* * *
It was in that third term that I showed Lord David my two completed short stories, “Michael Egerton” and “A Chain of Love.” He responded with the kind of detailed attentiveness that I’d not yet had from any other reader—none of my good teachers at Duke nor even Eudora Welty. They’d all responded with welcome enthusiasm, but it immediately became clear that David had read my stories with a fellow writer’s questioning eye. Why did such-and-such happen at this point and not another? Was the young sister too young to justify her presence in a story as necessarily brief as mine? Did North Carolinians from a rural world speak with such calm eloquence? His questions by no means always implied a desire for change; but even when they didn’t, he elicited from me a new intensity of self-examination that was thoroughly healthy for the work itself and my own involvement in it (from his generous approval, I remember a particular phrase—he said that “Michael Egerton” “went like an arrow to the target”).
Beyond that, he spoke of his own writer friends and acquaintances with a casual familiarity that made them seem real presences in the room and, further, made me feel that I might conceivably someday move in such circles with at least a sense of poise if not eminence—W. B. Yeats, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Elizabeth Bowen, L. P. Hartley, and more. And with his own always unmentioned aplomb, David discussed those eminences with no trace of braggadocio.
When we spoke (as we mostly did) of the classic works of fiction which I was then consuming wholesale—Emily Brontë, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Chekhov, Hardy, Woolf, Lawrence, and Forster—David reverted more than once to a major concern of his own: his concern for morality in art, for moral fiction. By moral he meant nothing so simpleminded as fiction which suppresses all concern with human sexuality or deals with sex in a pruned and scrubbed rhetoric. He wished only that a work of the imagination should be steadily conscious of its ultimate designs upon a reader and that its author should work to avoid secret or unconscious aims—ethical, moral, or erotic aims which advance on the reader in secret.
I’m afraid I no longer recall his examples of immoral fiction, though I do remember that he mentioned—with a smile—how Tolstoy had recorded his own condemnation of a passage in a story by Maupassant, a moment in which the author mentions soap bubbles on a woman’s skin (and thereby aroused the ever-arousable Tolstoy to immoral thoughts). When I asked him to do so, he likewise expanded upon a recent essay of his own in which—without quite saying so, at a time when homosexuality in living authors was scarcely mentioned—he implied that E. M. Forster’s novels suffered finally from an inability to portray, with ultimate degrees of success, romantic love between a man and a woman (a conclusion of David’s with which I, and many thousand others, have never agreed).
With me from the start, David Cecil discussed homosexuality and gave no suggestion whatever of disapproval or condemnation (born in 1902, and a deeply devout Christian, he lived then and for many years longer in the midst of as happy a marriage as I’ve ever witnessed). So far as I could see, homosexual love appeared normal to him, though it seemed never to have been a need of his own. He’d noticed with considerable sympathy the serious problems it presented to homosexual writers of either gender (though in our talks, I don’t recall our discussing my own particular sex life).
His oldest close friend, L. P. Hartley—the author of a brilliant then-recent novel, The Go-Between—was a repressed homosexual, and more than one of David’s woman friends was drawn in the direction of same-sex love (Virginia Woolf and, at least once, Elizabeth Bowen among them). Adrian Wright’s biography of Hartley makes it clear that, after David and Hartley met in Oxford, they developed an intense friendship; and for years after graduation (and before David’s marriage), David often stayed with Hartley in Venice. But whether the relation was ever expressly sexual, Wright has insufficient evidence to say—my own guess would be no. In any case, David never discussed with me that aspect of any living author’s life or work. We did, though, eventually begin to discuss my own growing love more candidly than I ventured with anyone else in my whole time at Oxford.
* * *
The other don who showed me special kindness in my first year was one whom I’d met when he joined Lord David in chairing my earlier class in criticism. He was Nevill Coghill who was then a fellow of Exeter College. His personal devotion was to the theatre (he directed frequent plays in Oxford); yet he most frequently lectured on Chaucer, Langland, Shakespeare, and Milton. And Chaucer was the poet whose Canterbury Tales he’d translated from the now-difficult Middle English for Penguin—a hugely successful book. I’d soon learn that Nevill had grown up in a family with various commitments to the arts.
His father was Sir Patrick Coghill, a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy who’d studied art in Paris in the late nineteenth century, lived on a sizable estate in Ireland, and painted a large number of high-skilled and often beautiful landscapes (several dozens of which hung in Nevill’s Oxford rooms; I was always hoping to be offered one but alas no). One of his maternal aunts was Edith Somerville who joined with their younger cousin Violet Martin, whose pseudonym was Martin Ross, to form the lifelong writing partnership that produced, among numerous memorable works of fiction, The Real Charlotte. Nevill himself was born in 1899, served in the First War, married, fathered a daughter, then separated from his wife and lived a quietly homosexual life thereafter. He later spoke to me of several romances with men, but he apparently never established a residence with any of them; and until his retirement from Oxford, he always lived in his college rooms.
Our own friendship began when, after the late-afternoon class in criticism, Nevill asked me if I’d come to his rooms in Exeter for sherry. I went and we talked easily and pleasantly, though I recall only one moment of the hour—Nevill mentioned to me the name Antinous, the first time I’d heard of that fascinating figure from ancient history: the emperor Hadrian’s young favorite who drowned mysteriously (suicide, murder, accident?) in the Nile in A.D. 130. Nevill was a fine laughter-loving tale-teller; and he’d been the teacher of W. H. Auden and Richard Burton, the actor, among numerous others. He’d even directed John Gielgud in a London production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream ten years earlier. On this first meeting, by the way, I mentioned seeing Olivier at Stratford and praised his Macbeth very highly. To my surprise Nevill said “Olivier is a thoroughly clever physical performer; but Gielgud is a very great actor, right down to the sockets!” I’m quoting from old memory, but I think the memory is true to what Nevill said, certainly to his fervor. In any case, though I then profoundly disagreed, I didn’t argue. And years more would pass before I began to understand Nevill’s meaning and how much justice was on his side, though I’ve never relented in my sense of Olivier’s very different kind of dramatic genius.
As I left that first meeting in time to race back to Merton for dinner, Nevill asked if I’d accompany him to a forthcoming evening in which the French composer Francis Poulenc would accompany the baritone Pierre Bernac in a recital of Poulenc’s songs. I joined him for that good evening (good despite the appearance of the two performers—together they looked like nothing so much as a pair of senior waiters at a one-star restaurant in the provinces). Nevill and I went back to his rooms for a drink afterward; and a friendship slowly grew, one which lasted till his death in 1980. It was never an intimate relation, but the years were increasingly full of excellent fun and mutual consideration; and I learned a great deal from him about poetry, teaching, and especially about human life.
* * *
Though Helen Gardner had rescued me from the company of Mr. Leishman, and though she treated me warmly, I was never to have her friendship. I’ve noted that we met several times each term in her rooms in St. Hilda’s (her sitting room was unusually bright, as dons’ rooms went); and she always led me in challenging discussions of Milton and his contemporaries—our talks were punctuated by laughter and distinguished by a peculiar trait of Miss Gardner’s. It was one noted
by several of my male friends who likewise went to her rooms for tutorials—she generally wore some sort of pendant on a long chain; and in the course of a discussion, she was given to manipulating the pendant fairly constantly in the vicinity of her sweater-covered and quite nice breasts.
I knew, and still know, nothing of her sexual predilections beyond Stephen Spender’s unconfirmed story of her falling haplessly in love with Henry Reed. I only know that her charming face (when she wished to charm), her beautiful eyes, and the ceaselessly moving pendant could leave me at the end of an hour with the sense of having participated in a semi-flirtation. Why not? The gesture was touching and surely no harm was done to either side—a single woman, a single man, alone together. Again, other male friends have reported their own odd hours with Miss Gardner; and one has just now written me from New Zealand (our first communication in fifty years and entirely unsolicited). With no coaching whatever, he mentions that Miss Gardner “sat opposite me, her skirt on her knees, her knees apart.”
What was involved in these fairly unique gestures—a half-realized hope maybe that one of us would respond with some form of physical completion? When I took her out to dinner, toward the end of my Merton years, and brought her back to my rooms for after-dinner drinks, there was no sign of the pendant or any other form of seduction. I never heard a word of scandal about her from either her several ill-wishing colleagues or her students; and most of the male students known to me report Helen Gardner’s carefully parceled-out portions of kindness and well-deserved criticism.
Late in my third term, I learned rather dramatically that she’d grown dissatisfied with my work. The word came in a small envelope addressed in her unmistakable clear script and sent through the university mail system (a Dickensian, bicycle-powered, and usefully prompt means of intercollege communication). She said, more or less literally—and very peremptorily—
Dear Mr. Price,
When do you propose to get to work?
Yours sincerely,
Helen Gardner
I knew I’d earned her rebuke. So I busied myself preparing several brief papers arising from my Miltonic readings; and soon enough I was back in her graces with a reading list for the Long Vac soon to come. And I took her out for thoroughly pleasant dinners more than once, but she never responded with a social invitation, even to so much as a cup of tea; and when I ultimately completed my thesis, our relation ended as though at the turn of a key—an instructive student-teacher interdependency but nothing more. Admittedly I can’t recall ever telling her of my writing fiction; and when I began to publish stories, I never sent her a copy or wrote to her otherwise (I must have felt some guilt at owning up to rival pursuits).
My friendship with David and Nevill continued richly, largely by mail once I’d returned home to the States. I obviously never felt impelled to contact Miss Gardner, ever again. Perhaps she felt no particular desire to know me further. And my one receipt of a rocket from her pen, my awareness of the cool savagery of her professional pride when aroused (I recall a Times Literary Supplement public correspondence with a younger scholar about the textual editing of Donne’s poems), and her own perhaps wary pull-back from a male student’s life would eventually leave me discharged into cool outer space.
* * *
I acquired other friends among the university’s various faculties. Merton’s chief English tutor, Hugo Dyson, was a textbook specimen of his generation. Like Nevill he’d served in the Great War; and he moved slowly through the quads with a badly damaged leg, a severe limp, and a sturdy cane. I never actually studied with him; but as Merton’s senior tutor in English lit., he took a persistent interest in my well-being. He’d kindly included me, early in my first term, in a dinner-jacketed meal for all the new Merton Eng. lit. students in a private room in college; and thereafter he’d stop me in Front Quad every few weeks and grill me cheerfully in his booming baritone—Was I happy enough? Was so-and-so being generous to me? Too generous perhaps? How many times had I yet had pneumonia? Our outdoor sessions would terminate in torrents of Hugo’s laughter and a waving-off with his walking stick—he thought nothing of hailing me loudly with a personal question across the long quad. His own pupils were fond of him, and he even wound up with a small but imposing role in a popular English film of the 1960s—John Schlesinger’s Darling.
A quieter man was the college’s senior history tutor, Roger High-field. For all his restraint he possessed distinct charm, a shy but smiling magnetism. His own specialty was medieval Spanish history, but he also knew a huge amount about the earliest life of Merton, and he’d ultimately co-write a history of the college. Roger was Michael’s main tutor, the one who assigned his weekly papers and then sat and heard them read aloud. How I came to know him and, every few weeks, go to his rooms for sherry and good talk, I don’t recall; but his friendship is among my warmest college memories.
An especially winning quality of Roger’s was his ability to be right up to speed on whatever novel I’d just finished reading. With no boast or brag, he could hear you out on your own opinion of the work—Tolstoy, Wilkie Collins, whoever—then he’d nod slightly and say something that would prove memorable for decades. One evening I’d just completed a second reading of Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, a novel that lies behind more than one opera; and I noted to Roger that I’d recently concluded a fascination with a beauty just as dangerous as Manon. Roger searched my eyes for the briefest moment; then said “Ah Manon, yes. The sort of person who absolutely always lets you down.” I suspected then, and still do, that something deeply personal must have powered that perfect observation; but I’d never have asked.
His younger history colleague John Roberts would eventually become Warden of Merton (the college president) and the author of, among other books, an immensely popular History of the World. John was only five years older than I and was the Principal of the Postmasters in my time, the equivalent of a minor dean in an American college. You went to him for permission to spend a night out of college during term or to come in late (the gate closed at eleven), though you learned soon enough that climbing in was a simpler solution. You could either scale a nine-foot-high wall at the elbow bend in Merton Street and drop down into the dark interior of the college garden, or you could merely walk in illegally. That required a lengthy detour down St. Aldate’s and then—just past the police station—you grabbed hold with both hands and swung round a rickety post that supported barbed wire and overhung a deep drainage ditch. From there you were free to walk through a spooky pitch-dark Christ Church Meadow for the equivalent of two blocks, then step over a low wall into the backside of Merton (that route, I’m told, has now been balked).
Somehow John Roberts and I soon knew that we shared common interests; and I frequently had sherry with him, often turning an amused blind eye to the numerous attractive women who visited him at odd hours. As a member of the college, I never had the slightest behavioral difficulty with him. In fact my only problem with John lay in his possession of a pronounced facial tic. In any conversation he was likely at startling intervals to give a sudden, and surely unconscious, twist to one side of his face. Given my helpless lifelong tendency to mimic the accents of whomever I’m speaking with, I’d have to struggle when I was with John not to return his tic with a consoling wince of my own. I think I never did, but I can’t guarantee it. He and his first wife eventually stayed with me in my first home back in the States; and he wrote me, most thoughtfully, years later when he learned of my cancer surgery (so did a mighty host of other Oxonians).
All these older friends—with the exception of Nevill and David, who were supremely important—are recalled here not so much because they proved helpful in my graduate studies (they did) but because they illustrate so likably one of my major early discoveries in the dim Thames Valley. For all the postwar bleakness of Britain then, and for all the British reputation for stiff-upper-lipped solemnity, my experience of Oxford—from the scouts at Merton on through my teachers and other academic friends—was a
n experience of high wit, often mischievous or otherwise boisterous laughter, and of infallible generosity if ever I asked for help.
As for my other experiences on that remarkably small island, my visits in recent years have been rare, mainly owing to the complexities of wheelchair travel; and I can’t vouch for the atmosphere of the contemporary country, one that’s altered in some ways unrecognizably since my time. But the whole nation in the mid-Fifties—close as it was to the horrors of the Second World War—is marked in my memory, like Oxford, by a warm and constant level of intelligence, and a widespread appetite for fun, a delight in the folly of the human race (as well as the silliness of one’s friends and enemies), and above all one’s own unquenchable absurdity. Even the joking American South of my boyhood didn’t surpass that only-just-torpedoed and slowly sinking imperial center for discernment and laughter, though the players and the games were worlds apart. And no other region on the face of the planet—none known to me, including all other regions of the States—has evoked more enduring love in me than the literal ground and the class-sorted people of postwar Great Britain.
* * *
In the remainder of summer term (it ran from mid-April to mid-June), life went on much as I’ve described it, with only a few other standouts and with the added diversion of the new car. Once it arrived Michael availed himself of it for drives in the Oxfordshire countryside to ready himself for the driving-license test he’d never yet taken (those were still days when very few Britons owned their own cars). His learner status required the presence of a licensed companion in the car, and that was always me—three or four afternoons a week. In the process, rain or shine, I learned my way round a world of villages whose names I’d encountered in reading Matthew Arnold’s Oxford poems, the only great poems which are specifically Oxonian—“The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis,” the elegy on the death of Arnold’s undergraduate companion, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough.
Ardent Spirits Page 15