In response to my call then, two strong-armed men came to my study, took one look at the trunk, gave a hasty pull at the leather handles, and said “No way, mate. If we can’t lift it, we don’t have to take it.”
In considerable shock I said “What do you suggest then?” The larger of the men said “Saw the bloody thing in ’alf,” and then they were gone. So much for the reliability of a nationalized railroad (it was the most substantial rudeness I’d yet experienced in Britain; the customs men in Harwich were after all responding to an error I’d made). A little desperate, I bussed myself into town and asked my travel agent for help. He at once suggested a local private trucking company whose polite but suspiciously undersized men came, took one slow look at my trunk, said nothing to one another nor to me but (without further ado) proceeded to heave the deadweight burden onto their lorry and bear it briskly away—nearly seven hundred pounds as I’d learn to my amazement when paying the freight bill later that afternoon.
* * *
Oddly I don’t recall my last night in Oxford. Did I dine with a friend (almost all undergraduates had left for the Long Vac)? Did I eat a farewell complimentary curry with my Indian waiter friends at the Bombay (that would have required a bus transfer)? Did I drop in at St. Hilda’s and see if Miss Gardner was available for something (about as likely as calling on old Queen Mary herself with a similar proposal, though a few weeks earlier I’d taken Miss Gardner out to dinner and brought her back to Sandfield Road for a convivial last glass of wine and a good deal of talk)? Or did I simply stay in Headington, eat bread and cheese, make the odd joke with Win as she looked in at intervals, apparently abashed to show any feeling invested in my departure, and make my final preparations for tomorrow’s train to Southampton and the better part of a week at sea—if we made it safely? An Italian liner, the Andrea Doria, had after all sunk almost exactly two years ago with the loss of some fifty souls.
In the absence of any specific memory, it seems right to recall my final dinner with Stephen. He’d come to Oxford some two weeks earlier, and we’d met—for dinner maybe or at least a good talk. We realized clearly that a first round of our friendship was ending. Again we both knew—silently—that despite the difference in our ages, I’d been promoted to a new rank when Stephen consulted me about his domestic options in the crisis he precipitated during his concern for Osamu. The immediate change in our relation was that I’d no longer be within easy reach of London; but while it eliminated our chances of meeting often for theatre and music, that was surely no great problem. Given Stephen’s restless circling of the globe, we were bound to meet again soon.
And there were always letters. In those last good days before the telephone largely consumed the art of letter writing, we’d go on with our regular correspondence. Stephen had told me more than once how he felt that the best of him was contained in his journals and his letters; and now—twelve years after his death—there must be thousands of his letters that survive and remain to be collected and published. His brilliant biographer John Sutherland has written that “The largest private collection of Stephen Spender’s correspondence and literary papers is held by his friend of many years, Reynolds Price. It is deposited (under restriction) at Duke University Library.” They’re letters which—for intelligence, wit, and emotional and narrative coherence—equal any I’ve read since Virginia Woolf’s. He himself almost never kept copies, saying that he liked to cast his bread on the waters and leave it at that. There are more than three hundred in my files alone.
The deepest-cut memory from that late Oxford meeting was Stephen’s saying how he worried about the very thing that gave me most hope—the fact that I was returning to my old home ground (at Duke I’d be little more than an hour from my birthplace). His own intensely cosmopolite view—plus his lack of any real knowledge of the realities of life in my old world and, even more crucially, his lack of any strong ties to a parental family of blood kin—was that I might now proceed to write only about a few past realities, abandoning the new lines I’d pursued as my angles of vision expanded in England.
Mightn’t I eventually dry up (he feared a certain Medusa power at the heart of American culture)? Without ever having told his two oldest friends apparently, he felt that America had, to a large extent, sterilized the early gifts of both Auden and Isherwood. I didn’t mention that they’d exiled themselves from fertile home ground, whereas I was returning from temporary absence; and of course I didn’t point out—and never would—the clearly painful fact that his own poetry had virtually ceased.
What he was telling me was something he’d plainly thought a good deal about; and coming from such a canny and benevolent friend (one capable of an unpretentious wisdom that often ran in tandem with his personal confusions and defeats), his question lodged in my mind at once as a warning worth perpetual attention. Since I had no guarantee to offer him that I wouldn’t likewise succumb to some nameless cauterizing American plague, I could only assure him of an ongoing awareness. Wouldn’t a three-year immersion in a culture as profoundly different as the Britain of those years have insured me, for life, against the pointless provincialism that Stephen seemed to dread? Young as I was, I felt he was wrong; and I was young enough to say so. It was one more of my brash replies which he absorbed into the wide and silent blue-eyed German-Jewish gaze with which he filed away refusals that he fully expected to meet again when the person whom he’d warned eventually realized his rightness.
Well, I came from sanguine stock. Both my parents had owned very little to bank on but persistent hope; and here now I sat, their healthy elder son, all but straining at the bit with the goodness of my already-annotated plans for a longish fiction. I’d even recently acquired a title. A few months ago I’d gone to an Oxford showing of The Bridge on the River Kwai. I’d seen the powerful film, brand new, on the rolling Queen Mary with Alan Campbell; but on a second viewing, I heard more clearly one brief—and near final—speech of William Holden’s.
It comes near the film’s catastrophic ending, when Holden and his young accomplice are deploying their explosives. As they’re almost done, Holden turns to the young man; and here’s the note I made that evening, back in my study—
There is a line in Bridge on the River Kwai which might give a title for the Rosacoke story—“Let me wish you a long and happy life.”
I was too early in my writing career to realize how crucial titles would become for me, how they’d crystallize my central meaning and lure me onward. But here, more than eighteen months before I began really writing my story, I’d found its heart. Though I couldn’t yet know it, I was off and—was I running? I was moving onward in any case—and not only toward a story that would become a novel but toward a further life of my own, one as happy at least as what I’d yet lived through (despite the sadnesses to which I’ve alluded, I’d known a great deal of unmitigated joy).
With a sense of silent drama then, and the baggage of hope that was natural for me, this native son began his return to the bright orange clay and dense piney woods of his early life, the home of so much of his eventual work. On July 23, 1958 I faced back west and put to sea again in another old but agreeable French ship, the Ile de France—launched as long ago as 1927—entrusting myself, mind and body, for five more days to the all but bottomless surging breast of the North Atlantic.
19
NEAR THE START of these memories, I recounted a shipboard meditation on my life as I headed for England in the fall of 1955. And while I don’t recall a similar spate of nocturnal reflection on the starlit decks of the Ile de France, it’s hardly misleading to indulge here in a parallel account of the man I thought I was as I headed home with three years of Britain and Europe packed into my skull and heart. Among many uncertainties I can guarantee that I felt huge relief at the thought of assuming a teaching job in September—an interesting-sounding commitment and a regular paycheck. And while that small sum would be gutted by the usual tax deductions, it would at least be a sum I’d earned. I could set up m
y own establishment, however modest, under no one else’s roof. And at least as important, I could contribute finally to my mother and brother’s expenses and begin to become—in my own eyes at least—something besides a bright and aging schoolboy.
I must also have thought of my prospects for love and companionship. I hope I’ve made it clear above that my relation with Michael Jordan had firmly, and almost painlessly, settled into the groove of close friendship, a groove that might offer its own disappointments. But even in America—where friendship between grown men seems limited to hunting parties, bowling teams, wallowing golf carts, and smoky poker nights—we seemed to have a fair chance at remaining available to one another as reliable wells of laughter, good stories, and all-but-silent support in times of trouble.
And I’ve laid out earlier here my hope that the brushfire intensity of my three months with Matyas had, near its core, so many chances for further thoughtful dialogue and—again—our frequent resorts to riotous laughter that had fueled our second-strongest mutual attraction. Surely there was a chance of turning our present separation into an eventual permanent reunion. At sea I understood the near-impossibility of my hope, but when did near-impossibility balk such hope? Whatever, deep-dyed romantic that I was—and a sexual wolverine by now—an enduring partnership was not among my immediate projects. And again, odd as it seems, I (and virtually all my few queer friends, from wherever) had way too little awareness that an overwhelmingly vital need in our lives was criminal according to the law.
Given the stack of notes for a long story, one I trusted would complete the volume contracted now with Chatto and Windus and with Random House, my urgent enterprise was the commencement of work on A Long and Happy Life. After docking in New York, I’d spend a few days in her big apartment with Nancy Jo Fox, a stunning Duke friend as given to hopeless love as I. Michael would join us briefly from Princeton for an evening or two on the town; and I’d hope to meet with Diarmuid whom I hadn’t seen for a full three years. Then I’d pass through the soon to be brutally destroyed Roman splendor of old Penn Station—grimier by now than Rome can ever have been—and board the Silver Meteor, the Seaboard’s crack express train for Florida via Raleigh.
Once semi-unpacked and well-fed at Mother’s, I’d begin my search for country quarters near Durham. I’d introduce myself to a few of my colleagues-to-be; and by the third week in September, I’d have begun to teach my first classes. I’d learned already in a letter from my chairman that my three courses were scheduled for Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays (Saturdays would be howlingly unheard of today)—two sections of freshman composition and a sophomore survey of English literature. If at last I could wrestle my perennially rambling attention into line, I’d have four whole days for writing (I hadn’t yet learned to take Sundays off). With any luck couldn’t I finish A Long and Happy Life, a story of—say—seventy-five or a hundred pages within six months? All provided, of course, that the draft—the government’s draft—didn’t want me.
But for all his recent denunciation of the Stalin years in Russia, Premier Khrushchev remained a formidable counter to the United States, its allies, and all its interests. The still-divided city of Berlin was a steady flash point. Our ground forces were kept at a high level of readiness for any threat that didn’t involve intercontinental ballistic missile attacks on our mainland or on any of our numerous partners in the NATO pact. My return could conceivably be the moment for my homeland to require at least two years of my life in military service. My draft board in Raleigh had the date of my return on file; and at times I could feel that reality ticking ominously. I had my flat feet and my lifelong affliction with severe hay fever as possible disqualifications. So till further notice, the plans for beginning my adult work remained in force.
On board ship with no close friends to divert me, I also looked round at the recent past and wondered what my English years had meant. How much had that investment of a thick slice of my life amounted to? I’d left home in the hopes of enlarging my abilities to write and teach. So far as the writing of fiction went, I’d completed four short stories—“Michael Egerton,” “The Anniversary,” “The Warrior Princess Ozimba,” and “A Chain of Love,” which I’d seen published with considerable reward; and now I’d started work on a fifth story, “Troubled Sleep.” More promisingly yet, I’d elaborately planned the rest of the book.
So far as the goal of teaching literature in a good university, I’d completed an intermediate graduate degree; and I’d made a reading-start on the work for a doctorate. But until I’d finished my Oxford degree and was homeward bound, I hadn’t fully considered how that hardly brutal stint of work on Samson had often felt too much like hauling a deadweight across a wide river. Granted, I still loved the poetry of Milton. Granted, I’d watched enough good teachers in my nineteen years of formal education to know that I’d almost surely love teaching (and I hadn’t yet foreseen the special rewards which annual roomfuls of students can bring to childless teachers).
Yet given the fact that what I wanted most to do—the writing—might well be compromised by the teaching, as the scholarship had compromised it at Oxford, could I bear to return home now and divide my time between teaching and writing—and all with the prospect, dead ahead, of another two or three years of doctoral work just to earn myself the essential union card for college teaching? What other choice was available, though? I had to make money, for myself and others; and surely there was no more likely job than the one that had landed unsought in my lap—three working days a week, nine months a year, at a first-rate university (even if the salary was minuscule). Well, the army would pay me a great deal less for donkey work.
* * *
I’ve mentioned coming from sanguine stock—good-humored hard workers. So for now I prowled the dark decks of the sleepless liner with the same pleasure I’d felt heading east three years ago. I seemed as sure as I’d been, in ’55, that I was headed for an outcome as promising as it was new (no doubt I’d even learn something in the army, if it spared my life). In many directions I’d changed remarkably in ways that even I could see. My hair was longer, my accent was Oxbridge British in spots (I recall my mother’s puzzled “The what?” as I announced that I was headed for the baaath; life in Carolina would soon erase that protective mimicry). My wardrobe—such as it was—was all English now, though by no means Savile Row in quality. The bamboo-handled, tightly rolled umbrella that I’d bought at the end of my Harvard summer four years ago had survived a thousand chances to be lost; for a while to come then I’d sport it as a cane (it bore no banner saying Ex–Rhodes Scholar—De Voto’s warning had stuck in my craw).
Three years in Britain had been the best time of my life till then; I’d experienced more pleasure (which can only come from acts, large or small) than in all the prior years. Yet I wasn’t Anglophile in any unreasonably altered way. I’d bear those skin-deep signs of Englishness for the months it took to settle back into a far older life—my first twenty-two in the upper South of the United States, years that followed far nearer than I yet comprehended on General Lee’s ride out of Appomattox, the murder of Lincoln, and the actual freedom of four million slaves.
That stretch of the world, which I’d loved enough to choose as the source of my early work and the ongoing scene of my daily life, was poised on the rim of a revolution at least as crucial as the war that had freed us from Britain two centuries ago and the even more devastating War between the States. The people who’d tended so many days and nights of my childhood—descendants of the African slaves my forebears had imported and owned—were stirring to a new life. With all I’d read in British newspapers and occasional issues of Time magazine, I had no real understanding of the power in the storm that was breaking and that would only grow till it wiped away many traits and tones of a world I’d cherished and begun already to preserve in fiction. Gone with the wind indeed.
Much of what I’d known, and at least silently accepted, was evil at the core. Whatever I’d learned in the ancient uni
versity I was leaving behind—an institution that, among a thousand other things, had played an indispensable role in manning the largest empire ever assembled—still, I hadn’t entirely identified the central errors in what I’d adhered to and honored in my prior life. Among the skills and understandings which lay ahead for me, that admission would be the largest and, in painful ways, the hardest since it would mean acknowledging that many of the people whom I loved most (my kin and oldest friends, not to mention myself) had been intricately incorporated into the tragic ongoing machinery of racial oppression—and worse.
TWO
THE UNITED STATES 1958–1961
1
WE WERE ALL BUCK-NAKED, wearing only our watches, maybe our potato-sized high-school rings, and toting our wallets. We were almost surely hapless American citizens, summoned for pre-induction draft physicals in our time and place. We were upstairs in a dim building in downtown Raleigh. I’d got home a couple of weeks earlier to find, on the night of my arrival, the letter I’d dreaded. It was waiting on the desk in my boyhood bedroom among welcome letters from English friends (no one, in those days, corresponded with the ferocious loyalty and promptitude of the English). The return address said, in letters of flame, Selective Service System.
And here I was, obedient to the call. Some two hundred of us—black, white, and a very few others from one of the surviving eastern Tar Heel Indian tribes—had appeared with astonishing unanimity at seven in the morning. As I entered the dark room and looked round for any encouraging face, I glanced into the farthest corner and saw an old high-school classmate. He had a magnificent name—Brutus Bloxton—and looked exactly like such a man—tall, built like a three-story brick warehouse, and blessed with a likably handsome face. I went toward him, and Brutus and I soon caught ourselves up on our lives since high school—a long seven years.
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