15 August 1966

     Stanley Wells' remark to me the other day—that he would be more than willing to come to lecture at Wroxton without an honorarium if he could listen to Dean Haberly talk—is much in my thoughts right now, when I am thinking that I probably won't see the Dean again for perhaps a long time. He is a remarkably entertaining and gentle man whose conversation is, as Wells suggests, a delight and a reward to all happy enough to be able to listen to him.
     I have sat with Wells, Michael McLagen [sp.] and many others here at Wroxton, happy and in wonderment for hour after hour hearing the Dean reminisce about some of his experiences in Britain and the States. I don't think I have ever heard him tell the same tale twice—even on those occasions when he was, presumably recalling the same set of events he had acquainted his listeners with at an earlier time. (The Dean's demurrers, whenever I have asked him to allow me to tape for posterity what I have heard him say, provide some explanation of the variant "texts" of his recollections. "No, no, no, NO, Savage!" he has laughingly protested more than once. "No taping of my stories, because then I won't be able to improve them with the next telling.")
     None of them need improving. None of them, furthermore, can be adequately preserved by some sneaky Boswellian effort at transcription by me or anybody else. Nevertheless, so that I can remember some of them in something like their original form, I'm going to record abbreviated versions of them here.
     One of them that I have heard him tell two or three times concerned a Miss Maypother who ran a children's—here it would be called an "Infants'—school. Miss Maypother ran her educational program in keeping with a firmly fixed pedagogical theory. She believed that children could grasp history only if they relived simulated versions of it. She therefore taught them about early mankind by having the students don furs and leather sandals and carry rude clubs for hunting, "caveman" style. Their garb and manner would change with the passing of eras, Attic and Roman garments giving way to later codpieces, jerkins, tunics, and so forth. Adults who, like Haberly, visited the school were at a distinct disadvantage because of a design feature Miss Maypother incorporated into all of the classrooms of the school: the doorways were child-sized, and grownups had to crawl through them.
     Another one dealt with a British woman of a certain age who jogged late each evening. Haberly met her, he told us, while he was doing research for his handsome study of tiles, now a work coveted by many English collectors. She exercised in the dark and, to avoid mishaps as she moved briskly along, wore a miner's hat with a lantern on it. She permitted Haberly to join her nightly constitutionals, Haberly said, only after he managed to master the art of jogging in iambic rhythm, the pace that she unfailingly maintained. She could, he firmly believed, instantly detect any variation toward trochees or spondees, for she more than once stopped and chastised him for a faulty beat.
     I think that my favorite Haberly recollection of his adventures was his account of two very rich ladies who lived, as I remember the details, on a lavish estate somewhere on Long Island. (One of the elderly spinsters was, unless my memory is faulty, the daughter of one of the Schwab magnates who left her an enormous legacy when he died.) The heiress and her friend devoted themselves to founding and maintaining a new, obviously mystical, and extremely exclusive religion. It was dedicated to the worship of a Belgian hare and a bantam rooster. Both of the devotees--who were also their faith's only priestesses—wore around their neck a gold chain from which dangled a locket. In the lockets were miniature portraits of the hare and the rooster, miniatures created by an accomplished European artist working on special commission.
     Haberly's connection with the two ladies and their deities came about because of his fame as a maker of exquisite and exceptionally durable books, an art to which he devoted himself for several years in England, where he established his own press. (He was a perfectionist about the craft. When he worked at illuminating manuscripts, he used the same dog's teeth medieval monks had used. Some of the tools he used to fashion his bindings were those Samuel Johnson had used in his father's shop. To prevent the depredations of bookworms, Haberly bound his signatures with the same heavily tarred ship rope that medieval and renaissance craftsmen had used. He discovered this fact through a careful examination of a centuries-old book found in a castle niche that had been walled over for at least two hundred years.)
     The ladies hired him to preserve the sacred writings of their religion by copying them onto gold-leaf-illuminated vellum that was violet colored. He was given luxurious quarters, his food, and a generously funded commission for the work. He could work at his own pace and was under no urgency to meet any deadline. He had, however, to obey one solemn command as he fulfilled his tasks: he could never leave the library-workroom in which he labored by any exit except the one to the terrace. The other means of egress, the elaborately handsome double doors of the room, led directly to the great hallway, an area absolutely off limits to him or any other man, he was told. The reason? In addition to their hare and their cockerel, the ladies had a third pet not part of their church's hierarchy: a cockatoo mortally afraid of men. The mere sight of anyone of the masculine sex, the ladies told him, could be fatal to the bird.
     Sometime after had worked at the manuscript for quite a while, the Dean once told me, a day came along when he was all alone in the great house, the ladies having gone off, he suspected, on some sort of pilgrimage. After he had worked quietly and productively for two or three hours, he was gripped by an irresistible urge to venture the merest peek out into the hallway through the double doors. Sidling softly over to them, he noiselessly opened them and placed an eye at the slit. Nothing untoward occurring, he parted the doors a little bit more and thrust the tip of his nose between them, seeking a better view of the forbidden territory. Just as he did so, he continued, blinking his eyes and shivering slightly as he recalled the event, he heard an eruption of raucous screeching from the bird followed by the sound of its body falling to the bottom of the cage. He slammed the doors shut and returned to the manuscripts, at which he worked in a kind of hypnagogic state until the two ladies returned.
     If he was able to, the Dean delighted in leaving the story right there and going on to some other subject as his hearers exchanged sidelong glances designed to move somebody to ask if the bird really died. Pressed by someone more importunate than he probably hoped his listeners would be, he would casually respond to a question about the cockatoo's fate. "No, no. Perfectly all right. Not a thing wrong with it. It just fell off the perch, I suppose." The airy, seemingly distracted manner with which he would round off his tale made more than one of those in his audience, I am sure, decide that such a fall from his story-telling perch was an accident that would never trouble Lloyd Haberly.