Reynolds, Have gone to an unveiling of the Dean’s bust, back shortly. Come in and pour yourself a drink.
Wystan
* * *
I obeyed and in fact he appeared shortly and apologetically, huffing and puffing as ever. Old Dean Jenkins was being honored in Christ Church with a commemorative bust, and it would have been insulting had Wystan not appeared. I recall almost nothing else from that meeting or most of our other numerous later meetings (strange that the most gifted person I met in Britain left so few traces in my memory beyond the startling sight of his face and a few donnish jokes from his formal lectures).
I think this first of our meetings in ’57 may have been the occasion for the only reference I ever heard Wystan make to his own sexual life (he never once alluded to mine; so far as he seemed concerned, I might have been finished off smooth below the navel). As he poured our second drinks, he launched into a grinning narrative of having brought an American airman home from White’s Bar on the High. White’s was a louche weekend hangout of airmen from nearby bases and their whores—girls who came down by train from London every Friday for lucrative weekends. The more affluent girls kept flats in Beaumont Street, one of the city’s tonier addresses—home of that jewel among small museums, the Ashmolean, and birthplace of Richard the Lionheart in 1157 and his wretched brother (later King John) when a royal palace was located on the site. Both Wystan and the airman were surprised in bed by Auden’s scout next morning when he entered to start the day. Wystan was a little concerned at the discovery and thought he must offer a word of apology and a handsome tip. But before he could mention the incident, the scout himself brought the matter up very succinctly, smiled broadly, and said that Mr. Auden was not to give a thought to the matter, not a thought.
In the remainder of the spring, apart from attending Auden’s three public lectures and joining him for an occasional morning coffee or afternoon drink, I recall mainly only a few events from a distinctly pruned-down array of music, theatre, and—what?—the literary arts. The first was a solitary drive to London in May to see Laurence Olivier in yet another phenomenal performance, this time in a contemporary play. As the third-rate vaudeville comedian in John Osborne’s new play The Entertainer—a play which Olivier had requested from Osborne—he astonished even a seasoned admirer like me, and virtually all reviewers, with the imaginative originality and virtuosity of his acting. I’d see him in the same play twice more that spring and eventually in the disappointing film. But it would be years before the public knew that, at that very time, his long marriage to Vivien Leigh was coming to final shipwreck on the combined rocks of her intermittent bipolar psychosis and his cold self-absorption—a private agony which he fed so brilliantly through the needle’s eye of Osborne’s portrait of a worse than mediocre performer, a character with the emotional stunting which Olivier may by then have perceived in his own offstage life.
The second especially memorable event occurred when I invited Auden to dinner at the Bear Inn in Woodstock. I drove the two of us up, and of course the tiny interior of my Beetle was dense with his cigarette smoke in only those seven miles, but I’d grown up in a home with chain-smoking parents and was hardly bothered. As we were seated in the helpfully bright dining room, Wystan said—in his most likable schoolmaster’s-lecturing way—that he was delighted to be my guest but that I must let him at least buy the wine. Knowing the sophistication of his taste, I promptly agreed; and he proceeded to order a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild. At the time I was way too inexperienced to realize what an investment he’d just made and what a tribute to our times together—one of the best and costliest of wines—but at my first taste, I realized that a sizable moment had arrived in my life: now I knew how good a first-rate wine could be.
Again our conversation is lost to me. I can assert a strange reality, however. In all our times together, Auden never spoke with me about Stephen (and almost never about Nevill; and he never said a word of even the mildest criticism of any friend we shared). His undergraduate friendship with Stephen had only strengthened through the years, unmarred by Auden’s baffling departure as the Second War loomed; and in the postwar years, Loudoun Road was always Auden’s resting place on trips to London. But though he knew of my quick friendship with Stephen, he never mentioned it and never remarked on any aspect of his old friend’s life or work. And it occurs to me at this moment that our conversations may have proved so unmemorable because, in fact, they never concerned any single human being known to me nor his own work.
It also interests me that, on our trip to Woodstock, I didn’t suggest to Auden that we walk the few yards over to one of the entrances to Blenheim Palace and at least look down at the grounds and the pond. I’d silently gathered that landscape was of no serious interest to so indoors a man (I did have the pleasure, months later, to walk there with a younger student at another college—David Korda, the son of Zoltan Korda, one of the famous Korda brothers of film-making fame. We never came to know each other well, though I’ll have to say that—early in his college years at least—David, with his Hungarian-Jewish genes, was as princely in his person as any man I’ve known).
* * *
After we left Woodstock that evening, I drove Wystan to my digs. We went to my sitting room and, again, talked unmemorably. To repeat, this was a time in Auden’s life when he’d only just published The Shield of Achilles with the eponymous poem still widely agreed to be among his finest. In this especially long evening, can I have had no questions or comments which elicited remarkable replies from him? Did he ask me nothing about my Milton thesis or my fiction? Apparently not—and partly maybe owing to the evening’s quantity of drink. In that department, I recall that—back on Sandfield Road—I produced a bottle which a friend had brought me from a recent recuperation on the island of Madeira. The old woman who’d sold it to my friend had told him that it was one of her own family’s finest vintages of the island’s famous wine, and indeed the heavy brown bottle had no label but was hand-lettered in spidery white paint.
Wine-innocent as I was, I showed it to Wystan and asked if we should try it. He readily said Yes, uncorked it himself, and poured us big glasses. At his first taste, he said “It’s turned to gin.” I didn’t understand what he meant and still don’t. I took my own first sip and agreed, though, that it tasted a little exotic—it was dark red but characterless. Still we’d finish the bottle soon enough—our second of the evening, in addition to our predinner gins in Woodstock (a lot of drink for me, even now). By then it was past eleven; and shortly we heard the sound of Michael returning, by bus, from his studies. I stepped to the hall and asked him to meet Auden. He joined us, Wystan poured him a glass of the remaining “gin” from Madeira, whatever it was; and when Michael mentioned to Wystan that he’d be attending Princeton next fall, Auden said very simply that Dag Hammarskjöld—then secretary-general of the United Nations—was a friend of his and maybe Michael would like to meet him (he never mentioned Hammarskjöld’s very discreet homosexuality, of which Michael and I then knew nothing).
Awhile later there was a tap at my door—Win Kirkby was checking to see if all was well. She’d known I was bringing the world-famed, as she’d have said, Professor of Poetry in after dinner; and she was ever a great respecter of titles, despite her Labourite convictions. So she too came in to meet the thoroughly boozed poet who of course rose to meet her. Then she politely declined a glass of our “gin” and went on cheerfully to bed. The seven- or eight-hour evening ended on those pleasant notes; and in the early hours of the morning, I drove Wystan back downtown to his digs. I almost knew at the time that—in a later life of excellent meetings with distinguished artists, some of them great—I’d have no other such privileged hours with a human being who was that supremely gifted, however withholding in our private conversations.
* * *
In the spring I noted, to Mother and Bill, a memorable evening when Stephen came to Oxford for a dinner at the Tudor Cottage with Michael, Tony Nuttall, and me
—followed by a visit to the Oxford Playhouse with Stephen and Tony for a not very distinguished undergraduate production of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, directed by Nevill and starred in by Vernon Dobtcheff who’d eventually have a long career of film roles as sinister males. Later in the spring, Stephen brought Rosamond Lehmann—a good novelist and a once-famed beauty and lover of Cecil Day-Lewis—to Merton to see a college production of Two Noble Kinsmen, a likable Jacobean drama co-written by Shakespeare and John Fletcher. The longish comedy was produced by students in the Merton gardens, at their most calmly luxuriant in early June; and Tony Nuttall (likewise at his most imposing) assumed the important role of Theseus. With his fine dark looks, his reliably deep voice, and his already masterful delivery of dramatic verse, Tony might well have had a classical stage career if he’d chosen to pursue one. In any case, the rough-and-ready college production was ultimately more enjoyable than Nevill’s indoor production of Faustus (as flawless a friend as Nevill always was, I’m compelled to say that his theatrical productions—including his hoped-for pinnacle, a 1967 film of Faustus with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, as the silent Helen of Troy—were often torpedoed by a garish excess).
Also in early June, the university was excited by the arrival of Robert Frost for an honorary degree. The great poet was then eighty-three years old; and because I was an agreeable student who possessed a working car, I was marginally involved in two aspects of the visit. On one of his three days in Oxford, Willie Morris and I were scheduled to collect Frost from the Warden’s quarters in Wadham College and drive him some four blocks down the street to Rhodes House where Frost was to be feted by the Rhodesters and assorted other Americans in Oxford. Our knock on the proper door was answered by the Warden himself, Sir Maurice Bowra—the “Warden of Sodom” as he was often called, a man who was simultaneously a widely known, if superficial, critic of ancient Greek and Roman literature and the author of remarkably skillful and amazingly scurrilous poems about his academic colleagues and public figures (poems that have only recently been published). He was expecting me and Willie, invited us into his foyer, and at once whispered to this effect—“The old gentleman went upstairs after luncheon here to have a brief rest in his room but has not reappeared; and when I just tapped on his door and listened, I heard no response nor any sounds of movement.”
To my and Willie’s chagrin, Sir Maurice pointed us upstairs ahead of himself—“Perhaps you should knock and call out to him in your own accent.” I looked to Willie in mute amusement—he was from Mississippi, I from Carolina, and Mr. Frost was from New Hampshire (though named after Robert E. Lee by his Confederate-sympathizing father). What chance did he have of hearing our accents? Nonetheless we preceded Sir Maurice up the stairs and listened at the firmly shut door for a moment. Then I (as Willie’s slight elder) summoned my courage—Frost was known for his testy humor—and called out “Mr. Frost, we’ve come to take you to the reception at Rhodes House.”
An all-round agonized minute of silence passed; and Sir Maurice, who was there behind us on the landing, whispered again “Oh God, has the old man died in my house?”
Then the door opened slowly and there stood the grandest head of straight white hair in the hemisphere—and the toughest face. His famous old-bear growl emitted a word or two, inaudibly. Well, at least he was alive. His hand came out to shake mine and Willie’s; and we got him safely down the Warden’s stairs and into the Beetle, on the front seat beside me. At the crowded reception he was, of course, a huge Yankee success.
Next afternoon my poet friend Ron Tamplin and I collected Auden and drove him to Beaumont Street where he was to introduce Frost’s only local reading at a packed lecture hall in the Ashmolean. It was the only occasion on which I saw Wystan markedly nervous before an appearance, but he introduced Frost most handsomely. In fact, he praised him in an unexpected way, saying that Frost was the living poet whom he most enjoyed reading. That didn’t entirely please the old man, and he let Wystan—and the entire audience—know as much in his opening words. I won’t attempt to recall them closely here (a recording may survive), but he let us all understand that he’d noted how Auden hadn’t called him the most admirable living poet. Then he proceeded to give a first-class reading.
I’d heard him read in Chapel Hill three or four prior times; before an American college audience he’d indulge in the sort of cracker-barrel New England country-philosopher imitation which was much enjoyed in the States—never reading his darkest lyrics, for instance. But at the Ashmolean he spoke of his own early days in England, with Pound and Edward Thomas; and he read a few of his jet-dark poems, especially my own two favorites, a longish poem called “Directive” which ends “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion” and then “The Most of It” which, almost literally, might have been written by Sophocles—it ambushes you that severely yet leaves you gap-mouthed with admiration. So despite the old man’s peevish remark about Auden, I left the big room happy, knowing that there could seldom have been a time—since, say, fifth-century Athens—when two poets of such extraordinary distinction had performed in the same room in immediate succession (one in introductory prose, the other in verse); and I was glad for the modest success of my chauffeuring duties in recent days.
* * *
The climax of the academic year, for 2 Sandfield Road at least, came in June with Michael’s final examinations. In those days a young Briton’s entire life—if he chose to live in the United Kingdom and work for a British employer—could be forever affected by the outcome of a week of exam papers, written in vast rooms filled with other candidates and with proctors roaming the aisles. A First would come as close to insuring early career success as anything could, a Second would prove a useful door-opener, a Third was essentially a disaster (Auden had got a Third, and Stephen had left without taking the exams; attendance at lectures and seminars counted for nothing). Calm as Michael mostly was, his anticipation of Schools had begun to build fairly visibly as the spring months advanced.
The first days in the gloomy Exam Schools, on the corner of Merton Street and the High, seemed to go well for him. On the night before he was to rise early to head down Headington Hill for his final day of papers, we’d dined at the Tudor Cottage; and Michael turned in early. Then I was awakened just after daylight by a light knock at my bedroom door. I opened on Michael in his pajamas, looking uncharacteristically daunted. I attempted an agreeable “Good morning,” but he only said “How do I look?” At first I laughed at the oddness of his question. Then I realized he did in fact look under the weather, and he went on to say “I’ve been awake most of the night; I think I have a fever.”
Win’s thermometer confirmed a high fever. From that point on, what felt like real drama ensued—the stakes were that high; we had to move quickly. By then it was nearly seven. I sped Michael down to the college doctor who discovered a long scratch on his leg. Michael and I quickly recalled an entanglement in riverbank thorns a week ago when we’d gone punting. Ah-ha—at once the doctor diagnosed the problem as erysipelas, an acute bacterial infection. From the doctor’s office Michael phoned his presiding tutor, Roger Highfield. When he learned that Michael was upright and conscious, Roger urged him to turn up for the day’s papers and do the best he possibly could. Allowances would ultimately be made; if Michael were to quit now, however, he’d almost surely get an aegrotat degree, one awarded without class ranking but in acknowledgment that the exams could not be completed because of illness.
We raced back to Sandfield Road, Michael got himself into the requisite Schools attire (dark suit, white bow tie, commoner’s gown, a mortarboard); and I delivered him to the Schools building by nine. Then I took myself to the chemist’s for the prescribed antibiotic (the doctor had given him an initial injection). In brief Michael made it valiantly through the last of his five days of papers; and when he returned to Oxford in midsummer for his viva voce exam (the oral), the committee of examiners “vivaed” him through to an honorable high Second.
15
&nb
sp; I SPENT THE LONG VAC almost steadily at work, initially in Oxford. Stephen had asked me to write an omnibus review of several novels for Encounter; and I readily undertook the task—reading Camus’s last novel The Fall and Iris Murdoch’s second and writing about them with the deplorable condescension so endemic to the reviewer’s trade. The fact that Camus might have read my review before his early death only some three years later has always troubled me—Encounter was widely discussed in intellectual France; and while no one there would have heard of me, any bad review is a bad review. And at Redmayne’s in Burford, I’d soon meet Iris Murdoch with her recent husband, my friend John Bayley from New College. If Murdoch had read my notice, she cheerfully forgave me as the twerp-in-training I’d soon decline to be again.
I knew that Stephen would leave in late August for a long lecture trip to Japan, and I made a few evening efforts to see him in London before his departure. Much the most impressive was a chance to see Peter Brook’s production of Titus Andronicus yet again when it was revived at the huge Stoll Theatre in London for a few weeks in July ’57. It was my third chance at this revelatory production of a play that had for so long been considered unproducible tripe. Before the performance Stephen sent a note backstage to Vivien Leigh, saying we’d like to come round at the final curtain and see her. Not ten minutes later a young man came to Stephen’s aisle seat and said that Lady Olivier would welcome us with pleasure.
Her performance as Titus’s daughter Lavinia, earlier at Stratford, had been derided by Kenneth Tynan—Leigh’s pursuing critical night-mare—as a travesty of the role’s demands for horror. In contrast to her husband’s sulphurously powerful Titus, with its great speech “I am the sea” and his quite credible amputation of a hand, Leigh’s portrayal of Titus’s daughter—raped, with her tongue and hands shorn away—was far more unreal. Her Lavinia was balletic in its stylized beauty and enforced silence in the face of Olivier’s bellowing realism. As Leigh saw it, Lavinia had more than half preceded her father already into some imposing but fearful afterlife; and from here, my memories of her appalling grace are stronger than my surviving pictures of him.
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