Ardent Spirits

by Reynolds Price

  After we’d talked at a couple of student parties, we began to meet for dinners, movies, and country drives—trips on which I was soon giving my second round of Oxford driving lessons. Soon I could hear the familiar sounds of a strong magnetism clamping down on my mind. His name was Matyas and in late February he invited me to join him on a trip to London for a luncheon with Sir John Gielgud—he’d met the great actor a year or so earlier. It was a small party in Gielgud’s narrow house on Cowley Street just behind Westminster Abbey—four guests in all, I think, including the young actor Brian Bedford who’d been Ariel to Gielgud’s recent Prospero in a London production of The Tempest (which I’d seen with another Oxford friend).

  There was excellent food served by an all-purpose butler; and of course there was much laughing theatrical talk and banter followed by coffee upstairs in the sitting room where a beautiful, perhaps Pre-Raphaelite portrait of Gielgud’s great-aunt the actress Ellen Terry in her exquisite youth, hung over the fireplace (I’m unsure whether it was by Millais or by her first husband G. F. Watts). I was agreeably surprised by the fact that, as we all sat—eased by modest amounts of midday wine—Gielgud began calmly to tell us about his notorious public shame only four years earlier.

  There’d been no comparable scandal in the upper reaches of the British theatre since the trials and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde half a century ago (and Gielgud had been the peerless actor in postwar revivals of Wilde’s comedies). Sitting in the warm safety of his home, hearing an eminent artist describe a personal disaster—and no later account that I’ve encountered contradicts it—we learned first that Gielgud’s knighthood had apparently been delayed by the government’s fear of his discreet but well-known homosexuality. Olivier, who was three years his junior, had been knighted years earlier, as had Ralph Richardson; and Gielgud was arguably their superior, certainly their equal. But in the swirl of artistic events and honors that attended the coronation of Elizabeth II in the summer of 1953, Gielgud at last became Sir John.

  Then early in the fall, he was arrested for importuning a plain-clothes policeman late at night in a men’s room in Chelsea. I recall only one thing he said about that moment of entrapment. He smiled slightly and said “I looked at the gentleman standing there and said to myself ‘Not my type.’ Then I told myself ‘Who am I to say “Not my type”?’” Since no physical contact occurred, the punishment was merely a small fine rendered in a magistrate’s court a few hours later. The significant punishment descended in a flood however, as news reached the papers.

  In recounting the story to us—four younger men, only one of whom I knew—our host focused on the immediate aftermath of the revelation, as he returned to his Cowley Street house alone. In Sheridan Morley’s authorized biography of him, Gielgud says that his first thought was suicide. I doubt he told us that. What he did say, without an audible trace of self-pity, was that—when the early edition of the Evening Standard hit the streets—he waited and waited for the phone to ring. Where were all his friends from the highest echelons of theatrical life? None of them phoned, though he did allow that “Many of them, to be sure, were likely still asleep.”

  At last Dame Sybil Thorndike—the elderly doyenne of the British stage and Gielgud’s colleague in an immediately forthcoming play—phoned sympathetically and refused to hear of his not attending that evening’s rehearsal. He went, the scandal mounted to hysteria in some quarters; but he somehow survived and continued, not merely in A Day by the Sea but in the succeeding months. In Gielgud’s after-lunch account, there was a coda that tasted a little bitter after his report of Sybil Thorndike’s kindness.

  Shortly after the play opened, the Queen Mother Elizabeth was scheduled to attend a performance. Just before the play began, the stage manager entered Sir John’s dressing room and asked if he’d please send the Queen Mother his regrets and not appear with the remainder of the cast when her Royal Highness came back to greet the actors (she was, by the way, known for liking queer men). Having no wish to embarrass a royal, Sir John of course sent a polite message—he was physically indisposed. When the great lady had said all her greetings, however, she turned to the bumbling stage manager, handed him her armload of flowers, and asked that they be taken as soon as possible to Sir John. And they were (the word bumbling is my own; Gielgud did not characterize the little man’s timorousness).

  The entire account of his humiliation can have taken no more than twenty minutes before he smiled again and stood to offer brandy. If I ever knew, I no longer recall why Sir John chose to tell us—surely none of us asked him. Reading Sheridan Morley’s careful chapter on the episode and its lifelong effects on a man of such distinction, I can imagine at least that Gielgud was unburdening himself of a heavy weight (he hadn’t mentioned that his mother was alive at the time of his shame). With how many others in the London of 1958 could he speak of the episode? Perhaps even more important, he was offering us, his young guests, a serious warning—a by no means uncalled-for warning.

  John Gielgud, who shared eminence with Laurence Olivier as a classical actor on the British stage of the late twentieth century. I saw him in King Lear, The Tempest, and in Graham Greene’s The Potting Shed; and among several meetings, I spent an extraordinary afternoon with him (and a few others) in his London home near Westminster Abbey in the winter of ’58. This studio photograph, from 1961 by Jeremy Grayson, captures his famous profile with the imposing nose which he always called “the Terry nose,” a gift to caricaturists. Through his mother, Gielgud had inherited the genes of the Terrys—an enduring English family of distinguished actors, including Ellen Terry, Sir Henry Irving’s partner through decades of distinguished Shakespearean performances (Gielgud was her great-nephew).

  Morley gives considerable evidence for thinking that the British police of the early to mid-1950s were engaged in an all-out assault on homosexual behavior, perhaps exacerbated by the arrest and conviction in 1953 of Lord Montague and three of his friends for alleged relations with two airmen. I can’t speak to the possibility that Gielgud was implicitly warning us; I don’t recall hearing any warning from him (nor from any other queer friend at the time). Morley spells out in painful detail the degree to which Gielgud—despite the enormous successes, especially in films, of his later years—was forever blighted by his arrest and left unwilling to discuss it, or his own sexuality, publicly however widespread the awareness of homosexuality became in the decades before his death.

  What I do know is that, after all these years, those quiet minutes—in a thoroughly private space—are the only time I’d yet heard an unquestionably great artist (and a great man) uncover the core of a personal tragedy. My gratitude is still considerable, for the trust involved, reckless as it might have been. I was after all a stranger, brought to his home by a man whom he hardly knew. We might have abused his confidence and caused him further embarrassment. What I’ve brought forward here, seven years after his death, is plainly meant by way of praise (and while my relation of Gielgud’s private account differs in a few minor details from Morley’s, I confirm my own memory).

  * * *

  For some time John Craxton and I had harbored vague plans to drive to Cornwall and take a boat out to the Scilly Isles. After another trip to London during which I introduced Matyas to John, back in Oxford I urged Matyas to make a party of three with me and John in the islands during the Easter vac. The Scillies were scantily inhabited then, not the tourist resorts they’ve since become; and John had stayed before on the island of Tresco with a warmhearted fisherman’s family—the Bill Gibbonses—in their small cottage. Matyas pled hopeless busyness but at last agreed, so John made the arrangement with Cathy Gibbons; and though Matyas tried to cancel at the last minute, I laid siege for his company and prevailed.

  John joined us in Oxford, and early one morning we set out for Cornwall—Penzance and Land’s End—in gloomy damp weather. At the time I was the only one with a driver’s license, so I manned the wheel one whole long day and night on a good many two-lane roads
that were even more excruciatingly slow than usual. Still we made only occasional stops for pub food, toilet calls, and stretches. We were aimed for an early-morning mail-and-supply boat that ran every few days from Penzance to the islands, and we just made it—parking my car in a waterside lot and boarding the boat almost as it pulled away from the dock (how could I trust that my much-loved Beetle would still be there when we returned?).

  The crossing lasted for a turbulent three hours as we entered the Gulf Stream that flowed north past Land’s End and rendered the Scillies not merely the westernmost outpost of Britain but quasi-tropical in their climate, by comparison with southern England at least. Matyas managed to sleep on one of the small boat’s inside cushioned benches. John and I spent most of the time on deck, absorbing the chill spray and waiting impatiently for the first glimpse of the islands. At last the boat beached us and our slim luggage unceremoniously on Tresco, and John led us toward our lodgings. The walk took us past the island’s lush garden adjacent to the local manor house and chocked with almost alarmingly healthy palm trees, large cacti, and various other entirely unlikely seeming plants for such a latitude.

  Our hosts and their children met us with an equivalent warmth. And a fine ten days commenced—lots of reading, naps, walks round the mainly empty island: a few more cottages, a tiny village center with a post office, and one or two miniature shops, a small church, and numerous areas of shoreline that would have been ideal for swimming had the early spring water not been dauntingly cold (Gulf Stream or not). Otherwise we had one another’s affable company and Cathy’s good plain food—huge breakfasts, elevenses, lunch, high tea, and a big supper which was always centered on whatever fish Bill brought in from the sea that afternoon. I recall that he returned once with a fresh-caught bucket of anchovies—small long silver fingerlings. Kathy boiled them up quickly, mashed them into a kind of butter, and served them with our tea on her homemade bread. I think I heard, years later, that Bill had drowned at sea.

  In the attic room of the cottage, I had also the fulfillment of my main hope in the trip. Matyas and I turned our prior uncertainty into an actual intimacy. Despite the fact that I’d turned twenty-five in February, it was my first experience of employing my body in one of its grandest jobs. There was, in a single important sense, no future for the acts in any true marital way (we could obviously propagate no children); and since I’d be departing for the States in June, our acts—however expressive of desire and affection—were hardly likely to be one of the main fuels of an enduring love. But as I already knew, any form of physically harmless sexual union between willing adults may well breed—literally—a number of good things. My writing had already greatly benefited by a few such affections; and the heated relation which Matyas and I chose to begin on Tresco would likewise prove fecund in very different ways (sex between two men is, in one pure sense, the ideal male sex act, productive of possible affection and a quick intense pleasure—an act that’s therefore profoundly different from female sex, likely as that often is to result in the commencement of a child’s life).

  And when I speak of fecundity, I’m not at all suggesting some vaporous metaphysical ecstasy—some seventeenth-century fantasy of souls uniting in midair above the bed, the grass, the sandy verge of an ocean beneath the little flesh with which I’d so far joined. What I knew by the spring of my third year in England was the vital relevance for me of intimate union, not only for its powers of simple invigoration through the heights of physical pleasure (with accompanying talk and laughter) but also for my own adult self-respect and the ongoing growth of my work. That pleasure affected deeply the rhythmic vigor of sentences on a page as they attended closely to the precise moral implications of my subject at any given moment in my story. The fact that the unions I longed for were then gravely illegal—in Britain, through much of continental Europe, in the States, and most of Asia—was a fact that hovered at the edge of my awareness of a powerful need; but I was hardly deterred.

  Even when love was out of the question—love in the sense of a relation that’s likely to endure, ripen, and alter with the decades—my realization that a sane and mainly admirable creature was desiring my body (and outright using it for his own purposes) helped me award myself at least a minimum of self-esteem. And that’s a quality which I, like most everyone I know, am generally a quart low on. I don’t think I’ve been much of a self-hater, though my adolescence had the usual stretches of in-turned self-consumption. Neither have I often stood before any of the available mirrors and preened in the glow of my imagined perfections. But my reflection, through the years, in the eyes of a sane lover—sane and not self-loathing—has taught me considerable amounts about my deplorable qualities and failings and has likewise encouraged me to shore up whatever genuine benevolence is left in my soul.

  * * *

  Through my remaining weeks in Britain, I packed in all I could while still pursuing the excitement of knowing Matyas (he no longer gave serious signs of resisting my aim). I also kept a steady amount of reading under way. I saw as much of David Cecil as he and I could manage. I worked on my notes for the pregnant-girl story, and I learned a great deal from a small passage with Nevill Coghill. In the post-Christmas weeks, thinking that Nevill might well be one of the three oral examiners of my thesis, I avoided the friendly evenings we’d become accustomed to having—in Oxford, Stratford, wherever. Eventually he sent a note and asked if he’d somehow offended me. He likewise invited me to tea. When I went, he asked again about any offense he might have caused; and I explained my recent disappearance—I didn’t want to press my friendship to the fore in any decision he might have to make on my thesis. He heard me out, frowning; then smiled his tooth-filled grin and said “But Reynolds, you’ve been my honored friend for nearly three years. You don’t think that if your thesis were poor, I’d fail it, do you?”

  If anyone had asked, I’d have denied possessing any shred of whatever Protestant Puritanism might lie among my origins; but no, here and now I was momentarily shocked by Nevill’s question. Smiling though he was, I could hear that he was dead earnest; and suddenly I realized that what he said had been clarified in a sentence I’d encountered in an E. M. Forster essay—“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

  My own later years of teaching, and life, have sometimes left me unsure of my total agreement with either Nevill or Forster (though when I insert the word mother, father, son, or daughter, then disagreement would prove impossible); but sitting on the other side of a Coghill family teacup, I’d glad I thanked my friend for his brave and instructive wisdom. (Years later I read about the 1980s revelations of treason among a group of Cambridge faculty and students—spy activities involving the betrayal of British and American military secrets to the Soviet government—and then I’ve had even more complicated situations in which to test Forster’s maxim: one of the notorious Cambridge spies, for instance, was later a firm friend of mine, though I scarcely knew of it till after his death.)

  In mid-February 1958, Nevill indeed proved to be one of my examiners—the other two were strangers—and at the end of a lively hour-long viva in the lobby of the Examination Schools, all three of them approved my thesis with no apparent pressure from my loyal friend. I was an unofficial Bachelor of Letters; the official award would occur in a begowned ceremony in Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre later in early May. I’d made my return, however belated, on the generous trust of the Rhodes Foundation, my teachers thereabouts, and my kin and friends at home. Further I’d proved to myself that I could stand in countervailing winds, most of them self-generated, and complete a job that had grown increasingly baffling for me—baffling in the sense of Why should I be doing this? But now—whether or not my high-school decision to pursue a lifetime of writing and teaching would prove feasible—much remained to be seen.

  18

  IN ANY CASE I’d celebrated my first professional publication in March of ’58 whe
n Encounter published “A Chain of Love.” It was a long story for any magazine, and it won a good deal of attention to itself. My Oxford friends and teachers were especially responsive, the BBC’s weekly magazine The Listener (whose literary editor was the distinguished writer J. R. Ackerley) took brief note of the story, a rare form of praise; and responses from the States included an offer of a contract for a book of short stories from Hiram Haydn, the famous editor in chief at Random House. Diarmuid recommended immediate acceptance, though he’d declined Cass Canfield’s from Harper’s. Hiram’s offer came with a five-hundred-dollar advance—serious riches in comparison to my recent bare fortunes. After the slow progress of my academic life, my literary life felt suddenly transfused with high-class hope.

  * * *

  It’s clear, I trust, that what remained of my three-year residence in one of the Western world’s most distinguished and venerable universities would hardly be spent in academically intense pursuits. A considerable amount of time was spent with Stephen—and in a hard period of his life. Through a good deal of ’57–58, he’d been attending various maddeningly pointless cultural conferences, especially in Japan. It had been his first visit to that opulent and almost incomprehensibly contradictory culture; and while there, he’d met a young man in whom he’d rapidly invested a great deal of emotional energy.

  The man, Osamu Tokunaga, had likewise quickly attached himself to Stephen; and in Stephen’s letters to me and in our later conversations, Stephen made it clear that he himself was in a personal dilemma. There were two problems—he felt an intense attraction to Osamu; he also felt that his home life was becalmed. From what he told me—and from the fact that he made a second trip to Japan on the heels of the first—I began to feel that only the youth of the Spender children, and the necessity of making the money to support an estranged family, was restraining Stephen from a drastic new arrangement.