Given the fact that we’d met little more than a year earlier, I was complimented by the trust Stephen seemed to place in my advice (I see now that he had few older confidants for such a crisis, perhaps only Isaiah Berlin who stood high among respected British intellectuals of the time). I was still twenty-five; Stephen would soon turn fifty. I hadn’t then grown as familiar as I’ve since become with a Western middle-class male tendency to midlife crisis—what I’ve since had reason to believe is a true male menopause (probably a psychic rather than a physical change; I know—I eventually had one). In any case I’d never met Osamu; but I was compelled to tell Stephen that, quite apart from the inescapable nature of his family commitments in England, his persistent thoughts of a future with a young Japanese man—perhaps even life with Osamu in another country—seemed to me hopeless.
I doubt I added the other relevant words, reckless and cruel to everyone involved, himself included. I could see he knew them better than I and recited them many times an hour. Still, he agonized for months; and as the next ten years would play out in Stephen’s life and work, the brief confusion surrounding Osamu seemed a major forecast of the humiliation attendant upon Stephen’s confirmation of rumors whose roots he’d pursued for years—the possibility that the CIA was in fact the principal founder and continuing support of Encounter, a support whose admission many of his far-left friends and enemies had urged upon him well before he at last believed it.
Whenever Stephen was in England, I’d drive to London for more lunches or dinners and evenings at the theatre. We saw, for instance, Graham Greene’s The Potting Shed with John Gielgud and Irene Worth, a mediocre play and a good performance marred by a smattering of audience laughter when Gielgud’s character began asking questions on the order of “What can be wrong with me?” At that time, for professional reasons, Stephen was seeing a good deal of Irene Worth, a native of Nebraska who’d succeeded in the British theatre (he was then translating Schiller’s Mary Stuart for Worth); and I joined the two of them in several talkative dinners, at one of which I confronted my first boiled artichoke—the culinary equivalent of encountering your first fried Gila monster: how do you approach it? Worth’s friendliness was always, and often tiresomely, laced with the standard actor’s fury—in her case, at such-and-such an acting colleague or director. She could well have used an awareness of Helen Mirren’s later remark about herself—“I’m famous for being cool about not being gorgeous.”
I’ve noted that Stephen and I heard Joan Sutherland in Meistersinger. Before the spring was over, my Merton friend Jeremy Commons took Stephen and me to hear Sutherland again, this time in Handel’s Alcina in St. Pancras Town Hall (as I remember). Handel had long been among my prime composers; and Sutherland herself sang memorably, without the mannered drooping diction that would spoil so much of her later work. But several of the surrounding cast were amateurish, and the sets were minimal (Jeremy would later become friends of Sutherland and her husband Richard Bonynge; and though he returned to his native New Zealand to teach, he’s managed to work frequently with Bonynge on textual and historical questions relating to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century opera).
In those last months I relished Wystan Auden’s annual visit—his usual superb lectures and a hilarious evening when I hosted a four-man dinner at the quiet Tudor Cottage in Iffley. Apart from Auden, the guests were John Craxton and a friend of his called Brin who’d come from London for the occasion. Brin was an Irish country boy and a member of the Queen’s Irish Guards, quartered in London. Possessed of a recognizably Celtic gift for tale-telling, Brin regaled us with stories of the means whereby many of the Guardsmen—miserably paid as they were—scrounged a fair amount of spending money by making themselves available for sexually active evenings with well-to-do male civilians whom they met mostly in pubs around Piccadilly Circus. His best story—and I can tell it here because Brin died many years ago—involved his beginning an affair with a well-known American film director whom he met in Hyde Park (decently, he declined to give us his name).
The director was then making a film in London; he and Brin began at once to meet for sex. Soon the director introduced Brin to his wife; and in short order Brin and the wife were meeting for their own intimacies. Brin assumed that these encounters were secret from the husband; but when the director completed his film, he invited Brin to a dinner in the couple’s hotel suite; and as the climax of the evening, the director and his wife jointly presented Brin with an engraved gold watch which made it quite clear that both husband and wife had, at some prior point, learned of one another’s meetings with Brin.
For me, it was a fascinating glimpse of a wholly new world when I realized that this Irish country boy, born into grim poverty, saw all such meetings—the one-on-one Piccadilly dates and the involvement with an American couple—as exhibits in a personal and highly comic Vanity Fair. Yet for all the comedy, and its pictures of human beings at their most helplessly abandoned to desire (a state about which I’d lately learned a fair amount), Brin anointed his accounts with a patently genuine degree of affection. He had clearly felt some degree of understanding of his clients’ needs and had been glad to be of service. Even his account of evenings with “the Mad Major,” whose exotic requirements I’ll spare the reader all knowledge of, was astounding but accompanied by Brin’s quiet chuckle. His short strong body and cheerful face were among the few possessions he could offer an interested world (he had a steady girlfriend, all the while—a Cypriot, I believe).
* * *
Late in the spring term, David Cecil gave a small dinner in his rooms in New College—six guests. Auden was guest of honor, and the others were undergraduate writers and perhaps John Bayley. This may have been the occasion on which I met Julian Mitchell who’d later become a successful writer of plays, films, and novels. Years later he’d visit me several times in the States and become a close friend. John Fuller, the poet, was likewise present; and the evening went ahead pleasantly—late sunlight poured through the windows—with a good deal of good-natured jokery.
As we neared the end of the wine and poetry, Auden lifted his head a little backwards—a sure sign, I knew by then, that he was about to deliver either a serious Auden dogma or a witticism. He then proceeded to tell us that he was proposing an emendation in Milton’s supreme pastoral elegy “Lycidas.” In the penultimate line, the traditional text of the poem has always said (and I give it in its seventeenth-century spelling; the word spelled blew is our word blue)—
At last he rose, and twitch’d his Mantle blew;
To morrow to fresh Woods and Pastures new.
“I’ve always suspected,” Auden said, “an error in the line; and I propose the insertion of a semicolon after the word twitch’d.” He then stood in place, gave an exaggerated twitch of his head, swept an imaginary mantle behind him with a broad wave of the hand, and began to say his goodbyes. I took the joke as a reference to my Miltonic interests. It was also clearly an adolescent textbook-Auden parody of the donnish absurdity he’d been teasing (however quietly) since his return to Oxford. We all stood, laughing, to see him off—tottering a little dangerously as he descended David’s stairs, entirely alone in the still-bright early summer evening.
A further deep look into Auden’s nature came at the end of term when he asked if I’d drive him and his sparse luggage to the station for his train to London and thence to New York. When I went to collect him from his rooms in Brewer Street, I asked him to sign a copy of his collected shorter poems. He signed himself “With love, Wystan Auden” which touched me—I hadn’t expected so much. But as I stood waiting, I looked round at two rooms in a state of disarray that I’d never before seen generated by any human being. And Wystan had only been in residence for two months. The desk, the floors, the tables, and every other surface were inches—if not feet—deep in abandoned books, magazines, clothing, galley proofs, dirty dishes, whatever. My face may have betrayed my literal shock; but Auden only gave a brisk wave above the chaos and said “If you’
d like to come back later and see if there’s anything you want, by all means do” (in those days Oxford rooms were almost never locked).
I drove him to the station, sat with him there in the gloomy café for a heavy mug of tea and twenty minutes of the very one-sided talk I’d always had with him—friendly on his part but entirely self-centered. Toward time for the train, I asked if he had any advice for the start of my teaching career; and rather surprisingly he said that if I felt attracted to any of my American students I must be especially careful in arranging private meetings. He expanded by saying, as I recall, “An English or European boy will politely decline an invitation if he suspects that a pass is likely to be made and is sure that he’ll wish to decline. A young American may knowingly accept the invitation, then appear surprised and even shocked at a pass.”
I nodded my bemused thanks for the information, then helped him and his tattered bags aboard the train. Straight afterward I returned to his rooms as he said I might. In the end I couldn’t bring myself to look for long through the indescribable and, in places, filthy mess. I collected two or three paperback books with penciled notations in his near-illegible hand, then abandoned the job. If I’d had more patience, I could likely have gathered a hundred pounds of lucrative items for future years but, foolishly, no.
As I left I wished only that I’d brought my camera, if only to have future proof of this great poet and critic’s potential for private disorder (later I read of Beethoven’s own notorious shambles in his frequently changed Vienna lodgings, the only parallel I’ve since heard of to Auden’s chaos). How does the mind of a genius—and Auden was the single unquestionable genius I’ve known—function in the midst of such external confusion? He’s known to have said he hated the self-generated havoc but found it inevitable; and it seems to have accompanied him throughout his life, wherever he paused for more than a day. Stephen was bad enough—when he left at the end of any stay at my home, I’d spend half a morning collecting his left-behind clutter; but compared with Wystan, Stephen was obsessively neat.
* * *
In the bright warm weather of May and June, Matyas and I continued our relation with trips to London to see the Moscow Arts Theatre in Russian-language productions of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. I read the plays carefully again before seeing them; and the performances were so splendid that I had the illusion, throughout, of understanding every sentence—if not every word. Back in Oxford we took long country rides (Matyas would soon be ready for his driving test); and we sometimes shared our delight in each other with the clouds and weeds. Such sharing was hardly wise, considering that male-male contact was still punishable in Britain by substantial prison time. And though the famous Wolfenden Report had appeared the previous year, recommending that sexual contact—in private between consenting males over the age of twenty-one—should be decriminalized, it would be another ten years before those recommendations became law and another forty-three years (in Britain) before the legal age was reduced to sixteen, the same as for heterosexual acts.
Before those weeks I’d been a thoroughly private man. Now, though, I carefully filed away mental images of places where physical delight reached memorable heights for Matyas and me. There was one particular Sunday afternoon on a flank of Boars Hill. The hill was a sedate but still-posh Oxford suburb, the sometime residence of distinguished turn-of-the-century poets and scholars. Robert Bridges, the poet laureate who’s now remembered mostly for having edited and published the great poems of his college friend Gerard Manley Hopkins, had lived on the hill for many years and died there in 1930. Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who either discovered or invented (as some scholars believe) Minoan culture in ancient Crete and published an exhaustive four-volume account of his findings, had survived till 1941. And Gilbert Murray, who’d long been the presiding scholar of Greek literature, had survived till almost exactly a year before the day I’m describing.
Bridges died at eighty-five, Evans at ninety, and Murray at ninety-one. In my own time there, yet another poet still lived nearby—John Masefield—and Nevill had recently told me of a visit to the old man. As tea ended and Nevill rose to leave, Masefield handed him a small new volume of poems. Nevill had not heard of their publication, and he expressed surprised pleasure. Masefield said “Ah yes, you see I’m like an old clock. My hands have fallen off, and no one tells time by me anymore, but I go on ticking.” So he did—to almost eighty-nine.
Yet for all the hill’s placid suburban air, even in the Fifties it harbored wild fields covered with new summer weeds and their various flowers. Matyas and I laid ourselves down there on a particular warm Sunday and took the nearest we could come to full pleasure in sight of the sky and anyone who might have happened to pass. In those high-class purlieus, no one seems to have done so, though I’ve wondered more than once if there could be a snapshot lurking in an aging box of someone’s scraps, recording the moment of two young men far gone in gravely illegal affection. In any case, there’s a vivid picture in my own skull still, safe behind my good eyes.
* * *
Not long after, I drove Matyas north to St. Andrew’s, the Scottish university where he’d agreed to serve as an examiner. We proceeded as speedily as we could manage on the highways of the time till we landed in a handsome seaside town. While Matyas examined students nearby for several days, I roamed the town’s lanes and numerous bookshops in surprisingly balmy weather and ate my take-out pub-sandwich lunches among the ruins of a medieval cathedral. Then when it was clear that Matyas would need more time for his local job, I turned back toward Oxford.
On the return I felt so sad to be alone that I paused on the long slow trip only for gas. I even sped past the tourist-hallowed sites of Wordsworth and the other Lake poets, and I was a man—still am—who revered Wordsworth second only to Shakespeare and Milton. The eventual dizziness of hunger did stop me once somewhere in the grimly industrial Midlands for a truly ghastly meal in a laborers’ café. When I entered and sat, the locals and the waitress were loudly enjoying themselves; and I seemed to be invisible to them. Only when I indulged in a loud stage cough did the waitress step over, tell me that there was still toad-in-the-’ole; but “All vegges are off.” I usually enjoyed such surroundings; but now I could only bolt down the barely warm meat pie and return to the road, aiming to reach my own narrow bed before another dawn. I was not only dead-tired but likewise on the outskirts of falling in love.
Compelled as I was, by the time I’d threaded my way through Coventry I knew I was dangerously exhausted. I’d already fallen briefly asleep at the wheel more than once. When I was back in the countryside then, I pulled into an apparently unoccupied clearing surrounded by dark trees. It was nearly one a.m. I locked myself in the car and slept for maybe three hours—dream-harried sleep—till an unnerving nearby sound woke me—gentle England had never seemed so threatening, and I drove back onto the highway.
* * *
A little later still, once Matyas returned to Oxford, and learned that I’d never seen Cambridge (Oxford and Cambridge seemed then as psychically far apart as Moscow and Cleveland), he insisted that we go there for a weekend. We drove over then, in more fine weather, to see welcome sights in a small but majestic university town that’s famously more distinguished for its writing alumni than Oxford (Cambridge taught a quartet of the supremes—Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson). Oxford had harbored more than one great writer—Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Oscar Wilde, Auden, and Philip Larkin among them—but it’s specialized in philosophers and statesmen (the joke has long held that Oxford excels in prime ministers because the schedule of trains from Oxford to London is far better than that from Cambridge).
I was glad to take us through Milton’s small college—Christ’s (which I’d never visited)—and from photographs I’d seen, I was able to point out the traditional site of Milton’s room. We had the compulsory outdoor tea in the Orchard in the ne
arby village of Grantchester; then back to Cambridge in late afternoon where, on the sidewalk, we ran into—of all people—John Gielgud who was also in town for a quiet moment. The meeting was so unlikely that I wondered briefly if Matyas had somehow arranged it; but that was past belief. And surely Gielgud hadn’t followed us there. Britain was, after all, a country smaller than many American states; such coincidences were inescapable.
We had a drink with Sir John in a nearby hotel bar (by then I was calling him John at his insistence); and despite his lordly countenance—suspended round an enormous but imposing aquiline nose and the world-famed cello of a voice—his gossip and theatrical anecdotes were as likable in Cambridge as in his own home. He said he’d be playing Cardinal Wolsey in a soon-opening Old Vic production of Henry VIII; we must be his guests. It was an invitation we hoped to accept (I’ve mentioned seeing both his Lear and Prospero earlier).
To have seen Gielgud in both those roles and Olivier in Macbeth, Titus (three times), and Malvolio in a span of three years was a theatrical and literary privilege of as high an order as I could imagine—a privilege impossible in subsequent decades. Their Shakespeare was twentieth-century university-trained in its accents and physical effects, though Olivier was more of a stage gymnast (to the point of flash exhibitionism) than Gielgud whom Kenneth Tynan once called “the world’s greatest actor from the neck up.” And of course no one really knows how Shakespeare’s own actors pronounced his lines; but the large-minded grasp of the two men’s imposing intelligences, the eloquence of their quite different voices, and the power of their gestures and general body-movement was incomparably memorable.
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