English faculty would yield up a welcome access to someone other than Mr. Leishman.

  In the first full week of term, after all, I’d attended the lectures of the famous Helen Gardner on the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (John Donne and George Herbert prime among them). I’d also joined a highly informal seminar—Lord David Cecil’s in practical criticism. And I’d begun, with my twenty-odd fellow B.Litt. aspirants, to attend the small classes designed to prepare us for our eventual research. Professor F. P. Wilson, a kind bulky rabbit of a man, instructed us in methods and sources of research for work in the literature of the English Renaissance (he was then at work on the volume covering a portion of that period in The Oxford History of English Literature). Helen Gardner was not yet Dame Helen and was thus a good deal less formidable than she’d eventually be. In addition to her huge lecture course, she led us B.Litt. aspirants through a meticulous class on the textual editing of poems of the same period. She was then involved in editing the poems of Donne, and we used her photostats of earlier editions and manuscripts—Xerox was a decade down the road—to make the difficult choices among numerous verbal candidates which would lead us to the poet’s intentions (the detective in me was steadily aroused).

  Herbert Davis, an English scholar of eighteenth-century literature who’d also been president of Smith College, taught us how Renaissance books and broadsides were printed; and he eventually supervised our printing, on the Bodleian Library’s large old handpress, a small gathering of the poems we’d edited for Miss Gardner. Finally a likable man in Hertford College taught us to read, and even to write, many of the otherwise illegible handwritten scripts of the time (see Shakespeare’s signature on his will, for an instance of seventeenth-century illegibility).

  Each of the classes was continuously interesting; and they offered the chance to begin an acquaintance with the few other students who hoped to pass a one-day exam, plus an oral, at the end of our second term. Success would either certify us to begin work on our theses or forbid our proceeding. Both Miss Gardner’s lectures on the Metaphysicals, in one of the booming lecture rooms of the enormous and icy Examination Schools, and Lord David’s small class in criticism—some fifteen students—which met in his slightly warmer rooms in New College were superb in almost startlingly different ways. I could see, when Lord David sat and raised his trouser legs a little, that he was the only Briton of my time whom I discovered as a wearer of men’s long underwear. Later I’d be wearing the same in the grimmer months.

  Helen Gardner knew her subjects exhaustively and conveyed her mastery in lucid, but never condescending, lectures—one of the rarest of academic skills. She’d nonetheless been subjected to many of the disappointments of a brilliant woman in what was then distinctly a man’s world. Stephen Spender would eventually tell me that he’d heard from W. H. Auden that, when she held a job at the University of Birmingham, Gardner fell in love with the poet Henry Reed. Reed, howev
er, was queer; and Gardner’s encounter with that reality led to a psychotic breakdown. In the absence of a good biography, I can’t vouch for Auden’s story; but it has a likely sound, especially since I slowly became aware of her reservations about many of her male colleagues at Oxford, and more than once I heard her cast strong aspersions at Auden and his friends. As her pupil, of course I was fascinated to hear of those possible early troubles in her life.

  In any case her ferocious conviction of the rightness of her opinions and her thrusting ambition in a time when women were still not expected to possess such aims left her unpopular with many of her fellows in the English faculty. And I later learned from one of her more sympathetic colleagues—David Cecil—that “Helen is the only person I’ve known who went barking mad and then came back—partway at least.” Luckily I collided with none of her unlikable traits. On the contrary—after a well-earned knuckle-rapping, she always treated me warmly.

  Lord David Cecil, photographed by my friend Thomas Victor when David visited the States in 1979. I flew to New York to see him, and spent a memorably bibulous and affectionate evening with him and his wife Rachel in the otherwise empty but opulent apartment of Mrs. Brooke Astor (she’d lent it to the Cecils for their New York stay). The next morning I phoned Tom Victor—than whom there’s been no better photographer of writers—and asked him to photograph David and, if possible, to catch his lordship in the unself-conscious midst of one of his most famous Oxford-lecture gestures—both hands upright in the air near his face, with the long fingers extended on the verge of stroking one another nervously. Luckily, Tom succeeded. Here David is seventy-seven years old, yet the picture clearly summons back the splendid talker who never treated me with anything less than unbroken kindness. Tom died of AIDS at far too young an age, and his best photographs have never been collected in a book.