With the approval of my parents—Father’s lukewarm, Mother’s reluctant—I sent a cable accepting Devlan’s offer, closed down my rooms at Columbia and boarded a Pan Am plane for England, where I spent a frantic week taking bus tours to the Wordsworth Lake Country, Shakespeare’s Stratford, Hardy’s Wessex and especially the back alleys of London made famous by Charles Dickens, whose work I did not like but I might one day have to teach.
I then crossed the Channel to Germany, where I spent a leisurely week absorbing the cultural treasures of my family’s homeland, then on to France, where I tried to catch a glimpse of Stendhal, Flaubert and Balzac without much success, because whereas England makes it almost impossible for the visitor to miss her great writers, France makes it impossible to see hers, but I respected the general savor of France with her grand buildings and imposing museums.
By bus I traveled from Paris to Rome, poring over maps each mile of the trip and fixing in my mind the geographical features about which I would be lecturing for the rest of my life: ‘Paris, Lyon, Grenoble, Les Alps, Genève, Firenze, Siena, Roma.’ I tried to use only the local versions of the familiar names, and I was so assiduous in my study that France and Italy, at least the parts I traversed, were permanently locked into my imagination. Just this one bus trip more than justified my summer in Europe.
Although I had been reared in a family, a regional tradition and a local college that had turned their backs on Catholicism, and with reason, because their Protestant forebears had been badly treated during the Reformation, I now found Roma, as I insisted upon calling it, a city incredibly noble and historically rich quite aside from its close connection with the Vatican. Strolling with guidebook in hand, I could visit in the course of any one day pre-Christian ruins, heroic memorials of the great emperors, others dating from the time of Christ, churches from the time when civilization was darkened, monuments of the Renaissance, memorials of the papal states, and the grandiloquent vestiges of Mussolini’s rampage. Does any other city offer so much? I asked myself as I wandered from one historic site to the next, and as my eight days drew to a close I suddenly realized that I had spent them all in Roma, not venturing into the countryside on a single exploratory bus trip. ‘Roma is enough,’ I said, and I went back to the Vatican to spend an entire day in its museums, awed by the wealth of sculpture and the variety of the paintings, about which I knew little except that the Sistine Chapel, with its magnificent ceiling and walls, was worth more than a couple of hours. I assumed at first that Michelangelo had done it all, but when even my untrained eye began to detect differences in style, I asked a European tourist what the facts were, and the man said in German: ‘I do not speak English,’ whereupon I repeated my question in idiomatic German, and he, a Swiss, turned out to be an art historian who felt that Perugino’s exquisite painting on the wall was just as good as Michelangelo’s on the ceiling.
Hours passed, and when gongs sounded to mark the end of day and the closing of the treasure house, the Swiss gentleman suggested: ‘The afternoon’s been so pleasant, could I invite you to share supper with me?’ and I was pleased to escape eating alone again. I expected the man to lead the way to one of the many restaurants in the area, but instead we walked to a minor hotel, where the chef was prepared to serve in the man’s room an excellent meal of saltimbocca, thin slices of veal and prosciutto, with a first course of the best spaghetti I’d ever had.
‘I see you like plenty of cheese,’ my host said, and when I replied that I liked anything with a salty flavor, the man cried exultantly: ‘Then you’d love anchovies!’ and he called for a small salad with plenty of anchovies. They were so unbelievably good that I wanted to be sure I understood how to spell the name: ‘Anschovis, anchois, acciuga, anchovy,’ the man said. ‘Different in every language.’
The meal ended on a high note, followed by a protracted period of suspended animation in which I began to feel ill at ease. Then my host asked gently, in German phrases that were unusually friendly: ‘So, why not spend the night here? I have an extra toothbrush and you can use my razor,’ and as he issued this invitation—a sensible one since I had already revealed that I was doing nothing that night, or any of the other nights, and my own hotel was a distance away—the man smiled at me engagingly. He slid his hands caressingly over my shoulders and in this unsubtle manner revealed his intentions. I was twenty-six and had never before that night experienced such a sensation, neither with a woman nor with a man, and I was terrified. When it became apparent that I was supposed to undress and climb into the narrow bed with him, I panicked, forcefully pushed him away and bolted for the door. Before I could break away, the man held on to my left wrist and pleaded in a quiet voice: ‘Please! It’s no big thing. And it’s very pleasant, really,’ but with a powerful wrenching movement of my arm I broke free and galloped down the stairs, not trusting the tardy elevator to rescue me from a distasteful situation.
When I reached my own hotel, with the familiar woman at the desk, it seemed like a refuge in a storm, a sensation that was enhanced when the woman handed me a telegram that had arrived while I was at the Vatican. It was from F.X.M. Devlan and said: ARRIVING AT YOUR HOTEL TOMORROW AND OFF TO GREECE. A warm feeling displaced the fear I had just experienced, for I thought of Devlan not only as a mentor but also as a trusted friend.
We drove slowly up the spine of Italy that first day, reaching Florence at dusk. Devlan, in his good Italian, asked a policeman where we might find lodging. The officer laughed: ‘Maybe two hundred places. The one on the corner, a nice mix of good beds and better food.’ When we checked in, the concierge seemed delighted to have guests who would be taking two rooms, and Devlan, who was conducting negotiations, made no demurral: ‘Two rooms it is,’ and after an excellent evening meal, we talked briefly and headed for sleep, each to his own room.
We spent the next day visiting the sights of Florence, and I was amazed how familiar Devlan was with the Uffizi Gallery, which he said was one of the top three museums in the world: ‘If you’re to be a first-class teacher of English in your little college, Karl, it’s obligatory that you know the fine arts, and music, and architecture and the whole great swirl of man’s aesthetic efforts on earth. And you really cannot know Dante unless you know Firenze and imagine him wandering among other hill towns. You ought to come back to Italy every summer for three or four years, for postgraduate wisdom.’
Devlan was rhapsodic about the Medici Chapel on whose walls a Renaissance painter had displayed a glorious procession of Medici princes, factotums and horsemen: ‘Here comes great Italy marching into your arms, bringing you its significance and its story.’ I appreciated the chapel more than I had the Uffizi.
That night as we dined in a restaurant on the banks of the Arno, Devlan reminisced about Cambridge, his early days at Kings College in 1951, a time of rations and postwar tensions. ‘Poor Cambridge!’ he said. ‘It’s been treated harshly in recent years, all the old sores scratched raw again with those revelations about Anthony Blunt.’
‘What sort of man was he?’ I asked, and Devlan told me of the famous Cambridge spies—Philby, Burgess, Maclean, Blunt—who had formed fast friendships at Cambridge in the 1930s and then had fallen under the spell of Russian Communism, so that when during World War II and later they attained positions of strategic importance in Britain and the United States, they betrayed the crucial secrets of both nations to the Communists: ‘They were traitors of the most egregious sort,’ Devlan said. ‘Cost the Brits and the Yanks enormous losses and the death of many Allied spies.’
‘Why would they have done what they did?’ I asked, as night darkened over the city, and Devlan replied: ‘Spirit of the times. If I had been their age, I jolly well might have joined them. As an Irishman I despised what England had always done to my country. I would have joined them not because I loved Russia but because I hated England.’
Devlan then began to talk about his attitude toward art: ‘The artist must always be somewhat opposed to society—against received knowledge
. He must be prepared to explore strange alleyways, to rebuke accepted wisdom, to confuse and challenge and reconstruct new patterns. The artist is by nature a semi-outlaw. Van Gogh assaults our sense of color, Wagner our inherited ideas about what acceptable sound is. Those young men of Cambridge were artists in their lives, none better, and they cut right across the heartland of life.’
Before I could unravel this perplexing philosophy, he continued: ‘And the master of them all was Anthony Blunt. Imagine. In the heart of the enemy, London, he achieved high office in military intelligence. And at the same time he received a knighthood because he served as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures—he was a great scholar on Poussin and other French landscapists. And all the time he was either passing the most critical information to the Soviets or protecting his fellow conspirators from being caught. His loyalty to his friends was impeccable, but that was understandable, because he loved them.’
Devlan rocked back and forth, his salt-and-pepper Caesar’s haircut bobbing over his eyes, and after a long while he asked: ‘Karl, have you ever heard of the remarkable statement of our great novelist E. M. Forster? Wrote A Passage to India—you simply must read it. He was a Cambridge man, you know. My college, Kings. Well, Forster said, and his words appear in many contrasting forms, but I remember them this way: “If the time ever comes when I must choose between betraying my country or my friend, I hope I shall have the courage to betray my country.” ’ He let these complex words hang in the air for a long time, then added: ‘That may be one of the profound statements of this century.’
I wrestled with this evaluation, then asked: ‘Are you speaking about your own friends, Professor Devlan?’ and the Irishman said: ‘I was never a member of any clique. They’d never want an Irish lout. But in my own way I feel about my friends exactly the way he felt about his.’
‘To protect them you would betray …’
Devlan did not reply. Instead he said in an entirely different voice: ‘Karl, the life of the artist is invariably “us against them.” People at large don’t want artists, don’t understand them, never find them totally acceptable till they’re dead. The novelists you’ve thought about so deeply, all of them, they were athwart the grain, and the moment they tried to conform to the grain, they lost their forward thrust—they were doomed to mediocrity.’
‘What is it you’re not telling me?’ I asked, almost in desperation, and Devlan said: ‘The famous Cambridge Four, brilliant beyond compare, daring like no others, jugglers with nerves of steel—they loved one another. They were a brotherhood, and they will resound in history when their detractors are forgotten, because they stood for something.’ Rising and walking toward the river, he said to no one: ‘They were my Cambridge fellows, my peers and my preceptors.’
‘You don’t mean you want to be a spy? To betray your nation and others?’
‘Of course not. I mean I want to live with a burning intensity—to have the courage to pay whatever price is exacted.’
After a long walk along the riverbank, we returned to our hotel and in the reception area we each hesitated when accepting our individual room keys, but nothing eventuated and we went each to his own bed.
I did not sleep that night. Twisting and tossing, I tried to absorb what had been said in the quiet restaurant, to winnow wisdom from the chaff. When morning broke over the city I had identified those truths that would animate my teaching life: ‘An artist is a creative man who cannot and indeed should not lead a normal life. He should find sustenance from trusted friends like himself. His task is to provide society with a fresh and sometimes necessarily acid portrait of itself. And the highest good in this world, the behavior by which a man is judged, is that he be loyal to his friends, no matter what the consequences.’
When light filled my room I riffled through my gear to find a pencil and scrambled about to locate a piece of paper on which I could write in complete sentences, lest I forget them, my four maxims. But when I read them over I noted a serious omission in the last and added a postscript: ‘I suppose she could be a woman, too.’
That evening, as we approached Venice and located the mainland depots where cars were parked while their drivers transferred luggage to one of the vaporettos, those noisy water taxis that plied the canals, Devlan said: ‘Venice is a city for lovers,’ and I said (rather childishly, as I realized later): ‘I call it Venezia,’ and he reprimanded me: ‘Henry James called it by the English name. He set the rules.’
That night I made no protest when he told the concierge: ‘Double room,’ and I was content when Devlan accepted the single key and led the way to the second floor.
The first day in Venice passed for each of us as if we were encased in a golden dream. I had never before experienced sexual passion and its force staggered me. I was like the little Mennonite girl of my home district who allows herself for the first time to be led into the hayrick. I could not believe the wonderful thing that had happened to me and that might have happened years ago if I had been more attentive to my innermost feelings. But, most of all, the beauty of my relationship with my admired professor erased the frightening ugliness of my earlier encounter with the Swiss traveler.
To Devlan, forty-seven years old and thick in the waist, the fact that a young man in the richness of youth should have flown across the Atlantic to meet with him in Rome, and that they should now be headed for two or three weeks in Greece, must have seemed almost inconceivable. He told me that frequently in recent years he had wondered: ‘Is it ended? Have the glorious nights I used to know come to a close? And then’—he looked out toward a canal where lovers in gondolas passed—‘in New York to meet a brilliant young American with three languages and a rare gift for words, and I, this aging Irishman, had recognized instantly that the young fellow was afraid to break into life, yet secretly eager to do so. I noticed at once that he was not easy with girls and probably never would be, and it then occurred to me that if I could get the young man to Europe and immerse him in the richness of cultural exploration, the Irishman might, just might, be blessed with one last fine relationship.’ He paused, then added softly: ‘And it has happened as I had contrived. Dear God, it has happened.’
Although our first day in Venice had been for me the beginning of a new life, it had been spent in an unfocused euphoria, but the second day was one of clear, aesthetic delight, for it focused not on Devlan and me but on Venice itself and the significant role it had played in world literature. To me the day was especially meaningful, for it illuminated my early study Henry James and Thomas Mann: Two Novellas Based in One City. This had led to my fellowship at Columbia and thus to my friendship with Professor Devlan.
We walked through narrow footpaths that lined the canals, hoping to find James’s decaying palace in which the American litterateur struggled with Juliana Bordereau and her ungainly niece, Miss Tina, in his effort to win possession of the cache of papers relating to the dead poet Jeffrey Aspern. As we walked, Devlan remarked: ‘The rather unpleasant English authority in the novel, John Cumnor, who also wanted the papers, could have been me, and the young American could easily have been you.’ Our search for houses that fitted the description in James’s tale became an investigation not into Venetian real estate but into a tangle of fictional lives that seemed more real than the lives of those living Italians who passed us on the narrow walkways.
‘That is the job of fiction,’ Devlan said with great intensity. ‘To put down on paper a chain of words, words that anyone could find in an ordinary dictionary, which will bring to life real human beings in a real setting. Of the half-million words in English, which ones shall we use to describe that old house fronting this rather smelly canal to make someone who reads them on vacation in Zambia not only see the setting but also catch its psychological importance? The words are available, just pick them out of the mass, but be sure to put them in the right order so you achieve the sought-for effect.’
We spoke of Mann’s story, of a Venice plagued by cholera.
‘But today there is no cholera,’ I said.
‘Ah, but there is. A deadly cholera is pervasive in all Western societies, a cholera of popular culture, spewing off the presses and through the airwaves, deadening everything, cheapening all. It engulfs us and will in time strangle us.’
Devlan elucidated the fear he had for the future of civilization, and said what he believed creative artists must do to prevent that miserable slide into mediocrity: ‘The great enemy is popular acceptance, because that proves the artist has settled for the least common denominator. The mission of the artist is to elevate himself through study and insight to the highest attainable level and then to communicate with his peers, to seek them out, to exchange concepts with them, and to write or paint or compose so as to illuminate the problems that concern them. Serious art is a communication between equals on exalted levels. Nothing else is worth trying.’
I saw the implications of this concept: ‘But I caught from things you said at Columbia that publication was the terminus of any writing. Now you say it’s nothing. Which do you mean?’
‘Remember my lecture that aroused such a storm? George Eliot is a treasure, Charles Dickens a mountebank. Cling to Joseph Conrad, reject John Galsworthy.’
‘But where does that leave publishing? Surely the dissemination of books by the authors you dismiss achieves some constructive purpose.’
‘They’re soporifics, pasatiempos. They do little harm and no good.’
‘Then what is publishing for?’
‘Real publishing is for the conducting of a dialogue between equals. When you sit at your desk, visualize your audience, your readers. As an intellectual—and you can be one of the best—you’re obligated to communicate with the brightest minds of your generation, with thoughtful men and women in Berlin, Leningrad, the Sorbonne and Berkeley.’
The Novel Page 22