28 January 1985

NOTE: Somehow, the chronology seems off in a couple of the entries along here. That is probably the result of my having written two or three entries at one time, after the day on which they are dated. This one, in one or two places, appears to be unaware of a preceding entry.
     The morning did not begin well. My travel alarm, set for about 7:40, rang at 7:10, cheating me of a half hour's sleep. The setting hand and the dial markings are, I am discovering after 2 or 3 days of using them, not very compatibly related. I wanted to waken no earlier than a little before 8:00 because I suspected last night, rightly, events proved, that I would have trouble sleeping. I did, nodding off over an Edmund Crispin mystery, my glasses and bed light on, at some time after midnight but waking again at 4:00. Getting back to sleep took at least 2 hours.
     I took much more time than I needed to wash, shave, and dress so that I would not catch Colin, the young cook, unawares. The Commons and kitchen in the Carriage Barn were both dark and, except for me, empty when I entered a little after 8:00. Back in the Abbey, Mrs. Popham told me that she would ring Colin on the phone, but I asked her not to, saying that I would walk up to the Wroxton Hotel for breakfast, just as I had for dinner last night. "But you'll get all wet in this rain," she protested, and, when I insisted on going, apologized profusely. "We'll be better organized tomorrow," she promised.
     Once I reached the Hotel, things quickly began to improve, though the light but chilly rain continued. The Hotel's dining rooms and bar are snug and attractive, with much red (on chairs and in carpeting) gleamingly polished brasses, white or beige plaster walls, a number of working fireplaces, and a profusion of dark beams in the low, irregular ceilings. It is, I think, 17th century, and half of it, or perhaps more than half of it, is roofed with a thick mat of thatch.
     Through the bay window across from my table I could see the Horton stone wall along the narrow but very busy main road from Stratford to Banbury, and, beyond it, a cow pasture between the small stone Catholic chapel, also thatch roofed, and a cluster of houses very much like it except for lacking its spire. The mossy stones of the wall and the rise of green pasture in the distance, comforting and prominent symbols of the gently stubborn survival of this area's old ways and faces and forms, filled the bay window reassuringly after each temporary blotting out by a trundling lorry or car whipping by. A hint of sun low in the east brightened the fog bank sky.
     Having reached the hotel low in spirits, I began to feel smugly self satisfied. The warm sensation lasted little more than a second or two. Almost as soon as I began to congratulate myself on my circumstances, ringed as I was with porridge, poached eggs, orange juice, toast, honey and coffee, the only other person in the room, a man of thirty or so, glanced at me furtively and coolly rose immediately and hurried out. Although four other hotel guests soon sat down a few tables away, dawdling over a second cup of coffee no longer appealed to me somehow.
     I asked for my check—oops! wrong word—and walked round to the other end of the Hotel to say goodbye to the Sammartinos. They were expecting a Daimler limo that was to transport them to a Grosvenor House suite, usually rented at about £300 per day they told me, as the guests of Lord Forte. I was to have helped them entertain him at the Abbey if I hadn't had food poisoning, and he hadn't had the flu.
     Peter and Sally gave me a short guided tour of their suite, by which, obviously, they were happily surprised. They had a right to be pleased with it. A first floor unit about thirty five—perhaps forty or more—feet long, it has an entry hall and a large sparklingly modern bathroom predominantly deep maroon and gray. These precede a long, low ceilinged room divided into sleeping area and sitting room with fireplace, an arrangement of low table and chairs, and a television set. A small casement window with leaded panes gives any TV watchers who turn their eyes slightly leftward of the screen a view of the same chapel and pasture I had seen from the dining room.
     I stayed till about 9:45, talking about subjects that gave me little real pleasure—Bob Donaldson's presidential policies, Peter's oft forwarded plan (attractive to no one I know except him) to have Lord Forte use the Abbey as a hotel one half of the year and FDU run courses there the other half, Peter's conviction that the University is no longer as creative or efficient as it was in his day. That sort of thing. Peter has talked to me about all of these sorts of subjects every time we have met. My telling him and Sally that I had to go because I wanted to leave them time to close up their suit cases was therefore in part ceremonial misrepresentation. In addition to wanting to give them "loose end" time, I simply didn't want to retrace any longer our well trodden tracks through these old worn out passages, having to shout two or three times almost everything I said to get my words through the deafness rapidly shutting Peter off from the sounds of the world. I left, however, full of affection for him and Sally.
     Characteristically, Peter had risen abruptly as I made my first "intentional moves" and hurled a "Goodbye-I have-to-go-to-the-bathroom" farewell over his shoulder as he disappeared into the entry corridor. When I shouted "Goodbye, Peter, bon voyage" after him and then embraced Sally, my throat tightened and I felt suddenly bereft. "As soon as we get home we'll call Patty and tell her you're all right," she promised, unknowingly compounding the sentimental distress I was feeling intensely. I held my cheek against hers longer than either she or I had expected because I feared that my eyes were moist.
     As I headed down Church Street toward the short cut break in the Abbey grounds wall, I thought with mixed embarrassment and gratitude about my morning behavior in the hotel. Why was I suddenly destitute when Sally said she would get into touch with Patty? Oh, I know that I was completely and spontaneously homesick. But that's not the answer I want. Why did I get homesick over something as inconsequential as that? I mean, there I was tight chested, tight throated, wet eyed—and as mournful as I would have been at a funeral—over a simple little remark. Should I be ashamed? Was I chillingly morbid, maudlin, childishly incapable of sustaining even modest shocks to the system? Should I, on the other hand, be proud, grateful? Were my tears and sorrow proof of warm sensitivity, a refined and delicate spirit?
     Another me that bears my name suddenly involved himself in the inquiry, as he often does whenever rapture or despair noticeably raises or lowers my spirits. "I don't know why, but I know what," he stage whispered out of the corner of his mouth. "You look ridiculous. Christ! A man—well, a male individual—your age puddling up over nothing! Just like yesterday, when you waved goodbye to Leonard and Arlene in London as they drove off on the bus to Windsor. You were swallowing hard all the way back to the Ebury Court. I don't know how the hell I put up with you. You find opportunities for cheap grief in discarding a pair of socks you've had for anything like a reasonably long time. I've seen you get miserable on some trip because you had to throw away in Atlanta or San Francisco or Dallas a used Speedstik dispenser that you'd carried on eight or ten earlier one or two day trips away from home. Even at home I've seen you act like someone who had just guiltily abandoned a child—or at least a pet—whenever you had to pull a sick old plant out of a pot and chuck it in the trash. To be honest with you, I wish one of us would get the hell out of here." He is my personal version of Poe’s “William Wilson.”
     Just once, I thought, I wish this master of ironic appraisal would say, "Don't worry about it. I understand. Maybe it's a fault. Who knows? But I like you. And there are a lot worse people than you."
     There are other me's besides him who try to be kinder to me, many others, with specialized role-playing functions. What we have here is not just a doppelganger, but a kind of "gangganger, I conclude, remembering something that F. Scott Fitzgerald once said about this subject: "Writers aren't exactly people. ... They're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." Those of them who try to throw an arm around my shoulder and hearten, I distrust as slavies, sycophants, toadies. None of them, I remain convinced, have the keen, objective, analytical mind of the one who always causes me to blush for my deficiencies. [1]
     And so I walked along dark-spirited once again on a morning unexpectedly full of brightness, vaguely displeased with myself and disturbingly aware of my frequent rapid descents from euphoria to a kind of depression close to panic. Thinking about my oscillations, my lark like soarings and plummeting falls, I catalogued some of the contrarieties and paradoxes I had noted in the last few hours.
     Peter's nature and my response to it came first and foremost to mind. On the one hand, he was a tiresome, bullying old man convinced that advanced age gave him a license for self-indulgence, for saying the same things over and over, for not only ordering people about but for doing so loudly because he was deaf. He used his deafness, too, as a way of justifying interruptions, of ignoring messages that might contradict his prejudices and preconceptions. His method is an inversion, of sorts, of the old Swiss proverb, "When he shuts one eye, he does not hear everything." When Peter shuts one ear, he does not see everything.
     I had felt thoroughly uncomfortable sitting with him at dinner last night. All of his questions and directions boomed through the dining room, first startling then amusing the other diners. "What kind of shoes are they?" he bellowed at me as we moved toward our table, his gaze skeptically fixed on the duck boots I'd worn to get to the Hotel through streets and pathways covered with mixed slush, snow, ice and half frozen mud. "Give us more of that bread," he told the waiter in the tone of a colonel calling a regiment to attention. "I asked for two extra slices of lemon for my salmon. Where are they? Here take this plate, and get us all another vodka. Are they capers? They look like beans."
     On the other hand, he was a gallant old warrior refusing any sort of retreat, a man full of a life and aspiration threatened by a mortality he both feared and despised. Every now and again he might feel a compulsion to accept the logic of surrender. At such times, he would rehearse preparations for withdrawal. Moods of that kind were, however, fleeting. Very soon he would be back to normal, full of rebellion and an unyielding determination not only to beat back the next onslaught but to move forward to some commanding height he saw, or thought he saw, in the near distance.
     I remembered his intrusion into my office, just after I'd assumed the presidency, when I was in conference with Regis Ebner, fairly new to his position of V.P. for External Relations and almost wholly new to Peter. "What are you doing?" Peter asked without preamble as he burst through the door, his progress vacuuming my secretary out of her chair and into the doorway behind him. "Never mind that, Peter," I said as I greeted him, cocking an eyebrow at Nancy to let her know, as she closed the door, that I understood that she could not have, should not have, stopped him. "What matters is your health. How are you?"
     I had two reasons for asking the question. I didn't want to have to get Peter involved in my fairly complicated talk with Regis, and I was honestly concerned about Peter, fresh from a rather long hospitalization and surgery for a prostatectomy and something else—both kidney stone and gall bladder removal, I think.
     "Oh, I'm all right," Peter answered off-handedly and then paused, looking thoughtfully at the carpeting. "There's one problem, though," he continued with a childlike candor and ingenuousness astonishing in someone as wise in the ways of the world as he, "I can't get an erection." I shot a glance at Regis, whose eyeballs had bulged and rounded behind his glasses, and looked again at Peter as he finished his report with a tone of brave resignation: "I'm not complaining. After all, I'm 81. But when it happens, it sure makes you feel old."
     As I made the sharp turn in Church Street, the sun brightened on the Abbey wall, delineating even more clearly the contrast between this part of the morning and its dreary beginning. Alpha and Omega, are the names, by the way, of the two cottages that mark the Banbury and the Stratford limits of Wroxton village. Yin and yang. Abrupt, illogical juxtapositions that mock every effort at order and coherence. I gloomily confessed that observing Peter, myself—people, life, the passing of days—seemed to me often like reading a text that was a pastiche of Beckett, Burroughs, Sarraute, and Robbe Grillet. Everything, myself, too, has too many faces.
     Vaguely recollected images come to my mind of oriental gods mentioned somewhere in Proust. Something about whole groups of faces side by side or superimposed where one face would be expected. Nothing, nothing is single. (Didn't Schopenhower note that a balloonist feels the earth sinking down not his gondola ascending?)
     For some reason, as I turned these thoughts over in my mind, I recalled the judgment of the unnamed old woman who is "Buddy's" friend in Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory." Responding to the remark of the mill owner's wife who wants to buy the Christmas tree the old woman and Buddy have cut down for their holiday—“Goodness, woman, you can get another one”—she "gently reflects" and replies: "`There's never two of anything.'" Right then, I felt uncomfortably sure      Last night, walking these same streets, I had figuratively cringed from an awareness of the discrepancy between my separation from my home and the warmth and peace of Wroxton's villagers whom I saw through their cottage windows. One couple sat together on a sofa, watching the telly, the wife leaning over in playful awkwardness to steal a sip of the beer her husband held idly at shoulder height as he peered fixedly at the screen. Another pair simultaneously cuddled an infant. I felt despicably sorry for myself, but, even so, morosely fascinated by the idea of ironic simultaneities. The speculation found its concrete imagery in the trapezoidal plots of light thrown through the windows onto the dark dirt lanes, in the thumping vibrato and grace notes of a Hawaiian record being played at top volume in a 17th or 18th century cottage that I passed as I neared the college gates.
     Starting this entry late this evening, I recalled other similarly incongruous yokings in my experience of the day. On a walk around the Abbey grounds in the morning, after breakfast at the hotel, I'd seen a moorhen, belly down, its wings spread in a gesture of flight frozen in the ice still on Lady Lake. A few yards further on, I saw beech saplings 2 or 3 inches in diameter supported by four inch thick stakes cut from dead trees just as, on the train from London, I had seen saplings staked in the same way in an old graveyard. Many of the tombstones had toppled, others were tilting, but the saplings braced by deadwood were growing, at intervals as carefully and regularly measured as the grave plots themselves. A minute's walk further on, I saw a dead blue tit bent double at the base of a soaring lime tree. Its glazing eyes looked sightlessly up toward the topmost branches. Fifty yards past that spot, I saw the Great Pond. Half of it, the shadier west end, I think, was a dull pewter color under ice. The other end, warmed by sun, was an olive mirror reflecting tree trunks, reeds, sky.
     Bob, the night clerk, greeted me when I returned to the Abbey with a question: "Been to the hotel, then, have you?" It reminded me of another event at breakfast, the puzzle of the young girl who had served me. I had had to ask her twice for coffee, three times for honey, and dodge slightly when she hit and tipped over my partially full orange juice glass with a milk pitcher. She also kept me waiting a long time for my check, and even though I knew that that delay was owing primarily to Peter's having intercepted her in the corridor to have her prepare his bill—I could hear him thundering "What's this £5 premium?"—I was still pretty thoroughly unhappy with her. But she was smiling brightly and gushing apologies when she finally hurried over to where I stood making a physical statement in the dining room doorway.
     She gave me the check—for £4.25+.75 V.A.T. She took the £l0 I gave her and at once both startled and inconvenienced me by handing me a £5 note as change. The inconvenience arose from my not having for use as a tip any of the coins I had counted upon her gratuity seeking instincts to include in the £5 I had coming. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm going to have to ask you for four one pound notes and some coins so that I can give you a tip." "Oh, that's not necessary, Sir," she replied, clearly uncomfortable, suggesting by her uneasiness that this was a totally new and—she hoped—an exceptional circumstance. "No, no, no," I insisted, pushing the five toward her. "I'll need change for the College phone anyway," I lied. The coins that she gave me, one 50p and five 10p pieces, did not add up to the 75p I had planned for. I hesitated clumsily for an instant after dropping the 50 and two 10s in her right palm, looking with a slight frown at the three 10p's I still had. "No, no, Sir. The gratuity was included, " she said, blinking her eyes shut and holding up her left hand in protest as she turned away with a musically cheerful "Goodbye, and thank you again."
     What kind of waitress was I to look back upon her as being? The inept creature whose service was grade D? A comely and warmingly pleasant young woman soothingly soft spoken, good to look at, and cheering to be around? A naive sort of rustic too slow on the uptake to see that giving me a fiver might create some tipping trouble? I momentarily compared her behavior with that of an American hat check girl I met recently at a booth with a fixed price of 50c per item. When I gave her a five to cover the four dollar charge, she brushed aside a dollar she had in her box and gave me four quarters. Thus she offered me an opportunity not only to give her a tip—unnecessary under the fixed cost system—but to give her a bad one (a quarter or a half dollar) or a fairly good one (75c) or, in her view, a proper one (a dollar).
     Should I see the breakfast girl as someone who would regard the calculating American woman as appallingly vulgar and scrounging, dispossessed of dignity by open greed? Or as someone devoid of ambition and drive, placidly committed to maintaining a dull but comfortable routine, rather irritatingly deliberate because working by rote? Or, maybe, as simply a representative of a culture altogether different from the beat-yesterday one to which the States had conditioned me? She was all of them, I supposed, and a few more that will occur to me later, and further complicate my view of an individual I will remember as a personification of the paradoxes much on my mind here. Thinking again later that the tip is built in in English hotel bills didn't substantially change my view of the waitress as a contrast to her American counterpart: if gratuities were included in American checks, waiters and waitresses would very quickly regard what was automatically included as no tip at all and would regard as generous—or worthy of real attention—only those customers who left something additional.
     Finally, I recalled Robert Denton, our groundsman, and Jessie Cook, for 40 years in charge of Wroxton's post office, to which I had gone in mid afternoon to buy a Cadbury bar from the small candy shelf.
     Mrs. Cook sat behind the counter, hunched over and peering at postal-savings forms. As I entered she squinted against the pale light filtering, through a window near which I stood, into the tiny, shadowy room. "Why it's Professor Savage," she exclaimed softly in some surprise. "I don't know why it was," she went on, "but I was thinking about you just the other day." There was no further reference to the fact that we had not met for over six years, but I suspected that she intended the seemingly casual comment as a grateful recognition of my return to the village—and of the return in her reminiscence of the older village days of which my appearance reminded her.
     With no fear of any egotistical overemphasis on my importance, I believe that my turning up again pleased her greatly. Yet her manner hardly changed, just as it had not changed twenty years before when she told me of the death of a beloved neighbor. I am willing to believe that, privately, Mrs. Cook has her passions and dreams, secret rages and covert desperations. Publicly, however, she maintains in moments of emergency, joy, and grief, the same demeanor of calm and mild astonishment with which I have heard her discuss the raids of blue tits or wasps upon the puncturable caps of the pint bottles left on her porch by the milkman: "The wretched little beggars have been at it again. The birds make the holes, they do, and the wasps squeeze in. Devilish milk nickers, they are, the lot of them."
     I had encountered Robert for the first time again during one of my walks around the lake. "Hello," he called out with a hint of a smile and immediately directed my attention to the poor condition of the "Christmas trees" planted among the much taller, much faster growing poplars. The poplars love the wetness of the particular boggy area we were in, he informed me, much more than the beeches and Norway spruce do.
     A note of intense indignation sharpened his tone as he continued his characterization of poplars. (They are full of water. He has an instrument that measures water content of trees, and the poplar's is the highest. They are not much good for anything. They are not nearly as "griceful" as the beech. The wood is too soft for lumber, and they crowd out better trees.) He especially dislikes one species of poplar, to which he refers as an "almbow," or something similar.
     He paused in his disquisition on trees to pick up his pitchfork and push and stir up the fire he had built to burn up the pile created by his clearing and pruning. I asked him if the droppings I had seen on the slope above the wooded plot in which we stood were signs of the munt jac deer that I was eagerly trying to get a look at. "No, rabbits, I should think. Come along here. I shall show you some deer pellets. They're long and thin, is deer pellets." He searched about in the carpet of wet leaves, swinging a heavy muddy boot left and right ahead of him as he moved along. "No. I must have disturbed them in the tidying up today. I saw them yesterday. That's cornus, there," he said, stooping to pick up a small branch waiting for the fire. "Dogwood. You have that in the States, don't you? Grows wild all over here, but the garden centers charge you one pound fifty for a potted plant this size."
     I asked him about a fairly large burrowing hole I had seen near the Great Pond on my walk. "That'd be a rabbit. It could be a fox, but I should think a rabbit there. Here's one over here by this great old poplar stump." He pointed out the hole and then called my attention to a large wound on a nearby beech. "The rabbit did that," he said, shaking his head in dismay. "The rabbits, the deer, and the squirrels all damage the gardens and trees. John Seagrave has a slide of a beech sapling a squirrel barked in one day, the whole tree top to bottom. It's a masters the damage they can do. The whole tree stripped bare. I've never seen the like. The squirrel that did it didn't get away free. I shot it, I did. The people in the forestry service have to shoot some of the deer. They'd lose their trees, else. We have just two pair of deer here, so I don't trouble them."
     We finished our talk and I left him whistling and thrashing at the clippings, not seeing him again till well after 5:00. Clad in garments the color of the earth and woodlands, he was driving a bright yellow tractor up the black-topped Abbey main road toward the village. As he drove, he cocked an ear at the racket of rooks in an oak he rumbled under. I watched him and recalled three earlier experiences with him.
     The first was in 1966, when he was a young assistant to the Scot who was then head gardener. I called his attention to a holly tree near the walk in front of the Abbey, telling him that one of the branches was growing right out into the path. Did he think it should be cut back? He didn't. He was definite about that. "Ivery toim I koot it, soombody in the village doys."
     The second was in the spring of 1967, when he was about 18 or 19 and I was about to board a coach in which I was taking a large party of undergraduates to Coventry. "Where are you goin', then, today, guvnor?" he asked. I told him, and he said, "Ah, Coventry. A smashing place, I hear. I should like to see it one day," he sighed, suggesting that it was a jet flight away.
     The last occurrence was in June, 1984, when I talked with him about some trouble he was having with his kidneys. He was all right, he assured me, while he was in Wroxton. It was when he got to Banbury that he felt pain. "It's the hard paving underfoot," he said. "Here, on the sward I have no trouble at all." [2]
     Just before he turned the tractor leftward toward the gate house at the meeting of virtually all of Wroxton's streets—Church St., Mills Lane, Main Street, Dark Lane—Robert turned and saw me on the path, under the oriel window. He stopped the tractor, climbed down, and hurried toward me. "I got the picture you left for me last year," he said, referring to an engraving of the Abbey. "It looks foin on the wall. Iverybody as cooms in comments on it. I've been wantin' to thank you."
     He was clearly embarrassed, had probably been thinking throughout the day of the proper form for these remarks of gratitude. "You're welcome, Robert," I replied quickly. "I like it too, but I like the walking stick you carved for me much better." His whole body relaxed and a smile softened his face. "Do you use it, then? I'm glad of that." And he walked back to his tractor with which he breaks the earth of which he himself seems in part compounded, mounted it, and drove away, in the direction of his Wroxton House flat and his wife, an American from Buffalo.
     Now, late at night as I write these lines, I sit here thinking about the relationship between the singer and the song. Who am I to encapsulate someone like Peter or the hotel girl or Robert Denton in sentences passing judgment, favorable or unfavorable? Whether or not I have said what I've said well or badly, whether or not my judgments are valid or invalid isn't the point. What is important is that I did the saying, the judging. I issued the pronouncements, admitted or excluded evidence and handed down verdicts. I, who felt inexplicable cold drafts upon the back of my neck as I bent over my tablet in the little pool of rusty yellow light in the dark of the vast old bedroom—the neck of someone not really the writer of these lines, I concluded, and shivered just a little.

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[1] When I reread this entry several years later, I decided to add to it two comments on writers and their “selves.” One of them was Philip Larkin’s observation quoted by Richard Holmes in his Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: `...a writer's reputation is twofold: what we think of his work, and what we think of him. What's more, we expect the two halves to relate: if they don't, then one or other of our opinions alter until they do.'" James Atlas, "Life and Letters: Holmes on the Case," The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 29, Sept. 29, 1994, p. 58. A second one concerns Samuel Beckett’s observation—where I forget—that he often thought that he was his own double.

[2] Robert’s comment reminded me of a brief bit I filed away from a NYTimes article of 9-24-74, p. 39. I forget who wrote it now, but it included the writer’s recollection of a Pinter-like character from Yorkshire “who detested towns because he `couldn’t walk on t’street…there were that many people about, I ‘ad to take big steps and little ‘uns, then big steps an’ little ‘uns again. Couldn’t get goin.’”