On the night in question, Jill drove herself from her Cotswold village into Merton Street where she parked an astonishingly well-tended antique Rolls by the college gate. What larks! as Joe Gargery says in Dickens’s Great Expectations. I can’t recall where we went for dinner—likely to the Café de Paris off the High or the Café Royale, two eateries by no means as grand as their names implied but as good as there was in the city then—or as good as Michael, our friend Garry Garrard, and I could afford for ourselves and our dates. Neither restaurant was more than a few blocks from college; but I’m sure we all packed into the Rolls and let Jill drive us there (none of us men yet possessed a British driver’s license).
Then back to college for dancing in the garlanded hall. Restored though it was, the medieval space retained its original lines and its noble volumes of timbered air overhead. Who provided the music, I don’t recall, nor precisely how we danced. Early in the evening there was a Scottish line dance, to bagpipe music, for the few Merton Scots, dashing in their kilts and sporrans. Afterward, it was mainly close dancing, with serious attention to proper footwork for the foxtrot, the waltz, or whatever else. By the time I’d left America, almost no one of my generation had mastered such steps; but stumbling though I was, I enjoyed myself.
The only small mishap was when, at our prior dinner—in the midst of inquiring about English dancing—I asked our assembled table “And do you also shag?” I was referring of course to the modified jitterbug which had originated in the Forties at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and then spread through the South. My friends took a gap-mouthed moment of silence, staring at their plates in a textbook illustration of the British idiom for sudden embarrassment, I didn’t know where to look. Then at last Michael said “Well, seldom on the actual dance floor.” It would later prove that shag was a British verb for “copulate”—only one of a number of idioms that divided our versions of the language in those days. The other great favorites were “What time shall I knock you up in the morning?” (meaning “wake you”) and “Keep your pecker up” (pecker meant “chin” in England).
We promptly recovered ourselves in gales of laughter. Though busily social, Merton was not especially famed for decadence; so I can’t recall that we drank ourselves into real inebriation. I do remember our taking pauses from the ball itself for quiet resorts to my nearby rooms where the six of us could talk awhile, but I think we stayed in possession of our wits. And at literal sunrise I saw Jill out to Merton Street and the Rolls which she’d drive back to her village.
4
I’D ALREADY PACKED to leave for London with Jim Griffin, Michael and his hometown date Anne, and Garry for the midmorning train. I’m an inveterate early arriver at depots and airports; but as I’d learn that day, to travel with Michael was to be required to leap onto already-moving vehicles. He firmly believed that any minute spent in waiting for transport was a minute lost. So a moving vehicle it was at the Oxford station—the train for Paddington. Once there, Michael and Anne got themselves to Victoria Station by tube for their train to Brighton. Garry lived in London, and Jim and I checked into our room at the Regent Palace Hotel smack off Piccadilly.
The hotel had opened for business late in 1915; and a recent biography of the great poet Wilfred Owen tells me that he stayed there, forty years earlier, in October 1915—at the age of twenty-two, the same age as I. He registered at the hotel some three weeks before enlisting in the British army, a fatal choice which would kill him exactly seven days before the Armistice in November 1918. Still in business as I write this, and looking very much like its old self in the Internet pictures—the Regent Palace even now offers rooms “with shared facilities”—this bustling but modest hostelry was comfortable enough for the few days we paused there. By that time both Jim and I were accustomed to shared facilities; and I at least had been taught long ago to avoid long walks down hotel corridors by peeing in my own room’s sink (followed by a careful flood of hot tap water of course). The same brand of peeing prevailed at Merton, with no coaching from me. Any male visitor to your room might well rise in the midst of tea and ask to employ your newly installed sink for a private moment.
I never quite got used to long walks down corridors to bathe in tubs available to miscellaneous strangers. Again, though, youth and penury bolstered us; and in our London pause, Jim and I were seldom in our room while awake. We were out to see the irresistible high spots—the National Gallery (unmatched, I think, for overall quality of the collection), the Tate, the Victoria and Albert, the British Museum, and Westminster Abbey. More than half-empty of tourists as the great sites were so near to Christmas, none of them failed us—though Jim was less an on-the-spot enthusiast than I, a difference imposed at birth no doubt by our geographical origins: his chilly New England, my balmy South.
We began, as well, to taste the all but endless resources of London theatre. First, we saw a peculiar play called The Strong Are Lonely. Concerned with Jesuits in colonial Latin America, it starred Donald Wolfit—notorious for his stagy silent-film lurches. I’d never see his famously powerful King Lear; yet I noted that his Jesuit elder was monumental, though trapped in a boring play. Far more impressive was the first London production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, his first stage fame in the English-speaking world.
Like most other Anglo-American theatregoers, I’d never heard of the Irish-French writer till we bought our tickets; and I came out into the cold December air more than two hours later, near overwhelmed by the indescribable power of what we’d experienced. For all the Shakespeare I’d seen in recent weeks at Stratford, the towering richness and variety of Beckett’s language, wit, and architectural wisdom, the absence from a long play of any dead wood (a thing one can seldom claim for even the supreme Shakespeare plays) put new coals under my own determination to write as much as possible through the upcoming weeks in Italy. Jim had declared his intention to reread all the Platonic dialogues in the time; I’d begin a new short story—but what about?
* * *
No further fiction had suggested itself from the recent subject of my father’s death (I’d sketched out “The Warrior Princess Ozimba” but had decided to wait awhile before finishing it). Nothing from my own recent life seemed sufficiently digested to produce controlled fiction, despite the fact that I seemed on the verge of the first worthy love of my life and the further reality that I’d apparently abandoned organized religion. Till leaving home, I’d been a fairly regular churchgoing Protestant; and at Oxford—in problematic times—I’d make solitary visits for prayer and meditation to the stark beauty of Merton’s thirteenth-century chapel, but I’d abandoned ordinary services. Here I was, though, on the doorsill of Italy with just enough money from the ill-gotten gains of Cecil Rhodes to enjoy myself. Surely some good notion would come in the calm of a shared room in Florence.
Jim had London friends whom he planned to see before we departed, so Michael took a quick train back to town, and he and I went out by tube to Twickenham stadium for the annual varsity rugby match between Oxford and Cambridge. I’d gone with Michael to watch several prior rugger matches up Iffley Road in Oxford and had liked the game at once—the unpadded roughhouse and the breathless uninterrupted nature of the play appealed to my old childhood liking for neighborhood touch football. The Twickenham match (I’ve forgot who won) was played in the usual amount of London mist and mud, but being there with Michael was fun enough.
Meanwhile the only real rock in my shoe was a chiding note from Mr. Leishman, received just before my departure from college. Why had I not called on him again toward the end of term? Well, I folded the letter and buried it in my desk; I’d think about that in a warmer place. He’d certainly given me no assignments, papers to write or assigned readings. Still, why hadn’t I attended at least one of his at-home evenings? Partly because I disliked him as intensely as I’ve noted above—and with good reason, I still think. Partly because I considered myself sufficiently employed in my work for David Cecil, Helen Gardner, and the teachers of my four B.Litt. preparator
y classes. And again, partly because of the full circle of pleasures and fears that had swarmed so thickly around me in the previous two months. Then of course, like many Americans I was more unprepared than I realized for an educational system that left me almost entirely in control of my studies with no older sympathetic watchdog to rein me in or lead me on. Nonetheless, I was badly at fault; and I’d ultimately pay for my negligence.
And inserting here an almost simultaneous event in a still warmer place—a place from which I was very much absent but an event which would profoundly affect not only my homeland but all the work I’d eventually do there—I note that, while I had no immediate awareness of it, on December 1, 1956 in Montgomery, Alabama a black seamstress named Rosa Parks had refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. Parks’s subsequent impeccable fame, the bus boycott which began among local black riders—warmed by the nonviolent rhetoric of a previously unheralded black minister named Martin Luther King—and the renewal of racial violence among many white Southerners were matters I’d learn of only when I returned to my Oxford fastness in January (my mail from home gave no reason to think that a major revolt had been triggered among us at last, yet the changes in my old world were hastening toward us, and I was far gone).
Since the spring of 1954—immediately after Dad’s death, the Supreme Court issued its Brown v. Board of Education ruling—I’d of course known that the social order of my home and all my kinsmen would gradually undergo a mammoth upending. I was uneasily glad to know as much. One of my first published prose sketches had appeared in my high-school newspaper in 1951 and reflected an early puzzlement at the often decorous cruelty of my white world; and my gradual withdrawal from involvement in organized religion was largely fueled by a sense of bafflement at the general silence of white Protestantism on so huge a subject. But I’d never been, and would never become, a social activist—not with my actual body on any physical rampart—yet almost all the manuscript short stories I was taking to Italy involved black characters in important actions: important and admirable, or at least virtuous, acts. Still, as the civil-rights movement got initial fire in its bones with Mrs. Parks’s slender refusal to move from a bus seat in Alabama, I was a long distance off, in more ways than planetary miles. And I’d remain so, in characteristic ways, for years to come.
* * *
On December 9—John Milton’s birthday and exactly one year since Jim and I had won our scholarships—he and I flew south out of London on a British European Airways prop-jet to Milan (in those days apparently Florence had no landing strip for full-size commercial planes). My first flight over the Alps was silently and vastly beautiful, and a single image I gathered as we passed the massive Mont Blanc imprinted itself deep in me and became the final sentence of a story I’d eventually call “The Anniversary.” We reached Milan in late afternoon, a bus drove us straight to the cavernous railway station, and Jim stood aside as I went to a ticket window and made my first attempt at spoken modern Italian.
I’d never studied the language formally, but one of my history teachers at Duke had offered an evening class for six or eight students who were interested in further investigation of Renaissance literature and history. The group proceeded, oddly but effectively, by beginning on the first night to read Dante’s Commedia. Despite his archaic Italian, Dante writes with a relatively easy syntax and vocabulary (he virtually invented the language as we know it); and I made considerable headway in his Inferno before I left Duke. Then once I’d known that Jim and I were set on a visit to Florence and Rome, I all but memorized an Italian grammar that I bought at Blackwell’s.
So I felt a certain new power unfolding in my hands as I asked the ticket seller when the next train departed for Firenze. He pondered my exotic grammar and accent, then nodded, kindly took a pencil, wrote the time on a small notepad, and extended it toward me with a bleak north-Italian smile. Good—we had barely an hour to wait. We managed a snack in a coffee stand in the station and went to the platform. It was still being said of Mussolini—then only a decade after his lynching by a mob not far from where we stood—that at least he’d made the trains run on time. They still did, to the veritable moment. We climbed aboard a carriage much like the British railcars I already knew, then sped on southward into gathering night.
* * *
The Pensione Quisisana was just as Redmayne had described it—a clean, smoothly run, and almost phenomenally quiet establishment, presided over by a likable older woman who spoke reasonable English, way more reasonable than my Italian. And well she might have—her premises could have arrived intact from an E. M. Forster novel about the British in Florence more than fifty years before (in fact, the Quisisana was actually used in the Merchant-Ivory version of Forster’s Room with a View in 1985). And while the place was by no means swamped with British guests—it seemed half-empty in the midwinter lull—there were several English couples. Two or three were plainly heterosexual, though a little old for hijinks; one was unmistakably lesbian, complete with severely bobbed hair and neckties straight out of The Well of Loneliness. All gave us friendly nods in the elevator or in the dining room, where we could choose to eat only breakfast or all three meals—good pasta, lamb, fish, and a good Chianti.
Jim and I took most of our meals there, chiefly for economy’s sake; but occasionally we’d choose a more imaginative place in the city—there was even one near the central piazza that served first-class beefsteaks. After two months of no decent beef, I treated myself on at least one evening to a full-sized steak, broiled rare, and languished in the pleasure (the restaurant priced it by the gram; and I hardly ate again for the rest of the week, though I never regretted my splurge). We thought we knew no one in midtown, though I’d hear soon that my old Milton teacher, Allan Gilbert, was there—the scholar so scorned by Mr. Leishman.
I wrote him a note, and he promptly phoned the Quisisana to invite us to dinner at his own small hotel. When we went there on the appointed evening, we discovered that he was experiencing an indisposition (he’d just retired from Duke at, I think, the age of seventy); but he received us cheerfully in the room he shared with his second wife, and she led us downstairs for dinner. Only then did she explain, in a whisper, that the trouble was constipation and that he’d been greatly pleased when his local physician gave him a laxative pill described as an archibusiere (I believe)—an arquebus. Since Allan had spent much time in studying Renaissance weapons—and an arquebus was an early matchlock gun—he took the pill with relish, and it was indeed working ballistically.
Still, a chance to see Professor Gilbert—with his almost alarmingly amused bright eyes and his snow-white short beard (one of the only two beards at Duke in that clean-shaven era; a colleague once described him to me as resembling Santa Claus’s grandfather)—reminded me of the frequently preservative effects of a genuine love of scholarly pursuits; how I wished I could somehow arrange for him to supervise my thesis. Failing that, however, my Florentine hour with him—and our glass of wine—did a good deal to restore my sense of why I was at Oxford after all: to burrow a little deeper into a mind as enormous and useful as Milton’s. Like so many distinguished scholars whom I’ve since known, Allan Gilbert’s ceaseless intellectual curiosity had kept him brilliantly alive and sympathetic to such interests in others.
* * *
Blessedly quieted as Jim and I were then, we made serious headway with our original intentions for the trip. He’d spend the mornings and late afternoons in our spacious room, reading Plato in an armchair beside our window on the Arno. I’d sit at a small desk and continue revising “A Chain of Love” and attempting to build a story backward from my airborne impression of Mont Blanc. As we passed it, I’d noted on the back of my ticket stub the following simile—“like some proud mountain, yielding to the sun its flanks of snow.” And now I heard the fragment as the end of a longish story that was entirely invented but that was rising on the visible givens of several visits I’d made to the rural North Carolina residence of my bel
oved seventh-grade teacher, Miss Jennie Alston.
She’d retired by then and was living in her family’s ancestral home—Cherry Hill, a tall and spacious antebellum plantation house which has since been superbly restored—with her elder sister Carrie and her elder brother Ed Falc. It was that setting and especially Miss Carrie’s physical appearance that underlay what I hoped to build into a story. Though I’d bought a handsome Olivetti Lettera 22 portable typewriter a few days after arriving in Florence, I was still writing all my work by hand, then typing it up a few days later (that practice would continue for thirty more years until word processors entered my life). And the early pages of the story were coming slowly.
There in another country, surrounded by generally friendly people who were nonetheless barely comprehensible to me—and accompanied by only one American acquaintance whom I’d known for little more than two months—I found myself immured, for the first time in my life, in a new and weighty kind of silence, almost a bathysphere of the sort that in childhood I’d seen exploring the ocean floor in my library books. And in that silence—punctuated by daily afternoon visits to the Uffizi Gallery, barely a block away—I could study such incomparable human achievements as Leonardo’s large sketch for a Visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, his Annunciation to the Virgin, and Botticelli’s prime masterpieces (the Venus and the Primavera). Then I could wander a little farther toward the north, to the Accademia with Michelangelo’s David and his late Pietà which was then in the cathedral with the face of the sculptor himself on one of the figures supporting the corpus. And in those richly loaded days, I was slowly—and very usefully—forced to accept a new fact about myself.
In sixteen years of formal education in public school and at Duke, I’d seldom heard a discouraging word about myself and my work (from arithmetic to drawing). A bright boy, I was generally recognized as such and, in one of the poorest American states, I was praised way more steadily than I deserved. Now after two months at Oxford and a few days in Florence, I was coming to realize that a career in prep school or college teaching should present me with no insurmountable problems.
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