I’ve noted the genuinely unnerving power with which Olivier portrayed the slow crawl of pure evil across Macbeth’s soul and, eventually, that soul’s physical face till the actor’s very eyes and hands seemed splotched with the same lethal, and contagious, fungus—even ten rows from the stage, I felt endangered. And the appalling strength of King Lear’s too-late denunciation of his wicked daughters in Gielgud’s portrayal, the near-comic tragedy of his night in the storm on the heath, and the pathos of his final recovery, his begging pardon from Cordelia, and his pitiful death were at least as potent as Olivier’s other interpretations and far more so than the television film which Olivier made so late in his life that memory fails him in numerous spots, as does the power of his voice. Since Shakespeare’s death in 1616, there can have been very few times—if any—when the English-speaking stage has offered two such actors, who were simultaneously at the top of their form, for the supreme tragedies of the language and were eager to portray them in theatres.
* * *
Soon after Cambridge, Matyas busied himself with plans to revisit his birthplace for the first time since his imprisonment fourteen years earlier. He’d be gone from Oxford all summer; and by the time he returned, I’d be back in the States, teaching my own first classes. As he launched those homeward preparations, I knew I was in love; and while Matyas didn’t seem as emotionally involved as I, he’d nonetheless expended a great deal of affection—as well as physical intensity—in our times together.
I understood that his career was established in Britain and that his whole life was anchored there (he’d had occasional affairs with other men and women well before I appeared). But I had no intention of attempting a long-term Oxford career of my own. Still I was young enough to think that somehow our relation could go on growing as we parted, deepening to the point at which we might each become the other’s chief emotional commitment. Academics, after all, get long vacations; and surely we’d be able to see one another.
Matyas’s emotional life seemed to me, as I’ve said, cored out by his imprisonment in late adolescence and then—after his liberation—by an inability to return to a family trapped in the Soviet East. Now I’d come to believe, however unrealistically, that I might begin to offer something like a long repayment for his years of emotional deprivation in a frozen-up postwar Britain. Whatever my hopes, I was rational enough not to express them aloud to Matyas, even when I drove him to London where we spent another two days together before his flight east. We made an attempt to accept Gielgud’s invitation to see him in Henry VIII. By phone he told us that the particular performance we’d hoped to attend was sold out and that his house seats were already committed. But he asked us to join him in his dressing room at the Vic before the play, by which time an opening might have developed in the theatre’s very limited space.
* * *
We sat in his tiny dressing room then as he made himself up for the overweening Wolsey, then stripped to a jockstrap and donned the cardinal’s voluminous (and very hot) scarlet robes. Watching a friend—even a new friend—slowly become someone else before my eyes was like nothing I’d experienced. At last a messenger tapped on John’s door to say that even the theatre’s standing room was now overcrowded. John said that he’d gladly speak with the stage manager and perhaps we could watch from the wings; but in fact he didn’t recommend it, especially for such a long evening and with so many bulky costumes passing in and out beside us.
We bade the kind man goodbye. He left for the stage in full regalia, and Matyas and I went out for our last night together. I’d encounter the peripatetic Gielgud once more before I left England, in the Randolph Hotel in Oxford when John Craxton was in town. Again, over drinks, he was prepossessing and funny in his uniquely distant way—warm, but warm from behind a perfectly polished glass screen (by the way, I never saw him indulge, even for a moment, in camp tones or gestures; and I never heard him drop one of his notorious sarcastic bricks—perhaps they were reserved for other actors). After that, I never saw him again, not face to face—though his belated decision to have a film career gave me numerous chances to see him again and again on screen, never more brilliantly than as Charles Ryder’s father in the TV production of Brideshead Revisited.
I no longer know all that Matyas and I did for the rest of the night. I do recall that his plane was due to depart early next morning, and each of us finally slept very deeply. My eyes opened though, just at dawn; and I lay in our narrow bed, preparing myself for another farewell. By then at twenty-five, I’d reached the age when (as I’d read) catabolism likely begins—the human body’s slow decline. And I’d said more enduring goodbyes than I liked, so I knew no real preparation for the sadness of another such farewell was possible but I braced myself.
And what I recall considering then, and for some days to follow, was the unaccustomed word rapture and its role in my life for the past few months. The English word derives (as rape does also) from a late Latin word for “seizure” or “seizing.” In the best of my unions with Matyas, I’d felt seized away—not by anything so simple as a form of physical gesture, certainly nothing with a hint of sadism. What I’d suddenly discovered was a synonym for rapture—with little doubt I’d tasted ecstasy (which derives from Latin and Greek roots meaning “standing outside”).
In the initial delights of plain physical nearness and the ultimate release, I’d frequently begun to feel outside my body’s and mind’s concerns—and for more than a few postcoital minutes. It seemed, then and now, a blessed acquisition; and like most forms of intense pleasure, it would ultimately lead to spells of dependence—a gratification most fully described in “The Closing, the Ecstasy,” the final poem in my Collected Poems, one written long after my first Oxford years and after actual paralysis had seized me.
Then a porter knocked to alert us. We shaved, dressed quickly with few words said, ate another inescapable breakfast; and I left Matyas at the in-town terminal for the bus to Heathrow. As he passed through the gate, I thought he seemed bereft of a great deal more than me (though in a few years he’d have a fine wife and likable children). By then my Beetle could virtually drive itself back to Oxford; so I set it on its invisible rails northwest and was on Sandfield Road again in hardly more than an hour.
* * *
The final days of those three years are a blur of packing and further goodbyes. I called on David Cecil in his home for a late-morning sherry. I’d been to his family home on Linton Road many times before, but I’d never quite noticed two revealing things. First, despite his family’s wealth, the house in north Oxford was much like the homes of a number of my teacher friends in the States (good furniture, good pictures; nothing ostentatious, though Glyn Philpot’s profile portrait of David as a young man was all but Edwardian in its muted Yellow Book flamboyance—I recalled that David had told me he’d been fascinated, during the sittings, by the fact that Philpot actually wore a gold earring). Second, David’s study—where we usually met—was upstairs among the family bedrooms (I’d met young Jonathan, Hugh, and Laura); and I sometimes made my way through relaxed family business as I climbed toward David’s study. Once I’d even met up with Rachel hoovering the carpet, hardly the household duty an American might have expected from the wife of an English lord.
Nevill Coghill’s imposing profile is on the left. He was one of two unfailing pillars-to-lean-on during my Oxford years. The man on the right is Richard Burton, the powerful and celebrated actor whom Nevill virtually discovered in 1944 when he was casting a student production of Measure for Measure; and Burton (then at Oxford for a few months on a military course) turned up to read for whatever role might be possible. Nevill told me, years later, that he’d very nearly cast the role of Angelo with another undergraduate before he heard the eighteen-year-old Burton read. That plangent Welsh voice proceeding from that impressive pockmarked face was at once irresistible, and Nevill changed his mind. Burton never forgot the chance he was given—the first of many of the great Shakespearean roles—and he hono
red Nevill, affectionately, on numerous occasions. In fact when I spent a day with Burton in Rome in 1962, he told me at length about the detailed advice he’d got from Nevill in advance of a Broadway production of Hamlet, under Gielgud’s direction, two years later. I saw the performance and thought it unvaried in ferocity.
This picture was taken, by Terence Spencer, on the most notable occasion of Nevill’s work with Burton—in 1966 when Burton returned to Oxford to join Nevill in a co-directed production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (with Elizabeth Taylor, Burton’s second wife, in the silent role of Helen of Troy). Following a successful run of performances in Oxford, virtually the entire university cast decamped to Rome and filmed the production in 1967. At the time of the film, Nevill was sixty-nine. I hadn’t then seen him for four years and never would again, though we corresponded faithfully till forgetfulness overtook my loyal friend.
The notion of an eventual D.Phil. under David’s supervision was still alive in my head, and he and I discussed again the possibilities of my returning in the not too distant future to complete that task. Then he took a long pause and urged me “not to court extreme loneliness”—I think I remember his phrase exactly. I thanked him and said I’d do my very best. As I stood to leave, David also rose and seemed on the verge of a parting embrace; but a spell of nervous blinking overtook him. He reached to his table and handed me a signed copy of his book of essays on Victorian novelists, apologizing for “a slender old book” which is nonetheless perhaps the best of his critical volumes. His now seldom-mentioned essay on Wuthering Heights, a book that he thought far and away the greatest English novel, goes deeper than any other known to me. At the time his lordship was fifty-six; my father had lived two years less. Considering how generous-hearted David had been in all our dealings, and given his apparent frailty, I thought for a moment we were parting forever; and I almost offered the embrace he declined. But not in England, not in 1958.
That same afternoon my farewell meeting with Nevill was more relaxed. In the past year he’d been voted into the Merton chair in English literature, then one of the few professorial chairs in English studies at Oxford. F. P. Wilson, his predecessor in the chair, had won it over C. S. Lewis; and Lewis had decamped for Cambridge. Nevill had won it over Helen Gardner. To a few, Nevill’s elevation seemed based on slender scholarly credentials. Miss Gardner was especially bitter at having been passed over, as she showed me in one of our last meetings. I was sitting beside her, in her study, as she read through one of my thesis chapters. In it, I referred to Nevill as Professor Coghill, though his inaugural lecture was a few weeks away. With her pencil she firmly struck through the word Professor and darkly muttered “Not yet.” Whatever her qualifications, she must have known that her great defect for the Merton chair was her gender.
The new post permitted Nevill to move, from his modest rooms in Exeter, several hundred yards across the High to Fellows Quad in Merton, the largest and most elegant of our quads. There he’d decorated his two-story suite of rooms in what one of his Merton faculty fellows described to me as “pansy modern.” To be sure, the décor was a little elaborate in spots; but I never reported the pansy opinion to Nevill, and he and I laughed over more sherry at my account of the recent disastrous state of Wystan Auden’s rooms. It was then that he told me a story from Auden’s student days. When Nevill had taught him some thirty years ago, he once returned to his study at Exeter to find the prematurely arrived Wystan rummaging through the papers on Nevill’s desk. The older man chided the younger on such behavior, but the adolescent Auden merely said “How do you suppose I’m to become a poet if I don’t know how people conduct themselves on paper?”
In late afternoon when I felt the need to move on, I asked Nevill for some wisdom to take home with me. All the years later, it seems a quaint request; yet he took it seriously and paused for an appropriate answer (despite his heretical sexuality he’d been described accurately by C. S. Lewis in their student days as “a Christian and thoroughgoing supernaturalist”). His answer for me was a story. Years earlier he’d been summoned to his mother’s deathbed. Lady Coghill had chosen an inconvenient time to die since Nevill was, I believe, serving as a Schools examiner—whatever, he had urgent duties in Oxford. He hired a small airplane to fly him from a tiny field in Oxfordshire to the family estate in rural Ireland; but when he arrived, his mother was in a final deep sleep or coma. He waited with his other muted kin as long as he possibly could before having to return to his professional duties; then he went in to kiss her sleeping head goodbye. She showed no response and he turned to leave quietly. As he touched the latch of her door, though, there came the sudden sound of her voice—“Nevill.” He turned to see her behind him, half-risen in bed. She lifted a frail hand and pointed toward him strongly. “Nevill, remember—I only regret my economies.”
As he finished his story in the dimming room, I could see that his bright eyes had filled. I stood to leave, knowing that I’d heard a crucial sentence—wisdom indeed, from a dying woman, brought forward by her son who was way past old enough to be my father. Few things I’ve heard have ever been wiser or of greater use in my own long life; and I pass the story on, every chance I get, to my younger friends and students—the story and the words it embodies (with a pronoun change): You’ll only regret your economies.
Nevill stood also, taller than I—not the first reminder I’d had of his time in the trenches of World War I where tallness was a danger—and folded me in. He was pushing sixty, he had a grown daughter somewhere far off, his marriage had ended decades ago, and I’d recently met what he called the great love of his life (a married man with children). Yet for all his cheer and competence and his legions of friends, Nevill had always seemed to me a lonely man. Still I knew he’d heeded his mother’s last words. He’d lavishly poured out his own deep mental and spiritual gifts; and however depleted the well must have seemed at many times, it had always refilled—as it had in all his unfailingly generous dealings with me. Another piece of parting wisdom then, to set by Auden’s characteristically peculiar observation, while I continued the complex labor of shutting the lid on three years of vital importance in my life.
* * *
In the few days left, I visited Stephen in London and spent two nights on Loudoun Road. One night we had dinner with his only surviving younger brother, Humphrey, who is only now being celebrated as the extraordinary photographer he’d been in his early years. I took to Humphrey right away, over dinner and through a long bibulous evening; but Stephen had never once mentioned his brother’s photography to me, and we didn’t discuss it that evening. Later I was often reminded how little Stephen’s surviving siblings—Humphrey and their sister Caroline whom I never met—figured in his present life, though he’d written (in the Forties) some of his finest poems about the last illness and death of Humphrey’s first wife Margaret. Enduring family devotion (apart from his immediate family) had got essentially omitted from his childhood skills, owing maybe to the early death of his mother and, thereafter, to his father’s lack of involvement with the children—all of whom were reared by a pair of exemplary hired sisters. (Surprisingly, after our dinner, I was sitting on the floor near Humphrey’s chair; and whenever Stephen left the room to pee—which was always often—Humphrey would lean forward and massage my neck or scratch my head. It was only in his obituary in the London Independent that I learned that he always told his three successive wives of his bisexuality).
From that visit to London I drove my Beetle on to Manchester for shipment to the States; and it seemed I’d make that long trip alone, despite the fact that the headwaiter at the Bombay Restaurant on Walton Street had asked to come along with me, just for the trip. He was a virtual twin to one of my childhood heroes, the film actor Sabu (the headwaiter’s name was Shamsul, and he was about my age). I’d never seen him outside the Bombay, though he’d kindly given me more free dinners in my recent near-bankrupt weeks. Maybe I feared beginning another intensity too late in my English stay, despite this youn
g man’s small-bodied physical perfection. I also felt a certain familiar human need to deepen my own sadness at parting from the scene of so much learning, so much education in the most useful senses.
The nearest feasible port to my home in North Carolina was Charleston, South Carolina; and when I left the Beetle in the clamorous freight yard of a Manchester shipper recommended by my Oxford travel service, I more than half expected never to see it again. Nonetheless it had made my time in Britain—and through the continental summer with Michael—far richer than either might otherwise have been. I spent one solitary night in an enormous Manchester hotel, also commended by my ever-resourceful travel service. And by the time of my next-morning train back to Oxford, I’d indeed intensified my tangled compound of sadness and withdrawal. I’d also stirred into the mix a bracing awareness that, if I were ever going to become the professional fiction writer I’d told the world I was on the verge of becoming, then a return to home-ground central (northeast North Carolina) was my surest means of taking an even more serious step on into that venture. All I needed now—I told myself—was a safe voyage westward and the quick location of a quiet country house.
* * *
Back on Sandfield Road, I spent a last three days repacking my trunk with semi-lunatic care. When I’d wedged in (with elaborate jigsaw-puzzle assembly) every acquisition from a manically acquisitive three years—every new book, framed picture, sweater, all the other clothes, souvenir tickets, and theatre programs, all the saved letters from valuable friends, and on and on—then I called British Railways to come and collect it for shipment to dockside Southampton and the French line, bound for New York. (I’d sold dozens of books to Blackwell’s, including my near-complete Columbia set of Milton, in order to purchase a few pictures that were still available at startlingly low prices. I’d seen Kenneth Clark, for instance, a few weeks earlier on TV; and he said that original Rembrandt etchings, printed during the artist’s lifetime, could still be bought for “less than the television set on which you’re watching this program”; so even with a beautiful Craxton portrait of a young Greek soldier, I thought I had a lighter load than I’d brought with me three years ago.)
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