Years after I failed in my attempts to calm his view of a mere English department, Bill’s widow—who’d been an ideal second wife in his final years, though he inexplicably refused to see her in his last days in Duke Hospital—told me about finding recent journal notes in which, shortly before his last illness, he recorded crouching to hide in a neighbor’s backyard while he was out for an afternoon walk. He’d retired honorably from teaching several years earlier; but now on his walk he’d suddenly caught sight of a department colleague approaching in the middle distance. It was someone he’d long regarded as his supreme vicious enemy. Bill tried to hold his ground and walk on ahead, but finally he couldn’t bear the encounter, so a man of his former unshakable dignity ducked aside and hid his tall frame in a painful crouch behind a row of dense shrubs and stinking garbage cans.
Yet when I spent many hours beside him in Duke Hospital in 1972, as his death from cancer bore down hard (the tumor had gone from a salivary gland to his brain), he raised his swollen head off the pillow as I was ending one of my visits and said “I don’t see how you stand this.” I’ve still never known what he meant by this. Was it the sight of his agony which I visited twice daily, his face contorted by the tumor that by then had wrenched his features almost unrecognizably, the onerous teaching duties which I’d sometimes told him about, my writing; or was it mere life, the long life he’d known by then? He died, soon after, at only seventy-three—a brilliantly generous and almost endlessly tormented life.
In a group of younger friends, Bill could overcome an innate shyness and begin to rouse the joviality which powered his most winning charms. I’ve known few men more capable than he of entertaining an entire room of assorted friends when he could be persuaded to launch a few of his splendidly narrated comic recollections from sixty years of life in the middle South or his early childhood in Persia. But again, when I spent the frequent evenings alone with him over dinner in my early years of teaching, his disdain for our colleagues—and his patent fear of them—began to prove contagious. John Knowles would say to me years later that “No illness is more contagious than madness.” And a fledgling instructor like me, in the first years of his hope to spend at least part of his life in teaching, almost began to suspect that the corridors of a university might be as densely lined with stilettos and poison rings as any Florentine palace in the days of the Medici and their mortal enemies.
Still I maintained our friendship—partly because I had a lot of evenings on my hands, partly because I genuinely liked Bill (even in most of his unpredictable mood swings), partly because he offered paternal affection and wisdom, but above all because he seemed unhurriedly confident that I could become a writer and might fulfill his hope that I’d produce, as Styron and Guy Davenport had, fiction of serious quality. Yet he never made me feel that his friendship depended upon my success as a writer.
It would be years before I discovered that it was my publication of a successful first novel that led Bill Blackburn, most mysteriously, to end our friendship for a number of years. At that painful point, Styron assured me that, when his own first novel was published, he’d undergone an identical rejection from Blackburn. However long Styron and I discussed that shared reality (and we often did), we never understood it. Surely neither of us was aware of having intentionally neglected or offended so generous, though notoriously sensitive, a man whose early encouragement we never ceased to acknowledge.
Any attempt to explain the connections between Blackburn’s prevailing dread and fear of sudden abandonment by those closest to him is doomed to textbook psychologizing. In some sense his suspicions and eventual terrors were among the fuels that powered, first, his comprehension of the poetry and prose he taught incomparably for so many years and, second, the hunger that preceded the love he invested in those students in whom he sensed a potential for good writing.
He was by no means the only teacher I’ve known whose work was fired by personal qualities that caused him or her great enduring pain and sometimes undermined his chance of endowing a given student with the very strengths he intended to give—Bill’s intensity, for instance, frightened off several gifted young men. In fact I suspect that few of my lifelong teaching colleagues, myself included, would claim to have escaped entirely such painful contradictions. Whether or not teaching is more conducive to such miseries than, say, a career in law, medicine, or the priesthood, I can’t begin to know. I do know that I’ve never been befriended—and in the first decade of our friendship, so generously helped—by another human being who was as near prone as William Blackburn to an immovable certainty that the ground beneath him was as treacherous as any dark marsh and that the thickets on every side were populated with alleged friends plotting his shame and swift downfall.
3
IN THE OTHER TIME available from my teaching and my efforts at writing, every week or ten days I’d drive the half-hour to Raleigh and eat with Mother and my brother Bill and spend an occasional night. The fact that I could now make a monthly contribution to their ongoing welfare was a great relief to me, especially toward the needs of a brother who’d lost his father at so young an age. When I returned to the States, my brother was seventeen and a high-school junior—the same even-keeled and easy kinsman I’d always enjoyed, sharpened now by the maturity required of him when our father died. Bill and I had always loved good books—the Landmark lives of great American boys had been important in his pre-adolescence for instance—and by the time I was home, he’d begun to show a fascination with American history that would ultimately lead to his distinguished career as an essayist, archivist, student and teacher of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history (for nearly fifteen years he’d direct the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, one of the most respected in the nation).
At that point also, Mother was mainly liking her job at the boys’ clothing store. Her natural warmth and curiosity made her welcome all but the most truculent of her customers; and she’d soon built up a sizable core of devoted mothers who’d shop with no one else when their sons needed anything from a Boy Scout uniform (with knife) to a graduation suit, tie, keychain, and shoes. And in my ongoing slender years, even I was able to fit myself out from her older-boys’ racks—trousers, shirts, underwear, even suits. The only aspect of her work that began to wear her down after a few years—she was in her midfifties—was the need to work till nine two nights each week.
But she liked the man who owned her store, and he well knew he had a gold mine of a saleswoman in Elizabeth Price. Her favorite colleague was a slightly older woman named Vir (to rhyme with fur). Vir was a true West Virginian with the classic “ridge runner” accent and unvarnished mountaineer idioms and tales that Mother would store up to tell us at our next dinner. Once we’d laughed our fill, for example, at Vir’s saying that she’d just bought some gorgeous water glasses that had “itching” on them (that is, etching), Mother would assure us that Vir would do anything on earth for her—a claim that would prove a demonstrable truth a few years later when Mother’s eyesight began to fail mysteriously; and Vir quietly saved her from frequent embarrassments as she miscalculated a customer’s bill, say, or couldn’t read the label on a box of sweaters.
* * *
At least one weekend every six or eight weeks, I’d drive the Beetle five hours north to Washington where Michael Jordan shared an apartment with an English engineer whom he’d recently met. The drive itself would be an adventure. Mainly you had to evade the nationally notorious and rapacious Virginia speed patrolmen, and then you had to literally manhandle your steering wheel as gigantic semis roared past and all but swept your tiny German bargain under lethal wheels. But my safe arrival in green Georgetown—Olive Street—rewarded the effort.
Colin, the housemate, was a droll Cambridge graduate our age who had incomparable success in girlfriends; and soon I was enjoying the small parties the two men would throw in their compacted space. By American-youth standards of the time, the evenings were slightly formal. The “chaps” mi
ght dress in summer jackets and white trousers, the American girls in summer dresses, the few English girls in summer “frocks”; and the atmosphere would revive my memory of pleasant English evenings, only with better-quality wine and all of us a little more adult in appearance and deportment.
Among other changes, Michael was expanding his own Merton repertoire of charms for the opposite gender, and more than half the pleasure of my weekends on their narrow sofa was a chance to study his and Colin’s compatible but highly personal modes of seduction. Soon Colin was squiring Berit, a lovely Swedish girl whom he’d met in Stockholm a year or so earlier and who’d come over mainly to visit him, I assumed. So compatible were the two men, however, that soon—somehow—Berit had decided to stay on in America; and she and Michael were keeping company while Colin, once more—and quite agreeably—went on switching his female tracks.
A more significant change for me was the inevitable evolution of my and Michael’s college friendship into something less steadily communicative. I wasn’t entirely glad for the change, but I was far from desolate. We went on seeing each other five or six times a year, always with the same mutual trust and frequent laughter. The relation would always mean things to me that it couldn’t to Michael, especially as we loaded more years onto our backs and Michael acquired a family (it would be nearly twenty years before I realized that the friendship had meant as much to Michael, though in a very different way, as it always had to me).
* * *
Further, I was forging on in my own emotional life. Matyas and I were keeping up a steady transatlantic correspondence in those last days of earnest hard-copy letter writing. And to me at least, there still seemed the possibility of some kind of long-term commitment between us. Even more than love and teaching, however, I’d now launched myself on what I’d so long hoped would be my central sustained work. I’d commenced to write the Rosacoke story that was meant to complete the full volume I’d contracted with Chatto and Random House. With all the pages of notes I’d made since January ’57, I still thought I was at work on a novella when I carved out the first sentence of A Long and Happy Life in October ’58—a sentence that, in eventual reviews and later critical studies, would come to have a life of its own.
When I speak of carving it out, I mean what the metaphor implies. Michelangelo wrote of his own sense that any one of his planned statues lay, pre-existent and awaiting his chisel, within the block of marble he’d chosen. In my own early days of continuous work—and especially in that ambitious beginning—I felt myself literally struggling to see, and then to liberate, an elaborate human action which was pre-existent in my mind, in the lives of imagined (yet quite real) human characters, and finally in the English language, my recalcitrant block of marble.
Just with his body and from inside like a snake, leaning that black motorcycle side to side, cutting in and out of the slow line of cars to get there first, staring due-north through goggles toward Mount Moriah and switching coon tails in everybody’s face was Wesley Beavers, and laid against his back like sleep, spraddle-legged on the sheepskin seat behind him was Rosacoke Mustian who was maybe his girl and who had given up looking into the wind and even trying to nod at every sad car in the line, and when he even speeded up and passed the truck (lent for the afternoon by Mr. Isaac Alston and driven by Sammy his man, hauling one pine box and one black boy dressed in all he could borrow, set up in a ladder-back chair with flowers banked round him and a foot on the box to steady it)—when he even passed that, Rosacoke said once into his back “Don’t” and rested in humiliation, not thinking but with her hands on his hips for dear life and her white blouse blown out behind her like a banner in defeat.
I’d begun to tell the story less than a month after beginning my effort to learn the other great skill I’d promised myself—the ability to teach. The story would take me more than two years to complete, and by that time I’d begun to feel a good deal more comfortable in the classroom and the conference office. I kept no journal of my progress and setbacks in teaching. The three days each week of entire commitment to my students consumed all the energy I felt I could spare for that large part of my life—even the plentiful energy of a man in his mid-twenties—but I went on making frequent notes for my writing. All those notes, and many more, are gathered now in a volume called Learning a Trade; and they remind me, first, of what a rich pleasure I took in being back on native ground or very near it.
I’ve noted the rural surroundings of my trailer/house, and the notes remind me of further details. Pastures of beef cattle mooed, bellowed, and mounted one another within a few hundred yards of my desk (all the cows seemed to be lesbian, frequently mounting one another in dogged patience, achieving what?). Brightleaf tobacco still grew, regally tall though deadly, on fields within a short walking distance from the page on which I described it; and the mules that still plowed the crop on a few small allotments were visible at rest on the evening hills, side by side in parallel exactitude but never quite touching. At least as welcome was the presence on all sides of woods and fields quite empty of other human beings.
And then there were the neighbors. A number of the men and women I slowly came to know (again, within a quarter-hour of campus) had lived in that corner of Durham and Orange counties for many generations; and they had useful stories to tell me—a gift they offered readily, for the asking, and in an idiom that was virtually indistinguishable from the syntax and rhythm of my story’s protagonists. One of them—Claude Bennett—had been born nearby, the son of a farmer whose family had lived in our neighborhood for more than a century. Claude and his wife Betty worked on the production line at American Tobacco Company downtown; and after his retirement Claude would be the man who drove me, with an almost equine patience, to Duke Hospital for the five weeks of daily radiation treatments awarded to my cancer. Even better through the years, the language of his and Betty’s family (they have two sons) has kept my ear to the local ground.
Henry May, my agreeable landlord, was from Pennsylvania; but he likewise taught me—almost daily—a great deal I hadn’t previously known about the actual land we lived on. He took obvious pleasure in the pond on our west edge, the trees and pastures, all teeming with wildlife. The wildest life I’d seen in Oxford was the occasional bird or feral cat; but soon after moving to Kerley Road, Henry began pointing out the smaller neighbors. Apart from nocturnal prowlers such as possums, raccoons, flying squirrels, and foxes, we had an immense snapping turtle in the pond (who occasionally wrenched a leg off one of Henry’s swimming white ducks); and speaking of larger animals, oddly the epidemic of elegant but car-wrecking deer had yet to engulf us. Birds were Henry’s mania—the usual tireless and endlessly hungry songbirds and a plentiful overhead supply of red-tailed hawks and wide-winged buzzards—and he could tell me about their habits and even their migratory routes which he knew in detail. A fair amount of his animal lore worked its away into my first four books; and of course I was free to roam his land and the many acres of Duke Forest that bounded him.
* * *
On my three no-school days (with Sunday for rest), I’d take my legal pad and climb to a hill above the pond. There I’d chosen a tall straight shagbark hickory on the edge of a wide-based triangular pasture. I’d sit there, lean back on the tree, then watch and listen closely. I’d done—and seen and heard—nothing to match this lone silence since age nine (when Dad sold our country house); and while it was hardly an exotic experience, I entered in my notes a few first reactions to what was clearly a rediscovered world.
A distant rifle and a crow flies into a tree that is already bare and standing white as a nerve. Another shot and every bird is silent, then the crow signals and everybody starts up again. It took them 10 seconds, though.
Some trees are already bare as though to get it over with as soon as possible.
One red leaf twisting through the air straight as a plumb line—with no tree anywhere near.
Air full of shining-new copper wire catching the light from place to pla
ce, seeming to float. And a single strand of silk with the spider attached working as though he would weave the whole air full of his shining.
Ducks asleep in the sun, heads under their wings, refusing to look up when I quack.
Meanwhile I pushed on with my long first scene—Rosacoke and Wesley’s opening motorcycle ride to black Mildred’s funeral, then the service itself. By November 4 I noted that I’d written eighteen hundred words and had Rosacoke entering Mount Moriah Church for the funeral. By my very slow Oxford standard, I was moving rapidly enough to feel encouraged, though I noted that I was concerned that neither Rosa nor Wesley yet had sufficient physical presence. That was a prime concern of the scenes, especially after I’d read quantities of D. H. Lawrence in England (Stephen had given me a three-volume edition of Lawrence’s stories; at his best Lawrence’s prose was still so potent I could hardly believe he’d died three years before my birth). I was determined that my young lovers should affect the reader almost as profoundly and erotically as they affected one another—that the reader should be aroused by the reality of the bodies, the odors, the atmospheres of this magnetic young pair. And I labored slowly in that direction as the notes make clear.
A large part of my aim to make the main characters both physically imposing and erotically attractive was a hope that would prove enduring through my whole career (till now at least, fifty-odd years since I started). Two of my early short stories reflect powerful attractions between male characters; but since the characters are pre-adolescent, there’s little or no erotic energy in their relations. And only a small number of my later adult characters lead dedicated homosexual lives. I’ve spent little time exploring the peculiarities of such experience, perhaps because—as I may have shown above—I’ve observed few such lives.
Ardent Spirits Page 37