Another trolley took us to the address—a boys’ boarding school, run by monks. The boys were away for Easter; and our room was what we might have expected—a bone-clean space, with two narrow beds (freshly made) and a crucifix centered on the wall. There was a running-water basin and a toilet with showers down the hall. A coffee-and-rolls breakfast was served, and for two days I don’t recall seeing another guest. Even the monks were mostly invisible—though if encountered, they’d bow and scuttle. And as we’d been told, when the time came to claim our space at the Pensione Università, we took up our bags and left. There wasn’t even a poor box by the door for a small contribution—something we just might have managed, given that our room at the Università cost $1.50 per night (including morning coffee, rolls, and jam but no more washing facilities than a basin in our room). We showered in a lower level of the grand train station, in the remarkably clean cubicles which proved to be rentable for showers—and whatever else was your choice.
* * *
The remainder of our time in Rome—was it ten days?—was much like my winter days with Jim, though the rain had mostly stopped. Among new sights I recall only seeing the older American film All Quiet on the Western Front—horrifically convincing (as it still is) in the portrayal of First War trench combat. At the prospect of our visit to the Vatican Museum, Michael quickly devised a new skill, one typical of his analytic mind. In those days the museum was arranged so that the Sistine was the final stop on your visit. Michael deduced that we should speed past the miles of ancient sculpture and paintings to the uncrowded Sistine, stay there as long as we liked, then amble back through the lesser collections. It was such a welcome discovery that we employed it on several other visits.
Again, the ceiling had not undergone the drastic cleaning which has left a spectacle whose colors look—in photographs—a good deal like early-twentieth-century French Fauve painting; so I’ve never felt deprived by my earlier experience of a reality filtered through the smoke of centuries. Any present visitor who regrets the experience of his elders should be assured that we saw a ceiling which amply attested to the genius of its creator and—for all its accretions—presented an entirely visible set of color compositions. In fact, The Last Judgment was far more beautiful before its cleaning.
And while the room’s crowded content has never comprised one of my favorite works of art, I’ve taken every chance to see it again—most recently in 1980 when a family friend, a monsignore in the Vatican, allowed me and another friend to enter through the main door of the Sistine and study the ceiling and the often-ignored side walls at unsurrounded leisure (he also led us into the generally closed small Pauline Chapel which contains Michelangelo’s final two frescoes—the conversion of Paul and the crucifixion of Peter; there we were literally face-to-face with the paintings, in easy touching distance, and the nearness was even more startling than I’d have guessed).
* * *
I’d alerted the Traxlers—Vieri and Nicoletta—to my planned return with Michael, and we spent a complicated Sunday with them. I don’t recall where we met, though I know I was embarrassed—aside their usual restrained sartorial splendor—by the fact that I’d had to discard my Venice-ruined loafers and buy the only shoes I could afford—white canvas sneakers bought in a shop in the station. My Christmas friends were tolerantly amused by my explanation; and as ready as before with a thoughtful venture for their visitors, they revealed a plan. They’d always wanted to explore a deserted village an hour from Rome.
We piled into two small Fiats, then made our way out through the rolling campagna to the few brick, tile, and stone remains of a village called Santa Maria in Galera (or Galeria). It stood on a bluff above the small river; and from what Vieri had heard, the inhabitants departed more than a century ago, scared off by a plague. Since the site has shown evidence of occupation from Etruscan times till the eighteenth century, the discouragement must have been severe. Very little had survived from the abandonment till the day of our visit, except for what seemed to be the church tower (and in 1980 when I hired a driver and found my way back, only by proceeding to the tiny piazza and questioning the most ancient of the nearby villagers for proper guidance, I discovered that even the tower had collapsed).
As we loaded up to return to the city, one of our two cars got stuck in a gulley; and the four men of the party piled out to the rescue—and the virtual end of my new sneakers. Soon we were under way but as we approached the outskirts of Rome at dusk, a child (who’d been hesitating on the left edge of the road) all but flung herself into our car. I was sitting by Vieri on the front seat, and I can clearly recall the sensation of feeling a body crushed beneath our wheels. Thank God, I was wrong. We piled out to find a scratched and howling girl, maybe five or six years old.
A small crowd of men and women from the neighborhood materialized, and I dreaded an ugly confrontation. They all looked remarkably poor; my friends clearly weren’t. But at once Vieri told the child’s father that he’d drive them to the nearest hospital to have the daughter checked carefully. The rest of us waited in our party’s second car; and in less than an hour, they’d returned—no broken bones, nothing worse than light scratches. Our eventual dinner was a little hungover from the strange afternoon—an hour’s eerie ramble through a cursed deserted village, then a frightening collision with a live human child (the affluent adults and the wretched child). We finished early and bade a farewell that I’ve never since repaired, though my Italian publisher did get Olga Millo to photograph me a decade later when I was in Rome again.
* * *
Otherwise this second Roman visit deepened my involvement with the deep-stacked city and its characteristically dignified and mostly helpful modern men and women. Surely there’s no other city in history, with the exception of Jerusalem, which has been ravaged by so many vicious invaders yet functioned so generously for so long. And it’s been among my privileges—not to speak of pleasures—to visit Rome some five more times in subsequent years, always uncovering more and more and always welcomed with their peculiar hospitable yet self-possessed gravity by whatever Romans I met, from a bruised street-child to the treasurer of the Vatican.
When we’d spent all the money we’d earmarked for Rome, Michael and I took the train north to Florence for two nights at a pensione Michael knew of there. We invested more hours in the Uffizi, the Baptistery, the Duomo, the Accademia, the Medici Chapel and palace, and the Piazza della Signoria; and I was further reminded of my satisfaction in accompanying Michael to galleries and other sites—he enjoyed beauty in the way I most admire and find it easiest to travel with, which is to say he loved it rather silently; it affected his actions, not his chatter. When we departed Florence, I left it for good—and all its treasures. I’ve noted earlier that my southern heart had never quite warmed to the city and its citizens; and whenever I’ve had the chance to revisit Italy, I’ve headed south (I should add that I regret my inability to join in the later American access to the pleasures of rural Tuscany).
One more jam-packed express train—we dossed down to sleep on the corridor floor—sped us back to Geneva for our flight to London, then on to Oxford again. For my academic health it had been far too rich a time away (no fiction writing either). But a shared pleasure in unexpected wonders—and my own growing readiness to invest in a friendship that was skewed on its bases and Michael’s own patience with the same reality—gave us each a lifelong relation with an unfailing friend: laughing, confiding, mutually supportive in all narrow straits, long decades without a single false move between us.
8
MY THIRD TERM began with an episode that might have proved grave. Just before I left for the Easter vac, I’d been using one of the Bodleian’s many thousand treasures—John Milton’s own copy of the plays of Euripides with marginal comments and emendations in his own youthful script (before his blindness obviously). Further-more the volume, which was in excellent condition, had later belonged to Samuel Johnson; and it bore both Milton’s and Johnson’s sig
natures on the flyleaf (Dr. Johnson was born exactly a century after Milton’s birth; and though the immensity of Milton’s gifts was always a demon for Johnson, he nonetheless revered him, however querulously). Such a book would, even then, have brought a considerable price at auction—or by secret sale to an unscrupulous collector. I’d been surprised to discover then that, when I decided to study the volume, I had only to submit one of the Bodleian’s routine call slips; and it was brought to my desk a few minutes later—no special security arrangements of any sort.
In those days volumes which a scholar planned to use frequently could be left overnight in a sort of cage from which they could be fetched the next day without the wait of a call slip. I’d left Milton’s Euripides in the cage at the end of each day for several weeks before the vac, but when I knew I’d be gone for at least a month, I informed the relevant librarian that the volume could be sent back to the stacks in the event of some other scholar’s need.
Shortly after my return, I submitted another call slip (I was especially interested in Milton’s proposed emendations to Euripides’s text, the only surviving record of his eagle-eyed study of the actual Greek; but since I knew almost no Greek, I’d seek the help of knowing friends like Tony Nuttall). In twenty minutes one of the usual book-fetchers—older men who’d clearly been instructed not to engage us in conversation—came to my desk and told me simply that the volume was presently in use by someone else. When I asked who, in hopes of sharing the volume, the fetcher said that it was in use by a Mr. Reynolds-Price (the class-conscious British of that era often tried to award me a posh-sounding hyphenated name—I was still then signing all three of my names, Edward Reynolds Price). The fetcher failed to smile—“Perhaps then, sir, you’d like to speak with Miss So-and-So at the desk there.”
I spoke with her at once—a youngish woman but as little amused by our problem as the fetcher. She confirmed, in a minimum of words, that the volume was indeed recorded as being in my hands. My old winter call slip was still inserted in the empty slot on the shelf in the stacks. Given the solemnity of her look, I began to realize that I might have a difficult situation on my hands. Faced with the lax security of those days, it would have been entirely possible for me to have inserted the extremely valuable Milton/Johnson volume into my satchel and smuggled it out of the building (there were no briefcase checks, merely the assumption that all the library’s users were ladies and gentlemen). I explained what I’d done—freed the book from the cage to return to the stacks some six weeks earlier—and the woman said “Then we have no choice but to wait and see what develops, do we?” The characteristic British “do we?” (or other similar question at the end of a sentence) can be alarmingly ominous.
For another month whenever I entered the upper reading room, I’d see a set of librarians lean to one another and whisper as I passed, no doubt some version of “That’s the chap who’s nicked our Milton’s Euripides.” Nothing overt was ever said to me, no imposing official called me in for a discussion of the matter, other kinds of service were never refused me, and I didn’t feel spied upon, but my own unease deepened as time passed, and once or twice I asked at the desk for any developments in the mystery of Milton’s Euripides. They’d generally shake their heads in the then-common English gesture of befuddled suspicion—“No, nothing whatever. Peculiar, isn’t it?” and when I’d agree, the librarian would almost invariably say “Ra-ther” (I record all this truthfully and with an odd affection for the even odder behavior).
At last one early summer morning, a fetcher brought the volume to my seat—no comment. When I rose to inquire at the desk, the reply was as laconic as ever—“Turned up somehow, back in its place on the shelf.” Since only employees of the Bodleian then had access to the miles of book stacks, I was left in wonderment. The book itself showed no signs of harm nor of what adventures it might have undergone in its months of silent abscondment. Well, it had survived Milton’s long life, his blindness, London’s dreadful plague epidemics, his danger of execution at the time of Charles II’s restoration to the throne in 1660, and the Great Fire of London in 1666 (not to mention the later vicissitudes of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s life and the recently avoided chance of firebombs from the Nazi Luftwaffe in the 1940s). So for as long as I used it thereafter, in the chill peace of the Duke Humfrey wing, the handy leather-bound volume—preserving, as it did, one of the three supreme epic poets’ textual comments on one of the three supreme Greek dramatists—always gave me a welcome sense of elation to be the momentary proprietor of a thing as complex yet simple as itself, as nearly eternal, though so easy to lose, as both the Bodleian and I had recently learned.
* * *
More pleasantly, summer term also began with two surprises. In April, Soviet Premier Khrushchev and his colleague Nikolay Bulganin paid a state visit to Britain, with a side trip to Oxford for a little heavily guarded sightseeing. For the day, the city was in peculiar hands. In a morning walk up the High, I could plainly see armed secret-service guards on college rooftops, surveying the streets (there’d been rumors of men from Central Europe who’d just entered Britain with the avowed hope of assassinating their prime oppressors). Late in the afternoon, when I assumed that the Russians had left town, I set out in sunlight for Rhodes House on a minor errand. I walked up Longwall Street, which runs alongside Magdalen College’s deer park; and just as I neared a small door in the high wall, a long black limousine pulled swiftly up beside me, the small door opened, and out stepped Khrushchev and Bulganin with a small covey of diplomats.
Astonished of course I froze in my tracks—careful to make no false move (but what would a false move be?)—and short plump Khrushchev looked my way with a broad grin on widely spaced teeth. I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from him; and had I been armed (and so inclined) I could easily have shot him—and no doubt been promptly gunned down in return. Instead I matched his grin and—whoosh!—he was gone, as I likewise went on my newly cheered way, being surely a man of almost infinitely less importance to world history, not to speak of any control whatever over the fate of many thousand humans still in state prisons, than the ill-dressed fat man I’d just now greeted and who’d nonetheless only just acknowledged the monstrous reign of Stalin.
The second surprise was a small flurry of interest in my longish story “A Chain of Love.” Diarmuid Russell wrote from New York to say that The Virginia Quarterly Review was interested in the story. At that point the manuscript was some twelve thousand words long; and the Quarterly wanted to give a prize in a contest it was running, but the rules had specified a maximum length of seven thousand words. Could I possibly cut it down to that length? I’d finished the first draft a year ago. Since then I’d continued with minor revisions—nit-picking—and though Diarmuid had been circulating it for less than a year, I’d experienced long stretches of beginner’s nerves—wondering why no one had yet bought it.
And I’ve noted more than one night’s dreams of going to the lodge and finding a letter from Diarmuid with a large check—my hopes and needs justified. But no, for all my impatience, the prospect of merely eliminating almost half the story couldn’t thread its way through my brain. The disappointment at the impossibility was sizable, but at least I’d been given the first whiff of professional interest in my work. And Professor Blackburn at Duke had urged me to send the story to another old student of his, William Styron. I’d not yet met Styron, but Blackburn wrote me to say that Styron had promised to read the story and recommend it to The Paris Review if possible.
That long-since famous Review had started life just three years earlier, and Styron was one of its original advisory editors. So when I wrote Diarmuid to say that The Virginia Quarterly was not a possibility, I mentioned showing it to Styron who was still a young man himself—eight years older than I but already the author of a novel that had been a critical success in 1951, Lie Down in Darkness. I didn’t know (and it was typical of Diarmuid not to tell me) that George Plimpton, the founder of The Paris Review and its chief edi
tor for more than fifty years to come, was a client of Diarmuid’s.
* * *
As spring moved ahead with occasional dry days, I began to meet with Miss Gardner again and attempted to get myself to work on the thesis. With the initial exam behind me, I was now very much on my own. I’d need to master my time, read the necessary background texts, and begin to write the thesis. If I was planning to win the B.Litt. and return home at the end of my second year, I had a great deal of work to do. Still there were sidelines, or lanes, that pulled me elsewhere.
The fiction was clearly one. The theatre, films, and music continued to be energy-hungry for time and attention in my life. Early in the term, for instance, Tyrone Power came to Oxford in a crackling revival of Shaw’s American Revolution comedy, The Devil’s Disciple; and in early May, Michael and I went down to London to hear Louis Armstrong and his band—an exciting introduction for Michael to America’s greatest, though aging, jazzman (I’d heard him a time or two at Duke). But the sideline that became a virtual superhighway was the arrival, in late May, of my Volkswagen. With the slow increase of daylight, and a modest increase of mercy in the weather (the BBC was beginning to speak of possible “bright intervals” in our days), my car became—alas and thank God—an ever more tempting distraction from my academic work.
And two of my teachers began to become real friends. I’ve mentioned David Cecil as a teacher. Despite the fact that his wife and three children occupied his evenings at a pleasant home in north Oxford, he often invited me to meet him—for unplanned conversation—in his rooms in New College. It was there, late one afternoon that, without his knowledge, I crossed yet another of my old boundaries. He’d offered me sherry on all my prior visits, and I’d accept a small glass. But now from the drinks tray in a corner of his sitting room, he said “Whisky?” I doubt that my hesitation was noticeable; but to that point in my life—again—my family’s history had braked me. Well, surely I was in safe quarters here, with a world-famed writer who was hardly likely to lure me toward a drunkard’s doom. I quietly said “Thank you” and put out a hand to take the heavy weight of a large glass half full of Scotch whisky with no ice or water. Hard-core then, from the start. But no family gene lured me on into trouble, then or since.
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