Writers and Their Teachers 9781350272262, 9781350272293, 9781350272279

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Writers and Their Teachers

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Writers and Their Teachers edited by

Dale Salwak

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Dale Salwak and Contributors, 2023 The Editor and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design by Rebecca Heselton Cover images: Pen © FeralMartian/iStock, Script © paseven/ iStock, Blackboard © Nastasic/ iStock, Desk © Duncan 1890/iStock, Fountain Pen © Morphart Creation/shutterstock, Typewriter © Jef Thompson/ shutterstock, Mortar Board © Bodor Tivadar/ shutterstock, Notepad © Leo Morgan/ shutterstock, Book © Arthur Balitskii All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3502-7226-2 978-1-3502-7227-9 978-1-3502-7228-6

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for our teachers

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CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors ix Preface xv

Part One School 1 Teachers We Remember: Gerrit Gouws J. M. Coetzee 3 2 Mabel Morrill Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina 3 Learning Curve Catherine Aird

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4 A Way with Words Michael Scammell 5 Peter Way Andrew Motion

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6 My Grandfather and My Other Teachers Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong’o 43 7 Il Miglior Fabbro George Howe Colt

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Part Two College 8 The Perilous Balance of Marvin Eisenberg Jeffrey Meyers 67 vii

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9 W. Edward Brown: Many Years of Mentoring Jay Parini 77 10 David Milch and the Strategies of Indirection in Fiction William Logan 83

Part Three Graduate School and After 11 My Doktorvater: Alvin Kernan Stephen Greenblatt 99 12 A Far Cry from Oxbridge Margaret Drabble 13 The Right Words Carl Rollyson

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14 Remembering Allen Mandelbaum Paul Mariani

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15 Sketch of a Professor: Roger Gilliatt Michael J. Aminoff 141 16 How Lucky I Was . . . Ann Thwaite

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17 J. P. Stern: The Professor from Prague Daniel Johnson 157 18 George Steiner: Enchantment and Dissent Robert Boyers 171 19 Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford Dana Gioia 185 20 V. S. Naipaul, the Drill Sergeant Paul Theroux Index 227

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Catherine Aird, MBE, is the author of more than twenty detective novels and short story collections, most of which feature Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan. She holds an Honorary MA from the University of Kent at Canterbury and was awarded an MBE, as well as the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association. Apart from writing the successful Chronicles of Calleshire, Catherine has written and edited a series of local histories and has been active in village life. She lives in East Kent. Michael Aminoff is a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, and an educator and medical historian. He is the author or editor of several medical monographs and of widely accepted medical/ neurological texts that have gone into multiple editions, as well as the coeditor of a 4-volume Encyclopedia of the Neurological Sciences (Elsevier/ Academic Press, 2003; second edition, 2014). He is also a medical biographer, with two books published by Oxford University Press, namely Brown-Séquard: An Improbable Genius Who Transformed Medicine in 2011, and Sir Charles Bell: His Life, Art, Neurological Concepts, and Controversial Legacy in 2017. Another was published by Raven Press (Brown-Séquard: A Visionary of Science) in 1993. His most recent biography, titled Victor Horsley: The World’s First Neurosurgeon and His Conscience was published by Cambridge University Press early in 2022. Robert Boyers is founder and editor of the quarterly Salmagundi, founder and Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute and Professor of English at Skidmore College, NY, where he was the first Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters (1995–2005). He writes frequently for such publications as Harpers, The Nation, The New Republic, The American Scholar, Granta, and The Guardian. He is the author of eleven books, the most recent of which are The Fate of Ideas (2015) and The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, The Academy & The Hunt for Political Heresies (2019). In 2009, he edited and introduced George Steiner at The New Yorker. His new book, MAESTROS & MONSTERS: Days & Nights with Susan Sontag & George Steiner, will be published in the Spring of 2023 ix

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J. M. Coetzee was born in South Africa in 1940, and was educated both in South Africa and the United States. He currently lives in Australia, where he is Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He has published novels, memoirs, criticism, and translations. In 2003, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. George Howe Colt is the author of four books of nonfiction, including The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, which was a finalist for the 2003 National Book Award. His most recent book, The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968 (2018), was named one of the top fifty sports books of all time by the Dallas Morning News. The son of a high school teacher and the husband of a college professor, he has taught at Smith College, MA, and was for many years a staff writer at Life magazine, where he met his wife, Anne Fadiman. Margaret Drabble, DBE, is a novelist and critic, born in Sheffield in 1939. After a brief and inglorious career as an actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company, she became a full-time writer, and has published nineteen novels, most recently The Dark Flood Rises (2016). Her work has been translated into many languages. She has also published various works of non-fiction, including biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and edited the Fifth and Sixth editions of the Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985, 2000.) She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously she was the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College, NH. She is the author or editor of nine books, including Carrington: A Life (1989), Black London: Life before Emancipation (1995), Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unpredictable Life of the Author of The Secret Garden (2004), and Mr. and Mrs. Prince: How an Eighteenth-Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend (2008). Her latest edited book is Britain’s Black Past, based on a BBC radio series she presented. She often appears on American and British radio and podcasts. Her book Black England, updated and revised, publishes in September in the UK, with a Foreword by Zadie Smith. Dana Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of California. He also served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and is the former Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of five collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which received the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize. His

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critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. He has written four opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies. Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of fourteen books, including Marvelous Possessions (1992), Hamlet in Purgatory (2002), Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004), The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011), The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve (2017), and Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (2018). His honors include the 2016 Holberg Prize from the Norwegian Parliament, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and the 2011 National Book Award for The Swerve, MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize (twice), Harvard University’s Cabot Fellowship, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. Among his named lecture series are the Adorno Lectures in Frankfurt, the University Lectures at Princeton, and the Clarendon Lectures at Oxford, and he has held visiting professorships at universities in Beijing, Kyoto, London, Paris, Florence, Torino, Trieste, and Bologna, as well as the Renaissance residency at the American Academy in Rome. He has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Philosophical Society, and the Italian literary academy Accademia degli Arcadi. Daniel Johnson is the founding editor of The Article. For two decades he was a senior editor, editorial writer, and columnist for The Times and the Daily Telegraph, before leaving to set up Standpoint magazine, which he edited for ten years. He is a prolific writer for numerous publications on both sides of the Atlantic on a wide range of subjects. William Logan is the author of eleven books of poetry and eight collections of criticism, most recently Rift of Light (poems, 2017) and Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History (essays, 2021). He has also edited four volumes, including Donald Justice’s Collected Poems (2004), an expanded edition of Randall Jarrell’s Poetry and the Age (2001), and the first edition in 130 years of John Townsend Trowbridge’s gothic Byronic long poem, Guy Vernon (2012). Logan has received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction, the inaugural Randall Jarrell

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Award in Poetry Criticism, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence, and the Allen Tate Prize. He teaches at the University of Florida. Paul Mariani is University Professor of English Emeritus at Boston College, MA. He has written biographies of William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and—most recently— Wallace Stevens (The Whole Harmonium, 2017). He has also published critical studies of Hopkins and Williams, as well as two collections of essays, A Usable Past (1984) and God and the Imagination (2002), and a spiritual memoir, Thirty Days (2002). He is the recipient of multiple National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the John Ciardi Lifetime Award for Poetry and the Flannery O’Connor Lifetime Achievement Award. His most recent books are The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity (2019), Ordinary Time: Poems (2020), and All That Will Be New: Poems (2022). Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, had 33 of his 54 books translated into fourteen languages and seven alphabets, and published on six continents. In 2012 he gave the Seymour Lectures in Biography at the National Libraries of Australia. He’s recently published Remembering Iris Murdoch in 2013, Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes in 2014, Robert Lowell in Love and The Mystery of the Real: Correspondence with Alex Colville in 2016, and Resurrections: Authors, Heroes — and a Spy in 2018. He is now writing a book on his friend James Salter. Andrew Motion was the UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. He is now Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore, MD. His most recent collection of poems is Randomly Moving Particles (2020). Jay Parini is a poet, novelist, biographer, and critic. He has written many books of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (1975–2015). His eight novels include The Last Station (1990), made into an Academic Awardnominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, Gore Vidal, and Jesus. Carl Rollyson is Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Baruch College, City University of New York, and has published fourteen biographies, including in 2020, The Life of William Faulkner and The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. His studies of biography include A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography (2005) and Biography: A User’s Guide (2008), and Confessions of a Serial Biographer (2016). His

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work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, University Bookman, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Kansas City Star, and many other newspapers and magazines. Dale Salwak is professor of English and American literature at Southern California’s Citrus College. His 28 books include Living with a Writer (2004), Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature (2008), Writers and Their Mothers (2018), The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne (2023), and studies of Kingsley Amis, John Braine, A.J. Cronin, Philip Larkin, Barbara Pym, Carl Sandburg, Anne Tyler, and John Wain. He is a recipient of Purdue University’s Distinguished Alumni Award as well as a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also a frequent contributor to the (London) Times Higher Education magazine and the Times Educational Supplement. Michael Scammell is the author of Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (1973), which won the Los Angeles Times and English PEN’s prizes for best biography of the year, and Koestler: the Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic (UK title, Koestler, the Indispensable Intellectual), which won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for the best biography of 2009 in the USA, and the Spears Magazine Award for best biography of 2010 in the UK. Koestler was also shortlisted for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography and listed by the New York Times Book Review as one of the “100 Best Books of 2010.” He is the editor of The Solzhenitsyn Files (1995), Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union (1977), and Russia’s Other Writers (1961), and has translated Nabokov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other Russian authors into English. His reviews and articles have appeared in The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Harper’s, and elsewhere. For many years he taught Russian Literature and was Chair of the Russian Literature Department at Cornell University, then taught creative writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York. Paul Theroux published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Annual (1976), Picture Palace (1978), The Mosquito Coast (1982), O-Zone (1986), My Secret History (1989), Millroy the Magician (1994), My Other Life (1996), Kowloon Tong (1997), and Mother Land. His highly acclaimed travel books include The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), The Old Patagonian Express (1979), Riding the Iron Rooster (1988), The Happy Isles of Oceania (1992), and Dark Star Safari (2003). Others include Saint Jack (1973), The Mosquito Coast (1982), Half Moon Street (1984)—all of which have been made into successful

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films—and Deep South (2015) and On the Plain of Snakes (2019). His book, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents, was published in 1988. Mr. Bones, a collection of short stories, was published in 2014. His latest novel is The Bad Angel Brothers. Ann Thwaite has spent her life as a writer, with two spells of teaching in Japan. She wrote and reviewed children’s books for many years. She and her husband Anthony lived in Tokyo, Richmond-upon-Thames, Benghazi, and Nashville, TN, but were based in Norfolk for nearly fifty years until Anthony’s death in 2021. Her five biographies, of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1974), A. A. Milne (Whitbread Biography of the Year 1990), the poet’s wife Emily Tennyson (1996), and the father and son P. H. and Edmund Gosse (Duff Cooper Prize, 1985) have all been highly praised. She has published two books of her family history: Passagways, The Story of a New Zealand Family (2009) and Running in the Corridors: Seven Stories (2014). Goodbye Christopher Robin (2017, from her Milne life) is now a major motion picture and mass market paperback. Beyond the Secret Garden (from her Burnett life) was published in 2020. Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o is a Kenyan writer and academic whose work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children’s literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyulanguage journal Mu˜ t˜ıiri. His short story, “The Upright Revolution: Or Why Humans Walk Upright,” is translated into 94 languages from around the world. In 1977, Ngu˜ g˜ı embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya that sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be “the general bourgeois education system” by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances. His project sought to “demystify” the theatrical process, and to avoid the “process of alienation [that] produces a gallery of active stars and an undifferentiated mass of grateful admirers” which, according to Ngu˜ g˜ı, encourages passivity in “ordinary people.” Although his landmark play, Ngaahika Ndeenda, cowritten with Ngugi wa Mirii, was a commercial success, it was shut down by the authoritarian Kenyan regime six weeks after its opening. Ngu˜ g˜ı was subsequently imprisoned for over a year. Adopted as an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, the artist was released from prison, and fled Kenya. In the United States, he taught at Yale University for some years, and has since taught as a dual-professor at New York University and at the University of California, Irvine. Ngu˜ g˜ı, has frequently been regarded as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

PREFACE

Great teachers are remembered through the lives of their students. Consider what Isaac Stern said about playing chamber music with the master cellist, Pablo Casals: Imagine yourself suddenly coming upon a wall, not knowing that beyond it lay an exquisite garden. What Casals did was open the door into the garden; you entered and suddenly found yourself amid colors and scents you never dreamed of. He revealed what might be accomplished once you were inside the garden. But how many of the colors and scents you could make your own, giving greater power to your musical imagination – that was your responsibility. Casals showed the possibilities as well as the pitfalls that new learning can engender, helping Stern to think critically about music and make his own choices while encouraging risk-taking and innovation. Though there are many resources available to those who want to enter their chosen field, there is nothing quite comparable to the charged personal encounter between an inspired teacher and an eager disciple. Students never know what they will discover about themselves, how they will be challenged, or where the instruction will lead. What interesting stories lie behind every lesson learned, consolation found, or career launched when a student discovers an inspiring teacher and decides to learn. “One loving spirit,” wrote St. Augustine, “sets another on fire.” Albert Camus dedicated his Nobel Prize to Louis Germain, his teacher at the Belcourt primary school in Algiers, and told him: “Without you, without that kindly hand which you extended to the impoverished little child that I was, without your example, nothing of all this would have happened.” I often wonder what would have come about if I had not heard Mrs. Joanna Hayes, my high school literature teacher, speak six memorable words that would change my life. It was late in May, xv

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toward the end of the semester, when she said to our class, “To one of you I am giving an ‘A’ for the semester. You have earned a ‘B+,’ but I’m giving you an ‘A’ because [and here are the six words] I think you have the potential.” In hindsight, it’s quite possible (and probable) that she was speaking to several students, but at the time, I believed that she was speaking only to me, and that made all the difference. Those simple yet meaningful words for that impressionable schoolboy helped solidify the commitment that carried me through high school, university, graduate school, and throughout my academic and publishing career. Sure, there have been times when my dedication flagged, and it would have been easy to skip a class or abandon a project and do something else. But whenever I felt reluctant about completing an assignment, unsure about something said in class, fearful of taking an examination, or doubtful of my creative abilities, there arose within me, like a divine benediction, the soothing words of Mrs. Hayes: I think you have the potential. In this spirit, three years ago, I invited twenty prominent writers to reflect on the value and importance of inspirational teachers in their own lives and work. I cast my net wide, providing the focus and theme, making suggestions for possible approaches, but left it to the contributors to decide on their own methods. Many searching questions come to mind. What makes a good teacher? Who served as a formative influence? What lit the writer’s creative fire? How did the teacher help to shape the writer? What is the value of a teacher in a writer’s life? What are the results of the reciprocal exchange of instruction and learning? These are among the questions answered in the following memoirs and appreciations celebrating masters of the profession from primary school through college into the graduate level and later. How refreshing to read about caring, supportive teachers who embrace the mystery and excitement of their profession while encouraging their students’ creativity, rigorous thought, and attention to detail. Each of the essays, all original for this volume, portrays influential teachers at the height of their powers. Each explores the awakening that can occur in the minds of those fortunate enough to have had such an educational experience. Through their knowledge, enthusiasm, insight, and high expectations, the best teachers engender in their students an insatiable search for answers to important questions and, in the famous words of Marcel Proust in The Captive (1923), “to possess other eyes.” What a noble way to

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spend a life. What a memorable, potentially life-altering message with which to leave one’s students—if they are open to it. This book describes the powerful influence of mentors at an impressionable time of young lives; defines the qualities that make a great teacher: intellect, stimulation, encouragement, and generosity; and relates the gratifying transitions from pupil to friend. It also portrays the writers as well as their teachers. The posh background of George Howe Colt contrasts with the modest origins of Paul Mariani and Dana Gioia. Carl Rollyson began as an actor; Margaret Drabble as a teacher at Morley College; William Logan as a hapless and illeducated young poet until the brilliant David Milch gave him his compass. Certain patterns emerge. Four writers had Jewish mentors: Marvin Eisenberg, Allen Mandelbaum, J. P. Stern, and George Steiner. Five writers went to America: J. M. Coetzee, Ngu˜ g˜ı wa Thiong’o, Andrew Motion, Michael Scammell, and Michael J. Aminoff. While in Africa, Coetzee and Thiong’o learned a new language. But teachers can be found anywhere, not (as we usually think of them) just in the classroom. Michael Scammell focuses on his role model, Anthony Brode, theater critic and editor at the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, where he had a job as a copy boy. Brode gave him books to read, took him to the theater, and introduced him to foreign food, wine, and middle-class manners. Ann Thwaite credits the hundreds of letters she wrote and received while away at school as probably having a larger part in turning her into a writer than anything she was actually taught (although later teachers helped to make her a better one). George Howe Colt writes of his high school friend, R. L. Farnsworth, who was the strongest influence on his becoming an author. Crime writer Catherine Aird traces early insights into the power of the imagination to her story-telling school friend, Judith Dickson, as well as the reading she did while convalescing from a serious kidney disease and her medical father who mentored an interest in forensics. Paul Theroux’s first real encouragement or insight into his own work did not come along until he met V. S. Naipaul, whose influence was the making of him as a writer. More than earning credits or awards or grades, more than acquiring information, education disciplines and strengthens the mind and teaches students how to think and ask questions and solve problems. It also confers on them the self-confidence necessary for self-propelling, independent study and work in the years ahead. As such, these essays confirm that a good teacher’s role, whether in or out of the classroom, isn’t always instructional but can be pastoral as well.

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This means putting the students’ needs at the center and providing opportunities for them to grow in self-esteem and independence of thought. It involves caring about their development personally, socially, and emotionally. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina’s high school teacher, Mabel Morrell, for example, was more than a mentor; she took Gerzina under her wing as a person, came to her home, asked her to sew a dress for her, and was the only teacher who ever met her outside of school. In many ways, W. Edward Brown inspired Jay Parini as a model of patient, uncomplicated, sincere scholarship. Everything Donald Davie offered his student, Dana Gioia, he needed, including his friendship and candor. J. P. Stern’s greatest legacy was to give Daniel Johnson permission to become the person he had always been: “that is, a writer of ‘this and that,’ a questioner of those in authority, a proud adherent of the doctrine of scattered occasions.” Stephen Greenblatt looked for and found steady support as well as instruction from his Doktorvater, Alvin Kernan, whose Second World War experience, about which he never spoke at the time, provided in a hidden way the special power of his pedagogy. Robert Boyers discovered in George Steiner one who thought himself both “learner and messenger, scholarly exemplar and friend.” Such teachers display humility, gratitude, and esteem for their students. They are always prepared, careful, contemplative, and provoking while growing every day in their own understanding and skills. Service of a cause greater than themselves is the lifeblood that flows through the pastoral heart. “The whole secret of the teacher’s force,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “lies in the conviction that men [and women] are convertible, and they are.” Quite obviously Writers and Their Teachers is a joint endeavor, and I owe a special debt of gratitude to the contributors who took time away from their own work to produce their essays. I also owe a great debt to Ben Doyle, commissioning editor at Bloomsbury, whose many conversations with me guided the project from inception to completion; to Laura Cope at Bloomsbury, who led me through the thicket of permissions, contracts, and other details that an editor inevitably encounters; and to Jeffrey Meyers, who generously helped me to ensure the involvement of nine of the contributors, offered valued feedback on the style and content of the essays, and suggested the structure of the book. Dale Salwak

PART ONE

School

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1 Teachers We Remember: Gerrit Gouws J. M. Coetzee

In 1948, as a result of a shake-up in the civil service, my father lost his job and our family made a move from the city of Cape Town to the country town of Worcester, some 90 miles inland, where my father had been offered the position of bookkeeper in a factory that canned fruits and vegetables. At the age of eight, I was therefore transplanted from my cosy little school in the suburbs of Cape Town, reigned over by motherly Miss Leslie, to the Boys’ Primary School in Worcester, a town where hostility between the Afrikaansspeaking and English-speaking fractions of the white population extended everywhere, even into the classroom. After a year in Standard Three (Miss Stofberg) and a year in Standard Four (Miss Kloppers), I graduated to Standard Five (ages 10, 11, 12, respectively), the sole class in the school taught by a male teacher. That teacher was Mr. Gouws, who had a reputation as a strict disciplinarian. We—that is to say, I and some fifteen other graduates from gentle Miss Kloppers’ care—therefore crossed into Mr. Gouws’s classroom with some trepidation. Mr. Gouws was nearly bald, so we took him to be of middle age (we were wrong). The rumors of his strictness certainly turned out to be true. He kept a bamboo cane on his desk and did not hesitate to use it. 3

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The teacher’s cane was the object of a cult in South African schools in those days—days when indiscipline of any form was frowned upon and corporal punishment, in the home and at school, was endorsed as necessary to the enforcement of discipline. The very boys who flinched and sometimes cried out in pain under blows to their hands or backsides would the very next day speak with a mixture of fear, reverence, and even affection of the cane and the teacher who wielded it. They would discourse at length and with a certain perverse relish about the varieties of sensation that individual canes (thin ones, thick ones, short ones, long ones) imparted as they struck the skin (searing, biting, bruising, . . .). The reputations of individual teachers, even of women teachers (who were entitled to their own canes), became bound up with the qualities of the pain they could inflict. I did my utmost to steer clear of Mr. Gouws’s cane. I did so by being very obedient: by diligently doing my homework, by never making a noise in class, by keeping my exercise books neat. I was a very quiet child—unnaturally quiet, I now think. Mr. Gouws taught all our academic subjects—English, Afrikaans, History, Geography, Arithmetic, and Nature Study. For Woodwork and Physical Education we had specialist teachers. I did well in Standard Five. We wrote quarterly exams, and usually I came first in class. I did not, however, come first in every subject. In History, Geography, and Nature Study, subjects that required lots of rote memorization, I was only mediocre. I cannot say that I worshipped Mr. Gouws, but I certainly looked up to him. Back in Standard Three, our teacher, Miss Stofberg, would at times fly into inexplicable rages. Though she frightened me, I had no respect for her. Mr. Gouws was better humored, more equable. To me, he seemed a good teacher and a just man. A few days after the academic year had come to an end, my mother received a telephone call from Mr. Gouws: would I, her elder son, please come to his home, whose address he supplied. I was taken aback to learn that our respected teacher lived in the same housing estate as I did, and indeed a mere four blocks away. Like many children, I had given no thought to the private lives of my teachers: where they lived, who they consorted with, how they spent their time when they were not practising their profession. As far as I was concerned, outside the classroom they might as well have had no lives.

J. M. COETZEE

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Why did Mr. Gouws want to see me? Had I done something wrong? Was there a mistake in my school report that he needed to correct? When I knocked at the door of Mr. Gouws’s house—which from the outside looked just like our house, and had indeed been built to the same plan—it was opened not by Mr. Gouws but by an elegant young woman. I tried to explain who I was and why I was there (but why was I there, and indeed who was I?). Before I could finish, Mr. Gouws himself appeared, wearing not his customary jacket and tie but (astonishingly) khaki shorts and sandals. As it emerged, I had done nothing wrong and there was no mistake in my school report. Mr. Gouws was simply inviting me to have tea with him and the young woman who had opened the door—a young woman who was, of all things, his wife! I didn’t particularly like tea-drinking or the rituals associated with it, but I sat down in the Gouws living room and drank my tea and ate my biscuit and tried to be polite. Mrs. Gouws soon left the room and I was left alone with the man who until a few days ago had been my class teacher. What was this all about? Seventy years have passed since that day, and answers to the bewildering questions that churned through my mind have become clearer. Now that the academic year was over and exams were behind us, Mr. Gouws, full name Gerrit Gouws, not middle-aged at all but on the contrary in his early thirties, felt able to relax, to cease to act as a figure of authority, and to become, if not a friend, then at least a friendly or avuncular presence in the life of a boy whom, for reasons of his own, he found interesting and perhaps even felt protective of. Above all, Gerrit Gouws, a dedicated and perhaps even idealistic young teacher, wanted to bring it home to this expupil of his that, as he made the move from Standard Five (the topmost class in the Primary School) to Standard Six (the bottommost class in the Secondary School), he need not be fearful or feel he was all alone: if he needed reassurance or support, he, Mr. Gouws, would be ready to give it. None of this was apparent to me at the time. I had no idea that Mr. Gouws or any other adult could guess what was going on inside me. It did not occur to me that to any moderately sympathetic observer it might be clear that I was a troubled child—clever in the head but psychically fragile. I wished only for tea with Mr. Gouws to be over, so that I could get on my bicycle and ride home.

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Not long after this episode, my father left the employ of Standard Canners and we moved from Worcester back to Cape Town, where I was enrolled in a new school and had a new set of teachers to contend with. I would never see Mr. Gouws again. Nonetheless, the memory of his strict but kindly figure has remained with me. Of his life story I know very little. Since he was on the staff of a primary school, I could infer that he did not have a university degree and could not teach at a secondary school. Either his parents could not afford to send him to university or else his matriculation results were not good enough for admission to a university. To qualify as a primary school teacher he would therefore have had to go to a teacher training college, for which financial aid was not hard to obtain, particularly if one was a man. After two years of college, he would have emerged with a certificate entitling him to teach children up to the age of twelve. How long he had taught in Worcester before I entered his class I can only guess. Perhaps two or three years.1 We come to the central point of this brief memoir. Gerrit Gouws was an Afrikaner. His mother tongue was Afrikaans; all of his own education, including his training as a teacher, had been conducted through the medium of the Afrikaans language. English was a second language to him. Worcester, where he lived and worked, and where I happened to spend three critical years of my childhood, was a largely Afrikaans town. That is to say, it had a white community that was split into a majority who spoke Afrikaans at home and voted for the far-right National Party, and a minority who spoke English at home and voted for the centre-right United Party, plus a large Coloured community who spoke Afrikaans and had no vote at all.2 At the time of which I am writing, the early 1950s, the strict variety of social segregation known as “apartheid” was only just beginning to replace the loose form of social segregation that had reigned ever since Southern Africa had been colonized by Europeans in the mid-seventeenth century. All schooling in Worcester was based on one or more forms of separation. There were girls’ schools and there were boys’ schools. There were white schools and there were Coloured schools. In the white schools there were classes conducted in Afrikaans for Afrikaans speakers, and classes conducted in English for English speakers. For reasons that I can only guess at—perhaps his lack of seniority—Mr. Gouws had been

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given the not particularly desirable assignment of teaching a class of English-speaking boys. One of the subjects he would have to teach these English-speaking boys would be English. Worcester Boys’ Primary was a state school, catering to all social classes among the whites of the town and its environs. At the most rudimentary level, there were two such social classes: a class of people who could afford shoes for their children, and a class of people who could not. I was lucky enough to belong to the former. I wore shoes to school. But I was not proud of wearing shoes. Many of my schoolmates came to school barefoot, even during the bitterly cold upland winters. In a society divided up according to race and language, where did I, John Coetzee, fit, with my English first name and my Afrikaans last name? The answer is that I fitted into the category of “white Englishspeaker”, but only uneasily. Uneasily because—as had been the case ever since, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the British took over the Cape Colony by force from the Dutch—there were Dutch (or Afrikaner or Boer, however one wishes to name them) families who prudently adjusted to the new political dispensation and found it socially advantageous to adopt the manners and language of their new rulers. Sending a child to an English-language school was a common way of smoothing the child’s way in the world. It had been the fate of both my parents to be educated via the medium of English; it became my fate, too. Nor was I the only boy in Standard 5E (the E standing for English or Engels) who was there, so to speak, under false colors: English neither by descent nor by language nor in culture, we nevertheless aspired to find a place for ourselves among the English. In times of bitter sectional hostilities, after the triumph at the polls of the Afrikaner National Party, Mr. Gouws never played the Afrikaner-nationalist card (though, on occasion, other teachers did). He never tried to shame children like me. If parents with Afrikaans family names like Pelteret or Luyt or Coetzee wanted their children to be educated in English, then he would educate them in English. That was his job. That was what he was paid to do. The Standard Five syllabus for English First Language required that students learn how to parse English sentences, that is to say, to break sentences down into clauses (Main Clause and attendant Subordinate Clauses); to distinguish clauses that functioned as

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Nouns from clauses that functioned as Adjectives or Adverbs; to identify the various kinds of clause, of which the most troublesome were Adverbial Clauses (divided into clauses of Time, of Place, of Manner, of Reason, of Condition, of Concession); then to break each clause down into its Subject and Predicate; and to break Predicates down further into their component parts: Verbs and Verb Phrases, Objects and Complements. This last task required, in turn, a command of Parts of Speech: Nouns and Noun Phrases; Pronouns and Relative Pronouns; Verbs with their various Moods and Tenses and their Auxiliary Verbs; Conjunctions; Prepositions and Prepositional Phrases; and—most arcane of all—Gerunds. Day after day, my classmates and I slaved at our desks over the parsing of English sentences, then again slaved in the evenings over our English homework. Each day, our exercises would be returned with corrections in red pencil in Mr. Gouws’s careful hand. There were days when I despaired, unsure how to tell an Object from a Complement, or a Concession from a Condition. As a last desperate recourse, I would even ask my mother for help; but her mastery of English Grammar was no better than mine. Now, seventy years after Standard Five, and with a career of my own in the teaching profession behind me, I find my heart going out to poor Gerrit Gouws, required to master the intricacies of the grammar of a language not his own, and to maintain an air of unshakeable authority while delivering lessons in that grammar to children, most of whom spoke the language with more facility than he did. How much midnight oil must he not have burned preparing for the next day’s English class, while his young wife slumbered alone in the marital bed! Today, after composing thousands of pages of English prose and hundreds of thousands of grammatically correct English sentences, I have achieved a firmer grasp of those niceties of grammar that eluded me in Mr. Gouws’s class and may well have eluded Mr. Gouws, too. I can with greater confidence tell the difference between an Object and a Complement, and distinguish an Adverbial Clause of Concession from an Adverbial Clause of Condition. In that respect, I have overtaken my esteemed teacher. But, ultimately, it is to him that I owe what ability I have to take sentences of the English language to pieces and put the pieces together again.

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NOTES 1 Since writing these words, I have by great good fortune been able to contact Mr. Gouws’s eldest son, now in his sixties, from whom I have been able to confirm that his father did indeed receive his training at a college of education, now sadly defunct, in the country town of Graaff-Reinet. Between graduating from high school and entering college he had spent some years employed as a clerk on the railways. 2 “Coloured” is an appellation that cannot be avoided when discussing South African society in the modern era. The term entered common usage in the nineteenth century. During the years of apartheid, it named one of the four race-categories into which the population of South Africa was divided. Though one may have hoped that after liberation the term might dwindle away, that has unfortunately not been its fate. A Coloured person, in the South African context, is someone who identifies as a member of the Coloured community. As a definition this is clearly circular and therefore worthless. “Colouredness” has always been an identity ascribed from the outside rather than growing from the inside. Some South Africans ascribed as Coloured reject such identification, on the grounds that the very act of ascription is inherently racist. Others embrace the term in a spirit of defiance or a spirit of mockery or for even more complex reasons. The definition of Coloured that one encounters in popular sources, a definition that I emphatically do not endorse here, is that a Coloured person is a person of mixed race.

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2 Mabel Morrill Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina

To look at us, we had little in common. She was white, tall, broomstick-postured, with pinned-up hair and sensible shoes. She wore two-toned eyeglasses—black at the top of the frame, clear on the bottom—straight skirts, and cardigans over her collared blouses. She looked like an old-fashioned schoolmarm, but in a way that said confident and intelligent, stern but quick to smile. High school students always talked about their teachers (the gym teacher with dyed red hair and elegant skirt suits who let the girls smoke with her in her office; the male teacher who, because he used a chalk holder to keep his hands and clothes clean, they assumed to be gay; the cheerful new science teacher fresh out of college, who had more in common with the senior students than with the other teachers). No one, however, ever said a word about Mrs. Morrill, who taught literature and creative writing. She was of course respected, but in reality we had no notion that she could even have a personal life that would interest us. As one of my classmates told me decades later, “I didn’t pay a lot of attention to grown-ups, not much . . . to who they were beyond their classroom role, but Mrs. Morrill seemed like one of the trustworthy ones.” She was certainly that, and even though we didn’t peer into her life beyond the school walls, she seemed to have looked inside each of us, sorting through our unconscious minds like the mother of the Darling children in Peter and Wendy who, when they were sleeping, carefully sifted through their thoughts and folded them back into place so they would not know she had been inside their 11

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minds. This was her gift; Mrs. Morrill had the ability to go straight to the particular thing that would most help or encourage each of us, even when she was delivering bad news. Because of this, I’m sure that each of us thought we were her chosen one, the one in whom she took a special interest, helping us find the words or the ideas that elevated our work. I know that I did. I liked her conservative look, for it seemed just the way that a teacher like her was supposed to look. We all admired the fashionable teachers, the cool teachers, the ones who asked us about the latest dance steps, but she was not one of those. I think now, however, that she was tickled that I was in full-blown Carnaby Street gear, mostly sewn by myself, lifted from the fashion photos in Rave magazine, which my sister special-ordered from London and picked up monthly at a local drugstore. No one at our school, or perhaps even in our city, looked like me. Vinyl minidresses in neon colors. Lime-green go-go boots. Enormous earrings made of plastic ribbons. One day, boarding a bus, an older student, returned to finish his diploma, breathed admiringly into my friend’s ear, “She’s so MOD!” This determination to be different, to aspire to something or someplace greater than Springfield, Massachusetts, took bravery, especially as a mixed-race girl who had both white and black friends, and straddled two worlds. Our high school system, so well known that it was studied nationally, later consolidated and changed. But in those years, students chose among four schools, depending on what they wanted to do after graduation. Mine, Classical High School, was for college-bound students, good in the sciences, but particularly in the humanities. Technical High School, or Tech, was for those headed for degrees in the sciences. Commerce was for future office workers. Trade was for those training for the trades. Every day after school my neighborhood friends and I walked past the students leaving Commerce, either heading home or, when I was sixteen, to my after-school job at the R&B record shop. And every day some of the Black girls attending Commerce, all strangers to me, jeered at me as I passed by. One day one of them stepped forward, pulled my huge earring from my ear, and turned back, waving it triumphantly to her friends. I kept walking. I kept the other earring. These black girls probably saw me, a biracial girl with light skin and many white friends, as a traitor to the race by dressing in what they considered outrageous ways.

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I don’t know if Mrs. Morrill sensed the line I was trying to walk in my teenaged life. Mod, but also Classical. Black, but also white. British Invasion but also Soul. Pop culture, but also a bookworm. I do think she enjoyed it. One day I walked into class wearing what we called a “fall,” a long semi-wig, and she smiled as she picked up one of the strands. “It’s amazing what they can do today,” she said to me at the classroom door. “You can have shorter hair one day, and long hair the next!” However I presented myself, she completely accepted me, although sometimes with amusement. The assignments she set the creative writing class called for both imagination and a tough realism. “Think of a character,” she told us in one class. “Write down a few traits. What is different about them? What do they like?” When we read our pieces aloud several minutes later, students said things like their person had a red car or walked to work. Mine, I said (rather shyly I imagine, because I knew they would laugh at me), had an insect collection. They of course laughed, but she stopped them, and said it was just right, it was just the sort of thing you could build a story around. Another day she mocked us for saying the sun peeped through the clouds. “Imagine that enormous thing peeping!” she chided. Slowly I began to grow. I don’t know when it was that I realized that she was taking a personal interest in my growth and development as a person. Knowing that I made nearly all of my own clothes in order to get the look I wanted, she stopped me one day after school and asked me to make her a dress. I was horrified—how could I do such a thing? But I agreed, and she brought me a pattern and fabric. As I picked them up to take home, she asked, “Don’t you need to measure me? That’s what dressmakers do.” Quelle horreur! (I was in my fifth year of French and prone to drama.) This was not, as it might seem today, an improper advance; rather, she wanted me to learn to do all the things I did in the correct way, whether it was writing a poem or making a dress. Thus it was that she came to my house. No teacher had ever come to my house. That was part of the unwritten rule of separation of school and home. You might see them in church, or look away if you spied them in a store, but they never crossed your threshold. When I was in third grade, in the days when doctors came to the house and pharmacies delivered medicine, our moonlighting teacher came to the door one evening to make a delivery. He looked embarrassed, and I, standing behind my mother, was embarrassed,

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too, for both of us. But when she came to my house, Mrs. Morrill walked cheerfully in, chatting warmly with my mother. It turned out that she had known the people from whom my parents had bought the house; they had also been teachers and she had been in the house before. They had a great conversation until it came time for me to pull out the tape measure. When it was done, I brought the dress to her home, which turned out to be an apartment within walking distance from the high school. I had put in the zipper badly, so that it pulled in the back, but she admired it nonetheless, holding it up. Then she disappeared for a moment and returned arm in arm with an elderly man, a bit shorter than she was. “This,” she said proudly, “is my husband.” She, who had of course seemed elderly to me, now looked younger, and happy. I realized that she was doing me a great honor, for I got the sense that he wasn’t well, that few got to meet him—indeed that perhaps that few knew he even existed—and that she considered me special enough to be introduced to him, her partner in life. She cheerfully wore the dress to school the next day, hopefully with a cardigan to hide the zipper, and then, since I never saw it again, presumably she packed it away. Naturally I thought that I was the only special student. But then I found that other students also had their stories of her kindness and intelligence, although I knew of none who had a home visit from her. One of my closest friends, still a friend today, says that because our school was so good, we had the best teachers, but that even among them Mrs. Morrill stood out for her perceptiveness. We all studied foreign languages, and she had us select poems from other languages and translate them into English, retaining their literary qualities. She sent our work to prizes available to students, sometimes without our knowing until one of us won one. In our class was a boy, also a senior, who was a very good poet. In our final spring he was in a terrible car accident, and the three others in the car were badly injured. He was, too; he returned to school after a tracheotomy, speaking hoarsely and haltingly through a hole in his throat. My friend told me that he was ostracized, perhaps blamed for the accident. More likely it was the way that people avoid those who are visibly altered or ill. But he was brave, and continued to speak and read aloud in class. When it came time for our end-of-year school presentations, the creative writers would read out their work to the school.

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As we prepared for the presentations, Mrs. Morrill took my friend aside after school, and told her firmly but gently that she was not going to be a poet; her writing wasn’t good enough. This didn’t mean, she said, that she would not be a good writer in another form (and indeed she later published a nonfiction book). However, she was a beautiful singer, part of the school’s madrigal choir. What if, she suggested, the injured student could read a poem, with my friend standing beside him, and as he rested his voice between recitations, she sang a song? It was a brilliant solution, and the two of them stood on the stage, with three poems recited and three songs sung, to appreciative applause. As my friend told me recently, “she saw us as whole people, not just what we could do in class. Mrs. Morrill told us that ‘this is what you could excel at.’ So we did.” The injured student went on to be a teacher and a musician despite his damaged voice. He recalled Mrs. Morrill playing Simon and Garfunkel’s album Bookends that had the lyrics printed on the back. “Did we play it in class? Hard to imagine,” he told me. Yet, “she was impressed by the line ‘the man in the gabardine suit,’ because she didn’t expect that someone of Paul Simon’s generation would know what gabardine was.” He also recalled something much more important, which I had forgotten: “The day after Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered and we sat in Mrs. Morrill’s class and she let us just write whatever we wrote.” Most likely she was grieving too much to teach that day, but a month or two later she announced to the class that my poem written in that dreadful aftermath, and in the wake of Bobby Kennedy’s murder, had won a prize from the Women’s League of Peace and Freedom. She had entered it without ever telling me. When the final prize assembly came for the school that June, I was given a creative writing prize: her own copy of Thoreau’s Walden. I am sure today that she wanted me to read about another writer who had trod his own path, and forged an unexpected life true to his calling. I never saw Mrs. Morrill again. But several years later, heavily pregnant with my first child, I sat in my office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and tried to track her down. It took several phone calls to my old high school, but someone finally found an address for her, in Devon, England. She, too, had trod her own path. I wrote to her immediately, letting her know that I had majored in English and Creative Writing in college, that I was married with a child on

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the way. That I would love to see her again. A few weeks later the letter came back, unopened. Someone had written across the envelope, “Sadly, deceased.” She took her mysteries with her, and for me the trail has gone cold but intriguingly coincidental. I found, thanks to the internet, that she had graduated from Rutland High School in Vermont; my husband and I both graduated from a college in Vermont. She went on to Boston, where she got a Bachelor of Literary Interpretation from Emerson College, known for the arts. We, too, later lived near Boston. She got an MA from Boston University; I got an MA from a college in Boston. She also studied at the University of Vermont. Her high school yearbook said that she had “little time for hobbies, but she does enjoy books and the theater.” In retrospect, England— even Devon—was the right place for her. Yet these finds led to more mysteries. Her name in high school, college, and profession remained “Mabel Morrill.” Since married women in those days took their husbands’ surnames, did she marry as a teenager? Unlikely. Am I misremembering that she introduced the man I met as her husband? Was he a brother, a friend, or was she living in sin? I like to think the latter. In a final coincidence, I later spent six months in Devon, where she had moved after retirement, as a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Exeter University, where I taught and wrote. Every day I walked the streets there, and wondered if she, too, had walked these same streets, and thought how fitting it was that for a time at least, the sidewalks of Springfield, Massachusetts, were meeting the pavements of Devon, England, all through the medium of words and teaching.

3 Learning Curve Catherine Aird

The first person to teach me anything about writing was not a teacher at all but a school friend called Judith Dickson who lived across the road. We were both seven years old and I had just had my tonsils and adenoids out—a fashionable operation in those preantibiotic days. Being the daughter of a general medical practitioner and a former hospital ward sister, it had been impressed on me that whatever happened I MUSTN’T MAKE A FUSS. And so I didn’t. Judith had had the same operation a couple of months later and, sitting on her garden wall, I listened, fascinated, to her very different account of a very similar experience. “A ghost with no face and no head had come into the room so I had screamed,” she said. She screamed then to show me just how she had screamed at the time. “He was dressed all over in white with a mask,” she said, “so I screamed again.” Then two women dressed like nuns with headdresses on had seized her by the arms and held her down on a hard table while the ghost clamped a funny metal thing (a meatcage anesthetic mask) down on her face, smothering her so she couldn’t breathe. Then he poured something that smelt horrible onto it which made her choke and then stopped her breathing at all. When she woke up again there was blood everywhere, so she tried to scream again but she couldn’t because her throat hurt so. And then they gave her an ice cream and so she was sick again all over the blood. “Everywhere was red and white,” she said graphically. She cried and cried but her mummy didn’t come and then she was sick again over everything. 17

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I remember even then admiring how she had been able to make such a drama out of the event when I hadn’t been allowed to and then realizing that this could be done with imagination, and to good effect on paper about almost everything. My first introduction to murder came later when I was told that if I looked to the right out of my bedroom window I could (very nearly) see the spot where a local mill-owner had been killed in 1812 by four local Luddites for introducing textile machinery into his wool mill. My first encouragement in writing did come from a schoolteacher but in a rather backhanded way. This was when she remarked that my history essays were very well written for someone coming up the science side of the school, although later in life I realized that this said rather more about her than about me, exemplifying as it did her view on the differences between the arts and the sciences. Alas, it was not long after that when my formal education ended abruptly. A family move some 250 miles south from Yorkshire was followed by my being diagnosed with a very serious kidney disease with lasting consequences. Confined to bed for a long time, diuretics, hypertension, and steroid drugs not having been discovered then, and knowing nobody local at the time, my exemplars came between hard covers from the village library. I soon graduated from the works of Leslie Charteris and Sapper— their heroes being The Saint and Bulldog Drummond, respectively— to reading more demanding writers such as John Buchan, Arthur Conan Doyle, and then the peerless P. G. Wodehouse who taught me that the speakers of good dialogue didn’t always have to be named: the reader should know by what was being said and the manner in which it was spoken which character had spoken. There is a railway station at the bottom of our garden so Freeman Wills Crofts and his form of train-spotting became an early favorite, followed by R. Austin Freeman, whose stories were set nearby. From there it was an easy step to the works of Patricia Wentworth, Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh—indeed, the whole cohort of the Golden Age writers and those who came soon after such as Christianna Brand, Josephine Bell, and Josephine Tey. It has been more difficult for me to break out from that truly blessed literary tradition of plausible clues, subtle red herrings, fair play, satisfactory endings, honest police, and believable

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characterization. (I did once attempt a parody of the detective oeuvre but nobody noticed.) Few of these authors set out to be teachers save for Dorothy L. Sayers, who had been a teacher and whose introductions to her collection of Detection, Mystery and Horror Stories published from 1928 are an excellent introduction to crime-writing. Over the years, before computers, I found that if I didn’t know something myself, I usually knew someone who did: that it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew that matters in these specialized instances. What has hampered my own updating within the genre is an engrained love of the puzzle as an art form. I lived in a household daily engaged in solving crosswords and with a keen (and wily) bridge player for a mother and a medical father who likened diagnosis to simple detection. It was, he used to say, the interesting part of general practice: treatment was dull because you could always look it up, but a collection of diverse signs and symptoms could be—and often was—intriguing. The words “differential diagnoses” appeared often in his referral letters to consultants. Forensic medicine was one of his interests and I would say that he was my mentor in this respect. This has obviously been a great help to me in writing crime and detection. I still have the counterfoils of the death certificates he wrote and these, too, have come in handy over the years. I well remember his giving evidence at an inquest on a local murder and suicide. He had to explain his reasoning to the coroner on how he had determined that the man had murdered his wife before cutting his own throat. That there had been no blood under the wife’s shoes and rather a lot under those of the husband was one of the reasons I learned from this “Autocrat at the Breakfast Table.” In fact, the conversation at our own breakfast table was more redolent of that between Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen, the two medical students in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, who didn’t let delicacy stop them from discussing their morbid anatomy studies at mealtimes. Sometimes I was able to experience my father’s methods myself. I was once sent upstairs in the house of a man found unconscious at the foot of his stairs to feel whether the bed was still warm and thus help establish when he had fallen. On a similar occasion I was standing behind my father making what I could of the time of death

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of a woman patient found dead in bed. The curtains were still closed although it was mid-morning, her bed-light and radio were both on and an undrunk bedtime cup of cocoa was on her bedside table, so it wasn’t too difficult. A situation in the village that seemed to me to have blackmail as its only explanation wasn’t too difficult either except that my father merely said “Yes” and wouldn’t elaborate further. My one glimpse of actual violence came when two men who had been fighting on a charabanc trip to the coast from London were brought into the consulting room after slashing each other with knives (the popularity of stabbing was to come later). When they tried to carry on their fight there, it was my brother who was sent for, not me—surely legitimate gender discrimination? Similarly, it was possible to see the police doing routine work on their own patch and I found this was equally helpful to an incipient crime writer. Such as watching the local bobby going through the cottage of a deceased elderly seamstress and taking into custody (I hope) her life savings from the places he knew exactly where to find them. The mantelpiece and the tea caddy seemed to be favorites. On another occasion, I watched a bulky police sergeant casually place his left leg across the right leg of a youth sitting beside him. The lad had been threatening to kill the girlfriend who had rejected him and then kill himself. Should he have attempted to stand up the sergeant’s unobtrusive maneuver would have prevented him from doing any such thing. An object lesson in Things Not Being What They Seem (an important part of crime-writing) once occurred outside our front door. This was when a double-decker bus stopped there, the driver rushing into the house saying that a young man on board had been stabbed. I helped my, by then, elderly father up to the top deck where the man had slipped to the floor almost under the seats. He was semi-conscious and there was an ominous patch of red on his shirt above his heart. My father diagnosed an epileptic seizure, the red stain coming from a broken red pen in his breast pocket. I did venture to ask another police sergeant if anyone had ever attempted to bribe him. Only once, he said, and that was when he found a high-value sterling note inside a driving license. He handed it back, advising the driver to keep it in a safer place in case it got lost! There was one memorable occasion when the village constable brought a sack full of old bones round on his bicycle and deposited

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them on the kitchen table. Told in no uncertain terms by my mother to take them outside, he explained that they had come to light when drains were being installed in a house next to the churchyard. And that the coroner required my father to certify that they were indeed only of historic interest. This he did, pointing out that they had already been buried twice before and thus must have come from a charnel house. This being the case, he said, there would be a lot more where these had come from. The policeman grinned and said that there wouldn’t be as he had told the workmen not to find any more. I am sure that procedures have been tightened in the subsequent sixty years. Joy of joys, I was once sitting in the back of a taxi with a friend when we were flagged down by a policeman standing in the middle of road. He leapt into the taxi and said, “Follow that car,” which the driver did with great enthusiasm. He then turned to us, apologized and said, “You can’t go to a punch-up on a bus.” The driver stopped short of the action so we didn’t get to see that. Another learning experience—one without any teacher and a salutary one at that—was to be the victim of crime myself. I was awoken in bed in the early hours by a man waving a baseball bat over my head. He and his two accomplices made away with a very great deal before locking me in my bedroom—this in the days before mobile phones. The dialogue was very disappointing, he asking me where my jewels were and my telling him that I hadn’t got any, only a bad heart: much too mundane to be of any use to a crime writer. I found learning by listening to be very helpful in writing crime and detection. Listening to the very senior nurse telling me how cleverly a doctor had faked the results of his drug trials; listening to elderly neighbors whose mother had so welcomed the Married Women’s Property Act; listening to a friend whose dying husband in his last days had started to talk about things she had not known of; listening to a farmer saying where he would hide a dead body—and no, it wasn’t disguised as a scarecrow; listening to the mystified speculations of those surrounding a suddenly mute woman; listening to someone miffed because she was never invited to a friend’s house when the duchess was staying only to find out much later that the woman she did often meet there called Topsy was indeed Her Grace. Plenty of scope in these instances for “Confusion worse confounded.” Something more in common with schooldays, though, was learning to start to think with a proposition in mind taking, say, a

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quotation from Seneca, “He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.”—Discuss. “Except in a mercy killing could anyone murder a friend?”—Discuss. “What would have happened if Achilles (or someone else) hadn’t had a bad heel?”—Discuss. “What could make an honest woman dishonest?”—Discuss. A surprisingly helpful vade mecum on characterization—it is sometimes difficult to latch onto the salient feature that makes a character memorable—is Scouting for Boys by Robert BadenPowell. Stressing, just as much as my father always did, the great importance of observation, he detailed what could be deduced from the manner a person wore a hat, the way they walked, and even what the wear on the soles of their shoes revealed were all easy enough points for an author to build up a character. Clothes might not “maketh the man” but they do help a reader create a mental picture of one. Agatha Christie often used as characterization the way in which clergy, doctors, colonels, and so forth were perceived by the public—more so then than now perhaps, when the nature of so many different occupations are incomprehensible to the uninitiated. Systems Analyst, Chief Operating Officer, Customer Support Assistant, even Nerd have quite different connotations from the above occupations. What I did appreciate is that the author needs to latch onto some little distinctive idiosyncrasy that marks the person out in the mind of the reader. I did learn, too, that writing teaches one something about oneself. Knowing, for instance, that writing a book has something in common with pregnancy in that this process, too, should experience a quickening or a coming alive halfway through. And once when it didn’t, knowing enough to finish the book and then consign it to the back of the attic for forty years, telling myself not to let it affect the next book. And noting that the winter I stitched a tapestry was one when I didn’t write a book and so knew not to do that again. And feeling my own heart racing as I wrote about a chase . . . Although at the end of the day one could say that all any crime writer really needs are Rudyard Kipling’s “Six Honest ServingMen—Their Names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who,” which, Kipling wrote, “Taught Me All I Knew.” Those and the eternal challenge of writing a locked-room mystery. Try that for size . . .

4 A Way with Words Michael Scammell

The word “teacher” conjures up educators of all stripes: professors, instructors, trainers, tutors, schoolteachers, but the person I wish to write about fits an older definition of the word, “one who instructs by precept, experience, or example.” My best remembered teacher in that respect is Anthony Brode, a journalist at the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton. I met him at the impressionable age of sixteen, when I had just left school and started my first job as a copyboy. I don’t think the word “teacher” crossed the mind of either of us at the time, but Tony gradually became a mentor to me and taught me how to write—and live—in an unfamiliar environment. We got to know one another in the fall of 1951. I had just finished grammar school, the first in my family to get a proper education thanks to the reforms instituted by the Labour government following the Second World War, and had done well academically, especially in English and foreign languages, but emerged from school socially backward and unsure of myself. My parents had both left school at fourteen and started their working lives in service. They were solidly working class, with scant idea of how to advise their newly educated son, and our school’s career advisor wasn’t much better. His idea of a good job was pen-pushing in local businesses or government offices, with little sense that an adventurous adolescent might crave something more challenging. Searching for inspiration as the time to start working approached, I recalled a comment by my English teacher, Mr. Curtis. I didn’t care for Mr. Curtis, nor he for me, so I was all the more surprised when 23

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in my last year, as he handed back one of my papers, he growled sotto voce, “Scammell, you have a way with words.” It was a rare compliment from an unexpected quarter and I soon forgot about it. I knew I wrote easily and with abandon. I was also a voracious reader of books, comics, newspapers, anything in print, including the two papers delivered to our house on weekdays and the three on Sunday. They were so familiar it would never have occurred to me to connect them to my needs, but now, casting around for inspiration, I remembered Curtis’s comment and thought, why not? Why not put the one skill I have to good use? I made a rare visit to the nearest sizable town where I lived, Southampton, with its excellent reference library, and copied down the addresses of forty local newspapers in the county of Hampshire. To each I sent a handwritten letter, asking if they needed a junior reporter, and got two replies. The editor of the Hampshire Gazette in Winchester wrote to say he was interested, but backed away when he learned I was sixteen, and the editor of the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, R. R. Gleave, wrote that he was looking for a copyboy. The Echo was one of papers we read at home, but I had never heard the word “copyboy” before. I looked it up and was disappointed to see that copyboys were essentially messengers, ferrying newspaper articles (copy) between reporters, subeditors, and printers before they appeared in print. With no other options in sight, I went for an interview. Gleave greeted me in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, a silver watch chain dangling from its pocket, looking the way an editor was supposed to look according to the illustrated books on journalism I had consulted in the library. When I asked him about writing for the Echo, or being trained to write, he was adamant: it was out of the question. He had all the reporters he needed, he said, including two junior reporters who had just returned from National Service and needed to be kept busy. I took the job anyway, hoping that once I showed him my way with words, he would relent and hire me. I wasn’t entirely unreasonable. Writers such as John Updike, Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Stone, Gay Talese, and Michael Ignatieff had all started out as copyboys, though I didn’t find that out till later. I started my job full of hope. The Echo’s newsroom was a busy and exciting place for a country bumpkin like me, with reporters coming and going, typewriters clacking, telephones ringing, the buzz of voices, and in the afternoon, the roar of the printing presses

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in the background. I was constantly on call, racing back and forth to deliver copy, galleys, or simply handwritten messages to the editorial staff. The most colorful character there was the crime reporter, whose name I have forgotten. He would come in wearing a soft-brimmed fedora and flowing overcoat that at first glance could be taken for a cloak, making him look like a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Sam Spade, and he always had a fruity anecdote or two from the latest court case he was following. A less eye-catching figure was the shipping reporter, Arthur Taylor, a neat man in sober suits, who looked more like a banker than a reporter. Shipping was Southampton’s lifeblood and Arthur was an expert on the arrivals and departures of transoceanic liners, such as the Queen Mary, the Queen Elizabeth, and the United States. He got to interview some of the film stars and other celebrities aboard, who were big news in the drab 1950s, and was another fount of off-therecord stories that couldn’t appear in print. These were the giants of our provincial newsroom and instantly caught my imagination. One day this would be me, I thought. Filled with optimism, I took evening classes in shorthand and typing, one of half a dozen pimply youths in a class full of young women training to be secretaries. It should have been a kind of paradise for someone in my shoes, but I was too timid and inexperienced to take advantage of the situation and got the brush-off each time I essayed a date. I failed in the classroom, too. Despite having proven my skill in foreign languages, I couldn’t make head or tail of the strokes and dashes of Pitman’s shorthand and my fumbling fingers never did master the typewriter keys. Ever since, I have either written in longhand or typed with two (or sometimes three) fingers. My feelings about the Echo began to fade. I was constantly on my feet, called on to perform the most menial tasks, and felt I was nothing but an odd-job boy. Among my regular humiliations was the loss of every Saturday to football—not to playing, but to working. The Echo depended heavily on income generated by its Saturday sales and its ability to deliver the English leagues’ football results quickly so punters could check their football pools. I spent my Saturday afternoons ferrying football scores and dispatches on how the Southampton team (the Saints) were faring to the subeditors in their cubicles. It was also my job, before the fun began, to cross the busy High Street at lunchtime and fill a giant tin teapot with milky tea for the subeditors on duty. The teapot was round and

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heavy and wobbled in my hands, making me fearful of dropping it. I was also afraid I would run into one of the girls I used to dance with at the Guildhall or the Royal Pier on Saturday nights and be exposed as a lowly slave, contradicting my casual boasts about the joys of working at the Echo. It was around this time I got to know Anthony Brode, another giant of the newsroom. Tony, as I soon learned to call him, was a bohemian figure, still rare in those postwar years, and recognizable by his looks and dress, from his overlong, wavy hair, black hornrimmed glasses to his light-brown corduroys, embroidered silk scarves, and suede high-tops with thick rubber soles known as “brothel-creepers.” Like most of our intellectuals at the time, he was a Francophone, hooked on French food, French movies, and French fashion, which was just coming back into fashion. He was also steeped in books, art, theatre, and music, and his laid-back approach to work and relaxed manner contrasted strongly with the nervous energy of the news reporters. And this was capped by a rollicking wit and bouts of shrill laughter that instantly drew you to him. Tony had once been the Echo’s editorial writer, a post that required close attention to current affairs and proved his seriousness, but he felt more at home in his present job as cultural editor and editor of a daily diary called “Topics of the Hour.” This miscellany of short, gossipy snippets about goings-on around town was fed by Tony’s interest in local history and his curiosity about the human condition, while his modesty and easy manner stood in sharp contrast to the self-importance of most of his senior colleagues. He was eager to talk, generous with his time, and unlike the other journalists, who were cordial, but rarely had time to linger or answer questions, Tony not only answered my questions, he had questions of his own—about my life, my family, my views, and my ambitions. It was flattering, to say the least, and I confided to him my frustration over my dead-end job and my anger at not being allowed to write. There was little he could do, he said, to help me with general reporting, but he offered to smuggle human-interest pieces I might write into “Topics of the Hour” without attribution. I managed about a dozen in the end, all lovingly pasted into my first scrapbook, and Tony was encouraging. He praised my writing, but also strictly edited it, cutting out my more self-conscious flourishes and pointing out the virtues of accuracy and brevity. He took my

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ephemeral compositions seriously and boosted my ego at a time when I badly needed it. Tony was twenty-nine when I met him, not quite twice my age, and though pleased by his interest, I doubted it would be possible to make friends with him. His accent, vocabulary, gestures, references, and manners all pointed to an upper-class education, which in class-soaked provincial England immediately put me on guard. In the working-class circles in which my family and friends moved, it was normal to despise the rich as much as most of the ones we knew despised us. It turned out Tony had spent his early years in prep school and his later years at Marlborough College, one of England’s most prestigious boarding schools, and though I didn’t know these details at the time, marks of privilege were all over him. My education at village school, secondary modern school, and four years of grammar school had slightly narrowed the educational gap between us, but socially there was a yawning divide. Instead of his Oxbridge drawl, I had a pronounced Hampshire accent. As a child I had pronounced “I” as “Oi” and the name of my native village, Hythe, as “Oithe,” and dropped my aitches, which still lingered in the way I spoke, while rough-andready manners betrayed my approach to life that trumpeted my social ignorance and low expectations of life. I was also stoutly left wing, a staunch supporter of the Labour Party, and took it for granted Tony was on the other side. There was only one problem. This social and political enemy just happened to be generous and unassuming, with impeccable manners, and was the most interesting person I had ever met. My heart was at loggerheads with my head, and I wasn’t sure how I should respond to him. Luckily, I took the side of my heart. Far from being heir to a country house and great wealth, Tony was the only son of an impecunious vicar, whose position as a clergyman of the Church of England had qualified him for bursaries to pay for his son’s privileged education. This made Tony something of an outsider himself and he responded by recoiling from the rampant snobbery of the public schools and spurning the sense of entitlement they had inherited. To demonstrate his rebellion, he also turned down a university education that was his for the taking and went straight from school to working for a local newspaper. Getting a job on a newspaper had been much easier for him than for me, of course, but he showed his independence by writing two very funny books about

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his early life, one devoted to the odd habits of his eccentric father and another to the pratfalls of a young journalist in the provinces. He had also changed his politics, moving left to support the Labour Party in general elections, but he was unable to change his accent, tastes, or refined manners, and they had misled me. After many cups of tea and heartfelt talks at lunchtime, Tony invited me home for dinner one day, which was followed by more invitations. Talking of different languages, the evening meal in my home was set for 5:30 p.m. and was called “tea,” while Tony’s evening meal started well after 7 p.m. and was called “dinner,” with wine, instead of tea, as the drink of choice. Technically I was too young to drink alcohol, but pretended to like the bitter-tasting beverage when he first served it and soon came around. Other compromises were harder to make. I was used to starchy, overcooked main courses with lots of meat, very few salads, and a wide variety of sugary “sweets,” and it took me a long time to adapt to Mediterranean dishes with little meat and salad with vinaigrette instead of salad cream. Luckily desserts—puddings in my lingo—were a nationally shared addiction and I practically always felt at home. With new food and drink came new experiences and new topics of conversation. Tony’s wife, Sylvia, was born in Buenos Aires, the daughter of an English businessman and his wife, and was well traveled. Educated in Britain, she became a talented amateur actress, and when she told her many stories, she illustrated them with theatrical flourishes and enunciated them in a Mayfair accent that was even more rarified than Tony’s. With her aquiline nose, high cheekbones, and a more-or-less permanent tan, she looked as striking off the stage as on, and it was impossible for a healthy male not to fall in love with her at sight. She and Tony seemed extremely happy together, in contrast with the unhappy marriages of my parents and uncles and aunts. They introduced me to live theater and took me to cast parties after some of Sylvia’s first nights, where I met and drank with similarly excitable actors and felt I would soon be a regular presence among Southampton’s sophisticated bohemians. Talk about art, books, music, the latest movies, interspersed with drinking and dancing, were all part of the mix and it was a heady time for me, though I never said much myself. After these parties I often had to stay with them overnight, since the ferry I had to take from Southampton to Hythe stopped running at about 10 p.m., and sometimes I stayed after an ordinary dinner.

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Unlike my family’s small living room, where four of us huddled over a coal fire on wintry nights with the radio blasting, making it hard to read, Tony and Sylvia’s comfortable lounge was spacious and warm, and I had free run of their bookcases (there was no television, of course). At home I was earnestly educating myself with cheap, color-coded paperbacks published by Penguin, searching out the pale-blue volumes devoted to religion, philosophy, and science and also the red and maroon covers signaling fiction and drama. At Tony’s home, the stress was on fiction, and I discovered modern authors, mostly British, such as Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, P. G. Wodehouse, and Agatha Christie, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Tony, it turned out, wrote regularly for Punch and had published parodies of Chaucer, Noel Coward, Kingsley Amis, and Jack Kerouac, along with his much anthologized parodies, “Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins” and “Calypsomania.” He finished his first book, Picture a Country Vicarage (1956), about his father, soon after I met him. It was in the vaudeville style of Wodehouse, and Tony followed it with To Bed on Thursday (1958), mocking his younger self as a novice reporter and parodying a host of journalistic clichés. With typically honest modesty, he rarely talked about his achievements but was more famous than he revealed—and more ambitious. He had decided to go beyond humor and let slip he had begun work on a “straight” realistic novel. At the age of eighteen, I was called up for National Service and assigned to the British Army. I was anticipating two years of boredom, but thanks to the languages I learned in grammar school, I spent most of my time studying Russian. This led to a degree in Russian at Nottingham University, followed by a year teaching English in the former Yugoslavia and then a move to New York to study Russian at graduate school. We stayed in touch throughout that time in part because I still needed his advice and in part because Tony was genuinely interested in my development and keen to see me succeed. Soon I was writing to him for advice on all sorts of subjects, from how to handle a captious girlfriend to how to complete a short story for the university’s literary magazine, Gong. I sent him a satirical essay I had written on life at a redbrick university, that is, Nottingham, striving to imitate Tony’s voice and language in his parodies, but neither story nor essay was well received by Gong’s editors, and I fared better when I started working

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for our weekly student newspaper, the Gongster, instead. Here was familiar territory and I was able to draw on Tony for so much advice on layout and distribution as well as on editorial matters that I have no doubt his comments helped us win the prize for best student newspaper of the year. By the time I moved to Yugoslavia our relationship had subtly changed. Tony was working on the novel he hoped would establish his reputation and allow him to give up journalism for fiction, and I was also thinking about writing a novel. This didn’t make us equals, of course. He was doing and I was dreaming, but it encouraged a similar cast of mind, and I gained enormously in selfconfidence when Tony told me his publisher, Paul Elek, was interested in publishing Russian authors. Elek asked for names and when I sent Tony a list, Tony lobbied Elek to publish an anthology of translations with myself as editor. I sent Elek my first translation, The Fatalist (1839) by the nineteenth-century poet and novelist, Mikhail Lermontov, but the idea was dropped as not commercial. Curiously, Tony got hooked on Russian literature and a few years later, helped a Russian émigré friend translate into English A Russian Childhood (1911?) by Elizaveta Vodovozova. The one literary subject we disagreed upon was the importance of a group of young English writers called the “angry young men.” I mention it because it was the one time that class came between us. Tony sent me a copy of Kingsley Amis’s comic novel, Lucky Jim (1954), and was so impressed by it he wrote a benevolent parody. He admired similar novels by John Wain and John Braine as well, and John Osborne’s sensational play, Look Back in Anger (1956), which gave its name to the movement. These “Oxbridge malcontents,” as one critic called them, had become uncomfortable with their lives because they felt their privileges represented a betrayal of their middle-class upbringing and they were too close to the establishment. Tony identified with them, regarding them as revolutionary, whereas I thought of them as spoiled brats compared with the truly poor. Our arguments had no real impact on our friendship. Tony continued to do everything he could to boost me by publicizing my “success story,” as he called it, in the Echo. “From Copyboy to English Teacher” was the splashy headline on “Topics of the Hour” one day, shortly before I set off for Yugoslavia, accompanied by a large photograph. The same photo appeared a year later, when I

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returned, on a page headlined “Everyday Life in Yugoslavia.” This one was particularly satisfying. I got to write for the Echo at last and was also paid for it. Tony printed another piece when I left for New York, featuring me again as the “former copyboy” who made good, and to mark my return to England the following summer, he informed his readers of my first big break, a commission to translate one of Nabokov’s Russian novels, The Gift (1938), into English. By a kind of fluke, my younger brother, William, who later became a poet, was now the Echo’s copyboy and Tony was helping to educate and polish him, too, making our relationships a family affair. Tony, alas, was now having problems of his own. Before tackling his long novel, he had dashed off a farce about a monk he knew who ran a circus, but was unable to find a publisher. The new novel, evidently satirizing local politics and pillorying the corruption of the provincial press (I never got to read it myself), was also causing trouble. He joked in one of his letters to me that if he told the absolute truth, he’d have to publish it under a pseudonym. Perhaps this influenced his decision to leave the Echo not long after that letter and work for a couple of local radio stations and then the BBC World Service (where I later worked) before returning to the Echo again. Maybe he had given up his novel by then, perhaps on health grounds, because he died at the shockingly young age of sixty-one. In its obituary, the Echo underlined Tony’s good humor and easy grace, his gift for making friends and keeping them, his deep love of books and good writing, his wit and talent for satire, but I’m not sure the author was aware of the personal and intellectual largesse Tony lavished on me and then my brother (and possibly others for all I knew). I was abroad at the time and missed the funeral. Had I been there I would have echoed everything said in the obituary and added a purely personal note. To me, Tony wasn’t just a friend, but also a mentor, benefactor, and guardian angel. A generous and wise counselor, he literally took over one part of my life and guided my development with a touch so light I never noticed it at the time. Looking back, I see that in my uncouth youth I was already ambitious and would have battled my way to some sort of success without his help, but what success I had came faster and more easily with his encouragement than it would otherwise have done. In conclusion I should mention one memento I received from Tony that extended his influence beyond the grave. Soon after I

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joined the army, he sent me a slim paperback to stuff into my knapsack and read in my spare time. It wasn’t a modern novel, but an eighteenth-century philosophical fairy tale, Candide (1759), by the French savant, Voltaire. I wondered why Tony had chosen this book, apart from his usual desire to educate me, and the obvious answer was its humor. Candide portrays the travels and fantastic adventures of a young gentleman, Candide, and his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, who, despite the horrors and disasters they experience and the excruciating tortures they endure, cling to Pangloss’s axiom that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” Much of the humor is slapstick and I laughed my head off the first time I read it. It was decades before I stumbled across the book again and rightly or wrongly, thought I saw a personal message in it. Voltaire’s aim was to ridicule the insane optimism (“Optimism” is the book’s subtitle) of Leibniz and other Enlightenment philosophers, who pictured their world as above all a benevolent place filled with gullible Candides. When rereading the book, I saw more clearly how Candide is portrayed as the perfect innocent, liable to pratfalls and easily duped by Pangloss’s absurd fairy tales, and as I reread some of those passages, I was seized by the idea that Tony saw such a Candide in me. I, too, was a naive and gullible innocent when I met Tony, inexperienced and apt to take every stranger at his word. And I was certainly an optimist, which also helped me, despite his fears. But Tony had a serious point. He was sending me a message, a friendly warning, too sophisticated to draw attention to it and overrating my ability to decode it. Then again, was it perhaps an enduring naiveté that lured me to believe there was a message to me at all? I will never know, but I prefer to think there was, and to imagine Tony chuckling to himself as he wrapped up his longest-lasting gift of all.

5 Peter Way Andrew Motion

“Life is first boredom, then fear,” Philip Larkin says in his poem “Dockery and Son,” remembering the complex strangulations of his own childhood, and the death-dread of his maturity. After Larkin and I had become friends in the late 1970s, I had the temerity to tell him that I thought he’d got it the wrong way round: in my own experience, life was first fear, then boredom (or at least the fear of boredom). I expected him to rebuke me, or insist that I was an unusual case, but he only shook his head in a rueful sort of way. “Monica agrees with you,” he said—Monica being Monica Jones, his long-time companion—then went on to talk about how all of us are inclined to interpret personal experience as a universal truth. “Mine is happening to me”: it was one of his guiding principles. In my own case, the idea that life began with fear had something to do with my father, a fundamentally very decent and well-meaning man whose own difficult childhood had made him a stern parent (“Man hand on misery to man,/ It deepens like a coastal shelf”), and a great deal to do with my prep school—the hideously misnamed Maidwell Hall, where I’d been dispatched shortly before my eighth birthday. It looked civilized enough—a large sandstone country house at the edge of a village in Northamptonshire, a hundred miles away from my family home in Essex; in fact it was an expensive misery-factory, where a regime of beatings and other sorts of abuse turned my mind to stone. During my five years there I learned next to nothing except how to keep up appearances, and in so far as it prepared me for the future, it convinced me that once the ordeal of 33

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my education was over, I’d never have anything more to do with books or study. I’d skip university and work for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, perhaps, living quietly in the Hebrides recording migration patterns. Or join the Forestry Commission and hide away in a cabin in the middle of a wood. But first I had to wade through another lake of fire: my secondary education. My parents, who either didn’t believe what I told them about the stupidity and sadism of Maidwell, or thought it was only normal because my father had suffered in similar ways himself, chose Radley College, a private school—“public” in the contrary language of the English system—in the countryside between Abingdon and Oxford. Why? Because my father’s brother Rob had been a pupil there in the early 1940s, and although Uncle Rob had never been known to open a book or show the slightest interest in the life of the mind (he was a farmer in Warwickshire), he’d somehow discovered that one of his schoolboy contemporaries was now a housemaster there. Peter Way. A nice chap, my uncle said. Had a bad time in the war. Fought in Italy. I imagined a purplefaced brute of the kind that flourished at Maidwell, gripping a rifle with one hand and a blood-darkened dagger with the other. I sat my Common Entrance exam, was astounded to pass, and my parents drove me to Radley before my first term began, so that I could get my bearings and meet Mr. Way. I can’t remember the first time I set eyes upon him—I was distracted by how nervous my parents seemed in his company, as if they believed my happiness at the school depended on what Mr. Way thought of them, not on what he made of me. But I can remember the four of us driving down from the school campus to the River Thames (there was an option for boys to row rather than play cricket in the summer), when Mr. Way suddenly turned to me in the steamy little cell of my Father’s Daimler and asked me about myself. Never mind what questions, and never mind my answers. The fact that he wanted me to speak to him directly was enough of a novelty to seem shocking, and in its small way wonderful. I opened my eyes and scrutinized him properly for the first time. He seemed cramped inside the car, so was probably six foot or thereabouts. Regimental tie. Tweed jacket and black trousers. Highly polished brown lace-up shoes with rubber soles. Sturdy-looking. But self-deprecating, too. Fine sandy hair and hesitant voice, keeping his teeth hidden when he smiled. Some difficulty saying his “r”s.

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Gesturing with his right hand while he talked, as though endlessly suggesting “after you.” Bad skin on his cheeks and chin. Or rather, pitted skin which showed that he must have had serious acne when he was a boy. Which showed, in fact, that he had actually been a boy, so probably knew what it was like to feel awkward and maybe to be bullied as well. As I thought about that, an idea that I’d never previously had about a grown-up began to take root in my head. Mr. Way was about to be set in authority over me, but in time he nevertheless might become a kind of friend. That sense of Mr. Way’s sympathy—of kindness waiting to be triggered and explored—remained latent for the next couple of years. Because he only taught boys during the second half of their time at school, I had no reason to see him except for rather formal social encounters (when he invited a gaggle of boys into his study for tea), or for administrative reasons (getting permission to bike into Oxford for an afternoon), or for matters to do with the work I was producing for other teachers. Usually this meant showing him the pages of an exercise book in which I’d failed a test, but because Mr. Way spoke understandingly during these referrals, and inflicted no further punishment, I felt that the hidden connection between us was still intact, still waiting to be realized. When I found that some of the other boys in the school reckoned he was a bit of a fusspot, it only made me like him more. Fusspot to me meant scrupulous—and anyway, so what if there was something a bit effeminate about him, despite his soldierly bearing and his enthusiasm for the school’s Combined Cadet Force: I was more than a bit effeminate myself. So what, too, if the story of his life seemed oddly squashed and confined. The fact that he’d ended up teaching at the same school where he’d once been a pupil didn’t necessarily mean that he had no ambition, and no appetite for the world. It might (or so I told myself) equally well mean that the experiences he’d had outside the Radley boundaries—during the war, especially—had been so traumatic, he preferred to stay in close contact with the things he knew and trusted. Yeah, yeah, said the dissenting voices. And yet when they went on to imitate him, wafting their right hands in elaborate gestures of consent, umm-ing and aaah-ing, absurdly exaggerating his rhotacism, hollowing out their voices into cavernous whispers and parodying what they supposed was the love-talk he exchanged with his (to us almostinvisible) wife, they did so without any venom. And without any

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trepidation, either. Mr. Way could be a stickler, and he certainly inspired respect in face-to-face encounters, but there was nothing unpredictable about him. And unpredictability was a quality that we disliked more than almost anything. In Mr. Fisher, for instance, and Mr. Catchpole, both of whom lost their tempers easily and often. Mr. Way never did that; we always knew where we stood. All of which makes it sound as though Mr. Way might have been a bit too straightforward to have any charisma. But that wasn’t true. Because despite his predictability there was also something slightly mysterious about him. Something paradoxical. On the one hand he had this military stiffness and reserve—but on the other hand . . . Most of us took very little interest in the private lives of our teachers, because very few of us thought of them as fully rounded human beings who had any existence beyond whatever we saw in our classrooms. But rumor had it that when not teaching, or marching around on the asphalt square behind the Armoury, or jogging up and down a touchline shouting strangely elaborate words of encouragement to his house rugby team (“Get in there boy! He who hesitates is lost!”), Mr. Way did that rarest and most peculiar of things: he wrote poetry. Or had written poetry once upon a time, anyway, and obviously been good at it. One unusually persistent boy had unearthed the spellbinding fact that Mr. Way had won the Newdigate Poetry Prize while a student at Oxford, and had been required to recite a part of his poem in the Sheldonian on the same occasion that T. S. Eliot (‘the aged eagle’) had been given an Honorary Doctorate. Even for pupils who had no time for poetry, it seemed incredible that someone we saw every day, someone whose routines were the same as ours and who lived by the same laws, could have achieved anything so impressive. Given everything that had happened (and not happened) at Maidwell, and given the almost complete lack of books and interest in books at home, it was hardly surprising that I’d grown up thinking of poetry as something alien to me. Now, suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. If Mr. Way had once written poetry—perhaps still wrote it—might it not be more approachable than I thought? As I reached the halfway point in my Radley life, this possibility was confirmed by my O Level English teacher, Mr. Hudson. Like Mr. Way, but less emphatically, Mr. Hudson was a surprising mixture of opposites— fanatical about all games, and hockey especially, orthodox in matters of opinion, yet often showing us that he cared deeply about

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the writers we discussed in class. When we were talking about the poets of the First World War, for instance, we thought he might have had a tear in his eye when he read us Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting.” And he certainly wanted us to feel strongly ourselves, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked us to write poems about the war, as well as essays. For the first time, I had the idea that making something—writing a poem—could be a part of learning. Not just learning in a classroom sense, but in a life sense. And if that was true about writing, maybe it could also be true about reading. There was only one way to find out. I chose English Literature as one of the three A Levels that would occupy me for my final two years at Radley and began taking classes with Mr. Way. A boy who’d already been taught by him for a year told me to beware: Mr. Way talked about poems in such detail, paying such close attention to every word in every line, that sometimes an entire lesson would be spent debating why the definite and not the indefinite article was used in a particular phrase. A ridiculous idea in prospect, but immediately not ridiculous when our lessons began. Once Mr. Way had marched into our first class, handed out the anthology of poems we’d be using for the term, and told us to turn to page such-and-such where we’d find a poem by Thomas Hardy called “I Look into My Glass,” which was the title as well as the first line, he immediately let me understand how poems require us to pay closer attention to language than any other kind of writing. Because they are more compressed, more distilled, more concentrated, and more interwoven than any other kind of writing. Of course we might therefore spend three-quarters of an hour talking about a single word. It might have taken the poet twice that time to come up with it in the first place. That thought alone struck me with the force of revelation. But it was immediately joined by another, equally powerful. Previously I’d thought of language as something that worked in only one dimension. Suddenly, in a flash of recognition if not complete comprehension, I realized that the meaning of words depends on a combination of sound with sense, which in turn led me to see that in order to understand a poem I needed to appreciate its musicality (or lack of it) at the same time as I worked out who was doing what and where and when. In other words, and for the first time, I grasped the idea that the language of poetry is not so much a matrix of hard facts leading to an inevitable and definite conclusion, as a forest of

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cadences and associations in which no interpretation can be “wrong” (in the way that a formula in a mathematics class might be wrong), provided I’m able to explain and justify it. This realization, more than anything else, connected the wires in my brain that Maidwell had kept apart, and made its lights flicker on for the first time. “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses,” Keats says in one of his letters. Quite so. And as a proof of that idea, Mr. Way didn’t so much explain these thoughts about sound and sense and meaning as exemplify them in the care and subtlety of his own readings. In the process, he inevitably made me feel that I was putting some distance between myself and my upbringing—and I welcomed this. In my now more confident state of being, I wanted to show that I was becoming my own person, which meant questioning or rejecting a lot of the assumptions that I’d inherited. At the same time, though, I didn’t want to break with the past entirely. I still enjoyed a lot of the country things I’d grown up with, and was moved or intrigued by them in ways that felt fundamental to my identity. And because Mr. Way seemed to understand this (without my having to spell it out for him), he managed to satisfy my appetite for rebellion while at the same time fostering a sense of continuity. Specifically, he allowed me to feel that the scenes of my childhood, and the sorts of things that interested me, were flowing naturally into the landscapes and mindscapes of the poems we read—Hardy’s poem on the day of our first class together, and then on subsequent days into other poems by other poets. Wordsworth. John Clare. Keats. Edward Thomas. Philip Larkin. Within a matter of weeks my bewitchment had turned into a kind of addiction and selfconfirmation. I can see now that while Mr. Way was teaching me, he was using the same methods and styles of reading that he’d learned himself in Oxford when he returned from the war. An English version of New Criticism, which concentrated rigorously on the text and paid little or no attention to biographical facts or historical context. In time I’d develop an appetite to know more about these things and include them in my responses to whatever I was reading. But during these earliest days of reading, I felt that I was meeting poetry in a very pure form, and I’ve always been grateful for that. Just as I’ve also been grateful for the range of writing that Mr. Way led me to discover. Plenty of contemporary things, which reinforced my

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developing sense that poems belonged in the here and now, including and especially Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Charles Causley, and Sylvia Plath. (The day we looked at Plath’s poem “Mushrooms,” and began talking about its symbolic dimensions, was one of the most decisive reading events of my early life—like discovering that a house I thought sat squarely on solid ground in fact had an enormous and marvelously inhabited cellar.) But also poems by the mighty dead: Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Hamlet, Milton’s “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and Dryden’s “Ode on Saint Cecelia’s Day,” Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and so on forward to Eliot, Eliot, Eliot (whom Mr. Way idolized), and Auden, Auden, Auden (who fascinated him). By the end of our two years together, and in addition to the set texts that I’d studied to pass my exams, I felt that I’d been given a map of the whole landscape of English verse, and a telescope with which I could look across it, to see which parts I might now most enjoyably return to, as well as which parts I might now explore by myself. At the same time as Mr. Way turned me into a reader, he turned me into a writer. A beginning writer at any rate. Although having said that, the transformation depended on fate as well as planning, and on something akin to passivity on Mr. Way’s part, as well as active influence. He took me seriously; he never complained about the derivativeness of my early efforts (one week I sounded like Heaney, the next like Bob Dylan, the next like Larkin); he never chided me for boastfully claiming to have discovered poets he’d known and loved for several decades; he made himself available to read my new things on a regular basis; he questioned phrases and lines and whole poems that he thought didn’t work. But at the same time, he never pushed himself forward, mostly confined his advice to recommendations about what I might read next, and was always softly spoken in his encouragement: he didn’t want me to start showing off, because he did want me to keep my eye on whatever subject he‘d chosen, rather than on myself as the person responding to it. In the process, he laid the foundation of a poetic credo that has stayed more or less the same throughout my life. Whether his advice and example would have had such a profound effect without the added influence of something completely beyond his control, I’ve no idea. But the fact is that about a year or so after I’d begun writing poems, shortly after my seventeenth birthday, my

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mother suffered a serious riding accident, lay unconscious in hospital for three years, lingered in a wretched half-life for another six years, then died. It meant—among many other things—that at a stage in life when I might easily have got bogged down in adolescent angst, I had a subject that demanded I pay attention to the world outside myself. A subject I wished had never arisen, but also one that I could not ignore, which confirmed my emerging sense that poetry was something I could turn to at a time when I might otherwise have felt adrift. And not only that. As my mother’s life transformed, and my father became increasingly immersed in caring for her, I also drew closer to Mr. Way himself. As a father figure? Of course, in some respects. But also as someone who was decisively not like my father, with whom I now shared a mass of interests, and to whom I could speak candidly about things that would have been difficult to broach at home. I remember, for instance, standing beside Mr. Way’s desk in his softly lit study one evening, and naively asking him straight out why such a dreadful thing had happened to my mother, who had done nothing to deserve her suffering. The fact that he felt able to do no more than shake his head and mumble something about those whom the gods love dying young, meant more to me than any of the pious phrases a less thoughtful person might have offered. It not only made me realize that all the poetry in the world is no defense against grief, but it also sowed in my mind the idea that poetry might be a means of giving grief a consoling shape. No one in my father’s family had been to university, and when the time came to think about what I might do after leaving Radley, I relied on Mr. Way’s advice. Try for Oxford, he said, partly no doubt because he’d been there himself, but also because he liked the idea of my taking a course that conformed to the model he’d already begun to build in our classes together. Once I arrived there, and with a carelessness that now shames me, we quickly drifted out of contact with one another—even though we’d parted affectionately, and I’d written him a poem of which the school printing press had made two copies, one of which now hung framed in his study. But I never had the sense that Mr. Way reproached me for this; in fact, I think he felt it was a necessary distance, which would allow me to embrace new influences, and head in new directions. It was part of his genius as a teacher—as it is of all good teachers—to know when to let go.

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Perhaps, too, he was playing a longer game than I knew. Because when I was appointed Poet Laureate in 1999, almost exactly thirty years after leaving Radley, I often found myself having to explain to journalists and others how I’d been drawn to poetry in the first place, and therefore talking more and more often about Mr. Way—or Peter as I now struggled to call him—and realizing more and more clearly how much I owed him. Throughout the lapse in our close contact, we’d occasionally written letters to each other and reliably sent each other Christmas cards. Now we began communicating at least once a fortnight and visiting two or three times a year: the friendship which seemed always to have been contained within the complex structures of a pupil–teacher relationship flowered at last, albeit with many of our old habits unchanged. Even when we sat down in the pub near the village outside Oxford where he’d retired, he still produced from the jacket of his tweed coat a neatly written list of topics he wanted to discuss, and set it on the table beside his right hand. As we got to the end of each, he put a tick beside them, just as he’d done in his study at school. The last time I saw him was at a reading I gave at Radley in the spring of 2015, shortly before leaving England to live in the United States, and the organizers allowed us a little time to talk alone together. Peter was an old man by now, almost 90 and very frail, but the hesitations were the same, the fastidious voice was the same, and the shyly vigilant glances were the same. Both of us knew we were unlikely to see each other again, but neither of us mentioned that. I did, though, allow myself to thank him more openly than I’d previously felt able to do. I told him that he’d given me my life. He smiled his modest smile, and for once there was no gesture of deprecation.

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6 My Grandfather and My Other Teachers Ng˜ug˜ı wa Thiong’o

My maternal grandfather, Ngu˜ g˜ı wa G˜ıkonyo, was my earliest teacher of writing. He could not read or write, so he dictated his letters to me. I was his scribe. I have written about this in my memoir, Birth of a Dream Weaver (2016). In it, I have described how he made me read the dictation, over and over again, until the letter, by word and tone, represented what and how he wanted it said. He taught me the value of the written word and the revision necessary to make it read smoothly. I have never been tired of writing and rewriting my manuscripts. Even in those days when I did not possess technologies of the typewriter and the computer, I did not run away from the challenges of rewriting. My first three novels, Weep not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967) were handwritten. I remember rewriting paragraphs, chapters, and even a whole manuscript. My revising mania reached its climax when in 1967, I recalled the manuscript of my novel, A Grain of Wheat, from the publisher to revise it. Unfortunately, it was now in page proofs, the last stage before printing. I had to pay the extra printing costs necessitated by my complete structural revision. Blame it on my grandfather, after whom I was named. He was not conscious of it, but my grandfather also taught me the beauty of written G˜ıku˜ yu˜. I would later take the same care for 43

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words and their beauty to school. And it was one of my other teachers, Fred Mbu˜ gua, who in my primary school at Manguu˜, made me read aloud an essay I had written. The applause from the class was music to me. In those days, I took as normal, speaking, reading, and writing in G˜ıku˜ yu˜ , my mother tongue. And then, in 1952, the colonial settler state banned all African-run schools, which also meant banning African languages in the school compound. The schools and the African languages used were seen as the ideological fountain of the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, popularly known as Mau Mau. If you disconnect schools from African languages, the words of liberation would not, at least, spread in the written form. English became the language of my education. And that was how I came across my next literary teacher. His name was Samuel K˜ıbico. He was a graduate of Alliance High School, and of course, now my English-language teacher. He had a home library. He introduced me to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). The pirates, Jim Hawkins in particular, captivated me. My childhood friend, Kenneth, and I would often greet each other in song: Fifteen men on a Dead Man’s Chest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! We started dreaming of escaping to become pirates on the high seas. Unfortunately, there was no sea around my home in Limuru. Even rivers were a rare sight. What about writing a story book like Stevenson’s? In my other memoirs, Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and In the House of the Interpreter (2012), I have written how this dream occasioned a heated debate between Kenneth and me. One had to have permission to write, I argued, and my friend Kenneth affirmed the contrary: one did not need a license to write. When later he went to a teacher training college, and I to Alliance High School, he followed up the debate with a fictional work. I am not in prison, he seemed to say. So, the idea of writing became a running theme in our letters and conversations. I would consider K˜ıbico and Kenneth as my other literary teachers. Only this time, we hardly ever talked about writing in G˜ıku˜ yu˜. English had captured our heads.

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There was reason behind this captivity. After the 1952 closure of African-run schools, any student caught speaking an African language was beaten or humiliated in every possible way. Alas, the days when a teacher could ask a student to stand up and read aloud an essay in their mother tongue were over. The other teachers were two students from Makerere College, Kampala, Uganda. Jonathan Kariara and John Nagenda were both in the English honors program. Kariara was in his last year and Nagenda a year behind him, but both were ahead of me. They wrote for PENPOINT , the English Department’s literary magazine. I have narrated my encounters with them in my memoir Birth of a Dream Weaver. Nagenda’s story, And This at Last (1961), captivated me. To this day, sixty years after, I still remember it. Kariara is the one I once encountered in the corridors of Makerere and, speechless, I blurted out a fib: I had written a short story, would he like to look at it? His affirmative YES made me face my fib: I had not yet written one, but now I had to do it. This encounter gave birth to my first story, “Mu˜ gumo/Fig Tree,” published in PENPOINT . So, fiction had produced my first fiction published in a literary journal. I would go on to publish Weep not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and A Grain of Wheat (1967). It was A Grain of Wheat which made me stop and rethink the habit of writing, in English. And all this, because of the 1966 International PEN conference in New York. Arthur Miller was then the president of PEN. One of the last events was a panel meeting between Pablo Neruda, the Chilean writer, and Ignazio Silone, the Italian writer. At one point, Silone said that Italian was not like one of these Bantu languages with one or two words in their vocabulary. I felt outraged. I stood up to protest: Bantu languages had certainly more than two words in their vocabulary. But when eventually I returned to Leeds and resumed work on my novel, the irony struck me: I had talked about the rich vocabulary of Bantu languages, and here I was writing in English. I don’t know whether to list Silone as one of my teachers, in a negative sense, but the question of language haunted me. Years later, in Kenya in 1977, I would participate in writing a play, Ngaahika Ndeenda/I Will Marry When I Want. The members of the Kam˜ır˜ıthu˜ Education and Cultural Center, all peasants and workers

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of the area, were now my teachers of G˜ıku˜ yu˜. For this, my prediction to Kenneth came true. The play was banned and I was imprisoned in a maximum security prison. It was in prison where, under surveillance night and day, I wrote my first novel, Caitaani mu˜ tharabain˜ı/Devil on the Cross, in G˜ıku˜ yu˜. And the guards were my main teachers of G˜ıku˜ yu˜. They would never tell me anything outside the prison walls, but they saw no harm in discussing language matters. I have narrated the drama of writing my first ever novel in G˜ıku˜ yu˜ on toilet paper in my memoir: Wrestling with the Devil (2018). So, it was a maximum security prison in Kenya which made me return to my roots, under the literary tutelage of my grandfather, Ngu˜ g˜ı wa G˜ıkonyo, to whom I am eternally grateful. He was indeed my first literary teacher, in G˜ıku˜ yu˜. It took me thirty years to return to my days as a scribe and explore the beauty of G˜ıku˜ yu˜. My novels, Caitaani Mu˜ tharabain˜ı/Devil on the Cross (1980), Mu˜ rogi wa Kagogo/Wizard of the Crow (2003), including the epic, Kenda Mu˜ iyu˜ ru/The Perfect Nine (2019), and a few others, are a testament to my return to the aesthetics of my grandfather, my first literary teacher.

7 Il Miglior Fabbro George Howe Colt

It was 1967. I was thirteen. A few nights before I was to start eighth grade in a new school, I slept over at the house of a friend who went there. As we lay in our beds in the dark, talking across the room, he gave me the lowdown on my future classmates: the boy who actually liked math, the boy who had a head shaped like a pumpkin, the boy who was good at shooting spitballs without getting caught. One by one, he went down the list. I thought he had come to the end. Then, with a chuckle that suggested not that the next boy was an afterthought but rather that he was in a category by himself, he added, “And then there’s Farnsworth.” *

*

*

We were day students at a small, all-male, almost-all-white private school in a wealthy suburb south of Boston. Set on 187 acres, the former estate of a nineteenth-century railroad tycoon, and insulated from what we called “the real world” by dense woods and thick stone walls, it was the kind of oak-paneled place where teachers called students by their last names, and coats, ties, and two years of Latin were mandatory. It even had its own castle, a five-story pile complete with turrets, parapets, a great room where we ate lunch at long refectory tables, and, it was rumored, secret dungeons. The headmaster was an elderly former Harvard football star who believed boys learned to become men “on the playing fields” and 47

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whose gruff-voiced readings at morning assembly of “Casey at the Bat,” “The Last Words of Captain Scott,” and “If” were recalled decades later by moist-eyed alums. The twenty-eight faculty members, almost all ex-prep-schoolers themselves, were for the most part genial, competent, and well-meaning, if uninspiring, men. (Only one, a part-time art teacher, was a woman.) The school was known more for its athletics than for its academics. The stars of what were called “the major sports” (football, hockey, crew) were the school’s gods, worshiped by students and faculty alike. Among the mortals, one’s status depended on combining a casual, tousle-haired handsomeness with an ability to get one’s work done while never appearing to try too hard or to care too deeply about anything. Given these criteria, Farnsworth was hardly the kind of kid likely to rank high on the pecking order. Rob was a short, stubby boy, with a fleshy, pale-pinkish face, a thatch of straw-colored hair, and brown horn-rimmed glasses he was always pushing up with a finger. His khaki pants rode unfashionably high above his white socks; under his wool jacket, he occasionally wore the sort of pastel cardigan sweaters some of the older teachers wore. He was a decent athlete, but not so good as to keep him from being relegated on the football field to the unglamorous position of guard, where he helped clear the way for the boys who got to touch the ball. Rob wasn’t afraid to be seen trying hard. Whether blocking a defender, building a model airplane, or improvising a harmony to “Eleanor Rigby,” he threw himself into things and didn’t care what he looked like as he did it. Running the gauntlet of little green caterpillars that dangled from the trees on our way to lunch, he’d pretend he was dodging Fokkers in an aerial dogfight, spitting out guttural rat-a-tats of machine-gun fire as he pirouetted and limbo-ed to safety. (Rob was always making us laugh—and laughing loudly himself. Or chortling, guffawing, snorting, or cackling; unlike most teenagers, he never worried about sounding like a fool.) At an age when one was judged by the company one kept, Rob hung out with anyone who cared to hang out with him, whether it be the center on the hockey team or the acne-scarred, stoop-shouldered boy who liked to talk about the Buddha—the kind of person who, before meeting Rob, I might have thought twice about being seen with. Indeed, as a self-conscious, eager-to-please, desperately-wanting-to-fit-in boy, I might have thought twice about being seen with Rob had it not been for our shared interest in literature.

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In English class, we were studying short stories. For our final project, we wrote stories of our own. Perhaps influenced by “The Lottery,” which we had just read, our efforts tended toward melodrama. One boy, a hockey player, wrote about the assassination of a figure skater at the winter Olympics (the murder weapon was a skate blade); I wrote about a case of arson involving a wealthy Virginia landowner and his tenant farmer. Rob wrote about a lonely, middle-aged widower in the Scottish Highlands who spent his days tending his vegetable garden and his nights reading The Divine Comedy. “The sun was sinking in the West, leaving its bloody trail behind, as McAnder shouldered his hoe and turned his back on the turnip patch,” Rob’s story began. “Wearily, he trudged up the narrow path toward the house, pausing at intervals to gaze hollowly at the verdant, rolling countryside below.” The story was not entirely without melodrama—on the very night McAnder decided to make a fresh start in Glasgow, he died in his sleep; the story ended with the sun rising and McAnder’s faithful dog sniffing its master’s lifeless body. I teased Rob about that turnip patch, but I was impressed. I wanted be able to write like that. Descriptively. Feelingly. As if I knew what I wanted to say. Rob was the first writer I’d ever met. He was going to be a poet, he told me matter-of-factly. In those days, any boy declaring an interest in poetry risked being branded a sissy. (Fiction, with Hemingway looming over high school English curriculums, at least had a redeeming whiff of testosterone.) But Rob didn’t care. Not only did he put his heart and soul into each writing assignment, he wrote stories and poems that hadn’t been assigned, that would never be graded, that our English teachers would never see. He showed me one of his poems. I don’t recall what it was about, just that he made each thing in it seem vivid and significant and new. He kept a journal, a small, tan spiral notebook in which, between classes or in study hall, he could be seen writing intently. I had always been a reader, the sort who borrowed armfuls of books at a time from the library, asked for books for Christmas, and, when nothing else was at hand, read the encyclopedia. But it had never occurred to me that I could be a writer: Writers went to sea, like Melville; shot elephants, like Hemingway; or fought in wars, like Mailer, whose novel The Naked and the Dead we had read in English class. Writers came from Brooklyn or San Francisco or Mississippi. Writers didn’t live in the suburbs and mow

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lawns and drive station wagons. (I hadn’t yet discovered Cheever, and it would be a few years before I read The Bell Jar, and realized that Plath had grown up in Wellesley, one suburb over from Rob— and had hardly lacked for material—or that even now, just down the road, Sexton was writing Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry from her five-bedroom colonial in Weston.) My friends’ fathers were bankers and lawyers and businessmen who commuted into Boston. My friends’ mothers were housewives. But Rob was going to be a poet. Perhaps I could be a poet, too. I had written poems before. I’d even won a poetry contest at my previous school with a rhymed, iambic sing-song about the wonders of spring. But my poems had been dutiful, teacher-pleasing responses to homework assignments, and the poetry I knew was largely limited to the chestnuts English teachers used, usually without success, to persuade their students that poems don’t have to be boring: Kilmer’s trees, Frost’s snowy woods, Cummings’s little lame balloon man. Then one day at the start of sophomore year, Rob handed me a small mustard-yellow paperback with a stylized portrait of an owlish-looking man gazing with what appeared to be moderate interest at the book’s title: T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems. Rob said I should check out this poem about a guy named Prufrock. From the very first line—with its blithe invitation (“Let us go then you and I”) followed by the ice-water shock of one of the most famous similes in the history of poetry (“like a patient etherized upon a table”)—I knew we were a long way from Joyce Kilmer. And what unfolded thereafter proved even more surprising. In describing the inner world of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot was describing me—or at least the lonely, yearning, hypersensitive, self-doubting part of me I worked so hard to hide. It was as if I were the patient etherized upon a table and Eliot had sliced me open and peered into my soul. From analyzing poems in English class, I had gotten the idea that poems were puzzles meant to be solved, not personal messages meant to be felt. Prufrock expanded my consciousness no less suddenly than the square of LSD I would place on my tongue freshman year in college. At the school bookstore, I forked over 75 cents of my lawn-mowing money for a copy of my own. It was the first book I ever bought. Eliot was Rob’s favorite poet. His mother, he said, had read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to him when he was a child. (This

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would morph into the rumor that Mrs. Farnsworth had read Rob the poem when he was in the womb—an origin story, his friends joked, that went a long way toward explaining him.) Now Eliot was my favorite poet, too. Like our class’s star athlete, who kept a hard rubber ball with him at all times, intermittently squeezing it to strengthen his grip, Rob and I took our copies of Eliot everywhere, pausing from time to time to exercise our minds with a stanza from Prufrock or a section from “Preludes.” In those pre-backpack days, students carried their schoolbooks stacked by size under one arm; Eliot fit neatly atop the pile, the poet’s face peering out as we walked from class to class. In the afternoon we’d tuck it into a jacket pocket as we headed down to the gym, in case we needed a quick hit of “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” before soccer practice. The book was a bright yellow badge signifying our membership in a club of two. Our classmates worshiped flaxen-haired lead guitarists and swivel-hipped halfbacks; our god was a middle-aged milquetoast who looked less like a poet—or what we imagined poets looked like—than like the bank clerk he had once been. (That Eliot had attended our school’s archrival for a PG year before entering Harvard only strengthened our devotion.) We read Eliot, we talked about Eliot, we quoted Eliot. Seeing a student mashing his fist in his armpit to make farting noises, we’d shake our heads in mock-weariness and murmur, “I grow old, I grow old . . . Shall I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled?” Contemplating whether to sneak out early from study hall, we’d muse, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” (When the Allman Brothers, as if in response to Eliot’s question, released an album titled Eat a Peach, it tickled us to imagine that the scraggly southern rockers best known for their caustic blues anthem “Tied to the Whipping Post” might be devotees of the fastidious Brahmin poet.) And, of course, when April rolled around, allusions to the cruelty of the month were profuse. Classmates rolled their eyes when we referred to Mr. Eugenides the Smyrna merchant or Phlebas the Phoenician (“a fortnight dead”), but it was enough that Rob and I amused ourselves. “Stetson!” we’d cry as we spotted each other across campus, “mon semblable,—mon frère!” Most of all, we wrote like Eliot. “Write what you know,” our teachers told us. But in the leafy suburbs of 1960s Boston, Rob and I churned out poems whose settings bore a striking resemblance to the seedier precincts of 1920s London, complete with streetlamps,

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gutters, cobblestones, deserted alleyways, and windblown scraps of newspaper tumbling across vacant lots. (If a concordance for our poems had been assembled, it would be nearly identical to one for early Eliot.) Our poems were saturated with smoke—from factories, from chimneys, from candles, from cigarettes—and generated more fog than a production of Brigadoon. Their narrators sounded less like wide-eyed teenagers than like worn-out middle-aged men. “Oh, very well, shall I tell you I am old / and sit with my head in hands?” lamented my fifteen-year-old self. In those days, when few schools offered creative writing classes, Rob and I constituted our own two-person poetry workshop. We exchanged drafts—“manuscripts,” we called them—and critiqued each other’s work. (“Fantastic lines—simple and somehow musical,” Rob wrote in the margin of one of my efforts. “I don’t know where it’s going, but so far promising.”) We typed up finished poems and snapped them into the three-ring binders that contained what we referred to as our “oeuvres.” We shared our excitement as we made new discoveries — Housman, Crane, Lowell, Wilbur—though Eliot remained our North Star. We developed our own critical lexicon: lines we admired were “trenchant” or “incisive”; those we didn’t were “mannered,” “stilted,” or, worst of all, “insipid.” We discussed symbolism, similes and metaphors, rhyme versus offrhyme, iambs and trochees, alliteration and assonance. (Assonance, we agreed, had an under-the-radar subtlety that on-the-nose alliteration lacked.) When we weren’t writing poems, we were writing in our journals. Like Rob, I had begun keeping one—using the same brand of 80-sheet, narrow-ruled “EYE-EASE” notebook he used—in which I jotted down descriptions of the wind shaking the limbs of leafless trees or of waves breaking on the shore. Like Rob, I embellished my journal with drawings of sailboats and clouds, though mine never looked as effortlessly stylish as his. (In time, I even began imitating Rob’s handwriting, whose precision and legibility seemed to give his words added gravitas.) We carried our journals everywhere, tucked under Eliot’s Selected Poems—perhaps hoping they might absorb some of the author’s genius—so that whenever a priceless thought occurred (we called them “aperçus”) we could get it down on paper before it slipped away. (If a thought occurred and wasn’t committed to our journals, did it really exist?) When we weren’t writing in our journals, we mined them for images that might be

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incorporated into an existing poem or might inspire a new one. At night, we kept our journals on our bedside tables in case we had a dream we wanted to record. *

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Years later, when I was in graduate school, the poet Richard Howard would inform my class, “When someone tells me he wants to be a poet because he has important things to say, I have my doubts; when someone tells me he wants to be a poet because he likes to play with words, I think maybe he has a chance.” Rob was the only person I knew who liked playing with words as much as I did. Our conversations were free-associative stews of private jokes, sports clichés, bad puns, arcane literary references, and archaic English vocabulary that amounted to our own special language, equal parts T. S. Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Monty Python, and Fred Cusick (the TV “voice” of the Boston Bruins). The school employed a Teacher of Reading, who not only taught us how to read faster (using a machine he called the Accelerator) but each week passed out a sheet of vocabulary words, the contents of which Rob and I inserted into our themes and our speech whenever possible. In our world, words were verbiage; books were tomes, people were personages, suitcases were valises, compliments were encomiums, disagreements were contretemps, fans were aficionados, letters were missives or epistles, and a short walk, depending on its purpose, was either a constitutional, a peregrination, or a perambulation. In our world, no one read a magazine but rather perused it; no one was upset but perturbed; no one contradicted but offered a riposte; no one daydreamed but was lost in a pensive reverie. Some words we liked for their finely shaded meanings; others simply because we savored the sound of them said aloud: Lugubrious. Peccadillo. Shenanigan. Haberdasher. Donnybrook. Brouhaha. Wanderjahr. Skullduggery. Jejune. Saskatchewan. (The word “picayune” was a particular favorite. When we discovered that there existed, in New Orleans, a newspaper called the Times-Picayune, we were filled with gratitude for the wonders of God’s creation.) Learning that Thomas Hardy had written a novel called Tess of the D’Urbervilles, we were so tickled by the title’s final word we repeated it with the gusto of toddlers who suddenly realize they can imitate the sounds their parents make. We invented our own words:

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“hundemude” meant extraordinary; a “doamer” was a clueless oaf. (Our linguistic excesses were almost always expressed with mock pomposity or buffered with irony; it was as if we spoke in italics. We were showing off, yes, but we were having fun.) Teachers cautioned us against using “fifty-cent words” in our themes, but we couldn’t resist. I recently came across an old essay in which I evidently found it necessary to employ the following words: abscond, ameliorate, comely, éclat, farrago, garrulous, harbinger, instrumental, pernicious, pièce de résistance, poltroon, promulgate, puissance, reverie, and sojourner. In the margins, my teacher had written “over-worded” or “over-adjectival” next to each overwrought word; eventually, he gave up and noted offending examples with a question mark. Eventually he gave up on that, too. *

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We worked hard on our poetry; we worked even harder at being poets. We indulged in all the hoary old romantic notions young writers used to indulge in. We vowed to ship out to sea on a “tramp steamer,” like Crane; to write poems in a garret in Paris, like Baudelaire. “Oh to be a smothered face pasted on a garret window,” I wrote in my journal. (Garrets were scarce in the Boston suburbs, so I did what I could by moving up to a cramped, single-windowed room on the third floor of my family’s comfortable home, previously used for storage, which had a view of the garage and a sharply angled eave against which I was constantly bumping my head. It wasn’t quite the Left Bank, but provided something of a placebo effect.) With Byron, Keats, and Shelley in mind, Rob and I allowed as how we’d be surprised if we were still alive at thirty-five, and breezily agreed that if, at that advanced age, we still had a pulse, it might be a good idea to swim out to sea and drown. We adopted Rimbaud’s credo that poets should be fueled by a “dérèglement de tous les sens,” which we translated as license to drink and do drugs whenever possible. Although we would have preferred to achieve this state with absinthe and hashish, we invariably had to make do with a six-pack of Schlitz or a few hits from a communal joint making the rounds at the oncein-a-blue-moon party to which we were actually invited. For a time, we took up smoking pipes. We fancied ourselves enfants terribles. It may be difficult to imagine now, but fifty years ago, with confessional poetry in its full-throated heyday, many young writers

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still subscribed to the myth of the “suffering artist”—that creative types were by definition penniless, brooding, melancholic, tortured souls. It wasn’t easy to be suffering artists on a 187-acre campus with its own castle, but Rob and I did our best. We cursed the banality of our privileged lives (even as we had no clue how privileged we were); groused about being world-weary (though we’d seen nothing of the world); boasted of how depressed we were (when, for instance, Neil Young’s latest album didn’t come out on schedule); and announced periodic bouts of writer’s block (though the rate at which our poems accumulated in their three-ring binders suggested otherwise). We complained of ennui (or anomie or malaise), as if giving boredom a French name elevated it into something noble, and promoted garden-variety gray moods into cases of existential despair. (We were reading Sartre and Camus in French class.) “Rien à faire. Rien à faire,” we’d mutter. “Pourquoi le désespoir?” In school photos, I took to staring off to the side with an enigmatic expression, as if I were preoccupied with something far more important than getting my picture taken for the Glee Club. We were insufferably pretentious, but we leavened our pretensions with a measure of self-mockery. It was a protective measure, a way of hedging our bets: You see, we aren’t taking this entirely seriously. After reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in English class, Rob and I came across Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Orwell’s satirical 1936 novel about an aspiring London poet who chucks his career in advertising and commits himself to the life of a starving artist. We laughed at Gordon Comstock and his affectations—the mere mention of his first, “slender” volume of verse, Mice, had us hooting—but Comstock embodied all that we dreamed of and secretly feared. And when, in the end, he gives up poetry, returns to his advertising job, marries his long-suffering girlfriend, and resigns himself to dreary middle-class life, we vowed that we’d never sell out like Gordon Comstock . . . would we? “Keep the aspidistra flying!” we called out to each other, the way people liked to say, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” We mocked our ambitions, and yet, with the hubris and blind faith of adolescence, we believed in them. And we believed in each other. We believed that, like Eliot, each of us would someday publish a Selected Poems, and, eventually, a Collected Poems. When we came across a posthumously published compilation of verse Eliot had written in high school and college, we imagined that one

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day someone would discover and publish our “juvenilia.” We envisioned future generations of students studying our poems in Sound and Sense; our faces gazing out from a new edition of Oscar Williams’ Immortal Poems of the English Language alongside those of Milton, Keats, and Eliot; our journals being scrutinized by scholars for clues to the evolution of our craft. (I was terrified of losing my journal—a tragedy not only for me but for American literature.) In those days, poets were routinely classified as “major” or “minor”—as if poets, like baseball players, played in different leagues. Rob and I, clinging to the bottom rung of the literary farm system, were determined to make it to the majors. In the meantime, we fantasized about the details we’d include in our About the Author bios on the backs of our first books and appended “Acknowledgments” to our English themes in which we thanked not only each other but the bands whose records we’d played while we wrote. Singing along to Simon and Garfunkel’s new album, Bookends, whenever we got to “Hazy Shade of Winter” and the lines “Funny how my memory skips / while looking over manuscripts / of unpublished rhyme / drinking my vodka and lime,” we’d glance at each other knowingly; that would be us someday—but our manuscripts would be published. It wasn’t all poetry. Like many suburban teens, we spent half our lives trying to get rides to friends’ houses, where we’d sing along to Buffalo Springfield, watch Sherlock Holmes movies on TV, play marathon games of pick-up soccer, and talk into the night about the necessity of finding a girlfriend—or what Rob and I called a “paramour.” (At our all-male school, opportunities to meet paramours were vanishingly slight, which meant that our “relationships” were conducted almost entirely in our imaginations and in the pages of our journals.) But even as we kicked a soccer ball or hunted down a can of beer, Rob and I were always declaring that we had to “get back to work on our poetry” or alluding to the “epic” poem, like “The Waste Land,” that we would write someday. We were certain that nothing was more important than poetry; that the only truly worthy career choice (aside, perhaps, from artist or musician) was “poet,” and those who settled for anything less were “accountants” and “junior executives,” oblivious to the ineffable mysteries of existence and doomed to lead pedestrian lives. They were doamers. We were so full of ourselves, it’s a wonder we didn’t float away like blimps.

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Underneath our posturing, underneath our “suffering,” Rob and I were in a near-constant state of exhilaration. As poets, we felt we had been let in on a secret: that beneath the surface of daily life, every precious moment vibrated like a hummingbird with meaning and possibility, and as poets it was our sacred charge to capture those moments in words. (Reading Conrad’s short story “The Secret Sharer” in English class, I thought: that’s what Rob and I are, secret sharers.) And when it was time to get back to what we called the “quotidian” world of trigonometry and carpool and study hall, one of us would, invariably, quote Prufrock’s closing lines: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls, wreathed with seaweed red and brown, / till human voices wake us and we drown. *

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By junior year, Rob and I thought of ourselves as a kind of literary team, not unlike the great literary “teams” of yore: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Rimbaud and Verlaine, Pound and Eliot. We cowrote what we thought was a devastatingly witty letter to the school newspaper, taking fellow students to task for their intellectual apathy (“As we have noted, if tacitly, throughout our time here, there has been a disturbing lack of ‘joie d’apprendre’ ”). We wrangled permission to co-author several English-class assignments, larding them with irreverent asides and adopting a smug, self-satisfied tone. (“We, as readers, have seen the themes of Ferlinghetti’s poetry many times before, presented with many more refreshing images, and embodied in a more thoughtful whole,” we wrote. “We have had our fill of the ‘satanic carnival’ school, having written in the same genre ourselves, and valued other, more talented poets, among them Bob Dylan, whose ‘Desolation Row’ is a fine example of this poet’s genius and craftsmanship.”) Our teachers weren’t sure what to make of us, but they were grateful to have students who not only did the reading but devoured it, and they generally let us have our way. In any case, I wasn’t writing for them; I was writing for Rob. We were riding high; these were, we liked to say, our “salad days.” We made plans to continue them by applying to the same firstchoice college, one with a celebrated English department and neoGothic dorms whose top-floor rooms looked a lot like garrets. *

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By the early seventies, the sixties had begun to lap at the school’s stone walls. Students railed about the “sheltered environment” of the school and clamored to be out making a difference in the “real world,” but our revolution was parochial; the most heated issues on campus weren’t civil rights and the Vietnam War but whether the school should go co-ed and whether the dress code should be abolished. Our acts of insurrection consisted largely of sneaking down to the convenience store that lay just beyond those walls, to buy candy and chips. My own rebellion was what would, a half-century later, be called performative. I tested the limits of the dress code by wearing striped bellbottoms, leather moccasins, paisley ties, and my grandfather’s satin-collared smoking jacket. I let my curly hair sprout into a bush. (I prided myself on being a nonconformist, not realizing that nonconformity had become the new conformity.) I wrote admiring editorials about Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale, and composed my Wiggins Memorial Essay—a biographical appraisal of someone who exemplified the ideals of the school’s former headmaster Charles Wiggins—on John Lennon. (I conceded that the outspoken Beatle was hardly a conventional choice—Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Churchill were the usual suspects—but explained, “I’m sure Mr. Wiggins could not have helped but respect such a genius as Lennon.”) My English papers, dashed off in a single draft the night before they were due, were enthusiastic but substance-free—more about my feelings about the material than about the material itself. (I recently came across an old essay titled “The Wit and Wisdom of the Hilarious, Sensational, We All Know Him and Love Him . . . Thornton Wilder,” whose nine diluted pages could be boiled down to a single sentence: “I really like Thornton Wilder.”) I paid scant attention to the rules of grammar and punctuation, which I considered “establishment” constructs that inhibited self-expression, and justified my careless work by calling it “stream of consciousness.” Asked to analyze a poem for English class, I reached new heights of self-absorption by analyzing one of my own. Although I acknowledged that both poem and poet were “rather obscure” and perhaps “overly influenced” by T. S. Eliot, what the poem was really about, beneath the fog and smoke, I couldn’t have said. That may have been the point: somewhere along the way, perhaps after tackling The Four Quartets, I had come to believe that poetry, by definition, had to be obscure—the more obscure the better. By now, my poems were so obscure they were impenetrable.

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Rob stayed the course—sartorially, academically, literarily. While I wore my moccasins and American-flag bellbottoms, he stuck to his loafers and straight-legged khakis, his only concession to fashion a jaunty plaid driving cap, the kind that might have been worn by McAnder in the Scottish Highlands. His sideburns descended an inch or so, but his hair wasn’t much shaggier than it had been in eighth grade. In photographs, he looked straight at the camera, albeit with a slightly bemused expression. I was constructing a self; Rob was himself. While I wrote my Wiggins Memorial Essay on John Lennon, Rob wrote his on Voltaire. While I poured forth stream-ofconsciousness pap, Rob continued to build his poems and essays as fastidiously as he built his model airplanes. In junior English, we studied nineteenth-century British poetry. I was resistant, dismissing Wordsworth, Keats, and Browning as dry, dusty, and irrelevant; in truth I wasn’t ready for them and didn’t want to do the work they required. Rob did the work, studied them, learned from them. He was serving his apprenticeship; he was honing his craft. Once, when I said something casually disparaging about the chairman of the English department, a merry, round-faced man who kept a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, Rob took me to task. I bridled—making fun of teachers was practically an extracurricular activity. Only later did I understand that Rob not only possessed an essential kindness, but wanted to learn all he could from someone who, like us, loved literature, and who, in his youth, had, I know now, dreamed of being a poet, too. *

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And then, senior year, Rob got a girlfriend, someone he met while rehearsing a play with a neighboring all-girl’s school. I should have been happy for him. He had found his paramour, his muse, his Maud Gonne. Instead, I was jealous—though whether more of Rob (for having what I most wanted) or of the girl (for taking up so much of my best friend’s time), I couldn’t have said. In any case, I’m ashamed to say that I responded by finding fault with his choice, who happened to be from the suburban social class we belonged to and professed to disdain. (How could he? Her father was a banker!) I sought Rob’s attention by pretending I didn’t want it, ostentatiously wandering off to write in my journal—making sure he saw me go— and insisting, in various passive-aggressive ways, that he prove his

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loyalty to me. Around that time, our yearbook pages were due. It was a tradition for each senior to design his own page, choosing favorite photos and asking friends to contribute appreciative remarks. For my page, Rob composed a short poem (“And there have been some times, other evenings, when, looking up / from where we moved or spoke, we glimpsed sunset, and offered each other drops of its light / through our prisms . . .”). For Rob’s, I wrote a rambling history of our friendship, taking up almost half the page, leaving barely enough space for Rob to squeeze in a few small photos and the concluding lines of Prufrock. Looking back—and I can hardly bear to open the yearbook now—I can see that I was marking my territory. My reaction revealed to me a painful truth: I needed Rob more than Rob needed me. Though I’d accumulated more gold stars in the miniature world of high school—soccer co-captain, a capella group, lead in the spring musical—in what mattered most, Rob was the leader, and I struggled to keep up. Perhaps that’s why when we likened ourselves to literary duos of yore, we never specified who was who, because, much as I wanted to believe otherwise, I knew in my heart that I was the sidekick: the needy, grasping Verlaine to Rob’s precocious, charismatic Rimbaud; stuffy Wordsworth to Rob’s incandescent Coleridge; prunish, fussy Eliot to Rob’s eccentric genius Pound. (All the more perceptive observations in our cowritten themes, I see now, were Rob’s.) Had I never met Rob, I might never have written poetry; had Rob never met me, he would have gone right on doing what he had been doing. It was a hard pill to swallow. In a class assembly, when Rob referred, in passing, to the author George Eliot as “he,” I felt embarrassed for him, as one might for a soccer teammate who accidentally kicks the ball into his own goal. But I also felt a brief, shameful moment of satisfaction: Rob had committed a literary gaffe, though I might have been the only one who noticed—I, who before meeting Rob, had rhymed Yeats with Keats. Rob, bless him, remained loyal to both his girlfriend and his best friend. Our bond weathered the storm. That Christmas my parents gave me a copy of “The Waste Land”: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. I hadn’t been so thrilled by a Christmas present since I found a set of Lincoln Logs under the tree when I was six. I called Rob to share the news. Over the next few weeks, we spent hours

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huddled over the book, studying Pound’s cuts and comments, marveling that he had marked up Eliot’s manuscript the same way we marked up each other’s. Inspired, I set to work on my own epic, a ten-page poem whose protagonist, a sensitive, pipe-smoking young man, bore an uncanny resemblance to Prufrock and whose conglomerate structure had much in common with that of “The Waste Land.” Two months later, I handed the finished manuscript to Rob, who gave me a careful line-by-line critique (“Fine imagery.” “Vocab heavy handed.” “Consider space here—abrupt transition.” “Portrait of a Lady-esque.” “Look for economy of expression— every word must have its purpose—musical, artistic, meaning”). I would return the favor a few weeks later when Rob completed his own epic. We finished up senior year in style. We collaborated, with several friends, on a column for the school newspaper. We co-edited the school’s literary magazine, filling its pages largely with our own poems (in part because almost no one else submitted anything) and listing our names on the masthead as G. H. Colt and R. L. Farnsworth (in the manner of T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats). We wrote most of the yearbook together, describing the school with a kind of premature nostalgia, as if we were looking back on our salad days from a distance of many decades. We continued to mark up each other’s poems—we called it “annotating” now, and joked about each other being Il Miglior Fabbro (the better craftsman), as Eliot described Pound in his “Waste Land” dedication. We were, I’m sure, the only students at the school who tuned in each Sunday night to The Forsyte Saga, the PBS miniseries based on the Galsworthy novel, and discussed each episode on Monday as fervently as our classmates discussed Mission Impossible. When we turned eighteen, we registered for the draft together, knowing we’d get college deferments. We were as close as ever. And yet in early April, when we learned that neither of us had been admitted to our first-choice college, the one with the neo-Gothic garrets (Rob made the wait-list while I was rejected outright), I think even I knew that it was just as well—that it might be better to go our separate ways for a while. And then, suddenly, it was graduation. Wanting to go out with a last literary splash, we collaborated on a poem, a hastily cobbledtogether Eliotean pastiche (“Time and all about us / shoot skyward like smoke / from twisted pipe dreams . . .”) I read aloud to the bewilderment of the assembled students, parents, faculty, and

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trustees. (Rob had the good sense not to take part in the public presentation of our creation, whose sole virtue may have been that it was half the length of the poem Eliot wrote and recited at his high school graduation in 1905.) In the ritual distribution of prizes, Rob and I were co-winners of the award for best essay on a literary figure (I for an essay on Rilke, Rob for an essay on Eliot). Rob won the English prize. I won an award for leadership—ironic, given that I had spent the previous five years following Rob. And then high school was over, ending, to paraphrase our literary deity, not with a bang, but a whimper. We sauntered in our white ducks and blue school blazers past the stone walls and out into the real world. *

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I would continue writing poetry throughout college, though, for a time, there would be less poetry and more dérèglement de sens. During a postgraduate year in Paris (my Wanderjahr), I would fulfill my dream of writing in a garret—or at least in a second-floor studio apartment with a portable heater and a hot plate, from whose window, if I leaned out far enough, I could see the tip of the Eiffel Tower. In graduate school, when Richard Howard predicted, not unkindly, that by age thirty, some of us would no longer be writing poetry, I knew he couldn’t mean me. But a few years later, I took a job writing for a magazine and, other than occasional light verse for birthdays and anniversaries, I haven’t written a poem since. In turning to what is now known, in a bit of aspirational branding, as “creative nonfiction,” I had no illusions about it being the literary equal of poetry, and over the years I have felt an occasional twinge of guilt, wondering whether, like Orwell’s Gordon Comstock, I have sold out. (Ironically, I have become a far more faithful reader of poetry than I ever was when I was writing it, though my taste now runs to Coleridge, Hopkins, and the other nineteenth-century poets I once lacked the patience for. I memorize favorite poems, and when I wake in the night and can’t fall back to sleep, I recite them to myself.) Looking back, I think that, at some level, I was more interested in being a poet than in writing poetry. But being a poet—albeit a caricature of one—helped me figure out what kind of writer I was. In the end, I count myself fortunate that I have been able to spend my life playing with words. I have Rob to thank for that.

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Rob would continue to hone his craft through a long and distinguished career in poetry. He has written three acclaimed volumes of verse, published widely in the major journals, appeared in several anthologies, and won numerous awards and fellowships. In nearly four decades of teaching, mostly in colleges but also in prisons and senior centers, he has helped hundreds of poets find and refine their voices, and guided thousands of readers through the work of Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Stevens, and many other poets, some of whom he first guided me through. A number of his students have gone on to publish books of their own. At the age of 55, Rob would cross the Atlantic on a 400-foot container ship (no one, apparently, calls them tramp steamers anymore), reading poetry, writing in his journal, and watching the ocean roll by. Though our literary paths diverged, Rob and I have remained part of each other’s writing lives. Over the years, even after I no longer wrote poetry, Rob continued to show me his work and ask for feedback, although I suspect it is as much for old time’s sake as for any real help I can give him. As my own books take shape, I discuss them with Rob. (In some sense, I am still writing for Rob.) In our books’ acknowledgments, we always thank each other. These days, Rob is an emeritus professor of English at Bates College. An article about the reading he gave on the occasion of his retirement, written by a student, described “the aged but dignified man” who “approached the podium and began to speak.” It gave me pause to hear him described this way, but Rob and I are now older than McAnder, the Scottish widower Rob wrote into life fiftythree years ago; we are tending, if not our turnip patches, our tomato rows, and reading into the night. Yet whenever we are together, we fall back into our shared language, our conversation periodically dissolving into fits of laughter (while our wives shake their heads resignedly in the next room), and I am transported back to the days when we were G. H. Colt and R. L. Farnsworth, aspiring poets. Once again we linger, at least for a few more hours, in the chambers of the sea.

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PART TWO

College

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8 The Perilous Balance of Marvin Eisenberg Jeffrey Meyers

The connection between teachers and pupils has been vitally important since the days of Socrates and Plato. In the modern era Ford and Conrad, Pound and Eliot, Lowell and Plath have continued this tradition. I first encountered Marvin Eisenberg in my senior year at the University of Michigan. I’d spent the summer of 1956 in Genoa and learned Italian, and surprised him when I used the unusual word guazzabuglio (muddle). I studied in Europe during my junior year, visited museums from Madrid to Vienna, and was eager to learn more about art. In 1958–9, I took courses in Italian Renaissance and French impressionist painting from the witty and dynamic Marvin, by far the most inspiring teacher and dazzling conversationalist I’ve ever known. His classes gave the same pleasure as watching a stimulating play or film. I found, at last, the great teacher I’d been looking for in three universities and my mind raced to keep up with him. As Samuel Johnson said of Edmund Burke, if you spend only five minutes with that man you’d immediately be convinced of his brilliance: “his stream of mind is perpetual.” I sat in the front row of a large lecture room, mouth half-open as if to swallow every word and worshipped Marvin as if I were attending Mass. As he flashed the images on the screen and brought them to life with his incisive comments, the metal clicker he used to signal the change of slides sounded like the castanets in a Flamenco 67

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dance. He translated the names of the Italian painters—Larry Monk (Lorenzo Monaco), Andy Chestnut (Andrea del Castagno), Little Barrels (Botticelli), and Paul Bird (Paolo Uccello)—to make them familiar and memorable. He enchanted me with his rich description of colors: amber, azure, ocher, fuchsia, sienna, vermilion, salmon pink, and warm terra cotta. Marvin related vivid anecdotes from Vasari’s Lives of the Artists: Giotto drawing a perfect circle, Andrea del Sarto’s cruel wife carelessly brushing against the still-wet paint of his picture, Paolo Uccello speaking in his dreams: “Oh, what a sweet thing is this perspective!” He revealed how Uccello’s stunning masterpiece The Battle of San Romano was conceived as a whole by bringing together the three fragments now on display in the Uffizi, Louvre, and National Gallery in London. When discussing Renoir’s Dance at Bougival he pointed out an amusing detail: the first cigarette butt in Western art. Revving himself up for his passionate, operatic performances, he conveyed a mastery of the material, intense excitement and joy as a teacher. At the high point of the lecture he would stand on his toes as if to launch into a balletic jeté. I longed to impress him and worked very hard, but was not one of his star students and could not get “A”s in his classes, partly because I didn’t have enough time to study. I had lost credits while twice changing colleges, was taking seven courses each term instead of the usual five and also had a part-time job. I was an English major, competing with the more experienced majors in art. But one day, as he tried to recall a passage from W. H. Auden’s wartime poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” (1940) and began to quote “In Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus . . .” I had my finest hour. I supplied from memory the lines he was seeking: “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster. . . . The expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” In that painting the larger-than-life Icarus, his head submerged and with only one hand and two legs showing, dies from the impact of his crash into the sea while the spectators remain callously unaware of the catastrophe. I couldn’t hope to imitate his idiosyncratic teaching, but I later tried to emulate his knowledge and enthusiasm. When I spoke to him, close up in his office, he looked joli laid: short and bald, with wide mouth, thin lips, and large nose, but

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intensely animated and witty. I mentioned my keen interest in Thomas Mann and he introduced me to James Meisel, who’d been Mann’s secretary in Princeton from 1938 to 1941 and was then teaching political science at Michigan. My long conversations with Meisel also inspired me and years later, in 2014, I published Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes. Born in Philadelphia in 1922, Marvin was fond of quoting W. C. Fields’ epitaph for his gravestone: “I’d rather be living in Philadelphia.” He received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and during World War II served as a cryptographer in the Army Signal Corps in New Guinea. He earned an MFA and PhD from Princeton, and taught at Michigan for forty years, from 1949 until his retirement in 1989. I was not the only one to admire his teaching. His extraordinary performance was recognized by local and national awards for “excellence” from Michigan and “distinction” from the College Art Association. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, had a term at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and was decorated with the Star of Solidarity for Service to Italian Culture. Marvin had a rare combination of skills. He was also an expert administrator: chairman of the Michigan Art Department for ten years; president of the College Art Association for two years; and advisor to the Fogg Museum at Harvard, the National Gallery of Art and the Freer Gallery in Washington, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Marvin gave thirty-five works to the University of Michigan Museum of Art between 1997 and 2012. Many of them were watercolors, usually in memory of friends or to honor them. As a collector he did not, apart from one Piranesi, View of the Roman Campidoglio, concentrate on the period of his greatest expertise, the Italian Old Masters. His eclectic taste included eight works of oriental porcelain and ranged from Persian salt bags to contemporary prints and drawings, including nudes and an abstract, La Main qui Châtie (The Hand that Smites). Marvin was always elusive. Over the years I kept in touch with him by letter and phone. But I managed to see him only a few times in Ann Arbor and on one memorable occasion when I invited him to lecture on Leonardo at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He was then teaching for a term in Colorado Springs and I assumed he would stay overnight. But he was eager to return and I could not persuade him to remain for more wine and talk. He was sempre in

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gamba, always dashing off to distant places and hard to pin down. Though I went to Europe every summer, I never had the pleasure of going to Italian museums with him. He had a charming way of expressing agreement by exclaiming, as I spoke, “Exactly! Exaaactly!” When I told him I didn’t like the pistachio pattern in an oriental carpet I’d just bought, he suggested, “You’ll like it better if you call it celadon.” He was always amusing in person and told, with lively facial expressions and theatrical gestures, about buying a very expensive blue blazer and being charged extra for the metal buttons. He loved Italian jokes about Mussolini and the pope. Anticipating his climactic line, Marvin would start an encouraging laugh before he got to the end. In one story a collector enters a gallery in Florence, looks at a portrait of Mussolini, thinks it’s been painted over and asks the dealer to take off the top layer. The next day he sees that it’s become a superb Tuscan landscape, examines it with a magnifying glass, but still has doubts and tells the dealer to remove a second layer. When he returns on the third day he sees revealed, under the two layers— another portrait of Mussolini! In a second story, the old pope is dying and eminent doctors gather around his bedside. –Well? –The only way we can save you is if you sleep with a woman. –I’m the pope, I’m ninety years old, and I’ve never slept with a woman. I cannot do this. –This is not a personal decision. You must follow our advice for the sake of the Church. –All right, if I must, but only under three conditions. – What are they? –First, she must be Catholic and a virgin. –Of course, we would never have any other kind of woman sleep with the pope. –Second, she must be blind and mute. If word gets out my reputation will be ruined. –That’s more difficult, but I think we can do it. What’s the third condition? –The pope cups his hands, grins and says –“Big tits!” Marvin’s teaching inspired my lifelong passion for art, with all its rigorous discipline, intriguing images, and quest to understand the peak of human achievement. He taught me not only to look closely at paintings and to describe in precise detail what I saw, but also to understand what they meant and add intellectual to aesthetic pleasure. Only then could I analyze them and discover their true meaning. As Joseph Conrad wrote in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897): “My task is by the power of the written word to make you hear all, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make

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you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.” I eventually collected 1,000 books on art, and published five of my own books and 100 articles on the subject. Marvin made me aware of the relations between literature and the arts, of the significance of paintings in major novels, and in Painting and the Novel (1975) I was able to show how the authors used pictures to illuminate the meaning of their fiction. He also influenced my interpretation of specific pictures: Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, Degas’ Misfortunes of the City of Orléans, Seurat’s La Grande Jatte. Later on, through my passion for painting, I formed a close friendship with the Canadian realist Alex Colville and published a book about him in 2016. Marvin was my ideal audience. I always wanted to please him and he replied generously to the work I sent him. His blurb for the dust jacket of Impressionist Quartet (2005) reveals that he took considerable time and thought for his response and—as a talented pianist—recognized the musical structure of the book. His commendation meant a great deal to me and compensated for my inability to get the highest grades in his classes: “Jeffrey Meyers’ approach to Manet and Morisot, Degas and Cassatt, brilliantly interweaves complex issues of personal relationship, artistic creativity, critical reception, historical events, and widely divergent social and economic backgrounds. As with a finely constructed chamber quartet, the qualities of each ‘instrument’ of his ensemble are preserved at the same time that a richly interwoven story unfolds.” For nearly forty years, from 1969 to 2007, Marvin sporadically sent me many typed and handwritten letters and postcards. His letters often perceptively responded to all the books and articles I sent him, though he sometimes revealed his own thoughts and feelings. In November 1969 and October 1970, he wrote, “I’ve finished my nearly ten years of chairmanship and will be at the Institute in Princeton next term finishing my long-postponed Lorenzo Monaco book and learning to read again after a wide breach. . . . Day by day I am struggling with Lorenzo Monaco but the end is coming into sight—or so it seems at the moment.” But he was too optimistic. The book began as a Princeton dissertation in 1954, but administrative duties had distracted him and depression blocked his writing. He personally carried his precious life’s work to Princeton and it was (deo gratias) handsomely and expensively published—with sixteen color plates and 337 black-and-white

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illustrations—thirty-five years later in 1989. He was lucky, during that long gestation period, not to be pipped at the post by another book on that subject. In contrast to his memorable teaching and coruscating talk, Marvin’s long-awaited work was immensely learned but surprisingly dry and dull. In Lorenzo Monaco (1989), he considered the artistic monk who was the preeminent Florentine painter during the two decades before the advent of Masaccio and Fra Angelico. He showed that Lorenzo’s works, among the most beautiful images in late medieval art, fused traditional Christian themes and elegant Late Gothic forms with a fervent monastic devotion. On February 1, 2001 he cheerfully wrote, “I am busier in ‘retirement’ than ever, but all at my own pace and my own fault when the pressures build. In 1998 I published a vast altarpiece reconstruction for the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo (along with two visits).” This appeared as a 77-page monograph, The “Confraternity Altarpiece” by Mariotto di Nardo (1998), an artist who flourished between 1394 and 1424. He described one of his articles, “A Few Words about Halos, Visible and Invisible” (Source, 2002), as “a brief observation about a large matter.” His chapter on “Two Echoes of the Platytera [an icon of the Incarnation] on Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” appeared in a Festschrift for Olga Pujmanova, whom he called “a wonderful person and a close friend.” The title, In Italiam nos fata trahunt, sequamur (Let Us Follow the Fates to Italy Where They Lead Us), comes from Virgil’s Aeneid and the book was published in Prague in 2003. He never completed his promising work on a great subject, “Robert Browning and the Arts.” Marvin always commented on my work with enthusiasm and wit. After I’d exposed the outrageous swindles I had witnessed while working for Christie’s in London, he warned me on December 31, 1998, “You had better wear a bullet-proof vest on King Street. The diamond switcher I found most scandalous. I thought this only happened [in the diamond district] on 47th Street in New York.” In April 1977, he called my somewhat provocative book, Homosexuality and Literature, 1890–1930, “a sensitive study, superb in its selection and freedom from a polemical modishness.” While still an undergraduate during the respectable and repressed 1950s, I heard rumors that he and another Jewish homosexual, known as the “two Marvins,” were lovers. Later on, when I got to

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know him, he punned on sodomy as “innuendo” and I caught a glimpse of his gay circle of friends. He told me that he held thé dansants in his apartment and, while he played the grand piano, men dressed in drag swayed to the music and rubbed against each other before having sex. The sudden fatal heart attack of his adored Japanese lover intensified his depression. Keiichi Hayano (1930– 2011) had a BFA and MFA from Michigan, was Professor of Fine Arts at York University and lived with his partner in Toronto. Marvin gave six of Hayano’s prints, collagraphs, etchings, and aquatints to the Michigan Museum of Art, and Hayano was one of the four dedicatees of Lorenzo Monaco. When I asked Marvin if I could dedicate my life of Modigliani to him as a personal tribute, he replied in comradely fashion on February 8, 2005, “Your proposed dedication of Modigliani touches me profoundly. I have profited immeasurably from the enormous scope of your writing. Your gesture puts a seal on our decades of acquaintance and association.” So, at last, the pupil had been able to instruct the teacher. Marvin, who was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in 2003, nominated me for an honorary degree at the University of Michigan. On September 28, 2006 he asked, “Could you send me a dozen or so copies of some ‘stellar’ reviews of a variety of items from your vast ‘oeuvre’?” Competition was intense—Bill Clinton was awarded a Michigan degree that year—but Marvin’s gratifying nomination helped compensate for not being able to hang out with Bill. Marvin regretfully wrote: “As is predictable, the social or political faction is the driving force in the selection. Where is pure, personal creativity, where is Donald Hall who taught here for years, where is music, where are you? Perhaps in a future round. In irritation, Marvin.” I knew that Marvin’s intellectual brilliance was closely connected to his precarious mental state. As John Dryden wrote, “Great wits are sure to madness near allied.” Marvin maintained a perilous balance, a hyperactive, high-strung, almost manic intensity, and frequently suffered deep depressions and nervous breakdowns. His letters became darker, though always with a touch of stoic humor, as his illness progressed. On July 24, 2002 he confessed, “I am in the grip of a few health problems—something has to give, after all. Next month I reach the big 80, a decade in which HMO’s thrive.”1 In three letters of January, September, and December 2006, he

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revealed that my description of Iris Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s disease in Privileged Moments (2000) “brought tears.” His older brother Frank, a contrast to Marvin, earned a doctorate in biochemistry, was married and had five children, and had worked for thirty years at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Frank’s death from Parkinson’s disease in 2006 evoked deep mourning and “apologies for the silence; I remain very bruised by the loss of my only sibling, to whom I was very close since childhood.” He’d seen his brother suffer and knew he would soon be going through the same agony with the same disease. Toward the end of his life, Marvin was cared for by a young black man, an All-American athlete and homosexual, born in 1949, who taught physical education and coached sports at several colleges. We got to know each other by phone and email. On November 15, 2012, he wrote me: “Marvin’s health is up and down, but he is doing well for 90. He says he can’t read anymore because of his poor eyesight; however, I know that is not totally the case. I would suggest that you send him your book, as it might inspire him to read something.” On November 7, 2014, he explained their recent difficulties: Unfortunately, I do not have any information about Marvin. I have not seen him in about a year. As you probably know I am no longer Marvin’s caregiver or have power of attorney. I resigned after I contracted pneumonia while moving him into his nursing home, and came close to dying from it. I had a temperature of 103.9. Marvin now has a court appointed lawyer who is supposed to be looking after his affairs. She has neglected his affairs, but found time to make my life miserable and has implied that I had been taking advantage of him. It didn’t matter that I had taken care of him for 11 years and helped to keep him alive over that period. All she saw was a younger black male and she assumed I must be using him. Marvin has not supported me in these problems, so I have dropped him. I feel sorry for him, but Marvin is so self-centered that he can’t understand how all of this affects me (although he is not selfish). Regardless, I still love him and am concerned about him. He and I have been friends for 41 years, since I was 24 years old. His friend also told me that in his last years, “starvin’ Marvin” thought his food was poisoned, refused to eat and had to be placed in Glacier Hills, a chilly Ann Arbor nursing home.

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Marvin’s neighbor and colleague at Michigan, Glenn Watkins, sent me a moving tribute: we were close, professionally sharing aspects of our field in an uncommonly rich way. He was smart as a whip, but never acted the part. It all came out in length over mutually respectful dialogues. I am a music historian, and while he was an art historian, his interest in music was consuming, adventurous and unending. He was one of the most important friends of my life, and I was understandably saddened that his last years were so uncomfortable. All who knew him, loved him, and wondered at his easy command of so much knowledge. Marvin’s last, bitterly hopeful letter explained, “I may be entering a Parkinson’s research trial (??). If those fucking stem cell research opponents and their phony evangelism would disappear, so might the disease!” His many electric-shock treatments to relieve depression mysteriously alleviated the symptoms of his disease, but did not halt its fatal progress. When I last phoned Marvin on his 83rd birthday, his speech was blurred and I couldn’t understand his words. But I was proud that I’d managed to please him, and amazed that the resilient patient lived for another ten years. Marvin’s mental breakdowns were worse than his physical disease, and he had to overcome formidable obstacles to achieve fame as a teacher, scholar, and expert on museums.

NOTE 1 HMO, health maintenance organization.

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9 W. Edward Brown: Many Years of Mentoring Jay Parini

I often think back to my days, in the late sixties, at Lafayette College. It was a heady period, of course, with Dylan, the Stones, and the Beatles putting out their classic records, with the Vietnam War raging. My generation took to the streets with placards, and I joined in eagerly, marching on the Pentagon in 1967. There was free love in the air (not for me, so much) and an awakened feeling of political power in those under thirty. Those great lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude ring in my head: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” It’s easy to exaggerate the feelings of that era—I’m as guilty as anyone in this. But I think many in my cohort felt a huge sense of liberation from two decades of Cold War frigidness and cultural as well as political sterility. The era of short-cropped hair and buttondown collars gave way to long hair and bell-bottomed jeans. Beards replaced clean-shaven cheeks. And those fashion cues—extremely superficial—were nevertheless a sign of transformations that were happening, were real, and remain important to this day. As I look back, I can’t help but turn to the memory of W. Edward Brown, my advisor in college, a deeply important mentor in my life, and a man who talked me through the late sixties and into young manhood, helping me to make sense of the world as I found it. I 77

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took every course he offered, spending long hours in his office doing Greek grammar beside him—not even a course, just a “special subject.” He taught me how to read ancient Greek, in various dialects! I remember him saying that “an awareness of the Greek roots of words will have an astonishing effect on your writing.” He once quoted Emerson to me, saying that every word was once a bright picture, that language itself is a kind of poetry, if keenly heard. Ed Brown listened keenly. He was a singular and single man (he was gay but didn’t talk about it). A member of the faculty at Lafayette from 1927 until 1973, he was a classicist by training, with a PhD from Yale. Greek and Latin—which he considered the bedrock of the humanities—were his specialty; but he also taught ancient history and Russian literature. He lived in a large woodframe house on Lafayette Hill, at 824 Paxinosa Avenue, with his sister Jean. It was a veritable house of books, his personal universe of favorite authors, all meticulously shelved by language and category. The classics of European literature were there—always in the original tongue. Needless to say, Ed was a gifted linguist who could easily read Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Russian as well as Greek and Latin. I remember listening to him one night as he read to a small group of students from Dante’s Divina Commedia and translated as he read, almost simultaneously. And this wasn’t a party trick. There wasn’t the slightest pretense about him. Erudition came naturally, part and parcel of his life, and he wore it lightly—or lightly enough. He was just Ed Brown being himself, and I soon began to imitate his manner, his casual self-deprecations, his ways of reading closely, attempting to mirror his sly wit, his complete attention to the text before him. If I have any of these traits, I owe them to Ed, and very often feel him inside me when I walk into a classroom. I think: I’m Ed Brown today, reborn. This is what happens with real mentors: they get under your skin in the best ways, and you become them, taking on their voice, their manner of inhabiting the world. It’s how we learn to be who we really are: through imitation. Ed had a bright, witty, wise manner, and he was thoroughly devoted to his students, who loved him without reserve. When I nervously asked him to be my adviser one day in my sophomore year, he agreed at once, suggesting that I change my major from

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history to “history and literature,” a new program he was spearheading. I think we became especially close when I turned up at his office one day with a sheaf of terrible poems I had written. Ed read them carefully, took them seriously, yet gently led me in better directions. “Rewrite them, and come back. And then come back again.” When I looked exasperated, he quoted Paul Valéry: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” I remember his sweeping lectures on Western classics from Homer through Tolstoy were famous on the Lafayette campus at the time. Students came in droves, wanting simply to be in his presence. My reading of Anna Karenina (1878) under his guidance led me to War and Peace (1867), The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886), and a dozen more books by a writer who has proved a touchstone throughout my life. “After Homer,” said Brown to me one day, “there is Tolstoy.” I should note that Ed’s lectures were amusing, informative, and moving. Students sat up, leaning forward into the class. Yet the manner was never flamboyant. Ed knew he could depend on the text at hand—always superb—and his reading of that text to hold our attention. We’d focus on a particular passage, and he would meditate aloud on what it meant to him. I recall actually weeping when he read aloud from that part in the Iliad about the death of Hector. In fact, I’ve often gone back to that part of the epic with amazement, preferring the same textbook we used in his class: the muscular translation by Richmond Lattimore (which was for decades the gold standard for English-speaking readers). The scope of Ed Brown’s scholarship seems almost impossible to comprehend or, in this day, to replicate. I’ve been teaching for over forty years myself and have to admit: one doesn’t come across many people with Ed’s range or particularity of knowledge. It’s an oldfashioned way of being a scholar/teacher, one that has its roots in European scholarship from the nineteenth century. For models, one would look back to people like Ulrich von Wilamovitz-Moellendorf, the German philologist. (Ed gave me a copy of his autobiography when I started graduate school, and I still dip into it now and then for inspiration.) Among Ed’s contemporaries were a handful of polymaths like Leo Spitzer, René Wellek, or Erich Auerbach, who wrote Mimesis: still one of the great books of literary criticism. These men were products of the Central European tradition of philology, and all of them sought a comprehensive and total vision.

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Ed knew everything, as far as I could tell; but he wore his learning lightly, never attempting to dominate in conversation, never forcing a matter or making those around him feel inferior in any way. He was a gentle soul, and yet he somehow managed to communicate that he expected a first-rate performance from every student. I worked hard for him, and he let me know that he appreciated my efforts. He treated every student as an adult, never condescending, always reaching for the best. Of course he knew a thousand times more than we did. But that was a kind of tacit understanding, and more effective because it was tacit. I spent my junior year abroad, in Scotland, and throughout the year I corresponded regularly with Ed, sending him poems of my own. He always replied at once, offering detailed critiques of the poems, giving me suggestions for revision and further reading. He knew exactly what I needed to read to advance in my own intellectual path, and I’m grateful for his alertness to those needs. I was only recently browsing through an old copy of Thomas Mann’s stories, and I found notes that I made that year in response to something Ed Brown had said to me. (Ed’s closet homosexuality made a text like Death in Venice vividly meaningful to him.) In one letter, he wrote to me: “You must read Tonio Kröger, a novella by Mann if you haven’t already. It’s about how an artist feels, almost by necessity, a certain alienation from the world around him. This seems to be what you’re feeling. As Mann says, you have somehow ‘to die to ordinary life’ in order to write poems or fiction. You live in the text that you create.” When I returned for my senior year at Lafayette, Ed and I drew even closer. I remember so well the night of May 4, 1970—the day when four students at Kent State were killed and nine others wounded. It seemed the country was exploding in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine, and I went straight to Ed’s house on Paxinosa Avenue. He poured me a drink, and we watched the television commentary. He told me not to lose hope. That every country and every generation goes through its paroxysms. The truth was, he said, that the reaction to these killings was hopeful. America would not be in Vietnam for long, he guessed. Nixon was back on his heels. Ed and I we remained in touch through my years in graduate school in Scotland, when I often sought his advice in letters. Quite miraculously, he had known Theodore Roethke, the poet who was the subject of my doctoral thesis, in the thirties, and he read his

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poetry closely. Ed’s thoughts on the poetry fed into my own thinking. He told me to think about the influence of European and American Romanticism on Roethke, and this led to my exploration of this vein, which resulted in my first book of criticism, Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic (1979). When I got my first teaching job— at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire—I remembered thinking: I’ll be close to Ed Brown now, as he had moved to Grafton, Vermont. This tiny Vermont village was some forty minutes away from my house on the New Hampshire border, and I was invited to dinner at his house, “Silver Birches,” within a week of arrival. He was a fine cook, and I often drove to visit him and sit afterwards in his living room over brandy. He would occasionally come to visit me in my faculty apartment at Dartmouth, staying for dinner when he could, although he found my cooking “less than imaginative.” (He gave me an Italian cookbook as a gift, and I still use it.) Several times he attended my classes as a kind of coach, offering comments on my teaching that proved immensely useful at the time and, indeed, later. “Think of a class as a kind of fiction,” he said to me, “one that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Knowledge is always narrative, and the shape of a class is everything. Your job is to summon a story in the student’s head, one that will stay there, a luminous other in contrast to his or her daily world.” I confess, it’s taken me several decades to understand what he meant in a deeper way. And I’m still not certain that I fully get it! What amazed me, as a young professor, was Ed’s devotion to scholarship, which never wavered. He learned Russian in his later years, and in his typical way, he dug into the subject with a kind of ferocity. I remember sitting in his study in Vermont, where he had Russian journals piled to the ceiling. He had for more than a decade been working on the history of Russian literature before 1840, digging into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in separate volumes, then moving into the nineteenth century with his fourvolume A History of Russian Literature in the Romantic Era (1986). Few scholars could manage such a task, but he was able to draw on his encyclopedic knowledge of classical and European models, which gave a rare depth to his work. There’s a sly wit in the writing, and one marvels at how his eye scans the broad horizon and yet lands on text after text. “I’m writing against the grain of Soviet historiography,” he told me. That was a daunting task, to say the least.

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Ed was never a “star” in his profession in the usual sense, not while he was teaching at Lafayette. That is, he published very little during his active years on the faculty, preferring to focus on his teaching, although he somehow managed to write a vast multivolume history of Greek and Latin literature that was never published. I was able to get my hands on a copy, and it sits on my bookshelf in my study—always an inspiration. His old-fashioned philological approach makes it probably unpublishable today, though I’d love to see it put into print for future generations. Mentorship is really a kind of friendship taken to a refined level. The friendship is one-sided at first, although in time there’s a kind of seesaw that finds a balancing point. I found that point toward the end, with Ed Brown, who died in the late fall of 1989. I think it was only a few months before his death that I made my way to his house in Grafton, bringing with me in manuscript parts of a novel about Leo Tolstoy’s final years that I’d been writing. I read him several chapters, and he offered suggestions. My only regret here is that he didn’t see the final version of that novel, which in so many ways I can trace back to my reading of Anna Karenina in his class many years before.

10 David Milch and the Strategies of Indirection in Fiction William Logan

Pianists trace their descent from one teacher to another back through the gloomy decades to a Liszt or a Czerny. Playing piano is a skill that becomes an art, writing an art that becomes a skill. I spent my early years at Yale wandering through Jacksonian America and, still a sophomore, taking grad courses in probability and game theory—I planned, until the bombing of Cambodia, to take a PhD in the coils of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Arrow’s Theorem. Privately I entertained an imprudent desire to become a poet, filling holes in my schedule with poetry workshops when I could have taken courses with one of the most incandescent English faculties ever assembled. Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, W. K. Wimsatt, Richard Ellmann, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, John Hersey, R. W. B. Lewis, and Maynard Mack do not exhaust the list. As an ill-educated young poet, I wanted to write poetry beyond my expectations, but I couldn’t even write within my means. Unlike Beckett, I did not fail again and fail better; I failed and fared worse. Two teachers gave me a compass, my final semester—one, a Pulitzer Prize winner, showed what the art in the art of poetry required; the other, disturbingly inspired, taught me the substance within the misty reaches of art. He was twenty-six when the workshop began, 83

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a would-be novelist. Years later he created two of the most rulebreaking shows on television, NYPD Blue and Deadwood. I had a few brilliant teachers, but only one genius, David Milch. Under Yale’s College Seminar Program, each of the twelve residential colleges offered courses outside academic departments, courses more inventive and freewheeling, often taught by hired gunslingers rather than regular faculty. The university never much cared for writing workshops—the English Department offered little beyond a famous course called Daily Themes. Founded in the first decade of the twentieth century, it had already trained three or four generations of journalists and freelance writers. The department’s few poetry and fiction workshops were oversubscribed months in advance, while one semester the only workshop listed as a college seminar received eighty-seven applicants. I was not interested in fiction workshops, even those taught by Warren and Hersey. I don’t recall that the department’s poetry workshops were taught by anyone of reputation. There were college seminars in poetry, however, taught by Mark Strand and Richard Howard, among others. Seminar teachers often came from New York or Boston, arriving by train and, immediately after teaching or spending the night in the master’s lodge, bustling home again. The salary was $2,000 per course, a little more than a graduate student would have earned in the early seventies. The spring of my junior year, after the ruinous mess of the Vietnam War and the killing of students at Kent State had driven me out of political science and American history, a friend mentioned that a riveting young fiction writer had set up shop in Calhoun College (since renamed Grace Hopper College). I found David Milch camped in the master’s spare office, which like those of other professors was drably furnished with ancient bookcase, scarred oak-desk, and splintery desk-chair, all hauled in by a Hollywood prop department. Atop the desk sat a Bogart-movie refugee, a heavy black telephone. “What can I do for you?” David asked, straight to the point. I explained that I’d like him to teach a workshop at Berkeley College, just up the street. He cheerfully agreed and gave me what I needed to propose the course to the college committee—a short biography and a description of his current seminar, Strategies of Indirection in Fiction. As the proposer would automatically be enrolled in the course, I felt it necessary to confess that I was a poet. He laughed and said, “That won’t matter a bit.” The seminar was duly approved.

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Each week the next spring, just after the hour, David would shamble into the seminar room in the basement of Calhoun. (Apparently seminars did not always meet in the sponsoring college.) There were a dozen in the class, all or almost all male—Yale had first admitted undergraduate women only two years before. Dressed in a black T-shirt and Levi’s or pale slacks, he seated himself at the end of the table, skylit by leaded windows that gave onto a deep window-well running along the side of the college. Over the T-shirt he wore the remains of a ratty suit-jacket. Burly and a shade under six feet, hair slightly thinning, vaguely dissolute, David had an intimidating presence. I often sat at the far end of the table, never directly opposite. He brought no notes. Taking off his watch and settling himself, without pause he began to speak. It was not a class that required discussion, and I expect we were so awed by the gouts of talk that questions would not have been rude so much as superfluous. Toward the end of class, David might ask, with a hint of aggression, if we had anything to add. I may have raised two or three points in the course of the semester, but I doubt anyone said very much. Most of us spent the time scribbling madly on our notepads, because what he said seemed crucial to any deep analysis of fiction. When finished, he’d pick up his watch, nod his head, and shuffle away, fifty minutes into the two-hour seminar. Once, and once only, he saw, nodding in exaggerated surprise, that he’d gone on for an hour and ten minutes. He held up the watch in triumph. Oddly, I don’t recall that he was particularly profane, not then— but I was so given to profanity myself (there’s an embarrassing transcript), I might not have noticed. David had a gift for physical comedy, as the incident of the watch suggests. Halfway through the course, a student was asked to read a short story he’d written, the only time this happened. I remember nothing about the story except that it went on and on. And on. Finally David rose from his chair, stood quietly behind the young man—who didn’t notice—and performed a soft-shoe shuffle, then sat down again. In his office, on another occasion, David made a point so vehemently he ripped an arm off the desk-chair. Slightly bemused, he stared at it in his hand, then attempted to put the chair back together, without success. Such minor disasters, treated to mock outrage, were not infrequent. Gesture was one of his main languages. A novel or book of stories was assigned each week—The Great Gatsby (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), and Absalom, Absalom!

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(1936) were obvious choices; but we also read The Confidence Man (1857), Molloy (1951), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), and stories or novellas by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, and Nathanael West. Less conventionally, we read Leonard Gardner’s Fat City (1969) and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961). Yates, one of David’s teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was somehow invited to class. I recall little about the visit, which took place outdoors at the height of New Haven spring, except that this tall, awkward man looked slightly bewildered, embarrassed by the attention yet tweedily gratified. The novel had been published to acclaim only a dozen years before, but none of us had heard of it. Every week or two, I’d drop by David’s office. Living in New Haven, he was far easier to approach than seminar teachers who rolled in by train. I’m not sure I ever saw anyone else from class there, but he always welcomed me gruffly with, “So, anything on your mind?” (Those may not have been his exact words; but the warm challenge implied, at least in tone, that every conversation had to start with a thrown gauntlet.) A little of his private life gradually leaked out. He was an inveterate gambler not infrequently in hock to local bookies. Like most gamblers, his appetites were always greater than his losses. Giving me his home phone number, he warned, “Ring twice, hang up, call again. Then I know you’re not a bookie.” The number or code would change from time to time. In the office he once said, “Hey, look at this!” He reached into a pocket of the worn suit-jacket and pulled out a wad of papers, which he tossed in my direction. A pile of what looked like play money spilled onto the carpet. I picked up one of the bills. I’d never seen a Ben Franklin before, its verso a deep, slightly strange forestgreen. Three or four thousand dollars lay at my feet. “Got lucky at the races last weekend,” was all David would say. In the late seventies, my sweetheart and I stopped by his apartment in New Haven on a drive down from Cape Cod. David played host the way a host should be played. In the middle of our conversation, he announced, “I’ve found the perfect jai alai system!” Talk stopped. Every gambler knows about systems. Every nongambler knows about systems. “You look skeptical,” he said, shaking his head. He turned to my sweetheart. “Debora, open the drawer of that end table beside you.” As she did, stacks of jai alai receipts flared up and drifted to the carpet. David gave a big grin,

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opening his hands in a helpless gesture, whether of defeat or victory I wasn’t sure. David’s relation to gambling, like his other addictions, brought him under the shadow of Dostoevsky. Whether high or low, the stakes were high. He justified the gambling, however ruinous its effect, by his need for action. No win was enough, only temporarily interrupting the cascade of loss. No win offered salvation, only a purge of instinct, the spur to the next bet; but then the goal was not winning, I felt, but punishment. David seemed to feel most alive, most put to the test, when he lost more than he could afford to pay. The losses were both self-destructive and heroic. Gambling was not his only addiction. I knew a little about David and drugs, and he knew a little about drugs and me. However broad my knowledge of contemporary pharmacology might have been, his was certainly deeper. David had graduated summa cum laude from Yale only six years before the workshop, receiving among the highest scores ever recorded on the final exam then mandatory for English majors. He often spoke warmly of “Mr. Warren”—Robert Penn Warren, who had made David his protégé. After graduation, David had gone to the Iowa Workshop, where he was something of a misfit. (Anyone from the Ivies was by definition a misfit there, I later discovered.) He’d gotten into a fistfight with Kurt Vonnegut, whom he thought a poseur, and dropped out to go to Hollywood, where he wrote for Peyton Place, then a popular thrice-weekly soap opera, the first ever to run at night. David had returned to Yale for law school—finishing the Iowa degree by mail, he told me. According to Mark Singer, who wrote his profile for the New Yorker (February 14 and 21, 2005), David entered law school to receive a draft deferment, a common strategy before the draft lottery began. (I was fortunate not to have been drafted in my sophomore or junior year.) David’s career as a law student was cut short by an incident, of which there is more than one version, involving heavy drinking, a police car, and a shotgun— either the squad car’s light bar or a hapless streetlight was blown away. He hung around Yale until Stanley Kunitz invited him to be his assistant in a college poetry seminar, probably in 1969. It wasn’t clear how many courses in poetry David had taken as an English major. He didn’t seem to understand poetry at all. He confided that in the seminar Kunitz would call on him now and then. “Mr. Milch, what is the meter of this poem by William Wordsworth?”

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Kunitz once asked. “Dactylic hexameter,” David replied. “Exactly!” said Kunitz. “Iambic pentameter.” David once showed me a group of poems by another student, and I dismissed them as perfectly awful. “Why?” he asked. “They have alliteration. They have metaphors.” What did I learn, then, from David Milch? My notes were not lavish—most weeks I wrote down just a page or two of what he said, though that may be the manifest sign of his talk’s hypnotic effect. His ideas were so striking, I only half-finished recording one remark before he launched into two or three others. I caught enough of the manner that I’ll use those notes as direct quotes: There is a reluctance of the writer’s imagination to give up free rein unless the form is congenial to the imagination. The recognition of that reluctance is the writer’s first duty. A writer needs a certain distancing so the imagination isn’t threatened. That distancing becomes a legitimate receptacle for the mind. You have to show the imagination that it is not under scrutiny or attack. Nothing in the spirit is unfit for the page, if properly communicated. Problems of technique are only problems of communication. Content must justify form. The source of humor is the thing survived. The reader is able to approach the story only as the voice allows. There are ways of absorbing neurotic obsession in form, then attacking other things in the story. Conrad used Marlow because he needed a ruminating device. I’m not suggesting that what’s good for your work is good for your life.

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The writer must give up fastidiousness. A pat story may be the most necessary. This reluctance is played out by the writer setting forty tasks before writing—as in the courtly-love tradition, the consummation often is not reached. The writer who never consummates permits himself to entertain the fantasy of talent in the head. In The Great Gatsby, a qualified narrative voice absorbs an aberrant state of mind to see the action rightly. Nick Carraway is the refractor of the story. There is a temptation to confuse internal state with external reality. How things work is a great subject if the author can participate unencumbered. When the values in the story do not coincide with those of the reader, he’ll try to get out by looking for inconsistencies. When the third-person narrative is conditioned by perceptions of the character observed, the reader starts with the feeling he has options. Where nothing else is offered in the world of the novel apart from the character’s perceptions, the feeling of having options is gradually eroded. Every narrator is conditioned as an actor to the extent he is tested as a narrator. One usually has the feeling of the weight of the past, but not the time the past takes to become the past. The ability to delineate what neuroses condition the character is where fiction begins, and what time does to that is where fiction ends. A story does not have to occur in time to get the satisfaction of process. Action ought to test the values of the form. The narrative voice has values the characters do not. Illusions get characters through the days.

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When you are accomplished as a writer, it’s harder to see what you’re not doing. If you concentrate on what you’re good at, OK—but, if you use that to cover up what you’re not good at, you’ll fuck up. The price paid for the embrace of a particular position, at the cost of humanity, is life. People who are very articulate in describing writing may have difficulty writing because they undercut the gratifications by making them conscious. I reject that you have to be naive to write, but it may be a great help. Mere technical virtuosity is a conceit. I have missed here his penchant for quoting Darwin, William James, Kierkegaard, and many another. At such moments David seemed in touch beneath the art on the page with a world of perception not immediately perceptible, and perhaps not perceptible at all—in other words, in touch with the drives and burdens of which art is made and in which nothing but art flourishes. These are fragments from his fifty-minute monologues across twelve weeks, monologues delivered almost without interruption, perhaps ten hours in all of an extraordinary mind engaged by his favorite subject. I doubt many have come closer to the fixation Coleridge created with his talk, or the surrender demanded. I had never heard another teacher talk like that. I’d never heard a teacher think like that. I’d had the benefit of courses with Edmund Morgan, Chris Argyris, Joseph LaPalombara, Richard Gilman, Gaddis Smith, and Charles Reich, all arresting lecturers who but for David would have been far more impressive. I could see in those seminar hours, however, the complicated transaction and explanation necessary for David to curb his own talent and make it useful. For all his Circean talk, his way of analyzing stories could never have been adopted by anyone else. Not only did I lack that cast of mind, but to try to imitate him would have been no easier than imitating William Empson or Kenneth Burke without being Empson or Burke. David’s influence was the more crucial because it was indirect. I did not have to treat him with the caution that might have been

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necessary with a poet, since poets almost unconsciously convey the allurements of their style, praising highest a sort of mimicry. While I was in grad school, however, he asked my advice about “The Men at Haskell Levine’s,” a narrative poem he later published in the Southern Review, which Robert Penn Warren had founded. The poem, meant to begin a sequence never, alas, continued, took advantage of all David’s gifts as a storyteller. The goad of studying with David, a goad that became a lesson ethical without being moral—he did not believe, so far as I could tell, in the morality of writing or of fiction itself—was the urgency of finding a path, however divergent or particular, into the work itself. The requirements for Strategies of Indirection were to submit two pieces of fiction or criticism. I gave him instead a gloomy sequence of poems about an unconsummated love affair. He read them, nodded, considered the matter for a second, then exclaimed brightly, “She must have some tits!” My hopes for the sequence collapsed. David possessed an uncanny comprehension of what was wrong with work I brought. Later he looked at a somewhat fragmented poem, no doubt perfectly awful. He glanced over it and said, “What if you put these lines here, at the beginning? And those over there, toward the end?” With a couple of arrows and a few deletions he completed the diagram; the poem became immeasurably better, no longer an idea without direction, one that hadn’t even known it was an idea. That deft practical instruction was as valuable as all the things he said. David wrote a letter of recommendation when I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Perhaps he’d even suggested that I go. I walked down to his office one day in March or April; as soon as I sat down, he said, cocking an eye, “Did you get in?” (Gauntlet thrown.) I said I hadn’t heard. He raised his eyebrows, as if struck by an immense idea. “Let’s call them!” he said. My heart sank. Taking the lead-weight of the desk phone, he dialed the number, which he seemed to know by heart. Dialing an old rotary phone took forever. Eventually someone answered. “Yeah, this is Dave Milch,” he said, gravelly but not unfriendly. “I’ve got my student Bill Logan here. Yeah, he applied. Did he get in? Yeah. Yeah. OK.” He slammed down the phone and looked at me. “You didn’t get in. But look . . .” Then he offered to make me his assistant the following year, promising to split his take from the college seminars.

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Heartened and embarrassed by his overestimation of my talents, to my long regret I turned him down. My reasons were not complicated. I had no idea what I’d do after graduation; but I didn’t want to spend the next year being outmatched once a week (“Dactylic hexameter!”), because just to be with David was to be outmatched. He had a gaggle of hangers-on who already wanted something from him. Whatever they wanted, I wanted something else. I was admitted to Iowa a year later, after another letter of recommendation from David Milch. David kept on at Yale for a decade, offering versions of the same seminar. I’ve met one or two former students, and they suffered the same enchantment. While I was his student he was working parttime for Warren, Brooks, and Lewis on a two-volume anthology of American literature. The spring of that seminar he asked me to compare two versions of a Henry James story, probably “The Beast in the Jungle.” Though I judged the earlier not materially different, in the end they chose the version from the New York Edition. Gradually I looked up the scraps of fiction David had published, all from an unfinished trilogy exploring the aftermath of the death of a boy in a car wreck. David had already signed the contract and received the advance. I found two chapters in his MFA thesis at Iowa, which he asked me to Xerox, having lost his only copy. As I recall, each volume would cover a day between the wreck and the funeral—a Faulknerian enterprise set in Buffalo, apparently based on the death of a friend. The dialogue was gripping in an unsettling way; but the exposition and description, though they served the story, were a work in progress, lacking the depth and reach he achieved so effortlessly in dialogue. He was master of motivation and complication, both evident in an unmade movie script I later saw, a script about a degenerate gambler who played the ponies. There were extensive notes, detailing what occurred in the minds of the characters, something scripts never do—it was a complete literary work in itself. At Yale, he was also busy writing scripts for a PBS television series on the James family, a series never made. I saw a few pages, his talent for revealing character through dialogue fully on display. He also wrote the script, allegedly in one weekend, for what would now be called an indie movie. Financed by the director, who had some family money, the setting of Pilgrims (1973) was a highway diner near New Haven. David was cast in a part that largely

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required playing himself. I recall only one line, during his encounter with a slightly cracked monologuist, played by a former Yalie who could produce soliloquies on demand. (I’d encountered him at the Yale radio station, where I’d been music and then program director.) In the scene between them, David looked at the guy and said, “You’re not wrapped too tight.” David wasn’t thriving in New Haven, however. I saw him whenever I passed through, every year or so. A decade after the seminar, he was gone. A former roommate was in Hollywood writing for Hill Street Blues. When the show lost a writer, he invited David to try his hand. There were other shows afterward, and larger paychecks. He told me that every time he tried to leave the business and return to fiction, someone doubled his salary. In 1992, David invited me down to Miami to watch the Breeders’ Cup for juveniles. The winner often became the favorite for the Kentucky Derby. He’d taken me to the track in Los Angeles when I stayed with him for three or four days, mentioning that he was buying race horses to cure, or at least hold at bay, his gambling addiction. (David claimed he’d offered a Lexus dealer a thousand dollars not to put a phone in his new car—it would save him from losing money while stuck in traffic.) After years paying to board and train the horses, he finally had a champion. He flew some forty people down to see the race—his father’s old gambling buddies from Buffalo, Yale classmates, members of his family, and Hollywood acquaintances. I seemed to be the only former student, though I gather there was at least one other. David paid for all of it—flights, hotel rooms—with, at least in my case, a handful of gambling money. Sometime that weekend, I saw him with a man at the hotel’s front desk. “Bill!” he called, waving me over. (I’d upgraded myself to William years before but never made a point of correcting him.) “Bill, meet Bill—Bill Clark. Bill’s a retired detective from New York. He’s telling me undercover and homicide war stories. Maybe we’ll make something of them.” What David made was NYPD Blue, the most groundbreaking cop show of its day, which won both men Emmys. David’s horse, Gilded Time, won the cup and a $640,000 purse. How could it not, in this fairy tale? Ever the gambler, for the post-race celebration he’d rented a country club in advance. Alas, though the favorite for the Derby, the horse bruised a foot weeks after Miami and missed the race.

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David left NYPD before the end of its run. He created a couple of other series, but one was canceled after the first season, the other after only six episodes. Then came Deadwood, where he at last created a profane Shakespearean world whose characters proved almost as skilled in rough eloquence and verbal pyrotechnics as himself. Even a writer who lives in the world must create the world in which he writes. Visiting her friend Larry McMurtry in his Texas hometown, Archer City, where he’d founded four bookshops, Susan Sontag remarked, “Larry, you’re living in your own theme park.” That’s what Deadwood was for David. I spent eight days on the set of the show’s third season. We’d been talking for a year or two about my writing a script for him, but he wanted me to come out to see how he worked. Deadwood was filmed on Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch, north of Los Angeles. “So,” he said, falling into step with me one afternoon. “What’s the best outcome here?” (Gauntlet thrown.) Though my hope had been to write for the show, I said I could see that his only method was to write everything himself. “Yeah,” he said, slightly embarrassed, scuffing the ground with his shoes. He told me that to satisfy HBO he took credit for two scripts per series, passing the remaining credits to a staff writer here, a producer there. He invited me to return for a long stay and hang around. Eventually he might have thrown me one of those credits. That was not the last of his generosities; but, like his offer when I failed to get into Iowa, I couldn’t accept. That rich vein in him included giving unknown actors speaking parts, qualifying them for the coveted Screen Actors Guild card—much to the anger, he admitted with a smile, of the SAG. The way David wrote is described at length in the New Yorker profile. (Mark Singer later claimed that I’d told him about David when we were both undergrads.) Due to a bad back, he would lie sprawled on the floor of the writers’ trailer, facing a computer monitor. Behind him interns and staff sat on a motley collection of chairs and a grubby, thrift-store couch. Beyond the monitor his secretary sat at her desk, with a second monitor. As David dictated, creating a scene in thin air, she’d type up what he said. He wrote aloud, like Henry James after he acquired a typewriter and secretary, or Milton when he was “milked” by his daughters. At the end of the scene, David would rewrite it, keeping up a steady patter that justified each change, each addition and deletion, as an alteration of

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emphasis or the provision of necessary information, teasing out emotion or advancing plot a notch or two. He had become notorious for writing to deadline and beyond, making last-minute changes to the script, the bane of actors and directors. One evening I left while he was still writing. I arrived the next morning to see carpenters finishing the set for that scene. Each of his writing monologues was recorded, and an intern would transcribe it overnight. Somewhere there must be hundreds of single-spaced pages of David talking about the nuts and bolts of scriptwriting. Working against deadline was obviously necessary for him. Once in harness, he was almost impossible to distract—and I suspect that, once distracted, he found it difficult to get back to work. He wrote to the last minute, then a minute more, a minute more, trying to get each character and action in accord with some cryptic, slowly adjusted design; but he needed the deadline just as much to make him abandon, eventually, the search for unattainable perfection. The intensity of the enterprise and his willingness to be observed in the act were even more impressive than the beauty of what was produced. Perhaps some painters have worked in the ruck and roil of a studio while watched by their apprentices, but writers are addicted to silence and slow time. For a man of David’s capacities, a man who answered the call of his obsessions, television scriptwriting took advantage of his disadvantages; and he did not mind, perhaps he even welcomed, naked observation of the drama of self. A brilliant teacher repairs an unfelt absence. Innocence is the goal of every act of writing, a goal in the end unreachable. We are soiled by the endeavor that would free us—the writer is always soiled by the particular. True Magdalenes, no matter how often forgiven, know they are not worthy, that unbearable guilt will always linger. That is the writer’s crucial, pathetic relation to his work. Similarly, there are debts that cannot be repaid because you do not possess the currency in which they were tendered. I learned from David not just what it meant to be a writer, but what it meant to live in that condition that is the world. I have attempted over the decades to pay that debt by shifting the obligation to my students. I have said too little about David’s generosity. We were in a restaurant in Los Angeles when he took out a roll of fifties and gave one to the maître d’, another to the waiter, and others to any staff who happened by. He asked to be remembered to the dishwasher,

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then turned to me shyly and whispered, “I’m putting his kid through college.” At the party after Gilded Time won the Breeders’ Cup, one of his New Haven friends showed me a large check David had written to cover medical expenses for the man’s wife. Fifteen years ago, I asked David if he’d talk to one of my former students, a young actress. He was in the first season of Deadwood and so fiercely busy it was hard to get him on the phone. Nevertheless, he met her for an hour and offered her an internship in California or New York, promising that if things worked out he’d find something for her as writer or actress. He stood up, she stood up, then he said, “Wait a second.” He took out his wallet and gave her five hundred dollars, adding, “Pay me when you’re rich.” She appeared in the third season of the show. There are other stories. Like many gamblers who treat largesse as an offering to the gods of chance, David’s philosophy was to overpay. I once asked what drove him to such unimaginable acts of kindness—or call it, as he would not, magnanimity. He puffed out his chest, put his thumbs in imaginary suspenders, splayed his fingers, and struck a pose. “Like to be the big man,” he said.

PART THREE

Graduate School and After

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11 My Doktorvater: Alvin Kernan Stephen Greenblatt

The Germans use—or at least until recently used—the word Doktorvater to describe a doctoral candidate’s dissertation director. I did not know the term at the time that Alvin Kernan became my Doktorvater at Yale, but I understood that we were in a relationship that went beyond the ordinary teacher–student bond that I had come to know from my classes. It was not that I confused him with my actual father; they were quite unlike each other in personality, spirit, and interests. A tall, slender, handsome man, with a gift for making friends and telling elaborate jokes, my father had virtually no academic or literary interests. Outward-looking and exuberant, he took pleasure in my academic successes but never, as far as I can recall, asked me what I was studying or offered to read a word I wrote. Alvin Kernan was square, as if cut from a block of stone. He would on occasion laugh wryly, but he was generally taciturn, restrained, even a bit saturnine. From my father I looked for love, which he gave me as best he could. From my Doktorvater, I looked for steady support as well as instruction, and he in turn clearly felt a kind of responsibility for me. Our relationship began before I became his PhD student. I took his undergraduate seminar on British satire, in the course of which I read 99

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his book, The Cankered Muse (1959). I was not particularly interested in Marston and the like who were the subjects of Kernan’s analysis, but I hugely admired the elegant way the book was written, and I asked him to supervise my honors thesis on Huxley, Waugh, and Orwell (published in 1965). I do not think I can bear to look back on the thesis; I know it is full of blunders of many kinds, including a slavish imitation of Kernan’s style. Kernan must certainly have known this as well. But—and I think this is greatly to his credit—he let me run along energetically without much in the way of intervention. After a hiatus of several years, I returned to graduate school at Yale. I had in mind to write a dissertation on Sir Walter Ralegh, whose poetry I had read and greatly admired. I wanted to explore why Ralegh who lived a very complicated life as grasping courtier, adventurer, soldier, politician, conspirator, and the like, wrote any poems at all, let alone the surprisingly moving and powerful ones that bear his name. It did not at first occur to me to turn once again to Kernan. I went instead to Geoffrey Hartman, with whom I had not studied but who was said to be the most brilliant and original literary theorist at Yale. I explained to Hartman what intrigued me. He listened politely and then said that if I wanted to do that kind of dissertation—he did not explain what kind he meant—then I would be better off choosing a minor work by Ralegh and producing an edition of it. In the context of Yale in the mid-1960s, that was, I understood perfectly well, an expression of distaste, akin to being sent off to run the hydroelectric plant in Ulan Bator. It took me almost twenty years to realize that such editorial work might in fact prove intellectually challenging, but I did not know it at the time, and I am reasonably confident that Hartman did not have any such challenge in mind when he sent me on my way. It was a sign of my considerable naiveté that I had had no notion that the structuralist theories that Hartman was championing at the time were sharply opposed to the historical inquiry that drew me and that I told him I wanted to pursue. I turned then to Alvin Kernan as a safe second choice, someone who would trust me and leave me to chart my own course. He would do, I understood, what he had done with my writing several years back—correct my errors of diction and grammar, mark when I had written something fuzzy or flaccid, flag passages that seemed awkward or murky, and hear me out when I explained the ideas I was trying to develop. And that is, in fact, exactly what he did.

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I particularly remember one time when he told me that the single most important thing I should learn was how to handle a transition from one paragraph or idea to the next. “Don’t ever throw away a good transition,” he urged me. All of this is fine—there was obviously something liberating for me about being left largely alone to find my way—but it hardly constitutes an account of an intimate teacher–student bond. We had occasional chats that were not altogether about matters of grammar or rhetoric, and at a certain point, when we realized that we both liked to play squash, we reserved a court in the gym from time to time and played some games. But these were not the occasions for much in the way of camaraderie. “Nice shot, Mr. Kernan,” I remember saying; or “I win, Mr. Kernan.” It was in fact only when I submitted my dissertation and received my PhD degree that he took the occasion to shake my hand and say, “Steve, now you can call me Al.” None of this sounds like it amounts to much, but in fact the relationship was incredibly important to me in ways that I could not at the time have articulated, though I sensed it. I only began fully to understand it when, years after I left Yale, I read Kernan’s book, Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket’s World War II Odyssey (1994). The book is a memoir about his experiences on aircraft carriers as a young enlisted sailor, culminating in the Battle of Midway. When I was writing my dissertation, we had never talked about these extraordinary events and the impact that they had on him. But as soon as I had read his account, I realized what had made Kernan such a perfect advisor and supporter for what I had wanted to do. For the whole point of my dissertation was to try to understand how Ralegh’s life in the world—a life bound up with risk-taking and violence, and discovery—shaped his poetry and how in turn his poetry shaped the way he presented himself in the world to others. Kernan had lived a life elsewhere, far from the secure boundaries of the elite university. He grasped in a deep existential way, as well as intellectually, what I was struggling to understand. And I in turn sensed that he enabled my project because it spoke to something important in him. After I finished my dissertation, I went off to the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor, and Al left Yale for Princeton, where he became the dean. This should, on the face of things, have signaled the end of the teacher–student relationship

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I have described. But it did not. In part, this is because for years I continued to ask Al, as my Doktorvater, to write letters of recommendation on my behalf to an array of fellowships that would give me time for research and writing. In part, too, it is because we began, without ever fully articulating it, to learn from each other. That is, we began to exchange work-in-progress, and we grappled, each in our own way, with the relationship between aesthetics and history. We did not by any means always agree. I was fascinated by Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism, all of which he mocked; he held onto a sharp distinction between representation and reality, a distinction I wanted to call into question. But our disagreements were illuminating, if only by forcing us to articulate our differences. And somehow, behind our exchanges, I had a deepening sense of the war experience that had shaped Al’s sensibility. On one occasion, when I was in Princeton to give a lecture, he told me a story that encapsulated for me his peculiar combination of toughness and delicacy. He was, he said, on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean, loading bombs onto planes. He looked around and as far as he could see on all sides and extending to the farthest point on the horizon there were other US ships; planes were flying overhead; he knew then that he was in the midst of an immense battle. The bombs, he said, were stored at the very bottom of the ship; they were loaded onto a lift that would carry them up to the flight deck where he was standing. As he looked down, a shaft of sunlight penetrated into the depth of the ship and lit up three yellow bombs that had been loaded onto the lift. He told me that he said to himself, “I need to hold onto this single image, to possess it and never let it go. This will be for me the emblem of war that I will carry with me for the rest of my life.” I cannot adequately explain the effect that this anecdote had upon me, but in addition to illuminating something meaningful about my Doktorvater’s sensibility, it has stayed with me as a means to understand the way Sir Walter Ralegh, about whom I mused more than fifty years ago, turned moments in his swirling, restless life into enduring poetic form.

12 A Far Cry from Oxbridge Margaret Drabble

When asked if I would like to write an essay on a teacher who had influenced me, Barry Till was not the obvious person to spring to mind. He never taught me, and he was an administrator rather than a teacher, so he doesn’t strictly qualify as a subject for this book. But the more I thought about him and the historic institution that he ran with such panache, the more the thought of writing about him and Morley College appealed to me. Morley had a considerable influence on me, and it was through Barry’s invitation that I came to teach there for eleven years, from the end of the 1960s through the 1970s. Those years taught me a lot. I knew nothing about teaching at the outset, I’d never had any teacher training of any kind, and one of my students told me years later that I’d looked ‘very nervous’ as I started my first class. And I was. I was more than nervous, I was scared. I stood in front of thirty or so mature women (and one man) who had enrolled, and wondered how on earth I was going to cope with them. Barry had taken a big risk with me. This was characteristic of him. He ruled Morley “like a benevolent despot,” according to his wife, following his own hunches rather than prescribed procedures, with none of “that nonsense about advertising, interviewing or competition.” The chain of events that led to my standing in front of that class is marked by accidental meetings and coincidences. Barry’s own tenure was the result of an unplanned career change. “He should and would have been a bishop,” says a friend who knew him in earlier years when he was, from 1960 to 1964, the Anglican Dean of St John’s Cathedral, Hong Kong. 103

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I knew something of the story of Barry’s transformation from man of the cloth to principal of what was founded as a college for working men and women. My main informant was Barry’s second wife Antonia Till, who as Antonia Clapham became a good friend of mine at Newnham College, Cambridge, where we were both reading English Literature and where we were supervised together by Jean Gooder, an overworked and inspiring postgraduate of whom we both have fond memories and with whom we keep in touch. Antonia’s 1966 marriage to Barry, some years older than she, was also unexpected, as she had been on the verge of marrying an undergraduate contemporary of ours, not a man of the cloth but a very talented actor: when that betrothal suddenly fell through, and after Barry’s first marriage failed, they came together and stayed together until he died in 2013 at the age of ninety. I didn’t know Barry in his Hong Kong days, when he was married to his first wife Shirley, with whom he had two sons. (He and Antonia, symmetrically, were to have two daughters.) My friend Josephine Gladstone, also a fellow Newnhamite, has shed some light on his time there. She was then newly married to her first husband, the outstandingly handsome “Sartrean Existentialist” (her words) Richard Marquand, later a maker of BBC documentaries and director of, amongst other movies, The Return of the Jedi (1983). (In 1968, he was to make One Pair of Eyes, a somewhat misleadingly colorful film about me, in which at one point I implausibly found myself in a nightclub. Richard really wanted to film a nightclub.) Richard had graduated from King’s College, Cambridge, and was doing his National Service in Hong Kong, while Jo was teaching biology at a Chinese high school and trying to set up a literacy class for adult Cantonese “amahs.” She remarks on her surprise that they became friends “with a reserved man in a dog collar who went to Harrow, Jesus College, Cambridge, served in the Coldstream Guards and wrote two dense non-fiction books.” She remembers that although she and Richard had Chinese friends and friends who had made mixed marriages, Barry and Shirley Till seemed to move socially in more exclusively Anglican and English circles, which the Marquands, both from old and established families of the liberal left, tended to avoid. One of Barry’s non-fiction books was a Pelican Original called The Churches Search for Unity (1972), a study of ecumenicalism, a movement of which Barry approved. This was written after he was

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reluctantly obliged, following his divorce, to leave the Church, and had embarked on another life. The preface of this work opens, provocatively, with a quotation from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), about two clergymen overheard arguing about the “eastward position” at the height of Jude’s domestic tragedy—to which Jude’s response is “Good God—the eastward position, and all creation groaning!” (The Eastward Position refers to the question, hotly disputed in Oxford at this period, as to whether the celebrant of the Eucharist should stand on the west of the altar, facing east, as had been practiced in Rome.) Barry threw down the gauntlet with this sentence, taken from a novel which traces the fatally disappointed ambitions of a self-educated working man. Although he came from a conventional English background, Barry was a strange mixture of the conventional and the idiosyncratic. Formally attired, and brought up with the good manners of the old regime, he had a rogue streak that would subversively break out from time to time. He was, I am told, and as one of his obituarists observed, “occasionally ratty.” Morley College in London was not an obvious home for his talents. It was the polar opposite of the Deanery of Hong Kong, and of Jesus College, where he had been Fellow, Dean and Tutor from 1953 to 1960. His Cambridge years overlapped with mine at Newnham, but we moved in very different circles, and did not know of each other’s existence. Morley was a pioneering institution, founded in South London in 1889 by feminist and social reformer Emma Cons (1838–1912), of Old Vic fame, and endowed by Samuel Morley (1809–86), woollen manufacturer, abolitionist, Nonconformist, and philanthropist, for the purpose of making further education available to the working classes. It is a far cry, geographically, architecturally, and intellectually, from the stately courts and groves of academe, from Jesus and Trinity, from the handsome nineteenth-century Queen Anne style buildings and spacious gardens of Newnham College. Recent promotional material for Morley describes its location as Waterloo, but originally it was more closely identified with the borough of Lambeth, notorious for its poverty, its slum dwellings, its factories, and its noisy and lively street markets. Lambeth North was the name of the bleak and unpromising concrete and cement underground station to which I made my way from Hampstead every Tuesday for eleven years. It had a very dreary underpass and an ancient creaking lift. The whole area, including Lambeth Palace,

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had been heavily bombed during the Second World War, which hadn’t improved its prospects, and some of the rebuilding was brutalist in style and execution. It had and has its cultural landmarks, including the Old Vic (a former music hall) in the Cut, and the 1970s National Theatre on the South Bank. The imposing building of the Imperial War Museum (formerly the Bethlehem Hospital), technically in the adjacent borough of Southwark, is on Lambeth Road, a short walk from Morley. But at the turn of the nineteenth century, when Morley was founded, the neighborhood was much in need of improvement. Some of the most vivid descriptions of Lambeth at that time are to be found in George Gissing’s Thyrza, one of my mother’s favorite novels from her Newnham days, on which she wrote in her third year dissertation—identifying, as I now see, with the hopes and difficulties of first-generation students from working-class backgrounds embarking on higher education. Thyrza (the name, incidentally, of my mother’s favorite aunt, and very much a name of the period) was published in 1887, two years before the foundation of Morley, and dealing with much the same milieu. It describes the aspirations of a high-minded and highly educated young man, Walter Egremont (a nicely upper-class name, though in fact he is the son of a wealthy self-made Lambeth oil merchant with a factory in Westminster Bridge Road) to establish a non-fee-paying workingmen’s educational group and a library. The lectures on English Literature that echo Emma Cons’s “Penny Popular” weekly scientific lectures at the Old Vic, which were launched at much the same time. The life of the proletariat, as ever in Gissing, is described with a mixture of horror, anguished attraction, disgust, admiration, and sympathy. Egremont’s most promising pupil is the intelligent and literate Gilbert Grail, employed at a candle- and soap-making factory, who rises at five, and works from six in the morning to seven at night. Gissing’s descriptions of the early rising, the chronic fatigue, the walking to work through fog and filthy air, the “ugly” and “hideous” buildings, the poverty-stricken tenements, are unsparing, as are the accounts of Lambeth’s populace, where “the elders bore the unmistakeable brand of the gin-shop, and the children were visaged like debased monkeys.” Egremont’s other pupils, who meet for his Thursday evening lectures in a sparsely furnished schoolroom smelling of leather from the saddler’s workshop below, manifest

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degrees of self-importance, petty capitalism, insufficiency of diet, and obsequiousness—apart from Grail, an unpromising bunch. Egremont, confronting his nine pupils, reflects on his mission: “The working man does not read, in the strict sense of the word; fiction has little interest for him, and of poetry he has no comprehension whatever; your artisan of brains can study, but he cannot read . . . Was it possible to bestow [on him] this sense of intellectual beauty?” It was a not dissimilar group of discouraging students that Virginia Woolf encountered when, as Virginia Stephen, she stood before her first class at Morley College in 1905. She is now probably the best known of the college’s many past illustrious lecturers. Lambeth was a far cry from Bloomsbury, where the Stephen family had moved in 1904 after the death of their father, and an even farther cry from Kensington, where she had spent her childhood. She was recruited by feminist and pacifist Mary Sheepshanks, daughter of the Bishop of Norwich and energetic vice-president of Morley, “a large, kindly and rather able sort of woman,” who also persuaded Christabel Pankhurst to give a lecture there in 1907. She tried to interest Virginia’s siblings to take part in the Morley project, but with less success. Virginia’s first description of her mission (in her early journal, A Passionate Apprenticeship, 1990) was to say that she had been asked to “start a girls club at Morley, & talk about books &c!,” but that’s not quite what she had taken on. It must have taken considerable courage for Virginia Stephen to enlist as an untrained teacher of the working classes, and she reacted to her task with a characteristically defensive blend of snobbery, hauteur, self-mockery, and seriousness. Her earnest students (male and female) represented the social stratum described in many of Gissing’s novels as well as Thyrza; we find them analyzed in detail in New Grub Street (1891) and The Odd Women (1893). She comments on them in letters to friends and in her official report in a tone that indicates her anxieties—they were at times “receptive” and “open-mouthed,” and “sometimes they seemed to gape not in mere impotent wonder, but to be trying to piece together what they heard . . .” There were anemic shop girls “who said they would write more but they only get an hour for their dinner” and a Miss Williams, whom she at first thought to be “the least interesting of my class,” but turned out to be a true new Grub Street phenomenon, “a reporter on the staff of a Religious paper . . . the germ of a literary lady in short! & a curious one . . . she was certainly of a

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higher level of intelligence than the other women . . . She was a writing machine to be set in motion by the editor.” At one point, Woolf notes in a letter to Violet Dickinson, I gave a lecture to four working men yesterday—one stutters on his m’s and another is an Italian and reads English as though it were medieval Latin and another is my degenerate poet, who rants and blushes and almost seizes my hand when we happen to like the same lines . . . I can tell you the first sentence of my lecture: “The poet Keats died when he was 25; and he wrote all of his work before that.” “Indeed—how very interesting, Miss Stephen.” The “degenerate poet” was Cyril Zeldwyn, whose passion for Miss Stephen was to appear in Mrs Dalloway (1925), “a ‘border case’ both socially and psychologically,” who develops a romantic adulation for Miss Isabel Pole, “lecturing in the Waterloo Road” on Shakespeare and Keats. Miss Sheepshanks, known to Bloomsbury as “the Sheep,” was sharply critical of her protégée’s amateur teaching efforts, but Miss Stephen persevered for three years, despite that bleak fifteen minutes of fear at the outset when she was kept waiting in “a great dreary room with tables and chairs and flaring gas jets.” She had some underlying sympathy with the spirit of her students, as Hermione Lee points out in her biography of Woolf, and she had a natural understanding of the aspirations of “Common Readers,” those semi-educated and self-educated adult students who haunted, as she did (and as I did), the democratic space of the Reading Room at the British Museum. Virginia Stephen was brave. She battled on with classes on Sir Thomas Browne and (surprisingly) Benvenuto Cellini and Venice, and she took her students on outings to galleries and to Westminster Abbey. But the Sheep continued to disapprove of her teaching efforts, and there was an unsuccessful attempt to transfer her Bloomsbury protégée to the role of librarian. But Stephen was out of her depth and struggling, as she was always to struggle with relationships with people from outside her own class. By the time I stood anxiously in front of my first class in 1969, to teach a course about Women and the Novel, the social composition of Morley’s students had changed beyond recognition. Educational

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institutions founded with the purpose of providing for the working classes have a tendency to drift towards bourgeoisification, and Morley was no exception. Despite its catchment area, which had itself changed somewhat over time, it had become more and more middle class, and attracted far fewer original Lambeth residents. Barry Till, inheriting a college that since Virginia Woolf’s time had profited from the talents of composers Gustav Holst and Michael Tippett (directors of music during, respectively, 1907–24 and 1940– 51), and artist Lawrence Toynbee (director of art during 1966–72), had noted, accurately, that young graduate mothers were, in educational terms, the new poor, often left in limbo for years as they put their intellectual lives on hold to bring up their children. The problems of the “housebound housewife” were now being articulated, and Barry read Hannah Gavron’s influential protofeminist work The Captive Wife, published after her early death in 1966. He paid attention to her devastating analysis, and the result was the innovation of day classes, a play group, and a crèche, run by trainee child-care workers, freeing a generation of young mothers for an hour or two a week to attend Morley. These young mothers composed a good part of the attendance of my classes. I was a young mother myself, and at half term when their school was shut my two younger children were able to attend the play group. There was no social gulf between me and my students: we knew one another’s domestic situations, and we knew why we were there. We had a strong sense of solidarity. There were, of course, some older members, too—these included Ethel Truman, a retired teacher of physics who had taught at the famous Queen’s College in Harley Street (Katharine Mansfield’s alma mater), and her friend Gertrude Thorneycroft, both in their mid-eighties. Betty Richards, a highly intelligent and memorable woman, had worked in the Far East as a nurse on the P&O line—she was, unlike most of them, the genuine Lambeth article. There was a social worker who had given up her professional life to devote herself to an exhausting regime of cultural activity: she went to the theatre two or three times a week. And there was a scattering of men—a retired ambassador, a retired psychiatrist, and an oddball chap who became something of a stalker and whose persistent attentions I came to dread. Ina Poliakoff, mother of playwright-to-be Stephen Poliakoff, was always a lively contributor. Whenever we meet at social events, Stephen and I talk about his mother, as he hasn’t read any of my

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novels and I haven’t kept up with his plays, so we don’t know what else to talk about. There were also a few Americans in the class, seconded to London through their husbands’ postings, who sought and found company and culture at Morley. But perhaps the majority of the group were young women like me, and together we explored the world of literature, making up our own syllabus and our own lives as we went along. I was my own student. We taught ourselves. We even looked like one another. I’ve a half-term play-group photo of two mothers and me, and three small children, enjoying a tea of mini-sausage rolls and iced biscuits. I think one of the children is mine, but I can’t be sure, and we women look very alike, too. We were generic. Barry gave me complete freedom to devise my own courses, and I didn’t have to demand any written work or do any grading. We freewheeled our way, often, I think, ahead of the game. When I taught my 1969 course on women novelists, feminist criticism was in its infancy: the only text was Mary Ellmann’s 1968 Thinking about Women, unless one goes back to Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own. (I bizarrely included Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, 1958, in my course, because it seemed to fit.) In 1975, we did a course on writers and the environment, called not very happily “Man and Nature,” which included John Clare, Hardy, Mary Webb, and Ted Hughes. We included fiction, poetry, drama. I once made them (and me) read great chunks of Byron’s Don Juan (1819), I can’t now remember why. I often set them far too much reading—several of them balked at reading Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959) in a week, but most of them battled on and tried to keep up. My class was popular and oversubscribed, and Barry introduced a rule saying students couldn’t attend for more than four years consecutively, against which edict those students already in their eighties successfully protested, and were allowed a special dispensation. The other class that was always oversubscribed was Maggi Hambling’s art class. Maggi, who as I write is still teaching at Morley, says she can’t remember how she was first enrolled—she thinks she may have been asked at some point to substitute for a substitute, and somehow stayed on. Barry “took a shine” to Maggi, already a well-known artist, responding positively to her forthright and frequently controversial work and opinions—she is famed for her louche reclining Oscar Wilde near Charing Cross, her large upstanding 4-metre-high shell, Scallop, on the beach at Aldeburgh,

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and, more recently for her naked statue in Newington Green commemorating the feminist and educator Mary Wollstonecraft. She also painted two fine portraits of Barry Till, wearing a red spotted tie. They became good and loyal friends. She claimed that she learned a lot from painting the “forceful and devoted” Principal of Morley: When we had a break Barry would leap to my side of the canvas and question the amount of green (or red) in the face. By the end of the third session, I handed him the brushes and asked if he’d like to paint it himself. There was also a slight set-to at my inclusion of a dragon. I had placed Barry beside a mirror in an attempt to show his public (often fire-breathing) personality on the left, and his genuine compassion in the reflection on the right. The dragon was Barry’s familiar. I answered his complaint by saying that if he wanted an “ordinary portrait” I’d do him one. Which I did, in the morning. For years, these twin portraits hung in Barry and Antonia’s dining room in Canonbury, where they lived in grand but hospitable style for many years, and where I attended many a dinner party. I suspect Maggi’s classes were less solidly middle class than mine. Their demographic diverged even more noticeably from Morley’s founding intentions, and some of her students were titled and distinctly upper crust. She says that Barry had to urge them to play down this aspect when visited by government inspectors. He hadn’t forgotten Morley’s original mission and the need for compliance. Barry was knowledgeable about art, and had some decided and unusual preferences—my art historian sister Helen Langdon remembers his deep admiration for the elaborate baroque-rococo sculptures of Sicilian artist Giacomo Serpotta, who worked in Palermo, mainly in stucco. Helen lectured a few times at Morley, and complained that the projector didn’t work very well, to which Barry robustly responded with the opinion that the best art historians don’t need many slides—a view with which she on the whole concurs. (I saw some Serpotta in Palermo with Helen, when she permitted me to enlist for one of her Martin Randall Caravaggio art tours.) Barry loved Italy, and he loved Norfolk, where he had for many years a country home near his friend and neighbor, the renowned priest and historian Owen Chadwick. I knew Barry in his

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Canonbury, Norfolk, and Morley manifestations, but was never quite sure how the different parts of his personality fitted together. I’ve never known anyone like him. He embraced contradictions. He was a brilliant fund raiser, an art which is a complete mystery to me, and he knew how to get the best out of both the public and the private sector. He was very well connected, and he fought hard for his cause. His deep commitment to adult education may have come about partly by accident, but it is this aspect of his life that meant most to me. He gave me an important space, at an important time in my life, and he was kinder to me than Miss Sheepshanks was to Miss Stephen. In my latest novel, The Dark Flood Rises (2016), I have some sequences that were directly inspired by my Morley experiences. I was very happy to have found them a home. One of my characters, Josephine, teaches an adult education course in Cambridge, which is frequented (unlike mine) largely by the retired and the elderly, as I had by then myself moved into that age group, and had been attending some daytime Continuing Education classes in Oxford. (I greatly enjoyed studying Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright with a charming old enthusiast of startling technological incompetence, who could never get his PowerPoint to work without assistance, and I don’t think that was the fault of the institution’s equipment.) So, Josephine’s classes are a fusion of Morley and Oxford, and she, like me, has a free hand to invent her own syllabus. I was particularly proud of her class on Old Age and the Concept of Late Style, with poems by Thomas Hardy, Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and Robert Nye, but no Larkin, because she drew the line at Larkin’s pessimism and thought it would not be good for her students to dwell on it. I wish I could have taught this course myself, but of course I was too young even to think of it in my Morley years. But I see that I have inserted into Josephine’s class a pen portrait of Betty Richards, from my own Morley class. I had forgotten it was there until I looked it up. In fiction, I was able to speculate freely about Betty Richards’ life, as she died some while ago. I liked her very much, and here she is: Last year Betty Figueroa had written an excellent and original little essay on Conrad’s narrative technique. Betty, in her late eighties, a brave and now presumably lonely old leftie of the old school, had worked for many years as a nurse on board the P & O line, and was

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full of interesting stories (always offered tentatively, in her hesitant and light and surprisingly youthful voice) about life at sea, from the long ago days of the long voyage to the Antipodes to the more recent age of the luxury cruise, and she was old enough to remember an age before the fax and the phone, when communications to land and other vessels were slow and sometimes misleading. (As, she pointed out, they were in the novels of Conrad.) She was a good reader, although/because she had had no formal literary training. She was something of a mystery, with her unexpected range of allusions and her loyal trade union politics, and Josephine imagined for her a romantic past, but could not give any shape to what this past might have been. Betty’s old age shines with the aura of a lived life. A tragic love affair, a long intercontinental romance, a secret adventure, a double life? I will never know more about Betty’s personal life, but I can hear her voice now, so light and so clear. Her contributions to my class meant a lot to me. She was a link with an earlier generation. We learn much from those we teach. I am grateful for my Lambeth years.

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13 The Right Words Carl Rollyson

“You read beautifully.” No one had ever spoken to me that way—in the voice of calm, urbane authority. He put his hand on my arm when he said the words, and it was as if I had been reborn. Some teachers have that power: to move you with a voice that liberates you to be yourself. Until then, I had no idea of who I was or who I wanted to be. At thirteen, in the late fall of 1961, I was an indifferent student at Nolan Junior High School in Detroit. My father had just died during a traumatic year in which he succumbed to cancer. Watching him waste away into the figure of a concentration camp inmate terrified me. I felt the first lifting of my spirits in an English-class assignment to memorize and deliver a famous person’s speech. The power of FDR’s words thrilled me, as did the experience of commanding the attention of an audience. Finding my voice in the words of fame turned me toward speech contests and public speaking, which, in turn, brought me to James Allen Jones, then directing a group of students just entering their teens in performances of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and King Lear. My speech teacher had encouraged me to audition for Jones, who gave me a script and had me read one of Cassius’s speeches in a large auditorium, but in the front row, seated next to him. I didn’t know then that he had played Othello in England and had taught Shakespeare there to eight-year115

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olds, as I learned from press clippings I read later in his home after I became part of his acting troupe that took us to England, when I was fifteen, to perform Shakespeare and to imagine myself—for the three-week tour—on my way to a world stage. Like Sylvia Plath, who never left behind Mr. Crockett, her inspiring high school teacher, I visited James Allen Jones regularly even after I graduated from college, performing in one of his productions of Othello when I became an assistant professor at Wayne State University. He came to my wedding in Atlantic City and scandalized the white males by dancing with their wives. To this day, he is a charmer and can be found on YouTube reciting Shakespeare. James Allen Jones stood out because he expected so much of students and galvanized us with his own example. Other teachers ridiculed him and doubted our abilities to master texts they had tried to teach bored students. Then we performed Julius Caesar for the school and were awarded a standing ovation. After the performance, we assembled to take questions and comments, and my Social Studies teacher stood up and apologized to Jones, saying he would never have dreamed that junior high school students could perform the entire play so beautifully. It was like a scene in a movie. That teacher didn’t know that we had saturated ourselves in Shakespeare, reciting speeches on our bus trips and in rehearsals going over the same scenes again and again until we knew one another’s lines. I memorized most of Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Hamlet, playing the roles of Cassius, Edmund, and the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I did not think of myself as a writer, but I had been entranced with the power of words—the rhymes and rhythms of prose and poetry that I internalized through performance. It is, of course, invaluable for a writer to read as much as possible, but to hear yourself reading, to have a group of communicants of the word, I see now, certainly encouraged me to seek the command of language that entices writers, and the readers we want to reach, to the page. After junior high school, in 1962, my family moved to Warren, a Detroit suburb, and I soon came under the spell of Sally Harlow, my drama teacher, who made a special project out of me, giving me the role of Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. All roles were supposed to be earned by audition, but she told me I was the only drama student who could memorize so many lines (he is never off the stage). She gave me all summer to work on the role before announcing she would do the play in the fall. She was funny

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and feisty and did imitations of Jonathan Winters and had us reading and reciting Tennessee Williams. She shocked the Cousino High School principal, Hector Grant, when she invited James Allen Jones to the opening performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner. In All-White Warren, he was the only black man, taking a seat in the audience with his usual aplomb. I have never talked about race with him. NEVER. And he has never brought up the subject. I only knew about Hector Grant’s plotzing over Jones’s entrance in the school auditorium because Sally Harlow reveled in it, telling me afterwards that the aghast principal blurted out: “Who is THAT?” She obviously enjoyed telling him that Jones had been my drama teacher. He taught me so much more than drama. What stands out about him is the way he carries himself with a nobility and charm that seems at once perfectly natural and yet also the result of education and experience. I often play back to myself his speaking voice, so eloquent and deeply tempered, when I sit down to write. *

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“What is your strategy?” A freshman at Michigan State University in 1965, I had the good fortune to enroll in John Forman’s section of American Thought and Language. A brilliant lecturer, Forman brought the colonial period of American history to life, especially the day he told us about discovering a drawing of Benjamin Franklin with a young woman sitting on his lap. It was my first glimpse of what working in archives might be like—how I could touch history, so to speak, in such a palpable way. He taught history with a twinkle. Even better, he had a cadre of brilliant teaching assistants. Ferris Anthony, assigned to me, was working on a PhD and also served as University President John Hannah’s speech writer. For the first time, I was exposed to a professional writer who did not speak about complete sentences or thesis statements, let alone grammar. He would read one of my essays and ask, “What is your strategy?” He thought of writing as a kind of campaign to win the reader’s attention. We worked together for only a semester. He went on to employment at other schools, and we lost touch, although of course I had been touched in a way no other teacher of writing had been able to do. My freshman essays, in the way he spoke to me about them, seemed

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to have world-enhancing significance—or so it might be if I kept at it, thinking through how I expected to move the reader. *

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“This paper is easily of graduate school quality.” In the fall of 1966, I was in my sophomore year at Michigan State University, enrolled in M. Thomas Inge’s Southern literature class. I was still a drama major but I had my doubts about pursuing an acting career. Thanks to Sally Harlow, I had been accepted as an apprentice with The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival in Cape May for the summer after my freshman year. As an apprentice, I had few speaking roles and mostly took out the garbage and performed other menial tasks, including digging a tunnel underneath the decrepit Cape May Playhouse stage so that Macbeth could emerge from below and surprise everyone in an action scene that had him jumping on me and one other apprentice. It was a scuffed-upsummer with director Paul Barry admonishing us about how difficult it would be to succeed as an actor. He estimated there were, maybe, 450 worthwhile acting jobs in the whole country. I saw actors in summer stock who got their parts because they were useful in other ways—such as rigging the lights. At the end of the summer, I was fed up with the scut work and the scramble of a summer stock schedule of a play a week that meant new sets, costumes, and shifting responsibilities for productions of Macbeth, As You Like It, and audience pleasers such as Oklahoma and Beyond the Fringe. That kept me busy for twelve hours a day and more in acting and dancing classes when I was not practicing my sword play while always on call for clean-up. The week before returning to college was spent mostly in bed recovering from exhaustion. So, when Inge made that thrilling comment on a paper I wrote about Carson McCullers, I turned toward teaching at the university level as my goal. Inge was a low-key teacher and not one to exaggerate his confidence in students. I felt like one of the chosen and already certain I would do a PhD dissertation on Faulkner, guided throughout my undergraduate years by Tom Inge, who became a friend and mentor, setting me up for applying to the University of Toronto to study with one of the foremost Faulkner scholars, Michael Millgate. As with James Allen Jones, it had only

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taken a sentence, said with such authenticity, that propelled me on. Inge’s soft Southern drawl could not have been more different from the urban baritone of James Allen Jones, or the perky palaver of Sally Harlow, a kind of Goldie Hawn in the classroom—but with a bitter edge, a sarcasm that reflected her own hard-won experience in the theater. *

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“Sometimes you discover a student who surpasses you.” With Professor Paul Hauben, a historian trained at Princeton, the classroom at Michigan State University in my second year there became what I would call a terrain of history in which we were expected to field his increasingly penetrating questions with wellprepared answers—if we had, in fact, done the work. I saw students crumble in class who had never confronted such incisive interrogation. The word—interrogation—sounds intense, and it was, but Hauben did not intend to be mean or to humiliate students. He was a Korean veteran educated on the G.I. Bill, and though I never asked him, I’ve always supposed he had no time in the classroom for other than the subject at hand—whether it was a lecture course survey of Western civilization, or, later, a seminar on twentieth-century European history. The first day of class in the lecture session I wondered what the crude television character Ralph Kramden was doing teaching history. Paul Hauben was from Brooklyn and spoke no differently from a bus driver in terms of his accent, and yet here he was introducing me to Henry Bamford Parkes and Thomas P. Neill whose books, Gods and Men: The Origins of Western Culture (1959) and A History of Western Civilization (1962), opened up the vast panorama of the past and how to deal with it as surely as William Faulkner’s novels did so on a more intimate level. For Hauben’s Honors seminar on European history, I wrote an essay comparing Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, bringing to bear all I had learned about tyranny. The essay, included in Honors College Essays (1969), became my first publication. From then on, I regarded writing as the ultimate expression of my understanding of literature and history, as well as a performance as satisfying as

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any role I could have played on stage. In retrospect, I can see how my desire to conjoin literature and nonfiction would become my life’s work in biography, my desire to show how history became filtered through the sensibility of individuals, as Faulkner did so palpably in his novels. With Hauben’s help, I was accepted for graduate study in European intellectual history at the University of Chicago, although I ultimately opted for literary study at the University of Toronto— partly because I worried about my poor ability to learn other languages and partly out of seeking, as I did with Jones, Harlow, Anthony, Inge, and Hauben, a mentor in Michael Millgate, with whom I could identify. We always had the same quest—no matter the subject matter—of mastery, of being able to present myself, as they did, as a repository, a kind of cynosure of knowledge that the best teachers and writers exemplify. I never thought of surpassing these heroes in my pantheon of teachers, so it came as a surprise twenty years later when Hauben, then teaching at the University of Pacific, invited me to give a talk about my work as a biographer. When he introduced me, he delivered that line: “Sometimes you discover a student who surpasses you.” He said it with humility and pride, expressing, I believe now, a pride in what he had wrought of me. Without Hauben, I don’t see how I could have deserved such a plaudit, and without me I don’t see how he could have seen in such palpable form the result of his own disciplined knowledge. We shared a combative and relentless search for understanding that stood me in such good stead when I encountered intellectual sensibilities that called on me to summon all the resources I had acquired in my work with these remarkable teachers. *

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“Where’s Carl?” In 1969, I entered graduate school at the University of Toronto, part of a city that was just taking off culturally, shedding what had been its stodgy reputation as the banking capital of the country, a decided second to cosmopolitan Montreal and the higher learning of McGill University. In Toronto, the ebullience of a university growing in prestige, called the Harvard of Canada, and the energy of an

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expanding urban capital excited me as much as the history I absorbed in the school’s centerpiece, University College, built in 1853 as a Romanesque revival building reminiscent of Oxford and Cambridge. The English Department faculty—about a third Canadian, a third American, and a third English, presented a marvelous palette, beginning, for me, with Kathleen Coburn, a Canadian, and a world authority on Coleridge. She was editing his notebooks when I took her class, and every session with her was an immersion in archival scholarship, a veritable day-by-day journey with Coleridge that excited what I did not yet know was a biographer’s quest. I often think it was missing a party that decided my fate. Coburn had arranged for an end-of-semester party at her home. Perhaps other professors at Toronto socialized with students, but I was not aware of it. I was greatly looking forward to the party when I was called away. I had to return home because my mother was dying, finally succumbing to ovarian cancer. Later, when I returned to Toronto, one of my classmates told me about the wonderful party and that Coburn kept saying, “Where’s Carl?” To this day, my heart sinks as I hear her lament. I had felt very close to her but never dreamed she would express a similar feeling so publicly. If I had attended the party, would that have sealed my bond with Coburn? Would I have changed course—choosing to work on Coleridge rather than Faulkner? I had written an essay on Coleridge’s oneman periodical, The Friend, and was attracted to his view of biographers, although I still had no idea that someday I would become one. Students often misunderstood Kathleen Coburn. They said she was in love with Coleridge. I don’t think so. She was, as I have been, in love with her subject of study, and I would like to think that she found in me a kindred spirit, a scholar who had the same kind of devotion to the subject, as a subject, which is why the question often put to biographers—“Did you like your subject?”—bespeaks a confusion about what biography is. Those biographers who do indeed fall in love with their subjects as persons, as figures they might have loved in the flesh, often go astray. They lose the objectivity needed to see they are dealing with the individual as a subject of biography, not as someone they could know in their lives off the page. It was the warmth of Coburn’s dedication both to her students and to her subject that attracted me, and that provided a confidence

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that two of my other professors—John F. Lynen and Michael Millgate, an American and an Englishman—upset but also uplifted. *

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“That was unfortunate” That devastating remark appeared on one of my papers for John Lynen in a University of Toronto graduate class on the American Renaissance. Lynen taught not only Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, but a kind of running discourse on how these writers should be handled in literary criticism. Lynen had his targets— Frederick Crews, for example, whose psychological approach to literature Lynen loved to demolish. He did the same with Richard Wilbur’s take on Poe. These takedowns were not nasty. They were more like Hauben’s penetrating insights into history and historical writing. It was not enough to know your subject—say Melville. You had to know how Melville had come down to this moment, so to speak, in the commentary about him. What better preparation is there for a biographer, although I still had no idea then that I would write biography. You had to write not only your analysis but do so in the wake of what had brought your subject to you. Since every word mattered to John Lynen, no word, let alone a phrase, could get beyond his scalpel-like commentary on papers. For him to say that a sentence, or even a word, had been an unfortunate choice took me aback, of course, but like one of my biographical subjects, Sylvia Plath, who boasted of her many rejection slips, I thrived on such rebuffs. I wanted to do better and was grateful that Lynen cared enough to indicate I had to do better. But indicating what is better is not the same as showing what better means. For that, I turned to Michael Millgate. *

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“You are the most resilient student I have ever had.” In 1970, Millgate was teaching a popular graduate seminar “Wessex and Yoknapatawpha.” He had already published the acclaimed The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966) and later would produce an important biography of Thomas Hardy. Just entering his forties,

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he had risen quickly to the rank of full professor, having started out in England at the University of Leeds (where I had spent a night in a dormitory during my theater tour with James Allen Jones in 1963). He was brusque, authoritative, and demanding. I wouldn’t call him approachable, but I knew he respected and encouraged dedicated students. I felt I had to show him what I could do by taking his course and doing well, which I did. He agreed to become my supervisor for a dissertation that was eventually titled, “The Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner,” which also became, after revisions and dropping the first “the,” my first book (1984). To begin with, I floundered. I had no idea how to write a dissertation—how to marshal ideas over a book-length argument of 75,000 words. I was trying to do too much at one time with my efforts to situate Faulkner in the history of the historical novel and of writing about historiography and the way the past gets told. Millgate tore apart draft after draft with incisive criticism. But he did something else. Occasionally he would rewrite some of my sentences, exploring what he believed I was trying to say. Invariably, I would look at those sentences, dumbfounded as to how I could do as well as his rewrites of me. So, I did what other writers have done: I stole those sentences and wondered if he would object. If he did, he never let on to me. Keeping his sentences challenged me to build up around them my own better sentences. Better sentences also drove what I needed to say in each chapter of the dissertation. I let the sentences guide me, instead of sitting there thinking about all the ideas I wanted to put into the dissertation. In the end, having absorbed the criticism, and getting quicker and quicker with my rewrites, Millgate observed: “You are the most resilient student I have ever had.” *

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“Who Are You Writing For?” So, when did I finally understand that I was meant to be a biographer? I put it that way because in retrospect, so much of what happened seems like my destiny, which involved crossing the line from academia to a conception of myself as a writer, a biographer, who just happened to make his living by teaching.

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The beginnings of my own career as a biographer arose out of a reading of Norman Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe (1973). I had settled on a study of Mailer as the next generation of writer after Faulkner to deal with the hermeneutics of history, a concern with how we know the past—even the recent past. Like Faulkner’s characters, Mailer had made himself a part of history in the march on the Pentagon in Armies of the Night (1968) and also in his interpretation of Marilyn Monroe, with whom he shared a quest for fame and a huge desire to become a cynosure not only in the consciousness of contemporaries but of history as well. He thought of her as an artist, and the actor in me responded to his own rationale for the biography: “put an artist on an artist.” But my first instincts were still scholarly. I published an article about Mailer’s Marilyn in a new journal, Biography, showing not only what Mailer had contributed to an understanding of Monroe but also to the understanding of biography as a problematic genre. How do you insert yourself into another’s life? That question intrigued me, but I was sidelined, in a way, when M. Thomas Inge, editor of a series of bio-bibliographies for Greenwood Press, asked me to contribute a volume on Monroe which would include a biographical essay and several chapters on the literature about her. I spent the summer of 1980 reading biographies and became restive and bored. Even the best biographies of her and some good essays did not answer my question: How good an actress was she, and how did acting constitute an essential part of her identity? That latter question Mailer addressed, but he could not put on the page what it was about her acting that could be articulated in an account of her personality. He did not have the vocabulary to describe what she projected on the movie screen and on the screen of her imagination of herself. What ensued that summer was a conflict between what I could say about her acting and accounts by others that I was obligated to address in the bio-bibliography. In the meantime, the manuscript kept getting longer and longer—close to 600 pages when I showed it to Susan Strasberg, whom I was interviewing about Monroe. The bio-bibliography did not require me to do interviewing, but I could not resist since she had known Monroe and her father was Monroe’s acting teacher, and I simply could not find any account of Monroe’s acting that satisfied me. In effect, Strasberg became my teacher— not about acting per se but about what kind of writer I was meant

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to be. To my delight, she agreed to read all 600 pages and came back with a succinct question: “Who are you writing for?” She pointed out that the strongest part of my book had to do with my understanding of acting and what acting meant to Monroe. What engaged Strasberg was my ability to actually show how Monroe performed her roles and how those roles related to her quest for self-knowledge. Susan was blunt: “Why don’t you junk all that material meant to impress your academic colleagues and concentrate on what you know best?” And that is what I did, canceling the biobibliography contract, and cutting the book in half and creating a much more engaging narrative. Most explicit references to Erving Goffman and other scholars about performative selves got junked but remained implicit in my narrative approach to Monroe. Finding a new publisher took some time, and that is a story for another day, and for one of my other books, Confessions of a Serial Biographer (2005). After Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress (1986) was published, I received a letter from Michael Millgate. He expressed wonder at how I had developed a vocabulary that makes Monroe’s performances come alive. “I certainly didn’t teach you how to do that,” he wrote. In effect, Susan Strasberg taught me how to rely on my own voice. And isn’t that where I began, with James Allen Jones telling me, “You read beautifully”? Wasn’t he recognizing my voice, and isn’t that what Sally Harlow, Ferris Anthony, M. Thomas Inge, Paul Hauben, Kathleen Coburn, John F. Lynen, and Michael Millgate encouraged me to develop? They all had very different voices and backgrounds and personalities, and yet they combined in some haphazard pattern—as paradoxical as that sounds—to stimulate what could not be taught, and yet had to be discovered through them, and other teachers like them: the right words.

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14 Remembering Allen Mandelbaum Paul Mariani

Back in September 1964, I began my PhD studies in English and Comparative Literature at the newly established Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Except on paper, there actually wasn’t a separate building yet for graduate students, and all our classes were held either at Hunter College on 68th Street, or in some rented spaces two blocks west. I’d completed my Masters in English the previous June at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY, and my wife Eileen and I wanted to return to New York City, where we’d both grown up. I’d lived in a tenement on East 51st Street in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, before our family moved to Levittown in 1948. In 1954, the family—six kids then—moved to Mineola, where my father ran an Esso and then a Sinclair gas station across from the county courthouses. My parents made it only to the ninth grade before they had to find work to eat, for this was the Depression. My mother, the only child of a Swedish-American mother and a Polish-American father, lost her father when she was nine, as a result of complications from being gassed in France in 1918 while serving in the US Cavalry. As for my father, his parents had both immigrated to New York in the mid-1890s from Compiano in northern Italy. My father was the last of their eleven children, six of whom made it to adulthood. 127

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So, I was the first in my family to finish high school, thanks to my mother, since my father had wanted to pull me out of school when I was sixteen to help him run his failing gas station. Because my mother understood the importance of an education for her children, she told him that my dropping out of school was only going to happen over her dead body. I attended Chaminade High School, run by the Marianist Order, for three years, and then it was on to Beacon, New York, in the fall of 1956, to discern if I had a vocation to the religious life. It was a terrific experience, but in the summer of 1957, when I went home for a short vacation, I realized that, while I wanted to be a teacher, I also wanted to get married and have a family. Since it was too late to apply to college, I spent a fifth year of high school at Mineola High. And then it was on to Manhattan College, run by the Christian Brothers up in the Bronx. I took 156 credits and switched my major at the last moment to English, to my father’s chagrin. (The extra 36 credits were because all our courses in religion were in addition to the normal 120 needed to graduate for those going on to graduate school—such were the times—as well as extra courses I took in American History to bolster my courses in American Literature.) What kind of living was I going to make with a major in English, he shrugged? But then, I was paying for my own education. After graduation, I began a two-year stint at Colgate and earned a Masters in English. The first year I served as a preceptor to fifteen freshmen. The second I taught four sections of freshman rhetoric and composition, and then went on to finish my classes in the spring of 1964. I’d married my college sweetheart, Eileen, in August 1963, and my second year at Colgate proved hard for both of us, what with my wife, who had just graduated from St. John’s University in Jamaica, teaching fourth grade at the local school, during which time she had two miscarriages. In the summer of 1964, I worked as a canoe guide at a boy’s camp up on Lake George while Eileen worked in the office. That September we settled into a modest second-story flat in one of the brick rowhouses out in Flushing, with Eileen teaching mostly African-American kids in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and me teaching comp and taking classes at Hunter and the two of us expecting our firstborn come early April. I’d applied to several universities for my doctorate and been accepted, but New York City meant being home again. And so it

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was the PhD Program at CUNY. Because I wasn’t sure what courses to take, I took Professor Helaine Newstead’s advice on these matters. Helaine was the director of the program, a Chaucerian specialist and a woman whose advice you followed. So, besides her course in Chaucer, she suggested I take a seminar in Dante with a professor in his late thirties who had just returned to the States after remaining in Italy until 1964, teaching at the University of Turin for five of those years. His name was Allen Mandelbaum. From my very first meeting with Allen in that seminar room on Lexington Avenue and 68th Street something resonated for me. He had a certain élan about him, a certain continental flair, and for me he seemed to know everything. Obviously, he knew and spoke Italian fluently, but he would throw in some Provençal or French or Spanish or Harlem jive talk just for the hell of it. One moment it was Mallarmé, the next Baudelaire, the next Virgil (in Latin), or Homer (in Greek), or something in Yiddish or Hebrew, or Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Montale, or Giudici—each of whom he had translated. I still recall vividly taking the IRT subway out to Flushing after classes with him, hanging onto a strap, my head still spinning with some brilliant comment, some axiom or maxim usually, he had made. Still, in all the years I knew Allen, he never spoke about his paternal or maternal family, except briefly when his father died and Allen accompanied his father’s body to the Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem for burial in a shroud. Always, it seemed, Allen was preoccupied instead with the poets he was translating. What I have been able to glean is the following. He was born May 4, 1926, in Albany, New York, one of four sons of Rabbi Albert (Alter Naphtali) and Leah Gordon Mandelbaum, both members of distinguished rabbinic families. As he mentions in one of his early poems, one of his brothers died in infancy. Allen moved with his family a number of times so that his father could serve as a rabbi in Louisville, Kentucky, Troy, New York, and Toronto, before settling—if that is the word—in New York City in 1939. During much of the Second World War, Allen attended Yeshiva University, as his father had before him, then studied English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, receiving his master’s degree there in 1946 at the age of twenty. He married Marjorie Bogat on December 21, 1947, when he was twenty-one, and with whom they had one son, Jonathan.

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Allen went on to earn his doctorate in 1951 at twenty-five, and was subsequently named to the Society of Fellows at Harvard, spending most of his three-year appointment in Italy. In 1954, he was appointed a Fulbright Research Scholar for another two years, and remained in Italy until 1964. In those later years, he served as director of print works at Cassino and later directed La Tipografica at Rome. During this time, he continued to translate modern Italian poetry, cementing friendships with poets like Giuseppe Ungaretti and Giovanni Giudici. In 1958, he translated a volume of Ungaretti’s poems, Life of a Man. Two years later, he translated a volume of Salvatore Quasimodo’s poems. In 1975, he published a second volume of Ungaretti’s work, Selected Poems. But Allen’s homage to Ungaretti wasn’t over. In 1989, in commemoration of the centennial of Ungaretti’s birth, Allen published a limited edition of 99 copies in his honor titled Ungaretti and Palinurus. In this book he placed Ungaretti side by side with Virgil, with parallel original texts in Italian and Latin, and included three engravings by Marialuisa de Romans. Four years later, Allen published his translation of a selected poems by David Maria Turoldo, Catholic priest/poet, ardent anti-fascist and champion of the poor, known as “the restless conscience of the Church,” who had died of pancreatic cancer the previous year. In the meantime, Allen also worked assiduously on a book of translations by Eugenio Montale, and though that volume was never published, several of Allen’s translations do appear in Harry Thomas’s Montale in English (2004). Back in 1964, Allen taught a year at Sarah Lawrence, as well as his class at CUNY, before joining the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York as Professor of English and Comparative Literature from 1965 to 1980. After Helaine Newstead’s retirement in 1972, he chaired the English Department until 1980, also administering the Italian Literature PhD track in Comparative Literature at New York University. In 1975, he lectured at Washington University in St. Louis as the Hurst Professor of Creative Writing. Two years later, he lectured at the University of Denver. In 1980, he was Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1983, he served as Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Purdue University and later at the University of Houston as Honors Professor of Humanities. In 1989, now sixty-three, he left New York and joined

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the faculty of Wake Forest University as William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Humanities, succeeding the esteemed scholar Germaine Brée. It was at Wake Forest that Allen would spend the rest of his life as teacher and then in retirement. But back in the fall of 1964, I was blessed to be one of his first students. Helaine Newstead had told me it would be well worth my time to take his seminar in Dante. What I couldn’t know at the time was that that decision would be a life-changer. Allen had moved into an apartment a hundred yards down from the site of the Whitney Museum at 945 Madison Avenue on the corner of 75th. This was the brand new Marcel Breuer gallery, which opened to the public in 1966. I visited him a dozen times in his third-story modest dwelling, with his wife (living separately from him) and son Jonathan in an apartment just above him. For a quarter of a century, Allen taught literature and the humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, first at Hunter and then at the center’s new headquarters on 42nd Street, across from Bryant Park and the Public Library, where in 1972 he was named executive officer of the doctoral program in English. I took two seminars with him, the first in the fall of 1964, on Dante, whom he was busy translating, a course so dense and multilayered that it covered only the Inferno and Purgatorio, and then the following fall a seminar on Yeats. He was an extraordinarily gifted teacher, and I loved his classes. In 1989, by which time I’d been teaching at the University of Massachussetts in Amherst (UMass) for twenty-one years, Allen took up his Chair at Wake Forest. Gifted poet that Allen was, he is more well known for his translations of the classics—Virgil, Dante, Homer, and Ovid—as well as those of his twentieth-century Italian poets. Those translations garnered him numerous awards in both the US and Italy, including the Order of Merit by the Republic of Italy in 1976. In 1994, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. In 1999, he edited with his friend Robert Richardson Three Centuries of American Poetry, from its beginnings through the early twentieth century, a hefty anthology published by Bantam Press. Four years later, he received an honorary doctor of letters from the University of Notre Dame. He was a natty dresser, in the European fashion, and always seemed to don a beret and smoking, a long cigarette holder in his right hand. He was tall, thin, lightly bearded, full of nervous energy,

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and always—always—thinking. It was the poet James Wright who once told him to take a deep breath—a deep breath, Allen—and relax. That may have helped for a moment or so, but then Allen was off again, thinking or composing something always in that humming mind of his. No wonder Barry Moser chose him for his Mad Hatter when he illustrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Or that his face, bedecked in a tall black Victorian hat and comic spectacles, should be chosen for the cover of Moser’s Alice. Back in 1967, I was writing my dissertation on the sonnets of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, directed by Allen, when I learned that Allen had just published his first book of poems, Journeyman. As soon as I heard the news, I took the train into New York City to buy a copy from the publisher and devoured it. At twenty-seven, I had finally found my own guide through the vast underworld of poetry, though it would take another ten years before I was ready to publish my own first book of poems, one which owes so much to my mentor. I began writing poems in 1974, my first an elegy to my mother’s mother, Emely, who had just died. But there’s another poem called “The Dancing Master” from that first volume, Timing Devices, a tall thin book designed and illustrated by that same, indefatigable Barry Moser. My book came out in 1977, and Barry would come to design and illustrate many of Allen’s books, among them Allen’s translation of the Commedia. Here’s the poem I wrote back then in honor of Allen: Of all my dancing masters the most difficult to follow was Allen, for he could dance a step so intricate, so convoluted, my poor feet kept tripping one over the other trying to keep up. Dante’s line splits into Baudelaire’s preoccupation with the polis and Mallarmé’s narcissistic self-dismay . . . Most masters were there, I thought, to be overtaken in the long run, or so Hegel has it. Though not this one. One, two, heel and toe, always another step, half-step, quarter,

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with that intricate arabesque of his, proving Zeno’s math about the tortoise and the hare. Fitting, I suppose, that he should foot it first, foot following foot outward, as we strode then toward the grotto, me a half step still behind him, both dancing toward the same silence. In the summer of 1975, Allen and his partner, Laury Magnus, joined Eileen and myself as we toured northern Italy. I remember Allen up at Lake Como, busy at his translation of the Purgatorio at the time, and his explanation that he had had to put Dante aside for a while and immerse himself in the Aeneid, composed thirteen hundred years before by Dante’s guide, Virgil. I think I understand why he had to do it this way. Virgil serves as Dante’s guide through the way of the lost and the way of the penitent, something we all share, before we can attempt to ascend to the circles of the blessed, via Beatrice, Aquinas, Francis, and Dominic. I recall one evening in Allen’s Dante seminar, when he read Dante’s passages from Arnaut Daniel in Dante’s exquisite Provençal, and then read a passage from a new translation of Thomas Aquinas by the Blackfriars begun in the 1960s, a project that would eventually run to sixty-one volumes. There was the Latin text of the Summa on the left side of the page, and the English translation on the right. Of course, Allen could read both. (Later he would tell me that he had tried to learn Arabic as well, but that time simply did not allow him to master the language.) But, as Allen explains in his introduction to his translation of the Aeneid, written as the war in Vietnam went on and on and on, it was his ties with Ungaretti, who had witnessed war firsthand along the Isonzo in northern Italy, which led him to translate Virgil at this point. “It was chiefly through Ungaretti,” he explained there, “that I saw in the Aeneid the underground denial—by consciousness and longing— of the total claims of the state and history: the persistence in the mind of what is not there, of what is absent, as a measure of the present.” Unlike the young Georgy Lukács who found Virgil too utopian, or Trotsky, who early on believed that the average human would in time rise above Aristotle, Goethe, or Marx, Allen understood that Virgil “was never so utopian” and “never deified the present or the future” and so could better understand “the dynamics of deifying the past.”

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And then of course there were those dozen years Allen spent in Italy, most of it in Virgil’s Tuscan countryside. The sense of place, Allen confessed, “Which for me at least had always been the last mode though which I heard a poet, after twelve years lived in the Mantua landscapes of Virgil, finally began, even as I was leaving Italy, to reinforce the voice of Virgil.” And if any poet might grasp that necessary sense of deep humanity, especially in an age like the abominable 1960s, that poet was Virgil. Allen’s translation of the Aeneid came out in 1971. I remember being with him back in 1969 when he sat down with the crotchety Leonard Baskin in Baskin’s book-studded library in Northampton, Massachusetts, to discuss the artist’s illustrating the Aeneid. Mostly I remained silent as the two went on and on, so that at one point Baskin asked me what I was doing there with Allen. At which point, Allen chimed in and explained that I was a new assistant professor of English at Umass in Amherst, and a personal friend, and that in time Baskin would learn about me. I remember, too, Baskin going into a tirade against T. S. Eliot’s early anti-Semitism, and Allen responding gently by quoting a long passage from Little Gidding (1942) about the steps in which someone must find his way. I remember, too, Allen making it clear that for the cover of his translation he wanted the image of Aeneas, displaced from Troy and on his way to becoming founder of Rome, carrying his old father Anchises on his shoulders as they fled the fiery destruction of the city. It should be no surprise that Allen’s translation received the National Book Award. It was a good match: Baskin the artist and Mandelbaum the poet. But a better one, the fuller one—would come half a dozen years later when Allen sat down with Barry Moser, after Barry had decided to illustrate, design, and print my first book of poems, Timing Devices (1977), with his own Pennyroyal imprint. What I did not learn for another quarter century, however, was that Allen had quietly and graciously offered to help Barry finance the publication of the book in a limited edition, subsequently published by David Godine, all of which makes the book even more precious to me. And when, in 1981, a new edition of the Aeneid was published, it included thirteen drawings by Barry. With his homage to Virgil history now, Allen returned to the Commedia. His translation of the Inferno appeared in 1980, followed by the Purgatorio in 1981, and the Paradiso in 1982, all

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published by the University of California Press and generously supported by the notable Dante scholar Irma Brandeis. Following that, Allen served as the general editor of the California Lectura Dantis, a collection of in-depth and fascinating essays on the Comedy. The Canto-by-Canto commentary of the Inferno appeared in 1998, followed ten years later by the commentary on the Purgatorio, by which time Allen was eighty-two. But by then age and illness had forced their way in, so that the commentary on the Paradiso remains in its own limbo. I suppose it’s his translation of The Divine Comedy that stands out as his major achievement, as it does for me. First published by the University of California Press, it was brought out ten years later by Bantam in a paperback edition still used widely in college courses, “a highly readable, vigorous rendition of Dante’s epic,” as one critic phrased it, “all the more impressive for being a faithful line-by-line rendering of the original rather than a loosely poetic reinterpretation.” Here, for example, is Dante’s entry into Hell as Allen renders it: Here sighs and lamentations and loud cries were echoing across the starless air, so that, as soon as I set out, I wept . . . Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, accents of anger, words of suffering, and voices shrill and faint, and beating hands— all went to make a tumult that will whirl forever through that turbid, timeless air, like sand that eddies when a whirlwind swirls. Those lines still strike me as I watch the news each night on TV. Here was Dante rendered, as Robert Fagles, a brilliant translator, tells us, “with clarity, eloquence, terror and profoundly moving depths.” And even as Allen was translating Dante and Virgil, he brought two major Italian poets to Amherst. The first was Giuseppe Ungaretti in 1969, just a year before Ungaretti’s death at eighty-two and just months before the poet was awarded the inaugural 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. I remember Ungaretti wearing that famous beret of his, much as Allen often did. Ungaretti: Hermeticist in the 1910s, Futurist, soldier on Italy’s northern front, supporter of the young Mussolini, atheist turned Catholic, and one

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of Italy’s finest poets, who spoke to us through Allen’s words as translator, and whose poems Allen published in 1975. And then there was Giovanni Giudici, who I was honored to have as my guest. This was in the early 1970s, and Giovanni’s presence proved another game changer for me. I remember showing him some of the poems I was beginning to cobble together there in my kitchen one morning. Giovanni looked them over, then said it was time for me to stop serving as an altar boy—i.e., writing criticism about poetry—and take on the priestly mantle of the poet. The truth is, I was struck by both Ungaretti and Giudici, and wish now I had spent more time reading and absorbing their work at the time, though I was already wading in the swamps of my first biography, that massive ten-year work that resulted in my life of William Carlos Williams, New Jersey doctor and a poet very much in the American grain. I was to see Giovanni again in the summer of 1975, along with his wife, at his seashore home in La Spezia and sharing a meal at a local ristorante with Allen, Laury Magnus, and Eileen. It was just one of many visits I made in the company of Allen that summer. Among the memories that stand out for me is one dazzlingly bright morning at a small hotel in Sulmona, Ovid’s birthplace, which we were visiting because Eileen’s paternal grandparents had come to America from the Abruzzi. There’s a bronze statue of Ovid out on the piazza there in Sulmona, and I can still see Allen gazing intently into the bronze eyes of Ovid, the poet whose Metamorphoses he would masterfully translate eighteen years on. But only after first translating Homer’s Odyssey three years before that. The man never rested. The way we traveled that summer was like this. Since only Allen spoke Italian, he did all the translating, which could be tiring. We would go to a church in Rome or Florence or Siena or Bologna or Milan and he would remind us that we only had time to view this Michelangelo or that Caravaggio or these Fra Angelicos or Giottos. I thought I was up to it, but I remember Eileen getting carsick once on the winding mountain roads of Tuscany, and how Allen had us pull the car over to the side of the road alongside a metal pipe buried in the hillside, out of which cold water was flowing, and how he applied a cold compress to Eileen’s forehead and neck until she recovered, while I waited impatiently to be back on the road again. What a godsend that man was.

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In late April 1980, during the Carter administration, Allen invited me, along with a number of other poets—Charles Simic, William Matthews, Madeline Defrees, Judith Johnson, and Pamela Hadas, as well as Barry Moser—to a gathering of Italian and American poets in a palace in Genoa for a three-day session of talks and readings. Allen insisted on speaking Italian during each of the sessions, so that I wondered at times if he was the same Allen I had known for the past sixteen years. At one point, I remember the Italian translator—a woman in her fifties—trying to keep up with Allen’s syntax, his sentences filled with allusion after allusion, a task she found so daunting that she finally said, “I cannot keep up with this man’s language, and so I am going to stop trying to translate him.” And with that the line went silent. And then came the news of the failure of Operation Eagle Claw to rescue our 52 American hostages being held in Teheran and of the helicopter collision that claimed eight American lives. That morning of April 25, our usually ebullient Italian host became so upset with this American “John Wayne gamble,” fearing now the Russians might enter Genoa. I remember, too, the look on several young Genoese leftists staring at me when I said something in my American language. But soon after we were on a plane flying home again. Allen, of course, who had spent so many years in Italy and knew the Italian temperament, just took it all in stride. Several times Allen would visit a university and mention my name, and before I knew it, I was on a plane for Colorado Springs or Notre Dame or Vanderbilt, being interviewed for a position there. As it turned out, I stayed put at UMass for thirty-two years, and then, after making a Jesuit retreat, finally signed on at Boston College when I turned sixty, in part because of my admiration for the Jesuits and my lifelong love of Hopkins and because our son, Paul, is a Jesuit priest. But how many mentors go out of their way again and again for their former students like that? Meanwhile, of course, Allen and I both kept busy writing and publishing. For me these were the years spent writing biographies of, first, Williams, then Berryman, Lowell, Hart Crane, Hopkins, and— finally—Wallace Stevens. There were also nine volumes of poetry, studies of Hopkins and Williams, essays on many contemporary American poets, and a memoir of making the long silent Ignatian retreat in 2000. And, of course, there was the teaching and lecturing and giving poetry readings at Bread Loaf and the Image conferences in Santa Fe and Whidbey Island.

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For Allen, too, it was one volume of poetry after another: Leaves of Absence (1976), Chelmaxioms: The Maxims, Axioms, Maxioms of Chelm (1977), A Lied of Letterpress for Moser and McGrath (1980), and The Savantasse of Montparnasse (1987), his final book of poems in English. Chelmaxioms was published with yet another portrait of Allen by Barry Moser on the cover. For the Savantasse, Marialuisa de Romans provided ten drawings. His last collection of poems, Le porte di eucalipto, a selection which came to 185 pages, was published in 2007, when he was eighty-one. In 1986 he published Ovid in Sicily, featuring select passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with a parallel Latin text and fourteen color plates from the Ovidiane sequence of paintings by Marialuisa de Romans. In 1993 came his stunning verse translation of the Metamorphoses. And in between those two events, in 1990, his verse translation of Homer’s Odyssey, again with engravings by de Romans. In 2000, he traveled to Florence for the 735th anniversary of Dante’s birth, where he was awarded the Gold Medal of Honor of the City of Florence for his Divine Comedy. Three years later came the Presidential Prize for Translation. Toward the end, I could hear his voice weakening on the phone, even as he still called me his bubeleh. He officially retired from teaching in 2008 at the age of eighty-two, and died three years later on October 27, 2011, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, after a long illness. Three days later, a graveside service was held for him on Long Island. The following spring, a memorial service was held for him at Wake Forest, which I attended. There were many distinguished scholars of Dante and Italian literature present, as well as his son, Jonathan, who had flown in from France, and it was good to make contact with him again after so many years. But mostly it was Lily Saadé I was in contact with, the woman who had worked with Allen as his assistant for twenty years, gathering his papers and fielding questions for him. “He was a grand man to work with,” she said. “He had a wonderful zest for life, and a remarkable creative energy.” Allen donated his personal papers and library to Wake Forest’s Reynolds Library. What complex feelings to walk through the Mandelbaum Reading Room displaying so many of his awards. His absence haunts me still, though his life has been a lasting consolation as well. What zest, what generosity he had. And that sense of humor of his, as well.

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Allen truly believed it was his duty to fulfill the talents he’d been blessed with as a poet and translator, his son has said. It was in fact his mission. He had called his first book of poems Journeyman, and that was in fact the case with Allen. All his life he was obsessed with travel, just as he was with each of the journeys he undertook with each of his beloved poets. There was a restlessness in his father, Jonathan has said, a never-ending curiosity that “led him to spend more time and effort translating the works of other faiths, even as he remained true to his Jewish roots.” There were and continue to be many tributes to the man and his work. “His knowledge of history, literature, culture, religion, and modern and classical languages created a scholar of unusual distinction,” Edwin G. Wilson, a former Provost at Wake, has said. He “had a breadth of knowledge and experience . . . remarkable in any age, but particularly remarkable now, when somehow the old patterns and commitments of learning have changed.” In other words, they don’t make them like Allen anymore. They just don’t. But let Allen have the last word. Here is Allen’s translation of Dante’s realization that he is and will remain in exile from his beloved Florence, much like Aeneas remembering a city that is no more: You shall leave everything you love most dearly: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes descending and ascending others’ stairs. But there’s that haunting end of the Paradiso, which seems to echo something of what Allen was also searching for, and with it the realization as with all of us of the failure of words to capture what we see in the blink of an eye. Something there, something intuited, before it too vanishes. “I wished to see/ the way in which our human effigy/ suited the circle and found place in it,” Dante writes, and my own wings were far too weak for that.” But then, the poet sighs, as Allen seems to sigh as well, as I do, too, all these years on,

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my mind was struck by light that flashed and, with this light, received what it had asked. Here force failed my high fantasy; but my desire and will were moved already—like a wheel revolving uniformly—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.

15 Sketch of a Professor: Roger Gilliatt Michael J. Aminoff

It was not bashfulness that made me hesitate to contribute to this volume, but fear of being regarded as an imposter. I am not a literary writer in the same way as are the other contributors, and I hesitated to be bracketed with them under false pretenses. I am, instead, an academic neurologist, medical writer, and biographer, and my interests are not with a mellifluous turn of phrase but rather with a more dispassionate accounting of facts. I hope readers will therefore forgive me if the account that I give here is not quite what they expected. There has always been an aura of austere intellectualism among British neurologists, competing with a suggestion of charlatanism in some who treat patients with neurological maladies. I had, since childhood, dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon but—once I realized that this required standing for long hours in the operating room and serving a lengthy apprenticeship to those who had preceded me—switched my interest to neurology, attracted by its intellectual rigor and the mystery of the brain. Thus, after house jobs (“the internship year”) and working on the junior staff in various London teaching hospitals, I passed the forbidding exams to become a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London (thereby gaining the British equivalent of certification in internal medicine) and started training as a specialist. 141

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January 1970 meant for me the start of a new job, as a registrar (senior resident) in neurology at the Middlesex Hospital, then a large teaching hospital with its own medical school at the edge of Soho in central London. It was a good time to be a young doctor, a time when nurses wore crisp uniforms with little white hats, their seniority denoted by the color of their belt and the grandeur of its buckle. The two consultant neurologists with whom I was to work were very influential, and the post was a recognized stepping stone to a position on the junior staff at The National, the main neurological hospital in the metropolis and, indeed, the country. I was to start work with the more difficult of the two consultants. “He is one of the establishment,” they told me, “very proper and correct. If you get on the wrong side of him, your career is over.” I had been warned about my new boss by several other young physicians, and it was difficult to forget their words, uttered in almost delicious anticipation of the troubles awaiting me. Roger William Gilliatt (1922–91) was indeed a member of the medical and social establishment. His father, an obstetrician, had been in attendance at the birth of Prince Charles and Princess Anne, had been knighted by the Queen, and had served as president of several professional societies. His mother was an anesthetist, and his sister had been a personal private secretary to Winston Churchill for ten years. As for the man himself, his studies at Oxford University were interrupted during the war when he enlisted in the army and as a young lieutenant gained the Military Cross for going forward under gunfire to rescue the crew of a burning tank. He rarely spoke about this except to dismiss it with an embarrassed, “I got lost!” Returning to Oxford after the war, he gained a science degree with first-class honors, trained as a physician in London, was best man at Princess Margaret’s wedding, and married Penelope, the writer and noted film critic who took his name but left him for John Osborne in a very public breakup. In 1962, already renowned for his role in studying the electrical activity of nerve and muscle for diagnostic purposes, he was appointed to the first chair of clinical neurology to be established in England. This, then, was my new chief. My future was to depend on an exacting man with an acid tongue and great expectations. And so, I waited for him on the neurology ward on a dull winter’s morning, determined to make a go of things. Tall, erect, self-assured, he arrived briskly on schedule, greeted me cheerily with a brief

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smile, and we began the first of many ward rounds. At the foot of each bed, we would halt while the intern gave a summary of the history and clinical findings in an ordered routine from which no deviation was permitted, and the medical students would watch in respectful silence. Gilliatt would check some of the findings for himself, speak a few words to the patient, and then turn to me with questions—what part of the nervous system was malfunctioning, what were the likely causes of the problem, what investigations or treatment were in progress? Almost always he would challenge something that I said, coming up with alternatives that I needed to accept or reject, obliging me to justify my original remarks. As a teacher, he was dogmatic, concise, and precise, untroubled by any need to encourage or praise. Everything was done in a measured way, but—or so it seemed to me—with an underlying air of menace. A suggestion from him was a courteous request, and a request was a command in all but name. It was always a relief when the ward round passed off without incident. Oliver Sachs had been an intern on the same service several years earlier—in the late 1950s—and has described how he was terrified, becoming almost paralyzed with fear when asked a question, sensing in Gilliatt “a sort of suppressed fury that might explode at any moment.” I soon learned that it was the unexpected, any departure from the script, that provoked my new chief. And ups and downs were, of course, inevitable. The first came when the intern had to go on leave abruptly for medical reasons. Gilliatt was reassuring, averring that he would make allowances for the extra load on me, but conveniently seemed to forget the circumstances as I managed without help until a replacement was appointed. Things came to a head a few weeks later when the secretary to whom he dictated letters about the patients immediately after each outpatient clinic, took a few days’ vacation. He came into the office after clinic to find he was alone, with no one to help him and, clearly annoyed, apparently held me responsible for not warning him or arranging a replacement. Red in the face, angry black eyebrows slanting upward like the horns of a devil, he glared at me tight-lipped as—outwardly calm but with a sinking feeling—I told him with pointed courtesy that I was unaware that my responsibilities included managing his secretary. He stormed off to summon aid and reappeared an hour later, the letters dictated, all smiles as if nothing had disturbed him. He was actually warm and friendly, perhaps feeling slightly sheepish

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at the fuss he had made over a petty inconvenience. And thereafter I sensed a change in his attitude toward me, a sort of acceptance that I was alright, perhaps because I had stood up to him. I wrote my first scientific paper while on his service, and it was published as a main article in the British Medical Journal. As Gilliatt encouraged research—especially the study of a clinical problem in the laboratory so that the solution could be brought back to the clinic—I wondered whether he would notice my contribution. His response was typical. “I enjoyed your paper in the BMJ,” he said with a smile, “but I found at least nine typographical errors that you should have picked up in the proofs.” He thus gave me a pat on the back followed by the proverbial kick in the pants. But I learned my lesson and thereafter have read the proofs of all my publications with assiduous attention to detail, as indeed he always did. Gilliatt expected the flow of patients into the beds under his control at the Middlesex to go smoothly. When patients were admitted with severe disability, unable to look after themselves, it was often difficult for me to discharge them in a timely manner to a nursing facility or to their home, with nursing support and aids to daily living (such as a hoist to get them into or out of a bathtub). His frown would deepen, however, if they were allowed to “block” one of his beds for more than a few days, and so—before one of his twice-weekly visits—we would rearrange the ward, moving the unfortunate patient to a distant corner, hidden out of sight and mind, replaced by another patient, not actually under Gilliatt’s care. Such behavior would be unthinkable today, but things were different then and the consultant physician was at the apex of a rigid hierarchical system, with almost unlimited power. It was always a relief when the deception passed undetected, but—looking back on it—I have a sneaking suspicion that he knew all along what we were up to. At the National Hospital during his weekly clinical conferences, interesting patients were discussed with senior physicians and visiting scientists, while the junior staff looked on with dread, worried that they might be called upon to comment. After each presentation, Gilliatt, despite his prior knowledge of the case, would ask his senior colleagues for their opinion, questioning their conclusions until—by this means—he arrived at his own. I suspect he felt uneasy about making a diagnosis in these difficult cases and made up his own mind by challenging the judgment of his colleagues

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and listening to the ensuing discussion. I also wondered, however, why they put up with behavior that sometimes seemed autocratic, especially as he did not control their salary or space or how they spent their time. Indeed, at times they seemed intimidated by him, as were so many of the junior staff. Perhaps they had reason to be concerned because Gilliatt did not suffer fools gladly, but in fact he always treated his senior colleagues correctly and with a show of respect. Nevertheless, he had a reputation for sometimes speaking his mind with disturbing honesty regardless of the consequences. One of the many stories about him relates to when he was a young physician and candidate for membership of the Royal College of Physicians. The oral part of the membership examination required a lengthy evaluation of a patient with some exotic disorder and the more limited evaluation of several “short cases” watched by two or more medical high priests. One of his short cases involved examination of an arm that protruded from a curtain, behind which lurked the rest of the patient, her eyes bulging from an obviously overactive thyroid gland. Gilliatt, feeling on somewhat shaky clinical ground and annoyed at the absurdity of having to examine an arm detached from its owner, is said to have remarked, “If you’re going to play silly buggers, I’m leaving,” and walked out of the examination. It was a brave but somewhat foolhardy thing to do, and probably the only time that he failed an examination. I still wonder whether the story is apocryphal. In any event, over the next few years, both at the Middlesex and then at the National Hospital, he was supportive of me. It was common in those days for an aspiring young doctor to get a BTA (“been to America”)—that is, to spend a year in America to gain further experience, develop a broader outlook, and become involved in some laboratory research to round off their education. It was he who put forward my name to spend a year as a visitor at the University of California in San Francisco before returning to take up a consultant post in London. I did indeed go to San Francisco and he kept an eye on my interests in London, letting me know when any senior appointments opened up. I succumbed, however, to the attraction of life as an academic neurologist in California and moved permanently to San Francisco. I think he was disappointed but understanding. He remained in desultory contact, occasionally writing me a short note in response

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to a newly published paper of mine. This was particularly gratifying for it meant that at least he had read the paper. He had once commented that “there should be a black book listing the names of those whose papers we never need read,” as was later recounted by Professor Ian McDonald at a memorial service for Gilliatt. He retired in 1987, moved to Washington, DC, as a visiting scientist at the National Institutes of Health, came out twice as a visitor to San Francisco, and died from pancreatic cancer in 1991. I am told that he had hoped in retirement to write a book on the characters in Trollope, but this was not to be. His legacy has been immense, but he has not always received the proper credit for it. When he was first appointed to the professorial chair at the University of London at the National Hospital and its allied Institute of Neurology in Queen Square, these institutions were not noted for fundamental research to understand better the operation of the nervous system in health and disease. Instead, they had a reputation for clinical excellence based upon the brilliance of earlier generations of their staff. Gilliatt had a particular love of tradition and an interest in history, especially medical and military history. Nevertheless, he firmly believed that to survive and flourish, the institute had to move forward with the times and build on a bedrock of original scientific research, and that in the hospital these advances should be translated into clinical practice. He thus fought a powerful group of senior clinicians to convert Queen Square, as it is widely known, from a private practice culture to a modern, intellectually challenging neuroscience center based on fundamental laboratory research. His formidable personality enabled him to impose his own vision for change on the subject and on its institutions and practitioners. His skills in committee, painstaking preparation, forceful manner, and twenty-five-year tenure of the university chair helped to ensure his success. By his example, many young neurologists were encouraged to follow an academic career and clinical neuroscience in the United Kingdom has flourished. By his actions, he helped to ensure that Queen Square survived the economic purges of different governments and became an internationally acclaimed center for studying the workings of the nervous system. When he looked back at it a few years after he had retired, he told me with enormous pride that the staff at Queen Square had never seemed more illustrious and accomplished, at least since Edwardian times, and this obviously gave him great satisfaction.

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Roger Gilliatt was an independent soul, perhaps hardened prematurely by wartime experiences, who took his time to make up his mind, but—once decided—often became quite inflexible. Reluctant to compromise, he did what he thought was right regardless of whether it was popular. He expected the best of himself and of others, and did not hesitate to make his disappointment clear when his expectations were not met. He kept his private life separate from his professional one, maintaining the facade of the aloof professor for his local trainees and juniors, even as he was generous in his social interactions with foreign visitors. He was a kind man, as became apparent when his reserve lessened, and it pained him that many feared him or held him responsible for their own failures or the downturns in their careers. I still remember him speaking of this early one morning as I drove him to the airport after he had visited us in San Francisco. It seemed to hurt him especially in his later years when, having relinquished the powers that a hierarchical system had bestowed on him, he moved to America and made new friends through his mellowing personality rather than because of his professional standing. He died thirty years ago and—at the time—his achievements were not as clear as they are today. His own research, especially in his later years, did not lead to outstanding discoveries or fresh biological insights but was based on the application of technological advances to improve the understanding of neurological disease and facilitate its evaluation. As for his wider influence on the profession, many in medicine remembered only his impatience, his wounding tongue, and the challenges in working with him, without appreciating the change in direction of clinical neurology that he had helped to engineer, without seeing the help and support he had given behind the scenes. Perhaps it could have been given in kinder, gentler circumstances, but the times were different and the feelgood era was still to come. He had great charm and—having married twice to attractive women in their twenties who went on to fame in the literary and artistic world—had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in non-medical circles. He certainly could have projected a more attractive image to the students and junior staff with whom he interacted, using his charisma to draw them closer to himself personally and to the subject matter of clinical neurology, still regarded by some as an esoteric specialty based on arcane principles. Nevertheless, he helped to shape the careers of many and

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the context in which they worked, introducing a precision to clinical neurology that previously had been lacking and drawing the methods of science more widely into its realm. As for me, I learned through his example to be precise, to weigh each word carefully regardless of whether spoken or written. I learned how to analyze a clinical problem rather than relying on intuition. I learned to make informed decisions that I could defend or justify, if only to survive professionally while on his clinical service. I learned the value of integrity, of choosing to follow a course that I believed to be right when the circumstances were difficult, even though this might sometimes alienate friends and colleagues. And I came to understand that while substance is crucial, style also is important in daily activities, and in both the spoken and written word.

16 How Lucky I Was . . . Ann Thwaite

I think no writer can have had more teachers than I have had; how many of them had any influence on my writing is another matter. The explanation for the multitude is that I went to seven different schools in four different countries before I was ten years old. I loved school from the first moment when, at the age of three, I was finally allowed to join my brother David for two afternoons a week at the kindergarten a few minutes’ walk from our North London house. The little school was run by the Misses Mabel and Violet Druce, two large, comfortable, benevolent ladies. I was reading well at five, before we moved a little further out in 1938. That was in April, the very month that in England it was announced that we were all to be measured for gas masks and that in Austria the Jewish population was forbidden to vote in the plebiscite for Germany’s annexation of their own country. The war that would change my childhood was becoming inevitable. It was at my next school, Holmewood in Woodside Park, that I trace the first direct evidence that a teacher had on my writing. I was apparently ready at five to get on with serious things, such as writing, but there was a lot of playing around and, when we stopped playing, we were expected to sit down and listen. My strongest memory of that school is of Miss Plumridge, in her gray cardigan, calling me a “chatterbox,” a word that was new to me. I think it was only in my mind that I retaliated: “I am not a box.” But exactly forty years later, I turned this into a picturebook text with a despairing teacher introducing into the school 149

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playground a large wooden box in which she hoped her pupils might learn it is better to be quiet. They didn’t, inevitably. But with its wonderful illustrations by Glenys Ambrus, it became, I think, the most popular of all my picture books. And I have spent a lifetime studying the way children talk, however brilliant or banal. I left England in July 1940, at a time when it seemed likely that a Nazi invasion of Britain was imminent. My parents had decided my mother should take us to the safety of New Zealand, their homeland on the other side of the world. We had lessons on the ship, of course. Our mother had been a high school teacher before she crossed those same seas to marry in London. Teaching one’s own children, aged seven and nine, was a very different matter and we didn’t make it easy for her. My preferred activity was writing stories on the blank backs of menu cards discarded in the dining room after every meal. None of these stories survive but I am pretty sure they were as uninspired and straightforward as the letters I wrote to my father and was able to read years later. They are now in the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum, together with all the ones I wrote to my parents from New Zealand in the nearly five years before we were together again in 1945. My letters show clearly that it was reality, not fantasy, that interested me, as it always has been, and I had not yet found a way to make reality interesting beyond the interest of the facts themselves. There were dangerous seas to cross, but it was a collision in the blackout with a cargo ship that marooned us in Cape Town for ten weeks of waiting for a new ship to take us on. So, my third school was in South Africa, my fourth and fifth in Melbourne and Sydney, as we limped our way across the Great Australian Bight and the Tasman Sea to our destination in Auckland. I remember little of those schools—apart from the happy discovery in a compulsory Afrikaans lesson that “spoek” was the word for “ghost.” I enjoyed school (real school, not lessons with my mother) wherever I was. Many years later I wrote in my family history, Passageways: “I was always really a natural schoolgirl, loving as I did pens and ink, desks and books.” I suspect I also thrived on my novelty status. After I had had a year living on an uncle’s farm in the Waikato, in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand and going to the local primary school with my cousins, my mother managed to get a

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berth on a troop ship, so she could return to England across even more dangerous seas. It would certainly be best for me to go to a boarding school where all the girls were without their parents, at least temporarily. Marsden in Karori, high above Wellington, had a lot going for it. It was an Anglican school with a good academic record. The headmistress (an elegant, slim, grey figure) was English and so were several of the staff. Moreover, it claimed Katherine Mansfield (arguably New Zealand’s most distinguished writer) as a former pupil. My great-uncle Fred Godber had boasted that, as a boy, he had actually delivered the cream puffs at the Garden Party in her most famous short story. I loved Marsden. In one letter to my parents, I actually wrote, “I adore Marsden,” obviously feeling they were in need of reassurance. The school was indeed an excellent choice for me in lots of ways. Other girls, also outsiders, remain my friends to this day, and I still have in my head some of the poems I learnt by heart. “Cargoes” by John Masefield was one of them with that wonderful first line: “Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir . . .” I got lots of encouragement to read and write. Books my parents sent managed somehow to cross the world and they still carry the penciled initials from the teacher who had to check they were suitable reading. They always were. I became a compulsive letter writer. There was an official letterwriting session once a week, supervised by a teacher. But I often wrote in bed in the summer when I was supposed to be asleep. Once, I told my parents, I was writing in a tree “in an awkward but comfortable position.” Another letter was confiscated in a French lesson. The hundreds of letters I wrote and received probably had a larger part in turning me into a writer than anything I was actually taught. Never, in all my fifty years as a biographer, have I been so aware of how the writer’s picture of the past is affected by evidence, what was written at the time. I can read what I wrote myself and even what my teachers wrote to my parents, now recorded conveniently in Passageways. How different would this essay be if I had had to rely entirely on memory. But I do remember vividly some of the teachers—for instance, lovely Miss Hillary (June, a sister of Edmund the conqueror of Everest) telling us enthralling tales when we were lucky enough

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to have her at our dinner table. They were far more interesting than what she was telling us in the Science room about the life cycle of the amoeba. Then there was the excellent Miss Strombom, a bracing English woman, who took us for both History and English Literature. In 1943, we were reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Scott’s Ivanhoe and Dickens’ Oliver Twist. Strange choices, I now think, for tenand eleven-year-olds. I much preferred the books that arrived from England, including M. E. Atkinson’s Lockett series, which I spoke about recently in London at the 50th birthday of the Children’s Books History Society. I was back in London in 1945. If all those letters had made me “decide to be a writer,” it was the teachers in my next school who helped to make me a much better one. Most important of all was Miss Miller, my demanding English teacher throughout the six years I was at my state grammar school, Queen Elizabeth’s in Barnet, at the end of the tube line from Central London. Miss Miller was one of a large number of unmarried women who taught us: Miss Slater, Miss Dumphreys, Miss Robinson, Miss Hillier, Miss Downes, Miss Redman, Miss Iliff, Miss Bryan, Miss Gunnery, Miss Manning, I can see them all in my mind’s eye, with their different subjects and their resoundingly English names. (The visiting Fräuleins and Mademoiselles came and went, unremembered.) It seemed the school was their life, as it was mine, even though we all had our unimportant homes to go to at the end of the school day. They were always ready to come in on Saturdays for rehearsals of the school plays, to take us to matches in far off schools: swimming, tennis, hockey. As we went up the school, the holidays were also involved. We saw Shakespeare plays in Stratford-upon-Avon, took part in drama and music festivals, went on historical expeditions. One really memorable week, a large group of us stayed in York and visited the lovely abbeys of Yorkshire: Fountains, Rievaulx, Whitby, Mount Grace. Monasticism was my special subject for Advanced Level History exams. I have in front of me an essay I wrote for Miss Miller in 6B. I was sixteen and had been set the subject: “Do you consider it an exhilarating or depressing thing to be young at this particular moment in history?” I would hardly like to ask such a question of my ten grandchildren in the middle of the pandemic in 2021. In

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1951, I was writing a poem about Seoul being on fire: my brother was on National Service fighting with the United Nations in Korea. At school, Miss Miller wrote in the margin of my essay: “Beware of hyperbole,” and further on, “Do not use the dash so much,” and “Beware of journalese.” Once she wrote simply “Style!” But at the end she encouraged me: “A really ‘exhilarating’ piece of work.” Miss Miller was one of many women, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, whose possible husbands had been killed in the First World War. We benefited from their devotion to their work. We never speculated that they were lesbian, though they often lived together. We had never heard the word and in our innocence had no idea why there was such strong opposition to our suggestion that the next school play could be Children in Uniform based on the 1931 German film. There is a recent post online: “How a school drama with an all-female cast broke down doors for queer cinema.” Miss Miller had graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, and Miss Slater and Miss Dumphreys had both been at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Such was their influence that these were the colleges I applied to and had to choose between in December 1951. I was offered places at both after failing to get a place in either the year before. My decision to go to St Hilda’s was largely based on my interview with Helen Gardner and the college’s lovely view across the Cherwell to the towers of Magdalen, Merton, and Christ Church. Helen Gardner was my college tutor for Literature. She would later become Merton Professor of English in Oxford, a Dame of the British Empire and editor in 1972 of The New Oxford Book of English Verse. My Language tutor, Dorothy Whitelock, was equally distinguished in her field and later became Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. We also had other teachers. We had to continue both French and Latin until we passed Prelims at the end of our first year. Then understandably, so that English didn’t seem a soft option, there were Middle English and Anglo-Saxon throughout the three years. Miss Whitelock “like her subject, was difficult to read,” as Gill Frayn put it recently. We nearly all found the obligatory AngloSaxon hugely time-consuming and tedious. But it certainly taught us a useful lesson that all things worth acquiring (such as an Oxford degree) involve hard work as well as pleasure. This seems rather more important than the one thing we all remember: Miss Whitelock’s smoking. She smoked incessantly

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throughout our tutorials and classes, with us watching anxiously for the ash to fall from her cigarette and land on her skirt. It never did. We did not know how large a part she was playing in those years in the fight for gender equality in the university. Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, retiring from a Chair Dorothy Whitelock was eminently qualified to occupy, was one of a number of men entirely opposed to the election of a woman. She was very much involved, too, in the struggle for parity, that the women’s colleges should have equal status with the men’s, eventually achieved in 1959. It was many more years before all the Oxford colleges became co-educational, a fact still regretted by many of us. In our day the lovely fact was that you could go to have a bath half-undressed, knowing there was no chance of encountering a man in the corridor if it was after 7 p.m. Helen Gardner, H.G. as we called her among ourselves, was impressive and rather daunting. She had a high reputation in academic circles for her editions of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets and had recently published The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949), which I had read in our school library. Eliot himself would consider it was the best book on his work and counted her as a friend. There was little about H.G. of the retiring scholar. She was something of an actress, indeed of a prima donna, a grande dame. (As a girl, she once admitted, “I terribly wanted to go on the stage.”) In her prime she was an excellent lecturer, though I understand in later years she became difficult to hear. She was a formidable woman. She was often intolerant and impatient, and never suffered fools gladly, but, if you were not being foolish, she was a brilliant tutor. I only once turned in a skimped essay—plagiarizing Malory critics in the library until the small hours before a morning tutorial. Her contempt was such that I never tried anything similar again. If students suffered trying to live up to her standards, the suffering was worth it in the end and she could be immensely challenging and stimulating. Though I knew her quite well and knew she liked me, I never got over a feeling of nervous awe. She invited herself to stay towards the end of her life, when on a hunt for shrouded effigies in East Anglian churches, and it felt as if I were having a twenty-four-hour tutorial. Fortunately, we devised the perfect entertainment to give us some relief. We took her to a neighbour’s Elizabethan manor house to see a cine film made by his father in Oxford in the 1920s, starring her contemporaries John Betjeman and Maurice Bowra.

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Her capacity for enjoyment of life as well as literature remained deep in spite of years of pain from arthritis. She loved literary gossip and gardening. She was capable of great kindness, and many can tell stories of her help and understanding. I can give two examples. When my husband, Anthony Thwaite’s first book of poems, Home Truths, was reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement in 1957 with a grotesque lack of appreciation, she wrote to the editor in protest. Her published good opinion was immensely soothing. She had such confidence in her own judgment, she could champion the young and unknown. Twenty-five years later, when I was working on Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape, she spent a great deal of time answering my questions about Gosse’s work on Donne and on the rise of English studies in Oxford and Cambridge. I felt I had written my book with her looking over my shoulder. Certainly, it wouldn’t have been the same book without her. I often wear a silver crowned heart, a pomander on a chain, which H. G. gave me as a wedding present sixty-seven years ago. Now it reminds me how lucky I was to have such teachers.

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17 J. P. Stern: The Professor from Prague Daniel Johnson

J. P. Stern came from the world of Kafka, escaped and then fought the world of Hitler, made himself at home in the world of Wittgenstein and lived to see the world of Havel. When he died in 1991, I had only known him for some thirteen years, though it felt as if we were the oldest of friends. But what I discovered only later was that his early life had been almost unimaginably dramatic—a glimpse of the abyss into which “the heart of Europe” (as he entitled his last collection of essays, 1992) had fallen before I was born. A whole series of miraculous coincidences had been necessary for Stern even to survive, let alone to pursue the career he did. Writers are born, not made, but they do not always recognize their vocation until somebody tells them so. In my case, that somebody was Joseph Peter Stern, always known as Peter. In 1978, when he became my PhD supervisor at Cambridge—what the Germans call my Doktorvater (“doctorate father”)—I knew nothing of his narrow escape from Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust, his wartime exploits, his friendship with Wittgenstein, his remarkable teaching career and his huge contributions to the study of German literature and intellectual history. Yet almost from the moment we met, he was not only my teacher but also my friend. 157

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For several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Peter did his best to discipline my inchoate, incoherent, overambitious dissertation on German pessimism, while I struggled to support myself and make sense of my life. In the end, the thesis was abandoned, but by then I was launched on a career which has enabled me to satisfy my curiosity about the world while cultivating an interior life detached from it—and, above all, to write. Without Peter’s eye for talent, allied to a generosity of spirit that, eventually, overcame the academic distaste for anything “journalistic,” I don’t know whether I should have had the confidence to follow my instincts. He did not willingly talk about himself, so I only learned about his past gradually and in great part, alas, posthumously. For the following sketch I am indebted to the late Sheila Stern, his wife, who supplied me with details to write Peter’s obituary for The Times (November, 21, 1991) and to Nicholas Boyle’s biographical introduction to The Dear Purchase, the last of Peter’s books, which appeared posthumously in 1995. Peter Stern was born in Prague in 1920, the son of a Catholic father and a Jewish mother. Unlike German-speaking compatriots such as Franz Kafka, he had grown up speaking only Czech and learned German only at the age of twelve. That he ultimately became a Germanist was improbable in the extreme. His father, an economist, belonged to the cosmopolitan, liberal, and mainly Jewish bourgeoisie of Prague, so as a teenager Peter spent time in Vienna and Bavaria. The Munich Agreement in 1938, which left Czechoslovakia at the mercy of Nazi Germany, spelled doom for families like the Sterns. In March 1939, as the Wehrmacht’s tanks rolled into the Czech capital, Peter walked across the border from Bohemia to Poland and, thanks to another miracle—a British visa, granted by a kindly consul—managed to get to England, where his father was waiting for him. Rather than follow them, his mother committed suicide; other family members died in the camps. Peter went back to school to improve his English, then to the London School of Economics (LSE), which by another stroke of luck was evacuated to Cambridge in the Blitz. One of many fellow exiles from Central Europe then in Cambridge was Erich Heller, who had befriended him on the quay at Gdynia as they awaited the last boat from Poland to England. Heller persuaded Peter to specialize in modern German literature, which he had overcome wartime prejudice to establish at Cambridge,

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and became his lifelong friend. Heller’s major work, The Disinherited Mind (1952), was the first book that Peter told me to read. Finding himself by chance in the university where his older friend was teaching, Peter moved from the LSE to St John’s College to study German, Russian, and Sanskrit. At Cambridge, too, he met Sheila McMullan, like him a gifted linguist. Then the war intervened. He joined the Czech Army in exile, then volunteered for one of the Czech squadrons of the RAF. Shot down in a bomber over the Channel, he was badly injured, losing two fingers, and spent many hours clinging to wreckage in the sea. By incredible good fortune, a British vessel returning from a clandestine mission to the French Resistance spotted and rescued him. The premature end to his war was a blessing in disguise which enabled him to resume studying for his degree at Cambridge. He and Sheila soon married. Apart from brief periods, they never left the Fens again. By the time I met him, Peter was Professor of German Literature at University College London (UCL), but he was always loyal to Cambridge: he was proud to be a lifelong Fellow of St John’s College; there he and Sheila built their impressive modernist house and raised their children; and there, too, their ashes lie. The most momentous coincidence of all also happened in Cambridge: Peter’s encounter with Ludwig Wittgenstein. In a foreword to the catalogue of a 1989 exhibition about the philosopher at the Vienna Sezession, he described their first meeting in November 1944. It was at an undergraduate society, The Contemporary, where a discussion about the virtues and values of Homer’s Iliad was in full swing. The mysterious stranger, holding a walking stick and wearing his raincoat indoors against the chill of the Trinity College room, reminded Peter of a farmer from the north. His voice, with its hint of an Austrian accent, immediately commanded authority. His account of tradition, which he compared to a rope woven together out of many threads, impressed Peter and the impression made was unlike any that he would ever experience again. When they left, he accompanied Wittgenstein—for it was he—and in due course, despite the age difference, they became friendly. They met at seminars, went for walks and made visits to the cinema to watch American films (for all his ascetic aestheticism, he adored kitsch). The Sterns fed the great man modest suppers, as well as the intellectual sustenance, of which he was no less in need.

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What drew the notoriously prickly Wittgenstein to the young student from Prague was the Mitteleuropean background and a love of literature—to which Peter brought a philosophical curiosity that appealed to Wittgenstein precisely because it was unschooled. He was as dismissive of his own work, especially the Tractatus (whose author he called “terribly stupid”), as he was unsparing in his judgments of others whom he thought pretentious or superficial. But he enjoyed conversation with Peter, perhaps partly because they shared experience of war. The older man had served in the AustroHungarian Army during the First World War; in the Second World War he was too old, but had done voluntary war work as a medical orderly in hospital and as a laboratory assistant, while anxiously following the fortunes of his former pupils in the forces. Peter’s account of Wittgenstein’s reaction to the news of the extermination camps makes harrowing reading. At first, he sought refuge in denial. Peter found him standing forlornly in the Fellows’ garden with a page torn out of the newspaper, asking: “Do you believe that?” But the evidence was too overwhelming. Wittgenstein spent days brooding on the horror, as it dawned on him that the perpetrators of this genocide were part of the same culture and society as himself. The Germans and Austrians, of whose intellectual world he was so much a product and which meant so much to him, had committed this unspeakable crime, whereas (so Peter suggests) the seemingly frivolous English had been quite incapable of it. More: they had resisted the criminals. “They had been in the right.” This episode inevitably touched on the Jewish heritage which the two men also had in common. The Holocaust was directed against the Jewish people, to whom his family belonged; yet his religious feelings had most affinity with a mystical, heterodox form of Christianity. His conclusion on Wittgenstein could equally have been applied to himself: “In the last days of the war, his Jewishness was neither more nor less than a part of his mourning humanity.” I have dwelt at length on this account of Peter Stern’s friendship with Wittgenstein because, although he seldom referred to it in conversation, I sensed that its importance transcended the usual pattern of academic collegiality and conviviality. For Peter, who had I think always been intellectually confident and independent, this encounter was life-changing. More than thirty years had passed from those bleak days of war and peace by the time I walked into the bright, book-lined drawing room of the Sterns’ home in Mill Road,

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Cambridge, in the autumn of 1978. Yet Wittgenstein was, if not a presence, then an absence that was palpable. We discussed his Vermischte Bemerkungen (Culture and Value), which had just appeared in 1979: a selection of notes and aphorisms from the Nachlass (Unpublished Writings). The slim volume included provocative, even embarrassing remarks mostly dating from much earlier in his life, whose publication Peter believed—almost certainly rightly—the philosopher would not have countenanced. The occasional echo of Wittgenstein’s Viennese contemporaries could be heard, “self-hating” Jews such as Otto Weininger, who had internalized the anti-Semitism that saturated the atmosphere. “The greatest Jewish thinker is only a talent. (Me, for example.)” For Peter, such lapses were dismaying, if not surprising; this was not the Wittgenstein he had known. That Wittgenstein had been a master of linguistic subtlety, of grammatical translucency and extreme aversion to anything meanspirited. Once again, though, we were confronted by the toxic Zeitgeist of the era, from which not even he had been immune. I would not presume to frame my relationship with Peter as a recapitulation of his own relationship with Wittgenstein. By the time we met, he already had a long academic career behind him and several of his doctoral students had become brilliant writers and teachers. Notable among them is Nicholas Boyle, whose monumental biography of Goethe occupies a unique place in Anglo-German scholarship and who also became my friend. But I do believe that Wittgenstein’s example—perhaps also that of Erich Heller, who was closer to him in age and background—played a part, conscious or unconscious, in the way that Peter mentored his students. Not for a moment was I made to feel inferior or put in my place, however often I might disclose my ignorance or my immaturity. Ours, I flattered myself, was a friendship and moreover one of equals, despite the vast disparity in knowledge, experience, and insight. He was meticulous in his own work and applied the same standards to that of others, but he could forgive many faults as long as the thrust of the argument carried weight. What mattered to him in any human interaction was precisely what had mattered to the master: an uncompromising intellectual honesty, in spite of the skepticism and relativism that is an inescapable aspect of modernity. “Wittgenstein,” he wrote, “was and remains the only thinker in whose philosophy the disparate currents of a Europe that in his lifetime was tragically divided were unified.”

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The man whose soft, precise voice with just the ghost of an accent greeted me was then at the height of his career. His smiling, slightly battered face seemed “lived-in,” even old to me, but I realize he was actually slightly younger than I am now. Peter always had the air of a man who knew what he was talking about, thanks to the unfathomable depths of erudition that he wore lightly but brought to bear whenever necessary. Along with the enviable attention to language acquired from Wittgenstein, he believed in close reading, an art he had learned from, among others, F. R. Leavis. Any essay in criticism under the name of J. P. Stern is certain to be a superb dissection of the text in question. It is, however, equally certain to be much more than an analysis of the author’s meaning. For another of Peter’s cardinal influences was the American critic Lionel Trilling, whom he had known well from his spells as a visiting professor at Cornell University. Trilling’s books, from The Liberal Imagination (1950) to Sincerity and Authenticity (1975), opened my eyes to the possibilities of “the higher criticism”, and especially to what Trilling called “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” What animated Trilling was not just textual scholarship, but the role of ideas in shaping society. W. H. Auden called it the “climate of opinion,” Michael Oakeshott “the voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind”—in short, the intellectual life. It was this ideal for which I lived, the infinite possibility that I believe Peter saw in me and recognized because he had sought to realize it in his own life and work. I was a kindred spirit; knowing that he saw me as such did more for my confidence than anything else—for this was not a privilege he conferred lightly on his students or anyone else. He had no time for false friends who ingratiated themselves in order to belittle others, such as the unnamed Austrian poet whom he quotes in his tribute to Wittgenstein: “But you know, my dear friend,” the man confided about Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy, “I must be quite honest, in the end, you know, aren’t all these just Jewish quibbles (“jüdische Tüfteleien”), don’t you think, dear friend?” Peter’s first book was a short study of Ernst Jünger (1953), the soldier-novelist best known for the war memoir Storm of Steel (1920) and the allegory of Nazism On the Marble Cliffs (1939). This monograph appeared in a series edited by Erich Heller, but Jünger piqued Stern’s lifelong interest in writers whose lives derived meaning from “the dear purchase,” a peculiarly German ideology

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that glorified heroic effort and sacrifice. Like Hitler, Jünger belonged to a generation traumatized in the trenches but who felt the need to universalize that trauma; unlike Hitler, he preserved enough humanity to reject the monstrous lie of the Third Reich despite serving in its armies. Later in life, however, Peter detected in Juˉnger’s prose the “continuity of war and peace which became the centrepiece of Hitler’s ideological programme.” In a rare use of the first person, he contrasts Jünger unfavourably with a much earlier German patriot, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Perhaps it doesn’t need saying that I regard Jünger’s ideology and the values he commends in The Storm of Steel as false, whereas I see Hölderlin’s patriotism as a serene benediction and a pious exhortation addressed to his country in a time of spiritual travail.” The next work in the Stern oeuvre had no obvious political agenda, but an implicit philosophical one. Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959) began life a decade earlier as a dissertation for which he received his PhD, the synthesis of many years’ research and the legacy of Wittgenstein. After taking his BA in 1945 and MA in 1947, Peter lectured at Bedford College London, before returning to Cambridge in 1951—the year of Wittgenstein’s death. Lichtenberg reflects his discussions with the philosopher, who treasured the aphorisms that Georg Christoph Lichtenberg scribbled down in his Notebooks (compiled 1765–99 but only published posthumously) as akin to his own “language games.” From these “scattered occasions” Peter constructed an “inverted Categorical Imperative,” in which each forms “a law unto itself . . . a little model of reality.” For Stern, the “central principle” of Lichtenberg (and Wittgenstein) is “an ‘absolute’ relativism.” This doctrine of scattered occasions had another source, too. For a period, his PhD was supervised by Michael Oakeshott, the political philosopher, who held a chair at the LSE but was also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. I met Oakeshott at the end of his life when he was fêted by American conservatives and even by the then prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. This time, he was in his late eighties: a twinkle-eyed, friendly old cove, still sharp but no longer writing or teaching. When Stern was his pupil, Oakeshott had been in his prime, writing the essays that were eventually collected under the title Rationalism in Politics (1991), the book that made him famous beyond a coterie of admirers. Stern was never part of that coterie, but

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he, too, was influenced by Oakeshott’s skeptical “pursuit of intimations,” his critique of the tendency to reduce politics, history, and life itself to abstractions. Lichtenberg being what we would call a scientist living at the zenith of the Enlightenment, he might seem an unlikely figure to juxtapose with Oakeshott or even Stern. But it is Lichtenberg the aphorist and critic rather than the mathematician, physicist, or astronomer who drew their attention. Lichtenberg’s “main experience in the world and in the world of ideas,” Stern wrote, was “his deep and consistent conviction that coherence, on either side of deliberate intention, can never be a criterion of truth; and that reality remains inaccessible save by way of scattered occasions.” These sentiments would have resonated strongly with Oakeshott, whose idealist epistemology interpreted the world through discrete and mutually exclusive modes of experience: history, science, art, and politics, which he prefers to call “practice.” For Oakeshott, a skeptical, empirical love of custom and tradition is built into human conduct and hence into our res publica; it is this that makes him a conservative, albeit of an entirely unideological kind. Was Peter also such a conservative? I always felt so: he was guarded in his political opinions, dismissive of parties and programs, positively hostile to the “braggadocio” of both extremes of the spectrum. But he was also liberal in the best sense: open-minded, cosmopolitan, and compassionate. In the background, no doubt, were the examples of his father, Gustav Stern (to whom Lichtenberg was dedicated), his fatherly friend, Erich Heller, and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein. All three, interestingly, had been admirers of Karl Kraus, the scourge of corruption and philistinism, whose periodical Die Fackel (“The Torch”) had held sway among the intelligentsia of Vienna and far beyond for nearly forty years. Kraus—who was the magazine’s editor, proprietor, and latterly sole contributor—had acted as the arbiter not merely of taste but of values; for many, he was the conscience of Vienna in unconscionable times. A brilliant, if caustic, aphorist himself, it was Kraus who had drawn Peter’s attention to Lichtenberg, observing: “Nobody digs deeper.” Both Kraus and Lichtenberg suffered from curvature of the spine: not only mavericks, they refused to allow their physical disabilities stop them. Kraus was, of course, no ordinary journalist, but a journalist he was, nonetheless. Perhaps Peter’s admiration for this genius of the higher journalism helped him to accept that this, and not academic life, would become my vocation, too.

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Indeed, Peter himself had a hankering after this kind of writing. He was an enthusiastic contributor to the London Review of Books (LRB), founded by his friend and UCL colleague Karl Miller. Some years after his death and occasioned by the publication of The Dear Purchase, I offered a review essay, embracing a full reassessment of Stern’s life and work, to the magazine. The LRB by then had long since parted company from Miller, moved sharply to the Left and no longer had a personal connection to Peter. They took a long time over publication, but eventually this overdue tribute appeared. However, the following issue carried a curt correction from Sheila, his widow: it was not the case, she wrote, that Peter had ever collaborated with Tom Stoppard on his adaptations for the London stage of Viennese plays by Schnitzler and Nestroy. I had introduced Stern to Stoppard at my parents’ house and, as I had hoped, these two natives of Prague got on famously. My assumption that Peter had later been consulted by Tom on these texts was ben trovato, but it never happened. What a pity he did not live to see Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt (2020), which melded so many of the themes of both men’s lives into an elegy for Central Europe that is at once the great playwright’s first tragedy and most probably his swansong. Peter himself wrote so much about that lost world it seems invidious to pick out a single passage. Most of his best writing in this field were collected after his death in The Heart of Europe: Essays on Literature and Ideology (1992). Included is his most personal essay, “A Crisis of Identity,” where he wrote about the murder of his uncle and aunt by the Germans on their Bohemian farm. Uncollected, though, is an article he wrote (at my suggestion) for The Times in 1990, just after he had returned to newly liberated Czechoslovakia for the first time in twenty-one years. In the midst of a piece of political analysis, there is this unforgettable vignette: It is almost half a century since the German occupation, yet the memory of those terrible years is never far away. Visiting a little country churchyard in Eastern Bohemia on a brilliant Sunday morning, I was shown around by the elderly verger. The chapel on the brow of the hill was in ruins, but the churchyard itself was well tended. He led me to the family grave I had come to visit, then pointed to a solitary gravestone: “We thought they too should be buried here.” The inscription on the rough granite contained no name, only a date in 1943 and five long numbers.

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“We found them at the bottom of the railway embankment. They were on their journey to the camps. The guards must have thrown them off the cattle trucks. All we ever found out about them were the numbers they had tattooed on them.” Peter was not merely a gifted journalist, but all his books were, conceptually and stylistically, the work of a born essayist. Both Reinterpretations (1962) and Idylls and Realities (1971) consisted of “studies” on themes in nineteenth-century German literature. His sole work of literary theory, On Realism (1973), is an extended essay. His book on Nietzsche began life as a slim paperback in the Fontana Modern Masters series, was extended as A Study of Nietzsche and further expanded in the German edition of 1983, with the subtitle, The Morality of the Utmost Strenuousness. In 1981, he co-authored with the classicist Michael Silk Nietzsche on Tragedy, a monograph on The Birth of Tragedy (1872). All of these “shots at the old target” (to paraphrase his inscription to me in one of them) were examples of the “doctrine of scattered occasions”: seemingly discrete insights that, taken together, add up to a unique portrait of the most “literary,” most aphoristic, and most widely read of all the German philosophers. In Nietzsche, Peter found the subject for which he was perfectly equipped. Yet, even this most influential of “modern masters” was not the supreme target at which he most wanted to take aim. That came only with his last book, The Dear Purchase (1995), which brought together his abiding preoccupation with the German ideology of sacrifice, strenuousness, and seriousness—a flawed tyranny of values from which only the unlikely pairing of Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka offered deliverance. I have already said something above about The Dear Purchase and much more elsewhere. But there is one of his books which I have not yet mentioned, even though it made perhaps the deepest impression on me: Hitler: The Führer and the People (1975). As a teenager visiting Bavaria in the mid-1930s, he had once glimpsed Hitler in the flesh and bore witness to the love affair of the German Volk with its Führer. Although he saw himself as a literary critic rather than a historian, here Peter subjected the latter’s raw material—Hitler’s speeches and table talk, transcripts of trials and interrogations, the entire panoply of Nazi ideology and propaganda— to rigorous scrutiny as documents of an intellectual as well as a

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political catastrophe. It had not escaped Peter’s notice that writers, artists, musicians, philosophers, and other intellectuals, including some of the first rank, had joined in the enthusiasm for Hitler and his “Third Reich”: some were loyal only at first, others until the bitter end. By the judicious use of the critical insights of other writers of the period—again, notably of Kafka—Stern was able to illuminate, with merciless precision, just what failures of moral courage or perversions of values had allowed Hitler, this outsider and adventurer, to subject an entire nation to his will. I still have a copy of the German edition of the Hitler book, which Peter gave me in January 1980, when I returned from Berlin to visit him in Cambridge. Here is how he inscribed it to me: “LW [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once remarked that there is real pleasure in a gift only when it is given absolutely—where the spirit in which it is given frees the recipient of worrying about it in case it gets lost. The book goes to you in this spirit.” The warmth, jocularity, and sincerity of these words is typical of the handful of Peter’s letters, postcards, and other items of memorabilia that I still possess. A few samples must suffice. On finishing a paper about relativity, he writes: “Me ’ead is steaming . . . I do, as the late W[alter] Kaufmann observed, live dangerously: A. Einstein, what next . . .” On a period of convalescence: “My dear Daniel, There is one thing abt this ‘episode’ that fills me with deep delight, & that is the gt kindness & affection I’ve become the object of from family, friends, colleagues, humbling & astonishing. You have brought cheer and now bring gifts—I am deeply grateful.” On one of my occasional reviews for the Times Literary Supplement: “Just a note to wish you a happy Easter and to say how well I liked your piece on Goethe in the TLS this morning, and how wise I thought it of you not to mention that very middling talk by [Karl Heinz] Bohrer.” (Three decades later, I met Professor Bohrer, finding him delightful and anything but “middling”—but that is another story.) Our correspondence is mostly scholarly and he pays me the compliment of assuming a great deal of knowledge that I probably lacked. Our conversation was likewise peppered with learning worn lightly, at least on his part. I was tested to the limit, challenged on every point, contradicted and corrected but with such grace and kindness that I scarcely realized what he was doing. Stern was not merely a teacher but a great teacher of teachers: a paper on a Goethe poem that he gave to a conference of German teachers was a case

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study in the then novel technique of “deconstruction”—“but by and large ‘our lot’ haven’t yet got to the point of Barthes objecting to de Man-ish ploys.” His aim was unspoken and his audience unaware, “yet they seemed to find it ‘interesting.’” The early 1980s was, with hindsight, the last gasp of a golden age for the humanities, before the combination of utilitarianism on the Right and philistinism on the Left contrived to turn academics into narcissists, more concerned with polishing their own pronouns than transmitting their own civilization. For three years—one in Berlin sandwiched between two in Cambridge—I was learning not only about several different disciplines, but simultaneously finding out who I was. The time came, however, when Peter realized that my thesis was not progressing as it should. He wrote me a kind but firm letter, asking me to explain what still needed to be done. I had been given a grant on the basis that the PhD must be completed as soon as possible; instead, I was spending my time writing about “this and that” for the TLS. “But you have, I think, chosen to pursue an academic rather than a journalistic career; I think it’s the right choice for you—feasible from yr subjective point of view, whatever the objective difficulties of the present time; & there is at least this much difference between the two, that the completion of a Gesellenstück [apprentice piece] called a PhD is, & I think is rightly, a sine qua non of the academic profession.” Peter was, of course, right about all of this, but he had trusted me too completely to know what was in my own best interest. By this time, my subject (“German Pessimism, 1870–1914”) had grown far beyond the scope of a PhD thesis and aspired to be a Geistesgeschichte, or intellectual history, of the German-speaking world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At some point in my time at Cambridge, he might have sat me down and gently explained that it would not do; that I must drastically curtail my ambitions and write a dissertation on a manageable scale within the timeframe that my modest finances allowed. I am tempted to say that he ought to have done so. But he trusted me to know myself better than I did. The inevitable happened: I ran out of money, took jobs elsewhere (one at a think tank, another at Queen Mary College (now University), London, and the goal of completion receded ever further. In his letter, Peter had, however, conceded that “you have a gift of fluent writing.” It was the first time he had said this; it made me realize that I could be a writer. He agreed and sent me to meet his

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contacts at the BBC. That came to nothing. I made one final effort to finish the PhD, spending a year in monastic isolation at a cottage in the Lake District, but the attempt failed. Looking back on that time, I was probably depressed, certainly repressed and extremely unhappy. On my return to London, I struggled to survive on what Peter had called “this and that.” I was invited to Princeton and gave a seminar to the history faculty, but no teaching job materialized. Finally, in 1986, I applied for a post as a leader writer at the Daily Telegraph. To my surprise, I got the job—only to find myself sent abroad the following year to be the paper’s Bonn Correspondent. Without ever quite deciding to do so, I had chosen a journalistic career rather than the academic one that Peter had seen as my vocation. It felt as if journalism had chosen me, not the other way round. It gave me a freedom to write that I had never felt as a research student, but for a long time it felt very much like second best. For a young man who had succeeded in most things, culminating in an Oxford First, this exclusion from the academic world was painful. I hesitated to contact Peter while reporting from Germany and later Eastern Europe—fearing that I must have disappointed him. There was, however, a consolation in all these dashed hopes, for him as well as for me. Peter had been born on the other side of the Iron Curtain. When it began to open, he was beside himself with excitement. And when he learned that his former pupil, by now the Telegraph’s Eastern Europe Correspondent, had played a small but important part in bringing down the Berlin Wall, he was deeply gratified, just as I felt profoundly vindicated. The most scholarly history of what happened on the night of November 9, 1989—The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Professor Mary Elise Sarotte—devotes not just a footnote but more than half a page to the question I asked at the Schabowski press conference and its consequences. I had played a part in the greatest event of postwar German history, perhaps even of world history. With hindsight, I can see that my whole life had been leading up to that moment and that I could not have done it without my years of friendship with Peter. One of the key Nietzsche quotations to which he had drawn my attention and which I never forgot was this: Nur als ästhetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt. (“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.”) That it came from The

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Birth of Tragedy only added to its resonance: for I saw German history in the twentieth century as irredeemably tragic and impossible to explain. Yet now something happened that did, in some sense, justify the people who, for the first time in history, took their destiny in their own hands, liberating and reuniting themselves. Peter Stern, whose Czech homeland had its own “Velvet Revolution” later that month (on which I also reported), felt overjoyed that he had lived to witness this consummation. I sensed this when I introduced Peter and Sheila to my wife, Sarah, and our firstborn son, Tycho. We stayed in touch and planned to meet again in Cambridge. It was not to be. Shortly before our planned visit, I spoke to Sheila and she warned me not to come: Peter was dying of terminal cancer. I had bought a special bottle of his favorite vintage hock for him, dating from the late 1970s when we had first met. Though he was never able to enjoy this wine, not even ambrosia from Elysium could compare with the intellectual feast he had set before those he left behind. As I write these words, almost thirty years to the day have passed since he died in November 1991. I missed him then and I miss him still. For me, his greatest legacy was to give me permission to become the person I had always been: that is, a writer of “this and that,” a questioner of those in authority, a proud adherent of the doctrine of scattered occasions.

18 George Steiner: Enchantment and Dissent Robert Boyers

When, as a second year graduate student at New York University, I first met George Steiner in early September of 1964, he had recently become quite famous—so it seemed to me—as the author of two major books and as the author of influential essays and reviews he had begun to publish in magazines like Commentary and Encounter. He was, to me, the very model of the man of letters, which is to say, erudite and self-confident, a scholar who was not content to be a narrow specialist, someone who could write for academic intellectuals and also for readers of the New York Times Book Review. Better yet, he was a European intellectual, a man who spoke several languages and refused to stay in his lane, or his place. Already he had ventured to write about subjects that most literary academics would have stayed well away from: about pornography and its effects upon our dreams and our speech; about the way the German language had suffered an irreversible decline as a result of the abuses to which the language had been subjected by propagandists, jurists, and journalists in the service of the Nazi regime; about Marxism and the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. Though I was all of twenty-two in 1964, I had read perhaps a dozen of Steiner’s essays and devoured both Tolstoy or Dostoyevski (1959) and The Death of Tragedy (1961). 171

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The only other teacher whose work I had read and admired when I entered her class was Hannah Arendt. I had signed up to take her year-long, two-semester class at the New School for Social Research as a paying auditor, knowing that hundreds of other auditors would join me in the assigned auditorium. In fact, protesters blocked the entrance to the building as we approached each week to enter and sit, as it were, at the feet of the great thinker, who had recently stirred enormous controversy with the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Strange it was, to move each week from Arendt’s lecture class on Monday evening to my Tuesday seminar with Steiner and his fellow teacher, the Irish scholar-diplomat Conor Cruise O’ Brien. Though Steiner and Arendt had certain interests in common— German literature, German philosophy, the Holocaust, Zionism, and the State of Israel—their styles, as writers, as teachers, as human beings, could not have been more different. It was not just that Steiner’s work had largely to do with language and literature, while Arendt’s had principally to do with political and philosophic matters. More to the point was that, while both went against the grain of received opinion and thus invited more than their fair share of rebuke and even derision, Arendt was a more sober writer, Steiner more given to theatrical flourishes. Rarely, when reading Arendt, did I want to stop and take down or memorize a sentence, whereas in reading Steiner (or hearing him lecture) I always felt that there were entire passages I simply had to commit to memory. Of course my class with Arendt was a lecture class set in a large auditorium, and I knew that in smaller classroom settings her approach would have been very different. Former students who studied with Arendt in seminars report that she held office hours and was “available,” though also “Intimidating . . . high-strung, uneasy, and quite unpredictable.” Though some found her a “forceful” speaker, Arendt was anything but a scintillating lecturer. She was the servant of ideas and a close and careful reader of Kant and other thinkers we studied together. If she was aware of us at all, her attention was occasional and intermittent. Though she often left her podium to pace up and down the aisles of the auditorium, she rarely looked up from the book she held in her hand and never fixed anyone with a look of challenge or concern. Only a few times in our thirty sessions did she take questions, and she seemed provoked only when someone asked her about the

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Eichmann book and she was forced to say that we were not gathered together to discuss that. In her demeanor there was no solicitation, no discernible curiosity as to what we might have made of her remarks on the faculty of judgment or on the indescribability of particular mental states. Astonishing therefore that like others in the room I felt that this was one of the most important experiences of my life, and that however lacking she was in apparent charismatic aura—especially by comparison with Steiner—she steadily communicated a passion for ideas that would never leave me. Very much like Steiner, in fact, she awakened in me the sense that what mattered most to her, as our teacher, was that we love the search for truth and feel always moved to question everything—our tenderest sentiments and our burning antipathies. No one could ever have imagined that Steiner was indifferent to the effect he produced. Like Arendt he was in thrall to the works he shared with us, and absorbed with questions he knew to be unusually demanding. But he regarded the classroom as a site of encounter and, more than occasionally, of struggle. He was determined to summon from his students not only an exacting, scrupulous attention to language and context but a willingness to probe and, where necessary, resist what they were offered. Nothing pleased him more than the moment when a student would challenge a proposition in Nietzsche or Schopenhauer and, under friendly or hostile fire from Steiner, refuse to abandon the objection. Chief among the effects he produced was the atmosphere of simmering controversy he did his best to fuel. Never was there any question as to who was in charge in Steiner’s classroom, or as to who among us was most equipped to answer any question and parry any thrust. And yet Steiner invited his students to meet him, if at all possible, not as subordinates but as co-conspirators sworn, as it were, to risk everything in the effort to get to the bottom of a passage, an idea, an irresolvable dispute. That sense of Steiner, as co-conspirator, was more than improbable. He was, after all, a world-class ball-buster. He took pleasure in demanding of us what few students anywhere could have furnished. No, I was not “fully conversant with recent developments in psycholinguistics.” Nor could I translate “into English prose, if you please,” the twelve or fifteen lines of a Heine poem Professor Steiner had just recited (from memory, of course) to our class. Nice to know that I

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was not alone in “failing to cite” my sources when I alluded to an anomaly we had discussed a week earlier, though it was hard not to feel that in Steiner I would always confront someone alert to the smallest errors or oversights. My first encounter with Steiner took place in early September 1964 at the bar in the One Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan. He and his illustrious colleague, the Irish diplomat and author Conor Cruise O’ Brien, were to interview me for a seat in a New York University Graduate Seminar on the literature of the European political Right. At once it was obvious that George spoke with a brusque, sometimes abrasive confidence. In our weekly seminar sessions, it seemed to me that he had read (and remembered) everything and to have thought every thought. With little warning, he came out with lengthy quotations: passages from Hegel, or Kierkegaard, entire poems by Goethe or Baudelaire or Browning. He was always one or two steps ahead of anyone in the room, springing nimbly from one idea to another, enlarging a point you had made. Often at the front of his utterances were the words “of course.” OF COURSE we knew that it was “the brutal oversimplification” at the root of certain texts that made them so seductive. OF COURSE you understood that Keats’s equation of truth and beauty could not be demonstrated in the sphere of music. OF COURSE you’d considered that, where it is mutually attained, orgasm is a kind of simultaneous translation. In our initial interview, George expressed astonishment that I had applied for a seat in the seminar without having a mastery of German. “But we’ll be reading everything in English translation, George,” said Conor, “and it’s clear the boy has read his Nietzsche and even his Doctor Faustus. My God, George, but I can tell that he’s even been reading you.” More than a little nervous about spending two semesters in the company of the formidable Steiner, my fears were entirely plausible. There were several moments when George would suddenly ask me to respond to a passage he quoted, from Novalis, or Schopenhauer, in their original German. “But Professor Steiner,” I would say, pathetic and embarrassed, “you do recall surely that at our interview I made it very clear that I had a less than elementary command of German.” “That he did, George,” said Conor, “and I dare say not more than one or two others at this table would be able to do what you’re asking of Boyers.” “Hard to believe,” George insisted, “that Boyers and those others would take up seats at the table when there

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were so many who applied and were turned away.” “I’m afraid you’ll just have to live with it, George,” said Conor, “and we will all have to live with you, won’t we?” Three years after the seminar, I asked Steiner—soon he would be “George”—to write something for a special issue of Salmagundi magazine on “The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals,” and soon after that we became improbable friends. He wrote frequently for Salmagundi—fifteen essays over the years—and for more than five decades my wife and I saw him at least once a year, in New York, in London, in Rome, and elsewhere. Twice each month for more than fifty years we exchanged letters. Often George came to Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, at my invitation, participating in conferences and delivering memorable lectures on subjects ranging from Antigone to “The Dreyfus Case” and “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” I repeat that our friendship was, in several respects, improbable. George was a haute Européen intellectual who rightly regarded me as hopelessly American, in spite of my efforts to absorb and even write about the work of demanding European thinkers and writers. Though often George was encouraging about the books and articles I wrote, he could also be withering, as when I wrote for The New Republic an ungenerous review of Thomas Bernhard’s novel, The Loser (1983), and George fired off a scolding letter, asking how I could have thought myself a suitable reviewer for such a work. When a favorable review of my early book on Lionel Trilling appeared on the front page of the TLS in 1976, George wrote to ask why neither I nor the reviewer, John Bayley, had noted my failure to address the “obviously central” question of Trilling’s ambivalent relation to things Jewish. George was always in the eye of one storm or another. He attracted criticism of a peculiarly virulent kind. Even among friends of mine who were in awe of his learning and panache there was a tendency to laugh at his flamboyance, his willingness to come out with just the thing certain to astonish, his sheer chutzpah. Where a writer like Susan Sontag often drew criticism for saying things incendiary and willfully provocative (“the white race is the cancer of human history”), George’s detractors frequently accused him of taking on subjects and issues he could not possibly have mastered (“The notion that one can exercise a rational literacy . . . without a

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knowledge of calculus, without some preliminary access to topology or algebraic analysis, will soon seem a bizarre archaism”). But then George really did impress scholars of Russian literature with his book on Tolstoy or Dostoyevski, in spite of his having no Russian. He did seem to classical scholars to write a more than firstrate book about Antigone (1984) without the formal training of a classicist. He did write a compelling and credible book on Heidegger (1979) for the Fontana Modern Masters series without having the credentials of an academic philosopher. His After Babel (1975) was the best book ever written on the subject of translation. At international symposia his sustained reflections on the Hebrew Bible, on the relation between the last supper of Socrates and the last supper of Jesus were central to the debates conducted by biblical scholars. And yet there were always attacks, and really I never knew how much they stayed with him, never knew him to answer them. George understood that he was a very public intellectual, and that many would necessarily envy his position as regular book reviewer for The New Yorker and as a scholar-critic whose books would routinely reach an audience far larger and wider than anything most academics could dream of. One afternoon, at a Harvard University seminar table surrounded by six or seven academics, George was asked whether he was as conversant with the major Christian theologians as his casual allusions would suggest. Try me, George said, and proceeded then to speak with admirable fluency of Pascal and Kierkegaard, of Augustine and Aquinas. After his lecture to a large audience that night, as we went off to a late dinner, George asked me whether I thought he’d be forgiven for moving in one day from “the theologians” to the “literary matters” he’d discussed that evening. In fact he was frequently not forgiven for his range, his learning, his audacity. In England especially he was often derided for the breadth of his interests and his willingness to take on just about any subject. But there were many leading scholars and intellectuals around to defend him, and often his books were received with enormous admiration. Even Edward Said, who was pleased to inventory his faults, wrote that “they were not the disabilities of mediocrity.” In fact, Steiner had been “a brilliant reproach” to his critics, and he was, without question, “that rare thing, a critic

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propelled by diverse enthusiasms, a man able to understand the implications of trends in different fields, an autodidact for whom no subject is too arcane.” Clearly Said was in earnest when he wrote that the standard nasty things routinely directed at George by his detractors were “the least important” things one might say of him or his work. Was he a strange bird? He was, but then “Steiner is to be read for his quirks, rather than in spite of them,” and it was no small thing that he wrote also “to be understood by non-specialists.” It was a major strength that “his terms of reference” were “trilingual, eccentric and highly urbane,” and that he took his lead from nothing “as stable as doctrine or authority.” There was, in Steiner, “a Tory disregard for specialization that is in very short supply,” and the least one might also say is that he “occupies an honorable position on that rapidly disappearing terrain between the ivory tower and the darkling plain.” Over the years George and I often differed in our sense of things, and once or twice we debated our differences on public platforms and in print. Even early on, in my class sessions with George, he exhibited what seemed to me an uncommon tendency to capitulate to a reading or an agenda dictated by facts and portents that didn’t clearly add up. He was perhaps unduly disposed to be awed by what he took to be the prevailing signs of cultural or spiritual decline in a text, to read into them large meanings and predictive patterns. His disposition was, to be sure, very much present in the thought of other major thinkers, from Nietzsche and Theodor Adorno to Thomas Bernhard and Paul Celan. And, of course, there was much to be learned by traveling with George and those other thinkers to dark places. But was it true, as George wished us to believe, that the vitality of a culture is best measured by the masterpieces produced under its auspices, or—much more important—that a prevailing sense that we live in what Pound called “a botched civilization” will doom other makers and thinkers to mediocrity? In later years, when we’d go over these matters at dinner or on a long train journey, he would occasionally acknowledge that temperament determines, to a considerable degree, our inclinations to read the available portents in one way rather than another. As an American, George would say, you’re bound to be an optimist. That is a given of your own disposition. To which I could only respond by saying that George was again setting in place a kind of determinism. I was bound to be. I was an American who must therefore. These

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formulas, I said, really do go to the heart of our differences. After all, I’m an American who studied with George Steiner. Who teaches After Babel and Language and Silence (1967). Temperament matters, yes, but the recourse to “temperament” could only be preliminary and provisional. I would not allow that my inveterate optimism, such as it was, had blinded me to reality. And neither would I allow that George saw only what he was determined to see. Always I admired in George a willingness to contend with opponents and to invite expressions of misgiving. Brash and often sweeping in his pronouncements, he was never merely opinionated, never proceeded as if he expected students or audiences to simply fall into line. In fact, he was a great and courteous debater even when paired with opponents who thought to cut him down to size. Always civil, he had arousing and memorable public exchanges with writers and thinkers as contentious as Noam Chomsky and Christopher Hitchens. But George did not teach merely to arouse contention or to provoke his students to alarm or unease. He grew substantially over his decades in the classroom, and I was grateful for a week I spent with him in 1990 at the University of Geneva, where he had taught for many years. George had several reasons for inviting me to Geneva, but he wanted especially for me to “witness” his Shakespeare seminar, though “seminar” was hardly an appropriate term for such a class. In fact, this seminar was offered in an auditorium that held more than 600 people, and it was filled to capacity. Of those present, only thirty or so were students enrolled in the comparative literature program, and of those a number were also students in George’s more intimate seminar in twentieth-century German language and literature. The overwhelming majority of the students in the Shakespeare seminar were assorted academics, politicians, lawyers, physicians, poets, and business people. Nothing casual about the setting, in spite of the motley assortment of participants As I scanned the room, I saw that each held in hand the same compact edition of Othello. George had already arrived at the lectern by the time I was brought to a seat by two of his graduate students, and he was engaged in conversation with two colleagues, waiting for the 9:30 a.m. start time. I expected from George a lecture to kick things off, but this was not to be an occasion for lecturing. Though George knew that his reputation as a thrilling lecturer had originally attracted much of the audience, he was

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determined not to deliver the very thing that would have seemed most predictable, especially with so vast an audience spread across a large auditorium. In fact, George had decided to handle the Shakespeare class somewhat in the way he taught smaller classes. The approach was a combination of close reading and encounter. The improbable experience on offer was face-to-face exchange. Honest teaching, in George’s sense of it, inevitably entailed a strenuous process in which amendment and rebuttal, questions and objections, were at least possible, the student attentive and thus answerable, poised to respond even if, in that auditorium, only a handful of responses might be summoned. With Othello open in his hand, George led us all through a few pages of the text, reading aloud, pausing over particular words or phrases, questioning his own take on an anomaly or apparent obscurity in the language. Throughout, each student was made to feel that nothing could be more important than the close reading we had been invited to perform. Hands went up, at least a dozen students spoke, some from the far reaches of the room. Only years later, in hearing George’s Norton Lectures at Harvard (The Lessons of the Masters, 2003) did I have language—George’s language—adequate to capture the felt power of this experience. “A Master invades, he breaks open,” George wrote in those Norton Lectures, and in fact he did break open each person in that Geneva room, opened us to intensities of feeling and sometimes uncomfortable thoughts. Above all, he drew from each of us an uncommon persistence of attention, communicating to us the sense that we were not mere onlookers at a spectacle belonging only to certified masters, or to scholarship. No one seated or standing in that room could feel in any degree remote from the work we were called to do. Here was a community devoted to an exercise in sheer, pleasurable, unremitting exertion. Most often the exertion was applied to the unriddling of sentences, the savoring of improbable locutions, the leap from the text before us to another that would provide further illumination. George’s persistent “you will recall” in this setting was a summons to his hundreds of “regulars” to remember other semesters in which they had studied together Lear or Hamlet or Twelfth Night. Is this a moment, George asked, when Othello betrays an inner being? Is it our conviction that we are throughout in touch with that inner being? To which, first one woman, then another, responded by recalling George’s sessions on Hamlet a year earlier, when they had

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concluded that the prince himself shows only an opaque and impenetrable surface. Whereas with Othello, said the older woman, you never feel that there is within him merely a void, a nothing, that he masks his inner being as Hamlet does. Am I right, Professor Steiner, more or less? This in turn led George to further juxtapose the two plays, the two characters. Is it not the case, asked George, that for Hamlet the women have no human reality, that for him both Ophelia and Gertrude are in effect private symbols for his own detestation of the world—whereas one can say no such thing about Othello’s relation to Desdemona, who enjoys a symbolic status, certainly, and yet is very much for her husband a flesh-and-blood reality. To have no sense of that difference, as between the one character and the other in their respective views of the women in their lives, was to miss an essential component of both plays. Also striking—so it seemed to me—was George’s summons to us to consider whether in Othello there was, anywhere, a place for joy. Was it fair to say that even in this work the darkness is not absolute? Might we together identify in the text, somewhere, a pulse of humor or lightness? He wanted, George said, to suggest that, however unrelenting the darkness, there is in tragedy some prospect of alleviation, or if not that, then at least recompense. And if that might be so, where, he asked us, would that be found, here, in the work before us? Might it be here, in this passage—which he read aloud—or in this one? Decidedly he was not thinking merely of the fact that a character like Cassio would go on to govern Cyprus more efficiently than Othello. That was not the kind of recompense George would have us consider. And so, what then? An instigation fruitfully met by each of us. In a way I had not appreciated many years earlier when I had been George’s graduate student, he taught now as one who thought himself both learner and messenger, scholarly exemplar and friend. To my surprise, I saw in George’s responses to students, even in that improbably large auditorium, that he came across as a mensch. A maestro companionable and yet exigent. To be sure, he was fabulously learned. And yet as he moved about the lectern, often meeting our eyes, he was clearly someone for whom everything that transpired was deeply personal. His unpacking of the text had no slightest trace in it of mere pedantry. This master wanted not

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disciples but a wide circle of communicants sharing their not-sosecret passion in what felt like a sacred space. At the reception that followed the morning session I got to speak with a good many people. A handful were students I’d met the day before at George’s Tuesday seminar. But most of those I met were older people—age range forty to sixty, one or two older—many of them traveling to Geneva each week expressly to attend George’s Shakespeare class. Some flew in or took the train from Paris or Milan and cities in other European countries, settling in at their Geneva hotels on Tuesday evenings and planning to return to their home countries that evening or later in the week. Several spoke of having attended the Shakespeare sessions for a decade and of hoping to persist through all thirty-seven plays. They were knowledgeable about their teacher’s work and thought him the ideal instructor. Though most of them had known him only in the one setting, they thought of George as a comrade-in-arms, a partner in an enterprise they would not have undertaken without him. An older man, a Parisian, introduced himself to me as a corporate lawyer who had always wanted to return to the study of Shakespeare and found in George a teacher who made him feel adequate to the task. Nothing in this, the lawyer said, to make you feel superfluous, that there are the real scholars and then, on the other side, the lumpen types whose views and insights no one would care to solicit. No, this was, so the lawyer and others told me, as close to an ideal community of learners as they could imagine. My wife and I spent days, sometimes weeks, with George, in several countries, over many years, and often I met people who wondered at our friendship and at my unstinting admiration for someone who could be “difficult.” Occasionally I would respond to such people by stating, simply, that Steiner was an irresistibly compelling thinker, a loyal friend, and, not incidentally, a great writer who had written a masterwork called After Babel and several other major books. What I did not often mention was that the opposition to Steiner was typically fueled by envy, or willful misunderstanding, or worse. Even when I was his student in 1964, I was aware that George had been the object of nastiness and acrimony when, as a young man, he taught at Cambridge University some years earlier. About those times, George did not wish to speak, even when pressed, but that they had an enormous impact upon him no one can doubt. Once I reminded George that the first letters

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I had sent him, soon after my graduate student years, were addressed to Professor George Steiner at Churchill College, so that he had to inform me that he was not at that time a professor, and that I was not to post letters to the Churchill College address using that term. A long and unhappy story, he wrote to me, promising to fill in the details at some future time. Later on, as an occasional visitor to Cambridge, with no previous experience of Oxbridge life, I found it hard to imagine the atmosphere of late-sixties and early-seventies conflict, when the barbs were flying and accusations of anti-Semitism were very much in the Cambridge air. George’s disappointment had to do with the fact that he was never offered a professorial or university appointment, in spite of his enormous following as a lecturer at Churchill College and his fame as a scholar and writer. For many in the Cambridge scene this was a scandal, and it was much discussed in common rooms and written up in the English newspapers. Had George made it clear that he regarded much that transpired in the humanities at Cambridge as narrow and provincial? He had. Did he routinely deride the tendency among English literary academics to limit their researches and their curricula to Englishlanguage works and to exclude from the curriculum the study of comparative literature? He did. Was it not his practice to challenge the academic status quo by insisting that his literature students become fully conversant with the works of Marx, Freud, Levi-Strauss, and other thinkers like George Lukacs and Walter Benjamin? It was. So that it cannot have been surprising to learn that among some of those who might have moved to confer a professorial appointment George had seemed the wrong sort of fellow. That he was regarded as “unclubbable” and “foreign” was often remarked, and such epithets appeared in stories devoted to the Steiner affair at Cambridge. But such epithets always struck me as anything but innocent, and I wondered what lay behind a little joke I heard one evening at a dinner with the critic Erich Heller, who told me that in English academic circles George was frequently referred to as “the Jewish Isaiah Berlin.” Funny, to be sure, and yet troubling, as Erich himself agreed. For Berlin was another kind of Jewish intellectual, one who had charmed his British hosts at Oxford and in the larger British political establishment. He was an independent thinker whose views were sensible and reliably liberal. Like George a great talker, he managed not to be a bore and yet not to provoke or offend. Like

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others in his cohort, he thought George electric and brilliant, but also too much. Even George’s learning he thought extravagant— extravagant in the way it was paraded. Though of course Berlin would not have said so quite so baldly, George clearly seemed to him to call too much attention to his passions, his unorthodox ideas, his obsession with the Holocaust and things Jewish. To those for whom George was “the Jewish Isaiah Berlin” he was somehow unassimilable, never quite “our kind,” always uncomfortably “foreign.” His tendency to work outwards from particular literary instances to what he called “the far reaches of moral and political argument” seemed to his detractors a fault, an over-reaching, unbecoming to one who wished to hold a secure position in a fully decent and settled community of moderate strivers. Of course, it is impossible to know what posterity will make of a body of work, or of a writer whose habit was to stick his neck out and to venture into territory others avoided. But I am certain that George wrote four or five first-rate books and two or three dozen essays that seemed indispensable to many of the best minds of his generation. And he was, at his best, a great and unforgettable teacher. Terrence Des Pres said of him that it was his habit “to push to, and then beyond, frontiers of established scholarship. Outrageous speculation is, for him, standard practice, often with splendid results.” James Wood noted that George was always “much more open to new work, in various languages, than is usual among English-language critics,” and he recalled that “there are people who speak happily of their years at Cambridge University in the sixties, when Steiner filled lecture rooms and burrowed into his cellular erudition, prompting students to discover writers who were hardly known to them.” All of this is true to my own experience of George, who was especially pleased to be described as an inspired teacher of reading and a man who aspired to demonstrate what Des Pres called the centrality of “creative distortion” in reading deeply.

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19 Class Struggle: Donald Davie at Stanford Dana Gioia

I have taken only one poetry writing workshop in my life. It happened while I was at the Stanford Business School. If that seems odd, it is because everything about my two years in business school was unusual. I had decided to get an MBA in order to be a poet. I planned to work during the day and write at night. My decision seemed misguided to my friends and family, but to me it had the virtue of simplicity. My double life began as soon as I started Biz School. I spent three hours each day reading or writing before starting my assigned classwork. My plan had one complication. It wasn’t the obvious difficulty of pursuing two different careers simultaneously. That part was manageable as long as I stayed focused. The complication involved artistic guidance. Stanford Business School provided excellent preparation for the corporate world, but the MBA curriculum failed to include poetry. I had to learn to write on my own, and I needed a mentor. By either luck or destiny, the person I wanted most was actually at Stanford. I had never met him. He was the English poet Donald Davie. Davie’s reputation has dimmed in the twenty-five years since his death in 1995, but when I first studied with him in 1975, he was probably the most eminent poet-critic in British letters. Davie’s 185

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reviews and essays appeared frequently on both sides of the Atlantic. His major critical books, Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), Articulate Energy (1955), Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), and Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972), had enormous influence in academic studies. “No other British poet to emerge since 1945,” Barry Alpert declared, “has a body of criticism to compare to Davie’s.” Eventually publishing 18 volumes of verse, he was also a central poet in “The Movement,” a contrarian school of postwar British poets. In Poetry 1900–1965 (1967), George MacBeth declared Davie was “widely regarded as the second most important member of the group” after Philip Larkin. Reviewing Davie’s New and Selected Poems (1961), Thom Gunn called him “one of the best three English poets of his generation.” These sentiments may not be widely shared today, but they matched my estimate at the time. It pains me now to list Davie’s credentials so coldly. Most American readers no longer recognize his name. Before business school, I had been a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Harvard. I had known with passionate certitude that I wanted to be a poet-professor: I would teach literature and write poems. The double career seemed a natural combination of two fields with nearly identical interests and values. But youth is fallible, at least my youth. At Harvard I realized how different the two careers had become. Academic scholarship had always been an elite enterprise, but in the seventies it had begun its great ideological awakening under the spell of French and German theory. The new trends were interesting, but they came at the steep cost of making literary studies more remote and recondite. My sense of literature was more democratic. I had no interest in writing poetry or prose that excluded the intelligent common reader. The university was no longer the right place for my ambition. Outside of academia, however, there was no obvious career path. I agonized over my future—that’s what grad students do best. Finally, I grasped a basic fact about being an artist that has guided me ever since. Part of a creative life is the necessity to create—and constantly revise—your own life. My future needed a major revision. The most natural way young writers clarify their ambitions is by meeting other writers. Each encounter proffers different possibilities. This method, however, had not worked for me. I had met few real writers. I was a working-class kid from Los Angeles. Most of the people I grew up among—Mexicans and Sicilians—didn’t even

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speak English as a native language. I worked menial jobs full-time in the summer and part-time during the school year. I had met professors at Stanford and Harvard, but they were career-minded scholars, not writers in the sense I needed. My only genuine writer friend was forty years older—Elizabeth Bishop. We often met at a teashop in the afternoon, but we never talked about poetry. She was a persuasive example but not a mentor. I was on my own. In the meantime, I had a Road to Damascus moment. It happened in a graduate seminar led by Harry Levin, the senior eminence of Harvard’s Comparative Literature program. His course examined the ways in which American and European writers had defined and often reinvented themselves in relation to one another. In his tailored suits, starched white shirts, and silk ties, the elderly Levin looked more like a diplomat than a professor. Visibly frail, he whispered in long, elegant sentences. No professor ever conveyed more diverse information with such easy charm. Levin spent the first hour of each session lecturing on that week’s trans-Atlantic topic—Henry James, Mrs. Trollope, Charles Baudelaire, or T. S. Eliot. Then tea was brought into the room by the department secretary Bette Anne Farmer—a courtesy that half a century later still impresses me. After tea was served, a student was required to lecture on some case of European-American literary relations. One week a classmate talked about the differences between contemporary English and American poetry, a subject I had never considered. She outlined two different aesthetics of poetry—one closed and conventional, the other open and explorative. She illustrated her point by reading two poems aloud. Her first example was British, “Poetry of Departures” by Philip Larkin. The second was a short sequence by Gary Snyder whose title I have forgotten. She had a strong point of view: Larkin’s constricted, formal verse was inferior to the innovative, generative power of Snyder’s free verse. The point was lost on me. When I heard, without any warning, Larkin’s poem, I froze in my chair. I had never read any Larkin, but whoever loved that loved not at first hearing? “Poetry of Departures” was funny, fresh, and painfully true. Snyder had written a fine nature poem, but Larkin offered a revelation about everyday social existence. I had never encountered a poem about having a life and job which one simultaneously hated and needed. Larkin did everything current American poetics declared wrong. He rhymed, dealt in abstractions, and explored a quotidian middle-class subject:

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Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand, As epitaph: He chucked up everything And just cleared off, And always the voice will sound Certain you approve This audacious, purifying, Elemental move. And they are right, I think. We all hate home And having to be there: I detest my room, Its specially-chosen junk . . . That awful mess was my life, too! I was enthralled. I had no idea who Larkin was, but I recognized mon semblable, mon frère. After class I crossed Massachusetts Avenue to the Grolier Bookshop. Larkin’s poetry proved to be out of print in the US, so I specialordered two paperback collections from England. Then I went to Lamont Library, found “Poetry of Departures,” and committed it to memory. Around the same time I heard Larkin fantasize about “walking out on the whole crowd,” I decided to leave Harvard. Being an academic was the wrong path for me. I had no idea what the right course might be, but two things were clear. I needed to make a living, and it wouldn’t be teaching in a university. I had to find a way of writing while holding a regular job. After years of retail sales and manual labor, I was ready for an office job. But why start at the bottom? I’d been there long enough already. So, I decided to go to Business School. My professors were horrified. Quitting a PhD program for Law School was a sad but respectable outcome, but no doctoral candidate left for business school—a venal and vulgar choice. Even my cash-strapped parents disapproved. My mother used one of her favorite words to describe my decision—“asinine.” Meanwhile I read about Larkin and the Movement. The group included Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, Thom Gunn, and Elizabeth Jennings with the historian Robert Conquest as ringleader. The Movement poets were smart, ironic, and skeptical of artistic pretension. They used rhyme and meter but in fresh and contemporary

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ways. Sign me up, I thought. Besides Larkin, the Movement writer who interested me most was Davie, the tough-minded poet-critic of the group. I already knew his book on Ezra Pound and had read some of his poems. He was exactly the sort of writer I wanted to become. Now Davie was located only a few hundred yards from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Between Cost Accounting and Corporate Finance, I had a free hour, which coincided with Davie’s graduate survey of “Eighteenth-Century Poetry”—not the most popular topic then or now. I decided to audit the class. “Audit” is probably the wrong word. I didn’t ask permission. I just showed up and sat in the back row. There were about twenty students in the course. None seemed excited to be there; most were satisfying an historical coverage requirement for their degrees. I was the lone volunteer, but my enthusiasm made up for their collective apathy. I had spent the previous hour in Cost Accounting. I make these lengthy introductory comments to explain the inordinate, perhaps even unhealthy, intensity of interest I brought to Davie’s class. Having abandoned my idée fixe of being a poetprofessor, I had to put my passion somewhere. It didn’t fit into Business School. I never did more than the minimum to pass my MBA courses. (A former straight-A student, I now appreciated how casually most people drift through school.) Meanwhile I tried to formulate a second life, mostly hidden from my peers. Davie was the catalyst I needed. So I became an intellectual stalker. I won’t apologize. No one was going to invite me into literary life. Writers make their own destiny, and there is a madness in young poets that polite behavior can’t satisfy. In my defense, I didn’t sneak into Davie’s lectures unprepared. I not only did all the course work, I also read the Stanford Library’s copies of his early collections, Brides of Reason (1955) and A Winter Talent (1957). I admired their precise and disciplined style. His verse was, to use his own formulation, “crisp, supple, and responsible.” Usually written in rhymed quatrains, the poems displayed a combination of intelligence and learned wit that I found attractive. A neutral tone is nowadays preferred. And yet, it may be better, if we must, To praise a stance impressive and absurd Than not to see the hero for the dust.

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Meanwhile I pored over Davie’s two provocative and powerfully argued studies of poetic technique, Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952) and Articulate Energy (1955), and I devoured his revisionist survey of twentieth-century verse, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972). It is impressive how much one can learn at university if one ignores the required schoolwork. I knew Davie on the page. Now I would observe the author in his natural habitat— the classroom. Davie was an owlish man of medium height and build, grown heavy from lack of exercise. His skin was pale and sallow from smoking. He seemed older than his fifty-three years. Nothing about his appearance seemed right for Stanford. His short wavy hair was combed back straight with oily brilliantine. His semi-rimmed eyeglasses were twenty years out of style. He dressed like a minor civil servant who aimed at minimal respectability. He wore a rumpled sports coat, a polyester tie, and an off-white shirt with a woven pattern. The combination of colors was simultaneously drab and discordant. Davie stood awkwardly at the small podium waiting for the campus carillon to ring the hour. Then he spoke. Suddenly his physical presence changed. The soft, dowdy figure solidified into a man of authority. He drew the room’s attention. Davie was neither a stirring nor inspirational speaker; his effect was calming and reassuring. He radiated steady intelligence and careful concern. Appropriately for a course on the Augustan age, he personified reasonability—a necessary posture because his ideas so often differed from the consensus. Raised in the “Dissenting Church” by the descendants of seventeenthcentury Protestants who left the Anglican establishment, Davie had become a dissenter from the current age. His ancestry and upbringing had fashioned an austere sensibility alien to California’s easy abundance. It’s a chosen North of the mind I take my bearings by A stripped style and a wintry. Davie had the ability—indeed the compulsion—to consider both sides of every issue. Whatever he endorsed, he qualified. He advocated Modernism, for instance, while questioning many of its key assumptions. He scrupulously distanced himself from every

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literary group with which he had become associated. His brief memoir of the Movement is mostly a list of the reasons why he did not belong to the group that made him famous. He was fair, reasonable, and often self-defeating—a man who refused to stay on the winning side. He was eccentric in the core sense of the word. He did not have the same center as other writers. I’m not sure what I’d expected in that classroom, but it wasn’t the curious performance that unfolded. Davie assigned two small anthologies, both edited by himself—Augustan Lyric (1974) and The Late Augustans (1958). I had assumed the course would cover key works by the major authors, but Davie took an idiosyncratic and Puritanical (with a very capital P) view of the period. Dissenting from the critical consensus, he never mentioned Alexander Pope or Jonathan Swift; indeed, he relegated most of the standard figures to the margins. Instead, Davie spent most of the term analyzing Christian hymns. His central Augustan poets were Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and William Cowper. “I have tried to take ‘lyric’ in a narrower sense,” he declared in his introduction to Augustan Lyric, “to mean a poem composed either to match an existing piece of music or in the expectation and hope of a musical setting being contrived for it.” Those are Davie’s italics; he wanted no one to miss his revisionist definition of the lyric mode. Few will dispute the accuracy of his adjective “narrower.” His Augustan lyric canon embraced “Rule, Britannia!” and “Welcome Cross,” while ignoring almost everything not written in hummable short stanzas. Davie made no attempt to make the pious material interesting. The students sat in stultified silence. No one ever asked a question. Dull as it was, I loved the class—and not just because it got me out of Biz School. I was starved for the living human presence of someone who took poetry seriously. It didn’t matter if I disagreed with his perspective; twice a week I heard Davie expatiate on poetry and poetics. In Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), Davie delineated a key element in his aesthetic, the “chaste” style—the use of plain diction and subdued rhetoric so that a poem’s language was never in excess of its meaning. This didn’t just apply to the Augustan period. Criticizing Wallace Stevens’s flamboyant early poetry, Davie had remarked, “I think the very greatest poetry is more chaste, less florid than this . . . I prefer an ethic more austere, a heroism less confounded with ‘panache.’” That preference was the guiding principle of his course. It is hard to banish panache from Augustan poetry, but Davie managed.

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“Artists are the antennae of the race,” declared Ezra Pound, and my youthful antennae were aquiver. Why did Davie teach such monotonous material in a joyless way? No one that bright was so dull by accident. Gradually I discerned the personal subtext of the class. The lectures were only partially about poetry. They were also coded monologues about Davie’s earlier life in England and current exile in America. His devotional curriculum was a painful meditation on his origins as an English Baptist. Calvin Bedient once described Davie’s conscience as “almost dramatically self-divided, it contains its own principles of self-correction.” I don’t misrepresent the class by describing Davie’s lectures as penitential exercises in selfexamination performed, only half-disguised, in public. Davie’s articulate advocacy did not enlarge my appreciation of Watts’s “The Hardy Soldier” or Cowper’s “Love Constraining to Obedience.” Stripped of their tunes, these mighty hymns had little poetic presence on the page. I began, however, to understand this brilliant but fretful man. The pain of Davie’s spiritual hunger was tangible. I should have guessed that he was in the process of reembracing Christianity—a slow, complex, and self-conscious journey in his case. He later confided that his move to America had brought him unexpectedly into the Church of England (the consummation of spiritual questions that had begun years earlier at Cambridge). His renewed Christianity produced numerous books, essays, and poems over the next twenty years. Paradoxically, it also cultivated a cultural insularity at odds with his international literary sympathies. Christianity is a universal religion: it calls all humanity to salvation. Davie’s revivified faith, however, had the effect of making his worldview more English. No Blakean vision of a New Jerusalem lured Davie. His spiritual yearnings were neither apocalyptic nor ecumenical. They were British, Protestant, and mostly retrospective—a recapitulation of his personal religious journey projected onto English history. He not only celebrated the Puritan heritage of both the NonConformists and Anglicans; he declared Puritanism an essential part of the British Enlightenment—“Isaac Watts is as authentic a voice of Augustan England as Alexander Pope.” He also lamented the decline of sacramentality, especially the communal celebration of the Eucharist, in both the Dissenting and Anglican traditions. As usual, Davie found virtue and fault on both sides, but his sympathies always lay with the “gathered church” of small dissenting chapels defending their faith in a fallen and hostile world.

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Perhaps Davie celebrated the “gathered church” because he felt a cultural rift in English letters. There was a constant anti-metropolitan animus in Davie’s lectures. His views were informed, but his distaste for urban cultural capitals was visceral. In the 1966 postscript to the second edition of Purity of Diction in English Verse, Davie condemns “the tawdry amoralism of a London Bohemia” that destroyed poets in both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. He praises Cowper as a writer who “consciously spurned the depraved and depraving London Bohemia,” and he suggests the Movement was motivated by the same rejection in post-Second World War England. Yorkshire-born Davie defined himself as an outsider to the London literary establishment (even as his writing appeared in every serious journal with “London” in its name). His critical stance was complicated. He cultivated an international perspective, often invoking poets such as Pound, Pasternak, Milosz, Mandelstam, and Mickiewicz, to demonstrate he was no provincial. At the same time, he championed the cultural perspective of the provinces as deeper than the fashion-driven capital. In our course, Davie labored to present English poetry as something that had happened mostly outside London and the urban elite. That reformulation required radical gestures such as his dismissal of the Augustan satire in favor of Puritan hymnody. A cosmopolitan and ironic Catholic such as Pope represented a reactionary sensibility that Davie mistrusted. “In how many poems by Pope,” he asked, “do we register the whole as greater than the sum of its parts?” Davie preferred the clear and common language of “plain men and women”—preferably united in a rousing hymn. The most influential product of Davie’s Christian rapprochement was The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1981). Our course surely represented some of his early planning for the anthology. His Oxford collection offered a fascinating but unsatisfactory survey of Christian poetry in English. Parsimoniously thin, the volume discarded much of the traditional canon. His new book was half the size of its predecessor, Lord David Cecil’s Oxford Book of Christian Verse (1940), even though Davie had a larger period to cover. The editorial approach was not merely narrow but pious; his selection criteria were unabashedly doctrinaire. “To be a Christian poem,” Davie asserted, the work “must treat of scripture to show how scripture embodies doctrine, and of doctrine to show how it has

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scriptural authority.” His intentions were polemical, a deliberate smack at any broader sense of the subject. Davie reduced Christian poetry mostly to devotional or liturgical verse. As Barbara Everett remarked in London Review of Books, Davie’s approach “does injustice both to the psychology of human beings, Christian and otherwise, and to the nature of art, Christian and otherwise.” Davie’s anthology remains as notable for what it omitted as what it included. Not only Pope disappeared. Many major figures of Cecil’s collection were dispatched or decimated. Both Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning vanished along with Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, and William Morris—too much doubt in that receding Victorian “Sea of Faith.” William Blake, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and John Clare are each represented by a single poem. Few Catholic poets are among the chosen—no candles or incense please! Not only Patmore is missing but also Ernest Dowson, G. K. Chesterton, Lionel Johnson, Hilaire Belloc, Allen Tate, Roy Campbell, James K. Baxter, Claude McKay, William Everson, Thomas Merton, Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, and Les Murray. Could this diverse congregation not provide a single poem worth Davie’s approval? Only one post-romantic Catholic appears with a generous selection—Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose style Davie had called “a muscle-bound monstrosity.” One suspects that Oxford had insisted. I have discussed Davie’s anthology in detail because it is weirdly revelatory of its complicated editor. Davie was neither as dour nor narrow as the book suggests. Like the Victorians he excluded from his collection, Davie had a divided mind—not riven between faith and doubt in his case, but between emotion and intellect. The warmth and generosity of his character seemed constantly thwarted by his distinction-making mind. His revisionist criticism often acted out more aggressive versions of his actual beliefs. The central issue in understanding Davie’s literary career is the uneasy relationship between his identities as a critic and a poet. “I am not,” Davie declared, “a poet by nature.” Yet he became one by choice, writing verse in constant counterpoint to his critical prose. The two sides of his mind seem at once complementary and conflicted. In so many of his finest lyric poems—“Woodpigeons at Raheny,” “Time Passing, Beloved,” or “Across the Bay,” for instance—his emotional and rational instincts battle for control of the narrative line. He distrusted emotion as a means of perception

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unless it proceeded under analytical scrutiny. Davie’s changes in poetic ideology and practice feel like attempts to reconcile that conflict. His analytical nature robbed him of much poetry—both by himself and others. Most poets move forward by instinct; Davie thought through every step he took. All serious anthologies have an autobiographical element. Davie’s stern and disputatious New Oxford Book of Christian Verse was both a brilliant defense of the Puritan sensibility and a portrait of his self-imposed deprivations and unhappiness. Only at the end of our class did he briefly examine one poem each by three major writers—Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith. A conservative man with liberal politics, Davie fretted over the worldviews of that Tory trio. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” received perfunctory and unsympathetic treatment. Whatever interest Davie had once had for the poem’s prosy vitality had dissipated. He praised Gray’s great elegy, but otherwise dismissed the poet as an author of miniscule output and overlarge reputation. Only Goldsmith brought forth Davie’s complete sympathy. Here was a masterpiece about the real England suffused with the melancholy of its traditions passing away. Goldsmith’s poverty elicited compassion in a way Pope’s physical disfigurement did not. Line by line, Davie savored the genius of “The Deserted Village.” It was a glorious class. Then—unwelcome cross!—it was back to Cowper. Each lecture was a revelation of Davie’s enormous nostalgia for the provincial England he had fled. Even from my anonymous backrow seat, I felt his pained displacement. In the 1970s, Californians assumed that everyone who came to the state fell in love with it, but Davie never warmed to the West Coast. He was nearly blind to its beauty. He lectured for an hour on the greatness of the English oak without noticing the magnificent coast live oaks visible from the classroom windows. The region was alien to his sensibility. He often reminded me of a character from German fiction—the strict Northerner recoiling from the sultry and permissive Latin South— but his distaste was intellectual as well as emotional. He saw California as a forlorn and chaotic frontier—too new and unsettled to be allowed into his imagination. Czeslaw Milosz, another Bay Area literary émigré, expressed a similar complaint, though the cultural dissonance spurred his poetic imagination. Milosz saw California as a new society tethered to

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landscape and climate but not to history. “I could not find the rhythm of time,” he wrote. “That was not a place where I could feel the granularity of historical time. Thus what remained was nature. I still perceive America exclusively as nature.” Davie shared Milosz’s hunger for tangible human history, but his alienation was more complete. No outdoorsman, this studious and sedentary man found little consolation in Western nature. Davie wrote obsessively about landscapes, but he rarely mentioned California. Inhabited or empty, West Coast landscapes filled him with anxiety. Consider the opening of “In California”: Chemicals ripen the citrus; There are rattlesnakes in the mountains, And on the shoreline Hygiene, inhuman caution. Davie’s horror was an extreme but not unique reaction. Intellectual expatriates in California, tormented by personal nostalgia, often bemoan their displacement, even as they prosper in their new lives. Paradoxically, they show little empathy or insight into the commonwealth of displaced people around them. California is a robust but raw society populated by successive waves of the poor and dispossessed—immigrants from Mexico, China, Vietnam, the Philippines, the Dust Bowl, and the segregated Deep South. Many of these refugees had no homes to return to; their history had been taken away. If they did not provide the centuries-deep social cohesion that elite European intellectuals missed, their presence offered a different and more complex sort of historical “granularity.” I understand Davie’s homesickness, but I fault his inability to learn from—or even much notice—the historical transformation around him. It wasn’t his place, and he wasn’t interested. An exile lives in absentia. In his ten years as the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities at Stanford, Davie remained a genial outsider. He never engaged in Bay Area literary life or played a larger role on campus than his duties required. He was a conscientious and attentive graduate advisor. He was a courteous colleague. Otherwise, Davie kept a calculated distance from the place. Stanford was never intended to be a home, only a judicious step in his professional advancement. He lived in the mental biosphere of his own formidable creativity,

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producing a constant stream of books, essays, and poems, nearly all of which could have been written somewhere else. Davie had come to California after his unhappy experience as Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Essex when student protests disturbed the campus. His failure tormented him, though most would have considered it a minor misstep in a distinguished career. He never returned to teach in the UK. He left Stanford in 1978 for a more lucrative position at Vanderbilt and stayed in Nashville until retirement. Including two earlier stints—at the University of Southern California and University of California at Santa Barbara—Davie spent twenty-two years in the US, never fully at ease. He took middle-class pride in the fact that he was better paid than he had been in the UK, but he worried that he had traded his real life for material prosperity. Davie’s scrupulosity of conscience was so genuine that he enjoyed few things, including his own success, without pangs of guilt. Perhaps his problems with Palo Alto began at the very start. Davie had been drawn to Stanford by his devotion to Yvor Winters, a literary father figure. Winters represented what Davie wanted to become—a poet-critic of high principle and intellectual stature who kept his distance from the literary world. By the time Davie arrived in 1968, Winters was dying from throat and jaw cancer. They had time only for one last contentious and uncomfortable meeting, which suggested that their relationship might never have deepened in the ways Davie had hoped. He remained steady in his admiration for Winters, editing a British edition of his poems in 1978. He also had a special fondness for Winters’s widow, the novelist and poet Janet Lewis. Whenever they met, Davie became excited, fussing over her like a favorite elderly aunt. Admiring Janet wasn’t hard. She possessed a radiant calm, probably the key to her marriage with the irascible Winters. I worry that my depiction of Davie may seem harsh or clinical. I remember him with unmixed affection. We liked one another from our first meetings, and our friendship deepened with the years. We remained in close contact till his death. Donald was as much of a literary father figure as I’ve had in my peripatetic life. My intention is to portray him accurately. He would have flinched at a sentimental or platitudinous memoir. “Speak of me as I am,” he would have said, “Nothing extenuate.” One purpose of literature is to register the complexity of our response to people, ideas, and events.

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Simplification is a form of distortion. When Davie wrote of Winters, he examined his contradictory reactions to that singular and powerful personality. Surely one reason that Davie himself has fallen into neglect is that his literary achievements can’t be summarized in a few sentences. If he is to be remembered, it must be as a complicated, contradictory, and even enigmatic man. One needs to probe below the surface. Voluble on most subjects, he was reticent about personal matters. He mistrusted American candor. He once remarked to a group of students that the problem with American marriage was that couples felt free to talk about everything. His own marriage had been strengthened, he declared, by an agreement that certain things could never be discussed. Public readings were rare at Stanford. The English Department sponsored only three or four each year. As an undergraduate, I never even heard the writers on the faculty. Returning to campus, I decided to sponsor readings myself. I was on the staff of Florence Moore Hall, an ugly cinderblock dormitory. It was the least appealing venue imaginable, but I could use its public spaces for free. How better to start a new series than to feature Donald Davie? He was delighted to be asked. I put up a few mimeographed posters and got the dorm to buy soft drinks. Alcohol was prohibited, but I bought several half-gallon jugs of red wine. To my surprise, over a hundred people showed up. I wasn’t the only person who wanted to hear poets. Davie was a serious, articulate, and academic reader. He had no interest in making an emotional connection with the audience, but he was determined that they understand his work. He presented his poems with meticulous commentary as if they were texts for class study. Reciting the poems, he seemed detached from the experiences they described. He held his subjects, like his audience, at a safe distance. Uncomfortable with his earlier Movement identity, Davie avoided reciting his celebrated early poems. As he read his new work, it became obvious that he was reinventing himself as a poet. Davie did, however, read one of his anthology pieces, “Remembering the ’Thirties,” which epitomized his early style— ironic, intellectual, and satiric. His cool brand of satire aimed not at comedy but distance and diminishment. “Remembering the ’Thirties” illustrated the Augustan quality of his verse. Driven by ideas, his lines rose to the level of poetry by their formal perfection and incisive wordplay. The critical intelligence of his language was

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inseparable from its imaginative power. The poem muses over how quickly the progressive British literature of the thirties had lost its urgency and relevance to the younger generation. Here are some characteristic stanzas: This novel written fifteen years ago, Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home, These poems about “abandoned workings,” show Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome. The Anschluss, Guernica—all the names At which those poets thrilled or were afraid For me mean schools and headmasters and games; And in the process someone is betrayed. Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke Might carve his own initials on our desk, And yet we’d miss the point because he spoke An idiom too dated, Audenesque. A literary-historical critique, the poem is also very Oedipal— artistic sons overthrowing their artistic fathers. I felt then, and continue to believe now, that this neo-Augustan style was Davie’s most natural mode of writing. He longed to be more modernist and changed his work as he aged, but irony and intelligence framed in formal argumentation and measures demonstrated his poetic imagination at its best. Davie was cheered to see the large turnout at his reading. He often forgot how highly esteemed he was by the Stanford community. He took a glass of wine and moved with awkward pleasure among his admirers. I remember one incident vividly from the crowded reception. Midway in the festivities, I noticed that Davie had been cornered—literally, backed into a corner—by a diminutive young man. Wedged against the wall, Davie was arguing with the fellow about “Remembering the ’Thirties.” “I think you have been disrespectful and dismissive of Auden,” declared his interlocutor. Whenever Davie made a counterargument, the young man would sweep it away and return to the assault. I felt sorry for Davie, but his passionate critic wasn’t wrong; Davie had a blind spot with Auden. Finally, I went over to rescue my embattled

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speaker by introducing myself to his articulate assailant. Both parties seemed relieved to be interrupted. Auden’s advocate was a graduate student in Economics at the Food Research Institute. He came from Calcutta by way of Christ Church, Oxford. His name was Vikram Seth. In the second year of Stanford Business School, we were permitted to take two courses elsewhere in the university. The assumption was that MBA candidates would take practical classes in the Law School or Economics Department. When I told my advisor, an athletic professor of accounting, that I wanted to take a poetry writing workshop, his sun-tanned face frowned. He started to raise an objection, then stopped. It was 1976. Students could do anything they wanted. He signed my class list. I came to Davie’s workshop brimming with expectation. The intensity of my desire will make little sense to young poets today who have taken creative writing courses since middle school. I had dedicated my life to poetry, but most of my guidance had come from the dead. I had learned to write through private study and practice. Now I would have the tutelage of a living master. I was thrilled and very nervous. There were ten students in the course as well as an enormous dog. The humans sat around a large wooden table. The dog slept at one end. Most of the participants knew one another from the graduate writing program. Vikram and I were outsiders. We didn’t know most of the people or why the dog was there. The windows of the seminar room looked out on the Quad, Stanford’s handsome Romanesque Revival plaza. When Davie entered, he sat down without acknowledging the dog. He introduced himself and then explained how he conducted his writing courses. His teaching method was so unusual that it requires description. There were no assignments or craft lectures. There was only workshop discussion led by the participants. Each weekly session was devoted to one person who submitted a few poems to be distributed in advance in mimeograph copies. That single session was the only time the individual’s work was discussed. Davie sat at one end of the table; the featured student sat at the opposite end. First, the author read the poems aloud. The other students were allowed to ask questions, but not about the meaning of the poems; they could only ask about the way in which the lines had been read aloud. No one was allowed to offer an opinion. Then the author read the poems a second time.

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That was the easy part. After the recitations the poet was required to sit in silence for an hour while the class discussed the work. “You will have the chance to overhear your audience,” Davie declared. In practice, Davie’s promise to “overhear your audience” meant passively listening to a roomful of young poets arguing about general aesthetic principles that your work failed to fulfill. At the end of the class period the battered author was allowed a brief reply—always an awkward and awful moment. The level of students was high. At least four went on to achieve some literary reputation—Vikram Seth, Vicki Hearne, John Gery, and myself. Vicki, who worked as an animal trainer, owned the class dog. Though mostly forgotten now, she published several well-regarded books before dying in middle age. There were also two poets of considerable promise. Cory Wade wrote better poems than anyone else—tight and polished lyrics, usually about her love affairs. She published for a few years and then disappeared. There was also the talented Robin Kojima, who published a few striking poems before leaving literature for the law. Life takes young poets to different destinations. The class displayed the normal mix of ambition and anxiety, but it also possessed a sense of seriousness about literature and poetic craft. Looking back now across nearly half a century, I recognize it was a different era—the radiant twilight of the print culture. Literature still retained its traditional importance for both students and faculty. Young writers had confidence that poetry could articulate the human condition. Poetry’s general audience might have contracted, but the art remained powerful and pure. We did not see poetry as a priesthood, but we shared a conviction that we dealt with something sacred. Serious reading was part of our daily lives, a form of spiritual devotion. Developing ourselves as writers was not a career path; it represented our hope of self-transcendence. Maybe we were just a band of dupes sharing a bourgeois delusion conditioned by our socioeconomic status. But, damn, it felt good. No one wanted to be anywhere else. I wonder how many graduate students feel that way today. We had another antiquated practice; we revered our teacher. Davie was cherished for both his virtues and eccentricities. We viewed him as an exemplary figure, a brilliant and tireless man of letters who had dedicated his life to poetry. We saw his workshop as a crucial moment in our artistic maturation. John Gery later expressed what was a common sentiment:

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When I learned that Davie taught at Stanford, where I knew [Yvor] Winters had found a sanctuary for his unorthodox ideas for years, I decided that Stanford was where I would need to go to study the writing of poetry; I was afraid that otherwise my own compulsion to write in meter and rhyme would be ridiculed as old-fashioned or squelched under the influence of the “free verse” poets teaching at such places as the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The workshop marked an ironic moment in literary history. Most of the students wanted to write in form. They had enrolled with the expectation that Davie, the poet-critic of the Movement, would champion rhyme and meter. The mentor they sought no longer existed. Davie had changed his views on form. His years in California, immersion in the works of Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, and growing distaste for some of his Movement colleagues had shifted his perspective. A few years earlier Davie and Larkin had engaged in a public battle over Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse (1973), and ill will continued on both sides. Davie now believed that free verse was the true American idiom. One example will suffice to illustrate his new sympathies. When asked to recommend a living American poet, Davie would name Ed Dorn, a Black Mountain College disciple of Olson. An odd generational struggle emerged. The established older poet urged the young to be experimental, and the young resisted. Davie did not appreciate that for our generation, Modernism was already part of literary history, a movement we had studied in school. While the great Modernists influenced us, their ideas didn’t offer a universal solution to our own poetic aims. The class debates repeated the very drama Davie had outlined in “Remembering the ’Thirties.” For us, his new poetic language was already “an idiom too dated”—Olsonesque. We wanted the freedom to explore things that the academy’s legacy Modernism excluded—most notably rhyme, meter, and narrative. The friction between teacher and students puzzled us at the time; it should have been understood as a premonition. Our conflict anticipated what would happen in the following decade when the “Poetry Wars” erupted between free-verse and formal poets. Our class actually produced the specific casus belli of that prolonged cultural brawl. In 1985, AWP Chronicle, the journal of Associated Writing Programs, the professional organization for the creative writing

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field, published an attack on young poets working in form. The columnist warned workshop teachers about a disturbing revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative among the younger generation—the “New Formalism.” The coinage was meant, of course, as an insult. Indicted as a key culprit was Vikram Seth. Davie never tried to dominate workshop discussion. He was a parental presence—a concerned and cautionary father. Never aggressive or unkind, he nonetheless made his opinions clear. We soon understood he didn’t care for formal verse. He didn’t attack it openly; he led the discussion to focus on its shortcomings. Davie was rarely enthusiastic about student work. He didn’t see his role as encouragement. As he later told me in an interview, his goal was to prevent students from “going up blind alleys.” He worried that youthful mistakes slowed a writer’s development. “I wouldn’t pursue that game much further if I were you,” he advised, “because I’ve been up there and it ends in a bare wall.” Only once did he praise a participant’s work unreservedly. The piece was probably the worst poem of the term—a rambling free verse reminiscence of a family farmhouse in the Midwest. This was the real America, Davie rhapsodized, described in the true American idiom. He extolled its authenticity at length. The author beamed, but no one else in the class seemed convinced, especially not Vikram who had no patience with mediocrity. For me, it was a clarifying moment to see a great critic so hopelessly wrong, bamboozled by his own theories. Workshops offer no easy way to discuss a participant’s poems without discomfort and anxiety. The problem is inherent in the format. The author craves absolute praise; the class is required to offer critiques. The unformed writer undergoes a barrage of opinion from all sides, including the authority figure. Davie’s system made the inherently confusing process particularly painful. Conversation continued for a full hour in the mute presence of the squirming student. When finally released from silence, the “featured” poet was either steaming with outrage or broken by disappointment. Puffing on his pipe, Davie never offered a word of consolation. His method was cruel but not bad preparation for later literary life. My session went no better or worse than anyone else’s. The class liked my three poems half-heartedly but puzzled over their impersonal subject matter—a landscape, a Russian pianist, and an anonymous Victorian pornographer. Only Gery got what I was

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trying to do. Davie also understood, but he didn’t approve. My subjects were too ostentatious for his taste, my language full of youthful extravagance incompatible with chaste diction and the plain style. The contentious group discussion provided nothing useful, but the experience of being on the receiving end was transformative. It took a few weeks to sort out my reactions. Then suddenly I understood where I was and where I needed to go. First of all, I knew I would never take another poetry writing course. I liked Davie’s class, but it had an unsettling effect. The conversations sharpened my critical thinking more than my creativity. They made me too self-conscious about every aspect of writing. I was already very analytical. I needed to move in the opposite direction and become more intuitive. Second, I enjoyed the community of poets too much. The camaraderie was exhilarating, but I knew my peers were not reliable guides for my work. Nor was my advice especially useful to them. I was too young and mutable to handle the social energy of a workshop. It triggered an instinctive desire for the group’s approval. Third, I needed to stop looking for external validation—and not just from my classmates. I had been sending poems to magazines with some success. The rejections and acceptances had begun to influence how I wrote. I decided to stop publishing for the time being. I wasn’t ready yet. The workshop had returned me to exactly where I had begun. The difference was I now understood what that meant—I was on my own. No one could exempt me from the solitary labor and anxiety of the literary vocation. As Pound warned, “There is no high-road to the Muses.” Workshops, conferences, consultations, contests, and writing groups might help others, but they disrupted my focus. I had to eliminate what distracted me from the work itself. My sense of myself was still too fragile, especially as I tried to balance two different lives. Finally, I knew my work had to be better. Not different, just better. I had to trust the idiosyncrasies of my taste and discover the right means to communicate them. Art relies on an author’s confidence in his or her imagination. There is no other reliable starting point. “We work in the dark,” Henry James observed. “We do what we can—we give what we have.” I could only give what I had, not what others wanted me to have. My self-assessment was not comforting, but for the first time I saw the task ahead clearly and not in soft focus. Davie’s class had indeed been catalytic—not

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in the way I had expected or he intended—but it gave me what I needed. I now often dropped into Davie’s office to talk. Stanford was a more informal university then. Professors kept long office hours, and they understood that much education was personal and impromptu. My frequent visits might seem presumptuous. Davie was a busy man, but I noticed he enjoyed being interrupted. He was lonely. I didn’t understand then how that could be. I hadn’t yet learned the isolation of an expatriate’s existence, or the psychic cost of moving repeatedly in pursuit of a career. When I knocked at his half-opened door, Davie would look up from a clutter of books, letters, recommendations, and term papers. Then he would shout, “Come in, come in!” as he relit his pipe and leaned back for a chat. In our office conversations I discovered the real Davie—the kind and vulnerable core that all his intellectual armor protected. When he relaxed, he became a warm and attentive man, familiar as a favorite uncle. He was also resolutely democratic. He never pulled academic rank, though he maintained the role of a concerned elder. I was publishing long reviews every week or two in the Stanford Daily— writing on authors such as Anthony Burgess, Vladimir Nabokov, Constantine Cavafy, Eugenio Montale, and Ezra Pound. Davie would sometimes produce a copy of the article and then proceed to review my review—not always favorably. He reacted to my ideas with candor, sometimes even fervor. He was shocked but delighted when I gave a poet on the Stanford faculty a negative review. “A very poor book,” he admitted. “But I can’t say so!” he added chuckling. Davie’s attention was especially generous because I wasn’t part of his graduate program. Our irregular relationship made us both relaxed; there was no official business to conduct. I wasn’t looking for a letter of recommendation or job referral. He would chortle at my jokes. He enjoyed irreverence, though he recoiled at the slightest indecency. He wanted to be amused, but he wasn’t confident of his own powers to amuse. He had a habit of approaching the edge of jollity before catching himself and returning to his earnest persona. His wit was best expressed in mordant remarks about his numerous literary bêtes noires. I realize, in retrospect, that Davie also appreciated having an admirer—an eager young poet who had read, indeed studied, his work. My visits weren’t part of his academic duties. The only demand I brought was that Davie be a great Man of Letters, a living

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link in the chain of English poetry. That was no hardship. He loved to hold forth—what poet doesn’t? Perhaps he had secretly been waiting in Palo Alto for someone like me. I asked for his views on all subjects, for who can separate life from literature? I broke through his reserve. He spoke candidly about his problems in the literary world. He even solicited my help on a few occasions. My attention reminded him that he mattered in ways that had nothing to do with his Stanford professorship. Best of all, we liked each other. When I left for New York to start my business career, we began a regular correspondence. “I miss it that you’re not on hand to drop in and talk to me during office hours,” he wrote. He was also pleased that my brother Ted had appeared in his course, “In Memoriam and After.” He noted my absence in the poetry workshop but added that Vikram had returned, “a great boon.” Davie worried that I had moved to the literary metropolis, so he was gratified when I rented an apartment in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Tuckahoe, Westchester County—“So much better,” he commented, “than Manhattan.” Davie set me an ideal example as a writer. He was always working and usually exploring something new. Most critics have little independence or originality; they repeat or elaborate the current consensus on a subject. Davie rarely wrote on a topic without dissenting from the consensus. He enjoyed arguing about writers and ideas, but he had no need to prove himself right—a rare virtue in anyone but especially so among eminent academics. He was open to new notions and frequently revised his opinions, sometimes changing them in fundamental ways. Davie strived for accuracy, and he expected others to share the impulse. His conversation was collaborative. He poked, questioned, rejected, or endorsed ideas with enthusiasm. Talking with him about a familiar poet such as Hardy or Pound often transformed my sense of their work. Likewise hearing him discuss a neglected writer such as Lorine Niedecker or Samuel Menashe led me to become a lifelong reader of their work. One day I told him that Basil Bunting was giving a reading that evening in San Francisco. I knew he considered Bunting the last living Modernist master. I was planning to attend. Did he want to come? Donald disliked big cities and had a particular horror of San Francisco. I knew he would decline, but I also felt he needed to come. So I pressed him by asking, “Will you ever have another chance to hear Bunting read?” He was startled by the question. He thought a moment and agreed to come.

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When I picked Donald up that evening, he was surprised to find two undergraduates in the back seat of the car. In retrospect, I recognize my bad manners. In my early twenties I had a more flexible sense of social etiquette than did an Englishman in his fifties. I thought it would be an opportunity for the students both to hear Bunting and meet Davie. As we drove into “the City,” as everyone local called San Francisco, Donald catalogued his objections to and suspicions of metropolitan culture. San Francisco received a quick dismissal. He saved his jeremiad for London and its “literary racket.” He made it clear that he came to San Francisco with reservations. It was typical of Donald that he couldn’t spend an evening on the town without qualifying his own motives. When we got to the event, the auditorium was packed—with exactly the people Donald disliked, Beats and bohemians. He sat uncomfortably with us in one of the front rows. Then Thom Gunn, dressed in his signature leather motorcycle jacket, came over to say hello. Gunn was the Movement poet Davie liked best, probably because he had escaped literary England. Although they lived only thirty miles apart, they rarely saw one other. As they chatted, Donald cheered up. “I didn’t expect to see him here,” he remarked happily. Bunting’s reading was remarkable. The stage was empty except for a large chair and a table on which there was a glass, a bottle of red wine, and a tall thin vase holding a single red rose. After being introduced, the elderly Bunting entered slowly. He carefully sat in the chair and poured himself a glass of wine. He read only two long poems—“Chomei at Toyama” and Briggflatts—and then answered a few questions. He never rose from the chair or stopped refilling his glass. His rich Northumberland voice had a thrilling physical presence, resonant yet nuanced. Not a syllable or a beat was lost. A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name naming none, a man abolished.

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The event lasted about ninety minutes—as did Bunting’s bottle of wine. The crowd was ecstatic, “blissed out,” as they said back then. Donald clearly enjoyed the reading, too, but as soon as the event was over, he started to leave. “Aren’t you going to say hello to him?” I asked. “Oh, I don’t think so,” he replied. “You have to let Bunting know you were here,” I insisted. “It will matter to him.” Donald rose, without enthusiasm, to pay his respects. Of course, I tagged along. As Donald mounted the stage, Bunting spotted him and beamed with pleasure. “Donald Davie!” he exclaimed, “How wonderful to see you!” His happiness was contagious. The two of them talked for several minutes surrounded by a small crowd of delighted onlookers. “That went very well,” Donald declared as we left the stage. We then stopped at a tavern where we drank several rounds. By now Donald was talking and laughing. Alcohol unlocked his high spirits. He had taken a shine to the two undergraduates—“these bright young lads,” he called them. It did them a world of good to see a chaired professor merrily drunk. Around midnight we drove back to Palo Alto, rapt in conversation. As he left the car, Donald looked me in the eye. “Thank you for making me come. This is the best literary night I’ve ever had in California.” Just before leaving Stanford, I did an interview with Donald for a special issue of Sequoia in his honor. I asked clumsy questions; Donald gave astute and interesting answers. He reprinted the conversation as the coda to his critical book, Trying to Explain (1979). At one point I inquired if he thought of himself as working in any literary tradition. Davie replied: I was schooled to think that Mr. Eliot had said the last word about tradition, and I’m not sure that he didn’t. I think a lot of things that I understand he said about tradition are right. I take him to have said that every major poet at any time creates his own tradition for himself. That is to say, he’s the heir to all the poetry that’s ever been written in the English language. But in the enormous resource of precedents, he gradually sorts out those which he can in fact make use of in his own writing (not necessarily those most esteemed)—that’s what a tradition is. It seems to me that yes, I’ve done that, but then, as I say, any poet worth his salt has done the same.

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If every poet creates his or her own tradition, then Davie is part of mine. I met him at a pivotal moment in my creative life. He didn’t give me what I wanted, but everything he offered I needed. Not the least gift was his friendship, which grew with the years. Another was his candor; he always told me what he really thought. I often ignored his advice, which disappointed him, but he respected an honest disagreement. Years later he surprised me by writing to praise some of the early poems he had dismissed. We remained friends until his death. Donald Davie deserves a revival. He was one of the major poetcritics of the twentieth century. His criticism and verse represent the only serious attempt by a Movement poet to explore the possibilities of Modernism. The great arc of his sustained and singular career has never been adequately assessed, even by his advocates. Few doubt his historical stature, but no one quite knows how to place him after his early Movement days. Davie was too prolific, various, and self-contradictory to be easily summarized. Worse, he was too fastidious in his self-doubt for current taste. I like to think his legacy will be rediscovered, explored, and judiciously validated, but I doubt it will happen soon. That task would require another Donald Davie.

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20 V. S. Naipaul, the Drill Sergeant Paul Theroux

From an early age, I was a passionate reader and writer, yet the thought of making a living as a published author seemed so farfetched that, out of a fear of being mocked, I never mentioned it. As an undergraduate, I’d studied with the intention of being a medical doctor. I could have become a doctor by going to medical school, a straightforward path to being a physician—I imagined working in a hospital in a tropical country. I saw no clear path towards becoming a professional writer. I guessed that you wrote a book, it was published, then you went on hoping. That is not the basis of a career. I knew some college professor poets, but not a single published writer of fiction. A self-supporting writer, who was not an academic, seemed a luminous but remote figure. I graduated in 1963 but unable to afford medical school, I joined the Peace Corps and became a teacher in the British Central African territory of Nyasaland, which became the Republic of Malawi six months after I arrived. Without much encouragement, I was writing all this time— poems, stories, and journalism—now and then publishing my things in American newspapers: about Africa in the Christian Science Monitor, and in small magazines such as the Transatlantic Review in London, Black Orpheus in Nigeria, and Transition in Uganda. I was very pleased when the widely circulated, anti-colonial Central African Examiner in Salisbury, Rhodesia, published a poem of mine 211

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in June 1964, and in succeeding months some of my dispatches, written under a nom de plume, describing the political upheaval in Malawi. I had also been writing fiction, but it wasn’t until a few years later, that I finished writing a novel. I was then a teacher in Uganda, twenty-four years old, and still had not met a real novelist. Both in Malawi and Uganda I volunteered to work in hospitals, to keep the spark of my medical ambition alight. In Kampala, in 1966, I met V. S. Naipaul, and my view of myself as a writer changed. I must also add at this point that, over the years, I have written extensively about Naipaul. I wrote a profile of him for The Sunday Telegraph Magazine in 1972. In that same year I published a book of criticism, V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work. Subsequently, I reviewed some of his books and, after about thirty years, when we fell out, I wrote a book about our friendship and its end, Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998). Our friendship resumed in 2011, and I wrote about that fortunate reconnection in an afterword to the paperback edition my book. Naipaul asked me to write a lengthy introduction to the 2017 Pan MacMillan combined edition of his three India books, which I was happy to do. I spent time with him in New York, I traveled with him in India, and saw him in the hospital in London just before he died in 2018. More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul and reflecting on his influence! Yet it is only in the last few years, the dust having settled, that I have reexamined our relationship and seen how complex it was, how important—how crucial—it was to my becoming a writer. To go back to Uganda in 1966: when I’d heard that he was coming to teach at Makerere University, where I was on the faculty, I read all his books, and enjoyed them. On being introduced to him I told him so; and he immediately took to me. No one else at the university had made that effort; but a writer to me then, a brilliant writer like Naipaul, was a powerful, shamanistic figure. And I still feel that way of writers I admire. Naipaul had published seven books, five works of fiction, The Mystic Masseur (1957), The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), Miguel Street (1959), A House for Mr Biswas (1961), and Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963); and two travel books, The Middle Passage (1962) and An Area of Darkness (1964). All of them were original and vivid, and two I felt were masterpieces.

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I was then twenty-five, and had decided to rewrite my novel. I was also writing an account of the surrealism of life under the dusk-todawn curfew in Kampala, as a result of the government laying siege to the palace of the Kabaka, or King of Buganda, and the chaos that followed. I was inspired by George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938). For his clarity of writing and political outlook, and his experience as an expatriate, Orwell was one my literary heroes. Although Naipaul was thirty-four, he seemed much older— opinionated, sure of himself, set in his ways, adversarial, moody, domineering. We were soon on good terms, but it was not a friendship between equals. Naipaul had an overwhelming sense of superiority. “I’ve been compared to Orwell,” he told me early on. “I don’t regard it as much of a compliment.” I did not hold his boasting against him, because it was the way he positioned himself against the world, in a posture of defiance. He knew he was flawed—stubborn, fretful, tantrum-prone—but he had no doubt of his literary achievement. So our relationship resembled that between a teacher and a student, a knight and a squire, a sorcerer and his apprentice, a substance and a shadow, an officer and a recruit. At last I had someone to talk to, someone to whom I could confide my secret ambition—not to be a doctor, but a writer. Naipaul prided himself on having earned his living solely by his pen. He also had an almost priestly sense of his seriousness as a writer. From the beginning, I saw that Naipaul did not function well alone, and never applied himself to the day-to-day domestic tasks that most people take for granted and perform without much complaint. He could not cook even the simplest meal, he did not do laundry or wash dishes, he did not make his bed, he was able to drive but hated doing so. He required someone to do these things, and beyond these domestic labors he needed a person to run interference for him, make arrangements, schedule appointments, help him through the day. Except when he was sitting at his desk, writing, he was helpless. He insisted on being waited on. This meant that he was very seldom alone. His life was a chronicle—often a dramatic chronicle, because he was so demanding—of his dependency on others. In his early married life, his wife Pat served that function, largely uncredited. In An Area of Darkness, she is mentioned once, as “my companion”

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and not alluded to again in the book, although she was with him every day for nine months of his year-long sojourn in India. Pat traveled with Naipaul to Africa, but as she did not drive, the Naipauls engaged a driver and a housekeeper, as well as a gardener. These servants rarely succeeded in pleasing Vidia. I remember him quarreling with his driver and insisting that the man sit in the back seat—what we sometimes called “the ministerial seat”—of the car, a new Peugeot 404 sedan, while Vidia drove, furiously and erratically. I was with Vidia on one of these occasions and asked the driver what the problem was. He replied in Swahili, “Sijui, bwana”—No idea, sir. The notion of the chauffeur in the back seat being conspicuously driven by the car’s owner, gave Vidia a certain grim pleasure. In Kampala, for quite a while, I became his driver, his escort, his interpreter. I had plenty of time, a teaching job at Makerere University, where Naipaul was designated writer-in-residence (though he never taught a class and said frankly he didn’t think much of the students). I knew my way around Kampala and often proposed junkets to nearby towns or beauty spots or hotels—Vidia liked having tea in a pleasant setting. I had many of the qualities Vidia required of a friend or functionary—I was responsive, helpful, knowledgeable, affable, and—this was a chief requirement, punctual. He tyrannized anyone who was late—and it strikes me that perhaps his driver had failed him on that score. There was something further he demanded of his friends: they needed to know his work thoroughly and have a high regard for it. At that time he was working on his novel The Mimic Men (1967). I knew very little of the novel, though I was with him a few times when he read parts of it to Pat—he habitually read her passages he had just written. I gathered the book was set in the Caribbean and that it was a sort of memoir of an islander—politician and businessman—in exile in London. I did not know the plot, but I knew many of the main character’s views, because Vidia—as I now called him, familiarly—often quoted his wise, and sometimes imperious, observations. Vidia lived the book, he identified with the narrator, Ranjit (Ralph) Kripal Singh—Singh’s views were his views: about colonialism, loyalty, London, exile, money, women, and much more. In many conversations about politics or life in general, Naipaul started sentences, “My narrator says . . .” A revelation that came to me much later was that, for the whole time Naipaul was writing this novel he adopted the manner, the

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gestures, the way of speaking of his narrator—who was not a writer but a politician, businessman, organizer, and ultimately an exile. Actors use the expression “staying in character” when, after a day’s filming, they go on speaking and acting in the role they’re playing— the same voice, the same gestures, and attitudes. Naipaul’s persona in Uganda then was that of Ralph Singh—and, it explained a great deal of his behavior, which was less than of a thirty-four-year-old writer rising in his profession than a world-weary but somewhat pompous middle-aged former politician at the end of his career, living in exile from his tropical island. The first impression I had of Naipaul was the intensity of his intelligence, his severity in conversation, his insistent interrogation, his scrupulous correctness, his domineering personality. “What do you mean by that?” “Define that word.” “You know that’s nonsense, don’t you?” He had no patience with casual conversation or idle thought— chitchat enraged him, he called it “chuntering.” He was the most demanding friend I have ever known, and certainly the harshest teacher. If I were to look for a comparison in severity it would not be an Oxford don, or a logician, or my mother—who was for me an impatient and unreasonable interrogator. Naipaul’s role was not a teacher, or a writer in residence, or Mr Chips. He was a drill sergeant—hard to please, confident, correct, stern taskmaster, pedant, perfectionist, occasional bully, and intimidator—and like the classic drill sergeant, he might shout to make a point. As my superior officer, he prepared me for battle. Had he known the sergeant and the line in the film Full Metal Jacket (1987), he would have routinely shouted, “What is your major malfunction, numb-nuts!” He was often funny—in the right mood he liked jokes, and repartee, he had a great sense of humor and a sudden laugh. But even with him guffawing over the absurdities he cherished, it was seldom relaxing to be in his company. People have often asked me how I was able to quote him so exactly, why I had such a clear memory of his observations or his speechifying. It was because I was nervous—because I was expected to be at my best—and, being anxious, my memory was my greatest asset. Mine was an animal alertness: no creature is more wired than an animal in unfamiliar surroundings—every faculty is twitchingly alight, every synapse engaged. I was fully awake in his presence and fearful of making a blunder.

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He could be anxious, too—nothing to do with me, but as a consequence of this, his first experience of Africa, newly independent Uganda with a prime minister and a king (who were at odds), and solid colonial buildings. The whole of Kampala was surrounded by bush—villages of mud huts, and enormous tracts of land where herds of elephants roamed, and the source of the Nile, as well as— at the western margin of the country—the spectacular Ruwenzori Range, snow-capped, with glaciers and exotic fauna and flora, giant lobelias and on the lower slopes, the bongo, the world’s largest forest antelope; lower still in the Ituri Forest, villages of pygmies. None of this impressed Naipaul. He was by nature urbane, a metropolitan, not a safari-goer. He remained largely in Kampala. But he found it hard to converse with Africans, he did not attempt to learn Swahili—the lingua franca in Uganda—and made a point of mispronouncing Swahili or Luganda words, even the name of the university, “Maka-ray-ray,” he’d say much to the annoyance of the locals. He was not happy in Uganda and said repeatedly that it had been a mistake to accept the proposal of the Farfield Foundation to send him as a cultural emissary. Instead of occupying himself with the university he became engrossed in his novel. The Mimic Men was narrated by an islander who referred to his island nation, a former British colony called Isabella, as “a halfmade society.” Naipaul regarded Uganda as a half-made society, and its intellectuals, writers, and politicians as mimic men. It was entirely appropriate that he wrote much of that novel in Uganda. Africa remained on his mind. He was in Uganda off and on for nine months altogether on that visit, and would return to Africa some years later, to Uganda, the Congo, West Africa, and South Africa, accounting for three books, the two works of fiction, In a Free State (1971) and A Bend in the River (1979), and in 2010, his last travel book, virtually his last book, The Masque of Africa (2010). I was with him a great deal of the time in 1966. I was unmarried, I had a sturdy car, I knew the roads, I spoke the language, and my job allowed me to travel. Naipaul’s belief in himself, and his confidence, dazzled me. He was disappointed with what he found at Makerere University, and disparaging about Africa generally. But he was immersed in his novel, and he said to me early on, “Of course you write all the time. You’d go mad here if you didn’t write.”

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He was the severe teacher—the drill sergeant—I needed, as someone determined to be a writer, and at work on a book. From the first, he made me question every belief and every assumption I had about Africa. I was too young and inexperienced to have any views about the writing life, but he had plenty of opinions on that score, and about reading, about literature, history, food, colonialism, politics, cricket, class, caste, travel, marriage, money, sex, and much else. He was frugal, he was fierce, he was moody, he could be combative, and sometimes he talked for affect. This could be pompous: “No—I’m not interested in that newspaper”—when I had offered him the overseas edition of The Observer. “I don’t read any newspaper unless I’m mentioned in it.” Or it might be ridiculous: “Italians make cheese out of dirt—but you knew that, didn’t you?” Or bombastic, like dismissing George Orwell. Many people were outraged by assertions like these. I was fascinated: I wrote them down in my diary. When I told him I was keeping a diary, he said, “It’s an utter waste of time. I traveled in India for almost a year and never took a single note. But managed to write a book about it.” When, early on, I told him I was at work on a novel he said, “Tell me why,” and explained, “You have to know exactly why you are writing whatever it is you’re writing. Otherwise, you’re just playing with art.” So, I had to explain to him why I was writing my novel: no one had ever asked me that. The unexamined intention meant you were not serious. The same went for the unexamined word. “Why did you use this word?” He disliked “fine writing”—Updike, for example. He hated anything that sounded mannered, affected, or experimental—so Joyce, Beckett, and others were beneath consideration. He asked me which writers I happened to be reading. I told him Nathanael West, Emily Dickinson, Albert Camus, and of course Orwell. He said he didn’t think much of any of them. He advocated the work of Thomas Mann, Anton Chekhov, Proust, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, and certain Latin poets (Martial, Horace). Of the King James version of the Holy Bible he said to me, “It’s frightfully good.” Early on he praised the work of Derek Wolcott, who had once been a friend of his, and he recited a whole poem, “As John to Patmos,” from memory—a brilliant island poem. But later he rubbished Wolcott, and Wolcott replied in the same vein, with several scathing poems, calling him V. S. Nightfall.

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I asked him to read an essay I was writing. He said, “Are you sure you want me to read it? I’ll tell you exactly what I think, and I must warn you, I’m brutal.” In the end I rewrote the essay about fifteen times, and it was published in the American magazine, Commentary (“On Cowardice,” 1967). With certain reservations and many severe questions, he approved of much of what I wrote, even a novella I had recently finished. His method was to write a first draft in longhand and then type it himself. I followed his example. And I write my first drafts in longhand to this day. “You’re just starting out, you’re growing,” he said back then. “Your writing will change from week to week.” My job was at Makerere’s Centre for Adult Studies, where I soon became director (all my students were much older than me). Now and then I shared my experiences with him, of things not going well, of students or fellow teachers letting me down. He said, “Why are you more concerned about the department than they are? If they don’t care, why should you?” That became one of his apothegms: “Do not spend time worrying about the fate of people who do not worry about themselves.” In his darker moods, he said, “Nothing you do here really matters—although you’re acquiring valuable experience. All this will revert—it will go back to bush.” If I doubted him, or challenged him on this score—“going back to bush” was a refrain of his—he said, “A society needs to be maintained. Things are built here, or given as aid projects, but you notice they are never maintained. They fall apart because they’ve been imposed on people who don’t have a sense of maintenance. It will all be bush.” He had said something similar and Olympian about the West Indies: “History is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies.” These were severe judgments, and questionable, too. But they arose out of The Mimic Men, which was full of such stern observations. It was a very helpful book for an apprentice writer to read, and also one upon which to make Naipaul’s acquaintance. As a novel of disillusionment, of identity, and postcolonial politics, of placelessness, it dramatized all of Naipaul’s enduring themes. And of all of his books it is the most epigrammatic. Quoting himself in his book, and speaking of Africa, he said, “I no longer seek to find beauty in the lives of the mean and oppressed. Hate the oppressor; fear the oppressed.”

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Of the mimicry of postcolonial politicians, “From play-acting to disorder: it is the pattern.” Another view, which he repeated with variations, throughout his life—but it reflected the feelings of his narrator—was (I am paraphrasing): “Never give a person a second chance. If someone has been totally loyal to you, and lets you down once, you must dismiss him, because he has violated his loyalty and failed you in an important way.” I said, “But if the person has been completely loyal and failed you once, why would you get rid of him?” “If the person has been completely loyal, he would not have failed you at all,” he said. “Something is irretrievably broken.” In Africa and later, Naipaul shared with me his rules of writing. One was his abhorrence of complex punctuation. His early novels and stories were examples of his use of short, declarative sentences. With Mr Biswas, his sentences became longer, with clauses, and the occasional semi-colon, but these sentences never called attention to themselves. He pointed this out to me, saying, “Writing should be transparent.” (Unconsciously echoing Orwell in “Why I Write,” who’d said, “Good prose is like a windowpane.”) “Write with detachment,” Naipaul said. “It doesn’t mean indifference—it’s the opposite.” His hatred of cliché arose from his suspicion that writing had to be the result of serious forethought; a borrowed phrase revealed a lazy mind, and had no weight. He wrote slowly, he rewrote thoroughly, he groaned over his work. He showed me the gold nib of his Parker pen which was worn to a slant from use. He rejected any notion that other writers influenced him— influence, he implied, was a sign of being derivative and second-rate. He disliked being compared to anyone else. He maintained that he was not burdened by any influences, and he proved this by saying that he had come from an island with no literature, no literary tradition, no sense of itself in fiction. “Not hallowed by fiction,” was the way he put it. He dismissed all previous attempts by Trinidadians to write about the island. They were mimic men, and their writing was mimicry. He had no models to work from. This was a problem but also a liberation, because it meant he was forced to see things as they were and give them life. “I am a new man,” he once said to me. “As Montaigne was a new man.” So his work was the beginning of a tradition, allowing Trinidadians to see who they were.

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His explaining his singularity was his way of distancing himself from me and my reading. He dismissed most writing about Africa. On one of our car journeys into the bush in Uganda, I mentioned Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile (1960), a history of exploration in the very area where we were traveling, near Lake Albert. “I tried to read it,” Naipaul said. “There’s a great difficulty. Moorehead can’t write.” No one he knew had depicted the Africa he was witnessing, he said. He later came to see that Joseph Conrad had done a masterful job— not Heart of Darkness (1899), but an earlier long story, “An Outpost of Progress” (1897). I read that story as part of my apprenticeship. Later he also saw that Jean Rhys had had a clear vision of the West Indies in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and her other works, and she became one of the very few novelists he recommended. But he also said that even bad writing was revealing—sometimes more revealing than skillful writing; and also—in his piece “The Killings in Trinidad” (1980)—“Fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.” “The best writing is a disturbing vision, written from a position of strength,” he said to me in Kampala. And, “If your writing is going smoothly and you’re comfortable writing a few thousand words a day, these are sure signs it’s probably bad.” He used the word “vision” a great deal. He emphasized that if one wrote well and truthfully, the writing would be prophetic. He believed that travel writing at its best was predictive. Years later, in India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), he compressed this view into a prescription: “I believe that the present, accurately seized, foretells the future.” This belief that writing from close observation could be oracular gave him the sense that, for all its challenges, there was no higher calling than writing. It infuriated him that writers were paid so badly. “We should be paid as well as surgeons, architects, lawyers and others at the top of their profession.” He was ceaseless throughout his life in his demands for the highest fees, though in the beginning his demands were seldom met. When he finished The Mimic Men, we had a celebratory dinner— we were in Kigali, Rwanda, on a road trip. He said, “I’m going to say to André”—André Deutsch, his publisher—“I want a thousand pounds.”

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The amount of this hoped-for advance meant very little to me. In today’s terms it is about £15,000—about twenty grand, a modest amount for a major novel. And André Deutsch, who was notoriously tight-fisted, did not give him the thousand pounds, which rankled. It was not until Naipaul changed agents, and publishers, years later that he received substantial advances for his books. I published my first novel, Waldo (1967)—and my novella, Murder in Mount Holly (1969), both works influenced greatly by my reading of Nathanael West. Under Naipaul’s influence I wrote a novel about a Chinese grocer, set in Uganda, Fong and the Indians (1968). I was still an apprentice, I felt. The following year (1969) I published a novel based on a school where my then-fiancée was teaching. This was Girls at Play. After reading it, Naipaul wrote me enthusiastically, saying generously that I had showed him the way— that it was possible to write something new set in East Africa, something that mattered; that my book was truthful, dark, and original. And in a further compliment, he said that it had given him the courage to write In a Free State, a novella and some stories published two years later in 1971. That was the year I moved to England, where I lived for the next seventeen years. I was still Naipaul’s apprentice. He was still the drill sergeant. I saw him every so often, and wrote to him. We talked on the phone. Both of us traveled. “Travel in itself for a book about a journey doesn’t interest me,” he told me once. “My intention has always been to travel with a theme in mind.” All this time, something important was happening in my life. It had begun in Africa, talking about books and writing with Naipaul; it continued in letters while I was in Singapore—many letters, because I had begun to discover my own voice, in stories that were collected in Sinning with Annie (1972), with my novel Jungle Lovers (1971), and with my Singapore novel Saint Jack (1973). The important thing—the essential thing—was that I had been taken seriously by a writer I respected and admired. It had actually begun in 1966, before I published a novel. It took the form of belief— Naipaul’s belief in my ability to write and, indeed, my ability to make a living as a writer. I was lucky. Naipaul took my ambition seriously and he discerned a gift in me, that was not fully developed, that needed nurturing. If I took writing seriously and worked hard, I might produce original

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work. Because the gift in the beginning is only the glimmer of an ability, that needs years of practice for it to shine. Remember that I was twenty-five years old when we met, and not much older when I began to publish, and thirty when I abandoned salaried employment and decided to make a living as a writer. But I had Naipaul’s encouragement: he believed in me. I should say that every writer—every aspiring person: basketball player, pre-med student, novice computer programmer, artist, musician—needs encouragement and this sort of belief. Your family will probably back you, but you don’t want it from your family: you want it from someone in the profession, someone you admire. Naipaul did that for me: he alone told me what I was capable of doing. Because of his travel, I saw less of him and with this distance, and the confidence that I had a career separate from his, I began to see contradictions, which were also lessons. One of Vidia’s obsessions was about physical health. The villains in his books, the ones who come in for the most disdain tend to be overweight, or pale—“there was a risen-dough quality about the magnate’s face and physique which hinted at a man given to solitary sexual excitations”—the face of an onanist. This is in India: A Wounded Civilization (1977). In The Mimic Men, when Ralph Singh visits a prostitute, she undresses and her breasts were released. They cascaded heavily down. They were enormous, they were grotesque, empty starved sacks, which contained some substance at their tips, where alone they had some shape . . . Below those breasts, wide flabby scabbards, which hung down to the middle, her loose belly collapsed; flesh hung in liquid folds about her legs which quivered like risen dough. In A Turn in the South (1989), he describes how older people in the Southern states in America are misshapen, “the individual way each human frame organized or arranged its excess poundage: a swag here, a bag there, a slab there, a roll there,” and he wonders if “if there wasn’t, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion.” That a man in his novel Guerrillas (1975) is overweight indicates sinister intentions.

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Neglect of the body in his work is like a moral fault. In Uganda we exercised—running around a sports field. Naipaul said that only “infies”—inferiors—allowed themselves to become fat and unhealthy—debauched, drinkers. He disparaged anyone who was not physically fit. His first measure of a person was based on their physical condition. I passed muster with him because of my good health, and in England when I visited him at his house in the country, I took my bike on the train and cycled the eight miles from Salisbury station to his cottage in Salterton. His brother Shiva had died of a heart attack in 1985, when he was just forty years old. Before then, Vidia had distanced himself from him, and been offhand, blaming his self-indulgence for his poor health. Shiva had been overweight, and a drinker, and smoker. Many of Naipaul’s lessons and observations, arose not from lived experience but from refractions of his mood. He was depressive. He lashed out. He said cruel things, he behaved badly. He was nearly always balanced and clear-sighted in his writing; but talking—belittling women writers, African novelists, disparaging E. M. Forster, saying “Princess Anne’s daughter has a criminal face”— he was often possessed by a foul mood. In such a mood he rejected me in 1996, and I wrote Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998)—not vindictively but in a spirit of discovery, being able to write about someone so different from anyone I had known; someone who had helped me on my way—and later, whom I had helped by encouraging him, listening to his complaints, finding him a new literary agent. It was a book about having a friend, becoming a writer, making a living, a whole friendship, with a beginning, middle, and end. Because the friendship was over, I was able to assess it, with the detachment that Naipaul himself had suggested. Fifteen years after my Naipaul book, I saw him at the 2011 Hay Literary Festival. Being helped through a common area by his wife, he limped, and looked unwell, seeming to struggle. On the encouragement of my fellow writer and friend, Ian McEwan, with whom I was drinking coffee, I approached Naipaul, and introduced myself—he looked confused, he was having a hard morning. I said my name and, “I’ve missed you.” He grasped my hand, responding with feeling, “I’ve missed you, too,” and so our friendship resumed. He’d broken one of his rules of life: he’d given me a second chance. We remained close for the next eight years. I saw him in London just a few weeks before his death, in 2018.

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In those eight years I saw a different man, not a drill sergeant but a contented man, happily married. And in this new mood his fierceness abated, he was mellow, my stories of his rages seemed preposterous to many of his new friends. Casting an eye at posterity, he had interviewed a number of potential writers to undertake an authorized biography. Patrick French, author of books on Tibet and India, got the job. The World is What it Is (2008), his biography of V. S. Naipaul is lengthy, detailed, felicitous, and discursive, giving context to Naipaul’s life. It was also a painful book to read, because much of Naipaul’s life was lived in struggle, pain, occasionally rage, depression, and disturbance. But here is a difficulty. The book ended with Pat Naipaul’s death, and Naipaul’s remarriage in 1996. But the marriage, and Naipaul, lasted until Naipaul’s death in August 2018. The last two decades of his life remain unchronicled. Naipaul’s second marriage was serene and productive. In those years he published seven books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Beyond Belief (1998; the sequel to Among the Believers, 1981). “People call Nadira a force of nature,” he told me proudly. He had said to me long before, “I need to be cherished.” Nadira cherished him—cooked the food he loved, kept the house as he wanted it, traveled with him, and was lover and companion, as well as in his later years a deeply maternal figure for a man whose own mother was fierce and domineering. He died a happy man. It was with his rejection of me, and my writing Sir Vidia’s Shadow, my summing-up, that my thirty-year apprenticeship ended. The dismissal was my liberation, my release from the drill sergeant, a sort of promotion to a higher rank. Out of his shadow, I saw his contradictions clearly, and I am still seeing them—his divided self, his many moods. In good health he was superb; after a bad night, or in a depressive frame of mind, he was a doomsayer. He could be violent—he physically abused Margaret Murray, his long-time lover. He could be flatly mistaken about writers. The cruelty in his remarks was unjustifiable. He was often wrong. People are not wicked for being overweight or illfavored. That the oppressed are always to be feared is a questionable notion. The writing of Nabokov or Updike may not be a windowpane, yet it is often brilliant and gives joy. Joyce and Beckett are inimitable. Africa has not returned to bush, though many of its people are badly governed, and still exploited by outside interests. Offering someone

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a second chance is a humane act: Naipaul’s gesture to me is proof of that. And no matter how much encouragement beginning writers receive, they are still forced to make their own way, scribble-scribble. One of Naipaul’s generalizations about writers was in an essay on “Steinbeck in Monterey” (1970): “A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth. And that myth is in the keeping of others.” Naipaul is not a myth to me. Now and then when someone mentions to me that they’ve read him, and they offer an opinion about him, I don’t recognize the man they’re describing, because I had known him so long and seen him in so many different circumstances, and learned so much from him.

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INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, 177 Aird, Catherine (pseud. Kinn McIntosh), 17–22 Alighieri, Dante, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio, 49, 78, 135 Allingham, Margery, 18 Allman Brothers, Eat a Peach, 51 “Tied to the Whipping Post,” 51 Alpert, Barry, 186 Ambrus, Glenys, 150 Aminoff, Michael, 141–8 Amis, Kingsley, 29, 188 Lucky Jim, 30 “Angry Young Men, the,” 30 Anthony, Ferris, 117, 125 Aquinas, Thomas, 133, 176 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, 172 Argyris, Chris, 90 Aristotle, 133 Arp, Thomas R. and Laurence Perrine, Sound and Sense, 56 Atkinson, M.E., 152, 162 Auden, W.H., 39, 199–200 “Musée des Beaux Arts,” 68 Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, 79 Autry, Gene, 94 Baden–Powell, Robert, Scouting For Boys, 22

Barrie, James Matthew, Peter and Wendy, 11 Barry, Paul, 118 Baskin, Leonard, The Aeneid (illus.), 134 Baudelaire, Charles, 54, 129, 174, 187 Beatles, The, 77 Beckett, Samuel, 83, 217, 224 Molloy, 86 Bedient, Calvin, 192 Bell, Josephine, 18 Benjamin, Walter, 182 Bennett, Alan, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore, Beyond the Fringe, 118 Bernhard, Thomas, The Loser, 175 Berlin, Isaiah, 182–3 Berryman, John, 137 Betjeman, John, 154 Bishop, Elizabeth, 187 Bloom, Harold, 83 Bogart, Humphrey, 84 Botticelli, Sandro, 68 Bowra, Maurice, 154 Boyers, Robert, 171–3 Boyle, Nicholas, The Dear Purchase (intro.), 158 Goethe: the Poet and the Age, 161 Braine, John, 30 Brand, Christianna, 18 227

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Brandeis, Irma, 135 Brode, Anthony, 23, 26 “Breakfast with Gerard Manley Hopkins,” 29 “Calypsomania,” 29 Picture a Country Vicarage, 29 To Bed on Thursday, 29 Brode, Sylvia, 28 Brooks, Cleanth, 83 Brown, Jean, 78 Brown, W. Edward, 77–82 A History of Russian Literature in the Romantic Era, 81 Browne, Sir Thomas, 108 Browning, Robert, 59, 174 Brueghel, Pieter, Fall of Icarus, 68 Buchan, John, 18 Bunting, Basil, 206–8 Briggflatts, 207 “Chomei at Toyanna,” 207 Burke, Edmund, 67 Burke, Kenneth, 90 Byron [George Gordon], Don Juan, 54, 110 Camus, Albert, xv, 55 Caravaggio, 136 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 132 Casals, Pablo, xv Cassatt, Mary, 71 Castagno, Andrea del, 68 Causley, Charles, 39 Cecil, Lord David, Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 193–4 Celan, Paul, 177 Cellini, Benvenuto, 108 Charteris, Leslie, 18 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 29, 129 “The Knight’s Tale,” 39 Cheever, John, 50 Chomsky, Noam, 178 Christie, Agatha, 18, 22, 29

Churchill, Sir Winston, 58, 142 Clare, John, 38, 110 Clark, Bill, 93 Clinton, Bill, 73 Coburn, Kathleen, 121 Coetzee, J.M., 3–9 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 57, 60, 62, 90, 121 The Friend, 121 Colt, George Howe, 47–63 Charles Wiggins Memorial Essay, 58 Colville, Alex, 71 Conquest, Robert, 188 Conrad, Joseph, 67, 86 “Heart of Darkness,” 88, 220 The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” 70 “An Outpost of Progress,” 220 “The Secret Sharer,” 57 Cons, Emma, 105, “Penny Popular,” 106 Cooper, James Fenimore, 122 Cowper, William, 191, 193, 195 “Love Constraining to Obedience,” 192 Crane, Hart, 52, 54, 137 Crews, Frederick, 122 Crockett, Wilbury, 116 Crofts, Freeman Wills, 18 Cummings, E.E., 50 Cusick, Fred, 53 Czerny, Carl, 83 Darwin, Charles, 90 Davie, Donald, 185–209 Articulate Energy, 186, 190 Augustan Lyric (ed.), 191 Brides of Reason, 189 Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, 186 The Late Augustans (ed.), 191

INDEX

New and Selected Poems, 186 The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 193–5 Purity of Diction in English Verse, 186, 190–1, 193 “Remembering the ‘Thirties,” 198–9, 202 Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, 186, 190 Trying to Explain, 208 A Winter Talent, 189 de Romans, Marialuisa, 130 The Odyssey (illus.), 138 Ovid in Sicily (illus.), 138 Savantasse (illus.), 138 Defrees, Madeline, 137 Degas, Edgar, Misfortunes of the City of Orleans, 71 Dickens, Charles, Oliver Twist, 152 The Pickwick Papers, 19 Dickinson, Violet, 108 Dickson, Judith, 17 Donne, John, 155 Dorn, Ed, 202 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 87 Doyle, (Arthur) Conan (see also Holmes, Sherlock), 18 Drabble, Margaret, 103–113 The Dark Flood Rises, 112 Dryden, John, 73 “Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Dau,” 39 Dylan, Bob, 39, 77 “Desolation Row,” 57 Eisenberg, Frank, 73–4 Eisenberg, Marvin, 67–75 “The Confraternity Altarpiece by Mariotto di Nardo,” 72 “A Few Words about Halos, Visible and Invisible,” 72 Lorenzo Monaco, 71–3

229

“Robert Browning and the Arts,” 72 “Two Echoes of the Platytera on Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art,” 72 Elek, Paul, 30 Eliot, George (pseud. Mary Ann Evans), 60 Eliot, T.S., 36, 39, 52–3, 56–8, 60–3, 67, 187 Collected Poems, 55 The Four Quartets, 58 Little Gidding, 134 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” 50–1 “Preludes,” 51 “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” 51 Selected Poems, 50 The Waste Land, 60–1 Ellmann, Mary, Thinking about Women, 110 Ellmann, Richard, 83 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xviii, 78 Empson, William, 90 Everett, Barbara, 194 Fagles, Robert, 135 Faulkner, William, 85, 118–24 Absalom, Absalom!, 92 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 57 Fields, W.C., 69 Fish, Daniel, Oklahoma, 118 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 29 The Great Gatsby, 85, 89 Ford, Ford Madox, 67 Forman, John, 117 Forster, E.M., 29, 223 Fra Angelico, 72, 136 Franklin, Benjamin, 117 Frayn, Gill, 153 Freeman, R. Austin, 18

230

INDEX

French, Patrick, The World Is What It Is, 224 Freud, Sigmund, 182 Frost, Robert, 50, 63 Galsworthy, Johnr, The Forsyte Saga, 61 Gardner, Helen, 153–154 The Art of T.S. Eliot, 154 The New Oxford Book of English Verse (ed.), 153 Gardner, Leonard, Fat City, 86 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Cranford, 152 Gavron, Hannah, The Captive Wife, 109 Gery, John, 201, 203–4 Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook, 11–16 G˜ı konyo, Ngu˜g˜ı wa, 43 Gilliatt, Penelope (née Conner), 142 Gilliatt, Roger William, 141–8 Gilman, Richard, 90 Gioia, Dana, 185–209 Giotto, 136 Gissing, George, New Grub Street, 107 The Odd Women, 107 Thyrza, 106–7 Giudici, Giovanni, 129 Gladstone, Josephine, 104 Gleave, R.R., 24 Godber, Fred, 151 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 133 Goffman, Erving, 125 Goldsmith, Oliver, “The Deserted Village,” 195 Gonne, Maud, 59 Gooder, Jean, 104 Gouws, Gerritt, 3–9 Grail, Gilbert, 106 Grant, Hector, 117

Grass, Günter, The Tin Drum, 110 Gray, Thomas, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 195 Greenblatt, Stephen, 99–102 Gropius, Walter, 112 Gunn, Thom, 186 Hadas, Pamela, 137 Hambling, Maggi, 110 Hannah, John, 117 Hardy, Thomas, 38, 122 “I look into my glass,” 37 Jude the Obscure, 105 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 53 Harlow, Sally, 116 Harrop, David, 149 Hartman, Geoffrey, 83, 100 Hauben, Paul, 119 Havel, Václav, 157 Hawn, Goldie, 119 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 86, 122 Hay Literary Festival, 223 Hayano, Keiichi, 73 Hayes, Joanna, xv–xvi Heaney, Seamus, 39 Hearne, Vicki, 201 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 174 Heine, Heinrich, 173 Heller, Erich, 158, 161–2, 164 The Disinherited Mind, 159 Hemingway, Ernest, 29, 49 The Sun Also Rises, 85 Hersey, John, 83 Hesse, Hermann, Narcissus and Goldmund, 86 Hillary, June, 151 Hitchens, Christopher, 178 Hitler, Adolf, 157, 165 Hoffman, Abbie, 58 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 165 Holmes, Sherlock, 25, 56 (see also Doyle, (Arthur) Conan),

INDEX

Holocaust, the, 157, 160 Holst, Gustav, 109 Homer, 129 The Iliad, 79, 159 The Odyssey, 136 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 62, 132, 194 Housman, A.E., 52 Howard, Richard, 53, 62, 84 Hughes, Ted, 39, 110 Huxley, Aldous, 100 In Italiam nos fata trahunt, sequamur, 72 Inge, M. Thomas, 118 Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 202 Jackson, Shirley, “The Lottery,” 49 James, Henry, 92, 187, 204 “The Beast in the Jungle,” 92 James, William, 90 Jennings, Elizabeth, 188 Johnson, Daniel, 157–70 “German pessimism, 1870– 1914,” 158, 168 Johnson, Judith, 137 Johnson, Samuel, 67 “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” 195 Johnson, Sarah, 170 Johnson, Tycho, 170 Jones, James Allen, 115–19, 123 Jones, Monica, 33 Joyce, James, 217, 224 Jünger, Ernst, On the Marble Cliffs, 162–163 Storm of Steel, 162 Kafka, Franz, 86, 157–8, 166–7 Kant, Immanuel, 172 Kariara, Jonathan, 45

231

Kaufman, George S. and Moss Hart, The Man Who Came to Dinner, 117 Keats, John, 38, 54, 56, 59, 60, 108 Kennedy, Robert (“Bobby”), 15 Kernan, Alvin, 99–102 The Cankered Muse, 100 Crossing the Line: A Bluejacket’s World War II Odyssey, 101 Kerouac, Jack, 29 K˜ı bico, Samuel, 44 Kierkegaard, Søren, 90, 174, 176 Kilmer, Joyce, 50 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 15 Kipling, Rudyard, 53 “Six Honest Serving Men — What and Why and When and How and Where and Who,” 22 Kojima, Robin, 201 Kraus, Karl, Die Fackel, 164 Kunitz, Stanley, 87 Langdon, Helen, 111 LaPalombara, Joseph, 90 Larkin, Philip, 38, 39, 112, 186 “Dockery and Son,” 33 Oxford Book of TwentiethCentury Verse, 202 “Poetry of Departures,” 187–9 Lattimore, Richmond, 79 Leavis, F.R., 162 Lee, Hermione, 108 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 32 Lennon, John, 58 Lermontov, Mikhail, The Fatalist, 30 Levi, Primo, Survival in Auschwitz, 119 Levin, Harry, 187 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 182

232

INDEX

Lewis, Janet, 197 Lewis, R.W.B., 83 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 163–4 Notebooks, 163 Lincoln, Abraham, 58, 60 Logan, William, 83–96 Lowell, Robert, 52, 67, 137 Lukács, George, 133, 182 Lynen, John F., 122, 125 Macbeth, George, Poetry 1900– 1965, 186 Mack, Maynard, 83 Magnus, Laury, 133 Mailer, Norman, Armies of the Night, 124 Marilyn: A Biography, 124 The Naked and the Dead, 49 Main qui Châtie, La, 69 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 129 Mandelbaum, Allen, 129–40 The Aeneid of Virgil (transl.), 133 Chelmaxioms: the maxims, axioms, maxioms of Chelm, 138 The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso (transl.), 135 Journeyman, 132, 139 Leaves of Absence, 138 A Lied of Letterpress for Moser and McGrath, 138 La porte di eucalipto, 138 The Metamorphoses of Ovid (transl.), 136 The Odyssey of Homer (transl.), 136 Ovid in Sicily, (ed.), 138 The Savantasse of Montparnasse, 138

Three Centuries of American Poetry (ed.), 131 Ungaretti and Palinurus, 130 Mandelbaum, Jonathan, 129, 138 Mandelbaum, Leah Gordon, 129 Mandelbaum, Marjorie (née Bogat), 129 Mandelstam, Osip, 193 Manet, Édouard, The Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 71 Mann, Thomas, 69, 80, 166 Death in Venice, 80 Doctor Faustus, 174 Tonio Kröger, 80 Mansfield, Katharine, 109 “The Garden Party,” 151 Marquand, Richard, One Pair of Eyes, 104 The Return of the Jedi, 104 Marsh, (Edith) Ngaio, 18 Marston, John, 100 Marx, Karl, 133, 171, 182 Masaccio, 72 Masefield, John, “Cargoes,” 151 Matthews, William, 137 Mbu˜gua, Fred, 44 McCullers, Carson, 118 McDonald, W. Ian, 146 McEwan, Ian, 223 McMurtry, Larry, 94 Mariani, Eileen, 127, 128, 136 Mariani, Paul, 127–40 “The Dancing Master,” 132 Timing Devices, 132 William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, 136 Meisel, James, 69 Melville, Herman, 49, 122 The Confidence Man, 86

INDEX

Meyers, Jeffrey, 67–75 Homosexuality and Literature, 1890–1930, 72 Impressionist Quartet, 71 Modigliani: A Life, 73 Painting and the Novel, 71 Privileged Moments, 73 Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes, 69 Michelangelo, 136 Mickiewicz, Adam, 193 Middlesex Hospital, London, 142, 144–5 Milch, David, 83–96 Deadwood, 84, 94, 96 Hill Street Blues, 93 “The Men at Haskell Levine,” 91 NYPD, 84, 93–4 Pilgrims, 92 Miller, Arthur, 45 Miller, H. de J., 152–3 Miller, Karl, 165 Millgate, Michael, 118, 120, 122–3, 125 The Achievement of William Faulkner, 122 Milosz, Czeslaw, 193 Milton, John, 56, 94 “Il Penseroso,” 39 “L’Allegro,” 39 Mitchell, Gladys, 18 Modernism, 190, 202, 209 Monaco, Lorenzo, 68, 71 Monroe, Marilyn, 124 Montale, Eugenio, 129 Monty Python, 53 Moorehead, Alan, The White Nile, 220 Morgan, Edmund, 90 Morisot, Berthe, 71 Morley, Samuel, 105 Morrill, Mabel, 11–16

233

Moser, Barry, 132, 134, 137 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (illus.), 132 Timing Devices (illus.), 132, 134 Motion, Andrew, 33–42 Movement, The, 188 Murdoch, Iris, 73 Mussolini, Benito, 70, 135 Nabokov, Vladimir, The Gift, 31 Nagenda, John, And This At Last, 45 Naipaul, Pat, 213–14, 224 Naipaul, Shiva, 223 Naipaul, V.S., 212–25 Among the Believers, 224 An Area of Darkness, 212–13 A Bend in the River, 216 Beyond Belief, 224 Guerrillas, 222 A House for Mr Biswas, 212, 219 In a Free State, 216, 221 India: A Million Mutinies, 220 India A Wounded Civilization, 227 “The Killings in Trinidad,” 220 The Masque of Africa, 216 The Middle Passage, 212 Miguel Street, 212 The Mimic Men, 214, 216, 218 Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, 212 The Mystic Masseur, 212 The Suffrage of Elvira, 212 A Turn in the South, 222 National Hospital, London, 142, 144–5 Neill, Thomas P., Gods and Men: The Origins of Western Culture, 119 A History of Western Civilization, 119

234

INDEX

Neruda, Pablo, 45 Newstead, Helaine, 129 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 166, 169, 173–4, 177 The Birth of Tragedy, 166, 169–70 Novalis, 174 Nye, Robert, 112 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 172 Oakeshott, Michael, 162–4 Rationalism in Politics, 163 Olson, Charles, 202 Orwell, George, 29, 100 Homage to Catalonia, 213 Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 55 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 62 “Why I Write,” 219 Osborne, John, 142 Look Back in Anger, 30 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 136 Owen, Wilfred, “Strange Meeting,” 37 Pankhurst, Christabel, 107 Parini, Jay, 77–82 Theodore Roethke: An American Romantic, 81 Parkes, Henry Bamford, 119 Pascal, Blaise, 176 Pasternak, Boris, 193 Peace Corps, 211 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, View of the Roman Campidoglio, 69 Plath, Sylvia, 50, 67, 116, 122 The Bell Jar, 50 “Mushrooms,” 39 Plato, 67 Poe, Edgar Allan, 122 Poliakoff, Ina, 109 Poliakoff, Stephen, 109–10

Pope, Alexander, 191–5 “Rape of the Lock,” 39 Pound, Ezra, 60–1, 67, 177, 186, 189, 192–3, 202, 204–6 Press, Terrence des, 183 Prince Charles, 142 Princess Anne, 142 Princess Margaret, 142 Proust, Marcel, xvi–xvii Pujmanova, Olga, 72 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 129 Queen Elizabeth’s Girls’s Grammar School, 152 Rabbi Albert (Alter Naphtali), 129 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 100–2 Reich, Charles, 90 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, Dance at Bougival, 68 Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, 220 Richards, Betty, 109, 112 Richardson, Robert, Three Centuries of American Poetry (ed.), 131 Rimbaud, Arthur, 54, 57, 60 Roethke, Theodore, 80–1 Rolling Stones, The, 77 Rollyson, Carl, 115–25 Confessions of a Serial Biographer, 125 Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, 124 “The Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner,” 123 Roosevelt, Franklin Delanor, 58, 115 Royal College of Physicians, London, 141, 145

INDEX

Saadé, Lily, 138 Sachs, Oliver, 143 Said, Edward, 176 St. Augustine, xv, 176 Salmagundi Magazine, 175 Samuel Marsden School for Girls, 151 Sapper (pseud. Herman Cyril McNeile), 18 Sarotte, Mary Elise, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall, 169 Sarto, Andrea del, 68 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 55 Sayers, Dorothy L., 18 Detection, Mystery and Horror Stories, 19 Scammell, Michael, 23–32 Scammell, William, 31 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 173 Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe, 152 Seale, Bobby, 58 Seneca, 22 Serpotta, Giacomo, 111 Seth, Vikram, 200–1, 203 Seurat, La Grand Jatte, 71 Sexton, Anne, 50 Shakespeare, 108, 116, 178–9 As You Like It, 118 Hamlet, 39, 116, 179–80 Julius Caesar, 116 King Lear, 116, 179 Macbeth, 118 Othello, 115–16, 178, 180 Troilus and Cressida, 39 Twelfth Night, 179 Sheepshanks, Mary, 107 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 54 Silk, Michael, Nietzsche on Tragedy (with J.P. Stern), 166 Silone, Ignazio, 45 Simic, Charles, 137

235

Simon and Garfunkel, Bookends, 15, 56 “Hazy Shade of Winter,” 56 Singer, Mark, 87, 94 Smith, Gaddis, 90 Snyder, Gary, 187 Socrates, 67 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 119 Sontag, Susan, 25, 94, 175 Sophocles, Antigone, 175–6 Spade, Sam, 25 Spitzer, Leo, 79 St. Augustine, Steiner, George, 171–83 After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 176, 178, 181 Antigone: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Literature, Art, and Thought, 175–6 The Death of Tragedy, 171 “The Dreyfus Case,” 175 Language and Silence Essays 1958–1966, 178 The Lessons of the Masters, 179 Martin Heidegger, 176 “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” 175 Tolstoy or Dostoveyski, 171 Stephen, Virginia, see Woolf (Stephen), Virginia, Stern, Isaac, xv Stern, Joseph Peter, 157–70 The Dear Purchase, 158, 162, 165–6 Ernst Jünger: A Writer of Our Time, 162

236

INDEX

The Heart of Europe: Essays on Literature and Ideology, 157, 165 Hitler: The Führer and the People, 166 Idylls and Realities, 166 Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions, 163, 166, 170 Nietzsche on Tragedy (with Michael Silk), 166 On Realism, Reinterpretations, 166 A Study of Nietzsche: The Morality of the Utmost Strenuousness, 166 Stern, Sheila (née McMullan), 158–9, 165, 170 Stevens, Wallace, 63, 137, 191 Stevenson, Robert Louis, Treasure Island, 44 Stoppard, Tom, Leopoldstadt, 165 Strand, Mark, 84 Strasberg, Susan, 124–5 Swift, Jonathan, 191 Taylor, Arthur, 25 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, “Ulysses,” 39 Tey, Josephine, 18 Thatcher, Margaret, 163 Theroux, Paul, 211–5 Fong and the Indians, 221 Girls at Play, 221 Jungle Lovers, 221 Murder in Mount Holly, 221 Saint Jack, 221 Sir Vidia’s Shadow, 212, 223–4 Sinning with Annie, 221 V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to his Work, 212 Waldo, 221

Thiong’o, Ngu˜g˜ı wa, 43–6 Birth of a Dreamweaver, 43, 45 Caitaani mu˜tharabain˜ı /Devil on the Cross, 46 Dreams in a Time of War, 44 A Grain of Wheat, 43, 45 In the House of the Interpreter, 44 Kenda Mu˜iyu˜ru/The Perfect Nine, 46 “Mu˜gumo/Fig Tree,” 45 Mu˜rogi wa Kagogo/Wizard of the Crow, 46 Ngaahika Ndeenda/I Will Marry When I Want, 45 The River Between, 45 Weep not Child, 43, 46 Wrestling with the Devil, 46 Thomas, Dylan, 112 Thomas, Edward, 38 Thomas, Harry, Montale in English, 130 Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, 15 Thorneycroft, Gertrude, 109 Thwaite, Ann, 149–55 Edmund Gosse, a literary landscape, 155 Passageways, 150 Thwaite, Anthony, Home Truths, 155 Till, Antonia (née Clapham), 104 Till, Barry, 103–4 The Churches Search for Unity, 104 Till, Shirley, 104 Tippett, Michael, 109 Tolkein, J.R.R., 154 Tolstoy, Leo, Anna Karenina, 79 The Death of Ivan Ilych, 79 War and Peace, 79 Toynbee, Lawrence, 109

INDEX

Trilling, Lionel, 175 The Liberal Imagination, 162 Sincerity and Authenticity, 162 Trollope, Anthony, 145 Trollope, Francis Milton, 187 Trotsky, Leon, 133 Truman, Ethel, 109 Turoldo, David Maria, 130 Uccello, Paolo, The Battle of San Romano, 68 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 129, 135–6 Life of a Man, 130 Selected Poems, 130 Updike, John, 217, 224 Vasari, Giorgio, Lives of the Artists, 68 Verlaine, Paul, 57 Virgil, The Aeneid, 72, 133 Vodovozova, Elizaveta, A Russian Childhood, 30 Voltaire, 59 Candide, 32 von Wilamovitz-Moellendorf, Ulrich, 79 Vonnegut, Kurt, 87 Wade, Cory, 201 Warren, Robert Penn, 83–84, 87, 91–92 Watkins, Glenn, 74–75 Watts, Isaac, 191 “The Hardy Soldier,” 192 Waugh, Evelyn, 29, 100 Way, Peter, 34–41 Webb, Mary, 110 Weininger, Otto, 161 Wellek, René, 79 Wentworth, Patricia, 18 Wesley, Charles, 191 West, Nathanael, 86, 217

237

Whitelock, Dorothy, 153 Wiggins, Charles, 58 Wilbur, Richard, 52, 122 Wilde, Oscar, 110 Wilder, Thornton, 58 Williams, Oscar, Immortal Poems of the English Language, 56 Williams, Tennessee, 117 Williams, William Carlos, 136 Wilson, Angus, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot, 110 Wilson, Edwin G., 139 Wimsatt, W.K., 83 Winters, Jonathan, 117 Winters, Yvor, 197 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 157, 159–163 Tracttus, 160 Vermischte Bemerkungen, 161 Wodehouse, P.G., 18, 29 Wolcott, Derek, “As John to Patmos,” 217 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 111 Wood, James, 183 Woolf, Stephen, 107 Woolf (Stephen), Virginia, 107–109 Mrs. Dalloway, 108 A Passionate Apprenticeship, 107 A Room of One’s Own, 110 Wordsworth, William, 38, 57, 59–60, 87–88 The Prelude, 77 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 112 Yates, Richard, Revolutionary Road, 86 Yeats, William Butler, 60–61, 63, 112, 131 Zeldwyn, Cyril, 108

238