Ardent Spirits

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Ardent Spirits Page 12

by Reynolds Price


  Otherwise I was continuing to prepare for the qualifying exam and went on attending lectures by Miss Gardner and David Cecil. I don’t recall in which order I heard them, but eventually I attended all David’s superb lectures on the early English novel and his full set of lectures on Shakespeare. I’ve never known another scholar with his particular gift for making a given work of fiction or poetry seem irresistible. Who would have thought anyone could take Samuel Richardson’s early seven-volume Clarissa and make it seem as riveting as a first-class film? More than once I’d left Lord David’s lecture, gone straight to Blackwell’s, and purchased a work he’d discussed that morning—in which process I discovered that Clarissa, for instance, is a very great, though extremely strange and lengthy, tragic novel.

  * * *

  My social life continued apace—considerably faster than was wise—and the numerous acquaintances I’d made in my first term had begun to winnow to a smaller group of close friends with whom I spent many good hours. Among my core of English friends was Ronald Tamplin, whose poetry and wit I much admired, and Tony Nuttall whom I’ve already noted. Tony’s own interest in exotic drama shone out one morning when he burst into my sitting room, fully attired in a suit of Japanese samurai armor which he’d suddenly discovered, inexplicably concealed in a cupboard in his rooms. For two minutes he gave me a hilarious imitation of samurai-movie grunts and lurches; then left as fast as he’d arrived (samurai films had only lately reached the West).

  My close American college friend was the droll Iowan, Rex Jamison, with whom I made several more hitching trips to Stratford. Assorted others included Jeremy Commons, the New Zealander of what seemed invincible cheer and enthusiasm. He’d eventually return to his home country to teach and write about nineteenth-century Italian opera. Of younger vintages, I eventually located John Speaight, a textbook example of an English eccentric (though in his case the eccentricity was genuine, not manufactured for public entertainment). John’s immensely thin body, his high nasal voice, his returns to college from exploratory visits to the secondhand shops of the city with a string bag full of peculiar small attractions, and his fervent love of the voice of Maria Callas on early 78 records left an unshaken memory with me. And Peter Heap, though a different sort of man—a bass-voiced veteran of two years in the British Army—would likewise survive the years as an ongoing friend (he’d ultimately enter the British foreign service and conclude his career as ambassador to Brazil, prior to knighthood).

  John Speaight, caught by me on the edge of the Merton garden in the winter of 1958. The odd black streamers down his shoulders are the draped remains of his Oxford Commoner’s gown, the gown that most of us were required to wear for any academic exercise—a tutorial, an exam, attendance at a university lecture, a college dinner, etc. Perhaps he was four or five years younger than I, but our shared interest in opera and drama gave us a good deal to talk about over tea in the afternoon or coffee after college lunch or dinner. John welcomed most chances to laugh and elicited much fun from his friends. Especially good were his long narratives of vacation trips to Soviet-era Bulgaria, where his father was British ambassador. Shortly after my return home in the summer of ’58, John turned up in Durham for a visit that took us as far south as Charleston. His unself-conscious eccentricity strengthened my liking for him as he returned to Britain to teach in several prep schools, and I much regret that I haven’t seen him for fifty years.

  Michael Jordan remained the friend whose company I sought most often. Though he was deeply buried in his history studies, he seemed to find all my own interests welcome; and we continued meeting often for Indian meals in town (cheap and tasty, though one of our restaurants—the Cobra—got indicted for serving cat meat in one of the curries on its menu). After dinner we’d often go on to films, plays, concerts, and occasional train trips to London. Again, Michael was in the second year of his undergraduate work; but like most Mertonians he seemed to invest as much time as I in our eminently respectable, yet busy, nightlife. I’ve noted several other events that held our attention. Almost nothing, though, surpassed two of our London ventures—the Leicester Square premiere of James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (the least good of his three films but still the most famous) and a single winter evening at Covent Garden. That would prove my only chance to see one of the supreme ballerinas as Margot Fonteyn and Michael Soames danced Prokofiev and Ashton’s full-length Cinderella. Ballet has never been a great pursuit of mine; but on this night, Fonteyn’s body performed unending miracles of grace that I’ve never seen matched by another human creature.

  Despite Michael’s being two years younger, by the deep midst of the winter of ’56 he’d become a strong magnet for the loneliness that—in the face of so much pleasure—had steadily increased in my absence from home. One evening we were sitting up late in my rooms when I was overcome by nausea from a wretched college dinner—bitter calf’s liver and onions. Suddenly I was forced to race off to the equally awful Mob Quad bogs for the first of numerous attempts to empty my stomach. When I returned from the second attempt, I told Michael that my flashlight showed that I’d also retched up blood; and he quietly said that, with my permission, he’d like to sleep on my sofa just to be sure I made it satisfactorily through the night.

  I was astonished at the offer, coming from so self-possessed and beautiful a man. I accepted gladly and again Michael’s value rose a long notch in my mind. I’ve noted my earlier sense of suspecting I loved him. More than any other man I’d known, he seemed to warrant such commitment—so long as my own offer could shape itself to the fact of his straightness; and his concern for my well-being on that one night almost surely is the fact that prevented my reviving the prior round of fatty-tumor cancer scare.

  The memory of my bad-liver night reminds me of my favorite example of donnish undergraduate wit. Quite mysteriously one morning in my first year, white porcelain holders for toilet tissue appeared in the bogs, firmly screwed to the dark brown walls. Previously our “bog paper” had been flung about on the filthy floors—and good luck for finding usable pieces. British toilet paper of those years was frequently of an inexplicably dreadful quality—tiny sheets, slick as wax paper—and one wag was heard to say “Did you hear that old Westrate has broken his arm? Ah yes, slipped off the bog paper and hit the floor hard.” In any case, to memorialize the appearance of paper dispensers in the Mob Quad, the incomparable Henry Mayr-Harting wrote the following in the Junior Common Room suggestion book (and I quote from memory), “Let me record with surprise and gratitude the appearance this morning of porcelain tissue dispensers in the Mob Quad bogs. Let it not be forgot, however, that the French Revolution was, in part, hastened by a slight alleviation of the misery of the Fourth Estate” (that is, the commoners).

  * * *

  In the midst of the winter gloom, one of my efforts at lifting the horizon was the beginnings of an effort to purchase a car. When I was a freshman at Duke, my bachelor cousin Macon Thornton had given me $3,000 shortly before his death (the equivalent of some $22,600 in current funds). I’d banked it for long-term needs, and a car now seemed an urgent need. With Michael’s enthusiastic help then, I investigated the conceivable options. They quickly boiled down to two possibilities—first, a Morris Mini (manufactured in the Oxford suburb of Cowley but gimcrack in many details) and second, a Volkswagen. At that point in world history, I was still loath to invest in a German product—Hitler’s famous “People’s Car”—but the small VW Beetle seemed an affordable yet elegantly stubborn road hugger.

  The price was initially daunting. At the Oxford dealership on the Plain in St. Clement’s Street, it would cost me $1,192—some $8,500 today. That would constitute a major bargain in new cars but a mammoth hole in my savings. In March of 1956, all the same—late in my second term—I ordered a new black Volkswagen with steering wheel on the left, American style (I intended to export it to the States at the end of my second year). I wouldn’t receive delivery till sometime in May—VWs were still scarce in Britain and im
ports were slow. However unpleasant the delay, it was just as well that I’d be firmly grounded in Oxford awhile longer—only four days after ordering the car, I sat for the B.Litt. qualifying exam.

  Having studied ferociously in recent weeks, reading through the greater parts of most days in the Bodleian, I sat down in full academic regalia—cap, gown, and white bow tie—in one of the smaller rooms of the Exam Schools and endured the three-hour written portion of the exam (all questions centered on the period I’d chosen, the English Renaissance). That was soon followed by an oral conducted by four or five members of the English faculty. Both halves of the ordeal were based on the preparatory courses we’d taken in the past two terms, and they proved to be the most rigorous intellectual workout I’d experienced till then.

  As I recall, seventeen of my fellow B.Litt. hopefuls stood for the testing. A letter to my mother reports that thirteen of us passed and could now proceed to the writing of a thesis, four of us failed. Two of the failures were non-Rhodester American acquaintances, and the sight of their collapsed faces as we clustered round the just-posted list of passes and fails was sad to say the least (no second chance would be offered them; the Oxford of those days was remorselessly realistic, and my friends’ single remaining chance was to leave the university). God knows what I’d have done had I failed.

  7

  PASS OR FAIL, throughout the second term, Michael and I had been planning to visit Italy during the Easter vac. He’d been there once before, though not to Rome. In any case the chance to go on the road with any close friend had always been high on my ladder of hopes, and this trip began only some two weeks after I passed the exam. Garry Garrard, our Merton friend from London, and a Brighton schoolmate of Michael’s named Ashley Basel were to join us for part of the trip. I’d only met Ashley briefly at a London party but I liked him. And Garry had been a cheerful friend in college, reading Arabic at the time and regaling us with his findings of the apparently endless sexual vocabulary of that language.

  Before our departure, though, I had a week on my hands, unnecessarily idle. Instead of remaining in college and working away, I decided that—after the ordeal of my exam—I could hardly expect myself to continue to work uninterruptedly (clearly the remains of my American sense that college vacations were precisely that, vacations). In Britain then a Scottish noblewoman called Miss MacDonald of Sleat ran an organization that found vacation lodging for foreign students with no place to go. I applied for a week of such lodging; and Miss MacDonald found me an aged couple in rural Sussex who took me in. They were Mr. and Mrs. A. W. Street, and they lived near the town of Crowborough in Sussex.

  Rather like tiny snow-haired dolls, both the Streets were well on in their late seventies, maybe older; Mr. Street had (I believe) once been chairman of the board at Lloyd’s of London, and their home was a large, calmly luxurious house surrounded by spacious gardens. There was no other guest but me, and I had a great deal of time in their silent house for reading and naps. Mrs. Street was still her own (rather scary) driver, and she took me off one day for a good view of the great house at Knole, the enormous ancient home of the Sackville family.

  Otherwise we listened to a great many recordings of Mozart operas, and we ate especially well—they had a German cook. When I sat down for my first lunch, Mr. Street—a cheerful senior—asked what I’d drink with my meal. I asked for a glass of water; and he looked at me with amazement—“Water, Mr. Price?” I confirmed my request—“Haven’t you ever been thirsty, Mr. Street?” His face cleared slightly and he said “Well, I suppose I have, yes, frequently; but it never occurred to me to quench it with water.” So I drank water and he drank ale; in the evenings we all drank excellent wine. Brighton was not far away; and at the Streets’ urging, I invited Michael for lunch one day. He came by bus and assisted in cheering our willing hosts. At the end of the week, I left them with considerable affection for their kindness, took a bus into Brighton, and joined up with Michael for our journey.

  Our budgets allowed us an only partial airborne trip. Before our early-morning flight to Geneva then, Michael and I spent the night in London in the digs of a Duke fraternity brother of mine who was then stationed at an American air-force base nearby. We arrived shortly before our friend and his fellow airmen were about to depart for their base; and the atmosphere of the flat, in its jollity, resembled that in the Pensione Nazionale on Christmas Eve—a likable mix of away-from-home Yanks (some of whom flew the bombers that were then in perpetual patrol, with their hydrogen bombs, above Cold War Europe) and their English girlfriends.

  When the airmen and the girls finally left, Michael and I found some pub food down the road; then returned for an early night. When I turned back the covers on the bed I was to occupy, I was reminded again of the bed-linen realities of male college life in the States—the sheets were almost indescribably filthy—but my other choice was the chilly floor. Well, I was a mere child after all; so I took a deep breath, crawled into bed, and fell asleep in two minutes. Michael chose the sofa and the clock woke us well before dawn. We were due to meet Garry and Ashley at Heathrow at an ungodly hour.

  We made our flight with Michael’s usual minimum of waiting time, then flew one more arc above the dazzling Alps and were in Geneva in time for a long walk round to acquaint the three of us with this odd combination of Calvinist grimness, international-organization world-optimism, and Swiss smugness (and that was before we knew the extent to which this scrubbed-clean country had financed a considerable portion of Hitler’s Holocaust). Then we found an inexpensive restaurant with superb fried potatoes and settled in for a clean night’s sleep at a pensione which Garry had found for us.

  For some reason Garry and Ashley took an earlier train to Milan next morning, with the understanding that they’d find two cheap rooms to contain the four of us, get gallery tickets to whatever opera was scheduled for La Scala that night, then meet us on the steps of the cathedral at an assigned hour in the early evening. Michael and I rose in good time to find our way to the station and board a midmorning express train. Continental trains then always seemed considerably more crowded than the English; and finding seats in the packed compartments was one more challenge (everywhere, I was accompanied by my new but weighty leather luggage, a graduation present).

  * * *

  Still, Michael and I were standing on the steps of the cathedral at the promised dark hour. We waited a long while, long enough to watch a mysterious man box the perimeter of the large piazza at least a dozen times (could he have been fulfilling a religious vow?). He’d commenced another round when our friends appeared, breathlessly explaining their lateness, and rushed us to the highest balcony of La Scala just as the glamorous Herbert von Karajan, less than a decade from his denazification procedures, raised his baton and poised his famous profile for a performance of Richard Strauss’s Salome (Strauss’s own relations with the Nazis were hardly impeccable, but he did at least have a Jewish daughter-in-law whom he struggled to protect).

  The greatest exponent of the outrageous leading role—the flame-haired Bulgarian Ljuba Welitsch—had sung her soprano to ribbons by then, and her successor Christel Goltz was no match for Welitsch’s demonic teenager with the ice-razor voice; but Karajan led a potent performance all the same, though the doings were rendered a little bizarre when it came time for Princess Salome to deliver the dance for her besotted stepfather King Herod. At that moment Goltz (who was neither unsightly nor obese) inexplicably slipped offstage as unobtrusively as she could manage; and the beautiful Russian ballerina Tamara Toumanova slid memorably into view to dance Salome’s crucial, and ultimately murderous, Dance of the Seven Veils to Strauss’s eminently and intentionally sleazy music.

  A cheap supper followed the opera (all four of us had laser vision—before the invention of lasers—for good cheap food), then back to the hotel our friends had found. It proved considerably more expensive than I’d hoped, but the rooms were handsomely simple and clean. Tired as we should have been, Michael and I had the l
eftover energy to sit for hours more in our room and talk our friendship into a higher orbit; then a deep-drowned sleep. The room, incidentally, offered the only bidet I’d yet seen. I was embarrassed to reveal yet another layer of American naïveté; so I didn’t ask Michael for its purpose. I assumed it was a footbath.

  Next morning we visited the remnant of the monastery where the shadows of Leonardo’s Last Supper were tantalizingly visible on the refectory wall above us. Leonardo’s almost pathologic ability to damage his paintings by radical experimentation with his pigments, and the fact that Napoleon’s soldiers would later cut a door through the foot of the mural, had severely damaged the dramatic focus—that moment when Jesus says to his twelve chosen companions “One of you will betray me.” Though I’d read Freud’s fascinating essay on Leonardo, as I stood near his ruined masterpiece I failed to reflect on the fact that a queer painter like Leonardo settled on such a potentially personal moment (a few years earlier, he’d been charged with homosexuality to the authorities in Florence and almost certainly arrested before he was finally, and inexplicably, released).

  For all the ruinous state of the wall however, just being in the same room which Leonardo occupied for the long months he took to complete his work was exciting to a young man with my Romantic-era sense of human heroism—a sense I’ve never lost. I might never rise to such an enduring height, but I knew a precipitous peak when I saw one, and here was an unquestionable summit on a not-so-large wall just above me. Its richness was thus more comprehensible and usable as a goad to my own ambitions than Michelangelo’s titanic ceiling in Rome.

 

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