* * *
As ever, all the same, I varied my academic labors with further reading in the classic prose fiction I’d come to need, like some vital mineral, for my own eventual writing. And my surviving notes also demonstrate how steadily I continued thinking of the story that would narrate Rosacoke and Wesley’s difficult courtship and final commitment. But by then my thesis work had become an established daily routine. By way of a regimen, Michael and I would generally head downtown soon after our giant’s breakfast. I’d park on Merton Street, we’d check for mail in the college lodge, then Michael would head for either the college’s own library or the Radcliffe Camera (the handsome eighteenth-century reading room set beside the Bodleian like nothing so much as the full-scale dome of a Roman baroque church neatly lifted off its home and set on a small green space in the midst of Oxford). He’d spend the day there, reviewing the required history texts for his coming exams.
And I’d head into the upper reading room of the neighboring Bodleian for my own final investigations of the history and theory of Greek tragedy and the beginnings of English tragedy in medieval and early-modern Britain. Even in my scholar days, a fair amount of batty anthropological speculation on the nature and origins of tragedy was available; so my reading was often less dull than it might have been (for instance, the word tragedy apparently derives from the Greek words for “goat” and “song,” and acres of trees have fallen to provide paper for the mad speculations those two roots have spurred).
During the spring of ’57, when Auden had returned for his annual three lectures—all of them superb and with their own sometimes batty moments—I might pause to have elevenses with him in his usual stand at the Cadena. Then I might lunch with Michael and other friends at George’s; and he and I would generally meet for dinner in college, at the Bombay, or at our hands-down favorite—the minuscule Tudor Cottage with its maybe six tables, a few miles outside town in the village of Iffley with its rock-ribbed and remarkably well-preserved Norman church. There we could eat the best kind of English cooking, prepared with great care for the nature of the ingredients and served in the preternaturally quiet rooms of a thatched-roof cottage (no Ye Olde Englande tarted-up stage set but an actual home with a low fire burning, when needed, in the rough-hewn chimney by its deep inglenook).
In the spring of my second year, Michael learned that he’d won a fellowship for graduate study at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton; and I learned from Rhodes House that my request for a third year of funding had been approved. I’d stressed that the completion of my ambitious thesis was a major goal; and more important, I said that I’d then begin serious work on a D.Phil.—work that would lead to a dissertation on the history of the short story in English. And since in those years, as now, it was virtually impossible to land and keep a teaching job at a respectable American university without a Doctorate of Philosophy, my proposal to Rhodes House had been honest enough (I’d even won David’s agreement to guide my work). The two developments meant that Michael would leave for the States in August, and I’d stay on at the Kirkbys’ for most of another year.
Very strangely, I don’t recall when I got a job; but at some point late in my second year (or early in my third), I received a letter from the chairman of the English department at Duke. He was contemplating a new program in freshman English and was in the process of hiring eight or nine young instructors who’d staff the course. We’d teach on three-year contracts with no hope of renewal thereafter, but the job was a start. A smallish salary was mentioned and normal academic working hours. But at least I could relax on that one pressing matter and not have to begin the enormous task of sending out dozens of applications to American colleges and prep schools (in the absence of affordable phone calls and e-mail, nothing would work but hardcopy letters). Obviously, I accepted at once and assured the chairman that I’d be available by September 1958, as he’d specified.
Meanwhile I accumulated still more notes for my long story. It was becoming obvious, finally, that the remaining reading for my thesis would prevent serious work on any new fiction in the immediate future. So I reckoned on returning to stories as soon as possible after I returned to America, which now promised to be the summer of ’58. Travel and the kinds of entertainment that had consumed so much time the previous year were more than a little curtailed, both by my academic duties and the fact that, with Michael’s upcoming finals, he was less available for assorted hijinks. But he continued his involvement with the Merton soccer club and our occasional evenings at the film society. He’d meanwhile begun to see a lovely raven-haired woman at St. Hilda’s College; and in the same spring season, he entertained in town an attractive young Vietnamese woman he’d met in Brighton (all his life, like me—though in an opposite direction—Michael’s been an unrelenting acolyte of physical beauty, though age has greatly slowed us both). These relations, as I recall, caused me no enduring pain—my relation with Michael had always assumed such developments.
My friendship with Stephen Spender grew further, chiefly by frequent letters between Oxford and London. When I felt I could take a little time from my work, I’d drive down to London for lunch or dinner with him—a concert or an opera with him and Natasha, an evening in the theatre, or a party involving his literary friends (we heard two memorable performances at Covent Garden—Meistersinger with, of all people, Joan Sutherland as a towering and lantern-jawed but powerfully sweet-voiced Eva and then a full-length revival of Berlioz’s gorgeous Les Troyens with Jon Vickers and Blanche Thebom).
And when the Spender family got access to the writer Rex Warner’s country house near Burford, I’d sometimes drive out to visit them there. One hot Sunday Michael rode with me, and I noticed how Natasha welcomed a chance to see that I had friends other than her husband—that I was a young man half Stephen’s age, very much embroiled in a life of my own and no threat whatever to her standing. Any domestic uncertainties seemed further eased by the fact that all our meetings were strung with the normal amounts of laughter. By then, incidentally, Stephen had acquired a secondhand tan Jaguar which Lizzie named Teddy; and while we commented gratefully on Stephen’s recent mastery of driving skills as opposed to Wystan Auden’s hair-raisingly awful performances at the wheel, the skills were strictly relative—there’d be more than one bad accident on Stephen’s record, though nothing that resulted in significant harm to anything, or anyone but Teddy. The main problem was a tendency to engage so deeply in front-seat conversation that Stephen forgot the existence of a road beneath him and other cars speeding toward him; David Cecil was even more alarming at the wheel.
If Natasha had needless concerns about my and Stephen’s friendship, I also learned of worries from my mother. Her friend Carolyn had lent her a copy of World Within World, and Mother promptly relayed her candid concerns to me as soon as she’d read Stephen’s account of his early relations with Tony Hyndman. I replied at once with honest reassurance; and in time—on several of Stephen’s many visits to North Carolina—she came to be especially fond of him. Her worried letter in the winter of ’57, by the way, was the only time in the remaining eight years of her life when she expressed the slightest concern to me about my friendships with other men.
In fact she mentioned marriage to me only once, when I was well on in my thirties. She said “Son, if you’re ever planning marriage, don’t wait till you’re as old as Boots.” Boots, whose name was Wilton Egerton Rodwell, was her own favorite brother, born in 1890 and thus fifteen years older than she; and from various bits of family narrative, I’ve assumed that he was born queer. Then when he was in his late forties, and a significant executive of the Seaboard Railroad, he married for the first time; the bride was his longtime secretary. To my great surprise, Mother proceeded to tell me that she knew Boots had waited too late in his marriage because—when he died of a ruptured appendix, not long after his wedding—his wife Lida told her that Boots was initially unable to consummate the marriage (after the honeymoon she’d undergone a surgical removal of her h
ymen).
My own guess has always been that he married late when he realized that his ongoing career, in that era, required a respectable wife. He may also have felt increasingly lonely; and Lida—a beautiful woman, by the way—seemed the ideal candidate for partnership. Whether there was any psychic component in his death not long after the marriage, even I won’t speculate. In any case, the peritonitis which followed the rupture of his appendix killed him rapidly in those last years before the availability of penicillin in the States (my mother had survived the same infectious assault in her late teens—the early 1920s—but she had the vigor of youth on her side).
Matthew and Lizzie Spender and Dimitri, taken by me in January ’57 on Hampstead Heath—Stephen and Natasha Spender’s son and daughter and the even younger boy, Dimitri, who was the son of Francesca, the family cook. The occasion was the same as the one recorded previously—Stephen and RP. Lizzie in the fork of the tree between the two boys has always looked to me, here, much like one of the enchanting but mysterious girls in the pictures taken so lovingly by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in his Oxford studio some hundred years before this day in London. I’ve seen Matthew happily in recent years and admired his paintings and sculptures (he lives in Italy). I haven’t seen Lizzie since she was maybe ten, though we’ve spoken on the phone lately. I’ve missed seeing Dimitri on my later trips to England.
My own early childhood memories of Boots are of a large, too-loud, always laughing giant; but my mother adored him, as did her three sisters, the eldest of whom once said to me—in innocent delight—“Lord, Bootie would rather wear Mama’s clothes, especially her hats, than eat when he was hungry!” For what it’s worth then, I can see that—in Boots—I almost surely had a queer maternal uncle. On my father’s side, there was a wealthy lifelong bachelor cousin in Chicago whom I met only once in my early adolescence but have always assumed was queer. At present I know of one other queer male cousin besides myself, one apparent lesbian, and a now dead cousin from Chicago. That makes five of us in two generations—four on Mother’s side, one on Dad’s. Potent genes may well have been at work.
I spent a second Christmas with Michael and his mother in Brighton—Anne Jordan and I grew closer as I missed my own mother more—but the quick trips to London and an occasional Sunday lunch with Redmayne constituted my travels. Otherwise during the vacs, I stayed on in my digs and was mostly working there now that my library research was largely complete. When I’d moved back to Sandfield Road in the fall, it seemed to me that Win’s décor in my sitting room was depressingly representative of the time, place, and social station—dun-colored embossed wallpaper, a dull tan carpet, comfortable over-stuffed brown chairs, and tan tiles around the fireplace. But she offered no objection when I asked to replace her garishly colored landscapes with pictures of my own. So the space gradually felt hospitable; and I could write there in uninterrupted quiet (the house had no telephone), or I could ask friends in for the occasional tea or sherry.
I underwent no severe yearning for further trips to Italy or elsewhere on the continent. The first year’s journeys—and the purchase of a car—had made a cavernous dent in my small personal savings, and only a recent reading of my weekly letters home has reminded me how nearly broke I was a good part of the time. That condition, hard as it often seemed, was an academic blessing in my second year since, again, I urgently needed to sit very still and complete the degree for which my scholarship was so uncomplainingly paying.
* * *
Through all my early problems with Mr. Leishman and my laggard progress with the thesis, I’d heard no grousing whatever from Warden Williams in the requisite once-a-term meeting with him in his large and calmly deluxe office in Rhodes House. Through clouds of aromatic pipe smoke, he’d turn his bemused gaze upon me and kindly inquire about my life, my work, and (very occasionally) my diversions. Given that he presided over the funding of more than half my Oxford career, it was no doubt intensely English of him to award me my social privacy. It would be demeaning to a good man to call it a purely dutiful relationship—he taught me nothing—but I knew that Bill Williams had no real continuing interest in me beyond that imposed by his job. He and his even more severely English wife Jill had their favorite Americans, and they made no effort to conceal the fact. That I was not among them caused me no single minute of regret. Dutiful child of the Fifties that I still was, though, I could always grin through the haze and assure him of progress, however glacial, in my work.
And speaking of glacial, I’ve hardly expanded for some time here on the two perennial problems I faced as an American from the warm-to-blistering and generally sunlit upper South. I’ve noted my tendency to melancholy through at least five or six months of the dark English year. And I’ve spoken of my hilariously inadequate electric space heater in the medieval fastness of Mob Quad. At the Kirkbys’ I at least had an Aladdin stove—a circular heater some thirty inches tall which burned kerosene (called “paraffin” in Britain). It would build up a likable, though oily-smelling, fug in whichever of my two rooms I set it in. Mostly I kept it in my downstairs sitting room, and it burned up its two-gallon tank every few winter days. The range of outdoor fall and winter temperatures in Oxford then was similar to the climate in my part of North Carolina; the difference of course was that the indoor temperature in Oxford was alarmingly similar to the outdoor.
Only in the most frigid onslaughts then would I haul the heater to my upstairs bedroom and burn it all night—with the single window tightly shut. Why I didn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning—I was unaware of the threat and no one warned me—I still don’t know; but I did sleep warmly, especially given Win’s tendency to give my door a single peremptory knock around midnight and rush in silently to thrust a hot-water bottle under the covers beside my feet. That was a service I hadn’t requested and for which she made no extra charge, only another instance of her native kindness. However spoiled I sound, none of that diminishes the severe effects of the cold and the dark. I’ve noted my college contemporaries’ indifference to the problems; but the older Britons—recall David Cecil’s long underwear—seemed to share my discomfort, if not my melancholia (for which they’d had long centuries in which to prepare genetic defenses). The standard greeting from virtually any of my older friends would be “Wretched weather we’re having, isn’t it?”
When at last I came to pack my great quantity of belongings to head back to America, I noticed—a little to my surprise—that I’d bought a number of sweaters in England; and as I wondered why, I concluded that there could hardly have been a day in the previous three years when I hadn’t needed a sweater for a least part of the day. As I listen nowadays to the BBC weather reports on the radio, I’m keenly aware of what temporary blessings Britain has won from global warming in the past fifty years. Even so, when student friends of mine from Duke go to study in England now, they invariably report on problems like mine with the outer and inner climate; and when very recently I phoned an English department colleague who was back in southeast England for the summer and eventually asked what he was doing at the moment, he said (and he’s British born) “I’m typing in my mittens.”
* * *
Nonetheless my second year was not devoid of occasional elations. Easter came in April that year; and Jim Griffin, Howard Reilly, and I spent the holiday very pleasantly at Redmayne’s cottage. For some reason she was away the entire time, so we did our own cooking and driving around in the Cotswold neighborhood—and a good deal of the late sleep with which young men of our time were afflicted (as young men still are, whenever possible). I’ve mentioned that Jim was the single member of our Rhodes class to spend the remainder of his professional life at Oxford. Howard invited me to his rooms at Magdalen once for a drink and took some delight in telling me that they’d been Oscar Wilde’s undergraduate rooms. He made no reference to any awareness of his own homosexuality; but once he’d returned to the States and won a law degree, he quit t
he law and spent some years in minor acting jobs on stage and in television commercials (he was strikingly handsome). We had almost no contacts in those later years, but I took him to see the splendid Chagall production of The Magic Flute at the Met in the late 1960s. Then there was little else—and no discussion, ever, of our private lives. Sadly, he proved the only one of us to die of AIDS, at the height of that disaster, when he was well into his fifties.
I’ve mentioned Auden’s return for the spring term and my inevitable midmorning coffees with him. This time he had a set of rooms in a Christ Church annex across from Tom Quad on Brewer Street, and shortly after arriving he sent another intercollege message to invite me for a drink. This was the time when he left me my favorite of his nearly illegible scrawled messages. I’d been asked to have drinks at his inflexible time, 5:00 p.m.; and of course I was poised on the pavement to be sure of my punctuality. As the great bell in Tom Tower began to strike five, I was advancing down the hallway toward Wystan’s door when I saw a piece of typing paper with a hole torn in it, jammed over the doorknob. When I reached the paper, I could see my name; and unwrinkling the message I could just read the following (in effect)—
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