A few old women lingered, apparently even more baffled than we, near the crematory. A few old men wore their Jewish prayer shawls and murmured prayers; a very few guards watched us but no one else. Years later I wrote a long story called “Waiting at Dachau” that arose from the experience. More immediately, in a letter home soon after the visit, I described Dachau as “one of the two most impressive things I’ve seen”—the other was the Sistine Chapel, and the claim still holds.
* * *
A night or two later, the four of us drove a swift eighty miles east to Salzburg for as near an antidote as one could imagine to so much horror—a festival performance of Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro. Conducted by Karl Böhm and sung by (among others) Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Irmgard Seefried, Christa Ludwig, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, it was a long but sublime evening. The fact that both Mozart and Hitler were Austrian, and that the conductor and more than one of the brilliant cast of singers had likely been members of the Nazi party, only complicated the richness of the evening.
Given my youth, I’d heard a rewarding number of great performances at the Met and on the surprisingly distinguished concert stage in Raleigh—where I heard Flagstad twice, Melchior twice, Marian Anderson twice, Pinza and Steber once—but as we drove back on another splendid highway, I silently reckoned I’d never hear a more nearly perfect ensemble effort in the service of a greater stretch of music. On that return to Munich, we spent most of our remaining energy laughing at something we’d heard at a polite Salzburg bar to which we’d retired after the music. Two older classic-American female tourists, straight out of a New Yorker cartoon, were discussing what we’d just heard. The larger of the two said to her friend, “I’m not really sure we got our money’s worth.” When her friend looked quizzical, the unsure lady continued, “Listen, when I hear great music, something in me just swells up; and tonight it didn’t swell.”
Three other events linger on from the week in Munich. Liz took Michael and me, for a drink, to the large beer hall—the Bürgerbräukeller—which was locally famed as an early meeting place for Hitler and his cronies and the scene of their failed putsch of 1924. It was clean-scrubbed and as charmless as a vast tile toilet, but did I expect charm from a Fascist cradle? Another day, Liz, Michael, and I returned to Salzburg for a morning’s walk through the old town, climaxing in a visit to Mozart’s birthplace—another hard-scrubbed site but one whose walls at least surrounded the authentic space in which one of humanity’s supreme benefactors began his life. Then we downed a big lunch, ending in my second chance at Salzburger nockerl, one of my lifetime-favorite desserts.
Jane Savage, dancing the Charleston in a dress of her mother’s from the 1920s. Jane sent me the picture in the 1950s, and almost ever since it’s been framed at my bedside. It was taken by a friend of hers at Radio Free Europe in Munich where she was working when Mike and I visited her and Liz McNelly in the summer of ’56. Jane had meant a good deal to me since we met in high school in the late ’40s, and there were times when I thought marriage might be a possibility (she may never have shared my thought). In any case, we brought each other a lot of pleasure and laughter till she married, moved out of easy reach, then succumbed to the slow ravages of multiple sclerosis, and died in her mid-sixties. In this costumed picture, she suggests—without obvious effort—both her gift for self-parody and her genuine grace.
Finally, the night before Michael and I were to leave Munich, the third memorable event came down. We went with Jane and Liz to a loud and eventually drunken party given by their colleagues at Radio Free Europe. By midnight, my childhood fear of drunks—their noise and the unpredictability of their hate—had sent me onto the porch to wait out the remainder of the evening. A patient soul always, Jane came out and joined me in an effort to turn my dislike of her friends. What always seemed my prudery at such occasions embarrassed me, and I surely had no problem with the fact that these oddly homeless Americans and exiled Easterners were sub rosa employees of the CIA—I’ve always thought that Radio Free Europe was one of the agency’s better ideas—so I unburdened myself of a good deal of the emotional history of my Oxford months.
I’d suspected all week that Jane had realized how much Michael’s friendship meant to me, and she’d shown no sense whatever of rivalry. I know I came near to broaching the matter, but ultimately my sobriety curbed me. So with her usual will to be defenseless, Jane moved into one of our first silences to tell me of the recently ended affair she’d had with an Eastern European at RFE—a man I’d liked in recent days. I was partly glad to hear of it—she and I, like most of our friends, had been so absurdly celibate all our lives—but I also felt a sudden steep wave of recalling how much she’d meant to me in the past ten years since I’d met her in our Raleigh neighborhood. I came very near a second proposal of some sort—marriage, whatever, I didn’t quite know. She was seated on the redbrick step just below me. I leaned way down, set my chin on the crown of her head—her blond hair—and dug right in. My hands didn’t reach out to turn her toward me; she didn’t turn but her head did press back hard into my sharp chin. I’m sure I thanked her—the few plain words.
* * *
Michael and I proceeded along the sunny Rhine for a good part of our way northwest. I recall bypassing Stuttgart, Frankfurt, and Bonn; then stopping for a night in Cologne. After the lack of obvious war scars in Munich and Salzburg (the Marshall Plan had done brilliant work in the hands of the notoriously able-handed and ambitious West Germans), it came as a surprise to see the condition of Cologne. More than ninety percent of the city’s buildings had been destroyed by Allied bombs in a total of 262 air raids; and at the end of the war, when West Germany was divided into zones of jurisdiction, Cologne lay in the British zone.
The British had, understandably, slim enthusiasm for encouraging the rebuilding of a country that had plunged them into war twice in twenty-five years. So the city we reached in late afternoon—the central city in any case—was a warren of only partly reconstructed single-or double-storied buildings, towered over by the giant cathedral that had also been damaged and was black with smoke but still strode triumphant above a huddled skyline. We stayed in a cigar-box-size room with a bombed-out widow for only one night, took a walk round central Cologne in the morning; walked slowly through the cathedral whose survival may well have been miraculous, and then were off.
Late the next afternoon—of a gray day—we crossed into Holland; and once we’d braved a literally incredible swarm of end-of-work bicycle traffic (hardly a car in sight but thousands of bikes), we found another widow’s room—a hilarious old woman—in downtown Amsterdam and ate a fine supper in an Indonesian restaurant (the Dutch equivalent of British Indian restaurants—colonial survival). Then we strolled through narrow streets in the dedicated red-light district. Informed though we’d been—like so many million tourists—we were quickly shown the reality of numerous attractive young women seated in windows a few yards from the sidewalk, polishing their nails, straightening seams in their fishnet stockings, meeting our eyes with the blank penetration of alluring cats but never once smiling (was a smile illegal?). One especially young girl did turn politely aside from my smile and dissolve in laughter; I stopped in my tracks, but she never looked back—not at me. I was tempted more than once to enter the open doors by the windows, if only to prove that the women were live and could actually talk. But neither Michael nor I took the bait, maybe because by then we were very near broke.
Like several other small but site-rich countries (Israel for instance), one of the numerous likable realities of a visit to Holland is that you really need to rent only one room. Then on public transportation you can easily venture all round the country—in Holland, nothing is much more than an hour from Amsterdam. So we stayed on in Amsterdam for several nights and submerged in a piece of amazing luck. The summer of 1956 was the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth. I take it as beyond debate that Rembrandt is as great a painter and draftsman as ever lived and that, further, he was at least a
s specifically Dutch in his vision as Praxiteles was Greek.
And Michael and I were now in precisely the right place on the planet to absorb two enormous celebratory exhibitions of Rembrandt’s work. In Amsterdam we saw as many of his drawings and etchings as could be gathered back to Holland for display at the Rijksmuseum. And in Rotterdam a comparably exhilarating wilderness of paintings was gathered. A two-day gallery visit was called for in either city; and we gave them that (only the gathering of Michelangelo’s work in Rome had provided a similar chance to see so much genius in so little space—and all of it near the scene of its creation).
What was almost equally astonishing was the fact that the Van Gogh family’s enormous collection of Van Gogh paintings and drawings was on display in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum (there was not yet a dedicated Van Gogh museum). And almost as an afterthought, in another wing of the Stedelijk stood (temporarily) the original of Picasso’s huge Guernica in the midst of a lavish display of related sketches and plans. As one who’d already begun to immerse himself in the depths of seventeenth-century Europe, I’ll confess that Rembrandt and Vermeer reached me in ways that Van Gogh and Picasso didn’t, not in my early twenties. Of course I admired the more recent painters; but I wasn’t yet deeply moved by them. Still I bought a full-size reproduction of Van Gogh’s very late Crows in a Cornfield and would soon hang it in my room in Headington.
The pleasure that spread in rings round the silent landing in my mind of a genius as comprehensive as that of Rembrandt or Vermeer has never ceased nor diminished within me. But time would ripen me for a greater vulnerability to the often hectic, sometimes serene, art of the more nearly contemporary men. Even now, the older painters still move me most—largely through their power to console. I take it that any sane human life, as it moves on past—say—the age of fifty is grateful for literal help in learning that its pains, griefs, delights, and hopes are shared; and the older painters offer such experience, steady and clear.
* * *
There were further Dutch sidelights of the Rembrandt summer. Despite our happiness with the jokey widow in Amsterdam, we soon discovered a reason to move to the Hague. Because of the crowded gallery conditions in the two large cities, all the Vermeer paintings that still belonged to Holland had been gathered in the Hague in—can my memory be right?—a single middle-size room of the Mauritshuis: among them, the Girl with a Pearl Earring, the View of Delft, The Little Street, The Milkmaid, and the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
For three nights then we found a room in the home of a large and thoroughly warmhearted family—the Sanderses. In our evenings we dined with them and then played quietly ferocious games of Monopoly with the parents and children. Otherwise we walked through the small leafy city and spent as much time as possible with the Vermeers. Among those immaculate and immensely complex pictures—each of them apparently breathed effortlessly onto their canvas or panels—the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter would work steadily in my mind after the visit and play a crucial role in suggesting to me the subject of my first novel. The picture shows what appears to be a pregnant young woman dressed in blue, standing before a large map (of what distant place?) and facing a well-lit window as she reads a letter (from whom?). In the Mauritshuis I’d stand and study the picture as I’ve never, before or since, felt compelled to study any image—setting my eyes to prowl the relatively small surface with the relentless thoroughness of a spy-in-the-sky satellite.
In our final days in Holland, we visited Delft for the small-town sense of Vermeer’s life (he was born and lived there always). His father’s narrow house still stands on the spacious central square, crowded though it is with Delft-blue porcelain shops which may nonetheless provide a clatter similar to the one through which Vermeer persisted, daily, in his creation of the phenomenal silence of his pictures. And as a fitting end to the trip, we took a long walk on the vacant and windy beach at Scheveningen where Van Gogh had often worked. Then five weeks after our departure from Newcastle, we returned on choppy water from the Hook of Holland to Harwich on the southeast coast of England.
Fine as the days and the long miles had been, I was ready for a stretch of solitude; no doubt Michael was also. We each had almost two months of the Long Vac left. I’d be faced again with the question of where to stay; we’d both need to get down to concentrated study. Meanwhile it’s worth noting that we’d completed that rarest of travel ventures—a long car trip, with all the enforced closeness such a trip entails, yet one without a single falling-out. If either Michael or I felt the need of a free breath, we wandered off for an hour of reading beneath a tree; or we sped up, two rooms ahead in a museum and indulged in private viewing.
One of the travel skills I learned from Michael was the wisdom of declining to discuss paintings, cathedrals, or even mountainscapes while we were in the act of viewing them. Discussion, if called for, could occur over our next meal; any disagreements would have cooled by then. Michael’s natural quietude had no doubt engendered the skill in him years earlier—later I’d learn that he likely acquired the trait from his mother, a woman who’d spent much time alone since her husband’s death, if not before—but through a trip as long as ours, his taciturnity damped down my Southern tendency toward instantaneous babble and thus any number of on-the-road wrangles.
11
IN ATTEMPTING to reintroduce my car to England, late on an August Sunday afternoon, I experienced a first brassy taste of British bureaucratic superiority. I’d bought the car, under the strict tax regulations then prevailing, without paying the large amount of purchase tax that a Briton would have paid. I was spared the tax on the understanding that I’d export the car forever within a year. Now the customs men at Harwich attempted to assert that I’d exported the car forever when I took it to Norway and that I could only import it now if I paid several hundred pounds of tax on the spot. As I attempted to explain myself to the increasingly livid agents in a shed in Harwich, I realized that I’d exported the car for a summer journey without sufficient inquiries, on my part, as to my freedom to bring it back. I assumed my year of grace-from-tax still had more than half a year to run.
Maybe the agents were annoyed at having to work on a Sunday—and work with a university student, at that (I was getting my first whiff of British class antagonism). But faced with their demand either for hundreds of pounds I didn’t possess or else the temporary surrender of my car, I finally asked to speak with the supervisor on duty. The request further infuriated the men who were dealing with my return; but a supervisor did indeed materialize, one with even more braid on his cap. I tried a last impassioned plea for an understanding pardon, and the man relented—not of course before he read me a lengthy and increasingly chauvinistic lecture to the approximate effect that “You Americans”—shades of Mr. Leishman!—“think you can rewrite our laws for your own benefit anytime you wish. This country suffered a world war for you, we’re suffering still; and here you’re swanking around with your dollars, flouting our troubles.”
I heard some degree of justice in his lecture; but I kept silent, then apologized for my oversight in not seeking the correct prior permissions. I made no attempt to defend my military compatriots who, even as I spoke, might well be climbing aboard willing girls in Gropecunt Lane—or an alley adjacent to the very pub nearest this customs station. No doubt, by their own lights, the customs men were correct; but since my prior experiences of the English had convinced me of an extraordinary lack of the prim self-importance and the moral superiority I’d faced for the past hour, I was briefly stunned. But the instant the supervisor waved us onward, I floored the pedal and was out of his shed before he could dream of changing his mind. I should add that the car had given us perfect service on the continental roads—needing only gas, oil, and an occasional windshield wash. In fact it would give me cheerfully reliable service for the seven years I owned it—by far the most reliable car I’ve owned, in fifty-one years of cars.
* * *
A supper of the famed, and first-r
ate, oysters from the nearby beds at Colchester set me back up; and before midnight I’d returned Michael to his mother’s flat. I stayed there with them another day or two. Michael was facing his third, and final, year at college; so once back home he betook himself to the books he might have been reading all summer. And I, who also might well have spent the past five weeks in the Bodleian, merely drove myself to Oxford and surprised the landlady who’d expected me no sooner than October 1. I asked to occupy my rooms for at least the time I’d need to shave off my beard, get my clothes truly clean again, select a few books of my own to read (mainly a few unread novels by Hardy and Forster and my increasingly annotated text of Samson), and change the oil in my car.
While I’d been on the Continent, Mother had finally undergone a surgery she’d long needed—a hysterectomy and the necessary work to repair the damage done by the delivery of two very large baby boys and a near-fatal stillbirth some twenty years earlier. My letters from the time reflect a good deal of worry for her health and the guilt I experienced for having been on a European lark while she suffered. They also show that I was beginning to think of the doctoral degree I thought I’d need after my B.Litt. In the summer before my senior year at Duke I’d spent a rewarding ten weeks at Harvard, studying with the first-rate, amusing, and friendly Howard Mumford Jones—among several others. And now I wrote home to say that “I’m pretty determined to try to get into Harvard next fall” (the fall of ’57)—yet I was still working much harder on my own fiction than on Milton’s poetry.
My mother Elizabeth and brother Will in 1956 on the porch of the Rodwell house in Macon where Mother and I were born. Between them is my cousin Marcia Drake Bennett, and another family member sits in the swing which had been such a welcoming feature of my long boyhood visits. I’ve mentioned the degree to which I missed Will and Mother during my three English years (we called him Bill then, and note his white socks). The many similar photographs which they sent me in their letters did little to assuage my longing for home, nor did my frequent spells of homesickness greatly dilute my pleasure in the British and continental years. Knowing that I’d be home, essentially for good, in the summer of 1958 kept me mostly even-keeled.
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