8 May 1985

The time that I might have devoted to my journal today was used, instead, to write this letter to a stateside friend:
     Having been miserably unsuccessful in my most recent attempt to establish an amiable working relationship with Mrs. C, J. S's p.a., I turned just a few minutes ago to the possible solace of Stephen Pile's The Book of Heroic Failures. Its section entitled "The Worst Phrasebook" instantly cheered my by reminding me that many of my own troubles are as nothing when compared with those of Pedro Carolino, author of The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English. Pile notes that Carolino wrote his Guide "despite having little or no command of English..." but "aided by the fact that he did...possess Portuguese French and French English dictionaries through both of which he dragged his original expressions. Here is a sampling of Carolino's instructional prose, which, as I say, raised my spirits just as they threatened to droop: "Familiar Phrases: Dress your hairs/ This not go well/ Undress you to/ Exculpate me by your brother's/ She make the prude/ Do you cut the hairs?/He has tost all his good...Dialogue 18 `For to ride a horse' Here is a horse who have bad looks. Give me another. I will not that. He not sall to march, he is pursy, he is foundered. Don't you are ashamed to give me a jade as like? he is undshoed, he is with nails up."
     Another section excerpted by Pile includes under "Anecdotes" these three sentences: "One eyed was laied against a man which had good eyes that he saw better than him, The party was accepted. I had gain, over said the one eyed; why I se you two eyes, and you not look me who one." A final passage lists these "Idiotisms and Proverbs": "Nothing some money, nothing of Swiss/ He eat to coaches/ A take is better than two you shall have/The stone as roll not heap up not foam/The dog than bark not bite."
     Pedro Carolino, I hasten to add, is not my only source of good cheer here at the Abbey. The ambiguities of my relations with the defensive administrative infrastructure set aside, life here is remarkably interesting and pleasurable. There are, of course, the grubby—the local term might be "grotty"—dailies of the place. Everything takes a long, long time to get done. (I have just finished a two-week wait for my first look at the current College budget, for which I am officially responsible. I spent 45 minutes yesterday trying to complete a two minute telephone call. And four days ago we received the last two of the five pieces of gym equipment we had been promised that we would have twelve weeks ago: several of the units had been misdirected as many as three times, and when the installer deliverer finally got them here to their proper place, he arrived at 8:30 in the evening—and without his toolbox, which he had left in Oxford.)
     The students, for the most part an unusually good and congenial group, generate their inevitable occasional difficulties. A man and woman, both of them having drunk more than they should have at our last buttery party, got into a water squirting, beer sloshing quarrel leading to the man's hurling the woman to the floor and bruising her arm. A day and a half of mediation was required to discourage the woman from having her father formally cite the man for assault. The ill will between Mrs. C and every member of the staff over whom my absentee predecessor has given her authority continues to be palpable. It is beginning to surface among the students as well. But there is also here a range of rare and surprising pleasures. The faculty is a joy to work with. They are bright, hard working, and exceptionally cooperative. Conversing with them at luncheon and dinner is exciting and instructive. I will miss them when I leave.
     I will also miss the opportunities like two recent ones that Wroxton provided. Last night I led 14 students in the College's "Annual Pub Crawl," driving them in the minibus to 6 different pubs in 4 hours: "The Plough" in Bodicote, "The Saye and Sele" in Broughton, the "Elephant and Castle" in Bloxham, the "Roebuck" in North Newington, the "Red Lion" in Horley, and the "White Horse" right here in Wroxton. Four of them were marvelous old taverns full of beams and timered and pargetted walls and occupied, before my noisy delegation galumphed in, by half a dozen or so locals shooting darts or sitting quietly by the hearth and looking reflectively at their pints of beer or ale.
     Our guide for the expedition was Colin Marsh, the sous chef at the Abbey. He obviously knew the territory through which he led us. He gave us previews of each of the places we visited, pointing out that the one to come was a "tied" house whereas the preceding one was "free" and thus did not stock the naturally carbonated ale or beer we had just sampled. Two of my favorites were the "Roebuck" and the "Red Lion." The former left me with two prominent memories: an old man, a faithful local who, according to the woman behind the bar, sat silently in the same spot every night with his pint peering at the fire; and a sign on a massive low beam upon which patrons could quite easily crack their skulls: "Duck or Grouse." The latter introduced me to a fat and amiable labrador retriever with a passion for crisps: he would nose my trousers—with a vilely wet nose—and roll on his back, working all four paws wildly and drooling disgustingly from his lolling tongue until I threw him another handful sized snack.
     Although they were public houses rather than true inns, the places we visited brought to my mind a passage in Martha Grimes's The Man With a Load of Mischief, dated 1981:

"The English inn stands permanently planted at the confluence of the roads of history, memory, and romance. Who has not, in his imagination, leaned from its timbered galleries over the cobbled courtyard to watch the coaches pull in, the horses' breath fogging the air as they stamp on the dark winter evenings? Who has not read of these long, squat buildings with mullioned windows; sunken, uneven floors; massive beams and walls hung round with copper; kitchens where joints once turned on spits, and hams hung from ceilings. There by the fireplace the travelers of lesser quality might sit on wood stools or settles with cups of ale. There the bustling landlady sent the housemaids scurrying like mice to their duties. Battalions of chambermaids with lavendered sheets, scullions, footmen, drawers, stage coachmen, and that Jack of all trades called Boots waited to assist the traveler to and from the heavy oaken doors. Often he could not be sure whether the floor would be covered with hay, or what bodies might have to be stepped over or crept past on his way to breakfast, if he slept in an inner room. But the breakfast more than made up for the discomfort of the night, with kidney pies and pigeon pies, hot mutton pasties, tankards of ale, and muffins and tea, poached eggs and thick rashers of bacon. ¶ "Who has not alighted with Mr. Pickwick in the courtyard square of The Blue Lion at Muggleton; or eaten oysters with Tom Jones at The Bell in Gloucestershire; or suffered with Keats at the inn at Burford Bridge: or, hungry and thirsty, who has not paused for a half pint of bitter and a cut of blue veined Stilton, flakey Cheshire, or a knob of cheddar; or known that he would always find the brass gleaming, the wood polished, the fire enormous, the beer dark, the host tweeded, and, upstairs, the halls dark and narrow, the snug room nearly impossible to find—up two stairs, down three, turn right, up five, walk ten paces, like a child playing hide and seek or a counting game? If the streamers have gone from the white caps, and the host is there more in spirit than in fact, like a smile hovering in the air—still with all of this wealth in the vaults of memory, one could almost forget that the pound had dropped." [p. 46 47]

     Last weekend—Friday, actually—I went to London with Philip Inwood's art class visiting the Tate Gallery and the National and then going to the theater after having dinner at Wheeler's on Old Compton Road, a block or so away from the theater on Shaftesbury Avenue—quite close to The Caine Mutiny, which I saw.
     At the Tate I stood for several minutes looking at Hogarth's "The Graham Children," remembering some of the antitheses and balanced contrarieties it has been found to be based upon: in the upper right corner both a cat and smiling boy look at a caged bird, the boy with delighted approval of the song, the cat with a feral, predatory intensity; at right bottom, more or less diagonally opposite from the living bird, a lifeless wooden one lies on the floor; at right top a clock on which is mounted a figure with a scythe points downward to the form of an infant, wide eyed in a world innocent of time and mortality; the infant—as unacquainted with the world's sins and temptations as with the imperatives of time—reaches, with symbolic irony, toward two cherries, forbidden fruit, held teasingly away from her by her older sister, simultaneously child and mock mother; the cherries dangled by the oldest of the three sisters appear as embroidered imitations in the brocaded dress worn by the next oldest; and the sigmoid curves of the draperies and garments contrast sharply with the hard edged zigzags and right angles of floor tiles, frames, and the like.
     The portrait is, as well as being the combination of realism and rococo playfulness some viewers have seen in it, an emblem of both the century that produced it and the juxtapositions crowded into the daily life of Wroxton. (Thinking about the contrasts, and oppositions that are a staple of life here at the College, I suddenly recall three facts that right now seem to make extremely good sense: (1) in Warwick Castle's torture chamber display, one notes that the thumb screws are equipped with elegant floral ornamentation; (2) the first slave ship to transport slaves from Africa to Europe was called the "Jesus"; (3) Adolph Hitler played the harmonica. Tangentially, I am also remembering that December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, is the day of the year when the sun sets earlier than on any other day.)
     At the Tate, for instance, just after I'd left the Turner collection (to which I'd moved after leaving the Hogarth), I carried in my mind's eye as I entered the men's room, the burst of light rushing through the "Interior at Petworth." The first thing I saw as I came within sight of the water closets was a man dumping buckets of water down the toilet bowls. Perhaps responding to the puzzled look I must have worn as I thought of him at his less that lovely labor a few yards from the Turners, he told me with an irritated shake of his head, "Plug up all the time, the wretched things do. Won't take the great wads of paper people chuck into them as if they was a rubbish tip." And when I got back to the Abbey very late at night and walked down to the laundry room, I heard two women students discussing Ballantyne's Coral Island as a possible source for Golding's Lord of the Flies while a third woman, too intent upon her efforts to pay the slightest attention to the other two, scrubbed vigorously at the crotch of what are here called "knickers."
     Outside my window right now I can see the sheep grazing upon a distant hill while, on the nearer lawn, the gardener cuts the grass with a smoking, rattling gangmower. Life here, in short, exists under the curse of being uncommonly interesting, but I have begun, now, to look forward frequently and keenly to getting back home, to the places and people I especially miss.