tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33784417455034450502024-03-12T20:10:20.500-07:00Walter Savage's Wroxton JournalsHistoric Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-82204992429898619792008-03-30T12:00:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:28:20.512-07:0013 August 1966 The last day and a half at the Abbey has been in many ways remarkable, in some respects unbelievable, in its juxtaposings of contentment and melancholy, delights and shocks, order and Chaplinesque chaos.<br /> The whole business began early yesterday morning. Before breakfast I was hauled by Dean Haberly out to the freshly excavated sewer trench that has been giving clues to some of the Abbey's past. The shovels and scoops have unearthed skeletons, roof and floor tiles, mullions, bits of stained glass, great silver headed nails, and broken sections of intricately carved columns, capitals, and bosses. Many of the fragments are brightened by splashes of gold, red, or blue paint. I felt slightly eerie seeing the colors shining in the sun four, many hundreds of years after it was applied, perhaps, by the Augustinian monks who built their church and priory here long before the place was to know the Raynesfords, the Popes, and the Norths who were later to own it successively.<br /> The Dean, who was at the very point of departing when he led me out to the trench, had two objectives for our pre breakfast trip. He wanted to scratch at the trench sides for more of the red floor tiles he had been finding daily, and he wanted to alert me to watch for the back hoe's uncovering of more of the church walls, first broken into a day or so before. His interest in the precise location of the latter had become so keen that, wearied as he was by his long and tiring duties with the summer graduate program, he was about to postpone his departure so that he could stay with the digging.<br /> Before we had so much as a sip of juice or coffee, therefore, we were sloshing around in a ditch nine feet deep and mucky from yesterday's heavy rains. His passion and my compliance—though it became more than that, for his wonderful enthusiasm, like his fluting laughter, is contagious—were quickly rewarded. Both of us uncovered a tile. His was broken, but large, with a fine deep gold pattern on its glazed terra cotta background—a cross, a fleur de lis, and a pine tree. It was striking. Mine was intact, but small, about two and a half inches square. It was a bold Lombardic Z, with a line drawn horizontally through its center. The Dean was hot on the scent and wanted to go on, but the rain, which began suddenly, and the reverberating Wroxton breakfast gong hurried us into the dining room.<br /> Our meal was soon over, for the Haberlys had to rush out to a taxi at 8:10. Like all those we had together, however, it was a pleasant one. I have never met a man with such lively and unfailing good humor. Reminiscence after reminiscence tumbles out of him, each one a joy. Over hasty swallows of breakfast coffee, he can somehow be reminded of, and able to recapture in sprightly terms, the delightful oddities he has encountered in his uncommonly unconven¬tional experience.<br /> One of them is about his having awakened years ago to find a large bat in the shirt of his pajamas. A second deals with his once having attended a recital by a flautist whose plastic artificial eye exploded from its socket in the middle of his rendition of a 16th century composition. A third concerns his having visited a children's school run by a Miss Maypother, who made her students live the stages of civilization (dressing, for instance, at first in hides and finally in contemporary clothes) and had all doorways three feet high so that adults had to crawl through them. A fourth recalls his having been commissioned to bind, illustrate, and print, for a wealthy eccentric woman (a Schwab heiress) a book written in a language of her own invention. She wanted the text in gold on lavender vellum, and she ordered him, for as long as he worked, to stay in one room of her home so that he would not shock her recently bereaved male cockatoo, mortally vulnerable, since the death of his mate, to the sudden appearance of any man.<br /> He can also draw upon his vast reading and study—and a memory that must be photographic—to respond with lectures in miniature to questions about stained glass, Roman Britain, the structure and regimen of monasteries, literary figures with whom he has had close associations, and an almost awe inspiring range of other subjects. All that he says he says well and with a modesty that seems altogether unnecessary.<br /> I have frequently asked him to allow me to tape at least a few of the memories he shares with listeners, but he steadfastly refuses. "No, no, no, Savage," he tells me with dismissive shakings of his raised hands. "Never." When I protest and ask him why, he says, "Because I improve each of them with every telling."<br /> As they are, the stories need no refining. They are so good, in fact, that several of the lecturers who visit Wroxton's classes regularly have told me that one of the principal attractions of the place is the opportunity to hear the Dean recall some of the events of his past. Stanley Wells, for one, has more than once told me that he would probably give his lectures here without an honorarium if, on each of his visits, he could be sure that he could enjoy some of Haberly's anecdotes. <br /> We said goodbye to the Dean and Mrs. Haberly with honest sadness. We knew that we would miss them both. We knew, also, that we would now be almost totally alone in the vast and creaky building, for no students were expected until September 5.<br /> I was especially loath to give up not only the Dean's conversation but also his infectious curiosity and capacity for observation which had made my every walk with him about the Abbey grounds, every poking into garrets and little used rooms an adventure and a discovery.<br /> As an example, he noticed that two windows in the Great Hall, facing the Minstrels' Gallery, are so mullioned and leaded that they must once have been outside windows. The observation led him to the conclusion that the center of the building, assumed for a hundred years to be the oldest part of the Abbey, must postdate the rest of the structure. The discovery was made apparently, simply as he strolled along. I learned later that his speculation was probably wrong. In this instance as in every other one I knew of, however, he was, in his ceaselessly zestful spirit of exploration, always in the right.<br /> After the Haberlys departed, our day was, surprisingly, pleasant and easy until 2:00 p.m. We bustled about with letters and memos and semester planning and walked through the charming village just outside the College gates. We watched a workman thatching a roof, stopped in at Mrs. Friend's small gift shop, and introduced ourselves to Mrs. Scott (who runs the tiny grocery store) and to Mrs. Jessie Cook, "licensed to sell beer to be consumed off the premises" and Wroxton's singularly friendly postmistress, perhaps the only postmistress or postmaster who licks and applies for you whatever stamps you purchase from her in the little cubicle just off the hallway of her and her family's living quarters.<br /> At 2:00 p.m., however, I got a call from Dr. Stanley Wells, who invited us to a dinner conference at the Black Swan, or "Dirty Duck," in Stratford at 6:30. I accepted hastily, for the atmosphere of the deserted Abbey closes in on one quickly and, be¬sides, Wells and I had to shape up the first four weeks of the Shakespeare course. Right then, Patty's and my troubles began, although I did not know so at the time.<br /> My inquiry to the Midland Red Bus Company offered no cause for alarm. The woman who took my call quickly told me that a bus left for Stratford from Banbury, at the Cross, at 6:03 and arrived in Stratford at 7:00. I had, of course, to call Dr. Wells and ask for a half hour's grace, but there was no real problem about that or about getting by taxi to Banbury, which we reached at 5:30. Our driver began our difficulty. He told us that the bus left from the depot, not from the Cross, and therefore took us to that place, about 9 blocks from the Cross. After idling for two or three minutes, I grew uneasy and began to ask around about the exact point of departure. Five different bus drivers gave me five conflicting sets of instructions. They agreed on only one point: the bus information booth was closed.<br /> Sifting the varying directions, Patty and I decided that the Cross was the safest waiting place after all, and at about 5:40 we started out briskly in a beginning shower. After only a block Patty became a virtual cripple. The rain, the damp pavements, and her high heels did something excruciating to a toe she broke years before. We would walk twenty steps and stop, she leaning on me heavily and making pained whimpers. We wobbled on, looking at clocks—for time was getting short—looking for a phone to call a cab, looking and feeling miserable and anxious, which we genuinely were.<br /> Somehow, we reached the vicinity of the Cross with seven or eight minutes to spare, and once again I ventured a few nervous questions of passersby. The first man I approached was a retarded alcoholic who cast dumb, frosty eyes on me for a moment and then hawked a wad of phlegm at my feet. The second was "a stranger here myself, you know." The third, obviously well moistened by a few pints of red or bitter, told me we were a block off target, that we wanted the Stratford Blue, which stopped only at the Cock Horse Tavern. We checked his instructions against those of three others who passed. Two of them, like the proprietor of a dairy shop into which I desperately dashed, knew nothing at all about buses.<br /> Three legged fashion, we hurried down to the Cock Horse. Nobody in the parking lot there, in the tavern, or in the sweet shop next door could give us assurance that we were where we should be. It was now 6:05, and I surrendered and decided to get a taxi all the way to Stratford, even though the fare and the tip run to 48s., or $6.72. The decision was not simple to act upon, for I could find no nearby phone, and I had to go hunting once more, leaving Patty standing out of the rain under an awning and look¬ing forlornly after me as she balanced on one leg, like a stork.<br /> I bolted into the Cromwell Arms Hotel and asked the desk clerk, an elderly woman, if there was a phone handy. "A phone, sir? Hm. Let me see. Did you try the Horse Fair: There's one there, I'm sure."<br /> I did not reply to her as I raced out. I thought that de¬parting quietly would be to my benefit and hers. I flew back to the Cross and found a phone booth, but I found also that the jingling freight of English coins that had been tearing at my pocket stitches with every one of the frantic strides I had so long been making did not include a "thruppence," the only coin the slot would accept. Getting one required four more inquiries, but finally I had one, was able to get through to Trinder's taxi, and, at last, to get under way to Stratford with Patty, who had limped up after me to the cab rank.<br /> Once in the cab, I saw a small placard identifying the vehicle as "Trinder's Easy"—rather than another of its kind, "Trinder's Baker" or "Trinder's Charley," I understood, but right then I saw the ironist's mockery behind the terms.<br /> The ride out to Stratford in the sheeting rain was close to perilous. The driver responded with manic zest to my request for a rapid trip. Schussing down the curves of Sunrising Hill was, consequently, a chancy few minutes that kept our eyelids from blinking even once until the descent was over. Our meeting with Wells and our late supper with him and Dr. Anne Righter of Cambridge were, nevertheless, thoroughly enjoyable.<br /> Before going to the Swan for Leek soup, prawns, gammon, chips, and a carafe of vin rose, we worked and chatted and had gin and tonics in the Shakespeare Institute, in a book littered room which looked out on beautiful gardens stretching immaculately and colorfully to New Place. In the middle of the vista was an in¬triguing gazebo sort of thing once used by Marie Corelli when she owned the big house now used by the Institute. Her less than epic books were all about, and Dr. Wells told us that large numbers of people of a certain kind still come to Stratford because Mme. Corelli lived there, not because Shakespeare did. He is often embarrassed by their questions about her work, about which he pretends to a blissful and carefully preserved ignorance. He told us also that one dowager once consoled him, when he told her that he couldn't read much Corelli, by noting, "Yes, her books are deep."<br /> Our return to the Abbey was a sharp contrast to our outbound journey, for Dr. Wells drove us back in his car. The ride, though thick fog had rolled over the narrow road, was a happily uneventful one.<br /> And so was most of today. Patty and I got a good bit of work done in the Minstrel's Gallery office, posted a pack of letters, and ordered the files. Late in the afternoon we walked through the village again, primarily because Patty was hit by homesickness and wanted some change of scene to put a stop to some of the moping she found herself unable to avoid. Coming back we were caught in a downpour, but we ran under a giant old beech and by that time Patty was able to joke about the "tree adders" an ancient Wroxton visitor had told us she always prepared against by raising a parasol whenever she was near overhanging branches.<br /> We watched the tapering off of the rain for ten minutes or so, hurried through the last mist of it into the Abbey, and had an authoritative scotch with water before a good dinner all alone in the big dining hall. As a waiter, a waitress, and the chef himself fussed about our table, we felt regal but awkward and lonely. The royal head, I remembered in the midst of the baronial accoutrements all about me, is heavy with isolation.<br /> After dinner, we dropped in at the North Arms, the pub just outside the college gates. We had sherry and a long talk with a young girl from the Madison campus who attended Wroxton last spring and stayed on as an assistant in the pub's saloon bar. (She is going back home shortly, she told us.) The appealing old pub—the building, a villager told me, is about 500 years old—pleased us greatly with its blackened beams and old brasses gleaming after centuries of polishing, and we walked back up the Abbey road, at about 9:15, almost light hearted in the heavy darkness not brightened at all by a rust colored moon barely visible through the sluggish racks of the fog.<br /> We were making ironic jokes about the hearty cheerfulness of the Abbey. (It was illuminated only by the lamps in the servants' two fourth floor rooms and two sixty watt bulbs in the Great Hall as we climbed the front door staircase—with exaggerated caution, for the past four days' rain and the night's dank mist had given the antique and foot hollowed slate a slickness like that of fish scale.) Our pleasantries died abruptly when we found the outside door firmly bolted. We had known that our key was good only for the second door inside the vestibule, but, knowing also that the night porter's duties ran till 11:00, we had felt no worry and had seen no need to take along a key to the lower courtyard door. We should have reckoned upon the porter's apparent absent mindedness and his present anxiety about his cancer stricken wife, which led him to plan to shut up two hours early and not give us warning as we left. Our situation was wonderful. <br /> There we were in the dripping blackness, rattling great Jacobean doors, feeling our way up terrace steps, poking tentatively about Stygian sunken courts, and raising helpless cries for assistance from four domestics who understand only Spanish and whose privacy was protected from our noise by their sealed leaded windows, small amber squares sixty feet above us in the dark. For 15 minutes we whistled, hooped, and sang out in unison, primarily to rouse the two Joses, Isobel, or Manuel, but partly also simply to reassure ourselves.<br /> After a week at the Abbey we had come to terms with the resident ghosts—an elderly lady and a monk, we had been told—about which we had heard the day that we arrived, but just a few minutes before we found ourselves locked out, we had learned at the pub of two more. One of them, one of the Lord Norths, we could welcome into our spectral family matter of factly. The Earl is said merely to wander over the lawns looking straight ahead through squinting eyes and recognizing no one, not even foreign usurpers of his grounds. The other one seemed less easy to accept. A murderer hanged in a nearby marsh for the killing of a young girl, he is, our sensationalist informants told us, well known to emit moans and scramble about the very paths and courts in which we were seeking rescuers. Our clatter kept him safely off, and it eventually brought Jose #2, mumbling and shuffling like Macbeth's porter, to our aid.<br /> We trudged up the sighing stairs to our bedroom, past the suits of armor in the corners of three landings—they still make us a little edgy when we come upon them in the dimness late at night—and let ourselves into our large and lofty quarters by screwing a weighty four inch key into a stub¬born 18th century lock. As we did so, we heard the piercing screams of a murderer's victim in a Sherlock Holmes film that the Spaniards were following on their telly two floors up, under the pointed gables in the attic. Patty had, she found, discovered a most effective remedy for homesickness, and I had met with a few additional reminders of the special quality of our days and nights at Wroxton Abbey.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-76216844112932738182008-03-29T10:18:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:28:47.269-07:0015 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. <br /> 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.")<br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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.) <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-6283387668359899842008-03-28T11:48:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:29:14.193-07:002 September 1966 I have often read and heard that the English foster order and have a reverential regard for it primarily because they are fundamentally disorderly creatures. I suspect their awareness of this carefully restrained trait has something to do with their emphasis upon the sort of punctuality that, J. Brett Langstaff said—in Oxford—1914 (New York: Vantage Press, 1965)—his Greek tutor’s butler called “the essence of politeness.” Their almost incessant quest for regularity and ceaseless efforts to eliminate untidiness of manner or place are everywhere evident. Those efforts are most obvious, perhaps, in the succession of gardens which line the narrow roads leading from villages like Wroxton and Drayton to towns like Banbury.<br /> Although close up they reveal pleasant individual touches, they seem, as they flash by a bus or car widow, almost identical. In virtually every one, the rusty ironstone earth is rich, dark, and weed free about the canes of roses luxuriantly in bloom. Among the roses are clumps of geranium, fuschia, snapdragons, ageratum, and similarly bright plantings. All the plots seem also to be just about the same lovely little size, about fifteen or twenty feet square and walled in by privet, yew, or fencing of wood, metal, or native stone. A five or ten mile broken string of them, colorful as it may be, can become monotonous and somehow a bit depressing.<br /> And so can several other features of the solid, dependable life the Englishman seems ever anxious to sustain. Queues form everywhere as a sort of spontaneous mass reflex. Imperatives adorn the walls of shops, restaurants, and hotels, and frown down from street signs and bus ceilings. On the Midland Red Line this morning, for example, I noted these signs: "The passenger is reminded that he must present his ticket for inspection." "Place used tickets in this slot." "Do not stand near this platform whilst the bus is in motion." "Ring the bell once only to signal the operator of the vehicle." In the storage tunnel of the Abbey I have frequently seen on the sides of used cardboard cartons the warning that "This tray will be charged at 2s. unless returned."<br /> And the Abbey instruction booklet, prepared by the English staff here, consists of eight pages of statements reason¬ably well represented by these few: "Faculty and Students should not bathe in either of the Lakes...The College Authorities reserve the right to enter any room at any time for purposes of instruction...Hand in your key to the College Office...Keys not returned will be charged at 2L each...Students must use the Garden Room Entrance to the College until 6 p.m. and after that time the Main Hall Entrance until 11 p.m...Students are reminded that all accidents, sickness or injuries, however, minor, must be reported...Do not replace an electric bulb [most of them are 40 watt] 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., from the General Post Office..."<br /> Admittedly such regulations have a peculiar justification in this ancient house, but they seem pretty much of a piece with the rules, written and unwritten, which guide the natives outside these walls. It all seems part of the system which multiplies the gardens; dictates a potted plant in back of a thousand windows in succession; and makes an instant reflex of "Sorry," “`kyou," and "Please." The same impulse produces little name placards over the doorways of shabby row houses identified as "Ivydene" or "Close Cottage" in imitation of the namings of the grander hold¬ings and estates on the fringes of towns.<br />  : One sees the system at work in the supermarkets, where each customer does his own bagging of his purchases. He sees it in first class railway cars in which passenger after passenger will back off from a "Reserved" card on a seat which has already been empty for half an hour and obviously will not be claimed by its purchaser.<br /> Like the gardens, these other evidences of some prevalent power supported by an almost universal solicitude for it can, I think, charm an American and make him feel envious, but they can also make him strangely melancholy and full of longing for the scrap and scuffle, the variegated confusion, even the reassuring—if shocking—wastefulness of his land's ways. He feels something like hunger, for instance, for big, strong Kraft paper bags instead of the flimsy ones he must bear so responsibly here, for books of match¬es scattered freely about (one pays 3d. for one of them to an English tobacconist) for free delivery service, for 3 hour dry¬cleaning facilities catering to his procrastination and slipshod wardrobe habits.<br /> He also finds himself longing for American slickness of decor, even if plasticized, in places of business as he views the 1930-ish appointments of a provincial English bank, the tawdry and tasteless jumble of clashing designs and colors in a Banbury fabric shop, the rummage sale disorder of an ironmonger's. And as he does so, he is reminded that the "the system" is not so all-pervading as it might seem, that he really has no right at all for thinking of the English as hive bound and wondering how in God's name they make love to each other or write wild and wonderful literature.<br /> He remembers the other half of the game that the system really is, the abandoned and crazy part of it. This part permits the fearfully sound, over disciplined, and frostily sensible Englishman to carry about coins which will buy nothing at all, to quote prices in a unit of currency that does not exist, to elect twice as many MPs as can be seated at any one time, and to cling stubbornly to currency arrangements and driving habits seen as quaintly perverse by most of the rest of the world.<br /> That, at least, is the way the whole matter seems to me right now, new as I am to Britain. But then, I have a special reason for being mindful of something close to violence which lies beneath the Englishman's veneer of conformity and steadiness. I have just visited a Banbury barber who wielded his scissors as if he were in the throes of an epileptic seizure. I can think of<br />few worse introductions to England. I commented on the event in these terms in a letter I sent to the States yesterday:<br /> "My most destructive experience...has been my visit 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 traumatizing 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.<br /> I have been trying, ever since I was brought home to convalesce, to decide just that 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 Behan's Borstal Boy appears to me a more pertinent possibility. 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 <span style="font-style: italic;">The Last of the Mohicans</span> years and years ago. His appearance, a cinema shocker in its day, led, I believe, to the founding of the Hays Office and quick passage of the Sullivan Act.<br /> The shop in which I was actionably assaulted was `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, which will be followed by a bold exclamation mark, not an apostrophe and an s.<br /> 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—the picture only, that is, I hope—when we get home and start settling some old scores with our showings of slides." <br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Note 1992</span>: Rereading this entry in February, 1992, just after having read page 27 of Lionel Tiger's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Pursuit of Pleasure</span> (Boston, 1992), I am moved to add another little bit of apparent incongruity to my earlier account of English rigidity and austerity: Tiger says, drawing upon <span style="font-style: italic;">The Economist</span> for August 5, 1989 (p. 58) that "In Great Britain one-third more money is spent on chocolate each year than on bread!"<br /> At almost the same time that I read Tiger, I was reading Dorothy Sayers' <span style="font-style: italic;">Gaudy Night</span> (New York, 1986). It, too, included a passage I was reminded of as I looked back at this 1966 entry.<br /> The passage, like the book as a whole, focuses upon Harriet Vane, Sayers' protagonist here. Vane has, reluctantly, gone back to her undergraduate college, Shrewsbury, for a reunion. Her reunion quarters are the dormitory room of an undergraduate, temporarily not in residence. Having settled in, she decides to bathe, for "Shrewsbury's hot-water system had always been one of its most admirable minor efficiencies." She looks about her as she hunts for the bath: "She had forgotten exactly where the bathrooms were on this floor, but surely they were round here to the left. A pantry, two pantries, with notices on the doors: NO WASHING-UP TO BE DONE AFTER 11 P.M.; three lavatories, with noticies on the doors: KINDLY EXTINGUISH THE LIGHT WHEN LEAVING; yes, here she was--four bathrooms, with notices on the doors: NO BATHS TO BE TAKEN AFTER 11 P.M., and, underneath, an exasperated addendum to each: IF STUDENTS PERSIST IN TAKING BATHS AFTER 11 P.M. THE BATHROOMS WILL BE LOCKED AT 10:30 P.M. Some CONSIDERATION FOTR OTHERS IS NECESSARY IN COMMUNITY LIFE. Signed: L. MARTIN, DEAN.<br /> Harriet selected the largest bathroom. It contained a notice: REGULATIONS IN CASE OF FIRE, and a card printed in large capitals: THE SUPPLY OF HOT WATER IS LIMITED. PLEASE AVOID UNDUE WASTE. With a familiar sensation of being under authority, Harriet pushed down the waste-plug and turned on the tap. The water was boiling, though the bath badly [p. 6] needed a new coat of enamel and the cork mat had seen better days." [p. 7]<br /> All those fussy rules brought back vividly for me the frequent misgivings I felt in the presence of England's many minatory public messages and instructions. In Sayers' context, however, they also reminded me of one of the happier consequences of England's accepting, with Harriet Vane, the "familiar" and, I think Englishmen often think, comforting "sensation of being under authority": an attention to details and a willingness to live by high standards of correctness, of which Sayers' writing in Gaudy Night is a good example. It may be one of the best-written of all English mysteries--at least as far as the sound and shape of its words are concerned.<br /> Here, to cite the first of a very few examples, is Sayers' treatment of Harriet's reminiscing about her days at Shrewsbury: "She saw a stone quadrangle...in a style neither new nor old, but stretching out reconciling hands to past and present. Folded within its walls lay a trim grass plot, with flower-beds splashed at the angles, and surrounded by a wide stone plinth..." [p. 1] Here, Harriet rummages through "an ancient trunk" looking for her academic gown which she will take with her to the reunion: "She burrowed to the bottom of the pile and dragged a thick, black bundle out into the dusty sunlight. The gown, worn only once at the taking of her M.A. degree, had suffered nothing from its long seclusion: the stiff folds shook loose with hardly a crease. The crimson silk of the hood gleamed bravely. Only the flat cap showed a little touch of the moth's tooth. As she beat the loose fluff from it, a tortoise-shell butterfly, disturbed from its hibernation beneath the flap of the trunk-lid, fluttered out into the brightness of the window, where it was caught and held by a cobweb." [p. 4]<br /> And here are several terms and phrases chosen more or less at random from other early pages of the novel: "Dr. Margaret Baring [a warden of Shrewsbury]...could soothe with tact the wounded breasts of crusty and affronted male dons. ... [p. 10] The procession came into sight...moving with the slovenly dignity characteristic of university functions in England. [p. 11]Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-3571114303249588982008-03-27T10:11:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:29:56.651-07:003 September 1966[I devoted this day of journal-writing to composing the following letter to a friend back home:]<br /> 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.)<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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."<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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."<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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.<br /> 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..."<br /> 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 <i>Last of the Mohicans</i> 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>i</i> will henceforth and ever after be long, and the <i>t</i> will be separated by a hyphen from the <i>o</i>, 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.<br /> 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. <i>The Guardian</i> 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."<br /> 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...<br /><br><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Note:</span> 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”Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-78346845021808231182008-03-26T16:51:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:30:23.803-07:004 September 1966Patty and I had a wonderful visit by John Fritz, of the history department at Madison. He was here to talk with me about a special course which may be arranged for the Madison campus. Its title will be something like "British Antecedents of American Culture." It would begin with lectures here at Wroxton, to be conducted, we now are thinking, by Graham Webster of Birmingham University. In addition to the lectures, the students would get actual field work in archaeology at some place like Sulgrave Manor. Then they would go to William and Mary, perhaps, and finally to Gene Weltfish's digs at Morristown.<br /> I gave John the information I had received from Webster in a meeting last week and asked him to talk further with Gene, Kent Redmond, and others at Madison and to keep in touch with me regarding later developments. Our business over, he and I joined Patty for drinks in the Faculty Lounge.<br /> Each of us had a Dewars and water there—with ice cubes to show John how much Patty and I appreciated his stopping by—and we carried our drinks with us during a tour of the Abbey and the grounds. Although we have had rain for some part of every day for a week, yesterday's late afternoon was a fine one, and we sipped our drinks and chatted and strolled, the tinkling of our ice cubes providing a pleasant little music for us. Just before we went into dinner, we sat on the moss clumped terrace wall to the east of the Abbey—the moss has tiny spikes of red capped flowers now—and laughed about the way that I had greeted John by the Duck Pond off Main Street across from the College gate. (I had flagged him down while he was still picking his way in his rented Vauxhall and told him I had come out to greet him for several reasons: I had porter's duty on Saturdays, was shying kestrels away from our wood pigeons, was checking on the growth of fairy rings, and did not want him to lose a second's opportunity to study appreciatively the handiwork of the first English barber I had visited on Thursday.) <br /> We had a quiet good time at our joking, and I suppose that all of us years from now will find those contented moments coming back to us with a sweet sort of melancholy full of the lovely and yet softly sad colors of the sky above the Abbey's great gables, gray purples and pinks faintly gilded. I am sure that I will. <br /> The three of us and Miss Hogan, the sprightly and charming Irish housekeeper, who is, unfortunately, leaving us shortly, had a bad dinner in the big dining hall. The relief cook, to whom I had spoken earlier in the day about John's visit, interpreted my request for a good meal as meaning a big one. He gave us five kinds of meat in a Devonshire Grill (veal cutlet, bacon rolls with something mysterious in their soft coils, sausage, hamburgers, and beefsteak), all of them a drip with cooking fat. We also had two kinds of potatoes (chips and duchess), and the omnipresent Brussels sprouts. John was gallant about the meal, or perhaps he had been rendered broadly tolerant by the third whisky I had poured for him, and even said that he enjoyed it. Patty and I, however, had our usual postprandial Wroxton pains, alarums, and excursions, and I was in our spacious bath room at 3:00 a.m., belching marvelously, swallowing at gaggings, and keeping one hand on the toilet lid and the other busy tossing milk of magnesia tablets between my teeth. From the bedroom I could hear Patty laughing sympathetically, not derisively. I have concluded that the brutality of England's barbers is exceeded only by that of its cooks.* <br /> After dinner the three of us went to the North Arms, where we had one or two sherries and a long talk with an English family, a man, his wife, and their seventeen year old daughter. Our conversation was most cheerful and congenial. One result of it was that the gentleman whose name we still do not know, promised that he would come to the Abbey soon to bring a peculiar little memento of our enjoyable hour together: a clay pipe used by 17th century gravediggers, he told us, as a disinfectant after they had buried a victim of the plague. Something like 4,000 people died in the little village where he now lives, and many of them, apparently, were buried on the 14 acres which he once farmed. The first time that he plowed his ground, he said, he found thousands of the pipes in the furrows, testimony to the mythology so often passing as medical science. The superstitious corpse bearers believed that if they took three or four puffs of tobacco after handling each of the victims and then threw away the pipe, they would ward off infection. <br> Patty and I look forward to getting this curiosity. We hope, too, that we can look forward to more heartening visits like John Fritz's. Both of us were full of regret when he drove off early this morning, headed for home as we headed for an almost wholly deserted Abbey, dreary under gray skies and a light rain.<br />___________<br /><br />*My several complaints about the food service in the Abbey in its earliest years are, happily, not representative of the fare served later on, when the College employed its own kitchen staff in place of the catering group on hand in the first few years of the college’s existence.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-37159312816154068832008-03-25T19:39:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:30:48.501-07:0010 September 1966The following letter to the editor appeared this morning in either The Times or The Telegraph, I forget which, under the heading, "`Runaway Engine": "Sir It is reported in your columns (Sept. 6) that a locomotive, by its own volition, ran away from Carnforth, and was not overtaken for nine miles. <br /> `I have it on record that in October, 1859, an almost exactly similar incident took place on the London, Brighton, & South Coast Railway, when early one morning a locomotive (unattended) gently puffed its way out of the shed at Petworth, and was not arrested until a courageous railways servant swung himself on to the footplate and shut off the regulator. <br /> `Is it not time that British Railways learned the lesson? Yours faithfully, A.C. Johnstone. Ruislip, Middx.'" <br /> The English, I keep reminding myself with good reason, are not a simple people. On the one hand, they fuss and bluster in their pubs, parlors, and papers about issues that must seem quaint to strangers among them like me. Long before I came here, I followed a rather extended exchange of Guardian letters about the night jar's call and about the proper way to idle. And just about a week ago I heard the local vicar say that he was going to have to get "a bit shirty" soon about the commercialization of his Wroxton parish, in which the opening of a tiny gift shop has increased the business enterprises by 33 1-3% (A pub and a village grocery were all that was here previously.) <br /> Like Americans and all other people, they also rail constantly at their government and all in its purview. In the three weeks or so that I have been here, I haven't heard a good word for Wilson or Labour. Most of my academic correspondents have been instantly testy about the "imbecile" currency regulations. Bank clerks, cab drivers, shop girls, gardeners, and roof thatchers have indignantly spoken to me of the medical services program, the wage price freeze, the Rhodesian policy, the non decimal money system, the dole, the immigration rules—applying especially to Pakistanis and Jamaicans who "come to squat here for public assistance, the dirty trots"—and the English workman's laziness. ("Top doss labour is seldom seen. Most of the blokes just tickle around.") <br /> And yet, in many respects they have a capacity for bearing discomfort, distress, even disaster, so quietly that an unsympathetic observer might characterize them as marked by a bovine hebetude. The gentry can engage in sprightly, graceful conversation over sherry and biscuits and create an air of genuine elegance even though their tweeds may be roughly worn and stained, their cigarette pack may have only two or three careful¬ly husbanded survivors in it, and the gathering for which one of their number has paid may have forced him to effect prudent economies in some department of his household budget. <br /> Two stories, I've recently heard comment unflatteringly on one set of the paradoxical attributes of these complicated people. The first, obviously Gallic in origin and indecent as well as unkind, runs this way: A Frenchman, strolling along a beach came upon a friend having his way with a distinctly unresponsive woman. "Pierre! Pierre!" he cried. "Arretez vous! That woman, she is dead!" "Mon dieu!" Pierre replied, "I thought she was English." The other more fairly represents what I judge to be the proper perspective. It deals with two Englishwomen who were lamenting their sexual obligations to their mates. "But, my dear," sighed one, "it is so awful! How do you stand it?" "Oh," the second answered, "I just grit my teeth and think of England." <br /> Perhaps it is this teeth gritting love of homeland that explains much about them. I came upon my first instance of it twenty three years ago—almost to the the day—in Italy,when I was wounded along with more than a dozen others knocked down by one mortar shell. The casualty nearest me was Clar Wyld, of Glossop, Derbyshire. He was hit worse than I and bled profusely from several non fatal but serious wounds in the head, face, and chest. During our four mile trip to the evac hospital he groaned frequently with pain and worried two or three times about the blood that had filled his eyes. He did some suffering, I know, for several hours on his hospital cot next to mine. <br /> Just before dark, a crisp sister gave all of us a very strong cup of tea. Clar, whose face bandages had by that time been pushed up over his brows, raised up weakly and drank his, with tentative sip¬pings at first and then in tongue scalding gulps. Within ten minutes, he was up from his cot. "I'm off to the half track," he whispered to me as he crept out. "Like a silly ass I left the code book by the radio. It won't do to leave that lying around for Jerry. I'll be back." In about an hour and a half he was back, with his code book and a happy report that getting rides both ways was easy. I don't think he was able to get on his feet again until more than a week later. <br /> Every day here I witness Englishmen performing in a manner really quite similar to—if under circumstances less critical than—Clar’s. I have had a ride to town with a man whose cheer-fulness was not at all dampened by the fact that his car's second gear failed frequently or that one of the doors was secured by a stout rope. I have heard the daughter in law of Lady Pearson (who occupied the Abbey as a tenant before FDU bought it) fondly recollect that her mother in law, when she leased the Abbey, resolutely wrapped an afghan about her seventy some year old ankles and greeted with quick impatience all complaints about the drafty old mansion's frostiness. <br /> Yesterday on the Banbury Tysoe bus with Patty, I rose to give my seat to a heavily burdened woman in her forties. "Not a bit of it, duck," she smiled. "This is jolly good here." As a return for my gallantry she did agree that I should put one of her several large parcels between my feet. As we drove along I looked out at Banburians standing meditatively or chattily in twisting queues inside post office and cleaning shop doors or musing through the windscreens of their little cars caught in one of the traffic snarls made unending by the narrow main streets and highways. <br /> Patty and I got off the bus with Jessie Cook, the woman who opens her living room as the village post office and who had been marketing in Banbury. Jessie walked briskly because the time was 4:40, and her second postal time block should begin each weekday at 4:30. When the three of us reached her cottage we came upon three villagers who had arrived promptly at 4:30 to buy stamps. They were busily expressing concern about the "wretched little blue tits," chickadee like birds here which have learned to spot the milkman's rounds and to tear holes in the aluminum foil caps of delivered pintas so that they can sip off a quarter inch or so of cream. "Nasty little things," one woman was clucking. "Let the wasps into the bottles, they do." They greeted Jessie warmly. None of them showed the least impatience about her being fifteen minutes late. <br /> Something more than a species of spiritual regard for tooth gritting may, however, be involved in the production of their sturdy quality. The services and products available may have a large part in shaping the character of those for whom they exist. One or two of my notes earlier in this journal serve as partial examples of what I have in mind. My sampling of "TCP," one of the few English mouthwashes I have seen on Banbury's shelves, can be cited as another evidence. It's nauseating, a curious blending of creosote and formaldehyde. Its remarkable taste lingers for hours, even when one dilutes the liquid with five parts of water and has a hearty breakfast right after using it. I read the label last evening as I flapped my still beefy tongue about in my mouth and noted that Englishmen are advised to swish the substance around twice daily. <br /> I thought of their toilet paper, their barbers, their cooks, and their market places' open air fish stalls in which a side of plaice may lie, unrefrigerated—in the sun and under attack by flies and wasps—for eight hours or more. My reflections helped me to accept a little less incredulously the conduct of the Clar Wylds. They also, I admit with a touch of regret, diminished ever so slightly my previously boundless awe and admiration over this people's indestructible thumbs up defiance to the worst of Hitler's fire bombings.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-58832194361456326782008-03-24T13:12:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:31:14.446-07:005 November 1966A good bit of the program is honestly remarkable. The good points plentiful. Yesterday, for instance, we heard an M.P. full of elegance and practical political wisdom, and this coming Thursday we are meeting him in London for another talk and a guided tour of Parliament. Just a little while ago we had a brilliant lecture by Inga Stina Ewbank, a Swedish scholar from the University of Liverpool, who cast her prepared notes aside and fashioned a marvelous impromptu analysis of Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy, just a week before all of us were to see it at Stratford. (The production is the first major one in about 300 years, and it is reportedly really fine. Ted Ross had run up from his London sabbatical digs to see it, and he and I and Rhoda and Patty literally bumped into each other in the lobby.) <br /> We've been to castles, universities, schools, village meetings, shrines, cathedrals, and landmarks of all sorts and have been visited by some of Britain's best scholars and lecturers. (One of them even came from Edinburgh to meet our classes.) We've heard, in addition, directors, actors, musicians, architects, political organizers, mayors, solicitors, museum keepers, and amateur and professional archaeologists. One of our lectures we heard in the 14th-century schoolroom where Shakespeare studied as a boy and four more in the Institute where a team of Shakespeareans is now preparing a new edition of the plays. The first of our "Schools and Schooling" lectures was presented by an Eton master in the High Room where several prime ministers had their early lessons. Another, on British prehistory, will soon be offered in the Ashmolean Museum by the Senior Keeper.<br /> As a result of some letters I wrote to the Banbury Historical Society and a local industrialist, two of our students, working respectively on 17th-century puritanism and marketing techniques, are drawing upon a unique ms. of sermons by a 1600 Banbury preacher named Whately and data made available by a local coffee-making subsidiary of General Foods. Still another student, having visited Stratford seven times and read Jan Kott and Martin Esslin, is analyzing the R.S.C.'s absurdist modifications of Shakespeare's plays. <br /> All of this is cause for delight, and on at least three days of every week here I am convinced that I am in a kind of academic Elysium.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-59771988483461577092008-03-23T13:28:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:31:35.913-07:004 December 1966A long time has passed since my last entry, I notice. Well, I have been busy. I think I recently told someone back home that I have been spending most of my days here struggling up a greased pole mounted in a nest of adders and that right now I am climbing like hell to stay even. The figure seems apt, if undistinguished. Day after day, week after week, I have been contending with the scheduling problems here. Will Dr. Bulpitt call me tomorrow to confirm his coming for a lecture six days hence? Does Mr. Madagan's failure to respond—for more than ten days—to my letter mean that he will not come to lecture twice this coming Tuesday, or that he has somehow forgotten the appointment? When I reschedule the appearance of Brian Davison (who misunderstood the timing for his visit which I telephoned him about in London), I must remember to call Blinkhorn's: the slide projector, hired for Davison's first canceled lecture,must be reserved for the make up date. <br /> What about the next all day coach trip? Have I, or has Patty, checked to make sure that Blenheim Palace or Warwick Castle will be open at the hour at which our group arrives? And where is the confirmation letter from Midland Red Omnibus Co.? Has something happened to the letter I sent a week ago to Mr. Sparkes in Traffic? (Further note for tickler file on this trip: Ask chef either to stop featuring lettuce and butter sandwiches in the box lunches or, if those bland things are a sine qua non, to wrap them in foil rather than napkins so that the lettuce does not turn brown during its overnight and following morning wait in the lunch boxes. And tell him definitely no more pork pies, for which the students seem to hold me personally responsible.) <br /> I must remember, too, to get someone on the crew here to readjust the radiators in the Library Lecture Hall. One of them creates a sirocco on one side of the room, and the other one is a rather infuriatingly ironic ornament amidst the frigidity which surrounds it. <br /> Thus goes the train of events associated with getting someone behind the lectern as often as possible for our class meetings. The processes are often full of anxiety. Our deadline for printing a week's schedule of lectures quizzes, trips, and the like is early afternoon of the preceding Friday. More than once I have received acceptances from tentatively listed lecturers as late as 1:00 p.m. on the deadline day. On four different occasions, listed faculty have failed to appear. In each instance their reasons for withdrawing have been good ones—sickness, a sudden summons to duties elsewhere—but their need to withdraw has been explained to me at the eleventh hour, and their inability to come has required either a rearranging of the week's program or a somewhat jerry built carrying on with it in its diminished proportions. <br /> By and large, though, supervising the strictly academic details of Wroxton days has been a duty full of rich and rare rewards, intellectually and socially. Patty and I have spent happy and stimulating hours in the company of dozens of people who have, indirectly or directly, been associated with the conduct of the courses or the Abbey. With remarkably few exceptions, our guests and hosts have been delightful companions.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-38858948094562567232008-03-22T17:08:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:31:57.633-07:0010 March 1978Today I left the Abbey very early with a coachload of the students on a weekend trip to Haworth and York. We rode noisily, the rock music on the tapes the students supplied for the coach's player blasting and thumping, often with jarring incongruity as we traveled through rural stretches in Oxfordshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and Yorkshire. <br /> The cows and sheep that raised their heads as we passed peered at us with that look of mingled alarm and disapproval at which ungulates seem to me to be so good at registering. Overinterpreting their expressions, I almost felt obligated to apologize to them for our—and The Grateful Dead's and Mick Jagger's—intrusion upon the quiet of their pastures. At noon we reached Haworth, de-bussed, and walked around the grim little town. <br /> Somewhere in the sky during the morning, the sun had looked like a gibbous blister, the color of pale phlegm, on gray flesh, but when we arrived in Haworth there was no sign of it at all. Appropriately, I suppose for anyone seeking to go back through time to the world and places of the three sister novelists, rain was falling lightly, dully glazing the cobbled street and stones of the buildings. Appropriately, too, a few sodden-looking crows were cawing hoarsely in leafless and wind-wracked trees nearby as our little party got to the Bronte house itself. <br /> After going through the house, we split up, but most of us had lunch at the White Lion Inn. Sitting on a rough bench as I ate, I remembered that it was in just such circumstances that Branwell Bronte allegedly spent so many hours riding away on the fumes of alcohol from the damp and the dreariness of his family's stark square house above the bitter lonely beauty of the moors. <br /> The wet and the darkness of the day and the thoughts of Branwell's short, miserable life threatening to depress me, I began paying elaborate attention to the plowman's lunch set before me by a buxom woman who called me—and everybody else she served—“Luv”: two wedges of Wensleydale, a large roll, half of a hot pork pie, two wedges of tomato, a large slice of onion, a bowl of pickled onions, one slice of pork loaf, and a half pint of Webster's bitters. God! I wondered, where would I find the plot to plow I had to find to measure up to this meal. (I paid 90 p. for it.) <br /> We got to York, at 4:30. I began a long and, since my sprained ankle was acting up rambunctiously, painful, crutch-assisted hunt for the room I had reserved in "Mrs. Leach's," as it was identified in the Abbey’s "Recommended Rooms" list prepared by students of past semesters. Her house, at 15 Moorgarth Avenue off Mt. Vale Drive, was much farther from the center of the city than the two or three York residents who gave me directions led me to expect. Consequently, my walk to it was not only prolonged—maybe as much as two miles or more—but wearing. I "knocked her up" at just about 5.30—17:30, that is, and was effusively welcomed. She confirmed the price, 3 pounds per night—“And that's with breakfast, as well," she said, almost immediately giving the lie to the conditions she stated by sitting me down to "a mash of tea" and some scones. She chatted with me while I ate and then showed me up to the second-floor front room I was to have. <br /> It was large, with the bay window so ubiquitous in English bedrooms. I was surprised to see that it lacked the equally ubiquitous kidney-shaped dressing table with triple mirrors strategically placed to face the windows, covered, almost always I had concluded, with ruffled sheer nylon curtains. With two beds, a clothes press, two chests, and a small radio, it was actually much more than I had anticipated. She told me, with some obvious embarrassment when I complimented her on it, that it was, in fact, the room that she and her husband used when they had no overnight guest. When they did, as on this day, they moved into the room formerly used by their son, now married and off with his wife and children, I think she said. <br /> As soon as I had settled up with Mrs. Leach, unpacked my bag, and staked out my claim to a drawer or two, I washed up in the bathroom I shared with the family and tried to shave, unsuccessfully because I had forgotten to bring my adaptor with me. I asked Mrs. Leach where in York I might buy one. "No need, Luv," she said. "We have one somewhere here," and after a few minutes of bustling about opening drawers and cabinets in various rooms downstairs, she triumphantly handed one to me. <br /> Somewhere around 6:30, I took a bus into the city for a short look around and to have dinner. The abbreviated sightseeing was a real pleasure, but the dinner was bad. I picked the restaurant, The Girondin, from the same student list that contained Mrs. Leach's name. The recommender was either self-destructively charitable or equipped with the palate of a carrion crow. My selection—mushroom soup, roast chicken, peas, potatoes, a glass of wine, coffee and ice cream—deserved approving comment for only one reason: since everything tasted almost exactly the same, you could eat or drink any one of its items before or after the other without having it disturb the bouquet of its predecessor or successor. ("Well," I tried to console myself, "what can you expect for L2.25? Very nearly a night's lodging at Mrs. Leach's," I unhappily reminded myself.) <br /> When I came back later in the evening, at 9:30, I met Mr. Leach, a telephone worker with the postal service, who called to my mind the face of a Welsh actor I couldn't identify. He was sitting in the "best chair" puffing on his pipe, looking for all the world as contented as Parson Adams near the hearth. He and Mrs. Leach invited me to join them in a cup of tea, with biscuits, and as we sat in front of an electric heater with the telly turned down, he and I had a friendly old vets' talk about our days in the British 8th Army, to which my First American Ranger Battalion was attached during the Italian campaign. <br /> He spoke in passing of some relatives in Derbyshire, and I at once thought for the first time in years of Clar Wilde of Glossop. One of two British 8th Army communications men who had been with my unit for several days at Chiunzi, he—as well as at least 15 or 16 others, I was later told—was wounded by the same mortar shell that sprayed four or five pieces of shrapnel in my shoulder, back, and rear end. <br /> Clar's mate on the two-man vehicle was a very young Irishman, named Paddy, I think, whose mother had virtually disowned him because he had signed on as a British soldier. (He told me that he had had to take off his uniform and leave it in Britain whenever he had gotten leave to visit his family.) As a kind of ritualistic observance to which tradition obligated them, Clar and he expressed a deep-seated dislike for each other to me and anyone else to whom they talked separately. But they soldiered together well, and when Clar got hit—in the head and much more severely than I—Paddy was full of concern for him and knelt by him on the litter giving him reassurances about taking care of details and getting in touch with his parents. <br /> I told Mr. Leach about Clar, about how, after he and I had been transported to a makeshift station hospital in a small church, Clar got up suddenly even though he was dangerously unsteady on his feet. "Damn!" he whispered to me. "I've left the flipping code book in the half-track. There'll be hell to pay if the Germans get hold of it." With that he sneaked out of the hospital, heading back to the lines. Mr. Leach said that he had never heard of a family with that name but that he would write to some of his kinfolk and see if they had. He seemed not at all surprised—as I had been and still am—that the seriously wounded Clar left the hospital as he did for the reason he did in the shape he was in.<br /> Shortly after ten, I went up to bed, took another distalgesic tablet to calm my throbbing ankle, and got into bed with P.D. James, her novel Unnatural Causes acting as the procurer. One of the last images in my mind's eye just before I went to sleep was of the look of York's bending river, its darkness spangled with the reflected gold of the sodium-vapor lights atop the Ouse Bridge and Station Road Lendal Bridge as I looked up the Ouse from Skeldergate Bridge, rising over St. George's Gardens to Baile Hill. I felt comfortable, happy, at home, particularly when I remembered having read, a few days before making the trip to this city the Romans called Eboracum and made the capital of Lower Britain, that a sixteenth-century Bishop of York—the 55th, I believe—was named Thomas Savage, just as my grandfather was.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-57847157166911434552008-03-22T08:25:00.000-07:002008-05-12T08:34:06.435-07:0011 March 1978SATURDAY<br /><br /> Up at 7:30, well rested after a good night's sleep but still feeling pain in my ankle. Downstairs to Mrs. Leach's long English breakfast: fried eggs, bacon, sausage, tomato, mushrooms, toast, honey, and tea. Dried cereal was also on the menu, but I succeeded in convincing Mrs. Leach that I really didn't need it. <br /> Mrs. Leach sat at the breakfast table with me all through the meal, talking the whole time as she closely watched my reactions to what she had prepared for me, a fact that made me feel required to exhibit a good bit more pleased astonishment over an egg or a banger than I usually do. <br /> An avid conversationalist who apparently seizes upon any chance source of inspiration, she called my attention to the birds feeding on the bags of nuts she had placed outside her kitchen window, identifying each type of visitor and explaining their habits and food preferences. She spoke of her husband's musical talent, and told me that her son had the same kind of aptitude, being good on both the guitar and the organ. Ability like that, she went on, was "nice," she thought, but she found musicians "trying." When I looked up at her more sharply than I probably should have at that remark, she fussed at some imaginary crumbs on the table cloth and hurriedly asked me if I was a musician—“I don't want to offend, you know." I told her that I could play nothing but the harmonica and that only about as well as I have read Adolph Hitler did. Her smile suggested that she felt greatly reassured and relieved. <br /> I began my day's outing with a bus ride into city center, to Exhibition Square, from where I walked past Bootham Bar to York Minster. I spent about two hours in the Cathedral, a designation, the walk-around guide pamphlet informed me, that means it is "the chief church of the northern province of the Church of England and the Diocese of York." Tourist-y as it was of me, I could not help reading the pamphlet's comments as I strolled through the overwhelming old building, saying silently to myself as I went, "Here, perhaps, is the spot where Constantine was declared `Caesar' early in the fourth century," or "This Norman glass panel is said to be the oldest stained glass in Britain." <br /> I found myself yielding to the same sort of impulse when, later, I passed St. Michel-le-Belfrey and the Shambles, respectively, where I pretended I could see the young Guy Fawkes walking about and Margaret Clitherow, martyred for her rumored help to Jesuits, writhing in agony under the stone-weighted door placed across her chest to crush her. <br /> A bus ride and another rather long walk took me to the Aardvark Restaurant for a good 50 p. plowman's lunch. After lunch, I visited the Castle Museum and its surroundings, paying particular attention to Clifford's Tower, a rebuilding of one constructed by William the Conqueror, with its marvelous view and charming chapel above the gateway. Because a passerby told me that he understood it was perhaps the work of Vanbrugh, I also stopped by at a rather grim structure called the Women's Prison. <br /> By this time, my humping along on crutches left me tired and with increasing discomfort in my ankle. I therefore took a bus back to the York Minster area, found a bench—near Duncombe Place and Petergate, I think, and sat down and rested and read till 4:00 o'clock, when I attended Evensong in the Cathedral. The service over, I walked down Stonegate, stone paved by the Romans, which the 40 p. "York Official Guide" I had purchased told me was "One of the finest streets in England," and where, the Guide further advised, I should keep an eye out for striking architectural details like the Stonegate Devil and the corner support at #13. From Stonegate, I went to the Shambles, called "one of the best preserved medieval streets in Europe." <br /> Alerted to "Shambles" by my reading about York before I made the trip, I had looked up the derivation. I found that the legs on butchers' stools and on the sort of tables on which they displayed their meats are the "ur-roots" of terms like "the place was a shambles" or "he shambled along." Dead metaphors, I thought, as are so many of our words-like metaphor, itself, for instance. <br /> Dinner time found me in what three or four of the students had told me was one of York's best restaurants, "Betty's." I had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, of course, and carrots, cabbage, cider—the hearty British kind that deserves respect, apple pie with Devon cream, and coffee—for £2.65. <br /> I got back to 15 Moorgarth Road just before 8:00. I took a bath, wrote in my journal, read, and went to bed after popping my daily fix of distalgesic. I lay awake for quite a while feeling my heart beat in my ankle and running in my mind a little film strip of some of the day's visual images: the dymo labels on the edges of the Leaches' clothes press shelves ("Shirts," "Underwear," "Pyjamas," "Sundries")—testimony to their fastidiousness; a lorry full of bawling cattle on their way to slaughter as I walked toward lunch; a verse carved on the outside wall of Debtors' Prison in 1820 by Thomas Smith, 28, hanged for stealing sheep: "This prison is a house of care,/A grave for man alive/A touchstone to try a friend/ No place for man to thrive."Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-46421076218944901802008-03-21T19:51:00.000-07:002008-05-19T14:24:52.894-07:0028 January 1985NOTE: 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.<br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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? <br /> 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.”<br /> 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." <br /> 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]<br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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." <br /> 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. <br /> 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?" <br /> 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. <br /> "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." <br /> 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. <br /> 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?) <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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."<br /> 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). <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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." <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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." <br /> 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." <br /> 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. <br /> 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." <br /> 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. <br /> 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]<br /> 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." <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /><br />________________________________________<br /><br />[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," <span style="font-style:italic;">The New Yorker</span>, 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. <br /><br />[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.’”Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-35285769893299287482008-03-21T13:44:00.000-07:002008-05-19T13:54:39.506-07:001 February 1985At 5:30 p.m., I have just poured myself a gin and tonic, warm, since I have no access to ice, but strong. As I have done each of the 3 or 4 nights since I got my bottle of White Satin and the Schweppes set ups, I just lifted the glass (a kitchen tumbler, half filled) above my head in a wordless toast. Tonight as on each of the preceding nights, the gesture induced a small attack of melancholy. My mood is easily explained. I am alone in the Abbey, except for Ronald Ward, a visiting faculty member from Randolph Macon. Quiet, aloof and holed up in the Cloister Cabins when he isn't off somewhere in his V.W., he hardly counts as a presence—at least not today, when I have seen him only at lunch and breakfast. The Abbey is now, as it has been, in effect, on each of the last few nights, virtually soundless and lighted only in my bedroom and one or two fire corridors, an incongruous place for a toast. <br /> The prospect of my solitary raising of a glass, of anyone's doing so in such circumstances has its obvious poignancy, or, better, pathos. I feel like Tiny Tim, poor, crippled and made embarrassingly happy by a modest alleviation of his misery. (I suppress a foolish half-urge at these moments, to say with a reedy piping, "God bless us everyone.") Bathetic or not, the incongruity of my pitifully celebratory gesture is, as I have said, obvious, and so is the temporary effect of that incongruity upon my disposition. <br /> What seems to me less easy to explain is my reason for persisting in this sentimental ritual. I lift the glass in a scenario appropriate to a Dion Boucicault drama—which should make me squint tightly, pucker my lips, and shake my head in disbelief—and a wave of sadness rolls over me. I observe myself doing it while I am doing it and while one part of me wallows in the Emmeline Grangerford invocation of grief, another whistles softly in derision. <br /> Why have I repeated it for three or four nights? Masochism? Counter phobic fear? Or a brave, off handed, ironic statement by someone sore beset by loneliness? I don't know. I am as puzzled by it as I am by my response to the possibility that this place is haunted. I do not believe in ghosts. I look askance at anyone who does. Nevertheless, I think I have gone out of my way to invite reports from believers since I've been here. <br /> I broached the subject to John Mainbarrow, who, carefully encouraged and properly assured of a sympathetic hearing, gave me, in roughly the words I attribute to him here, the following report of his own experience, about which he remains, or pretends to remain, skeptical: <br /> "I've had two encounters here that I can't explain. One of them involved an electric kettle that worked perfectly before and after it acted so strangely just the one time I have in mind. I was in a room with a tutor and one of us turned the kettle on. Almost immediately, we noticed that the kettle was off, and still less than lukewarm. One of us turned it on a second time. Again, a few moments later, we realized that it clicked off without even beginning to warm the water. The same thing happened a third time. <br /> "The other took place one night, when I was sleeping in the Queen's Room. Although I have always been a quiet sleeper—no tossing, turning, or flailing about—I wakened in the middle of the night on the floor beside the bed with the pillow and bedcovers all on the other side." <br /> John's reluctant suspicion that something may be going on here is seconded unreservedly by Ronald Ward. Discussing the Abbey's reputation as a retreat of specters, he told John and me at lunch yesterday that on Sunday night when he and I were the only overnight guests (I thought at that time that I was the sole occupant) he heard someone walking whenever he wakened during the small hours—and it wasn't I. (I decided not to mention Mrs. C's having told me that one of the cleaning ladies refuses to enter my room because she is convinced that it has some sort of spectral intruder in it.) <br /> Reflecting upon these testimonies with the required amount of sympathetic attention while making one's way through some dark, creaking stretch of the old building can produce a momentary chill upon the upper sides of the arms or the back of the neck. The cool prickling sensation can be especially noticeable when, as happened to me this evening, the reflections are accompanied by the sound of an owl's moan like cries and the passing of a draft, slow moving but chill, across one's cheeks and forehead. I have concluded that some impulse in me is moving me to use both the melancholia of the toast and the spookiness of the ghost-hunting as a means of dramatizing my existence at a time when I feel cut off, depressed, insignificant. <br /> My determination to find artificial proofs of my worth has been reinforced by my unsuccessful attempts to cope with a series of peculiarly British frustrations and small humiliations visited upon me in the last day or so. Trying to get back the gloves I lost on the Sunday train has been one of them. I reported my loss at once to appropriate BR officers in both Reading and Banbury. Both of them offered me much encouragement and much evidence of their extraordinary reliability by the way they received me and dealt with me. <br /> The Banbury Station Supervisor's conduct was incomparably impressive. Tearing a strip of paper from a discarded tablet pad, he took down my name, the date, my address, the time and destination of the train, and a full description of the gloves. He entered the date in his makeshift ledger with great care and the utmost deliberation, pausing to read each datum aloud after he'd entered it and ceremonially touching the point of his pencil to his tongue tip before proceeding to the next. "I should think you'll be hearing from me in the morning," he said with a reassuring wink and nod as we completed our interview. Five days later, I have heard nothing, even though I have twice called, once giving to someone else in the station the same set of particulars I had supplied to the Station Supervisor. His transcription, apparently, has been seen by no one, including him, since he created it. <br /> Closer to home, and less forgivable, I think, are the malicious crotchets of the lock on my bedroom door, the washing machine in the laundry room and the typewriter in the library. The eccentricities of the aging equipment and furnishings in the Abbey I not only accept but take pleasure in. Thus I smile conspiratorially at the armoire in my bedroom each time I fiddle for as much as thirty or forty seconds with its lock, creatively capable of a dozen or so varied combinations of jammings, slippings, and swift free spins and clicks of no effect whatsoever. (The apparently obvious solution—not locking it—is no solution at all. The doors, five feet high and well over two feet wide, hang open and sway and creak.) <br /> I have a similar fondness for some of the perverse old structural features of the house. Two of my favorites are the ceilings just inside the doorways to, respectively, the twisting staircase from the "cloisters" and Room 30 on the 4th floor. Both of them curve down acutely just past the lintel, forcing all who come through the doorway to stoop swiftly or tilt to the left if they would avoid driving their skulls into the stony concavity that seems to rush down toward them. I also rather like the Stockhausen kinds of chords and fugal runs orchestrated by the supply lines and drains of the plumbing. Violin scrapings, flute like bleeps, and oboe obbligatos are only a few of their symphonically rich and varied sounds .<br /> The inefficient antiques of the building are beginning to seem full of charm to me. Sticking doors, grooved and hollowed stair treads sometimes slightly perilous underfoot, and creaking floorboards twelve inches or more wide with spaces between them big enough to lose a ballpoint pen in are all reminders of a long, long past. Some of the Abbey's nooks and crannies, like the small raised chamber concealed behind a hatch in the wall at the end of the third-floor corridor, bring one daily face to face with history. If the legends concerning it are to be believed, it is a "priest's hidey hole," sanctuary for a Roman curate during the angry Protestant days following Cromwell's protectorate. <br /> With his characteristic flair for animating the most lifeless of subjects, Dean Haberly once told me that the Abbey wall along Church Lane is another memento of this old, old building's historical importance. The pocks and pits, the Dean said—not altogether reliably, someone else later cautioned me—may be the result of gunfire exchanged in this very area during the Civil War, the forces of the two rivals in the rebellion being led, respectively, by the Abbey's Lord North and Lord Saye and Sele of Broughton Castle in the neighboring village. <br /> For other reasons, too, the eccentricities and oddities, the quirks and conundrums of the place have begun to appeal to me more and more. Balky toilets, drafts beneath doors and around windows, dribbling and intermittent shower heads, telephones that thwart attempts to communicate, deliveries that do not arrive, frequently maddening insistence upon punctilios rigidified by nothing but accidental custom—the whole range of "user-unfriendly" Wroxton and British facilities and circumstances, have begun to command my respect as builders of character. (“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”) The obstacles and impediments one encounters during a typical day over here are probably the kind of thing that Sir Basil Blackwell had in mind when he explained his longevity, in the quotation attributed to him in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Times</span> printing of his obituary, as the result of his "having lived constantly in a state of mild irritation" throughout his ninety years. It's all part, I suspect, of a tacitly affirmed British system of spiritual enrichment. <br /> It takes me back, too, with a peculiarly pleasing, but chastening, nostalgia from this place and time so far removed from it, to my childhood, when Americans were less willing than now to sacrifice almost anything and everything for convenience.<br /> I'm thinking, for one thing, of the Model T's still around when my father was buying second-hand cars for $50 or $60. Almost everyone driving for any distance at all made sure that he—the pronoun was not sexist for that time—had a full set of tools for on-the-spot repairs (and as a tangible reminder of one's responsibility for vigilant maintenance). Almost everyone was sure, too, to remember spare tires (usually more than one). They were more essential then than gasoline credit cards now. <br /> There were, furthermore, built-in, engineered difficulties that regularly tested the resourcefulness of the driver. One of them was the positioning of the gas tank: under the driver's seat and below the carburetor. The design often meant that going up a steep hill was impossible unless the driver turned around and backed up, assisting gravity to get the fuel from the tank to the carburetor. Another was the carefully concealed oil and gas gauges that kept drivers edgily in doubt about the level of the vital fluids. (The oil gauge, as I recall, was simply two capped holes somewhere on the side of the engine block. If one got one's finger wet through the opened top hole, the oil was plentiful. If one's finger came out of the bottom test hole dry, he was probably already in serious trouble.)<br /> Also in those late twenties and early thirties, I can remember, several of Dad's deeds testified to his commitment to a dependence upon self-reliance coming close, in some of its manifestations, to a willed immersion in suffering. He made a point of raising his own chickens and turkeys and beheading one of them on a backyard stump late on a Saturday or Wednesday afternoon for a Sunday or Thanksgiving dinner the next day. He banked the coal furnace each winter night and every few days lugged out heavy containers of ashes with which he filled muddy potholes in the dirt driveway leading to a detached garage. He stuffed his almost sole-less shoes with newspapers before going out on his rainy-night rounds as a milkman. <br /> When I was four or five, I watched him one afternoon as he fashioned from a wire coat hanger and cloth some cumbersome and dreadful—and as I now suspect, useless and perhaps damaging—prosthetic device to relieve the discomfort of a rupture he suffered. (Self-treatment for ailments was common in the family. Someone told me that Aunt Ella, Dad's oldest sister, once relieved herself of the severe pain of a decaying tooth by heating a table-knife blade in the flame of the wood stove and touching the hot point of the knife to the exposed nerve, "killing it and the hurt with it", she later said.)<br /> One December morning, Pood, the unruly gelding who cantankerously pulled the wagon assigned to Dad by the dairy for which he worked for several years, slammed his hoof down on Dad's instep, breaking it. For something like five weeks, therefore, Dad served his route on a shattered foot, hauling himself up onto the seat by both hands and jumping gingerly down at the next stop. For the five or six nights right after his injury, I had the exciting chance to begin riding the milk-route with him at 2:00 a.m. and help with the deliveries. On each trip, a quart bottle in each hand, I dashed dozens and dozens of times from wagon to porch steps, full of self-importance. Not many eight- or nine-year olds, I smugly told myself, were up and about like me running throughout the night. In the blackness relieved only by the faint amber glow of widely separated street lights, I ran also with more than a little dread, down the strange, dark ways, hearing Pood's distant hoofbeats making lonely noises on the blacktop. <br /> But on one Christmas Eve, just before midnight, as we stood waiting for the bus that would take us from our home in Wenonah to the dairy in Merchantville, I looked up at the few strings of decorative lights left burning late at a nearby house and saw the colors explode and quiver. My head spun, and I fell, and Dad had to carry me back to Aunt Het's, where I spent the next month quarantined with scarlet fever. Dad was alone again on the wagon. <br /> Remembrances of this sort make me attach special meaning to the term "depression" that played, economically and psychologically, so large a part in Dad's existence as a dark and life-threatening force to be fought against constantly, and mostly in solitude and silence. (It was, at last, to kill him, for he died from the shock therapy prescribed as a cure for his descent into an unrelieved and spirit-numbing sadness of a clinical type.) They also make me feel cheap and small whenever I begin to congratulate myself for coping with whatever obstacles I face over here. <br /> I think I've almost talked—written—myself into looking forward to vexation, problems: "If I'm lucky, there may be real trouble ahead, and we'll have a chance to show them we've got some sand in our craw."<br /> On second thought, I think I'll wet my whistle with another "gin and..."Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-16511032484498566922008-03-20T19:36:00.000-07:002008-07-01T16:56:33.857-07:0011 February 1985The events of the last few days convince me that we have poltergeists, if not ghosts, with us in the Abbey. Their mischievous misconduct is a reassuring scapegoating explanation of the mishaps, small emergencies, and obstacles that have almost continuously frustrated our recent progress. Friday's five inch snowfall, accompanied by drift producing winds and frigid temperatures that turned roadways into stretches of glare ice, forced the indefinite postponement of Saturday's Oxford tour. The storm also kept some of our suppliers, much of our service staff, and, today, one of our lecturers from getting to the Abbey. <br /> One of our two furnaces has been operating unreliably and causing all of us and our hot water taps to run cold. The exercise room equipment that was supposed to have been delivered Friday or today is still not here. One of the three washing machines is malfunctioning. The chef's refrigerator is out of order. Three of our larger, heavier doors—to the front porch, the courtyard, and the terrace outside the faculty room—keep blowing open and inviting in arctic gusts and drifts of snow. The intercom system has been erratic. Claire Snopek, who left to visit her English relatives on Thursday night, called in this morning to report that she is bedridden with gastro enteritis. We have run out of large denomination coins with which to change the pound notes of students "desperate" to use the telephones to call home. <br /> My inability to get to Oxford Saturday prevented me from getting some texts needed by students who changed their programs late. Somebody—or something, my present primitive superstitiousness insists—has torn the rolled towel dispenser off the Buttery wall. Students are locking themselves out of their rooms every hour on the hour. Dr. Henson's extracurricular riding lesson session on Sunday at a stable in Steeple Aston went off, after a lengthy delay, only because Dr. Henson was able to compress five students and herself into her subcompact Citroen 2 c.v. She and the would be horsewomen macaronically entwined in a groaning, wobbling vehicle resembled circus clowns—all unattached elbows, knees, heads, and bottoms flattened against windows—in the Citroen struggling up the slight incline toward the Abbey gates. (The minibus that the party was to have used was ungettable. The key to the garage door was under lock and key in Reception. The only two people with keys to the basement room in which the garage key was secured were both snowed in in nearby villages. Seagrave also has a key, but he was away visiting his mother.) <br /> As I started the opening sentences of this entry, the wire holding a picture to the Minstrel Gallery wall snapped—was snapped?—and tumbled and clattered onto the mantelpiece, scattering a pile of papers and sending a matchbox car speeding end over end across the floor. The "on off" switch in the laundry room was turned off by...uh,...someone, inducing a mild attack of hysteria in Marilyn Verra and Felicity Hillmer, who had inserted 50p. to do their washing, got nothing for their money, and came complaining to me that "nothing is working here." I resignedly showed them how to turn the switch from red "off" to white "on," but I didn't have the heart to try to qualify their criticism that, normally, I would have regarded as overgeneralized. <br /> At the very moment that they besieged me with waving arms and shrill staccato cries of outrage, I was trying to find a replacement stylus for the record player on which the students are advised to listen, this week, to a Hamlet album supplementing their Shakespeare studies. The stylus in need of replacement began to show its age, or bad treatment, last night. <br /> About 7:30 I walked into the game room where the record player was surrounded by seven or eight students, all of them with New Penguin <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span> texts in hand, and all of them mesmerized by the borborygmic growls vibrating the speaker cones: "Arh, dubroo lurb da aroogoo oorf frerm," Hamlet's bowels slowly rumbled while the students, as one, turned their inquiring stares hopefully toward me in a wordless appeal for exegesis. "According to A. C. Bradley," I stated in my best lecturer's tone, my fingertips steepled together in front of my chest, my head tilted slightly backward and my knees thoughtfully bent, "that means that we need a new needle." <br /> I thought that we had completed the necessary steps to get one today, but, somehow my request to Mrs. Raine, the Receptionist, got misunderstood by Mr. Winkler, our engineer, chauffeur, and all purpose maintenance man. We are, consequently, no nearer to producing understandable sound from the record player than we were last night, when Nicholas Baldwin, political science tutor, and I tried to transport the only other Abbey player from the buttery bar to the games room. <br /> To make the attempt, we had, first, to go to my bedroom to get the keys to the Reception Office key closet. Then we had to get from the key closet one key to the Buttery and two others for the two locks on the Buttery Bar door. (One is a very old, weapon like implement; the other is a Yale type.) Getting the last two to work agreeably in tandem was by no means simple. They needed much encouragement and flattering from me and from Baldwin, who had a go at the pair of locks after my three minutes of delicate manipulations succeeded, initially, in freeing the top bolt but not the bottom one. Baldwin, in his turn of two or three minutes, was able to coax open the bottom lock but not the top one. When I, thereupon, took painstaking charge of the key to the upper lock while he, simultaneously, soundlessly guided the guided lower one, we finally triumphed, entering the bar with the same sort of joy and wonder that Egyptologists must have felt first entering the tomb of Tutankhamen. <br /> Ours was, however, a fleeting triumph. The cord from the player to plug was sealed into the back of the player. The plug at the other end was at least ten times the diameter of the hole in the unlockable bar framing through which the cord had been passed by whoever installed the rig. Soon after I had to confess my record player failure to the disappointed, and quite clearly contemptuous, students, the one remaining ping pong ball in the games room disappeared. In the midst of my searching for it or another to replace it, Nanette Decea and Stephanie Donato rushed up to ask me to conduct a search of the Abbey, especially the students' bedrooms, in an effort to find out who had just stolen Nanette's Minolta camera. (Ten minutes later Nanette reported that she had found it herself.) <br /> Then there was that trouble with my reading lamps last night. I have two of them on the small chest beside my bed, both of them fitted with 40 watt bulbs. To amplify somewhat the pale amber flow of lumens that falls upon the pages of my late night reading, I balance both lamps on the near side of the chest and tilt their shades up at an acute angle. [1]<br /> About 12:15 I was nearing the final pages of an Edmund Crispin mystery, <span style="font-style:italic;">Buried For Pleasure</span>. Like all Crispin mysteries, this one soothed and delighted me with numbers of sections like two that I had paused to smile over reflectively, the book resting comfortably on my sternum. In the first the fetchingly eccentric don/detective Gervase Fen questions Olive and Harry, a pair of rustics who may have witnessed a murder he is investigating. <br /> <br />"`What did you see?'<br />`We was mollocking,' said Harry... <br />`She'm a rare one for mollocking, is Olive.'<br />Olive appeared gratified by this tribute. `Me Grammer,` she remarked,`allus says,"When oats be cutting, maids be riggish."<br />`Your grandmother,' Fen tells her,`is clearly a depraved old woman.'" <br /> <br /> In the second, Fen, to recover from the effects of a lengthy scholarly immersion, seeks the distraction of standing for Parliament and seems, unaccountably, likely to win a seat. He delivers a deliberately insulting election-eve speech to antagonize the voters and thus, he hopes, escape sitting in Westminster, an ordeal worse than his recent work on "that malignant poet, Langland." Here is part of the speech:<br /><br />"It is often asserted...that the English are unique among the nations for their good sense in political matters. In actual fact, however, the English have no more political good sense than so many polar bears. This I have proved in my own person. For some days past I have been regaling this electorate with projects and ideas so incomparably idiotic as to be, I flatter myself, something of a tour de force. Into what I have said `no gleam of reason has been allowed to intrude’ and I can think of scarcely a single error, however ancient and obscure, I have failed to propagate. Some, it is true, have cavilled at my twaddle, but their objection has been to its superficies, and not to its inane basic principles, which have included, among other laughable notions, the idea that humanity progresses, and that fatuous corruption of the Christian ethic which asserts that everyone is responsible for the well being of everyone else. Such dreary fallacies as these...have been swallowed hook, line, and sinker. And I am bound to conclude that this proven obtuseness is not unrepresentative of the British people as a whole, since their predilection for putting brainless megolomaniacs into positions of power stems, in the last analysis from an identical vacuity of intellect. What is referred to as the political good sense of the British...resolves itself upon investigation into the simple fact that until quite recently the British have been politically apathetic...It is this which accounts for the smoothness of our nation's development in comparison with the other countries of Europe; and our fabled spirit of compromise...has derived from nothing more obscure or complicated than a general indifference to the issue of whatever controversy may have been on hand; though we, of course, in our vanity have ascribed it to tolerance." <br /><br /> My pleasant progress through Crispin's pages was joltingly halted when my two bed lamp bulbs blew, one shortly after the other. Rather than get out of bed, take off my pajamas and put on a shirt and slacks so that I could go on a bulb snatching foray through the Abbey, I tried to keep on reading by the light of the low wattage of the remaining lamp. (Most of the bulbs here are either 25 or 40 watts. I therefore pushed two lamps together on my side of the bed table.) <br /> After 10 minutes of tilting my head and book awkwardly to get from the dun colored 40 watt bulb the maximum illumination upon my pages, I gave up, doffed and donned and started my late night hunt for a replacement. Luck, or the ways of the Abbey, were against me. <br /> The most accessible room for my bulb raid was #1, just across the small hall outside my Room 2. As noiselessly as possible, I unlocked #2's door and crept in and removed the bulb in the lamp nearest the door. As soon as I got it in my hand, I suspected that something was wrong. When I got back to my bedroom, I found out what it was that was wrong. The base of my bulb was threaded; that on the one that I had just snatched was what is called here the "bayonet" type: instead of threads it had two projections that slip down into grooves in the socket. <br /> Not at all sleepy but unable to read, I turned off the faint amber glow of my lamp and lay in the dark, listening to the cries of owls and the peristaltic sighs and rumbles of the old disagreeable bowels of the Abbey.<br /> The grumbling in the walls was strangely like the garbled speeches of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Hamlet</span> record, but in the Bedlam noises I thought I heard the lines "All is not well; I doubt some foul play."<br /><br />_____________________________<br /><br />[1] The English attachment to low-lumen lamps is apparently long-standing. In Margaret Halsey’s <span style="font-style:italic;">With Malice Toward Some </span>(New York, 1938), I found this passage: “One of the things I am used to is reading lamps, but the English idea of lighting seems to be a single shaded bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling, so that people who want to do close work have to cluster like flies on a grease spot in the one small area of illumination. …” [p. 74]Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-74827894909133398962008-03-20T10:26:00.000-07:002008-05-19T13:50:44.044-07:003 March 1985It is 10:10 a.m. as I start these lines. The day is gray, chilly, rainy, and lightly windy. The evergreens on the high bank that slopes down to the lawn outside my window—its still lawn to me, not sward—are full of darkness and movement. A rook—or a crow—sits on a shattered branch at the top of a centuries old cedar-like tree. The sodden terrace and the muddy path above it, carpeted with dead leaves and beech¬nut hulls, are bare of the squirrels, woodpeckers, blackbirds, and wood pigeons often busy there, under the watchful eye of Robert Denton's glossy black cat. <br /> The Abbey is soundless, only two of the two dozen or so students not away for the weekend having wakened for breakfast. Those two came into the cafeteria at approximately 8:45, as I was finishing the poached egg, bacon, toast, honey, and coffee that I ate alone until Colin Marsh, the second cook, or "sous chef," sat down for a cup of tea just before the two women entered. <br /> The Games Room, I saw as I reentered the Abbey through the basement door heavy with massive boards and thick, iron-strap hinges two feet long, has a morning-after look. Pingpong paddles and darts are scattered on the floor among puffs of popcorn and a litter of beer bottles, soda cans, candy wrappers, cigarette ashes and crumpled cigarette packs. Most of the chair cushions lie on the floor or crookedly between the chairs' arms, where the students tossed them after using them for pads in the crowded video room, the scene of a showing of <span style="font-style:italic;">Excalibur</span> till about 2:00 a.m. <br /> Told by Karin Jones, who rented the cassette, that the film was "really great though a little dirty at the beginning," I watched a few minutes of it myself, sitting on a wooden ledge at the side of the small crowded room. Karin's "a little dirty" part, I decided, must have been the scene in which Uther, transformed by Merlin into the likeness of a rival warrior whom Uther kills, rapes his rival's widow—apparently without removing any of his suit of armor. <br /> Much more offensive, by my reckoning, were the other scenes that finally drove me out, and to the telly room, where I watched Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape. In one, the pre-Arthurian knights are titillated by a dancing girl certainly trained in a harem. In another the young Arthur reels through an English tropical jungle a squirm with anacondas, saurian tree beasts, and arm long millipedes. <br /> I look out into the rain as I hear the bells of All Saints begin to call the villagers to morning service, and I look back, as well, upon the surrealistically incoherent imagery not only of <span style="font-style:italic;">Excalibur</span> but of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Rocky Horror Picture Show</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">An American Werewolf in London,</span> two other rented films almost incessantly attended by the students during the last few days. Recollections of the films' disorderly jumble of high spirited thriller narrative, defensively ironic allusion, and conspiratorial citation came to me as the bells of the church spun through the last of their changes, followed by the eleven slow and solemn final gongs that deepened the melancholy with which I turned to this entry. Unable to breathe through my nose, badly congested for many days, I dropped my pen, flattened my palms on my writing table top, and drew a quick, forced breath, like a gasp, through my teeth. <br /> I felt suddenly much disturbed by my memory of what I had seen of these last two films. The sequence of each came back to me as a nightmarish tumbling of kaleidescopic wedges and flakes, spilling into acute and abruptly shifting polychromatic shards. The violently pulsing psychedelic hues were mixed, in my mind's eye, with occasional frames of ghostly black and white: a black garter belt against a transvestite's hairy but talcumed thigh, black lipstick and rice powder on the face of a henna hooded lesbian, the werewolf's fang bright in the tomb darkness of a London alley. <br /> I confess that the films frightened me, not with any Hitchcockian suspense or horror, but with their strainingly sophisticated irreverence toward their own creation of fantasy and their half hearted impulse to invite and yield to a suspension of disbelief. Thus they seemed compelled to trivialize the rhetoric, to paint graffiti upon the pentimento iconography of the childhood matinee memories of the audience. Worse, they kept giving encouraging nudges and winks to their viewers, little insiders' signals authenticating, placing a public stamp of approval upon, an affirmation of faith and trust devoid of any embarrassing revelation of fervor or commitment. The regular showings of <span style="font-style:italic;">Rocky Horror</span>..., in particular, seem to me a form of "gray mass"—not a black one—for The Cool, for a Rastafarian ritual slaughter of wind up chickens and stuffed puppies. <br /> My eyes drifting over to the tilted, lichen covered post by the steps in the paved walkway to the church, I thought again, also, of Robert's cat. It squatted on that mushroom shaped pillar cap when I wakened one morning last week. Its head moved slowly back and forth, cobra-like, as it searched for possible prey. Close to an hour later, after I had come back from breakfast, it had spotted its possible victim and was beginning its stalk. I watched it for five or ten minutes, detecting its continuous but imperceptible movement only by sighting upon a large bright leaf behind it. Gradually, very, very gradually, the distance between the leaf and the cat's bunched haunches increased. A forepaw would rise, float forward, and come to rest, and I could not see it move. <br /> I was determined to actually record its motion, the way as a child I would try, sometimes, to catch a mantel clock's minute hand moving. I had no more success with the cat's paws than I had had with the clock hand. And so I walked away. But I returned to the window every now and again during the next hour or so. At the end of that time, the cat had moved about a hundred and fifty feet, in the direction of the largest oak on the Abbey's front lawn—or "sward" as it is called here. I didn't know what the cat saw there. Whatever it was, it was as invisible to me as the individual movements of the cat, a fact that now, even more noticeably than on that other morning, made the scene somehow quietly terrifying: death drifting inexorably closer, its approach ignored, or denied, by the illusion of permanence that sustains mortality. <br /> I lean back from the writing of that last line and hear the sound of it in my head: "...the illusion of permanence that sustains mortality." A quiet, staring pensiveness takes charge of my thoughts. I think about the sound of the words. For the moment, at least, it pleases me. The rhythm feels right without being an imitation of poetry. The possible ambiguity of sustains (as "supporting" but also "receiving the force of") and mortality (as "life," "being alive" but also "susceptibility to extinction") could, in a larger context of a better writer than I—a more artistic one—possess significance. For a moment, I have to admit, it did for me. It and an element perhaps a dozen sentences back ("a Rastafarian ritual slaughter of wind up chickens and stuffed puppies") fill me, for just a pico second or a bit more, with contentment, with a comforting awareness of having accomplished something, of having established a type of personal authority over the course of events by having established authority over the course of words. That self sufficiency is important to me right now. <br /> On this dark, still, and solitary Sunday, images of entropy seem, temporarily, symbolic of an inhering force's destructive operation upon the elements and matter of life. I press my forefinger lightly against the right side of my nose and try, unsuccessfully, to blow air through my clogged left nostril. The mildly painful pressure against my eyeball and the wet rasp and bubbling noise in my sinuses confirm me in my Presbyterian's gloomy Sabbath awareness of the ending of days and time. In this spirit of resignation, I go looking through the record of recent days for additional signs of possibly catastrophic influences and powers. <br /> I think, first of all, of the constipation and flatulence which have, of late, been so chronically a part of my consciousness that "chronically" seems inappropriate. Its denoting "long duration" or "frequent recurrence" implies a beginning point and a specific—if long-delayed—termination . The first goes beyond my powers of recollection. The second I now regard as inconceivable. "Regular," in the sense of "normal," "usual," "according to established rule," looks to me to be a more accurate and, thus, preferable term. And, I am meanly delighted by the inversion of order the use of the term implies. It agrees with my mood. <br /> Responding to what a psychologist might call an "anal trait"—and many psychologists typified by those who have anal-ized Swift would, I feel uncomfortably sure, call it so even in this context—I am impelled to pause over my windiness. It may be the result of the College's solid, fatty English food. It may originate in a visceral dislocation caused by an airborne fungus as mysterious as the cause of AIDS. (The latter speculation is not wholly without justification. When I was at Wroxton in 1968, I developed on my tongue a moss like growth the color and texture of sheared beaver. Dr. Long, then the attending physician at Banbury's West Bar Surgery, diagnosed the furry cover as a fungal infection which is, he said, "just in the air.") <br /> Whatever its source, it has lately been my constant companion. Internally and externally, I mutter, growl, rumble and pop. Lengthy series of crepitations crackle and rustle behind me as I walk or, as is frequently the case, run away from anyone in my vicinity. If the hissing, humming, whistling emissions and ripping, rattling explosions were not so rude and so full of chastening reminders of the crumbling clay of which I am formed, they might, in the virtuousity and variety of their tones, timbre, and tempo, fill me with sensations of admiring wonder. As it is, I live with them as with a roommate clumsily practicing the first rudiments of drumming.<br /> Again I interrupt my writing to look back over what has happened under my pen in the latest passages. As I was the last time I reread sections of this day's comments, I am made thoughtful by what I find. Thoughtful, this time, but not, as earlier, pleased by the sound of the words, contented. Instead, I feel an instant distancing from that self who supplied the words I see. For the most part, the incipient scatology of the discussion bothers me. It is not very good scatology, not nearly robust or exuberant enough. It found its way into that writing self's text, perhaps, because, subliminally, Swift, Tom Sharpe, and Rabelais have been on my mind ever since I finished Sharpe's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Throwback</span>. <br /> That rampaging novel is full of accounts like this one, describing the efforts of Lockhart Flawse, the protagonist, to drive an unwanted tenant out of the house owned by Flawse's wife, Jessica. Flawse decides to capitalize upon the illicit assignations of the tenant, Col. Finch Potter: <br /> <br />"...for the next week Lockhart sat in a darkened room that overlooked Number 10 and watched from seven till midnight. It was on the Friday that he saw the Colonel's ancient Humber drive up and a woman step out and enter the house with him...Ten minutes later a light shone in the Colonel's bedroom...the Colonel drew the curtains...the woman came into the category his grandfather had described as Scarlet Women...Lockhart was still sitting [in the garden] at midnight when...the couple came out...Lockhart noted the time and made his plans...he travelled to London...and managed to buy what he had come to look for. He came home with several tiny tablets in his pocket and hid them...Then he waited until the following Wednesday before making his next move...Lockhart slipped next door into Number 10 carrying a tin of oven cleaner. The label on the tin advised the use of rubber gloves. Lockhart wore them. For two reasons; [sic] one that he had no intention of leaving fingerprints in the house...; two because what he had come to do had nothing whatsoever to do with oven cleaning...[He] went upstairs to the Colonel's bedroom and through the drawers of his dressing table until Lockhart found what he was after...What was in the French letter that Colonel Finch Potter nudged over his penis at half past eight the following night had certainly kept. He was vaguely aware that the contraceptive felt more slippery than usual when he took it out of the box but the full effect of the oven cleaner made itself felt when he had got it three quarters on and was nursing the rubber ring right down to achieve maximum protection from syphilis. The next moment all fear of that contagious disease had fled his mind and far from trying to get the thing on he was struggling to get the fucking thing off as quickly as possible and before irremediable damage had been done. He was unsuccessful. Not only was the contraceptive slippery but the oven cleaner was living up to its maker's claim to be able to remove grease baked on to the interior of a stove like lightning. With a scream of agony Colonel Finch Potter gave up his manual efforts to get the contraceptive off before what felt like gal¬loping leprosy took its fearful toll and dashed towards the bath¬room in search of a pair of scissors. Behind him the Scarlet Woman watched with growing apprehension and when, after demonically hurling the contents of the medicine cabinet onto the floor, the Colonel still screaming found his nail scissors she intervened. <br /> `No, no, you mustn't,' she cried in the mistaken belief that the Colonel's guilt had got the better of him and that he was about to castrate himself, `for my sake you mustn't.' She dragged the scissors from his hand while the Colonel, had he been able to speak, would have explained that for her sake he must. Instead, gyrating like some demented dervish, he dragged at the contraceptive and its contents with a mania that suggested he was trying to disembowel himself. Next door but one the Pettigrews, now quite accustomed to things that went bump in the night, ignored his pleas for help before he burst...the car [of the police at the end of the road] screeched to a halt outside Number 10 and [the police] were met by the [Colonel's] bull terrier. It was not the amiable beast it had been previously; it was not even the ferocious beast that had bitten Mr. O'Brien and clung to him up his lattice work; it was an entirely new species of beast, one filled to the brim with LSD by Lockhart and harbouring psychedelic visions of primeval ferocity in which policemen were panthers and even fence posts held a menace. Certainly the bull terrier did. Gnashing its teeth, it bit the first three police¬men out of the Panda car before they could get back into it, then the gatepost, broke a tooth on the Colonel's Humber, sank its fangs into the police car's front radial tyre to such effect that it was knocked off its own feet by the blow out while simultaneously rendering their escape impossible, and went snarling off into the night in search of It found them aplenty. Mr. and Mrs. Lowry had taken to sleep¬ing downstairs since the explosion of Mr. O'Brien's Bauhaus next door and the new explosion of the blown out tyre brought them into the garden. Colonel Finch Potter's illuminated bull terrier found them there and, having bitten them both to the bone and driven them back into the house, had severed three bushes at the stem with total disregard for their thorns. If anything it felt provoked by creatures that bit back and was in no mood to trifle when the ambulance summoned...finally arrived. The bull terrier had once travelled in that ambulance with Mr. O'Brien and residual memories flickered in its flaming head. It regarded that ambulance as an offence against nature and with all the impulsion of a dwarf rhinoceros put its head down and charged across the road. In the mistaken belief that it was the Pettigrews at Number 6 who needed their attention the ambulance men had stopped outside their house. They didn't stop long. The pink eyed creature that knocked the first attendant over, bit the second and hurled itself at the throat of the third, fortunately missing and disappearing over the man's shoulder, drove them to take shelter in their vehicle, and ignoring the plight of Mr. and Mrs. Lowry, three policemen and the Colonel whose screams had somewhat sub¬sided as he slashed at his penis with a bread knife in the kitch¬en, the ambulance men drove themselves as rapidly as possible to hospital...For the next twenty minutes Colonel Finch Potter's bull terrier ravaged the Pettigrew house...Acting with impeccable good taste and unbelievable savagery it tore its way through...furnishings and dug holes in a Persian rug in search of some psychedelic bone...Finally it leapt at its own reflection in the french windows and crashed through into the night...Colonel Finch Potter's howls had long since ceased. He lay on the kitchen floor with a cheese grater and worked assiduously and with consummate courage on the thing that had been his penis. That the corrosive contraceptive had long since disintegrated under the striations of the bread knife he neither knew or cared. It was sufficient to know that the rubber ring remained and that his penis had swollen to three times its normal size. It was in an insane effort to grate it down from a phallic gargoyle to something more precise that the Colonel worked. And besides, the pain of the cheese grater was positively homeopathic compared to the oven cleaner and came as something of a relief albeit a minor one. Behind him garnished in suspender belt and bra the Scarlet Woman had hysterics in a kitchen chair and it was her shrieks that finally drove the three policemen in the patrol car to their duty. Bloody and bowed, they broke the front door down in a wild rush provoked as much by fear of the bull terrier as by any desire to enter the house. Once in, they were in half a dozen minds whether to stay or go. The sight of a puce faced old gentleman sitting naked on the kitchen floor using a cheese grater on what looked like a pumpkin with high blood pressure while a woman wearing only a suspender belt shrieked and gibbered and in be¬tween whiles helped herself to a bottle of neat brandy, was not one to reassure them as to anyone's sanity. Finally to add to the pandemonium and panic the lights failed and the house was plunged into darkness..." [The excerpt is taken from Tom Sharpe, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Throwback</span> (Pan Books, London, 1980), pp. 129 134] <br /><br /> If you are going to deal with questionable material, that sort of passage reminds me, you should pull out all the stops. Circumspection, taste, and timidity have no place in bawdry, pornography, or scatology. Unfortunately, I have more than my share of two of these three characteristics, much less than I should have of the other.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-3912303168003344022008-03-20T10:21:00.000-07:002008-05-08T18:32:43.724-07:004 March 1985Tonight, I had great difficulty getting to sleep. Shakespeare was at least partly responsible for my insomnia. I haven't been reading him lately, but somehow a line from <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry IV, Pt. 2</span> got in my head as I was tossing and turning and making elaborately precise, unnecessary, and useless but irresistible adjustments to the bedclothes, pillow, and pajama top. The line that popped into my consciousness just about twelve o'clock was Falstaff's to Shallow: "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow." <br /> I said it softly aloud three or four times and then lay wide-eyed for a long time thinking about it for several reasons. It filled me with warm feelings for a Falstaff looking back, late at night with pleasure and some melancholy, upon amiable carousals of an earlier time. It seemed to be informed with such a generic valedictory spirit. Hearing it with my ears and then inside my head, I was awed—again—and roused to greater wakefulness, by Shakespeare's ability to invest even an incidental line like this one with music and meaning. Not a single sound in it was anything but the best possible one for its place. All the phonemes created euphony and a fine lilting rhythm. They felt good on the tongue and on the ear. And what about that extra syllable at the end of the line—the first half of an extra foot after the fifth one? That low. What a great bit after all those bell-like m's! Another tolling sound as a subtle echo. <br /> I remembered another by-the-way kind of line I saw recently, one in <span style="font-style:italic;">Antony and Cleopatra</span>. Charmian, the maid delivers it just after Cleopatra has pressed the second asp to her flesh: "...A lass unparallel'd," she says. Is it nothing but wacky overinterpreting to see a slyly concealed ambiguity in those first two syllables? I asked myself. Can't "A lass" also be "Alas," a lament rather than a designation? You're stretching it, I warned, but I'm not sure that I paid much attention to the warning. These sorts of "accidental" multiple meanings are too common in Shakespeare to be passed over quickly. <br /> I rolled over on one side, then the other, then onto my back, and asked myself how anyone ever could try to write anything after having read Shakespeare. Doing so is like whistling in the gusting wind or shedding tears in the rain. All writers, I decided, have either to avoid Shakespeare—or forget him the instant they pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard. <br /> I thought, too, about how Falstaff's line fitted into <span style="font-style:italic;">Henry IV</span>, like a lost feather from the plumage of a bright-hued bird. You could miss it in passage, but God! how it drew you up when from flight it floated down at your feet. The words glowed in the darkness of the bedroom, and somewhere bells sounded, almost causing me to sit upright in bed. Well, I thought, this is a better kind of keeper-awaker than Eliot's white mares.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-18023088673223705862008-03-19T18:07:00.000-07:002009-11-07T20:52:16.739-08:009 March 1985SATURDAY<br /> A bright and almost balmy day. Thin scattered clouds drifting south eastward above the heavily mullioned tall windows in my bedroom occasionally filter the strong sunlight. In cool looking waves it alternately washes across the lawn, rises to the dark of the wooded bank by the north wall and then recedes into the angular shadow of the Abbey. (The daylight in my room even on the sunniest mornings has a pale, Edward Hopper quality.)<br /> Somewhere among the lime trees—60 to 70 feet high—and the dense but shorter evergreens,Robert Denton is at work with his chain saw. The growl and whine of the saw cutting through branches reminded me, for some reason, that I wanted to ask him about the wood pigeon feathers strewn in several disordered heaps and patches along the Abbey paths. I hurried out of the building to get to him before he moved off, and as I walked thought about my visit, last night to the Rose and Crown pub in Ratley.<br /> I had been taken there with Nicholas Baldwin, by Philip and Tara Inwood, respectively a College art tutor and his wife. Tara, a descendant of the Heinemann family of publishers, I have been told, is bright and attractive, with a trim figure, dark, softly waved hair, and a warm, full-lipped smile. Philip, with red gold hair and a clear, boyish face, is as good looking as she is. The occasion for her and Philip's inviting Nick and me to the Rose and Crown was their having finished preparations for their shows. Tomorrow, Tara's photographs will be on view at the Bampton Arts Centre as part of a two woman exhibit—Caroline Forbes is the other contributor—entitled "Writers and Musicians." On 24 March Philip's "Watercolour Landscapes" private show will open for two weeks in the Great Hall of the Abbey. The evening out was, thus, their celebration, a sort of self congratulatory ceremony that they chose to share with Nick and me.<br /> The pub is in a neat and orderly little village of perhaps 300 or 400 people. Its stone cottages clustered around and on the hill that rises steeply from the lower level, above a narrow lane leading eventually, I think, back to Wroxton through Hornton and Horley. Like Philip and Tara's Wroxton cottage on Main Street, the Rose and Crown seems little changed by the several centuries it has endured. Both have stone and plaster walls and thick dark beams, warped, age fissured, and low enough to require defensive stooping by all but the shortest visitors.<br /> How do public houses like the Rose and Crown and Wroxton's White Horse avoid law suits by guests who bash their skulls on some of the great joists—at least eight inches square and no more than six feet above the floor—that run through their main rooms? In the rapaciously and opportunistically litigious America of today, $50,000 judgments would be a regularly provided for operating expense, covered by a liability insurance policy costly enough to force the price of beer up to £1.50 per pint.<br /> Over here everyone accepts the beams not as annoyances but as contributions to the coziness of the places in which they are found. In one that I visited with the students on one of our "Pub Crawl" nights, the main beam in the largest room had affixed to it a hand printed sign reading "Duck or Grouse."<br /> The honest atmosphere of such pubs free of any of the adulterations prized by polyurethane-and-permastone improvers, makes me think about the character of my own land and people. When I did so sometime back in circumstances similar to those of last night, one image flashed instantly in my awareness. It was the end panel of a pack of fig roll biscuits that I purchased on March 7 for 27p in Banbury's Marks and Spencer's market. Under "Ingredients" appeared this listing: "Fig Paste. Wheat Flour. Sugar. Glucose Syrup. Vegetable Oil. Dried Skimmed Milk. Salt. Flavourings. Citric Acid." Where's the rest of it? I wondered, the magical additives and congeners that would have made totally unnecessary the legend printed on the see through cover of the British package: "Display until 30 Mar D Best Before 13 Apr." <br /> The Ratley pub is Philip and Tara's favorite. "No juke box or anything like that," Philip said approvingly as we got into his V.W. in Wroxton. "Tara and I hope that not too many people find it." Although I will probably never visit it again, I, too, hope it stays the way it was when I was there: quiet, and unimproved but warmed by a ready friendliness, a bit chilly but brightened by pleasant fires in large hearths at either end of its two rooms made one, unaffectedly homey with a sturdy white labrador rolling on the floor in invitation to playful mock battle, and two Jack Russells barking and scratching behind some solid door decently muffling their racket in a distant room.<br /> Robert put down his saw the instant I came into view. Before I could ask about the pigeon feathers, he entered upon an explanation of his cutting up the tree. "`Twas a healthy tree, but tipped over by the wind," he said, eager to have me understand that he would never have felled it otherwise. "`Twas badly rooted here in a wet spot on the hill. The water gets under them, you see, and the first strong wind knocks them over." When he had finished his comments on the tree, I finally asked him about the pigeons and asked if he, too, had noticed the remains of several.<br /> "Oy," he answered and led me to a place a hundred yards toward the ice house. The soil, covered by conifer needles, was disturbed, and feathers lay in an irregular circle two feet or more across. "Fox has had him," he declared bending low over the spot. "He won't have caught the bird, probably. It will have been `pricked.' The farmers are shooting the pigeons right now to keep them from the seed. Some of the birds get only wounded and fall to ground. Others die in the night and drop off their perch. But oi've watched the fox having a mouse. It's wonderful to see the way it crouches and pounces"—here he rose on his toes and thrust his arms out suddenly—“and comes down right upon the creature."<br /> Robert then asked me if I had seen the badger sett, and, when I told him I never had, we set off on the path north of the Great Pond to the high ground in the woods about a quarter of a mile away. Continuously, as we walked, Robert drew upon his steady and acute observation of the Abbey grounds, proudly showing off his authority as a scholar of the earth. "This would be honey fungus," he said pausing over a pale orange growth on a rotting stump. "Deadly it is. If you get it in your garden it runs right along the roots underground, spreading everywhere and the whole lot is lost." Bracket fungus, he went on, was just about as bad. It got its name from looking like a shelf bracket, he added as a foot¬note.<br /> A rabbit started up as we left the stump, and Robert stopped to call my attention to its "form." "They will go underground in a burry," he explained, adding, when he saw my look of slight uncertainty hearing "burry," "We call them `burry' here. Others will say burrow. `Tis all the same," he finished in a tone that left little doubt that the local term was unquestionably the better one. "They keep above ground more now," he said, resuming his remarks about rabbits. "Crafty, they are. They know the fleas in the burries spread myxomatosis." (Robert much admires the ability of wild creatures to perceive all sorts of danger, and, after their form of careful analysis, to draw up reasoned solutions to cope with present threat. Foxes are better equipped for such planning than rabbits, he is certain. "They have moved into hurban areas like Banbury," he has told me. "They know they are safe from the hunt there.")<br /> We got to the badger sett only after several more stopovers. During one, Robert pointed to a hole high on the side of one of the tallest trees nearby and told me that it was used by dozens of bats that roost in the rotting trunk. "They'll be in there now. They were once in another weak old beech that we had to cut down. Swarmed out of it, they did, in the light of the morning. This one should come down as well. It will fall soon in a strong wind and will probably damage some of the young trees we've set out for future generations. But I believe we should leave some dead trees about for creatures like the bats. And the green headed woodpecker. The barn owl is almost extinct now, with the way `modern farming' is pulling down the old barns at such a rate. We need the hedgerows, too, and there are perishing few of them left here about now. I don't think `modern farms' should be allowed around here. They don't fit in, do they, with their metal sides and roofs and the way they've done for all the spinneys? Every last inch of earth must be plowed. The countryside looks sterile," he said sadly, looking through the trees toward the expanse of rolling hilly farmland, freshly turned over for later "corn drilling."<br /> "I don't hold with squeezing every pence out of the land. If we have enough to live by that's enough, isn't it? Look off there toward Bretch Hill estates. All of that used to be trees. It's horrible looking now, with all the walls and roofs everywhere. And the people don't care for the environment. The young lads come in here with knives and girdle the trees. I will show you some foin' larches and Scotch poins of 30 years or more with the bark stripped off six feet of trunk. There's no point to it. Just vandalism and destruction.”<br /> As he nodded his head in mingled anger and despair over the damage to the trees, I recalled a passage I had read years before in Frazer’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Golden Bough</span> about primitive Germans’ love of trees and hatred of those who destroyed them. A typical punishment for girdling a tree, as I recall, was nailing the girdler’s navel to the tree and then rolling him round and round the tree, wrapping the barked section with the innards of the malefactor. Studying Robert’s expression as he moved away from one of the dead trees gave me a new understanding of the passage.<br /> “Last year,” Robert, went on, “was a bad one. They were in the grounds all the toim. Pinched m' favver's tools and pulled stones out of the dam and bridge. A few years ago they stoned the swans, breaking their necks. And one came in wiv a shot gun and blew the ducklings apart. A doozen or two birds, he done for, leavin' the bodies lyin' about. Oi've tried to teach some of the young ones some country lore, but they just give you lip and get ugly wiv you if you try to correct them. `Twill all be like Leamington Spa one day. That was a smashin' place one toim. But it's overgrown now. `Tis all changed, it is. Everything moves too fast. Loik in the States. Coo! That's too swift for me. Oi never get bored with the quiet of these grounds. There's soomthin’ new to see and learn all the toim. Even in the winter wiv the snow coverin' all, you can read a great record in the tracks."<br /> Embarrassed, all at once, by recognizing the length of his remarks, he strode rapidly away, neither of us speaking until he drew up again before another hole in a tree. "That there would be a tawny owl's opening," he said.<br /> At another place he touched my shoulder and pointed to a tiny thicket of suckers half a dozen feet above the base of a large beech. He had left the suckers there when he pruned this autumn, he told me, because he'd remembered that a blue tit had four eggs in a nest there last spring, and probably would again this year. Above us a magpie labored upward with a fat stick in its beak, beating its wings strongly and rapidly to clear the top of a larch. I guessed aloud that the nesting would start very soon. "Oy," Robert agreed, "the aconite and snowdrops have been in flower for some toim now." They were all about us in the clearings, the bright yellow butter balls of aconite and tight clumps of spotless white. I looked at them and heard a line in my head:"Numbers of clumps of chimeless bells." I edited it as I followed Robert up the slope to the sett: "Countless clumps of aconite, its golden bells untolled." The punning final word made me smile to myself—out of pleasure or irritation; I couldn't tell which for sure.<br /> The badger sett was well worth the walk. At the edge of one hole Robert scooped up a small, sticky mass of fur, which he separated and let float on the air. It was from a baby rabbit, he informed me, explaining that although only the "rogue" badgers are thoroughgoing predators on game, all of them will "have a yoong rabbit when they can, though earthworms are their steady diet. They find the smallest leverets, he continued, with their wonderful scent, and led me along a badger trail that ran straight to a rabbit's burrow. "They know just where the little ones are. But they can't catch the large ones." He halted me again and stretched the toe of his Wellington, heavily weighted with red mud, toward a small opening in the grass. "That's a bolt hole. Hard to see, they are. Ivery rabbit will have one if it can, twelve feet or more from its burry opening. Sometimes, when you're hunting, you'll see the rabbit rise up by one of these holes, listening and looking for you. If you shoot, you think you've missed sometimes when you haven't at all. The rabbit has plunged down into the bolt hole, wounded. If you take a stout stem of briar, wiv thorns heavy on it, and reach down into the hole, you can often drag the rabbit back out. It got only a foot or two into the run wiv its hurt. That's a little trick that's saved more than one supper for a hunter who knows his business." <br /> Robert pointed out to me several other features of the sett. Some large bones he identified as those of a dead badger, its skeleton exhumed by another one making a later burrow. He picked up a piece of Hornton stone and showed me the marks upon it, proof, he reminded me, of the badger's powerful claws that enable it to dig through rocky soil. A few feet away from the burrow he found evidences of the young badger's testing of their claws by slashing at the bark of a tree. In leading me away from the complex of holes and mounds, he showed me the debris of the badger's old bedding, dragged out of the burrow and replaced regularly with new supplies of leaves and straw. "Badgers are wonderful clean about the burries," he said and reinforced the statement by finding on the surface of the soil a number of cup-sized hollows—“latrines,” he explained, in which the badgers void.<br /> Caught up in our walk and talk, Robert went on to guide me around the whole perimeter of the Abbey's 57 acres and beyond, up to the arch by the footpath, over to Trinity College's reforestation plot and then westward to the dovecote and back to the Abbey's front entrance. Enroute, he showed me the carcass of a dead munt jac deer on which "carrion crows" were feeding as we approached. The eye socket, I noticed—and tried at once to forget—had been pecked clean. On the height of a field planted with winter barley, we enjoyed a marvelous view of the villages of Horley and Shotteswell, a prospect, that was, Robert decided, vastly superior to the view of Banbury and the estate houses, semi detached or in rows of "terraces."<br /> Our walk had taken over three hours. Luncheon was near at hand, and we parted, Robert heading for Wroxton House up the slope beyond the Abbey, I to the cafeteria, where I ran over in my mind others of the items of information Robert had shared with me during the morning. I recalled his regret over the trees killed by the knife wielding boys: "Oi helped to plant those trees when I was a lad the soize of them what stripped them. Oi got £2 a fortnight for my work then."<br /> Reflection upon his first work for Lord North had led him to a brief impromptu lecture on the history of the grounds: "At one toim the last old lord had about a 100 workers at the Abbey. Near iveryone in the village was in his employ. Twenty five gardeners he had then, and some men just to look after the wall that ran round the whole of the property. There was a water wheel on the stream when I was a lad. It pumped water all the way up to the great house. But it was broken up, along with the house that used to be near. My mother delivered letters to that house on a bicycle when she worked for the postal service. `Tis a shame they destroyed the dwelling. The Old Lord got too poor to think about repairs. They had to put down some of his dogs near the end, Oi've heard, because he couldn't pay for the keeping of them, and some say he had to sell off one of the farms for £200. When Trinity College took over after his death, they didn't care."<br /> I also remembered his rapt attentiveness to everything we passed. Repeatedly, as we had walked, he leant down and picked up bits of litter thrusting the pieces into a sack to be thrown in the rubbish. Twice he picked up beverage bottles and carried them to where he could bury them under stones that he heaped over them. Once he drew up sharply and picked up a rock fragment four inches square, on the surface of which he had spotted a fossil shell the size of a small thumbnail.<br /> My morning's outing put me in a happy mood, and I decided to cycle into Banbury even though I didn't really have to do any shopping. I just wanted an excuse to be out again in the country¬side. By the time I had finished the long climb up Drayton hill, however, the complexion of the day, and of my mood, changed suddenly. Rapidly massing clouds turned the sunny afternoon gray, and almost at the same time, I discovered that the rear tire of the Abbey bike was slowly but steadily losing air. I also discovered that one of the student users of the bike recently had removed or lost the hand pump I had found attached to the bike's frame just two or three days earlier. Peering over my shoulder every now and then as I pumped my way to the Warwick Road and down it in the direction of Banbury, I comforted myself with the reassuring reminder that there was a petrol station only about a mile ahead.<br /> I shouldn't have counted on it as a source of help. For one thing, the air pump bore a sign warning that use of the hose to inflate bicycle tires was "dangerous and absolutely prohibited." For another, the hose end didn't fit my valve. British bikes come with two different types of valves, only one of them the same size as automobile tire valves. Mine was the other type. I looked for someone whom I could ask for advice but found no one. The station was a self service one with only a candy selling young woman behind the till. Wheeling my bake away from that station, I saw another one just down the road.<br /> My spirits rose when I saw that it sold bicycles and parts. Its air hose, I learned quickly was of no more use to me than that at the first station, but I approached a young man in the bike department, full of confidence that I would soon be spinning on my way. I wasn't. The young man saw no solution to my problem short of my buying a new handpump and an adapter. My suggestion that he lend me a pump drew from a blank stare of disbelief. He did, however, tell me that if I walked my bike the quarter mile, approximately, to Trinder's on Broad Street, I could get help there.<br /> Pushing the flat tired bike beside me, I made my way to the corner of High and Broad, and saw Halford's bike shop right on the corner. Why go three or four more blocks to Trinder's? I asked myself, looking at the crowd of Saturday shoppers, many of them with enormous prams or leashed dogs trembling and straining to move their sluggish bowels, I went into Halford's, described my needs to a be smocked young man who assured me that the solution was simple and sold me a 60p adapter, telling me that three blocks up on Broad Street, just past Trinder's, I learned, I should find a BP station with an air hose that the new adapter would permit me to use.<br /> A bit sheepish as I hauled the bike past Trinder's, I navigated my way to the station, waited for two car owners to inflate their cars' tires, and then, having with a proud flourish screwed the adapter onto my valve, pressed the end of the air hose to the adapter. Dust rose in a sooty cloud around my head, but the rim didn't. It rested on the squashed tire, unaltered by the rush of air. I tried the hose again, with the same pointless result. Finding no one to ask for help, I rolled the hose back up and pushed the bike back to Trinder's. The clerk there recommend the same remedy proposed by the one in the second service station: buy a bike pump and inflate the tire by hand. "Could I pay you 20 or 30p to lend me a pump?" I asked. "The bike is not mine, and the pump for it is somewhere back in the owner's shed." "Oh. I'll inflate it for you," he responded, and five minutes later—about three quarters of an hour after I had stopped at the first station—I was back in business, rolling the wrong way down Broad Street to the market square.<br /> When I got there and leaned my bike against a wall in the thronged lanes, my spirit changed again. I was certain that no one would bother to steal my bike propped against the wall. All the irritation I had felt in my attempts to get the tire pumped up disappeared. I felt good about being among people so predominantly decent and honest. I finished my chores and headed back toward Wroxton, feeling a mild elation all the way, even though, or perhaps because, the route back is mostly uphill. Struggling up the steep inclines on the old, one speed bike, I felt in the very muscles of my legs and back the contours of the undulating lands Robert and I had looked out over in the shining splendor of the late morning.<br /> A light, brief rain started as I reached the head of Silver Street, just west of the Roman Catholic church in Wroxton. I didn't hurry. I didn't voice any silent hopes that the rain would stop. I wanted it to continue, come down harder. I wanted to be wet, like the leaves of bean plants in the fields around me. I wanted to feel this place on my skin, to be a part of it. When the raindrops ceased a minute or two after the first ones moistened my hot forehead, I felt something like severe disappointment. I coasted down Mills Lane to the Abbey gates, watching the road surface rush under my feet. Was I moving forward, or were the road and the place beneath me speeding away while I stood still, disappearing behind me, flowing into the past? I didn't know. I didn't care.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-36290148860304528062008-03-18T17:29:00.000-07:002008-05-14T17:39:00.270-07:0011 March 1985A fine, fair morning, the third in a row. One of the first things I saw when I pulled the draperies to let in the light from the strong morning sun was a cock pheasant gliding into the evergreens on the hill. The glistening flash of mottled earth and enameled green as the bird spread its wings in the sunlight made me eager to take a walk around the grounds, which I did right after breakfast. My sweater and light jacket were more than I needed out in the clear, warm air but not enough in the chilly darkness under the evergreens. "It's springtime in the sunshine but winter in the shade," I said to myself. <br /> Moving repeatedly every hundred yards or so from one season to the other provided a sort of theme for the day: all was contrast, opposites succeeding each other turn and turn about. Pussy willow buds swelled fat and silken on branches overhanging an ancient, rotting stump covered with lichen and fungus—the cold blossoms of decay. Coots and mallards raced and flapped and skimmed noisily in courtship rituals on the surface of the great lake, at the edge of which I saw a blue tit crushed in mud and, again today, the remains of a munt jac deer, dragged once more by carrion creatures out of the thicket into which Robert Denton had lifted it yesterday. Looking at the thickets growing right down to the water and the rampant marsh grasses thrusting through the lake's muddy banks, I remembered, probably imperfectly, part of a line of Thoreau's about the New England coast: "...a wild rank place with no flattery in it." Later in the walk, as I made my way up the northern edge of the grounds, the racket of a rookery scraped against the chimes of All Saints' clock, floating, round and full, like bubbles in the air. <br /> For quite some time, I stood on the mound below "The Cataract," listening to the plash and gurgle of the water and remembering Horace Walpole's delight in sitting in the Chinese Pagoda that once whimsically graced the crest of this little hill. Thoughts of Walpole reminded me of another literary figure who had visited Wroxton, Henry James. In a passage that I have squirreled away from somewhere in his writings--just where I forget right now, he left this recollection of the wonderful old building: "And what shall I say of the color of Wroxton Abbey, which we visited last in order and which in the thickening twilight, as we approached its great ivy-muffled face, laid on the mind the burden of its felicity?" <br /> I then turned onto the path leading to the church and met Rector Walker just opening the door of the south porch. We renewed our acquaintance, interrupted by eighteen years of not having seen one another, and he told me briefly, though with persistent stammers that set his chin tab to quivering, of Walter Naylor's death. Mr. Naylor, whom Patty and I got to know in 1967, had worked hard one day, the Rector reported, mowing and tidying up the Church's graveyard. He finished his task, returned homeward down Lime Walk, and dropped dead. The paradox of his having died, in a sense, out of caring for the dead, disturbed me as another of this morning's odd juxtapositions. <br /> Standing in the shadowy nave of the church, looking up at the W N carved in the arch above the chancel screen in memory of Mr. Naylor, I felt that both the Rector and I were in need of cheering up. I decided to read the Rector one of my favorite short passages from Kilvert's Diary, which I had in my pocket: <br /><br />"April 27, 1874: ...the Vicar of Fordington told us of the state of things in his parish when he first came to it nearly half a century ago. No man had ever been known to receive Holy Communion except the Parson, the Clerk, and the sexton. There were 16 women communicants and most of them went away when he refused to pay them for coming...At one church there were two male communicants. When the cup was given to the first he touched his forelock and said, `Here's your good health, Sir!' The other said, `Here's the good health of our Lord Jesus Christ.' One day there was a christening and no water in the Font. `Water, Sir!' said the clerk in astonishment. `The last parson never used no water. He spit into his hand.'" <br /><br />The Rector's hearty laughter echoing in the gloom and dust of the vault intensified, rather than lessened, my odd uneasiness with the day's discrepancies. A strange antiphonal music seemed to fill the air. <br /> I said goodbye to the Rector and strolled slowly through the lichen crusted stones in the graveyard, acutely conscious of the inappropriate brightness of the sun's rays falling upon memorial tablets from which the turning years had rubbed virtually all the names and dates. One or two refracted rays fell in the same sprightly and unsuitable way upon the deeply shadowed commemorative plaque on the south wall, asking the parishioners of All Saints to remember those village men who gave their lives in "The Great War." Although Wroxton was then, as it is now, a settlement of a few hundred souls seemingly remote from the disorder of the world, the names of the war dead totaled sixteen, four times as many as in World War II. <br /> I reentered the south porch of the church, saw a wrinkled notice in a frame fixed to the wall, and took out my pencil and copied what appeared there: <br /><br />"Canon XCIX. No person shall marry within the degrees prohibited by the Table here set forth: The Table of Kindred and Affinity wherein whosoever are related are forbidden by the Church of England to marry together. <br /><br /> A Man may not marry his<br /><br /> Mother<br /> Daughter<br /> Father's mother<br /> Mother's mother<br /> Son's daughter<br /> Daughter's daughter<br /> Sister<br /> Father's daughter<br /> Mother's daughter<br /> Wife's mother<br /> Wife's daughter<br /> Father's wife<br /> Son's wife<br /> Father's father's wife<br /> Mother's father's wife<br /> Wife's father's mother<br /> Wife's mother's mother<br /> Wife's son's daughter<br /> Wife's daughter's daughter<br /> Son's son's wife<br /> Daughter's son's wife<br /> Father's sister<br /> Mother's sister<br /> Brother's daughter<br /> Sister's daughter<br /><br /> A Woman may not marry her<br /> <br />Father<br />Son<br />Father's father<br />Mother's father<br />Son's son<br />Daughter's son<br />Brother<br />Father's son<br />Mother's son<br />Husband's father<br />Husband's son<br />Mother's husband<br />Daughter's husband<br />Father's mother's husband<br />Mother's mother's husband<br />Husband's father's father<br />Husband's mother's father<br />Husband's son's son<br />Husband's daughter's son<br />Husband's daughter's husband<br />Daughter's daughter's husband<br />Father's brother<br />Mother's brother<br />Brother's son<br />Sister's son<br /><br />and this Table shall be in every church publicly set up and fixed at the charge of the Parish." <br /><br /> Soothed somewhat by the parallelism, balance and completeness of the Canon's columns, I was reassured also—for a reason I didn't fully understand—by the placard next to the Table of Kindred and Affinity. A listing of the charges for various services provided by the Church, it revealed that the cost of a wedding or a funeral was almost exactly the same, the most complete possible set of marriage services running to £33, only £1.50 more than those for burial. <br /> Across Silver Street, in the yard behind one of the cottages on Church Walk, a pretty young woman was hanging her fresh washed clothes upon a line. As I headed toward the gate in the Abbey wall, I waved to her and said good morning. She stuffed a damp garment under her left arm and reached up with her right hand to remove a clothes pin held between her teeth. "Good morning," she replied cheerfully. "A splendid start to the day, isn't it?" "Yes it is," I called back, trying to sound confidently contented. On the other side of the high wall, I heard Robert Denton's happy whistle and, as counterpoint to it, the sad, slow notes of a wood pigeon. <br /> The mismatched sounds brought a comforting thought quickly to my mind, crowding out a persisting dreariness of mood: This contrapuntal background music doesn't have anything at all to do with disorder, I conveniently convinced myself. It's a proper sort of anthem celebrating something fundamentally a part of this England full of contrarieties, a musical evocation of all sorts of cultural characteristics: the reflexively quarrelsome response of one Times reader to another's comments on avocados, or train schedules, or army underwear—to anything; the ritualistic hoots and "Hear-Hear"s of Westminster's question periods; the elaborate incidental politeness that is often not much more than the result of impatience and a fervent wish simply to avoid further involvement; the communal satisfaction over the condign misfortune of those victimized by their own rashness, disobedience, indifference, or foolishness contrasted with the universal—and often spontaneously sentimental—compassion for blameless sufferers, especially if they are It's also, I remembered with a smile, a tribute to that creatively perverse assertion of the dissident private view that enriches England's literature with irony and iconoclasm and its history with admirably stubborn rebels shouting their beliefs to the muttering mob even as the headsman nudges them toward the block—or, as Raleigh did on the eve of his beheading, carefully crafting poetic lines of farewell to life like these: “Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,/ My staff of faith to walk upon,/ My scrip of joy, immortal diet,/ My bottle of salvation,/ My gown of glory, hope’s true gage,/ And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.” <br /> I knew that the explanations were calculatingly Pollyanna-ish simplifications, but they served my needs. The last village sounds I heard as I crossed the sward to the Abbey's front entrance were the happy shouts and bright laughter of little children at play in Dark Lane.<br /> Walking up the Abbey driveway, I remembered that the first residence one sees entering the village is named Alpha Cottage and that the last one one passes on leaving the village is named Omega Cottage.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-80213962689711189242008-03-17T07:25:00.000-07:002008-05-15T07:43:30.212-07:0012 March 1985A fairly busy day. I visited a lecture and a tutorial session. I wrote a fairly longish memo to Seagrave about some student discontent. I met with a delegation of students before and after writing the memo about their complaint, which seems altogether justified to me. I made a trip into Banbury to replace the battery in my wristwatch, which stopped at 2:03 this morning. In the afternoon I met with Christopher Fitter, to whom I had to send the termination-of-appointment notice Seagrave has been eager to have me write. <br /> After my talk with Fitter—seeking, perversely a dreadful pun, one could nickname him "Steam" because of his intensity, which I commend him for, I met with two other tutors. I told David Luker, the historian who lives in Wroxton House with his pregnant American wife, Ann, that I had talked with Seagrave about getting a better cooking stove in the Lukers' flat. I met with Nicholas Baldwin to compliment him on his conduct of the tutorial session I attended and to talk, playfully, with him about a multi-disciplinary study of the power and influence of the Prime Minister as it would be treated by an anthropologist concerned with tribal governance, a socio psychologist interested in leadership dynamics, and a Lorenz like biologist studying pack or flock leadership. <br /> Late in the afternoon, I got around to reading Kilvert's Diary again. Emboldened by a warm gin and tonic—warm ones are much more full of "Dutchman's Courage" than iced ones—I occasionally edited some of his lines as a little exercise. <br /> I approached the activity with an assurance close to arrogance because of some fooling around I had done a day or so ago with a line of Yeats'—the one in which he referred to life as "a long preparation for a day that never comes." I readjusted it with an almost juvenile confidence. "Life is a long preparation for the day that Never comes," I wrote down on a pad smugly admiring the subtlety of the effect I achieved by putting special stress on the and not only stressing never but using it as a noun, not an adverb, making Never equivalent to the eternity that follows death. <br /> Kilvert's line that caught my editorial attention was this one: "...and as I passed Cross Ffordd the frogs were croaking, snoring and bubbling in the pool under the full moon." It was so close to perfection, I decided, that it deserved revision. "...croaking, snoring and bubbling under the full moon in the pool" would be, rhythmically, an improvement I imperiously declared. Why didn't Kilvert see that? I was disappointed by his insensitivity. I read his version, then mine. Yes, mine was better. Oh oh! But what about the modification? I've got the moon in the pool! He was right. I was wrong. (I am not sure that I was equally wrong with my attempt at a pair of lines from Addison’s Cato. I edited them, too, the other day as I had a cocktail-hour gin and tonic that justified my presumption. Addison’s lines were these: “When by just vengeance guilty mortals perish, The gods behold their punishment with pleasure.” Good, I thought, as I sipped again at my drink, but there is something wrong. I listened to several different versions of them in my mind and decided that the trouble was the hypermeter ending both lines. This, I magisterially decided as I pressed my glass against my cheek, would be better: “When by just vengeance guilty mortals die, The gods behold their fate with gladdened eye.” Of course, I have made a heroic couplet of Addison’s blank verse, but no matter.)<br /> How does someone achieve the instinctive rightness of a Kilvert? How did he come by the simplicity of his description of a storm: “A wild stormy night. The Dulas, Clyro, roaring red, and the Wye surging broad yellow and stormy." Or the absolute power of a sentence like this: "At Rhos Goch Lane House no one was at home, so I stuck an ivy leaf into the latch hole"? I remember Picasso saying something like "It took me five years to learn to paint like Rembrandt. It took me a lifetime to learn to paint like a child." <br /> I wish that just once I could write with the sort of honesty and innocence of loving fidelity to the object that Kilvert displays. I think that then I would be content. Someone, someday, might then look up and pause over my words, as I do over Kilvert's, reverent, grateful, and full of a renewed belief in the worth of the long conversation that makes then now, now then, and hereafter both here and heretofore. That would be proof that I had lived, at least for my sudden and improbable friend, that reader of a later day. (Being able to build that bridge from here to there, from this time to that, could give anyone a solid sense of what the young Sam Shepard felt when, quite new to his writing craft, he told himself that "with words you could do anything.") <br /> But keeping journals is a risky business, unless those who keep them succeed in convincing themselves that the notes are absolutely private, permanently. (My experience with this one sharpens my appreciation of Boswell’s comment: “It is a work of very great labour and difficulty to keep a journal of life, occupied in various pursuits, mingled with concomitant speculations and reflections.”) Start thinking, as I came close to doing just above, about an audience larger than yourself, and you are in trouble: either you egotistically assume that whatever you say is well worth any sensitive and intelligent reader's time or you begin to bend not only the context of what you get down but also the context of what you observe as possible material to be gotten down. <br /> You also begin to adopt the voice that you think your once and future reader will be pleased to hear and thus run the risk of losing whatever honesty and spontaneity you may be capable of, of becoming a performer who "popularizes his or her own experience," renders it suitable for public consumption. <br />Once you start doing that, can you really distinguish between what you do and think and what you think you should do and think to win the approval of your reader? Can you keep everything from becoming "material" before it truly becomes experience? Can you keep yourself from becoming material, grist out of which you fashion the many different selves you see yourself becoming on the different pages that you fill up? [1]<br /> Can you, as you reread entry after entry, recognize your self among the many me's and I's you meet in them? Are you the all powerful figure who shapes the people you meet and makes them "fit" the places in which you've set them, or the chameleon who takes its color from its surroundings, who rather desperately seeks for some definite shape of identity by rubbing up against the edges of the basics of daily existence? Can you bear the burden of self awareness, the implicit concentration upon self that a journal involves? <br /> What do you do about the feeling you often get, scribbling away, making sentences and paragraphs out of nothing but a look out a window, when a thought like this comes to you, reminding you that you have language but no real theme: "I always know my subject. What I lack is a predicate." Must everything I get down be subjective, devoid of all objectives? Thoughts like these give me, I think, full understanding of what Henrik Ibsen felt when he said once, “To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”<br /> Example: I stood with Patty on the edge of the ocean one moonless New Year's Eve, very near midnight, comforted by the total blackness of the vast water and at the same time awed and somewhat frightened by an acute awareness of time and timelessness. The flat laughter of three or four people drinking outside a nearby hotel mixed with the sound of the surf. In the darkness of the beach, large clumps of cold-stiffened white sea foam rolled across the sand, ghosts of dead crests, riding night winds, then tumbling again into the incoming water and slowly disappearing in the barely visible waves. "Say something about this," I told myself, but the speaking, itself, though soundless, drew me away from what I had been before the words, what I had felt then. And I knew at once that I would not ever get past the nouns to the verb that roiled the water and quickened the air.) <br /> Some of these thoughts run through my head because I read somewhere the other day, Leonard Woolf's comment in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Journey Not the Arrival Matters </span>on dealing with autobiographical material: "If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable." I've also been reading not only Kilvert's but also Byron's journal. (Another potentially fatal peril facing any of us who keep journals is reading predecessors like those two, or Pepys, say. Even worse, perhaps, would be to keep in mind the statistics on A. C. Benson's journal-keeping: "From 1897 to 1925," according to the <span style="font-style:italic;">Oxford Companion</span>, "he kept a diary, amounting to five million words...") <br /> Coming from such collections to the blank pages of your own tablet is a little like, well, carefully clipping a lengthy hair from one of your nostrils or putting salve on a small bleb or canker while a glossy photograph of some exquisite film star or international fleshly icon is fresh in your memory. "Does this really make any difference at all?" you are just about certain to ask yourself as you peer, eyes widened beneath quizzically arched brows, at the snippers or the tube of salve. Should you ever again even think of seeking some way to do something about brightening your blank countenance—or pages even more blank?<br /> Byron, himself, you may try to console yourself by remembering, confessed some misgivings about his daily, or periodic, entries. The December 6, 1813, comment in his journal (which ran from November 14, 1813, to April 19, 1814), went like this: "This journal is a relief. When I am tired..., out comes this, and down goes everything. But I cannot read it over; and God knows what contradictions it may contain. If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to oneself than to anyone else), every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor." <br /> In another place—I forget which page of it I have transcribed from in John D. Jump's <span style="font-style:italic;">Byron</span> (London, 1972), he reveals his own uncertainty about what he has committed to his journal's pages: <br /><br />"People have wondered at the melancholy which runs through my writings. Others have wondered at my personal gaiety; but I recollect once, after an hour, in which I had been particularly and sincerely gay, and rather brilliant, in company, my wife replying to me when I said (upon her remarking my high spirits) `And why, Bell, I have been called and mis called Melancholy—you must have seen how falsely, frequently,' `No, B,' (she answered) `it is not so: at heart you are the most melancholy of mankind, and often when apparently gayest.' ¶ ...if I could explain at length the real causes which have contributed to increase this perhaps natural temperament of mine, this Melancholy which hath made me a bye word, nobody would wonder; but this is impossible without doing much mischief. I do not know what other men's lives have been, but I cannot conceive anything more strange than some of the earlier parts of mine. I have written my memoirs, but omitted all the really consequential and important parts, from deference to the dead, to the living, and to those who must be both. I sometimes think that I should have written the whole as a lesson, but it might have proved a lesson to be learnt rather than avoided; for passion is a whirlpool, which is not to be viewed nearly without attraction from its vortex. ¶ I must not go on with these reflections, or I shall be letting out some secret or other to paralyze posterity."<br /><br /> Passages of this sort can comfort us lesser scribblers of dull daily doings. But not for long. For very soon in what a real journal keeper like Byron bequeaths to us we see, even in some of his most casual places—the memorable bits he records from his own direct experience, not at second hand as most of us do—that we can keep going with our jottings only if we have the assurance of everlasting secrecy, that what we wrote will get mercifully lost, or that, although it may survive, nobody will subject it to a later reading. <br /> "Then why write any entries at all?" is a question most of us may want to leave to metaphysicians puzzling also about infinity or a kind of invaginated time space universe turning in upon itself. <br /> Here are just two anecdotes Byron shares with us: <br /><br />"Monk Lewis was observed one morning to have his eyes red, and his air sentimental: being asked why? he replied, `that when people said anything kind to him, it affected him deeply; and just now the Duchess has said something so kind to me that...' here tears began to flow again. `Never mind, Lewis,' said Colonel Armstrong to him, `never mind, don't cry. She could not mean it.'" [Jump, 66 67] <br /><br />"I forgot to mention that she [he is speaking of Margarita Cogni's ascendancy over him--and, specifically, about her occasional odd behavior during his coupling with her] was very devout, and would cross herself if she heard the prayer time strike—sometimes when that ceremony did not appear to be much in unison with what she was then about." [Jump, p. 61 62]<br /><br /> Well, we say, forget all that—while we're making our notes. (Making love, dreaming a future into being, denying our mortality, creating, all of them require us to trick ourselves into believing, in the midst of the most slavish sort of reflex acts, the happy lie that this has never happened before. Not like this.) So I will forget, and rashly record along with Byron's anecdotes three items that have diverted me today. (I will also remind myself not to feel too reverent about the sacred text of a journal like Byron's, to keep in mind his hammy kind of role playing that led him to demonstrate rare sensitivity by ostentatiously eating only biscuits and soda water in public but stuffing in potatoes and chops when he thought he was unobserved.) Two of them came to me from Nick Baldwin. <br /> The first is his account of an event that occurred on one of the many single lane roads that twist between thick hedges on the Devonshire moors: A young man speeding along braked to a stop behind a car driven by an elderly lady. As she moved toward him in reverse, he backed up. She moved further toward him, and he retreated more rapidly. The retreating continued for more than half a mile, the woman waving her arms in warning and flashing her lights as she pursued him at an accelerating rate. Irritated, the young man moved backward even faster. So did the woman. Finally furious, the young man at last found a slight widening in the road, permitting him to try squeezing past the other car. As he drew abreast of the woman, she wound down her window and shouted, "Pig! Pig!" The young man cranked his window down and retorted, "Cow!" as he floored the accelerator. Still looking backward in indignation as his car rushed back into the ruts ahead of the woman's car, he crashed into a pig that had apparently been delaying the car behind which the young man had for so long been trapped. <br /> The second is Nick's favorite headline that appeared in a small local circulation Devon newspaper: "Snail found in milk bottle." <br /> The last one I'll include in this day's entry concerns a hand lettered sign Patty saw on a high wooden gate on a property just off Warwick Road in the Neithrop section of Banbury: "Beware of dog or else." <br /> I particularly value this last threatening placard as capable of providing real insight into one fairly prominent component of the English character, at least as I see it: full of blustering hostility discouraging approaches, because there is actually nothing altogether dreadful inside to protect the private fastness from incursion. <br /> In <span style="font-style:italic;">Slouching Towards Bethlehem</span>, Joan Didion asked herself some of the same sort of questions about journal-keeping that I have been asking here. Looking back over some of her old notes, she admits to trouble in seeing why some of them found their way into her pages. She confesses that "our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable `I.'" Experiencing difficulty finding the relevance of many of her jottings, she finally sees their point: as access to time and self past: <br />  "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the pepole"—that’s the way it's spelled in my copy of <span style="font-style:italic;">Slouching Towards Bethlehem</span>, and I think the typo is an inspired one—“we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were..."<br /> Maybe the greatest comfort a journal keeper like me can find is in remembering Willa Cather’s comment about authors: “I think people often write...for just one person…” Who is listening to me? I am. I am an audience I can deal with.<br /> Joseph Brodsky, I found almost a dozen years after finishing the lines above, had other comments about the practice:<br /><br />”...once one realizes how much somebody's life is a hostage of one's own memory, one balks at the jaws of the past tense. Apart from anything else, it's too much like talking behind somebody's back, or like belonging to some virtuous, triumphant majority. One's heart should try to be more honest—if it can't be smarter—than one's grammar. Or else one should [p. 66] keep a journal whose entries, simply by definition, would keep that tense at bay." [p. 67] Joseph Brodsky, "Life and Letters: English Lessons from Stephen Spender," <span style="font-style:italic;">The New Yorker</span>, 1/8/96, pp. 58-67.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-40081793669719417952008-03-17T06:14:00.000-07:002008-07-10T06:21:21.686-07:0014 March 1985It is now 14:45 and the sun is shining brightly. (The self that reads the lines written by the self that writes them is dumbfounded by that embalming opening. But he—or it—can be confidently scornful only by forgetting what today has been like.) From 6:30 or so until 11:00 the sky was full of sun, and the air, though fresh, was clear. At 11:00 gray clouds massed together and formed one thick, low bank of cold mist from which small pellets of frost—not snow—fell in irregular and scattered showers. Then we had a burst of summer sun followed by rain. An hour later we had a proper snowstorm; for about thirty minutes, fat, wet flakes crashed against and slithered down the window panes. <br /> I watched them for a short time and thought back to my first freshman English class at Middlebury College, convened on a snowy day much like this one, thirty nine years and 3000 miles removed from this time and place. I remember only one sentence spoken by the instructor, a young man who looked to me then like a cross between Walter Abel and John Lund. He wore socks that did not match and was obviously recovering from some recent heavy drinking that led to his dismissal later in the day on which I met him for the first and only time. Perched unsteadily upon the edge of a table and leaning precariously to one side, he shared with us the riches of his wisdom—or the distresses of his hangover: "As you look out the window at those snowflakes, remember that no two flakes are the same, and none of them ever collide." <br /> I have often suspected that that professorial profundity gave me instantly the courage to contemplate a career as a member of a university faculty: if someone who greets a class with an opening like that one can get a job, why not me? The weight of unworthiness heaped upon me by three and a half years of life in the army as private first class began to lift. (Although I did not know it then, on that winter's shower morning, both my first professor and I were on the move.)<br /> My day today began a bit earlier than usual because I wakened at 6:00, about an hour and a half before the alarm was to ring. I got dressed, experimented casually with the new gym equipment in the basement and then took a walk around both lakes. At the big one I came closer than ever to seeing the munt jac deer. Robert told me last night that he was now seeing them in the morning in the bright red thicket of young dogwoods at the east end of the island. As I came abreast of it, I saw something russet colored flash past a small break in the branches shining in the morning sun. The glimpse was of the briefest sort, however, one of Mark Twain's "candid camera snapshots of frightened creatures in the grass." <br /> I walked on quietly, hoping for another look, but I saw nothing. When I got to the north side of the lake, much closer to the island, I stood motionless for about five minutes, in the hope that one of the deer—Robert said he saw three does and one buck—might appear. None of them did, but I continued my walk certain that tomorrow, or one day soon, I would catch sight of the whole tiny herd. I don't want to leave here having seen only a dead specimen. I want to see one full of life, stamping its small hooves at me, bowing its neck, bounding swiftly away, then stopping for one last backward glance, a mixture of inquisitiveness and blustering but unconvincing defiance, before it springs out of sight. <br /> At the place where I usually end my walk, I cut across the lawn below the gardens to revisit the badger setts east of the sheep pasture that Mr. Fox rents from the College. The side trip was uneventful, but during it I recalled two grim little tales I came upon recently. The first came from Robert, during our hike together on Saturday. <br /> When we got to the top of Taylor's Pool, he broke his silence and said, as much to himself as to me, "Right there," pointing to a distant spot, "is where that young chap from the village fell into the well. He came through the grounds one foin morning, spoke to my dad, and was never again seen alive. He was found later, head down in the old well. We'd hunted a week for him, all through the woods and even in the lakes. The police set up their base in the Abbey for days. They dragged the lakes and even used doivers. And then soombody found him. I've always worried that he may not have perished outright. Terrible thought, him wedged head down that way all that terrible time." <br /> Robert's genre tragedy sent me looking through Kilvert for a passage recounting a similar sort of anonymous rural catastrophe. I found it among his early entries: <br /><br />"Tuesday, 8 March [1870]. Yesterday there was an inquest at the Blue Boar, Hay, on the body of the barmaid of the Blue Boar who a day or two ago went out at night on an hour's break, but went up the Wye to Glasbury and threw herself into the river. She was taken out at Llan Hennw. She was enceinte. Met the Morrell children returning from a walk with the first white violets and primroses." <br /> <br /> When I came to that last sentence about the Morrell children, I felt, on my second reading, exactly what I had felt on my first: a strange astonishment, a mixture of joy and enchanted disbelief. No highly sophisticated, craft conscious writer could ever have those first three sentences followed by the fourth. Kilvert's doing it is proof of a marvelous simplicity of authorial mind that makes Pepys' or Boswell's most revealing confessions seem subtly calculating. No matter how many times I return to that March 8 entry, therefore, I will feel a warm affection for Kilvert, but also an amusing necessity to make tolerant allowance for his ingenuousness. I will, in other words, feel both condescending toward him and humbly aware of his ability to fashion lines of unforgettable power by accident. <br /> Someone I discussed art with years ago told me that he believed that all great art is an accident. I agreed with him, on the condition that he would agree with me that the miraculous accident befalls only those blessed few who are accident prone. Most of us are too prudential to run the risk of divine calamity.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-21950977795803992542008-03-16T14:00:00.000-07:002008-05-19T17:05:03.303-07:0025 April 1985I start these jottings by recording an item that I saw just a few minutes ago in a recent issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Times</span>:<br /><br />"A man who brought terror to women in his home town was revealed yesterday as Keith Everitt, a security guard. Over eight months he carried out a number of attacks near his former home in Bushey, Hertfordshire. Everitt would creep behind unsuspecting women and teenage girls, hold them and then shampoo their hair. Watford magistrates were told he admitted deriving sexual pleasure from what he had done." <br /><br /> If any woman ever happens to see these lines, they may provoke for her an odd set of musings the next time she uses her Prell. I hope, however, that she—and anyone else who chances upon them—will give some little thought, at least, to the way they symbolize rather well a conspicuous feature of life in the Abbey. The item's strange blend of reflective pastoral serenity and sudden arresting surprise—girls and women abruptly set upon by a jack-in-the-box assailant springing out of a thicket or a copse—seems to typify much of what is the singular Wroxton experience: a combination of tranquil sanctuary and confrontation with the shock of discovery. I say this as I look back at some of the items on my calendar for the last few days. <br /> On Friday, I rode to Oxford with our art tutor, Philip Inwood. In addition to enjoying a good walk around the colleges on one of the best mornings of the year, I browsed in Blackwell's and visited the Ashmolean, where I took in the Greek and Japanese exhibits and saw two special shows, one an assembly of British drawings from 1945 to the present, the other a collection of Turner watercolors. <br /> Detouring on our way back to Wroxton, Philip gave me a short guided tour of some of the most attractive and less well known small villages like Wooton and Great Tew, the latter owned almost entirely by one landlord and boasting a marvelous pub, "The Falkland Arms." It is managed by a husband and wife who make five or six different fruit wines on the premises. (Strawberry and apple, were listed for the day we stopped by.) Every building that I saw in Great Tew was constructed of Hornton stone that had the warm look of lightly browned toast, and many of the houses were splashed with the bright color of espaliered forsythia or japonica. <br /> The roads leading to little places like Wooton and Great Tew are single track lanes squeezed on either edge by the sides of very old, thatched, stone cottages and the mortarless rocks of the garden walls that mark the boundary of virtually every property. In one or two places, hedges of privet and blackthorn and holly made leafy tunnels of the lanes. <br /> At one point Philip and I got out of his VW Golf and climbed up on a low wall to get a better view of the rolling countryside of irregular patches of woodland, farms, and meadows with meandering streams and cows and ewes nursing this spring's lambs and calves. The stillness was broken only occasionally by the bleat of a lamb, the distant and pleasantly melancholy crooning of a wood pigeon, and small, indeterminate sounds of domestic doings in some far-off cottage. Neither Philip nor I spoke for several minutes. We just let our eyes slowly rove over the "peaceable kingdom" or Constable scene. When we finally looked back at one another, each of us knew, without saying so, that both of us would long remember what we had seen, standing there on the wall at the edge of the lane. <br /> On Sunday Eithne Henson, who teaches two novel courses here, took Patty and me to Canon's Ashby, a recently restored medieval house once owned by relatives of John Dryden. Two or three of the walls in its rooms are, in effect, marvelous old murals, although they were probably not seen as such by the original owners. The "Spenser Room," so called because, reportedly, Edmund Spenser frequently stayed in it as a guest, was discovered to have, under the crumbling walls later removed by the restorers, mistily faded paintings of <span style="font-style:italic;">Faery Queene</span> scenes and large plaster rectangles decorated with abstract symbols in once bold reds now softened to terra cotta. <br /> Monday, all of us went to Stratford for our second visit in two weeks to the R.S.C. theater, where we had earlier seen <span style="font-style:italic;">The Merry Wives of Windsor</span> and where, this time, <span style="font-style:italic;">As You Like It</span> was the offering. As quirky as Wives in some people's view—both productions are staged in modern, or at least, 20th century dress—its action, and theme as well, depended heavily upon a vast white drapery that billowed over the set as a Forest of Arden snowfall and rose to become all sorts of things like bridal canopies and great snow covered trees. The forestage was given over to a real running brook in which young lovers danced (like Tommy Tune and Twiggy) and into which country bumpkins clumsily tumbled. <br /> Yesterday, I went with Nicholas Baldwin's British Politics class to Parliament. We left Wroxton at 7.30, got to Westminster Palace at l0.20, having been stalled in Lincoln-Tunnel-like gridlock, and spent 2 hours being guided around both Lords and Commons. We also heard a talk by Lord Tordoff, chief Liberal whip of the House of Lords, who had generously granted Nicholas's request that he meet with the Wroxtonians. During the rest of the day (which ran straight through till our 7.30 bus boarding at Trafalgar Square with only twenty-five minutes for lunch,) we sat in on debates in both houses, listened to a talk by Lord Elwyn Jones, a Labor life peer and former Lord Chancellor as well as former Attorney General; watched the Speaker's Procession; and heard talks (in Parliament-building conference rooms) by six different MPs and one secretary to an MP. <br /> The MPs, by the way, were an accurately representative group. Two of them were Liberal, two Conservative, one Labour, and one SDP. They came from districts as widely separated as Truro in Cornwall and Great Grimsby in the northeast. <br /> Tonight I drive a minibus load of modern drama students to Banbury for a performance of <span style="font-style:italic;">Look Back in Anger</span>, and tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. I start out with the students for a weekend trip to North Wales. We are to visit Caernarvon Castle, climb Mt. Snowdon, and go on a guided tour of a slate quarry. We will start the return trip to the Abbey about noon on Sunday. <br /> We have also had some little excitement and a few busy times on the Abbey's grounds over the past week or so. On Saturday, one of the six swans assigned to us by the "Swan Rescue Association" died. I saw it—it was the cob, the oldest and largest of the parents of four one year old cygnets—thrashing about spasmodically on the water at about 6:00 p.m. By the time I had run up to the village and returned with Robert Denton, the Abbey gardener, the bird was dead, floating with its wings spread on the lake surface and its head and neck hanging like a thick feathery length of rope under the water. Robert and I pulled the bird's body to shore with a grappling hook, fighting off the female, who spread her wings protectively over her dead mate, trumpeted loudly, and tried to frighten us away with thrusts of her bill and noisy, threatening flappings. I thought, sadly, of the old folklore about the pairing of young swans, their gliding together to some thicket-ringed edge of water, touching their heads together—their curved necks forming the shape of a heart, and thus mating for life. <br /> When we carried the sodden weight of the dead male away, the pen began a series of mournful cries that lasted through the night. I closed my bedroom window early, but the sadness drifted in, nevertheless, incongruously mixed, after eleven or so, with the thump and wail of a disco party in honor of newlyweds in the village. <br /> Twice, Robert has had the police in to try to catch a Drayton village teenager who comes into our woods with a fowling piece and begins blasting away at squirrels, rabbits, ducks and swans. At first Robert and I therefore thought that the swan had been shot. A postmortem proved us wrong. He had died of old age or disease, perhaps lead poisoning from dredging in the muddy lake bottom for roots and ingesting discarded fish-line weights or bird-shot pellets. Both are common causes of waterfowl death in England now.<br /> Almost nothing else worthy of comment here, at the moment, is in any way troublesome, but even the grounds can remind you of Wroxton's thought-provoking mix of rustic calm and that which can abruptly astonish. The lawn is greening luxuriantly as spring advances, buds are swelling on tree branches and rose canes, and numbers of the flowers are in bloom. Aconites, primroses, daffodils and jonquils are everywhere in the wooded areas, especially near the ice house on the rise by Lime Walk. Anemone, chinodoxia, and half a dozen other flowers that I know only by sight are brightening the knot garden and the herbaceous borders. <br /> Close to the Folly in the East Garden, however, several shafts of stinkhorn thrust almost lewdly out of the low weeds like ithyphallic totems left over from some Bacchic festival procession. Birds on the Great Pond seem to be responding to this fungus's gamic dehiscence. At least two pairs of mallards are nesting on its banks, and a tufted grebe that everyone concluded last year had been widowed for life has found a mate this spring and is elaborately busy following the rules of a highly stylized and compulsively ardent courtship ritual. <br /> Beyond that, the students are becoming a much more cohesive and thoroughly likable group. I've begun to feel very good about having been able to get to know them. The FDU contingent has been a real pleasure to work with, though their almost aggressive informality seems to perplex one or two of the more traditional English members of the staff.<br /> C. S., for one, calls the tutors "Doll" and gets the attention of her roommate Ellen by whistling through her teeth, piercingly. The other night, she also irritated the chef here by sneaking behind the cafeteria service counter, stealing a second after dinner cream puff, and running out of the dining room. Slim, athletic, and tom-boyish, she easily outdistanced both the chef's cries of protest and the pursuit of a waiter, ordered by the chef to retrieve the cream puff, set aside as dessert for a late-dining staff member. I asked her, an hour or two afterward, to try to set things right by talking to the chef about the incident. She quickly and amiably agreed: "Ok., Babe. No problem. What's the big deal about a cream puff? To tell you the truth, it wasn't worth stealing, anyway."<br /> Her own and her FDU classmates' work compares most favorably with that of representatives of the 12 other colleges from which this term's students have come. And the best grade in the course for which I administered the final, a one point offering called "Britain in the 20th Century," a course that ends several weeks before the others, was earned by a Madison woman, Jill Vacula. <br /> The bells in All Saints tower, not far from my bedroom window, are now tolling, the shouts of the frisbee players on the front lawn are dying down, and someone is pounding on the dinner gong in the Great Hall. It's time to end this entry.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-35489193639969123502008-03-16T11:57:00.000-07:002008-07-15T12:04:45.506-07:0026 April 19858:13 p.m. at the Plas Bowman in Caernarfon. Caernarfon, I have been told today, means "castle on the river" in Cymric. The Plas Bowman is a small, clean hotel on High Street, about a block away from the river. High Street is quite narrow, about two car widths from side to side. The gray stone house opposite the hotel is therefore very close to my bedroom window. Looking through the window, I can see the wallflowers clumped atop the roof slates. One of them is 8 or 10 inches across and at least 6 inches high. The largest plants, apparently rooted in the warped and tilted slates, are thick with bright, butter‑yellow bloom. At the Castle, from which I have just returned, I saw dozens of similar wallflowers sprouting from the towers and battlements. One of them, I discovered when I climbed to the top of one of the highest towers, grows in the crenelations more than a hundred feet above the ground. How they survive—drawing sustenance from stone—seems a mystery, to me, at least.<br /> Some of the images I will recall as reminders of Caernarfon's character (beyond those that drew me and others as visitors) are the large polished stone this hotel uses as a doorstop in the lounge and a sizable bale of hay sticking out of the trunk of a guest's car parked in front of the Royal Hotel, where I had dinner.<br /> The hotel, by the way, is on the corner of Stryd y Fawr (High St.) and Stryd y Eglwys (Church St.). My room in it is small, about 7 feet wide by 10 feet long. The short walls are dominated, respectively, by a large, glossily enameled white entry door and an equally large, deeply recessed window well finished in rather crude but freshly painted panels. A thin white curtain scrims its lower half and a traverse drapery of dark beige hangs from a home‑made valance above it. Beneath a chipped and dented chair rail, again white enameled, is a cream plaster wainscot. The walls are covered with cream‑colored paper with pink wisteria flowers, roughly the size of thumbnails, that hang from dark tan vines bearing occasional green leaves a fifth the size of the clusters of flowers. The blossoms, vines, and leaves form an irregularly triangular pattern. The furnishings—a small mirrored dresser with groaningly balky drawers, a wooden twin bed stained a dark mahogany, a white wooden bedside table 2 feet high, a red gooseneck lamp, and a chair—have the look of articles on display in a second‑hand store. The closet is merely two wooden panels about 4 feet long that form a side and top built into the corner to the right side of the door. Although the side panel is painstakingly cut to fit over the chair rail snugly, it bellies away from the wall sharply toward the top piece, leaving a noticeable gap. A sliding curtain covers the front.<br /> The room is next to a toilet and bath. The toilet is regally positioned on a platform a foot higher than the floor level. At the end of the tub is a closet about six feet high. Behind its right door is an insulation‑wrapped boiler, into which and out of which a vast number of sharply elbowed pipes project. The other half is given over to the storage of bath mats. Next to the closet four bath towels hang on a heated rack. They are the only bath towels I have seen here. (I used middle one, left side, after my bath, having convinced myself that it was the one nobody else had used. The toilet in the adjoining room has no closet seat lid. Or, rather, the closet seat lid for it lies on the floor next to the water closet. Under the p.v.c. pipe running from the reservoir to the bowl, a plastic box catches the drippings from what seems to be a permanent leak. The hinges on my bedroom door squeak twitteringly whenever I enter or leave the room, a fact I was disturbingly aware of when, at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., I tried to make a trip to the john without announcing my purposes to suddenly awakened guests in rooms near mine.<br /> When I bathed, I lathered up with a thin, well‑used bar of soap with an incontestable verification of its claim to earlier service: a dark, crisp pubic hair, shaped convincingly like a capital‑letter U, embedded in the cake's slightly gummy surface. Homey touches of this sort, I concluded as I sat down at breakfast with the owner full of friendliness and hospitable good cheer, are the other side of the coin that purchases so much good will for Britain’s b and b’s. He happily recounted tales of the sexual exploits of Lloyd George as proof of Welsh vigor and demonstrated further provincial pride in reminding me, eyes contentedly closed and head nodding in neighborly approbation, that when Princess Margaret visited her husband's Caernarfon‑area family after her wedding, she was greeted by the locals simply as "Mrs. Armstrong‑Jones."Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-85306293037965547562008-03-16T08:47:00.000-07:002008-06-03T08:53:14.825-07:0028 April 1985It is 5:55 a. m as I start this Sunday morning entry—rather shakily. (I feel nauseated and stricken with deja vu at the same time. Here I am at almost the end of my spring Wroxton tour of duty in something of the same sort of shape in which I began my days here in January: sick and using my journal as an invalid's therapy.) <br /> I have been awake most of the night listening to my innards imitate the noises of wounded beasts, mating owls, and startled rooks. Every fold in my gut trembling beneath my distended abdomen squirms in protest against the Indian dinner I had last night with two students, Betsy Kase and Karla Rosenfeld. (In pleased mockery of my earnest but inept volleyball playing with them and their classmates, they have begun to call me "Spike." At the moment, the term denotes something lodged in the spastic folds of my bowel.) <br /> As I start writing, I'm looking back with a kind of horrified amusement upon the unconsciously metaphorical threat residing in the question one of them asked me as she held an extra portion of the entree—“Spiced Biryani," I think it was called—on a ladle above my plate: "Have some more, Spike?" It was around 2:00 a. m that I first recognized the ominous ambiguity of the nickname in the dinner hour context.<br /> I don't feel especially bad or really tired—having just returned from a purgative trip to the bathroom, but I have another ground for grievance against the Plas Bowman: it has no regard for a sick guest's desire for inconspicuousness while creeping from bedroom to bath and back between midnight and morning. The squeaky door hinges, upon which I commented in an earlier entry, actually shrieked when I tried to ease my way out of my chamber and into the hall, and then back again. And the toilet thundered and burbled endlessly after I flushed it.<br /> I will therefore have some breakfast and join the students' tour of Portmeirion and Llechwedd Slate Caverns. If I felt less reason to worry about pinching back nausea with tightened lips, I might try to achieve a Welsh pronunciation of that last place name in keeping with my new Welsh dictionary's instructions for articulating the doubled l sound: "It is best pronounced by placing the tip of the tongue against the roof of the mouth near the front teeth as if you were going to pronounce l but instead of doing so, blow hard.” <br /> After having climbed Mt. Snowdon yesterday, I don't want to miss the chance to see as much more of Wales as possible. Like Vermont and much of Appalachia, it is a poor country. That makes some kinds of purchases cheap—I got a shepherd's pie lunch and coffee for £1.35, and three drinks I bought for myself and two students in an admittedly shabby discotheque cost £1.40—and the countryside attractive: poor people haven't the capital to develop and "improve" their environment the way "rich Americans," for instance, can. <br /> From Snowdon we had spectacular views of several villages, of high valleys sloping to deeper ones, of talus scattering slate cliffs shining in the sun, of a tarn below a cirque in the upper slope of Snowdon, of ridge after ridge covered only with short grasses and lichen, some of it bright chartreuse splashes on dark gray boulders. We could also see what Housman called (in "Bredon Hill" I found out when we got back to the Abbey and I could check) "the coloured counties." And everywhere we saw sheep. They were as numerous on the highest ledges as they were in the roads, footpaths, and gardens in Llanbergis at Snowdon's foot. Our coach trip from Wroxton, which began at 8:30 a.m. and ended at Caernarfon at 1:30 p.m., was slowed, in fact stopped dead, twice by flocks of free ranging sheep in the middle of the road from Llangallen to Caernarfon. <br /> For a number of reasons, I stopped just below the highest peak of the mountain, after having climbed upward for approximately two and a half hours. I had turned an ankle and felt discomfort whenever my foot slipped on the shaly debris of the trail. I had also begun to feel a slight pain in my chest and a little dizziness, especially when I looked over the edge of the trail, not much more than six feet wide in some of the higher stretches. Furthermore, David Lalin, beginning to suffer an attack of acrophobia, was showing signs of mild panic. I told him I was turning back and that he could make the descent with me. He jumped at the chance, and both he and I were happy with our decision soon after we started downward. <br /> While we were still many hundreds of feet above the "Halfway House," at a point roughly 1850 feet above sea level, we encountered a rain and hail storm, whipped into our faces by a strong gale. Within two or three minutes our clothes were soaked and our cheeks burned. The storm ended quickly, however, and, standing in the sudden sunlight, we looked back upward and saw the summit of Snowdon en¬veloped in the dark, thick gray cloud through which we had passed. Although I was concerned about the party of 7 that we had left, they made the top safely and joined the rest of us in a cafe in Llanbergis well before the 4:30 deadline set for our departure in the coach. We had Welsh rarebit and dry draught cider and then pretended to shop in the Arts and Crafts Center, the only place we found on or near Snowdon that had a public loo. <br /> We got back to Caernarfon shortly after 5:00. I took a bath, read, had a gin and tonic (sans ice, of course) in my room, and then headed—like a lamb trotting toward the butcher—for the Gandhi Tandoori Restaurant. (If it were a Mexican establishment, the proper name for it would probably be “Fuego en las Tripas,” which, a Spanish-speaking friend has told me, means “fire in the bowels.”) May its chef live a thousand years, in the circle Dante provided for the likes of the Borgias, and purgatorially dine only upon dishes of his own corrupt and degenerate devising.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-49019154724022103902008-03-15T14:12:00.000-07:002008-05-19T14:23:23.557-07:008 May 1985The time that I might have devoted to my journal today was used, instead, to write this letter to a stateside friend: <br /> 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">The Book of Heroic Failures.</span> 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English</span>. 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." <br /> 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." <br /> 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.) <br /> 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. <br /> 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.<br /> 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. <br /> Although they were public houses rather than true inns, the places we visited brought to my mind a passage in Martha Grimes's <span style="font-style:italic;">The Man With a Load of Mischief</span>, dated 1981: <br /><br />"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] <br /> <br /> 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. <br /> 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. <br /> 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.) <br /> 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 <span style="font-style:italic;">Lord of the Flies </span>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." <br /> 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.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-66963566091226379222008-03-14T10:01:00.000-07:002008-05-22T10:07:24.249-07:0019 May 1985This was a sad day. All of the students left for home. Patty and I felt melancholy watching the last of them go off down the long lane to the village, most of them in a hired coach, but others in groups of two or three in cars belonging to family or friends. Following a policy that has governed many of my days over here this time, I decided to write my way out of the gloominess in which I was wrapped as I walked through the Abbey's suddenly empty rooms and looked over its deserted swards and paths. I sat on the terrace and composed this note to the students:<br /> <br /> A FAREWELL MEMORANDUM<br /><br /> Although I will not post this memorandum until after I return to the States on June 1, I am writing it at the Abbey. As I write, Patty and I are sitting on one of the benches on the East Terrace, near the Library windows. It is just after 4:00 p.m., about six hours after the largest group of you left by coach and minibus for London and the airports. <br /> The late afternoon air is bright, warm, and still and full of the calls of woodpigeons, the bleat of sheep, and the final echoes of the bells in the tower of All Saints Church. The sounds seem almost mournful, right now, on this day of leavetakings, and a mood of sentimental melancholy grips those of us who watched you leave. Your departure has convinced some of us staying on here that the Abbey is, indeed, full of ghosts, for we see and hear your spirits still walking the halls of this great old house. <br /> Out of such a mood, I send these lines to thank all of you for your help and friendship during this past term. Life at Wroxton is, sometimes, a social as well as an educational challenge, and I am grateful to you for measuring up so well to both kinds of tests. Patty and I will long remember you with affection and respect. We hope that we can see you again one day back home. Whether we do or not, we wish you well and ask you to call upon us if you think that we can help you. <br /> <br />Roughly two hours after I finished the memo, Patty and I decided to go up to the Wroxton House Hotel for dinner. Blue as we felt when we arrived, we were soon given other things to think about. We sat next to an attractive young English couple and across from a middle aged English husband and wife in a cozy room. Typically for English restaurants, the conversation was quiet, as were the four English diners' use of the knives and forks: every now and then you could hear a stray word and a barely audible click of a utensil. So soft spoken were our neighbors that the splash and gurgle of a waiter refilling a wine glass was a conspicuous sort of clatter. <br /> Suddenly, a party of 15 Americans entered from the bar and took their places at the long banquet table on the other side of our corner table. Most of them carried drinks, and most of them were laughing loudly and speaking to each other in semi shouts. For five minutes or more they argued with one another about the ingredients of a "Harvey Wallbanger." "What's a Harry Wallbanger?" one of them finally asked. "Harvey, not Harry," another corrected. "It's a drink with Gallianos." The two nearest us dropped out of the larger group discussion to call the attention of a third to a bull's eye mirror on the wall. "We had a bull's eye mirror once," the man said. "No we didn't; we thought about getting one," put in the woman beside him in the tones of a wife bored and offended by her husband's consistent mistakes. "What kind of Cha bliss are we havin' with our dinner?" one of the men at the far end of the table asked the headwaiter pouring white or red wine. "Is it dry or sweet?" "Dry, of course, sir," the headwaiter replied, gracefully concealing his astonishment at the question. "OK, I'll have some of the white," the diner answered. <br /> A man two or three seats closer to us told the white wine drinker something about red or white wine—I couldn't tell which because a group between him and me exploded into laughter over a remark by some member of their party about some kind of wine being "bad for anyone with a kidney condition." The young English couple exchanged quick glances and slowly rose and left the room, as did the older pair soon thereafter. I thought suddenly of the way that the pair of cardinals that visit our garden back home darts away whenever a flock of starlings or cowbirds flies in, bickering and chattering. <br /> When we got back to the Abbey it was nearly all dark inside. Piano music, however, eerily filled the Great Hall, illuminated only by the pale gray light of the dying day. Patty and I sat down quietly in the deep shadows, listening. We were not sure who was playing, since the keyboard was hidden from us in the bay below the oriel window. We decided—perhaps insisted, given the stories we had heard about the Abbey's disembodied residents—that it must be Philip Inwood, whose bicycle we had seen parked outside the rear courtyard door through which we had entered the building. <br /> We sat almost motionlessly for twenty or more minutes, watching the room darken. The suits of armor on either side of the fireplace steadily lost the lustrous pewter glow they had given off when we first took our seats. Gradually, they became only lighter shadows in the thickening gloom. The music swelled and quickened. The mercury vapor lights on the front porch stair wall flared on, casting onto the ceiling coffers and wall above the fireplace the heavy black outlines of the stained glass armorial bearings in the oriel window. As the daylight disappeared, the black outlines grew increasingly hard edged, sharply defined against the rosy gold light of the porch lamps.<br /> The experience was an extraordinary one. We broke into applause when the music stopped, causing the pianist—it was Philip—to rise in understandable fright and tell us that we had given him a real start. We told him that his music had given us a tremor or two, also, until we succeeded in convincing ourselves that he—that someone—was actually at the piano. <br /> We went up to our bedroom and to bed, considerably lighter in spirit than we had been for several hours. Before I dropped off to sleep, however, I lay quite still, listening to the slow, lower-register kleine nacht music of the Abbey itself: its drawn-out, wood-sounding shudders, its arhythmic clicks and creaks, and its stony sighs. Then I went to sleep, not unwillingly, but somewhat sadly, groggily aware that my days and nights in the great old house were nearing their end.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3378441745503445050.post-25872618244725908722008-03-13T16:26:00.000-07:002008-07-07T16:34:31.682-07:0029 July 1985Today, I received a letter from Miss Rina Milsom, of the "Swan Rescue Service," Shotesham, St. Mary, Norwich, Norfolk, NR15 1XX. Miss Milsom is concerned for the safety of our five trumpeter swans, having heard that we allowed several hundred Girl Guides to visit the grounds—and get very close to the swans—just a few days ago, and having learned, also that one of our cygnets has disappeared. She wants us to fence the property and to limit access so that the swans will not be disturbed. If we do not comply, she warns that the Service may have to take the swans away from us. I wrote her this letter: <br /><br /> “Ms. Geraldine Raine has acquainted me with the contents of your letter of 18 July 1985, for which I thank you on behalf of the College. Three of the subjects with which your letter is concerned deserve direct and prompt response. <br /> First, the College cannot consider a fencing project that would be absolutely intruder proof. Our grounds cover 57 acres. Closing the perimeter gaps would be expensive—I would estimate the cost as in excess of £4000—and would require a barrier that would be conspicuously at odds with a plan we are following to restore the Abbey's 18th-century gardens. (The grounds are, of course, regularly and vigilantly patrolled.)<br /> Second, we have had no further news of the missing cygnet. Our groundsman has made extensive enquiries and has carefully searched all the waterways in the area, but he has found no trace of the lost bird. We suspect, however, that it left of its own accord. We have found no evidence of any attack upon it. We will, of course, keep on the watch for our stray, but we have no great hopes that we will find it. <br /> Third, we cannot completely close our grounds to visitors. When we sought grants for some of our considerable restoration projects, we agreed to admit visitors past prescribed times. Though the times of visitation are limited and although visitors are supervised and required to abide by clearly defined regulations, a limited number of people are rather often guests on our grounds. We have not encountered and do not expect to encounter any real difficulty in our efforts to have the visitors and the swans respect each other. <br /> Representatives of your service will always be welcomed as observers of the swans' circumstances and conditions here at the Abbey. If, for any reason at all, any of your observers think that the College cannot provide the birds with the sort of habitat they need, we will, regretfully, agree that the Service should seek a home for them elsewhere. <br /> Until we receive such unhappy news from you, however, we will continue to do our very best to ensure the swans' health, safety, and contentment. We have become devoted to them and would sharply miss them were they to leave us.”<br /> My duty reminder list for today read like this: Check with the student with the infected foot to see whether or not she needs a visit to the National Health Service. Write to J. Neil Waddell, School House, Bishop's Stortford College, Maze Green Road, Bishop's Stortford, Herts., to ask about the catalogue he is preparing of the C.S. Lewis library. Write—or at least start writing—my recommendations to President Donaldson . Write a press release on Nick's appointment as Acting Director. Make sure that the letter prepared on 7/27 is retyped with all the earlier typos removed. Ask Geraldine about deposits on Newcastle Brown Ale bottles that MBA students take out of the Buttery. Write Tony Baldry, MP for the Banbury district, thanking him for meeting yesterday about the planned Wroxton Advisory Committee made up of local citizens. Write David Luker concerning his complaint about John Seagrave's decision regarding Luker's stipend. Check with Marian Cowie about honoraria for Eithne, Paul, Brian Little, and Tara Heinemann for their work in the MBA program.<br /><br />POSTSCRIPT (ADDED LATER) <br />In the process of clearing out my files and packing up to leave, I discovered a note from a graduate student who assured me that she would send me the text of a "Sound and Light" script about the Abbey—a project that I had suggested to her. Dated "December 10," it reached me several months after I left the Abbey, probably for the last time. Its historical references to the Abbey included this passage about the first layman to own it: "In 1536 Sir Thomas Pope, who was Treasurer of the Court of Augmentations, the ministry responsible for the newly dissolved monasteries and Henry VIII's close friend, purchased the lease to the 3,000 acres of Wroxton manor and land. ...he endowed the lands to his younger brother John with the stipulation that John and his descendants hold the lease in perpetuity. Thus, it was Trinity College who collected the income from the property. After three marriages and repeated attempts, Sir Thomas died childless in 1554."<br /> The incongruous mix of an official, historical tone and the hiccup of solecism in the text set me to reflecting again, with a mixture of mild melancholy and amusement of my own compounding, upon the range of disparities Wroxton has always set before me. My last two or three days there in June of 1985 were a perfect example of them. <br /> Patty and I stayed on after everyone else left except Ron Ward, and he stayed for only one day and night. For at least two days and nights, therefore, we were the sole occupants of the big old house. Suddenly emptied of the staff and students who had made up the community in which we had lived for several weeks, the building seemed dispiritingly chilled and cheerless. It was, furthermore, a far from hospitable place to be. The heat and hot water had been turned off during the nights as part of the shut-down operation. Consequently, whenever we wanted to bathe, we had to get in the tub before 8.00 p. m. or sometime after 8.00 a. m.<br /> Hot water for morning coffee required a trip from our Room #2 in the west end of the first floor—American translation, "second floor"—down to the ground floor, eastward to the basement, and through the old cloister corridor from the east end of the basement to the far west end of the oldest underpinnings of the Abbey. In a small, jerry-built kitchen there, we could make use of a two-burner electric stove on which we could heat a saucepan of water, which we would then carry up to our room. <br /> While these circumstances made staying on somewhat grim, they also allowed us the pleasure of having everything virtually to ourselves, and we were able to pretend total and exclusive ownership to the great old building and its grounds, through which we walked in solitude and wonder, only occasionally seeing Robert or one of his parents tending to the beds or clearing brush. <br /> On our very last morning, as we took our final walk past the kitchen by the north end of the Carriage House, Peter, the chef, came hurrying out the door. He was in the midst of a last clean-up of the cafeteria before vacation. He reached out to shake my hand and, remembering his wet hands, wiped his palms on his apron with murmurs of apology. As we smiled at each other in our goodbye handclasp, he said, "Goodbye, sir. It's been a real pleasure to have you in charge here. I think I speak for all the staff in saying that."<br /> His farewell, delivered with great care and a deference that contended with a controlled friendliness bent upon avoiding familiarity, was touchingly simple and sincere. It was also accompanied with an obvious, though far from fully successful, effort at casualness. I found it honestly moving. I thanked Peter huskily through a small lump in my throat and, as I told him how grateful to him and his fellow workers I was for their friendship and help, I looked off toward Lady Lake, partly to break off eye contact. <br /> Over the hounds' cemetery and the path leading to the water a light fog scrimmed the tree trunks and bushes, giving the look of an Oriental landscape to the scene. I felt a sudden urge to leave, to make the departing as short as I could, to put the Abbey behind me. Shortly thereafter, that's exactly what Patty and I did, for we got in our rented car, which we were returning to an agency in Banbury, and began our trip homeward, by train from Banbury to London and then to Southampton and by boat from there to New York. <br /> As I drove up the long driveway to the village, however, I kept an eye on the rearview mirror, watching the Abbey grow smaller and smaller behind us—and larger and larger in memory.Historic Buildinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01907710679922746138noreply@blogger.com0