In the early morning dark, I made a silent decision against rescue. It was the first consciously heartless adult decision I’d made. But apart from sheer blood mercy, why should I offer this man—who’d refused every effort our family had made to help him—the chance to ruin our Christmas? Finally I saw him drive slowly away. In another ten minutes our telephone rang. I knew it was he at the nearest pay phone; and I raced to lift the receiver and set it off the hook unanswered. A day or two later, we heard that he’d gone back to his wife and child, and I realized that I’d made the first thoroughly adult decision—however unlikable—in the matter of my troublesome relatives.
The second memory is better. Michael came down by train from Princeton for Christmas week. We all drove up to Warren County to dine with the remains of our kin. Their inexhaustible and unsurpassed skills at recounting family history amused Michael with the evident novelty of the memories—his own family kept few such narrative traditions—and the opportunity to see my older kin at their best convinced me once more of the rightness of my decision to wait till I’d come home to stay before commencing my own long story—I needed the voices of these subtly precise verbal masters in my ears (and even that late in ’57, the bitter feelings in the face of an ongoing thrust for civil rights that would rile half a dozen of my older male kin had not bit deep).
Michael and I also drove a few hours north to Williamsburg, Virginia to see the hard-to-believe reconstruction there of the royal capital of Virginia as imagined by millions of Rockefeller dollars. In our superior youth we regaled ourselves with condescending shots at the easy targets of thoroughly modern American faces (complete with bifocal glasses) poised atop eighteenth-century dresses or knee trousers ending in calf-clinging hose. We were more impressed at nearby Jamestown, site of the first permanent English colony in North America and the home of Pocahontas, Powhatan, John Smith, and John Rolfe (Pocahontas’s eventual husband and, alas, the founder of the American tobacco industry and a billion lung cancers).
In Virginia we found one of our 1956-style local households offering an inexpensive guest room for rent; as Michael and I had parted only four months earlier, it felt entirely natural to resume our Oxford conversation right where we’d left off. Above all I was interested in Michael’s immediate reactions to life in the States. So far he seemed to have enjoyed himself thoroughly—one of the grounds of our friendship, from the start, had been an appetite for pleasure of all harmless sorts—and he was already hinting at the possibility of searching for at least a temporary job on this side of the Atlantic. His intellectual tilt was aiming him now in the direction of international economic affairs; and in those still green days of numerous good jobs across a wide board, his chances seemed better than promising that he could go more or less anywhere he’d like to be.
Apart from the foiled late-night visit from my drunk cousin—which neither I nor the cousin ever mentioned to one another or to Mother—it had been a good visit. Home still seemed home, a relief for us all (Dad had been dead for three years now); and the thought of having Michael only a few hours up the eastern seaboard was welcome. If only I could find an affordable country house, then I’d hope for a quick introduction to the arts of teaching (since Oxford had nothing resembling the American system whereby graduate students teach lower classmen, I’d never taught a class). Three years of life in the traffic and endless dialogue of Oxford had left me ready for a stretch of country quiet. Surely the thousands of acres of evergreen forest that surrounded Duke could fold me in—me and my hope to begin the story I thought would complete a volume.
In early January ’58 I returned to New York and boarded the original Cunard Queen Mary for the return to England. She was a huge vessel but—in the dead of winter—she was nine-tenths deserted; and we intrepid few were a whole day at sea before encountering rough weather. It was only then that I learned that the fine old vessel—she’d entered transatlantic service in 1936—was not fitted with the stabilizers which might have counteracted the pitch and roll of a winter sea. So by the second morning most of the other passengers in third class (surely no more than a hundred souls) had absented themselves from breakfast—and from almost all subsequent meals, bar visits, and strolls on the rainy decks. But the ship went on, undaunted, in her pendulum rock as the cheerful staff strung ropes along the corridors for us to grab when necessary, and waiters dampened our tablecloths in the hope of preventing slippages of our plates and cutlery.
Even now I have an indelible memory of a kitchen door swinging open on a young waiter, with a full tray of loaded plates, just as our tilt went deeper than usual. His face registered a kind of amused horror as he realized he was helplessly falling. It was too late for him to do more than offer a Chaplinesque grin as he—and all his plates of English breakfast—pitched loudly to the floor. Somehow I managed to eat on (might I, at this point in an earlier century, have signed aboard a whaler or even a corsair for a few years of seasoning?).
One passenger who shared a resistance to seasickness proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable man in his mid-fifties, named Alan Campbell. I met him on our first evening at sea, and we took to one another at once—partly because he was a Virginian. Even after a long night in the bar, it was clear that he was no braggart; but eventually he said he was bound for England to accompany the English playwright and actor Emlyn Williams on some sort of theatrical tour (likely Williams’s astonishingly convincing impersonation of Charles Dickens reading from his own fiction—I’d already seen it twice, at Duke and then Stratford). It was at least another day before it became clear that this Alan Campbell was himself a successful screenwriter, one who’d worked largely in collaboration with Dorothy Parker, the famous—even notorious—poet and wit. Their most famous film was the first version, in 1937, of A Star Is Born with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March. Further, as I’d discover when I reached Oxford and looked him up in Who’s Who, Campbell had twice been married to Miss Parker—married, divorced, remarried.
The two of us spent a good part of the remaining week’s journey in the otherwise abandoned third-class saloon and did our best to amuse one another—I with stories of peculiar Oxford types like Mr. Leishman, Alan with memories of Dottie’s finest moments (she was still very much alive, they appeared to be still married, and he always called her Dottie; but later biographies of Parker indicate that their relations were always complicated by mutual alcoholism, an aspect of Alan that I never witnessed). An occasional memory of some other friend might flicker through his conversation—Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, Dashiell Hammett, Scott Fitzgerald. But he proved that very rare American—one who’d known well a number of deservedly famous men and women and could mention them rarely and casually but never in the wearisome tone of a mere name-dropper. David Cecil, Spender, Auden, and Connolly shared the trait; but they were from a far older culture and could speak quickly of, say, Virginia Woolf, Eliot, or the Queen Mother Elizabeth as naturally as you might mention your favorite rural aunt and her delicious gooseberry jam.
Alan was likewise interested in my accounts of scholarly research at Oxford and my pressing hopes to write good fiction, and he asked to be alerted when I began to publish. On the fifth afternoon we docked in France—Le Havre (or was it Cherbourg?)—for just long enough to unload a few passengers and for Alan and me to take a brisk walk round the port, one of the only two visits I ever paid to France. Then we headed back for Southampton but were delayed for almost a whole day, by adverse winter winds, in proceeding up the river past the Isle of Wight to dock again.
When we landed at last, Alan and I said goodbye with the genuine hope—on my part at least—to meet again. We never did, though we corresponded pleasantly, at widely spaced intervals, after he’d returned to Los Angeles and life with Dottie. Then in June 1963 I learned of his death in a newspaper obituary, a suicide at the age of fifty-nine. I never learned why (if anyone knew) and all I’ve learned since is something I read in a magazine years later. A neighbor of Dorothy Parker happened to be in Los Angeles
when Alan died. She went straight to Dottie and said at once “Is there anything on earth I can do for you?” Dottie said “Yeah, get me a hot pastrami on rye; hold the mayo.” Alan would have relished telling me that in the third-class saloon if he could have looked some five years forward.
What I have left of him now are these vivid shipboard memories, then a startlingly tacky card he bought on a day trip to Tijuana and mailed to me (a huge bouquet of unimaginable, stinkingly perfumed flowers), a few brief notes, and a memorable letter containing a fresh anecdote from an evening with his wife—an account that offered me a first-class Parker remark that, to the best of my knowledge, never saw the light till I published it in my novel The Good Priest’s Son in 2005. It bears repeating here—for the billions who’ve yet to read my novel—in the hope that I can lodge it in the treasury of classic Dorothy Parker remarks.
Sometime in 1962 she and Alan had been invited to a preview screening of The Chapman Report, a film based on Irving Wallace’s novel about a door-to-door survey of the sexual behavior of American women. It had, apparently, the sole distinction of being directed by George Cukor. In any case Alan and Dottie managed to sit through the entire two hours; and as they were glumly departing, a flak from the studio approached Dottie with a tape recorder—“Oh Miss Parker, the studio would be so honored if you’d give us a few words about the film.” Alan said that, without breaking stride, Dottie said “In my opinion, The Chapman Report will set fucking back fifty years.”
17
RETURNING TO A COLD wet gray Oxford, it felt entirely natural to reconnect the battery on my Volkswagen and rejoin Win and Jack Kirkby, Tony Nuttall, a few other student friends, and of course my faculty friends—David, Nevill, and (to the cool extent she permitted) Helen Gardner. I even recall my usual failure to connect with Professor Tolkien. At least once a month, I’d be climbing into the Beetle just as I saw Tolkien heading toward me from his home at number 76. I’d always ask if I could give him a lift down to Merton, and he’d always give me nothing more than a broad grin—“Thank you kindly, Mr. Price; but I think the walk will do me good” (by the walk, he meant another fifty yards to the bus stop on the brow of Headington Hill; now that I’m older than him at the time, I understand—he didn’t want to have to make small talk with a student; and by the way, he pronounced his name Toll-KEAN, not TOLL-kin as most Americans miscall him).
While I waited for my oral exam, I dutifully began to think of what lay before me if I undertook serious work on the D.Phil.—a history of the short story in English. From midway through high school onward, I’d consumed hundreds of such stories and, in recent years, an almost equal number of the Russian, French, and German stories which had deeply influenced the best writers in English. Guided now by David Cecil—who almost literally seemed to remember every word he’d ever read, certainly every plot and character—I began more reading and rereading: the often ramshackle but generally powerful stories of D. H. Lawrence, the perfections of James Joyce, stories by Hardy, Forster, Woolf; even a few living writers like V. S. Pritchett and of course Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Porter, and Welty (I’d hardly thought yet of immersing in the brief English prose fictions that came before the nineteenth century).
Truth is, though, that while the reading was often pleasing—and occasionally exciting and instructive—by then I was far more interested in the possibilities of my own work, especially now that I was freed of the weight I’d worn for two years—poor blind shackled Samson. The surviving notes for my long story show how much time I spent that winter and spring in contemplating the technical problems of what would be my first venture into long narrative. Reading those notes so many years later, I can see how clearly I was coming to realize the degree to which the story of Rosacoke and Wesley’s relationship was beginning to absorb the core of many emotions of my own and the questions my feelings raised in my own life and in the world around me. The history of fiction famously contains many instances in which male writers have successfully invented central female characters who go on to express intense thoughts and feelings in which the author himself is profoundly invested.
Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and Hardy’s Tess are the most enduring such characters; and while a few feminist critics have attempted to demonstrate that these characters are unconvincing portrayals of “real” women, they’ve hardly stemmed the flood of conviction by generations of readers, female and male, that these novels—and a good many more—produce a rich sense of complex female life. Wouldn’t almost any well-equipped novelist of either gender be to a large extent psychically bisexual—as were Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner in the narrative intensities of opera?
Why that’s so is hard to define; but when I asked the question of David Cecil, he said virtually the following, “Men are reared by women; so are women. Each of us has a mother; and in almost all societies, children are raised in the essentially exclusive company of women till they’re at least adolescent. Therefore observant men learn a great deal about women before they begin to desire women sexually; female writers are put at a disadvantage perhaps because, while they’re reared by women, they happen to be women themselves and thus spend little time in the close company of men till they’re courting or married.” I can understand why some women find such an observation difficult to accept; but if they reject it, then it would be interesting to hear why they think there are so few distinguished novels written by women with central male characters. David had earlier noted in an essay on Jane Austen that, in all her novels, she has no scene in which a man is portrayed alone and in thought; and he added that she apparently doubted her ability to achieve such a moment convincingly.
Peter Heap, early 1958, at Inkpen Beacon, the highest point at the northern edge of England’s chalk downs. The gallows that stand only a few yards from Peter in this picture were first built in 1676 to execute a man and his mistress who had, nearby, clubbed the man’s wife and son to death. When the brutal couple were hanged, it was claimed that their chained remains could be seen from surrounding counties, suspended from the gibbet. Peter had arrived at Merton a year after me; and though I was a graduate student, Peter’s two years of prior service in the British army left him only two years younger than I in his freshman year. We’d set out idly from college after lunch for a brief country ride to help us dispel winter grimness, but good talk took us farther and father onward till we wound up in Berkshire at this spot, grimmer than the weather in which I took this picture. In the years after his degree in politics, philosophy, and economics, Peter’s work in the Foreign Office would prosper; and by the time of his retirement, he was British Ambassador to Brazil. Shortly thereafter, he was knighted—Sir Peter Heap, a grateful but unexpected thing to call this cheerful old friend.
* * *
The numerous lingering events of that final term included a drive with John Speaight and Peter Heap to Peter’s family home in Bristol. I’ve mentioned Peter’s army experience, which left him with a fund of amusing memories but also the familiar English hunger for amusement from others, a hunger which renders them among the planet’s great listeners. I’ve also recalled John’s wry wit. With that gift (plus the fact that he was a perfect stereotype of the learned young man who has agreed to look funny: large ears, huge glasses, an irreparable cowlick, and a slow but winning grin), he was always a welcome companion. A few days then with two such friends, quite different from any Americans I knew—and quite different from Michael—added a helpful late set of touches to my sense of the early-postwar Englishman.
Those days in Cary Grant’s hometown (his real name was Archibald Leach, and he was born there in 1904) included visits to Bath and the nearby small city of Wells. I’ve noted my visit to York Minster and its lasting impression on me as the grandest of ecclesiastical buildings. Wells Cathedral remains for me a structure with similar irresistible power. A considerably smaller medieval space is rendered haunting by its solution, found some two centuries after the building’s completion, to the problem
of supporting the weight of the tower when signs of strain began to develop. Three inverted gothic arches were introduced at the crossing which bisects the altar; and the resulting solution to a potentially disastrous problem is not only ingenious but entirely original and ultimately a witness to an initial human failing that was met with a practical imagination that ended in startling beauty.
* * *
The remaining crucial event of those last months in England was the eruption of a first quite fervent erotic relation, this one with a man eight years my senior. He taught elsewhere in the university, and I’d met him on several relaxed social occasions early in my third year. For honorable reasons that I won’t spell out, he’d been separated from his family in Eastern Europe, had spent hard months in a prisoner-of-war camp, and had reached Britain soon after his liberation (by then his home was in Soviet hands). The experience had not only all but starved him, it was my eventual sense that it left him with intense emotional hungers and a baffling fear of feeding them.
For whatever reasons, he seemed to fend off his obvious needs. Nonetheless in some thirteen prior years, he’d worked his way up the formidable British academic ladder to a safe position. Yet I was far more drawn by a physical appearance that distinguished him, in any room, from even the most striking nearby Briton. In his strong head and face, I aroused my attraction by assuming—maybe rightly—that there was a whiff of genetic memory of the passage of Attila and his Huns through medieval Europe. In any case his appetite for long sessions of philosophical conversation could grow complicated by his insistence on dominating a round of exchanges—there was a genuine air of the warrior about him—yet he laughed often, if a little reluctantly, when sufficiently entertained; and his spoken English was perfect, though firmly accented.
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