In retrospect it seems to me a remarkable fact that two healthy young men, neither of them possessed of extraordinary needs or demonic pressures, could have spent more than a month of evenings as quietly and compatibly as Jim Griffin and I. When I think of the students I’ve taught in the past five decades, I suspect that most of them would find our behavior weird or, at the least, incredible in its calm dedication to what’s now called the “academics” of university life. Where was the other half—our social life? I think I’m fair to the majority of my present-day students in saying that they’d read the above pages and wonder why we weren’t seeking the Florentine and Roman bars and clubs, meeting our Italian contemporaries, and getting on with the dancing and talking, drinking and hooking up (that latest name for no-fault sexual events)—those involvements that now seem not only desirable but a kind of life’s blood to so many American middle-class “kids” (Jim and I would have been kids by current definition).
Any explanation of the contrast that’s overtaken contemporary American youth is almost sure to sound more like the old ladies in the Milton lounge than useful good sense, so I won’t engage in guessing—except to say that Jim and I were the offspring of parents who’d survived the deprivations of the Depression and the steady demands of the Second War. We had no genetic connection with the lively sociopolitical generation of the 1960s and early ’70s, and some of our innate quiet was likely a product of that difference. To go further, as I’ve said, would involve me in deploring a great deal of what I see now. In any case, I can’t recall either Jim or me expressing, or feeling, any lack of excitement in our Italian weeks.
* * *
Before we headed back to Oxford, though, we made one attempt to compensate for the fact that we’d failed to seek any real acquaintance with live Italians. An older English friend had given us the name of a young brother and sister—Vieri and Nicoletta Traxler—and we made postal contact with them in our final days. They replied with an immediate phone message at the Milton. Could we come to dinner a few nights later at Vieri’s home? We accepted gladly and, with a certain amount of fumbling, we found his house in the silent dark of the Via del Velabro near the Arch of Janus, between the Palatine Hill and the Tiber. In memory it seems a small house, but the dining room had a handsome large fragment of old mosaic on the wall, and an excellent dinner was served. The talk, in impeccable English, was pleasant; so in all, we spent a warm and jocular evening with the two Traxlers.
They apparently enjoyed it as well; and with no coaching from us, they suggested another evening with the chance to meet a few of their friends. On that second occasion, we met Vieri and Nicoletta—with three or four friends of roughly our age—in a loud and cheerful restaurant in the funky cross-the-river district of Trastevere and had an even finer time. Fine with a single strange moment of exception. When I noted that several of our wineglasses were empty, I took the neck of the huge flask of Chianti in hand to repair the lack.
But before I could proceed to fill the glasses overhandedly (as wine is normally poured in America), the most beautiful of us—the gorgeous Olga Millo—seized my wrist and said “You are holding the bottle wrong.” She made me set the flask down and showed me the proper method. With a certain male American stubbornness—and in hopes of a mild, maybe slightly inebriated, joke—I took up the flask again, just as I’d held it before. Olga then flung a fiery gaze at my eyes—“In Sicily they would kill you for this.” Ah, right. I repaired my mysterious gaffe, the evening recommenced happily; and afterward several of the party took us on to what they said was the only English-language film theatre in Rome.
There was in fact such a place—very small but elegantly fitted—and the film was Doctor at Sea, a brand-new entry in a series of stories about the life of a young English physician. Only just recently, fifty years later, I found a videotape and reminded myself of its innocuous details. The doctor was played, as ever, by a young Dirk Bogarde who was serving as a ship’s doctor on a luxury voyage in the Mediterranean. The female flirtation on board was played by a new French actress called Brigitte Bardot. This was before Bardot glittered to the top of international fame as an outrageous sex kitten, and none of us had seen her on screen before now.
When we eventually entered the theatre, the lights were already out, a newsreel was playing loudly, and we groped our way into seats on a row toward the back. When my eyes adjusted, I could see that—apart from the four or five of us—the theatre was entirely empty except for a couple who sat literally just ahead of me and slightly to my right. The film proceeded on its feather-light and easily forgettable way. The one really striking component was the chanteuse aboard ship—played by, surprisingly, Bardot—and the difficulty with which, in a 1955 English movie, she managed to damp down to acceptable levels her naturally high rate of physical smolder.
When the film ended and the house lights rose, I looked at the well-behaved young couple just ahead of me. It consisted, without question, of Brigitte Bardot and a young male companion. I can see her clearly still—in a French version of the standard tan British duffle coat and a slim modicum of makeup. She may have felt my recognizing gaze just behind her; and when she and her friend stood, she turned a full-face smile back toward me. She was after all nearly two years younger than I. I said “Merci, Mademoiselle Bardot” in my best French accent. I’d never been to France but had studied the language for two years at Duke. She gave me a charming bow, the others then recognized her, and we all shook hands (natives of the Romance-language world then shook hands as inevitably as the British fled the practice).
Had we been prepared for such an encounter—and I’m surprised that Vieri the diplomat wasn’t—we could at least have invited her and her companion for an espresso nearby; there was surely a caffe in reach. They were plainly our age and apparently at rather loose ends in Rome, Bardot was not yet (even in France) a raging celebrity, they might have joined us. But no. We parted in the lobby; and my chance at talking with one of the genuine film sensations of our time—and exercising my almost never tried French—vanished as she walked away, hand in hand with her friend in the chill, just-after-New-Year’s night.
Recalling those two good evenings, and a further dinner with Nicoletta and Olga, I’d say that our new Roman friends differed from our Oxford and American contemporaries most obviously in being a good deal more fashionably and expensively dressed, with an unspectacular self-dignifying elegance. Yet their warmth was unmistakably southern, and their curiosity about Jim and me—who we were, where we came from, what we intended to do with our lives—was very different from the then basic English tendency to go with what they could see about a stranger and ask him nothing more. Again their command of our language was embarrassingly excellent; and their appetite for pleasure seemed virtually identical to ours. The fact that Vieri Traxler was a few years older, and as I’ve only discovered in consulting Google while writing this page, he would ultimately become the Italian permanent representative to the United Nations (1989–1993) was not then visible to me or to Jim; and I hoped to see them again in time—as I hoped to see Rome, through the rest of my life.
After only a few months in England and a few weeks in Italy, I could say that these new Roman friends showed far fewer signs of World War II than my young Oxford colleagues and Britain in general—an entire country still in the grip of what might have been called advanced melancholia. Admittedly the Traxlers and their friends were financially secure; and their homes had surely not been bombed by Allied planes. Yet I sensed far fewer notes of depression from these technically defeated Italians than from the victorious British. The Brits of course were compelled to fight for their lives; but had they, in the end, been forced to pay too much for their survival? Well, Italy after all had been a unified nation for less than a century, whereas Great Britain had not only been unified since the reign of James I in the seventeenth century, it had ruled—and greatly benefited from—increasingly large portions of the planet for nearly two hundred years. Now that rule was
rapidly ending.
6
A FEW DAYS LATER Jim and I flew north in sunlight, and that was very nearly the last sun I recall through the next two months. I was sorry to leave a city that I’d only begun to plumb. No lifetime could plumb it, especially given two enormous facts about the place—the fact that, in contrast to Florence, say, or London, so many of Rome’s fascinations lie out of doors, and in the further fact that so much of the present-day city exists in easily seen layers, from the oldest recovered prehistoric sites right on through republican and imperial times, through the Dark Ages of barbarian havoc on into the Renaissance, modern Fascism, and the ever-growing fringe of a contemporary metropolis. As our plane lifted off, I know I told myself I could live here, something I’ve never felt (before or since) about another large city.
Simultaneously, though, I was especially glad to return to England and my growing friendship with Michael Jordan. I’d thought about him a great deal in the past five weeks and had even received a letter from him—he’d delivered post-office packages in Brighton for a while before Christmas, then gone skiing in Austria. As far as the prospect of even colder rooms and a drastic shortage of daylight, I could tell myself that at least I’d been in Italy for the year’s shortest day. But January and February—even in the south side of England—were wet, dark, and cold. In those days of no central heating in Oxford (I literally knew no one who possessed it), my ancient rooms were heated only by the previously lamented single-bar electric heater. I’ve also noted that Merton provided us with a certain number of kilowatt-hours without extra charge (British electricity, being coal-produced, was phenomenally expensive then); but in the hope of something like an indoor fifty-degree level in the midwinter daytime, I employed my heater so relentlessly that my extra charges came, by the end of term, to a scandalous total.
My English student friends were indifferent to the problem. They thought nothing of warming the rooms to, say, forty degrees; then flinging their door wide open as they left for an errand and leaving it agape. My younger friend Anthony Nuttall, who’d later became a distinguished critic and teacher, used to tell our colleagues that “Reynolds is growing orchids over there in Mob Quad—orchids and iguanas.” He was rather proud of my Yankee extravagance. I seemed to be his tame billionaire. My prodigality kept me at least from perishing of cold, and I took a certain pleasure in being something of an outrageous college pet—the Man Who Craves Heat.
What any partial solution to my heating problem couldn’t help, of course, was my difficulty with darkness; and lamps which provided the required spectrum of daylight were decades off. So I battled a steady case of the blues—low-grade most of the time but by no means all. I was reaching an age, in my two parental families at least, where a man was expected to have a decent job and be carrying his own weight in the world, if not a wife’s and children’s also. And while I don’t recall seeing myself in that particular way, in retrospect I think that I did feel a considerable degree of shame.
The large amount of sheer pleasure I was taking in my life, the satisfactions of a lively reciprocated friendship with a Briton who had strong American interests, the enormous amount of dangerous spare time I had at my disposal, and the fact that a substantial gift of money from the Rhodes Trust was deposited in my name at Barclay’s Bank at the start of each term—all those things combined to cast an intermittent regretful air around me. I was doing fine—I made that clear in my letters home—but I did so with a troubling degree of wondering: were my letters to some degree sadistic, rubbing my pleasures into whatever wounds my mother and brother might still carry from Dad’s death?
Rereading my every-Sunday letters home after five decades, I can see that she and Bill were far from socketed in abject misery in Upper Dixie, awaiting me and my first paycheck. Mother had her consuming job, Bill had his high-school duties; but they had more friends than even I had, they had loving family, they were not—to my knowledge—in deep financial difficulties, and I thought I’d be home in eighteen months to widen any straits through which they might be moving (I’d eventually discover that Mother was concealing a few serious money troubles). To some extent then my guilt was excessive, but the degree of self-punishment was a gauge of the genuine care I felt for them.
Meanwhile I slogged on with my B.Litt.-prep classes, my choice of university lectures, and the patch of serious worry that bedeviled me when I thought of Mr. Leishman (if I visited him in January, I don’t recall the circumstances). But that one problem was soon dispelled. At the end of one of Helen Gardner’s lectures early in the term, I went forward to ask her a question about the day’s poetry. We talked for three minutes; then she glanced at her watch and said “Could we step across the street to the Eastgate and have a glass of sherry?” It was near lunchtime and the small Eastgate Hotel, with its pub, was only a few yards away.
* * *
In those days Miss Gardner was in her late forties; but her prematurely white hair and her bright, often smiling, eyes lent her head and face a real distinction. That, and the fact that she was already a renowned scholar in the small world of transatlantic literary studies, gave me an immediate sense of promotion to have this moment with her—a slight step-up in the then-minuscule world of the Oxford English faculty which, nonetheless, had my local fate in its hands. By the time our sherries arrived, we were launched on a discussion of the portrayal of evil in seventeenth-century English poetry—from the Macbeths to Milton’s Satan—and a mention of my unhappiness with Mr. Leishman had surfaced (not that I thought he was evil). Miss Gardner asked me a few slyly amused questions about his procedures. Then she sipped from her small glass—I’d soon learn that we were having what was called elevenses, a short drink and perhaps a biscuit (a dry cookie)—and she said “Would you like me to take you on?”
Helen Gardner, only a few years after she supervised my thesis on Milton. For a commercial photograph, it’s very much like the woman I knew, through so many hours of pleasant, yet probing—and surprisingly revealing—one-on-one conversation in two and a half years of work. Note the guarded reserve of the smile and the absence of vanity in her refusal to remove her glasses for the picture. The head is extraordinarily packed with information—facts combined with intense feeling. And that huge quantity is held by her with no false modesty; in fact, she’ll fight with all the strength of her small body for the rightness of her knowledge (her books and essays and the correspondence columns of The Times Literary Supplement sometimes scorchingly attest to the trait). As was often observed, she was not much loved by her colleagues; and many of her students approached her with fear, though my own experience was more enjoyable. Yet our relations never resulted in a lasting friendship. Apart from a two-minute encounter in our mutual bank on the High Street, soon after my return in 1961 for a fourth year in Oxford, I don’t recall that we ever met or corresponded again. As a man who’s now taught longer than she at our final meeting, I can well understand her subsequent silence toward me—I’d been one of her hundreds of students—but I regret my own silence toward a teacher who rescued me from early academic trouble and then bore patiently with my initial failures of academic focus. It seems that she died in misery. As a rigorous Christian, did she feel she was paying on debts she owed in a long life’s work? She owed me nothing whatever.
I’d been a mainly lucky man; but this degree of kindness from a distinguished teacher was surprising, though I’d revered most of my teachers. I’d attended Miss Gardner’s lectures for two terms and was a member of her seminar in textual editing, but this was the first time I’d sat down alone with her, so I leapt to say Yes. She made the arrangements promptly with no further requirement that I see Mr. Leishman, on whom I never laid eyes again. And soon I began to visit Miss Gardner in her almost unnaturally uncluttered rooms in St. Hilda’s to discuss a thesis subject (an old guilt at abandoning work with Leishman led me to include him, twenty-five years later, as a sympathetic minor character called Fleishman in my novel The Source of Light).
Sinc
e my sophomore year at Duke, Milton’s late verse play about the tragic Hebrew champion Samson had been my pick of all his work. The poet’s genius in the sheer manipulation of English (which he virtually reinvented for his purposes) had been the characteristic that first drew me to him, and in no other work is that genius more amply on view than in Samson. As Miss Gardner and I talked through our first meetings, it began to seem that my own interests and what she knew about prior work on the play—it was not then much studied—suggested a subject that might be most helpful to the world of scholarship: an exploration of Milton’s use of the Chorus in Samson. The play is far the most successful English-language attempt to write on the ancient Greek tragic model, and the Athenian dependence on a centrally important character called the Chorus (portrayed by fifteen men in the theatre) offers perhaps the greatest challenge to anyone working in the form, in whatever language.
We agreed on the nature of my early reading. It was going to be voluminous; and Miss Gardner was especially pleased with my suggestion of reading Italian Renaissance critics in their discussions of the Greek plays which were only beginning, in their time, to be published in anything resembling reliable editions (I felt ready to explore both Italian and Latin texts, with dictionaries handy). Soon I was keeping regular hours in both the upper reading room of the Bodleian and in its oldest wing, the fifteenth-century Duke Humfrey Library (built to house a donation of books from Humfrey, the brother of Henry V).
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