Ardent Spirits

by Reynolds Price

  16

  WHEN I RETURNED to Oxford for the fall term of my third year, I’d completed well over half my thesis; and when I met with Miss Gardner, she was pleased with the chapters which she felt free to read. The next two months were as devoted to work as the end of the summer had been. I’d occasionally go for coffee or a curry with one of my younger college friends. I’ve mentioned Peter Heap and John Speaight, who were especially enjoyable for their quite different qualities. (Peter had done his two years of national service before coming up to Merton and had good stories of Her Majesty’s army in stations as far-flung as the old Gold Coast just before it was Ghana. John’s father was British ambassador in Bulgaria; and the droll John would return from endless train-trip vac visits to Sofia with astonishing stories of life behind the Iron Curtain and of what a tin of Nescafé could be exchanged for in Sofia.)

  Another always welcome companion was Tony Nuttall. Tony had moved into Michael’s rooms at the Kirkbys’ and was proceeding toward the completion of the unusually demanding course of classical education called Literae Humaniores or Greats, a course which consisted of a four-year immersion in the Greek and Latin languages, plus their surrounding history, philosophy, etc. and which remained—even in our time—Oxford’s greatest offering to undergraduates. Greats would be only the start of a training that led Tony onward into graduate degrees in English literature and then toward a career as one of the very few first-rate scholar-critics of his generation in Britain and America. Over many years as a devoted teacher at the University of Sussex and back at Oxford, he wrote voluminously on a wide array of subjects in the literatures of the English language and concluded his career with Shakespeare the Thinker, one of the rare books entirely worthy of its incomparable subject.

  In our year together on Sandfield Road, Tony’s chief alternate commitment was to acting with the Merton theatrical group called Floats and to entertaining friends at various women’s colleges—he was always fine to look at, with a deep-voiced wit ever ready to chuckle—but the two of us had Win’s breakfasts together daily, plus occasional films, plays, and dinners. And that was the extent of our friendship in my first Oxford stint. I never wanted an atom more from him, and it’s only been with the ease of e-mail that we returned lately to occasional nostalgic communication.

  You can perhaps then measure the extent of my shock and grief when I note that—not receiving Tony’s usual immediate reply to an e-mail question as I prepared the long paragraph above—I checked the Internet to see if he might be away on a tour with his new Shakespeare book and discovered that he had died very recently—quickly, alone in his room in New College, of a ruptured aorta—and been buried, literally, on my seventy-fourth birthday (only three months from his own seventieth). The numerous obituaries in the English press are the warmest I can recall for anyone.

  * * *

  Aside from those therapeutic meetings with friends, I was otherwise buried in work. Throughout high school, Duke, and the summer at Harvard, I’d finish an assigned piece ten seconds before it was due, then race to my teacher’s home with a steaming hot paper and abject apologies. With my B.Litt. thesis, by now I’d prepared a detailed schedule that would have me delivering the requisite three copies to a bindery up the Cowley Road early on the morning of the day it was due at the university registry—I had a promise from the binder. In my heedless youth I was pleasantly confident, but of course I’d neglected to allow for trouble. And trouble struck fiercely in early October.

  I’d driven out to Burford on Sunday for lunch with Redmayne. No one accompanied me and as I was returning to Oxford in late afternoon, I entered the roundabout at the top of Banbury Road when—like a sizable house collapsing on me without ten seconds’ warning—I was struck by the Asian flu. I’d heard that by now, even in Britain, the viral infection was approaching pandemic stage yet I felt invincible (like much of the public then, I was suspicious of the flu shot and had avoided it). It’s now thought by many epidemiologists that this strain of influenza infected more people than the Spanish flu of 1918, but the availability in 1957 of antibiotics to treat the secondary infections that killed so many in the earlier pandemic suppressed the death rate (even so it killed some seventy thousand in the United States alone). In 1957 the infection was known to strike suddenly, without warning—as it did me. I hadn’t noticed so much as a sneeze nor any coughing, not till the crucial moment.

  As I drove on down Banbury Road, I quickly guessed what was wrong and realized that I had to focus very intently if I hoped to get back to the Kirkbys’. With another two or three miles to go, I bore down hard. My vision was affected and as I passed through the main business district—nearly deserted on Sunday afternoon—I felt as though I might go unconscious at any moment. A sane man would have pulled to the curb and somehow called for help; but with my fever I was hardly sane.

  Still I made it through town and into my narrow bed on Sandfield Road. Tony must have been away from the house; but thanks to her fearless soul, Win Kirkby promptly took over and nursed me through an eventual whole bedridden week. My fever stayed too high to think of getting up for any long stretches of work—nothing essential remained but checking a few footnotes and the typing. With her brusque but generous heart, Win fed me and brought me those English-homemaker panaceas—hot-water bottles and hot drinks. Whenever I was clearheaded enough to mention the disaster that had struck my thesis schedule, Win would cluck and say “Listen, His Lordship will somehow save your blooming neck.” Far-left Labourite though she was, she still trusted in an actual lord—David Cecil—to save me. He’d come to my digs once for tea; and she’d managed—again—to knock on my door while he was there and to meet him, most respectfully (she all but curtsied).

  He might well have moved ahead with the saving; so might Miss Gardner for that matter, though she wasn’t yet a dame; but I hoped not to lean on either don. So I got up as soon as I could stumble downstairs to the task that lay strewn about my study. I’d finished the actual writing of the thesis—some 175 mostly handwritten pages lay on my desk, waiting only to be typed out in fair copy with three carbons. My strapped budget was requiring that I myself man the typewriter—the nifty but featherlight small-gauged Florentine Olivetti.

  * * *

  That first day back downstairs, with hot-drink help from Win and Tony, I managed maybe ten pages. My keyboard skills had been learned in a high-school typing class (I’ve often said that the two most valuable courses of my lifetime were Latin and typing); but my lingering fever was causing more mis-strikes than usual. I doubt that anyone younger than forty even knows what carbon paper is—or was. In the century before Xerox however, it was the only practical way to make multiple copies of a typescript; and a huge mess it was for anyone but the most deft professional stenographer. Even at my best I was surely not that; so with the necessity of carbon paper, any mis-strike would cause a significant wait while I carefully erased my original, then each of my carbon copies (taking care not to rub carbon onto my corrected pages) before I typed the corrected word on my original. In the course of the next two or three days—I still hadn’t risked driving into town—I typed another twenty or thirty pages. Then I felt the necessity of dressing and driving into college for a breath of air, the mail, and tea with my friends. That small excursion went so well that I decided I could accept Stephen’s invitation—he was recently back from Japan—to join him and the children at Bruern, near Burford, where they were staying in an immensely likable loaner house, lent them by Michael Astor.

  Mainly I recall sleeping a lot, then going with Stephen next door to dine in the Astors’ enormous house with them and a dozen of their friends. It would be my only evening, ever, with that many English aristocrats and plutocrats at a single table, though I remember only two things—first, I learned from an overnight guest as new as I to such rarefied surroundings that the morning papers were delivered literally warm to each overnight guest’s room (some soul on the large staff literally ironed your Times before it was delivered)
; and second, at the dinner table I encountered lemon wedges individually wrapped in lemon-colored netting to avoid an accidental dousing of one’s self or one’s neighbor while spraying an early course of shrimp (or shrimps, in the plural, which was then the British form unless they called them prawns).

  I returned to Oxford feeling a little restored and ready to return to the final assault on typing the thesis. Alas, I’d collided with another lurking microbe; and my departing flu made room for a full-scale new infection. I tried to ignore it and cough my way onward through the typing; but after a poor day’s work, Win’s thermometer confirmed a return of my fever. Tough as she was, Win said I truly must now see the college doctor. She guessed it right—“Here you gone and brought us all a case of pneumonia, you pitiful dog.” I obeyed, the doctor listened to my chest, confirmed Win’s guess and sent me out with a bizarre prescription: a transparent yellow liquid which I was supposed to gargle for one whole minute, then swallow the entire mouthful. I’ve never since found an American doctor who recognized any such therapy.

  If it worked, it worked slowly. Thoroughly weak again—and feeling like Milton’s version of Hell in Paradise Lost (alternate spells of fire and ice)—I returned to the Olivetti and way more than half of my waiting pages. With frequent pauses to nap on the couch, I moved ahead. But my absolute deadline was striding down on me. I got to three a.m. of the final day—no real sleep for three straight days—with some ten pages still to go, plus a detailed bibliography; and my limited supply of endurance quit. My exhausted mind and body simply told itself Forget it. So what if you don’t get the damned degree, this year or ever? To hell with the nightmare. I lay down on the sofa again; the thought of climbing upstairs to my actual bed was too chilly a proposition at this point. The Aladdin stove had at least warmed my sitting room to, say, fifty-five degrees. I pulled Win’s crocheted afghan up over me and fell deep asleep.

  Not so deeply however as to bury my apparently ineradicable Protestant conscience. My mother and brother, our extended family, the Warden of Rhodes House, Helen Gardner, David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, Michael and his mother, Win and Jack, Tony and a few other Merton friends would learn of my defection and shake their heads in degrees of emotion from bafflement to disappointment to “I told you so” conviction—This sorry lad, amusing though he might have been, lacked the shoulders to bear a scholar’s burden. He passed through here like a restless moth. Pray he manages to be a writer at least.

  So after a twenty-minute nap, I rose, completed the job, and drove up Cowley Road to find my binder waiting—a stubby square-jawed yeoman Briton of the sort who fired the first volley at Agincourt, then awaited further orders (if I’d failed him, he’d have been there all the same, having made a promise to some bloody young Yank and turned up an hour early to keep it). I returned to my digs for a shave and a whore’s bath, collected my regulation bound copies, parked illegally outside the elegant Clarendon Building on Broad Street, raced dizzily in, and laid them in the hands of the University Registrar five whole minutes before the town clock at Carfax struck an unmistakable noon (the final twelve hours of the crisis had been my own version of a Buster Keaton film). I slept through what was left of the day and the whole next night.

  * * *

  A week later Jane Savage came from Spain to stay in Oxford a few days (after leaving Munich a year ago, she’d worked in Spain meanwhile and now felt ready to return home). During her visit, I drove us once to London where we saw Olivier in The Entertainer, my third time with the play and his unfaltering sensational performance. Then bent on keeping my promise to Mother—that if I stayed for a third year, I’d come home for Christmas ’57—we took the train to Southampton. On November 29 then we boarded the old French liner, the Liberté. The ship had started life as a German liner—the Europa—in the early ’30s; the Americans had used her briefly as a captured troop ship in the ’40s, then handed her over to the French as part of the massive World War II reparations. The French line changed her name appropriately and refitted her for transatlantic service (and since a more modern reader may wonder why we didn’t fly, I noted in a letter home that a round-trip airfare would then have cost $550 ($3,850 now), a shared cabin on a good ship would cost $350 (or $2,450).

  The Liberté was hardly as glamorous as other French liners of the time—the Ile de France and the forthcoming splendid but short-lived France—but she was thoroughly adequate for our young purposes; and since she gave me only my second trip on the North Atlantic passenger run, I’ll expand a little on the nature of the old liner crossings. First, the experience was radically different from what’s offered by present-day cruise ships. Since the majority of passengers were hardly prosperous and were headed purposefully from Europe to America (or vice versa), there was none of the cruise-ship air of endless food and drink, on-deck swimming pools, and frequent ports-of-call for exotic shopping. In short the ships were not entertainment devices.

  On all the six liners I ultimately experienced, if you were traveling third class, you had your bunk in anything ranging from a small four-passenger cabin to a private cubicle. You had the use of all third-class accommodations, barred as you physically were from access to the other classes aboard. The third-class provisions included pleasant lounges with adjacent bars, reclining chairs on deck for earnest reading or conversation (with occasional visits from attractive young members of the crew bearing trays of hot bouillon), on-deck shuffleboard or badminton, a free nonstop movie theatre with brand-new films, and above all the dining room. Even on the British Cunard line, third-class food was good—far better than Oxford food to be sure. On the French ships, of course, the food—even in third class—was first-rate; and as with all the lines, you could eat as much as you liked and drink as much of the proffered wine. Then if you sat up talking with some likable stranger, sipping your drink slowly, you’d be able to wobble to your cabin after midnight and sleep through the appalling snore of your venerable cabin-mate—from Cornwall, Provence, or Poland (Jane and I didn’t share a cabin).

  Also since most ships took about five days to cross in either direction, you set your watch back or forward one single hour each midnight. Then when you reached New York, Southampton, or Cherbourg, your body was on local time—no jet lag. To my surprise in the late fall on the Liberté, I confirmed that I was a good sailor. By the mid-1950s most of the large liners were fitted with anti-rocking mechanisms that made stormy waters less a passenger threat than they’d previously been; and only once did I feel a mild case of queasiness.

  The turbulence lasted one afternoon and evening, so I missed a single meal. In fact my anticipation of the excellent cuisine was a potent cure and preventive, as was the fact that—owing to their thoughtful design—none of the ships ever seemed crowded, at whatever season. If you wanted to be alone at any point, you had no problem finding a secluded spot. I even resorted now and then to childhood play. If approached repeatedly by someone I dreaded, I’d eventually reply in a fluent but entirely made-up foreign language, thereby preventing further discourse. I thought I sounded vaguely Balkan. In any case it always worked.

  * * *

  December at home was nearly its familiar self, despite my father’s absence. Shortly after settling in at Mother’s, I drove to Durham for a meeting with my future department chairman at Duke. With marked enthusiasm, this small man with the nicotine-stained toothbrush mustache—Charles Ward, a biographer of Dryden—explained the details of the program he’d personally devised for the perennially impossible task of teaching the composition of clear and cogent English prose to mobs of eighteen-year-olds, many of whom were very much at sea in the skill. How do you teach their native language to virtually grown men and women who still can’t employ it in writing (in those days English was indeed the native language of virtually all our students)?

  While back on campus I called on two of my old faculty mentors—Harold Parker in history, a monkish bachelor than whom I never had a better teacher (and who married happily in his old age), and of course
William Blackburn with whom I’d stayed in Hampstead. It was especially odd, greeting them now in a new hat, only three years after I’d been their respectful student. They appeared to welcome me, though Blackburn—in his innate old-Southern formality and wariness—made me feel more like the boy I still was than I enjoyed. I’d be moving back to Durham in another few months, and I’d also need to find living space. With my small salary ($4,800 annually—$33,600 now), I wondered if I could find so much as a dry shoebox; but it was way too early to search.

  From the month at home, a few more details linger. The worst came with a knock on our front door at three a.m. on the morning of December 26. I was sleeping in the front room upstairs and went to the window to see who was there at this unlikely hour. No one but me had heard the knock, and soon I saw by the streetlight that one of Mother’s nephews—the family’s favorite drunk—had stepped back and was looking toward the front of the house, imploringly. Then he tried a second round of knocking. Still no one but me heard him. We all knew that he’d disappeared from his wife and daughter a few days earlier on one of his endlessly recurrent jags, and Mother had often rescued him in the past.