I’ve tried to make clear that I was never one of his friends. The innate shyness which his oldest friends frequently mention in their recollections may have been at work—a shyness often concealed by overbearing loquacity. Or maybe he just didn’t like me, yet we often talked interestingly and laughed together a good deal in Oxford. Otherwise I saw him only four times, I think, thereafter—twice in New York and twice in Washington, occasions arranged by others (he recommended me for a Guggenheim Fellowship in the late Sixties, and my application was successful). I shared in whatever sense of a barrier he may have felt with me; in my case, he was too enormous for real friendship (that seemed a general response from other of my Oxford contemporaries). Still, I never doubted for a day that he was the only steadily productive genius with whom I’ve spent real time.
Even in the most relaxed moments in his Christ Church rooms, coming to the end of our first half-quart of martinis, he’d fall silent for two long draws on his endless cigarette; and in the brief silence that fell around us, I could hear his great mind turning like the wheels of a vast locomotive. Surely the barrels of alcohol and the kegs of amphetamines were, in part, mere means of damping that motion, the heat and light it steadily induced as it did its work—not to speak of its almost constant pain in the hope of loving someone as steadily difficult as Chester Kallman (that’s of course to ignore the impossible challenge that faced Kallman daily—his attempt as a would-be younger poet to live with, and love, one of the great poets of the English language). And it should never be forgot that even the face Auden laid before us in the late photographs—that dreadful ruin—still concealed a brain that could issue, almost till the actual month of his death, the odd gorgeous poem.
* * *
In those days the British took a person’s twenty-first birthday as a celebratory occasion far more regularly than most Americans. I’d observed my own twenty-first two years before, just as Dad discovered his cancer; but Michael’s fell late in that spring term of ’56. He’d met Pamela Redmayne on several rides with me to Burford. When she learned of his oncoming auspiciousness (and she said it coincided with an unspecified birthday of her own), she sprang into her finest military-planning mode. On the day in question, she said, we’d gather a few decorative girls and a number of Rhodesters from my class, several of whom had likewise bought cars. Then we’d proceed toward Longleat House, the home of the Marquess of Bath and the ancestral seat of the Bath family since 1580. Weather permitting, we’d search out a particularly beautiful hillside near Longleat. The place, it seemed, was known chiefly to Redmayne; and there we’d eat the enormous picnic she’d provide. As ever, all participants had preliminary duties assigned to them; and Michael and I spent the previous night at Pamela’s house, performing various chores.
The great day dawned at last—gloriously sunlit, only the occasional cottony cloud lined with gray (imitating its predecessors in landscapes by Constable). As Michael and I ate Pamela’s immense English breakfast, the tableside BBC weather report could—as ever in those pre-global-warming days—only muster its weakest threat: Bright intervals interspersed with showers. So in midmorning, off we set—John Sears from Massachusetts and Balliol, Rex Jamison, Jim Griffin, and Howard Reilly from Pennsylvania and Magdalen among others—in several midget autos, each car filled with smiling youngsters roughly our age, all almost infinitely grateful for such spring weather and the bursting hampers of guaranteed fine food.
Any trip with Pamela would include some modest detour to pay a brief call on a significant historic site. She never went in for lengthy tours, knowing (as she usually did) far more about the place than any official guide who was likely to appear. That morning she led us to the circle at Avebury, a prehistoric stone ring—only eighteen miles from Stonehenge—of incomprehensible complexity, the result of a gigantic effort from perhaps 3000 B.C. It’s estimated that it took the equivalent of seven hundred men ten years to complete the task.
I regret to say that I was so involved in the beauty of the day itself—unmitigated sunlight after so much outer and inner darkness—and in Michael’s delight in our birthday plans that I registered the marvels of Avebury less indelibly than I should have (I flagged it for a later return but never made it). From Avebury, Pamela guided us farther on to our destination—a spot on the Longleat estate called Heaven’s Gate (or so she claimed; it certainly felt like a celestial entrance, and it looks that grand still in the color home movies I made at the time). The dozen or so of us sat down on a steep hillside—not in the usual picnic circle but facing Longleat House below us—and were told, briskly by Pamela, that we were in yet another nobleman’s park designed by Capability Brown. Then hungry as dogs—the males at least—we seized upon Redmayne’s first-rate chicken and salad, her English cheeses (which I still prefer to French) and homemade brown bread, all washed down with potent cider (wine and beer were mostly omitted from her battery of offerings but were seldom missed).
As we neared the point of abdominal ballistics, Pamela produced—incredibly—thirteen cakes, each made by her own hands. Then amid our oversated groans, we toasted our benefactress on her own birthday (I estimate she might have been sixty) and Michael on his newly confirmed manhood. Deeply reserved Englishman that he was, Michael laughed, then stood and bowed his formal thanks to Redmayne. I’d very likely not been happier in my life, not till then. And even now, turning back, I can think of very few days as full of harmless pleasure in the midst of an aristocrat’s expensively tended grounds, entirely free to us, surrounded by friends of proven merit and with Michael, whom I more than half suspected was now an incomparable friend.
In short I’d come to trust the fact that I was fully committed. I’d told no one and wouldn’t, for years—not even the object of my feeling. But commitment meant to me then that, so far as I could begin to foresee—since marriage and children were out of the question—I’d step forward without hesitation, if called, to lay down my life for the person in question. I don’t recall having formed such an outlandish feeling, much less so dedicated a feeling, at Heaven’s Gate; but I think it’s true to my conviction that day, that point in the year. Fifty years later I may smile at my intensity; but I know I was not deluded. I would make that offer still, if called upon. The person had already proved his own loyalty and was giving as much as his very different nature could find a way to give.
To my further delight, when Pamela and several more of us stalked down the hill and approached the main door of Longleat, there stood the present holder of the title—a pleasantly ordinary-looking man of early middle age, greeting tourists (the house supported itself now on tickets). Redmayne moved forward and presented herself, by her own name and her father’s, as a friend of the Bath family; and he greeted her with obvious recognition and welcome, waving us inward without bought tickets. After that, the interior of the house lay on the downward side of the day. Nonetheless we took the tour, with Redmayne correcting the hapless guide sotto voce but no doubt correctly. By the time we’d delivered Pamela back to Burford a few hours later and were safely back to Merton in early dark, I was more than ready for a long night’s sleep. And the blessed Bill Jackson let me have it (no open curtains and “Good morning, sir” at half-past seven—how did he know?).
* * *
Also that spring William Styron responded to the manuscript I’d sent him at Professor Blackburn’s insistence. He said at once that he was only an adviser to The Paris Review but that he’d already sent the story on to Peter Matthiessen, the fiction editor, with a high recommendation. He then went on to say the kinds of things any apprentice longs to hear from a respected professional—
I think it is a most beautiful and touching tale. The mood is set from the beginning, the tone is maintained throughout, and it all builds up, I think, to a wonderfully telling and poignant picture of life-in-death, with the background of the Piedmont South done with great accuracy, and humor, and versimilitude. (sic)
* * *
The only problem which Styron’s praise
presented, of course, was the fact that it gave me a powerful impetus to get on with new fiction when a thesis was still the abyss that yawned before me.
With a few other diversions then, the term—and my first academic year at Oxford—wound to its close. Michael and I and a couple of girls from St. Hilda’s took a few Sunday afternoon drives down to Windsor Great Park to watch Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, play polo in the presence of the royal women and infants—the younger Elizabeth II and her sister Margaret, as dowdy as ever then in tweeds and head scarves, and only the Queen Mother flying her usual banner of eccentric high fashion with ostrich-plumed hats and satin handbags in the midst of high-spirited polo (the Queen’s children, Charles and Anne at eight and four, were the normal dressers of the family).
Then I went for an affable end-of-term meeting with Miss Gardner to confirm her recommendations for summer reading and writing. There was one more packing of all I’d brought to Oxford and all I’d acquired in the past eight months (Jackson had volunteered to store my trunk in his spacious pantry till I was ready to move to my digs). There were a series of coffees and sherries with my college friends—temporary farewells to tide us through the Long Vac. Then a visit to Brighton to spend a few days with Michael and his mother in her council flat—a pleasant six rooms with views of the sea and the town that had bloomed as a pleasure dome for the profligate Prince Regent (later King George IV) in the early nineteenth century.
RP with Wendy Stringer and Stella Kirk, photographed by Michael Jordan on the polo pitch at Windsor on a Sunday afternoon in June ’56. Prince Philip (the Queen’s husband) is a member of the horse melee before us; and the royal family are seated directly opposite us, some fifty yards away. Behind us is the black Volkswagen which I’d only acquired a month ago, and atop my head is the brown Borsalino porkpie hat I’d acquired in Italy sometime during the prior Easter vac. The two girls were cheerful friends from St. Hilda’s College; and Wendy—in the middle here—would eventually marry an Italian and spend her life in his country. Note the degree of dress-up clearly involved in a visit to Windsor (the nearby Queen, in tweed skirt and head kerchief, is dressed less formally than we, though the Queen Mother is reliably dressed in pale-blue silk and a hat with modified ostrich feathers). In addition to the porkpie, I’m wearing a tie, the camel’s hair jacket I bought in Venice, and—above all—the white socks that American college men of my era religiously wore. As grave as the three of us look—and Mike as well, behind the camera—we’re actually thoroughly enjoying ourselves: in another two seconds, I’m sure, we’d have faced Mike and laughed.
9
MICHAEL AND I drove slightly east to Glyndebourne and heard Mozart’s Idomeneo, my only visit to the famed musical shrine. The opera was seldom produced in those days; and the reliable resources of Glyndebourne—luxuriously cast and conducted operas in the grounds of a handsome country estate which the audience was free to roam during the long picnicking intermissions—went some way toward full pleasure (it was likewise a beautiful evening). The opera house of the time was small—the size Mozart had likely composed for—and decidedly plain in its décor, though the acoustics were superb and the music exalted.
Next I dashed some two hundred miles west to Plymouth to meet the ship of my Duke friend Deede Dort (I’d not yet reached the age when I could suggest that an able-bodied adult friend seek public transport). She and I sped back to Brighton, found her a hotel room on the seafront, and joined up with Michael for a jocular Sunday’s drive to Canterbury where we roamed the cathedral which preserves the site of the murder of Thomas Beckett, the later goal of centuries of pilgrimage. Then we pushed on to Hastings and the nearby Battle Abbey where William the Conqueror had landed in 1066, killing the Saxon King Harold on the spot and proceeding to alter the fate of England and all its eventual descending cultures—their law and social structures and above all, the nature of the English language (an Anglo-Saxon tongue which gradually became at least thirty percent French).
After two or three days of good undergraduate memories and half-sad laughter as we walked on the front, Deede flew on to Paris where she’d study painting for several years; and I could finally bring myself toward something that represented, at least, the quiet solitude I’d treasured since childhood and needed now more than I’d realized in the midst of the past year’s pleasures and struggles. That state of calm didn’t, however, bring me back to a working scholar’s desk. Instead I began a one-man drive westward to see a few things that had snagged in my mind during years of earnest reading and—earlier still—in my boyhood obsession with good King Arthur, his questing knights, and the Grail itself: their own mysterious gleaming aim.
* * *
In that first postwar devastated decade, with petrol prices phenomenally high by American standards, the roads were hardly crowded with privately owned cars. And few British roads were more than well-maintained but narrow two-lane concrete strips, going their remorselessly curving ways till—suddenly—there might be a mile or so of blessedly dead-straight progress. Such stretches sometimes proved to be laid on the tracks of ancient Roman roads (I recall hearing an old schoolmaster say that he’d once asked his boys why the Romans tended to build straight roads—for shorter distance obviously—but one boy eagerly raised his hand to say “So we Britons couldn’t ambush them round the bends”).
On most of my extended road trips, I couldn’t plan to average more than thirty miles an hour. As an unadjusted American on my first long drive then, I had a good deal to learn. First, there were the old roads themselves. An impatient driver like me met with numerous scary moments when a two-lane road, in a curvy stretch, would unexpectedly narrow to little more than one lane; and I’d round the next curve to find myself in near-collision with an unhurried farmer driving some piece of antique farm machinery on to his next field. And in rural areas, which included most of southern England then, the high banks were often topped with dense hedgerows that loomed immediately at the edge of the concrete with no forgiving shoulders and made passing another car impossible. So anyone hoping to survive a day’s travel, in body and mind, was soon compelled to learn a steady patience.
But soon the new tolerance became one more pleasure of the trip. Apart from guidebook-recommended sites, there were few of the obvious roadside stops to which an American and his bladder were accustomed—few petrol stations and absolutely no snack shops (even most Stateside highways were then devoid of franchise fast-food stops). The only chance of a small meal would be in a village tearoom, a good country pub (sandwiches and meat pies), or occasional uninspiring restaurants in towns. A man’s needs to pee were easily met with the kind of unembarrassed roadside pause that was demonstrated to us on our first night in England; a modest woman faced more serious problems.
A generally reliable pleasure of the road—ultimately one of the memorable joys of my British years—was the average Briton’s ready willingness to talk and chuckle with a traveling stranger. Within days of my arrival in the country, I was asking myself how the British Isles could have acquired their worldwide repute for frosty self-possession. If anything, I was having to employ courteous ways of disentangling myself from a talkative and hugely helpful man or woman whom I’d asked a simple question (and a Southerner was a trained employer of polite escapes).
In my first term David Cecil had asked me, during our first conversation after his seminar dispersed, how I was being treated—“Are the English being beastly to you?” When I assured him of the contrary, he said “Don’t let them mislead you now. When the English seem cold, it’s worth remembering that—frequently—they just don’t know you’re there. Call yourself to their notice, and I suspect you’ll prosper.” And so I had. In fact by the end of that first academic year, I was on the verge of a finding that would prove accurate for all my later experience of Britons, with normal exceptions, right into the mid-1990s—The British are slower to declare a friendship than Americans; but once declared, they’re nearly unshakable in their loyalty, far more so than th
e glad-handing but often fickle Yank. And not at all incidentally, I think David’s suggestion of blind self-absorption—as an analysis of British beastliness—is also an explanation for a large part of the human animal’s rudeness and chill in whatever nation.
* * *
I drove west through the Thomas Hardy country of Dorset—especially the county town of Dorchester, with its city museum that then contained Thomas Hardy’s reconstructed study. His novels had begun to interest me when I discovered Tess of the D’Urbervilles in high school. I’m sure that I didn’t realize then how deeply I’d been marked by the fact that so much of my childhood and early teens was spent in a distinctly flavored region—the endlessly complex biracial society that had grown up in the cotton-and-tobacco countryside of northeast North Carolina, with its unadorned rolling hills, thick pine woods, and broomstraw fields, its sunbaked villages, and small towns with handsome white timber and redbrick homes from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the incredibly enduring hovels of black men and women who were, at most, only one or two generations out of actual slavery. Some seven decades might have passed since abolition; yet most of those men and women were still implicated in a dense involvement with their white overlords—an involvement that was, more often than we now acknowledge, as emotionally interdependent as the ruthless system allowed and had produced one of the twentieth century’s great Anglo-African languages and the verbal and musical art that was still arising from it.
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