It’s worth noting here that she then had no earned doctoral degree; but that was true of virtually all the best teachers with whom I worked at Oxford—again, British academics would generally receive an initial bachelor’s degree; then proceed to educate themselves thereafter, and brilliantly so in a good many cases. F. P. Wilson, David Cecil, Helen Gardner, and Nevill Coghill (among my early teachers) possessed a depth of knowledge and reflection which they wore with a grace, wit, and often elastic readiness to learn that was new to me. It’s been disturbing to learn, however (from the last book published by my eventual digs-mate Anthony Nuttall), that “when Dame Helen Gardner, famous for her academic ferocity, lay dying, she too was visited [as Richard III was in Shakespeare’s play] by the figures of those whose theses she had failed, whose careers she had marred; they stood round her bed.” Tony didn’t say where he’d learned of her deathbed trials (and now he too is dead); but he himself had been a student refused by Gardner, though his superbly successful career was hardly marred by her.
* * *
David Cecil, the critic and biographer of Lord Melbourne and Max Beerbohm (among numerous others), was the object of more affectionate and unskilled mimicry than any other member of the English faculty, of which he was now the most internationally noted member. The grandson of Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria’s long-serving prime minister, and a descendant of William and Robert Cecil, who had served Elizabeth I and James I in similar offices, Lord David had more than a few justifications for self-confident oddities. And in fact he was notorious—in his well-attended lectures—for eccentricities of performance which may or may not have been intentional or neurologically required.
For example, he tended, in his frequent moments of genuine aesthetic excitement, to spray his nearby auditors with tiny drops of spittle. In even more powerful moments, he’d clamp his eyes shut and rise to his toes in an O altitudo! of appreciative ecstasy. Simultaneously the mile-long fingers of either hand might extend and wave round before him with what his delighted students called “Lord David’s porridge-stirring.” Even in calmer moments, his thumbs executed a ceaseless stroking rhythm on his second fingers—a habit which I sometimes find myself unconsciously imitating, even today.
However if a student troubled to approach him with a serious question—or to attend a term’s worth of one of his small classes and immerse in the texts he set for his weekly meetings—that student could come to know a senior scholar-critic of unfailingly keen intelligence, warmed with a generous admixture of kindness and an utterly personal humor. But lest I’ve suggested an excessive softness, I’ll add that he suffered no fool gladly, even the then-notorious Dr. F. R. Leavis of Cambridge, who’d often employed David Cecil as a foppish straw-man representative of all that was wrong in British literary studies. Yet if an apparent student-fool proved to be psychically disturbed, he’d find real compassion from Lord David. In the first term’s class, I saw him deal helpfully over several weeks with a genuine madman in our midst, one who seriously imagined that Princess Margaret was about to visit him.
Sad to say, a friend’s wit in conversation is the most fleeting of gifts. When the friend is gone, so is the humor, since it’s invariably a function of that person’s entire body in action (especially in so peculiar a body as Lord David’s and in however small a room). But in a lifetime’s acquaintance with several world-class talkers, I’ve known no other conversationalist who equaled David Cecil. And I stress the word conversationalist. He was most definitely not a monologist, and he took watchful care to avoid boring his company. He even once told me that his uncle Hugh Cecil had encountered a man who was famed as “the greatest bore in England.” After a long prologue the great bore paused and said “I hope I’m not boring you, Lord Hugh”; and the kindly Lord Hugh replied “Not yet.” The fact that David Cecil gradually became one of the greatly treasured friends of my life continues to be a source of real thanks for me.
As I’ve written these lines about him, I’ve returned to a fascinating volume of recollections—David Cecil edited by Hannah Cranborne, his great-niece by marriage. Reading the memories of such friends as Isaiah Berlin, John Bayley, Anthony Powell, and the old family retainer (third footman at one of the Cecil estates) who said of David “He wasn’t sporty and he didn’t like shooting,” I’ve found myself sad again to have lost such a man. In fact I can think of no adult friend—and almost no kin of my own, however beloved—whose physical presence and voice I miss more than David Cecil’s; thus hereafter I’ll mostly refer to him as David, which (early on) he asked me to do. In any case, his lordly status was a courtesy title, received as a son of the Marquess of Salisbury; and in those pre-Thatcher days, most of us enjoyed our work with an affable lord.
* * *
But in the midst of so many pleasures—such a rush of gladness—an unexpected darkness began to consume me. First, as October accumulated its shorter and shorter days, I was growing aware of my position on the planet. I was after all on a latitude with the start of unoccupied Labrador. By early November, full day wasn’t dawning on Merton College till about well past eight o’clock; a blue dusk was descending by four as the river mists rolled across the Meadow toward my window, and I had nearly two months to go before we reached the winter solstice—the year’s shortest day. That long ago very few of us knew anything about a now-familiar condition called SAD—seasonal affective disorder, a possibly severe psychic response triggered by hormonal change, to sunlight deprivation. Symptoms might range from mild depression to more serious derangements.
Among my many pleasures then, I was somehow growing sadder by the day. Something told me that I was responding—almost two years later—to my active role in Dad’s last weeks, the awful days after the removal of a lung in the hopes of surviving—for a few months or, at most, two years longer—the cancer he’d earned (at age fifty-four) for the smoking he’d joked about beginning in pre-adolescence. Mostly I’d served him as an efficient manager in critical situations; and as an elder son who’d never been called on for significant help, I took way too much pride in my final role. So it was months before I’d begun to feel at all troubled. I knew that I’d yet to undergo a full acknowledgment of Dad’s death; and I didn’t realize the inevitability of some such recognition. Was that what was gripping me now?
Whatever, one evening I returned to my rooms from a musical outing with a friend from New Zealand, Jeremy Commons; and as I stripped before donning my pajamas, I felt a small uneasiness in my left side, some five inches west of my navel. I explored the spot and soon discovered a firm lump, no bigger than a boy’s agate marble. The skin around it was not numb, but the shallow-buried lump seemed to lack all feeling. Was that a bad sign? Whatever, in an instant I was drenched in a downpour of certainty—cancer. My father had died of it twenty months ago, and now I’d join him.
Through the next two weeks, my mind increasingly sickened me; but I told no one. Who was there to tell? Among my new friends, no one yet seemed near enough to burden with the news. They were all my own age or younger; and if I needed anything just now—short of healing—it was wisdom. In those days only the wealthy could afford phone calls to the States (in the three years to come, I’d phone home one single time); and I wouldn’t want to alarm my mother with unconfirmed news.
After maybe ten days, during which I walked through my duties and a round of modest entertainments in near-zombie fashion, I went to Dr. Kirkham, the college physician whose office was a good distance across the city—near the almost disturbingly hideous Keble College, built (as it was) from an array of Victorian colored bricks, almost like some child’s entertainment. Kirkham patiently heard my complaint, examined me briskly, and told me that I had no cause for concern. This was plainly a small fatty tumor, he said, a lipoma—a collection of fat cells—and it might be reabsorbed as rapidly as it had formed. It would hardly grow further. I should ignore it and go about my life.
I recall telling myself a dumb joke as I walked back to Merton. Ignore it and go about my
life—fat chance! The joke of course was no help at all. In the coming days—in an effort to calm myself (and with little thought that sheer work might serve me best of all)—I’d begin to indulge in one of the fine sidebars of Oxford life: plays and other theatrical events. My Rhodester friend Frank Sieverts organized at Balliol College a public reading of Tennessee Williams’s brand-new play, the deeply felt—and for those days, startlingly candid—Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; and I read the leading male role: the sexually and psychically tormented Brick. I didn’t feel then (and never would) a special affinity with Brick’s passive agonies, but Frank’s gentle demand for extensive rehearsals—and the large and enthusiastic audience who turned out for our single performance—gave me some relief.
* * *
The other immediate possibilities for diversion included productions available in the town itself. There were two professional venues—the New Theatre and the Oxford Playhouse—plus numerous college productions of all sorts. In London, only forty miles southeast and reachable by numerous trains per day, there were endless inexpensive shows. And at the end of a brief hitch-hike ride some forty miles northwest, there was Stratford-upon-Avon with its Shakespeare Memorial Theatre which—just a stone’s throw from either his birthplace or his tomb—provided a rich variety of first-rate actors in mostly fine productions of the work of the world’s ultimate Hometown Boy. In my first term I also went to what seemed a thousand films. Apart from the numerous cinemas in town, the Oxford Film Society offered screenings of classic films that had been past my reach in Raleigh or Durham, and Michael and I attended at least one such offering each week.
Then with Michael and another friend or two, I saw—at the New Theatre—an uncut pre-London production of Hamlet with Paul Scofield as the Prince and Diana Wynyard as his mother. After Laurence Olivier’s filmed Hamlet of the late 1940s, Scofield’s seemed excessively dry and monotone—a hard young man to care for, certainly not for the very long hours of an uncut performance; and though Wynyard was a glamorous Gertrude, Mary Ure’s Ophelia was a howling embarrassment. In Stratford I saw Anthony Quayle and Joyce Redman in a rollicking, if obvious Merry Wives of Windsor and then John Gielgud and Claire Bloom in King Lear. Though the sets and costumes for Lear by the Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi were too independent an attraction, the acting was unforgettably potent. Most impressive of all, in the midst of my descent into cancer fear, I saw the three most imposing Shakespeare productions of my life: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier in Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Titus Andronicus.
Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier as the murderous Macbeths in a production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955. I saw a performance with several Rhodester friends, and afterward we proceeded backstage for a meeting with Miss Leigh (Lady Olivier) who told us in amusing detail about a recent and loudly ballistic Guy Fawkes Night at the Oliviers’ home in the countryside. The two of them—near the end of their long and famous marriage—were appearing in a full season at Stratford—Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Titus Andronicus. I’d eventually see their astonishing Titus three times but each of the other plays only once. It was a decade in which some critics felt that Leigh was exposing a smaller classical talent to dangerous comparisons by appearing with her titanic husband, whom she far surpassed as a film actor. Before the Stratford Macbeth, I’d seen the two of them together in New York in a superb Antony and Cleopatra where her Cleopatra was plainly superior to his underheated Antony (the same week, I saw their Caesar and Cleopatra). At Stratford, Olivier’s Macbeth was incomparable in its detailed portrait of a man slowly consumed by evil; but then Leigh’s smaller-scaled Lady Macbeth was a gorgeous viper who adored her husband and lured him into his murders by her sexual power over him. I’ve never seen better Shakespearean performances than the two of them delivered that fall at Stratford.
* * *
But with all the attempted distractions, my cancer worry continued till it had deepened into a real phobia, even the beginnings of a psychic breakdown. As the lump in my side seemed—to my probing fingers—to grow, I seriously thought of going to the one midtown travel agency and inquiring about the costs of shipping a corpse from Oxford to the States. As easily as I can imagine any reader’s laughing at the revelation, to me it still doesn’t seem a comic idea. The fact that I held off my inquiry was some sort of dawning realization that I was almost in deeper water than I could return from. I went back to the college doctor, and by then he perceived the gravity of my mental condition and sent me to a surgeon.
British surgeons are called Mister not Doctor, and I seem to recall that the fine man I visited in his offices in north Oxford was called Mr. Till. In any case, he patiently sat and heard me describe my recent history, then examined me, then sent me to the Radcliffe Infirmary for full X-ray studies. When he had the images in hand, he called me back to confirm what I’d already been told more than once—the X-rays had revealed a harmless fatty tumor. Since I’d told him of my accompanying stomach upsets, Mr. Till added a further interesting detail (in words to this effect)—“Mr. Price, I suspect that your gastric health may be complicated by your recent immersion in an English college diet. At the end of the war, we encountered a number of released prisoners of the Nazis who were suffering what we came to call carbohydrate shock. After months of sadly deprived rations, the sudden flood of potatoes, turnips, swedes, and bread swamped many of them with excess starch; and we had to warn them to limit their consumption, especially of potatoes” (at least two of those items were major components of virtually every Merton meal, and turnips had begun showing up only days before—swedes are what Americans call rutabagas). Having consoled me to that extent, Mr. Till then said that he’d like me to see a physician in Longwall Street—“Dr. Mallam, just a good internist to be sure everything else is in working order.”
I saw that elderly gentleman who examined me, stem to stern; then said that Mr. Till had mentioned my father’s recent death—would I tell him more about it? I recounted my role in those events, Dr. Mallam nodded and said “Well, of course you’ve been concerned.” Then he repeated the harmlessness of my tumor but said that, if I’d feel better about it, he could arrange with Mr. Till to have it removed—a simple procedure. With a kindly upraised hand, though, he stalled a prompt agreement from me and said that I should take a few days to think through the prospect, then let him know my decision. When he stood to see me out, he actually touched my shoulder—something no one had yet done in England—and he said “Mr. Price, if you have a cancer, I’m about to have a litter of puppies.” His rosy plump face grinned enormously, I suddenly burst out laughing, and my weeks’-long fear was dispelled on the spot.
On my way back to college, I stopped in at Corpus to see Jim Griffin. He and I had discussed the possibility of a joint trip to Italy during the upcoming Christmas holiday or vac, as it was called—each of us would be expected to clear out of our college rooms for most of the time—and I’d held him off while I contemplated my imminent death, though of course I didn’t give him that excuse for my delay. (The Oxford academic year basically consisted of three eight-week terms—Michaelmas, Hilary, and Trinity—interspersed by vacs of some six weeks, with a longer summer vac.) Now I could tell Jim about my misplaced worry and confirm that I hoped we could move ahead with Italian plans—the fact that we had no erotic interest whatever in one another was one of the firmest grounds of our friendship.
* * *
Our original interest in such a trip had been encouraged by one of the unique Britons whom I’d encountered—a woman named Pamela Redmayne. I’d first met her when she’d visited friends during my final semester at Duke and had taken me to lunch in Durham. At the time she seemed to be in her mid- to late fifties and was the epitome of what I took to be a certain kind of English maiden lady—tall, not quite handsome but physically imposing, given to a steady stream of talk about herself and her famous friends. The years would sadly prove that—despite the hospitality of her home in the Cotswold village of Bu
rford—Pamela was given to mythomania, a form of narrative invention in which she placed herself at the center of many important events, often political events which she couldn’t have witnessed, much less engendered.
For a single example, she once told me (in words to this effect) “Yes, I well remember when I was in Russia midway through the war, Joe Stalin called me in, showed me a long ward of starving boys and girls and said ‘Miss Redmayne, I only have food for ten of these children. You alone can make the choice; which ones shall we save?’” I honestly don’t believe that I’ve misrepresented her story—or more precisely, my memory of her story. Whether the stories proceeded from a walled-off set of delusions about her past or a simple desire to entertain guests or to make her own quiet life seem more dramatic, I can’t say.
Still, she had many forms of thoughtfulness, none of which I’ve forgot. Operating from her narrow two-story cottage attached to a large farmhouse called Bartholomews on the high hill at the end of the Burford High Street beyond the church and the Windrush River—and surely with a small minimum of funds—she’d often invite six or eight Rhodes Scholars to board a bus early on an Oxford Sunday morning and make the fifteen-mile trip to Burford (with the usual young man’s lack of curiosity about his elders, I never asked her how she acquired her interest in Rhodesters). There by her omnipresent sitting-room fire, we’d toast ourselves with sherry and then eat an ample lunch of well-cooked and blessedly seasoned chicken with copious amounts of rice. Though not a subtle cook, Pamela claimed time at the Cordon Bleu school in Paris; and while most of her recipes seemed more nearly Spanish than French, they produced unfailingly likable results.
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