After lunch she was likely to produce a walking stick for each of us and lead us off on a thoroughly brisk two-mile walk down the hill to Burford’s superb church or along the line of the slender Windrush, barely more than a creek, where Queen Elizabeth I had been welcomed by the villagers nearly four centuries earlier. And for this hospitality, she asked nothing more from us than, perhaps, “Four of the best lettuces from the Open Market in Oxford” or that we up-end the full rain barrel by the front corner of her house. As dusk began to close in, she’d give us a quick cup of tea with one of her fresh scones and homemade quince jam; then imperiously shoo us on our way downhill for the last bus back to Oxford (we’d flag it down, in the dark, with our white handkerchiefs).
* * *
One of the favors she’d done for me and Jim Griffin was to provide the name and address of a pensione in Florence, almost every Englishman’s favorite Italian city. It was the Pensione Quisisana, right on the Arno, only a few yards from the Uffizi Gallery and the city’s central piazza. But our first term still had a couple of weeks to run; and freed as I now was from cancer, I was still oppressed by the darkness and the indoor chill as winter drew near. Each Mertonian had a single electric-coil heater to warm his two rooms; but given the size of my rooms and the river damp, switching on the heater was about as effective as lighting a match in a chilled gymnasium. My return to health was completed, though, by an increasing number of friends—from England, New Zealand, Holland, and the States. Michael Jordan, with his keen interest in American culture and his readiness to go with me to films, plays, and concerts had soon become what David Gilchrist (he of the “dressing gown” breakfast) called my sparring partner.
And I managed to do a good deal of the reading called for by Miss Gardner’s lectures, Lord David’s class, my several prep courses for the B.Litt. exam, and my ongoing love of Milton. During my freshman year at Duke, in a major’s introductory course, I’d come to love Paradise Lost for the Baroque complexity of language which it managed to combine with an ultimately paradoxical tenderness toward its hapless and all-too-fallible human stars, Adam and Eve in their perfect home—Eden. And here four years later in a dark and freezing Oxford, I had a just-sufficient supply of scholarly genes to power me through the necessary hours of reading in an underheated Bodleian Library and my own ancient rooms (though Milton attended Cambridge, he was known to have visited the university library in which I studied; his father was a native of Oxfordshire, and the poet married his teenaged first wife some three miles away).
* * *
Stronger still, however, and growing steadily was the hope to write my own fiction and poetry. Late in the first term, I conceived a story called “The Warrior Princess Ozimba.” If I could find time to write it, it would be my second attempt to enclose—and partially defuse—some of the lingering intensities of Dad’s dying in a well-controlled and compelling narrative. Less than a year before, I’d written—in the single writing class I ever took—a story called “A Chain of Love.” It dealt with a death like my father’s and the family ordeal which surrounded it, and it still needed work.
Nonetheless it seemed firm enough to stand alone—a story that centered on an imagined girl named Rosacoke Mustian (my first use of a character who’d appear in three later novels) and on Rosa’s sympathetic fascination with a family who accompany a dying husband and father across the hospital hallway from her own dying grandfather—such a country family were encamped with an old kinsman in a room near Dad’s, though I never spoke with them. In contrast, “The Warrior Princess Ozimba” would center on a young man’s assuming a duty of his father’s soon after that older man’s death—the delivery of a promised pair of tennis shoes to an old black woman who had worked for their family through many decades. Even while I read for hours in the work on which I might soon be examined by the English faculty, I thought obsessively about both my stories. The two—one nearly finished, the other not yet begun—had all but convinced me that I was not wholly wrong to head for a writer’s future.
Less than a year earlier, Eudora Welty had been invited to Duke by a committee from the Woman’s College. She delivered a lecture that would become her much-admired later essay “Place in Fiction”; and at the request of my teacher William Blackburn, she met with a small group of students and commented on their manuscript stories. At that point in my dreamy notion of a writer’s career, I’d finished a single very short story which I was prepared to show a writer of Welty’s distinction. It was called “Michael Egerton,” was no more than three thousand words long, and again it dealt with an emotional and ethical quandary I myself had experienced at the age of twelve in my only time as a summer camper.
Eudora Welty on her first trip to Italy, probably in the fall of 1949. Not long after we met in 1955, at my request she sent me this picture and called it, in her accompanying letter, “Eudora of the Boboli.” She’s in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, and the picture is by Anthony Bower. Taken years before osteoporosis began to produce a slowly painful spinal curvature that stole seven inches off her height, she’s clearly a tall woman here, as she still was some five years later when I met her. Never a natural beauty, Eudora had nonetheless an overwhelming attentiveness and concern that left most people who met her with the sense of a beautiful nature. Uncoached, many—on their first meeting—remarked how much she was like Eleanor Roosevelt: devoid of surface attractions yet powerfully magnetic. Though I’d see her hereafter, time and again till near her death, I almost never saw her otherwise than elegant and lovely. She signed a picture of the two of us, taken in the mid-1980s, with these few words that move me deeply still—“Ours the best of friendships.”
At the end of her impromptu class—and in the presence of other students—Miss Welty told me that my story was thoroughly professional; might she show it to her agent? I was semi-pulverized with surprise, knowing that she’d actually published a handful of stories as good as the best of Chekhov. So I accepted her offer at once; and very shortly thereafter her agent—the superb Diarmuid Russell (pronounced DUR-mid)—contacted me, said that he thought “Michael Egerton” was “good,” and offered to circulate the story and any others that might be ready. At the time I was completing the first draft of the Rosacoke story, and I sent that on to him not long before heading to England.
He and I stayed in regular touch thereafter. Diarmuid’s extremely prompt letters had the quality of the e-mail whose invention was still decades off—a near-telegraphic speed, brevity, and pith. A cradle Irishman and the son of the mystic poet Æ (George Russell), Diarmuid had come to America as a young man but had maintained an ironic Irish view of Britain. One of his first letters to me at Oxford previewed his characteristic brand of brisk sympathy. He responded to my early complaint of insufficient indoor heating by informing me that the young Charles Darwin had encountered on Tierra del Fuego, while voyaging on the Beagle, indigenous folk sleeping naked (with no apparent discomfort) in the snow.
For all his salty attention, however, Diarmuid could not place any of my first finished stories—not quickly—and like so many apprentice writers, I spent more time in balked yearning than was good for my academic duties. When would my work reach even a small public of readers? I can even recall experiencing, on my straw bed, more than one dream in which I went to my pigeonhole in the Merton lodge and found—Yes! Letters of acceptance and actual checks.
So my first term’s work was more than a little compromised by all the uncertainties that surrounded my prime ambition to write and by the physical and psychic complexities that had surfaced in the wake of Dad’s death. I did, as I noted, see Mr. Leishman a second time in the term, though I recall nothing about the meeting. But the remainder of my degree work was accomplished in the B.Litt. classes and other public lectures. My chief memory of those weeks of work would have to be a partly delicious, partly melancholy sense of solitude as I’d walk the few hundred yards back to college from a long afternoon of reading in the Bodleian.
Once I dodged my way
through the murderous traffic of the High, I’d duck down the narrow lane that led to Merton Street. Its modern name is Magpie Lane; but in medieval documents it’s a little startlingly but charmingly—and no doubt truthfully—called Gropecunt Lane (even in my time I’d occasionally come down the lane late on a weekend night and pass American airmen and English girls embracing upright against the old walls).
* * *
Apart from my two kinds of work then, and my growing friendship with Michael, I immersed increasingly in Merton’s distinctive social life. I’ve noted that there were a few other Americans in college; but I’d decided—on the voyage—that it would be absurd to stick with a group of American contemporaries when I had the chance, in what I assumed would be a two-year stay, to learn as much as possible about another country and its culture (one of my compatriots made it clear that he thought I’d made a wrong choice in adhering to the Brits—“none of whom will follow you home,” he said—but I ignored the warning, thank God).
I was soon joining, then, a small circle of English undergraduates in someone’s rooms to have coffee (weak powdered Nescafé) for forty-five minutes after a hall-lunch. I might then return from the library around 4:30 for a copious tea in the Junior Common Room bar with a few dozen student colleagues—most of us seated at minuscule tables, eating tomato or Marmite sandwiches while a skilled few of us threw darts with fierce concentration at a dartboard hung on a wall some eight feet away. At six I’d likely offer sherry to one or more friends in my rooms, or go to theirs for the same varieties of mostly South African sherry—a decent inexpensive version called Dry Fly was a frequent label. Then I’d put on my hip-length black gown (required for attendance at all lectures, college dinners, and other official events) and sit on a tightly packed wood bench to hear one of us read the college Latin (Christian) grace and then to bolt down in typical young-male fashion the dinner served over our shoulders by white-coated scouts.
As ever with institutional food, there was a fair amount of howling about its quality, though both the available British foodstuffs and the ambition of British cooks were still—as I’ve noted—overshadowed darkly by the Second War; the college meals were, I suspect, not a good deal worse than what many of my friends endured in their homes. First, there’d be a lumpy cream soup; then lamb, mutton, or sausage accompanied invariably by potatoes (fried, roasted, or mashed) and brussels sprouts, turnips, or cabbage; with a final pudding drowned under custard—all overcooked to stringy toughness or sodden tastelessness. Still, our vigorous table-talk proceeded, despite the fact that anyone could be sconced (compelled to drink a large tankard of beer without pausing to breathe) for talking “shop”—that is, discussing our studies. Our talk was, in fact, about little else.
Other dinner subjects were politics, sports, cinema, the telly, and Oxford characters (of whom there was always an ample supply). Oddly, in all my three years at Merton, I had no real friendship with another student in the entire university who was anticipating life as a novelist, poet, or dramatist; and I never felt the lack. In my second year, I met Willie Morris, a new Rhodester from Mississippi who’d eventually become a distinguished autobiographer. I enjoyed occasional meetings with him and his friends in New College, an all-American group that included the very bright and amusing Neil Rudenstine—a future president of Harvard—but Willie and I never grew close. His sense of rivalry was surprisingly strong; and it only relaxed in later years when (against his will) he left the editor’s chair at Harper’s magazine.
What I’d of course read about—but was finding it hard to judge this early, except as I developed an ear for accents—was the social revolution under way at Oxford and Cambridge (and to some degree in the “redbrick” provincial universities): the nation-altering results of the postwar Labour government’s decision to subsidize virtually any young man or woman who could succeed in passing through the strenuous obstacle courses set in their secondary-school educations. The colleges now—with a few exceptions, say, Christ Church and Trinity at Oxford—were no longer primarily haunts of the rich or the upper middle class; and what I was getting to know, for better or worse, was a whole new Britain.
The 1920s Oxford of, for instance, Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited was meant to be dead. I say meant to be because, despite the presence of many “grammar school boys” at Merton—the sons of fathers who could never have afforded to send them on from secondary state schools to the university—many of my college friends came from well-to-do homes and spoke some version of upper-middle or upper-class British English (always the surest class identification test). At Merton there was even a small clutch of “Old Etonians” who spoke in the plummy tones that one seldom hears now, even in British plays and films.
In fact, I’ve now sat through numerous such performances in which native-born actors were supposed to be speaking in Oxbridge accents but could no longer produce a flawless simulacrum of those rounded vowels, produced at the very front of the upper row of teeth and then fed through the nose. There are even small errors in the accents of several otherwise fine performers in the brilliant televised production of Brideshead. I did occasionally reflect on the surviving chasm involved in our being served, both in our rooms and in hall, by men who were often as old as our fathers—many of them had defended the Empire in the recent war. As a native of the American South of course, being served by my elders was no strange phenomenon; but all those servants were black and the descendants of slaves, whereas in the Merton of the 1950s all the college servants were white.
In the face of such intentionally benign social engineering, I was still more than mildly concerned to encounter—more than once during my first year at Oxford, and a few more times in my British years—sudden outbursts of anti-Americanism from some otherwise friendly acquaintance. I’ve noted that Mr. Leishman was much given to commencing his cultural ventings with “Oh, you Americans.” Coming from his parodistic tweed-knickered frame, such moments came as no surprise and were the subjects of whatever comedy I could rouse on my return to college.
But from acquaintances of my own age and educational background, anti-Americanism came as more nearly a shock. In retrospect it’s also surprised me to recall that I was never challenged to explain or defend the particular evils of racial repression—and worse—in my own native province, the old Confederacy where, in those very years, the civil-rights movement was gathering speed and force. The complaints were always about American foreign policy, the continued extensive American military presence in Britain, and the bad taste in civilian clothing of American airmen on their boozy weekends in Oxford (possessed, as they seemed to be, of endless ready cash).
* * *
I was ready—perhaps too ready—to agree that the United States had plenty to be ashamed of, on the grounds of its own past (in the present world of George W. Bush we’re deplored, even hated, as never before in my lifetime). But to meet with such virulent expressions from a very few highly educated young Britons was to be amazed at their own refusal to acknowledge at least a pair of realities—both the long and oppressive imperialist history of their own country and a failure to consider that their resentment of the States might derive in part from their blindness to the fact that the quite incredible hegemony of their own small island nation in two and a half centuries of imperial world power had ended quite decisively, only a few years before my arrival in Oxford. A piece of real estate no larger than, say, that American region called New England had managed, through intelligence and luck, to rule a very large portion of the planet since the beginnings of the eighteenth century. Now it no longer did so.
The young protestors, however passionate and sincere (and some of them had only recently completed their required two years’ service in the British military), had a grave problem for their own personal futures. And it was a problem which they often seemed peculiarly unaware of. Since the old Britannia was effectively dead, there was no empire left to go out to, or to profit from, with the abstract skills for which their brillia
nt educations were preparing them. The thousands of jobs available to their forefathers were gone—and apparently forever.
I knew only one Mertonian from my three years who, on graduation, assumed an old-time Empire job—he went to Fiji to work in the postal system, I believe. What did these young men propose to do on the small and already crowded landmass of the United Kingdom? In all the hours of lively talk I heard at Merton, I literally never heard a word on the subject (but then I’ve never heard a word from a young American on the subject of our own inevitably shrinking empire). In any case, that first term ended at a peak of good cheer.
The crowning social event of the term was also its last—the college’s commemoration ball (what were we commemorating?). It was scheduled for the last night before we were due to scatter for the six-week Christmas vac. While spending an earlier weekend with Redmayne in Burford, I’d met an attractive young woman called Jill. She and her mother had taken me, on my first visit to Stratford, to see The Merry Wives. And eventually I invited Jill to be my date for the ball. She wrote back, accepted gracefully, and concluded by asking (in effect) “Shall I bring the Rolls? It might be fun for us.” I’m not sure I’d known that her family possessed a Rolls; but of course I said “By all means” (on my one visit to Jill’s home village, Swinbrook, Jill had driven me to see the Mitford family graves in the local churchyard—I had a curiosity then about the three remarkable Mitford sisters, primarily Unity who involved herself, perhaps romantically, with Hitler; then attempted suicide).
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