Though Hardy’s world looked—to me, at first—far bleaker than my own, it had reflected in his novels an emotional complexity so much like the country of my early youth that it drew me powerfully in. And the fact that David Cecil was one of Hardy’s distinguished interpreters and an enthusiastic guide to my reading and English travels was a help (David’s father—and eventually his elder brother—were, in succession, the Marquess of Salisbury and were thus centered on an important Hardy town; and David himself kept a village home in the region almost all his life and died there).
* * *
I pushed on to Exeter with its fine small cathedral, much damaged by a German bomb; then on across the wide gloom of Dartmoor with—in the visible distance—its looming prison (you were warned then, as you still are in parts of the American southwest, not to run out of fuel in the area); and thence to Cornwall. My target was Tintagel and the ruins of its storied castle, and I reached the nearby village at dusk. There were virtually no tourists—to be sure, I dignified myself as a traveler—but there was a sad rash of Guinevere Tea Rooms and Lancelot Tobacconists. No motels of course and, according to the AA motoring guide, no hotel I could afford; so I entered a shop and asked if there was a local woman who could offer me an inexpensive room for a few nights. The female person at the counter took a long look at my face, then laughed, and addressed me in a thick Cornish accent—“You said a woman, didn’t you now? Well, if it’s a lady you’re looking for, I could send you on to Mrs. Mason. She and her daughter Jill are just up the road. They can likely take you in.”
A stubby woman almost swallowed up in her apron, Mrs. Mason and her antique suspicious spaniel welcomed me to the back bedroom—for a shockingly small sum—and in no time she and Jill, a pretty girl a year or so older than I, cooked me what they called “a meat tea”—four elegantly fried eggs, big rashers of Cornish bacon, bread and dripping (bread fried deliciously in bacon fat) followed by an eventual assortment of scones, cakes, and biscuits, accompanied throughout by cups of black tea strong enough to ream a radiator—and I was expected to eat their hearty dinner a little while later. In my three good days with the Masons, I spent so much interesting time talking with the two ladies in their kitchen that I finally had to force myself out into the gray drizzle to explore the ruins of my original magnet, the twelfth-century castle on Tintagel Head.
By what may be a complicated set of misunderstandings, the haunting landscape of the area, the masses of mossy stonework high above the crashing sea, an occasional now-empty grave chiseled into the live rock, and the one old church on the misty cliffs have conspired to win for themselves credit as the birthplace of King Arthur and, in some accounts, the site of Camelot itself. I’d read that much, often enough, in my childhood. And though I came here as a man disillusioned by his readings in the recent cold realism of Arthurian history, I nonetheless spent rapt hours roaming the otherwise empty array of this old place in simple awareness of visiting the same kinds of layer-on-layer of human habitation that had won me in Rome (there were fewer layers in Tintagel of course, but they were sonorous all the same).
Back at the Masons’ alone in my small room, I turned for the first time in months to serious thought about my fiction. I’d brought with me copies of the three finished short stories which I’d sent off to Diarmuid Russell. I’d also brought what I’d so far written on the story I’d begun in Florence but had got nowhere near completing in the six months since—“The Anniversary.” And more in hope than certainty, I’d brought my Florentine Olivetti. I can even remember some typing in Mrs. Mason’s kitchen, though I no longer know whether it was new work or the endless recopying to which all writing veterans of the pre-Xerox/pre-computer era were sentenced by the turtle-slow technology of the time—the laborious retyping of all new drafts and a constant reliance on the dreaded carbon paper if copies were needed. A further writer’s demon of the time was the never-quite-allayed terror of a lost manuscript. No writer I knew, once he revised a draft, ever corrected his carbons; so all our work was subject to fire, robbery, or the brand of agony that Hemingway endured when his first wife lost forever the only manuscript of his first book of stories (Lawrence of Arabia also lost his original version of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom while changing trains in Reading, England—very near Oxford).
* * *
I’d meant, intently, to concentrate on my two kinds of writing that summer—“The Anniversary” and then a very substantial amount of work on my thesis, on which (despite the promise to Miss Gardner) I’d managed very little, if any, work. The familiar yet incurable guilt of the seasoned procrastinator seldom ceased assailing the lone hours of my wanderings; but I consoled myself with the would-be writer’s assurance—relax, this is all invaluable experience. So after a glimpse at a few more Cornish sites with Arthurian overtones (above all, the ruins of King Mark’s castle, as in Tristan und Isolde), I made a slow way back from Cornwall for a few more days with Michael and his mother. Michael had a brief summer job, to help with the expenses of our forthcoming jaunt; but somehow it didn’t prevent our driving the hour north to Wimbledon where, according to a letter to Mother that week, we stood “for some eight hours to see Ham play.”
Hamilton Richardson, as I’ve noted earlier, was my Rhodester friend and was then a serious hope of American tennis. He was the top-ranked American player that year and might well eventually have won the singles at Wimbledon had his diabetes not stood in the way. Still, Michael and I were at Wimbledon for at least two days in June, unreserved but patiently waiting in line for access to the free seats. Though the sunlight was the most relentless I recall from that era, and with all our standing up, Wimbledon was a decided pleasure, however eccentric—the tents serving strawberries and cream, the members of the royal family in attendance in Centre Court to see the startlingly handsome Lew Hoad win the men’s singles (the finest eyes I recall on a man); and finally, the grotesque hats on would-be-fashionable Englishwomen.
* * *
I’ve mentioned that foreign students at British universities then had a real problem during the lengthy college vacs—where to stay. I’d moved out of Merton in June; and while I’d booked my Headington digs, the Kirkbys hadn’t agreed to take me in during any portion of the Long Vac. But I didn’t feel I should crowd Michael and his mother in their two-bedroom apartment for more than a weekend at a time. I could likely have offered Pamela significant help with the groceries, the grass, and the rain barrel for significant stretches in Burford; that prospect didn’t attract me, though. Yet whenever I contemplated renting a temporary room in Oxford, I’d look at my budget for the pending continental trip and realize how close to the financial line I was steering. For the first time in my life, I was all but adrift.
So I took the chance to spend a free week, in a Hampstead hotel, with my last Duke mentor William Blackburn, who was at work in the British Museum’s library on an edition of a particularly rich correspondence between Joseph Conrad and the editor of Blackwood’s Magazine. Blackburn had taught me Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry and drama in my sophomore year; and when I’d survived a stunningly low grade on the first paper I wrote for him, he invited me to lunch and, over a plate of barbecue, asked whether I’d yet considered applying for a Rhodes scholarship in my senior year (he’d been a Rhodester from South Carolina in the 1920s). To that point, I had no such plans; but Blackburn set the thought at work in me.
William Blackburn in 1961, in his longtime office on the second story of the East Duke Building of Duke’s East Campus. For some twenty years this enduringly successful but endlessly difficult teacher met his seventeenth-century literature class as well as his narrative-writing class in this small room. The few members of these deeply affecting classes sat in desk chairs along three sides of the office; Blackburn sat at his desk against the back window, with a view of the seated statue of Washington Duke just behind him. (The myth, in my student years, was that if a virgin walked in front of the bronze Mr. Duke, he’d be compelled to stand; very few girls took t
he risk. Nowadays no one even seems to recall the myth, much less fears risking a revelation of her sexual adventures.) Taken by John Menapace, who was then the art designer at Duke University Press and a photographer of real power, the picture is a forceful memory of Blackburn’s large head, nose, and hands. Even now, more than fifty years since my last class with him, I note with some degree of jitters that he’s reading one of the booklets in which we then submitted our final exams. If he looks up now, he’ll either grind his teeth in the deep despair of a lifelong teacher or break into his rolling bass laugh—a sign of rare pleasure from a troubled man.
Furthermore his classroom demonstrations of the degree to which a thoroughly robust man could respond to the power of lyric verse at its pinnacles—Thomas Wyatt, Walter Raleigh, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare—were crucial to my own already strong hope to write and teach. It may sound Mr. Chips–like; but many more of his students than I (Styron among them) attest to the fact that William Blackburn was the kind of magus who could give his class an oral performance of, say, Spenser’s “Epithalamium” in his richly modulated baritone—sometimes accompanied by his own silent tears—and teach us more about Spenser, and poetry as a benign life force, than any number of lectures.
In my last year at Duke, his pioneering two-semester course in the writing of prose narrative—which he refused, admirably, to call creative writing (“All good writing is creative,” he’d say)—became the forum of my first two successful short stories. Blackburn himself could scarcely write a postcard. His own prose was stamped by the hulking awkwardness of his tall stout body. But he had the born teacher’s gift for identifying ability and authentic passion in a student and for zeroing in on those incipient qualities to produce ultimate results.
That very rare strength helped propel more than one man to the eventual publication of good fiction—William Styron and Fred Chappell were two of his other successful writers. He seldom encouraged female students, on the grounds that they were so seldom able—in their careers as 1950s wives and mothers—to find the time to write. In retrospect, while his explanation had a certain validity, my guess is that he more likely feared some romantic involvement (on his part) with a gifted young woman.
The fervor he was capable of pouring into his support of a particular male student—and his ability to reject fervently the same student if some never-declared, and apparently paranoid, limit were passed—eventually suggested to me, through a sometimes mysteriously interrupted friendship of more than twenty years, that there might be a deeply buried but troublesome erotic component in a few of his teacher-student relations. I recall for instance that he once spent almost an entire class hour demonstrating to us—very dubiously, to say the least—that Shakespeare’s most indubitably homoerotic sonnets could not in fact be homoerotic.
But none of the three other male recipients of his backing has ever mentioned to me any moment of overt word or gesture. On the contrary, so controlled was his support of me that after my father’s death in the winter of 1954, Blackburn became for me not only a respected teacher but—for almost a decade thereafter—a surrogate father (so much so that I ultimately regretted, in silence, giving him a handsome sport jacket that my father had bought a few months before his death; it fit Blackburn perfectly and gave him, at times, an unnerving resemblance to Dad).
I was glad then to spend those inexpensive summer days with him in London. By that point he was an enormously lonely man in his late fifties. He’d ended his own first marriage in the late 1940s; and despite often comically desperate efforts, he failed to find a second wife for another twenty years. In that time he was isolated from his teaching colleagues by what they perceived as a degree of paranoia that only grew more disabling as he aged. Even with his few adult friends and favored students then, he could often be grim company. He once told me that his father “died in a madhouse”—an assertion I’ve been unable to confirm. So perhaps he was burdened by a genetic tendency to severe melancholia. Yet despite his depressions, and his suspicions of the loyalty of even the most devoted friends, he worked with gargantuan energy at his teaching. And his often sardonic but irresistible wit could make him a frequently rewarding companion (weeks after our time in London, he spoke in a letter of “our week of laughter at the Sandringham [Hotel]” as the high spot of his English summer).
Of our time together, I recall mainly a continuation of the sunlit weather I’d had at Wimbledon and the chance to make some return on Blackburn’s many prior generosities to me—it would be years before he accepted my addressing him as “Bill.” On the night of July 1, 1956, for instance, I treated him to a genuinely first-rate musical occasion. At the almost-new Festival Hall, we heard the Verdi Requiem conducted by Guido Cantelli, a superb young Italian conductor. Toscanini’s much-loved protégé, Cantelli would be killed in a plane crash a few months later. On this warm and tranquil night on the south bank of the calm Thames, though, he led the Philharmonia Orchestra with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Ebe Stignani, Ferruccio Tagliavini, and Giuseppe Modesti in a performance of blazing splendor.
Blackburn’s love of music was one of the chief consolations of his solitude, but his taste ran—as it did in his choice of poetry—toward the leaner textures of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian and English composers (secular ones above all). Yet for all his love of early music, and his general avoidance of opera, even Blackburn was demonstrably moved by Verdi’s mammoth eloquence in a Requiem which unflinchingly confronts the worst possibilities of death and remains bowed but upright and still rapt in the face of life’s final mystery, imploring God’s mercy on those who’ve preceded us beyond the veil of eternity. Only some eighteen months after my father’s death, the performance worked as a sovereign final distancing of that powerful man from my own grieving mind.
10
SOON THEREAFTER Michael and I—with the fledging beards we’d just begun growing—loaded my car’s tiny front-end trunk with our travel provisions (engines in VWs then were located in the rear): a minimum of clothes, and a case of canned corned beef that Michael’s mother had bought us, wholesale, for roadside lunches. Then we aimed ourselves due north. We spent a night above a quiet pub in the town of York (where Constantine was proclaimed Roman emperor in A.D. 306 and Auden was born in 1907); then a morning in the nearby York Minster. It remains to this day the grandest ecclesiastical building I’ve seen, the one that stands for me as a thoroughly convincing demonstration of the overwhelming reality, somewhere beyond us, of a watchful creative existence—something called God in the absence of some deeper comprehension.
Later that day we spent an hour in another grand building, tall above a river—Durham Cathedral, even older than York in its present form, with piers down both sides of the dim nave, massive in girth as the magnified legs of the Norman builders who set them up (I was mainly drawn to the bizarre face on the main door’s knocker, a place of safe harbor for runaway convicts). Then we pushed on for a night and a day with our beautiful Oxford friend, Stella Kirk from St. Hilda’s. She led us on a visit almost to the Scottish border to see Alnwick Castle, the home of the Percys and their rowdy son Hotspur (clearly one of Shakespeare’s favorite characters); then a roam through the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, the seat of John of Gaunt (gifted also with Shakespearean eloquence).
Then on to Stella’s welcoming family in the village of Felton, a few miles from our port, and a happy evening which included my introduction to cold poached salmon with fresh mayonnaise as a dinner dish, all at a big table with family and friends in the clear late light of a far-northern country—a further blessing poured round us. Next morning—July 12—Michael and I stood in Newcastle in further unblemished sunlight and watched my Volkswagen hoisted off the pier, straight upward through what seemed an infinity of dangerous air, then safely down aboard our ship for the calm all-day and overnight voyage across the North Sea to Norway: five hundred miles north, beyond the undersea Viking Bank.
* * *
Then the long-planned journey and our
first week in Scandinavia. We claimed the unscratched car in sunbathed Bergen—which seemed a glistening toy town, the birthplace of the composer Edvard Grieg, though we hardly paused—and began our drive toward Oslo. Again it was little more than a decade since Western Europe had been freed from a state almost unimaginable to an American—the long grip of the Nazis and the worst of all wars that destroyed them. Norway reflected that recent history in many ways. Most striking at once was the fact that the roads, except in a few towns, were still dirt roads—well maintained but unpaved.
And there were few towns along the way—and over the mountains—from Bergen to Oslo, only the occasional village with, often, small squads of boys who seemed to be collecting license-plate numbers from the scarce traffic (as British boys then often collected locomotive numbers). My plate was QG-2166, as I well recall—largely because I can still hear the raucous young voices shout it out in Norwegian as we passed, waving their wild enthusiasm while we vanished eastward in a light cloud of dust. And almost anywhere we stopped—for gas or water—there’d be a single striking framed photo on the wall: a young man accepting the surrender of an imposingly uniformed Nazi officer.
The young man in the picture appeared to be in his early adolescence, and he seemed to be dressed in something like a Boy Scout uniform. I can’t recall that we ever got an authoritative explanation of the widespread scene, but a friendly drunk outside the Oslo city hall one later evening told us that the Norwegian government-in-exile had decided upon this moment as a final humiliation for its defeated enemy—the forced surrender of a proud Prussian officer to a mere Nordic boy. God knows, valiant Norway had earned the moment; and I hope that’s more or less the true story.
Ardent Spirits Page 18