* * *
I’ve mentioned my essential solitude in those years back home, the first years in which I thought of myself as a full-grown man. I was strengthened in my sense of maturity by the fact that Mother and Bill were half an hour away in Raleigh. My nearness allowed them to call on me for various kinds of filial or fraternal help; and I was after all contributing a monthly sum to their support. It was the largest single item in my budget, larger than my rent; and it helped me realize that (in my own mind at least) I was not only the head of a household—which my dying father had asked me to be—it was also, far more than I realized, a vital investment in an anchorage.
Though such financial specifications may stink of grudge and regret that I had needy kinsmen, I can only add that the contrary was true. What I’m trying to convey is the after-all-familiar realities of a young man or woman with a first real job and fewer dollars than his needs require (and those demands included the wavering pressures of sexual need and a drive for steady company). The chance of my discovering a partner to share my own life, and any house larger than a trailer (on my present income), seemed highly unlikely. I knew of no all-male partnerships in the Duke faculty of those days and none in the middle-class circles of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill (there must have been many). Further, I can’t recall feeling especially burdened by the solitude. Like a great many men of that age, then and now, I was driven by the powerful furnace of sexual hunger but hardly by any immediate need for a permanent domestic surrounding.
In fact looking back at my life from the age of eleven on—and comparing my feelings with those of others whom I’ve observed closely—I can say truthfully that my sexual nature was as powerful as any I’ve encountered at close range, whatever the direction of that man’s desires. I mention the fact, not in pride—far from it—but only to describe an emotional reality. And the strength of those desires was by no means easy to manage. Way more than once I wrestled with the galvanizing truth of Racine’s description of sexual obsession in Phèdre, his greatest tragedy—
C’est Venus tout entière à sa proie attachée.
(It is Venus wholly attached to her prey.)
Yet again, my coals were as effectively banked as they’d been for long stretches of my Oxford years. I developed one or two brief crushes, one or two old loves exerted intermittent force—the distant homes of the lovers contributed to my control—and the ceaseless demands of my work kept me mostly content.
That stability was old and familiar, sometimes so familiar as to be annoying in itself. More than once I longed to be the kind of man who could howl at the sky or pound a fist through a Sheetrock wall, but I couldn’t—I’d learned otherwise. I’ve mentioned how, as an only child till I was eight, I adjusted to a life devoid of playmates. The pursuits that made a lone boyish life possible were also prophetic of my adult life. As soon as I’d learned how, I read voraciously—everything from comic books and Bible stories to Robinson Crusoe, Gone With the Wind, and The Boy’s King Arthur. At least once a day, I played with a set of first-class building blocks sent to me by our one wealthy cousin, who lived in Chicago.
I don’t think I knew there was any such profession as architecture; if I had, I might be building houses now, not writing this page. And atop all my other childhood work, I drew and painted endless pictures. The greatest gift to my childhood, however, came when my parents moved us into a wooded suburb where we stayed from the time I was five till I was nine. I’ve noted above that those long hours of roaming alone in silence, and in the sudden company of occasional wild animals, fed all my prior dreams and aroused new ones. As much as Wordsworth or Thoreau, I was a child who heard nature speaking to him—or so he thought (and still thinks).
* * *
So there in my mid-twenties, in another set of woods and by a real pond, I managed my two strands of work with the addition of my Duke friendships, my occasional weekends in Raleigh, and the drives to Washington. It would be a few years—from thirty onward, say—before I felt myself staring with any sustained degree of longing at the hope of enduring love and company. Meanwhile A Long and Happy Life grew darker and longer and emotionally more prophetic in the intricate groundwork of the dance that Rosa and Wesley traced as they neared and parted and at last chose one another. The novel’s forecast pertained to the hungers I’d feel more powerfully a little down my own road, the normal hungers of human creatures—a reliable partnership each evening and night, if nothing more.
For me, as I was coming to understand in the act of writing about people very different from myself, those hungers would be endlessly complicated by the fact that my magnet was set for men in a world where such an innate draw was punishable—in the state and the nation where I had every hope of living the rest of my life—by an assortment of the severest punishments, short of death, that the law could dole out. And if that reflection sounds self-pitying to a younger reader, born in a less-stringent era, I’d ask the reader to consider this (and to check it in reference works if necessary)—it’s merely, and appallingly, true to the facts of the time and place. And the fact that I can read in this morning’s New York Times of homosexual repressions in sub-Saharan Africa, and in the huge Anglican Christian membership of those same countries, makes me wonder how enduring the present-day change to mildness in certain American and European laws may ultimately prove to be. Yet strangely perhaps, I doubt I felt truly endangered in the mid-1950s.
Fairly often in the local papers, I could read accounts of men convicted of what was called “the crime against nature”—acts subsumed, apparently, under the single old word sodomy. But despite all my queer grad-student friends’ stories of pickups in local bars, truck stops, or bus stations—the traditional meeting places of the time—again I’d never known a man charged with the crime of sodomy, much less convicted (in London, Gielgud had been convicted of something less than a crime). I’d even met a man who was having an affair with a married highway patrolman. And given my longtime aversion to smoke-filled saloons, I was hardly likely to find myself in trouble for a public assignation.
Once I went with friends to the one queer bar in Chapel Hill. It was on the main street down a dark flight of stairs, and the room was soaked in dense blue light. Cans of beer or Coke were available—no stronger liquids in a mostly dry state—and the clientele (no women were visible) were either clumped in the center of the small space or arranged one-by-one along the four walls. There was no dancing, only dim songs from a corner jukebox that required frequent feeding. My friends at once joined the central clump; but soon I found myself in what seemed my natural habitat—the periphery, with the one-by-one set, propping up the walls in chosen isolation. What was I meant to do next, though?
Attempting to look as magnetic as possible, in a blue light that might well have proved slowly fatal, I dared quick glimpses of the nearest faces and imagined that I might fall in love with several (I’m truly not joking—they were mostly attractive). But an unaccustomed shyness had already swamped me and forbade my advancing on anyone. And surely no one advanced on me. Was I truly that lacking in magnetism, were my face and body all wrong for the game, was I too old? (again, I’m not kidding—through all my adult life, I’ve hardly been a draw, for men or women). A good many men in the central clump were even older than I, but most of the one-on-ones seemed as much as two years younger and were either even shyer or were only there for scenery (either becoming the scenery or studying it in awed silence seemed the only two options). In the course of twenty agonized minutes, I’d drunk my beer and said not a word. Hell, I didn’t even smoke. So with a fake smile, I said a quick goodbye to Jim Boatwright (who’d been laughing loudly from the start in the midst of the clump as if that were home). Then I climbed to the street and drove myself back quickly to the trailer. End of local queer-bar life. Never again, quite literally (and almost never elsewhere).
6
WHILE MY TEACHING DUTIES were heavy, they were hardly as onerous as, say, the work of a high-school teacher of English or
math. I continued to be able to confine my classes and conferences to three days a week, however long the days; and often they ran from eight to five, sometimes later. Nonetheless three years at any job so demanding can require a vast amount from the worker and yield perhaps as large a return as any public-school teacher yields. I’ve mentioned the sheer fatigue induced in even a teacher as young as I; likewise I’ve noted that, when I started, I was close to my students’ age.
In my first year back, for instance, I taught two students who’d been freshman friends when I left for England (they’d had to be privately asked not to call me “Reynolds” in the presence of the class). But at the end of three years, I seemed a light-year older than eighteen or twenty-one. By then I no longer felt like a fraud when students addressed me as Professor Price, despite the fact that I wasn’t yet a professor. And any interest I’d retained in their private lives or social activities had drastically faded. Even an invitation to my old fraternity’s annual homecoming barbecue was easily declinable. If I went I’d stand awkwardly at the edge of the jollifications, knowing almost no one and addressed as “sir” by any student who felt a well-bred responsibility to involve me in the fun. And the fun at Duke, even as late as the early 1960s, was dry—the slightest drop of alcohol on campus could result in expulsion from the university and was thus nowhere near the student obsession it is now in the sodden years of the early third millennium when we graduate numerous firmly established alcoholics each year.
Late in those first years, I’d begun to feel increasingly like a teacher of the sort who’d meant something to me in my own student years; and some of the skills involved proved invisible but urgent—a sane awareness of how much energy to devote to an average lecture or conference, an understanding of which students were eager to toy with my office hours and which were genuinely interested in learning. Finally I began to establish which departmental duties—committees and meetings—could be briskly dispatched and which were truly useful, to the department’s necessary work, to the health of my own teaching life, and to my growing comprehension of the degree to which an academic department in a fine university is often no more benign or intellectually respectable than, say, a division of Chrysler Motors (a few years ago, I asked a president of Duke who was then a close friend to tell me the difference between presiding over Duke or over Ford Motor Company; he said “At Ford, you can fire someone”).
Lest any of that seem excessively cool and careerist, I should add how thoroughly I enjoyed the demands of those early classes, how I loved exploring poems and novels I’d long admired with students to whom they were as foreign as Tibetan sacred texts, and what a sense of reward I got from struggling to guide a number of my students into the writing of clear and accurate American English prose (though I’ll have to confess that the teaching of writing became increasingly unlikable as the years passed, and students came to us from widely spread American high schools that had essentially abandoned any such instruction).
It would still be difficult for me to imagine a literate adult who couldn’t be excited by the challenge of working with a roomful of post-adolescents as they first encounter Shakespeare’s King Lear (the classic study of a dilemma so many of them will encounter when their own parents age into dementia) or Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (the great fictional study of the ravages of Western colonialism and the perhaps endless hatred we’ve earned as nations who lied and murdered our way to the natural riches belonging to other people). Almost from the first week, I began to see how the teaching of a good text could quickly become a new and especially rewarding means of reading it. To this day, I think I’ve never quite plumbed the depths of many novels, plays, and poems more deeply than those I studied, hard, to feel fit to teach in those early years.
Further, my colleagues and I—and a few enthusiastic students—organized something I can hardly imagine my Critical Theory–obsessed colleagues considering now: we rehearsed and performed, one night, a book-in-hand reading of King Lear. Blackburn, with his rumbling bishop’s voice, was our Lear; I was Gloucester. And all the roles were well-enough cast to detain a full-house audience of students and faculty for the nearly four hours a complete reading took. I can still resummon the excitement I felt, driving home alone near midnight. Writing was still very much my chief vocation, but teaching was surely my love.
And by the time I reached my own late twenties, I’d begun to be aware of the degree to which my own love of teaching was a legacy of my love of almost all my own past teachers, from the first grade through three years of graduate study. For me, most of those women and men worked before and among us students in an unparalleled aura of serious virtue. I never had an athletic coach; but I’m sure that no whistling mentor could have mattered more to me than devoted women like Jennie Alston and Crichton Davis in grade school, the dizzy but profoundly gifted Phyllis Peacock in high school, the monkish Harold Parker at Duke, or the worldly yet entirely committed David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, and Helen Gardner at Oxford.
As I moved more deeply into teaching, I became aware of another pleasure of the job and its most solemn duty. From the time I was six or seven, I’d been an intensely—but independently—religious boy and man. I had brief stretches, in adolescence and early manhood, of commitment to organized Christianity—to churchgoing as a chief means of worshiping the God I perceived in nature and daily life. But as I’ve noted above, that formal commitment had disappeared by the time I left home for England.
My teaching, however, slowly became my primary means of attempting to practice the life of a good man, a responsible child of God. My fiction has never concerned itself outright with religious realities, and I’m not aware of passages in that fiction which have conscious designs on a reader’s religious sensibilities, though a few of my poems may. But since the curriculum assigned to me in my first years at Duke offered an entire semester each year in which I was to expound the work of four of the supreme religious poets of the English (or any other) language—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton—I could hardly avoid hinting at my own convictions.
Not that I did so overtly, far from it. I’ve never detected a missionary gene in my biochemical battery, but a work like Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale or Shakespeare’s The Tempest or Milton’s “Lycidas” aroused in me degrees of enthusiasm that might well not have surfaced had the writers themselves not invested profound religious thought in their work. They were each thinking steadily about not only the official expressions of belief available in the time we have, but also the literal mysteries of faith and doubt—who or what made us, for what purpose, and what does it propose to do with us in response to the choices we make in our few decades of conscious life? Most central of all, I’d try to raise Leibniz’s troubling question—“Why is there something and not nothing?”
* * *
I’d been a student recently enough to know that few questions interest young readers more than those. Once a teacher has familiarized himself with the content of a poem, his next problem as the guide of class discussion is how to involve students in noting the physical structure of a work—its form of language, the strategy of its storytelling, and its ultimate design upon an audience. Third, he needs an aptitude for whatever forms of honest yet entertaining footwork he can devise to beckon the class into an exhilarating, and finally instructive, look at a sizable subject—a subject as large as, say, Shakespeare’s assertion (in the mouth of Edgar toward the end of King Lear) that “ripeness is all” or Milton’s declared effort, near the start of Paradise Lost, to “justify the ways of God to men.”
So while I acknowledge that those mysteries have propelled my work most potently in my years of teaching, it’s worth adding that I’ve never thought of myself as any sort of priest in hiding; and I’ve seldom been free of grave human error. Even when I’ve taught a seminar in the Gospels of Mark and John, I’ve resisted the attempt by a few Christian class-members to enlist my admission of brotherhood. In the seminar room my aim is to guide them through as clear an und
erstanding as possible of the career of a man called Jesus of Nazareth who lived in an obscure corner of the Roman empire in the first century A.D. and whose acts and teachings are most reliably preserved in those two narratives—Mark being, almost surely, the oldest of the canonical four gospels and John being the one which seems most certainly to enclose the memories (no doubt highly edited and expanded) of a man who witnessed the life of Jesus at close hand and who describes himself as “the man whom Jesus loved.” Should a student decide to worship Jesus as the incarnation of God, that decision is an act in which I don’t participate. In discussions of Paradise Lost and the long career of John Milton—which includes total blindness at about age forty-three—I feel freer to come down on one side or the other in those theological debates which arise in the poet’s retelling of the story of Adam and Eve; and that freedom derives from the fact that Milton makes no specific demand for the reader’s faith or even his agreement, only his focused attention and a ruthlessly honed intelligence.
* * *
Those descriptions of my early teaching are true, not only to my own feelings at the time but also to a certain 1950s spiritual fervor that many young men (and a relative few career-seeking women) invested in their careers and, in return, seemed to derive from them. Almost a decade before I’d taught my first class, I joined in a panel discussion of English teaching at Meredith College in Raleigh. My teacher Mrs. Peacock had asked me to be there; and my brief remarks—published in The North Carolina English Teacher—are an accurate forecast of a strain of feeling that would fortify me through my apprentice years. The peroration from my little speech may sound at least mildly absurd now but I’ll own up.
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