Thursday, March 27, 2008

3 September 1966

[I devoted this day of journal-writing to composing the following letter to a friend back home:]
     Patty and I have just finished reading your letter as we breakfasted. Your news of home brightened our meal, a typical Wroxton one in that the bacon was strikingly like what I imagine uncooked ear lobe would be and the fried eggs featured yolks the consistency of Turkish taffy and whites floating in oleaginous puddles. (The fats and greases here are poured out in Brobdingnagian fashion by the chef, and regular items like squooshy chips and fried bread and fish are doing astounding things to our visceras, which mutter and percolate busily whenever we deny them their generous daily allotments of entero-vioform.)
     Our cheerfulness and contentment as we read were enriched by a feeling of righteousness, for we knew that we were receiving your message at an hour when you were either just returning from some Spanish debauch or lying slugabed. We thank you for your note and hope that we can expect another sometime soon.
     We are still, of course, getting used to the Abbey, our job, the village, Banbury, and the English and their ways. We are in our permanent quarters in Room 2, now, after five days or so in Room 1 while the Haberlys were here. Digs here, as you know, are handsome but a piece of real estate rather than a bed and bath. The bedroom, I would say, is nearly 40x25, the bath about 10x18. The ceiling, richly figured with strapwork and gilded pendants, hovers some sixteen feet above us. The north wall, on the left of the Abbey, is given over almost wholly to the eight-light casement window through which I can right now see a sloping green bank heavily wooded with beeches, oaks, and evergreens like the towering and aged yew near the "croquey" green.
     Patty and I never get in each other's way, not even when we fly into sudden constitutional jogs, but we do feel a peculiar kind of isolation, especially whenever we find ourselves a little smarmy about Madison. We have also had some difficulty in adjusting to Jacobean carvings in The Necessary, in which, as I have hinted, we have been spending more than a decent share of our time. Hour by hour, however, the mini-flat is becoming home to us, as are all the roughly sixty rooms of this giant old place.
     The Davises—Ricky and his constantly snitty wife who serve jointly as business managers here—are, as I told Chris Hewitt in a letter of which he may have spoken to you, are less easy to come to terms with. They are still attempting the Mrs. Jewkes or Mrs. Danvers technique with me, but the lordly manner that I have affected as I stride about, tweed jacketed, crisply capped, and slapping vigorously at imaginary riding boots with an imaginary baton, has, I think, given them pause in their formerly obvious resolve to pin me to some rustling garret cot while a sodden and lustful neighboring barley farmer has his way with me. My memos, masterpieces, if I say so myself, of taut organization, self-sufficiency, Latinate terms, and a few obscure literary allusions, seem to have likewise helped serve my purposes, and I doubt that I shall have any real trouble with "Ricky" or "Linnie."
     About my work, itself, I am much less sanguine. After only a week of use, my desk calendar is a palimpsest of scribbles which, I hope, will remind me at the proper times to do things like (1) tell the chef that Miss Remas is allergic to fish and tell the college physician that two other women must never be given penicillin or sulfa; (2) invite Messrs. Gibbard and Portergill to dinner to discuss a Banbury Rotary project for our students; (3) arrange a tea or sherry for the Reverend W.J. Smart from Sulgrave Vicarage, where I am soon to join some Americans like our Ambassador and an Air Force high muckety-muck at an Anglo-American vesper service—covered by B.B.C.—in honor of Washington's family; (4) contact the Hamilton Galleries in London about a Wroxton hanging of the paintings of an American artist, Ann Cole Philips; (5) make a text-buying excursion to Blackwell's in Oxford; (6) meet an Oxford official about lecturers' dates; (7) confirm a series of field-trip reservations dates for the "Friendly Midland `Red'" Motor Bus Co.; and (8) write, phone, and visit about two dozen academics, professional men, and public officials whom I may be able to secure as lecturers or tutors.
     Lesser matters, like the fact that, as of now, Rutherford has not, in spite of my letters and cables, put a penny in the Wroxton till at Barclay's Bank and that academic preparations for the semester are being financed by my personal traveler's checks, are daily stuffed into various don't-forget niches of my mind. (Several of our academic devices here make inevitable a kind of giggling chaos. If, for instance, a lutanist, a member of Parliament, or an expert on 13th-century tiles happens to get sick, sozzled, or stubborn, the delicately balanced schedule for a forthcoming week or two must be hastily revised. Existing reservations for buses must be canceled and new ones set. The chef must be warned that we will, after all, be home for lunch and dinner on Tuesday, not mousing around Oxford of Stratford or Bath. And all conferences and review and assignment sessions with students have to be moved to new slots.
     Dealing with such contingencies might rather easily produce in me the nystagmus about which I have my little phobia, but it can also be exciting and full of lovely, small quietnesses. Two examples of what I have in mind are these: (1) Mrs. Scott, who runs the miniature grocery store in the village, has rapidly acceded to my request that she add a few items to her stock—ruled note paper, some kind of tobacco besides "Digger," a black and vile plug of formidable power, and oddments like scotch tape and pen refills. "Whatever you want, sir, you just tinkle. Mr. Scott's a dead hand at getting things in." (2) Because Dean H. has found that Blackwell's is hopelessly sluggish about filling book orders, we do much of our text buying at the Banbury Children's Book Shop. I stood in it the other day, fussed over by the matronly owner and her solicitous young clerk, and wrote out orders for the O.E.D. and a history text as I ducked my head under a "Beatrix Potter Centenary" banner. I do not expect to be bored by my duties.
     The people here are also endlessly fascinating studies for an American, or at least for me, new and naive as I am in this clime. I entertained two Banbury officials the other evening, a farmer and a real estate man. For two hours they chatted with me, not only about the business we had to discuss, but about fox hunting, Switzerland, France, Spain, and Italy, which they have recently visited, the carvings in the Abbey Chapel ("Not met often, is it, that bit—the fifth panel showing the circumcision of Christ?"), and the eleven Earls of Guilford who ruled this manor. They also told me that the big evergreens here are not, as I assumed, sequoias, but Wellingtonias, and that the Banbury history book I was reading was less good than three others I could get.
     Today the relief cook here gave me a ride into Banbury and back. As his dilapidated midget Reliant rattled down the narrow road on the three wheels over which it is triangularly balanced, he rattled on about the Mediterranean countries he had been to last year, about birds—he had seen a kestrel swoop across our route—and about English justice. ("Shockin', it is, the way they'll savage you for petty things.") As we pulled out of the parking lot in which he had left his car for ten minutes, he braked to a halt, vaulted out the door, and raced over to a white-smocked attendant snoozing a block away in the sun. When he got back into the car, he apologized to me: "Forgot the sixpence charge, I did. `Tisn't my way to go off without paying."
     These sorts of experiences suggest pretty well my reasons for regarding the English with admiration, affection, and occasional envy. Their sense of order, their good manners, their good talk, their intellectual curiosity and range of interests have been remarkably pleasant surprises to me, even though you had given me advance notice of them. Conversations and books, as well, had theoretically prepared me for their eccentricity, or at least singularity, but even so, the concrete examples of it that I have met have left me blinking.
     The sewer-line excavations here brought a number of "oners" on the run. Elderly architects, young students, infirm widows, and brisk fellows with hearty mutton-chop tufts have been crawling in and out of the ditch. Amateurs all, they have nevertheless been professionally precise in their sifting of clay for bits of tile or stained glass or building blocks. They have taken color slides of the fragments, have measured the gleanings and the depth of the strata in which they were found, and used magnifying glasses to study the direction of the chisel marks on the stones once part of a 13th-century church wall.
     Some of them came to pursue two or three interests at once. One country-gentry-lady type, about sixty, frequently interrupted her study of the dig with dashes to some thicket to spot a yellowhammer, a Spanish owl, or one of the barking deer lately observed in the vicinity. Others, like a thin and angular granny with an immobile face, were memorable for attributes that had nothing to do with historical or archaeological keenness. She carried an umbrella on a sunny afternoon because she had heard that tree adders, a threat, I gather, only to her, frequently fling themselves like arrows from branches at victims strolling beneath the trees.
     Not all things English, of course, have me entranced. Some of the English ways, in fact have mildly and, in one or two instances, even heavily depressed me. The order—in the inevitable garden plots, the putting-green lawns, and queues which form, apparently whenever any pedestrian stops for a moment anywhere—quickly becomes strangely monotonous. Interior design, in banks and clothing shops, for instance, seems to me disquietingly 1930-ish, as does the fare on the workingman's rented telly. The look of a Banbury fabric-shop window crammed full of hopeless patternings and color combinations, is, well, appalling. Paying 3d. for matches to light cigarettes three times more expensive than those in the States, bagging your own groceries in a supermarket—in a bag you are expected to have brought with you, waiting a week for pants pressing, and finding most services in provincial hotels and elsewhere suspended at 11:00 p.m. can sometimes leave you feeling slightly different than formerly about the multiplied coddling of self-indulgence back home.
     If the regulations issued by the English staff of the Abbey are representative of generally prevailing attitudes, the abundance of blunt imperatives and injunctions is something else that might get to you. Here are some fair samplings of the 8-page folder: "Faculty and Students should not bathe in either of the lakes...The College Authorities [note the capital letters] reserve the right to enter any room at any time for purposes of inspection...Hand in your key to the College office...Keys not returned will be charged at L2 each...Students must use the Garden Room Entrance to the College until 6:00 p.m. and after that time the Main Hall Entrance until 11:00 p.m....Students are reminded that all accidents, sickness or injuries, however minor, must be reported...Do not replace an electric light bulb [40 w. is standard] with a more powerful one...Throwing water, snow or any other substance into, from within or towards the College buildings, is forbidden...Articles of food must be kept in glass, plastic or metal containers...Guests to meals and other resident guests must pay in advance...If you have a Radio Receiver you should obtain a license, price 25/d...If you leave your bicycle for any purpose [they are rented from the College], take the lamps and inflator with you..."
     My most destructive experience, however, has been my visit yesterday to an English barber shop. The U.S. Customs booklets should include clear warnings about the danger of such foreign adventuring. It is physically and psychologically excruciating and produces marrings which, unquestionably, are irremediable. I looked in the rear-view mirror when I wakened from the anesthesia with which the surgery had been attended and promptly blacked out again. I have been trying, ever since I was brought home to convalesce, to decide just what style of "do" I received. The young sheep-shearer who had at me assured me that he would give me an "American cut," but the term would suit only if, as I now believe, he was speaking out of a violent prejudice against my native land. "Olivier's Henry V" or "The Borstal Boy" appears to me a more accurately applicable designation. I have seen only one haircut like it in my life. That one was on the head of Bruce Cabot when he portrayed a villainous Iroquois in Last of the Mohicans years and years ago. His appearance, a cinema shocker in its day, led, I think, to the founding of the Hays office and quick passage of the Sullivan Act. The shop in which I was actionably assaulted was named "Christo's," pronounced just like the first part of "Christopher." For me, though, the i will henceforth and ever after be long, and the t will be separated by a hyphen from the o, followed by a bold exclamation mark. I had Patty take a close- up photograph of the back of my head while it was still smoking hot from the drawer's knife. You shall have a good view of it, I hope, when we get home and start settling some old scores with our showings of slides.
     The barber's totally unprovoked attack upon me has burdened me with a temporarily dyspeptic view of all things British, and I have been trying conscientiously all day to sweeten my contemplation of them. The Guardian which I have just been reading helps a good bit, particularly with its out-of-the-way columns. The personals remind me that, my barber not withstanding, the English are a people full of a tender and lasting sentiment: "In Memoriam: Everitt, William Needham, M.C. Captain 1/4th Battalion, Duke of Wellington's Regiment. Eldest son of the late Mr. and Mrs. C.K. Everitt, of Sheffield. Killed in action...on 3rd September 1916, and who has no known grave but the soil of France. In honor of his name and also of all his gallant comrades of the 1/4th and 1/5th..." In addition they provide evidence that what may seem pure maliciousness to me now may really be enigmatic playfulness: "Gemma: Wishes for a happier Navy blue anniversary. Snooker still loves the little Bocky. T.C. Ox."
     This dreadfully long letter to you has been one more bit of therapy for me. Sitting so long over it, however, has begun to aggravate my old condition. I hope that it has not been too abrasive to your contact lenses. If you will promise to write us again, I will promise not to be so rankly prompt or lengthy in replying hereafter. Now I will free you after one or two final requests: Please give my and Patty's best wishes to all who will not spit at you nastily at the mention of my name. And please—brace yourself; this will sound like the "Singing Lady" birthday lists of the `30s—give custom-service hellos to Sarah, Mara, the Pratts, Breen, the English Department, and the coffee regulars, including, of course, Ursula and our p.r. chief, for whose clipping service we are grateful. (You will instantly think of obvious omissions attributable to a rapid worsening of my condition. Tom E., the Gordons, Budishes, et.al. Work them in.) Naturally we miss all of you. Our love...



Note: The following sign, which I saw in at Christ Church, Oxford, leads me to believe that Mr. Davis’s regulations here are by no means an indication of local eccentricity: “Christ Church Meadow. The meadow keepers and Constables are hereby instructed to prevent the entrance into the meadow of all beggars, all persons in ragged or very dirty clothes, persons of improper character or who are not decent in appearance and behaviour; and to prevent indecent, rude or disorderly conduct of every description. /par/ To allow no handcarts, wheelbarrows, no hawkers or persons carrying parcels or bundles so as to obstruct the walks. /par/ To prevent the flying of kits, throwing stones, throwing balls, bowling hoops, shooting arrows, firing guns or pistols or playing games attended with danger or inconvenience to passers by, also fishing in the waters, catching birds, bird nesting or cycling. /par/ To prevent all persons cutting names on, breaking or injuring the seats, shrubs, plants, trees, or turf. /pr/ To prevent the fastening of boats or rafts to the iron palisading or river wall, and to prevent encroachments of every kind by the riverside. THE GATES WILL CLOSE AT 9.0”

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