A 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Saturday, March 22, 2008
10 March 1978
Today 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
11 March 1978
SATURDAY
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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."
Friday, March 21, 2008
28 January 1985
NOTE: Somehow, the chronology seems off in a couple of the entries along here. That is probably the result of my having written two or three entries at one time, after the day on which they are dated. This one, in one or two places, appears to be unaware of a preceding entry.
The morning did not begin well. My travel alarm, set for about 7:40, rang at 7:10, cheating me of a half hour's sleep. The setting hand and the dial markings are, I am discovering after 2 or 3 days of using them, not very compatibly related. I wanted to waken no earlier than a little before 8:00 because I suspected last night, rightly, events proved, that I would have trouble sleeping. I did, nodding off over an Edmund Crispin mystery, my glasses and bed light on, at some time after midnight but waking again at 4:00. Getting back to sleep took at least 2 hours.
I took much more time than I needed to wash, shave, and dress so that I would not catch Colin, the young cook, unawares. The Commons and kitchen in the Carriage Barn were both dark and, except for me, empty when I entered a little after 8:00. Back in the Abbey, Mrs. Popham told me that she would ring Colin on the phone, but I asked her not to, saying that I would walk up to the Wroxton Hotel for breakfast, just as I had for dinner last night. "But you'll get all wet in this rain," she protested, and, when I insisted on going, apologized profusely. "We'll be better organized tomorrow," she promised.
Once I reached the Hotel, things quickly began to improve, though the light but chilly rain continued. The Hotel's dining rooms and bar are snug and attractive, with much red (on chairs and in carpeting) gleamingly polished brasses, white or beige plaster walls, a number of working fireplaces, and a profusion of dark beams in the low, irregular ceilings. It is, I think, 17th century, and half of it, or perhaps more than half of it, is roofed with a thick mat of thatch.
Through the bay window across from my table I could see the Horton stone wall along the narrow but very busy main road from Stratford to Banbury, and, beyond it, a cow pasture between the small stone Catholic chapel, also thatch roofed, and a cluster of houses very much like it except for lacking its spire. The mossy stones of the wall and the rise of green pasture in the distance, comforting and prominent symbols of the gently stubborn survival of this area's old ways and faces and forms, filled the bay window reassuringly after each temporary blotting out by a trundling lorry or car whipping by. A hint of sun low in the east brightened the fog bank sky.
Having reached the hotel low in spirits, I began to feel smugly self satisfied. The warm sensation lasted little more than a second or two. Almost as soon as I began to congratulate myself on my circumstances, ringed as I was with porridge, poached eggs, orange juice, toast, honey and coffee, the only other person in the room, a man of thirty or so, glanced at me furtively and coolly rose immediately and hurried out. Although four other hotel guests soon sat down a few tables away, dawdling over a second cup of coffee no longer appealed to me somehow.
I asked for my check—oops! wrong word—and walked round to the other end of the Hotel to say goodbye to the Sammartinos. They were expecting a Daimler limo that was to transport them to a Grosvenor House suite, usually rented at about £300 per day they told me, as the guests of Lord Forte. I was to have helped them entertain him at the Abbey if I hadn't had food poisoning, and he hadn't had the flu.
Peter and Sally gave me a short guided tour of their suite, by which, obviously, they were happily surprised. They had a right to be pleased with it. A first floor unit about thirty five—perhaps forty or more—feet long, it has an entry hall and a large sparklingly modern bathroom predominantly deep maroon and gray. These precede a long, low ceilinged room divided into sleeping area and sitting room with fireplace, an arrangement of low table and chairs, and a television set. A small casement window with leaded panes gives any TV watchers who turn their eyes slightly leftward of the screen a view of the same chapel and pasture I had seen from the dining room.
I stayed till about 9:45, talking about subjects that gave me little real pleasure—Bob Donaldson's presidential policies, Peter's oft forwarded plan (attractive to no one I know except him) to have Lord Forte use the Abbey as a hotel one half of the year and FDU run courses there the other half, Peter's conviction that the University is no longer as creative or efficient as it was in his day. That sort of thing. Peter has talked to me about all of these sorts of subjects every time we have met. My telling him and Sally that I had to go because I wanted to leave them time to close up their suit cases was therefore in part ceremonial misrepresentation. In addition to wanting to give them "loose end" time, I simply didn't want to retrace any longer our well trodden tracks through these old worn out passages, having to shout two or three times almost everything I said to get my words through the deafness rapidly shutting Peter off from the sounds of the world. I left, however, full of affection for him and Sally.
Characteristically, Peter had risen abruptly as I made my first "intentional moves" and hurled a "Goodbye-I have-to-go-to-the-bathroom" farewell over his shoulder as he disappeared into the entry corridor. When I shouted "Goodbye, Peter, bon voyage" after him and then embraced Sally, my throat tightened and I felt suddenly bereft. "As soon as we get home we'll call Patty and tell her you're all right," she promised, unknowingly compounding the sentimental distress I was feeling intensely. I held my cheek against hers longer than either she or I had expected because I feared that my eyes were moist.
As I headed down Church Street toward the short cut break in the Abbey grounds wall, I thought with mixed embarrassment and gratitude about my morning behavior in the hotel. Why was I suddenly destitute when Sally said she would get into touch with Patty? Oh, I know that I was completely and spontaneously homesick. But that's not the answer I want. Why did I get homesick over something as inconsequential as that? I mean, there I was tight chested, tight throated, wet eyed—and as mournful as I would have been at a funeral—over a simple little remark. Should I be ashamed? Was I chillingly morbid, maudlin, childishly incapable of sustaining even modest shocks to the system? Should I, on the other hand, be proud, grateful? Were my tears and sorrow proof of warm sensitivity, a refined and delicate spirit?
Another me that bears my name suddenly involved himself in the inquiry, as he often does whenever rapture or despair noticeably raises or lowers my spirits. "I don't know why, but I know what," he stage whispered out of the corner of his mouth. "You look ridiculous. Christ! A man—well, a male individual—your age puddling up over nothing! Just like yesterday, when you waved goodbye to Leonard and Arlene in London as they drove off on the bus to Windsor. You were swallowing hard all the way back to the Ebury Court. I don't know how the hell I put up with you. You find opportunities for cheap grief in discarding a pair of socks you've had for anything like a reasonably long time. I've seen you get miserable on some trip because you had to throw away in Atlanta or San Francisco or Dallas a used Speedstik dispenser that you'd carried on eight or ten earlier one or two day trips away from home. Even at home I've seen you act like someone who had just guiltily abandoned a child—or at least a pet—whenever you had to pull a sick old plant out of a pot and chuck it in the trash. To be honest with you, I wish one of us would get the hell out of here." He is my personal version of Poe’s “William Wilson.”
Just once, I thought, I wish this master of ironic appraisal would say, "Don't worry about it. I understand. Maybe it's a fault. Who knows? But I like you. And there are a lot worse people than you."
There are other me's besides him who try to be kinder to me, many others, with specialized role-playing functions. What we have here is not just a doppelganger, but a kind of "gangganger, I conclude, remembering something that F. Scott Fitzgerald once said about this subject: "Writers aren't exactly people. ... They're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." Those of them who try to throw an arm around my shoulder and hearten, I distrust as slavies, sycophants, toadies. None of them, I remain convinced, have the keen, objective, analytical mind of the one who always causes me to blush for my deficiencies. [1]
And so I walked along dark-spirited once again on a morning unexpectedly full of brightness, vaguely displeased with myself and disturbingly aware of my frequent rapid descents from euphoria to a kind of depression close to panic. Thinking about my oscillations, my lark like soarings and plummeting falls, I catalogued some of the contrarieties and paradoxes I had noted in the last few hours.
Peter's nature and my response to it came first and foremost to mind. On the one hand, he was a tiresome, bullying old man convinced that advanced age gave him a license for self-indulgence, for saying the same things over and over, for not only ordering people about but for doing so loudly because he was deaf. He used his deafness, too, as a way of justifying interruptions, of ignoring messages that might contradict his prejudices and preconceptions. His method is an inversion, of sorts, of the old Swiss proverb, "When he shuts one eye, he does not hear everything." When Peter shuts one ear, he does not see everything.
I had felt thoroughly uncomfortable sitting with him at dinner last night. All of his questions and directions boomed through the dining room, first startling then amusing the other diners. "What kind of shoes are they?" he bellowed at me as we moved toward our table, his gaze skeptically fixed on the duck boots I'd worn to get to the Hotel through streets and pathways covered with mixed slush, snow, ice and half frozen mud. "Give us more of that bread," he told the waiter in the tone of a colonel calling a regiment to attention. "I asked for two extra slices of lemon for my salmon. Where are they? Here take this plate, and get us all another vodka. Are they capers? They look like beans."
On the other hand, he was a gallant old warrior refusing any sort of retreat, a man full of a life and aspiration threatened by a mortality he both feared and despised. Every now and again he might feel a compulsion to accept the logic of surrender. At such times, he would rehearse preparations for withdrawal. Moods of that kind were, however, fleeting. Very soon he would be back to normal, full of rebellion and an unyielding determination not only to beat back the next onslaught but to move forward to some commanding height he saw, or thought he saw, in the near distance.
I remembered his intrusion into my office, just after I'd assumed the presidency, when I was in conference with Regis Ebner, fairly new to his position of V.P. for External Relations and almost wholly new to Peter. "What are you doing?" Peter asked without preamble as he burst through the door, his progress vacuuming my secretary out of her chair and into the doorway behind him. "Never mind that, Peter," I said as I greeted him, cocking an eyebrow at Nancy to let her know, as she closed the door, that I understood that she could not have, should not have, stopped him. "What matters is your health. How are you?"
I had two reasons for asking the question. I didn't want to have to get Peter involved in my fairly complicated talk with Regis, and I was honestly concerned about Peter, fresh from a rather long hospitalization and surgery for a prostatectomy and something else—both kidney stone and gall bladder removal, I think.
"Oh, I'm all right," Peter answered off-handedly and then paused, looking thoughtfully at the carpeting. "There's one problem, though," he continued with a childlike candor and ingenuousness astonishing in someone as wise in the ways of the world as he, "I can't get an erection." I shot a glance at Regis, whose eyeballs had bulged and rounded behind his glasses, and looked again at Peter as he finished his report with a tone of brave resignation: "I'm not complaining. After all, I'm 81. But when it happens, it sure makes you feel old."
As I made the sharp turn in Church Street, the sun brightened on the Abbey wall, delineating even more clearly the contrast between this part of the morning and its dreary beginning. Alpha and Omega, are the names, by the way, of the two cottages that mark the Banbury and the Stratford limits of Wroxton village. Yin and yang. Abrupt, illogical juxtapositions that mock every effort at order and coherence. I gloomily confessed that observing Peter, myself—people, life, the passing of days—seemed to me often like reading a text that was a pastiche of Beckett, Burroughs, Sarraute, and Robbe Grillet. Everything, myself, too, has too many faces.
Vaguely recollected images come to my mind of oriental gods mentioned somewhere in Proust. Something about whole groups of faces side by side or superimposed where one face would be expected. Nothing, nothing is single. (Didn't Schopenhower note that a balloonist feels the earth sinking down not his gondola ascending?)
For some reason, as I turned these thoughts over in my mind, I recalled the judgment of the unnamed old woman who is "Buddy's" friend in Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory." Responding to the remark of the mill owner's wife who wants to buy the Christmas tree the old woman and Buddy have cut down for their holiday—“Goodness, woman, you can get another one”—she "gently reflects" and replies: "`There's never two of anything.'" Right then, I felt uncomfortably sure Last night, walking these same streets, I had figuratively cringed from an awareness of the discrepancy between my separation from my home and the warmth and peace of Wroxton's villagers whom I saw through their cottage windows. One couple sat together on a sofa, watching the telly, the wife leaning over in playful awkwardness to steal a sip of the beer her husband held idly at shoulder height as he peered fixedly at the screen. Another pair simultaneously cuddled an infant. I felt despicably sorry for myself, but, even so, morosely fascinated by the idea of ironic simultaneities. The speculation found its concrete imagery in the trapezoidal plots of light thrown through the windows onto the dark dirt lanes, in the thumping vibrato and grace notes of a Hawaiian record being played at top volume in a 17th or 18th century cottage that I passed as I neared the college gates.
Starting this entry late this evening, I recalled other similarly incongruous yokings in my experience of the day. On a walk around the Abbey grounds in the morning, after breakfast at the hotel, I'd seen a moorhen, belly down, its wings spread in a gesture of flight frozen in the ice still on Lady Lake. A few yards further on, I saw beech saplings 2 or 3 inches in diameter supported by four inch thick stakes cut from dead trees just as, on the train from London, I had seen saplings staked in the same way in an old graveyard. Many of the tombstones had toppled, others were tilting, but the saplings braced by deadwood were growing, at intervals as carefully and regularly measured as the grave plots themselves. A minute's walk further on, I saw a dead blue tit bent double at the base of a soaring lime tree. Its glazing eyes looked sightlessly up toward the topmost branches. Fifty yards past that spot, I saw the Great Pond. Half of it, the shadier west end, I think, was a dull pewter color under ice. The other end, warmed by sun, was an olive mirror reflecting tree trunks, reeds, sky.
Bob, the night clerk, greeted me when I returned to the Abbey with a question: "Been to the hotel, then, have you?" It reminded me of another event at breakfast, the puzzle of the young girl who had served me. I had had to ask her twice for coffee, three times for honey, and dodge slightly when she hit and tipped over my partially full orange juice glass with a milk pitcher. She also kept me waiting a long time for my check, and even though I knew that that delay was owing primarily to Peter's having intercepted her in the corridor to have her prepare his bill—I could hear him thundering "What's this £5 premium?"—I was still pretty thoroughly unhappy with her. But she was smiling brightly and gushing apologies when she finally hurried over to where I stood making a physical statement in the dining room doorway.
She gave me the check—for £4.25+.75 V.A.T. She took the £l0 I gave her and at once both startled and inconvenienced me by handing me a £5 note as change. The inconvenience arose from my not having for use as a tip any of the coins I had counted upon her gratuity seeking instincts to include in the £5 I had coming. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm going to have to ask you for four one pound notes and some coins so that I can give you a tip." "Oh, that's not necessary, Sir," she replied, clearly uncomfortable, suggesting by her uneasiness that this was a totally new and—she hoped—an exceptional circumstance. "No, no, no," I insisted, pushing the five toward her. "I'll need change for the College phone anyway," I lied. The coins that she gave me, one 50p and five 10p pieces, did not add up to the 75p I had planned for. I hesitated clumsily for an instant after dropping the 50 and two 10s in her right palm, looking with a slight frown at the three 10p's I still had. "No, no, Sir. The gratuity was included, " she said, blinking her eyes shut and holding up her left hand in protest as she turned away with a musically cheerful "Goodbye, and thank you again."
What kind of waitress was I to look back upon her as being? The inept creature whose service was grade D? A comely and warmingly pleasant young woman soothingly soft spoken, good to look at, and cheering to be around? A naive sort of rustic too slow on the uptake to see that giving me a fiver might create some tipping trouble? I momentarily compared her behavior with that of an American hat check girl I met recently at a booth with a fixed price of 50c per item. When I gave her a five to cover the four dollar charge, she brushed aside a dollar she had in her box and gave me four quarters. Thus she offered me an opportunity not only to give her a tip—unnecessary under the fixed cost system—but to give her a bad one (a quarter or a half dollar) or a fairly good one (75c) or, in her view, a proper one (a dollar).
Should I see the breakfast girl as someone who would regard the calculating American woman as appallingly vulgar and scrounging, dispossessed of dignity by open greed? Or as someone devoid of ambition and drive, placidly committed to maintaining a dull but comfortable routine, rather irritatingly deliberate because working by rote? Or, maybe, as simply a representative of a culture altogether different from the beat-yesterday one to which the States had conditioned me? She was all of them, I supposed, and a few more that will occur to me later, and further complicate my view of an individual I will remember as a personification of the paradoxes much on my mind here. Thinking again later that the tip is built in in English hotel bills didn't substantially change my view of the waitress as a contrast to her American counterpart: if gratuities were included in American checks, waiters and waitresses would very quickly regard what was automatically included as no tip at all and would regard as generous—or worthy of real attention—only those customers who left something additional.
Finally, I recalled Robert Denton, our groundsman, and Jessie Cook, for 40 years in charge of Wroxton's post office, to which I had gone in mid afternoon to buy a Cadbury bar from the small candy shelf.
Mrs. Cook sat behind the counter, hunched over and peering at postal-savings forms. As I entered she squinted against the pale light filtering, through a window near which I stood, into the tiny, shadowy room. "Why it's Professor Savage," she exclaimed softly in some surprise. "I don't know why it was," she went on, "but I was thinking about you just the other day." There was no further reference to the fact that we had not met for over six years, but I suspected that she intended the seemingly casual comment as a grateful recognition of my return to the village—and of the return in her reminiscence of the older village days of which my appearance reminded her.
With no fear of any egotistical overemphasis on my importance, I believe that my turning up again pleased her greatly. Yet her manner hardly changed, just as it had not changed twenty years before when she told me of the death of a beloved neighbor. I am willing to believe that, privately, Mrs. Cook has her passions and dreams, secret rages and covert desperations. Publicly, however, she maintains in moments of emergency, joy, and grief, the same demeanor of calm and mild astonishment with which I have heard her discuss the raids of blue tits or wasps upon the puncturable caps of the pint bottles left on her porch by the milkman: "The wretched little beggars have been at it again. The birds make the holes, they do, and the wasps squeeze in. Devilish milk nickers, they are, the lot of them."
I had encountered Robert for the first time again during one of my walks around the lake. "Hello," he called out with a hint of a smile and immediately directed my attention to the poor condition of the "Christmas trees" planted among the much taller, much faster growing poplars. The poplars love the wetness of the particular boggy area we were in, he informed me, much more than the beeches and Norway spruce do.
A note of intense indignation sharpened his tone as he continued his characterization of poplars. (They are full of water. He has an instrument that measures water content of trees, and the poplar's is the highest. They are not much good for anything. They are not nearly as "griceful" as the beech. The wood is too soft for lumber, and they crowd out better trees.) He especially dislikes one species of poplar, to which he refers as an "almbow," or something similar.
He paused in his disquisition on trees to pick up his pitchfork and push and stir up the fire he had built to burn up the pile created by his clearing and pruning. I asked him if the droppings I had seen on the slope above the wooded plot in which we stood were signs of the munt jac deer that I was eagerly trying to get a look at. "No, rabbits, I should think. Come along here. I shall show you some deer pellets. They're long and thin, is deer pellets." He searched about in the carpet of wet leaves, swinging a heavy muddy boot left and right ahead of him as he moved along. "No. I must have disturbed them in the tidying up today. I saw them yesterday. That's cornus, there," he said, stooping to pick up a small branch waiting for the fire. "Dogwood. You have that in the States, don't you? Grows wild all over here, but the garden centers charge you one pound fifty for a potted plant this size."
I asked him about a fairly large burrowing hole I had seen near the Great Pond on my walk. "That'd be a rabbit. It could be a fox, but I should think a rabbit there. Here's one over here by this great old poplar stump." He pointed out the hole and then called my attention to a large wound on a nearby beech. "The rabbit did that," he said, shaking his head in dismay. "The rabbits, the deer, and the squirrels all damage the gardens and trees. John Seagrave has a slide of a beech sapling a squirrel barked in one day, the whole tree top to bottom. It's a masters the damage they can do. The whole tree stripped bare. I've never seen the like. The squirrel that did it didn't get away free. I shot it, I did. The people in the forestry service have to shoot some of the deer. They'd lose their trees, else. We have just two pair of deer here, so I don't trouble them."
We finished our talk and I left him whistling and thrashing at the clippings, not seeing him again till well after 5:00. Clad in garments the color of the earth and woodlands, he was driving a bright yellow tractor up the black-topped Abbey main road toward the village. As he drove, he cocked an ear at the racket of rooks in an oak he rumbled under. I watched him and recalled three earlier experiences with him.
The first was in 1966, when he was a young assistant to the Scot who was then head gardener. I called his attention to a holly tree near the walk in front of the Abbey, telling him that one of the branches was growing right out into the path. Did he think it should be cut back? He didn't. He was definite about that. "Ivery toim I koot it, soombody in the village doys."
The second was in the spring of 1967, when he was about 18 or 19 and I was about to board a coach in which I was taking a large party of undergraduates to Coventry. "Where are you goin', then, today, guvnor?" he asked. I told him, and he said, "Ah, Coventry. A smashing place, I hear. I should like to see it one day," he sighed, suggesting that it was a jet flight away.
The last occurrence was in June, 1984, when I talked with him about some trouble he was having with his kidneys. He was all right, he assured me, while he was in Wroxton. It was when he got to Banbury that he felt pain. "It's the hard paving underfoot," he said. "Here, on the sward I have no trouble at all." [2]
Just before he turned the tractor leftward toward the gate house at the meeting of virtually all of Wroxton's streets—Church St., Mills Lane, Main Street, Dark Lane—Robert turned and saw me on the path, under the oriel window. He stopped the tractor, climbed down, and hurried toward me. "I got the picture you left for me last year," he said, referring to an engraving of the Abbey. "It looks foin on the wall. Iverybody as cooms in comments on it. I've been wantin' to thank you."
He was clearly embarrassed, had probably been thinking throughout the day of the proper form for these remarks of gratitude. "You're welcome, Robert," I replied quickly. "I like it too, but I like the walking stick you carved for me much better." His whole body relaxed and a smile softened his face. "Do you use it, then? I'm glad of that." And he walked back to his tractor with which he breaks the earth of which he himself seems in part compounded, mounted it, and drove away, in the direction of his Wroxton House flat and his wife, an American from Buffalo.
Now, late at night as I write these lines, I sit here thinking about the relationship between the singer and the song. Who am I to encapsulate someone like Peter or the hotel girl or Robert Denton in sentences passing judgment, favorable or unfavorable? Whether or not I have said what I've said well or badly, whether or not my judgments are valid or invalid isn't the point. What is important is that I did the saying, the judging. I issued the pronouncements, admitted or excluded evidence and handed down verdicts. I, who felt inexplicable cold drafts upon the back of my neck as I bent over my tablet in the little pool of rusty yellow light in the dark of the vast old bedroom—the neck of someone not really the writer of these lines, I concluded, and shivered just a little.
________________________________________
[1] When I reread this entry several years later, I decided to add to it two comments on writers and their “selves.” One of them was Philip Larkin’s observation quoted by Richard Holmes in his Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: `...a writer's reputation is twofold: what we think of his work, and what we think of him. What's more, we expect the two halves to relate: if they don't, then one or other of our opinions alter until they do.'" James Atlas, "Life and Letters: Holmes on the Case," The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 29, Sept. 29, 1994, p. 58. A second one concerns Samuel Beckett’s observation—where I forget—that he often thought that he was his own double.
[2] Robert’s comment reminded me of a brief bit I filed away from a NYTimes article of 9-24-74, p. 39. I forget who wrote it now, but it included the writer’s recollection of a Pinter-like character from Yorkshire “who detested towns because he `couldn’t walk on t’street…there were that many people about, I ‘ad to take big steps and little ‘uns, then big steps an’ little ‘uns again. Couldn’t get goin.’”
The morning did not begin well. My travel alarm, set for about 7:40, rang at 7:10, cheating me of a half hour's sleep. The setting hand and the dial markings are, I am discovering after 2 or 3 days of using them, not very compatibly related. I wanted to waken no earlier than a little before 8:00 because I suspected last night, rightly, events proved, that I would have trouble sleeping. I did, nodding off over an Edmund Crispin mystery, my glasses and bed light on, at some time after midnight but waking again at 4:00. Getting back to sleep took at least 2 hours.
I took much more time than I needed to wash, shave, and dress so that I would not catch Colin, the young cook, unawares. The Commons and kitchen in the Carriage Barn were both dark and, except for me, empty when I entered a little after 8:00. Back in the Abbey, Mrs. Popham told me that she would ring Colin on the phone, but I asked her not to, saying that I would walk up to the Wroxton Hotel for breakfast, just as I had for dinner last night. "But you'll get all wet in this rain," she protested, and, when I insisted on going, apologized profusely. "We'll be better organized tomorrow," she promised.
Once I reached the Hotel, things quickly began to improve, though the light but chilly rain continued. The Hotel's dining rooms and bar are snug and attractive, with much red (on chairs and in carpeting) gleamingly polished brasses, white or beige plaster walls, a number of working fireplaces, and a profusion of dark beams in the low, irregular ceilings. It is, I think, 17th century, and half of it, or perhaps more than half of it, is roofed with a thick mat of thatch.
Through the bay window across from my table I could see the Horton stone wall along the narrow but very busy main road from Stratford to Banbury, and, beyond it, a cow pasture between the small stone Catholic chapel, also thatch roofed, and a cluster of houses very much like it except for lacking its spire. The mossy stones of the wall and the rise of green pasture in the distance, comforting and prominent symbols of the gently stubborn survival of this area's old ways and faces and forms, filled the bay window reassuringly after each temporary blotting out by a trundling lorry or car whipping by. A hint of sun low in the east brightened the fog bank sky.
Having reached the hotel low in spirits, I began to feel smugly self satisfied. The warm sensation lasted little more than a second or two. Almost as soon as I began to congratulate myself on my circumstances, ringed as I was with porridge, poached eggs, orange juice, toast, honey and coffee, the only other person in the room, a man of thirty or so, glanced at me furtively and coolly rose immediately and hurried out. Although four other hotel guests soon sat down a few tables away, dawdling over a second cup of coffee no longer appealed to me somehow.
I asked for my check—oops! wrong word—and walked round to the other end of the Hotel to say goodbye to the Sammartinos. They were expecting a Daimler limo that was to transport them to a Grosvenor House suite, usually rented at about £300 per day they told me, as the guests of Lord Forte. I was to have helped them entertain him at the Abbey if I hadn't had food poisoning, and he hadn't had the flu.
Peter and Sally gave me a short guided tour of their suite, by which, obviously, they were happily surprised. They had a right to be pleased with it. A first floor unit about thirty five—perhaps forty or more—feet long, it has an entry hall and a large sparklingly modern bathroom predominantly deep maroon and gray. These precede a long, low ceilinged room divided into sleeping area and sitting room with fireplace, an arrangement of low table and chairs, and a television set. A small casement window with leaded panes gives any TV watchers who turn their eyes slightly leftward of the screen a view of the same chapel and pasture I had seen from the dining room.
I stayed till about 9:45, talking about subjects that gave me little real pleasure—Bob Donaldson's presidential policies, Peter's oft forwarded plan (attractive to no one I know except him) to have Lord Forte use the Abbey as a hotel one half of the year and FDU run courses there the other half, Peter's conviction that the University is no longer as creative or efficient as it was in his day. That sort of thing. Peter has talked to me about all of these sorts of subjects every time we have met. My telling him and Sally that I had to go because I wanted to leave them time to close up their suit cases was therefore in part ceremonial misrepresentation. In addition to wanting to give them "loose end" time, I simply didn't want to retrace any longer our well trodden tracks through these old worn out passages, having to shout two or three times almost everything I said to get my words through the deafness rapidly shutting Peter off from the sounds of the world. I left, however, full of affection for him and Sally.
Characteristically, Peter had risen abruptly as I made my first "intentional moves" and hurled a "Goodbye-I have-to-go-to-the-bathroom" farewell over his shoulder as he disappeared into the entry corridor. When I shouted "Goodbye, Peter, bon voyage" after him and then embraced Sally, my throat tightened and I felt suddenly bereft. "As soon as we get home we'll call Patty and tell her you're all right," she promised, unknowingly compounding the sentimental distress I was feeling intensely. I held my cheek against hers longer than either she or I had expected because I feared that my eyes were moist.
As I headed down Church Street toward the short cut break in the Abbey grounds wall, I thought with mixed embarrassment and gratitude about my morning behavior in the hotel. Why was I suddenly destitute when Sally said she would get into touch with Patty? Oh, I know that I was completely and spontaneously homesick. But that's not the answer I want. Why did I get homesick over something as inconsequential as that? I mean, there I was tight chested, tight throated, wet eyed—and as mournful as I would have been at a funeral—over a simple little remark. Should I be ashamed? Was I chillingly morbid, maudlin, childishly incapable of sustaining even modest shocks to the system? Should I, on the other hand, be proud, grateful? Were my tears and sorrow proof of warm sensitivity, a refined and delicate spirit?
Another me that bears my name suddenly involved himself in the inquiry, as he often does whenever rapture or despair noticeably raises or lowers my spirits. "I don't know why, but I know what," he stage whispered out of the corner of his mouth. "You look ridiculous. Christ! A man—well, a male individual—your age puddling up over nothing! Just like yesterday, when you waved goodbye to Leonard and Arlene in London as they drove off on the bus to Windsor. You were swallowing hard all the way back to the Ebury Court. I don't know how the hell I put up with you. You find opportunities for cheap grief in discarding a pair of socks you've had for anything like a reasonably long time. I've seen you get miserable on some trip because you had to throw away in Atlanta or San Francisco or Dallas a used Speedstik dispenser that you'd carried on eight or ten earlier one or two day trips away from home. Even at home I've seen you act like someone who had just guiltily abandoned a child—or at least a pet—whenever you had to pull a sick old plant out of a pot and chuck it in the trash. To be honest with you, I wish one of us would get the hell out of here." He is my personal version of Poe’s “William Wilson.”
Just once, I thought, I wish this master of ironic appraisal would say, "Don't worry about it. I understand. Maybe it's a fault. Who knows? But I like you. And there are a lot worse people than you."
There are other me's besides him who try to be kinder to me, many others, with specialized role-playing functions. What we have here is not just a doppelganger, but a kind of "gangganger, I conclude, remembering something that F. Scott Fitzgerald once said about this subject: "Writers aren't exactly people. ... They're a whole lot of people trying to be one person." Those of them who try to throw an arm around my shoulder and hearten, I distrust as slavies, sycophants, toadies. None of them, I remain convinced, have the keen, objective, analytical mind of the one who always causes me to blush for my deficiencies. [1]
And so I walked along dark-spirited once again on a morning unexpectedly full of brightness, vaguely displeased with myself and disturbingly aware of my frequent rapid descents from euphoria to a kind of depression close to panic. Thinking about my oscillations, my lark like soarings and plummeting falls, I catalogued some of the contrarieties and paradoxes I had noted in the last few hours.
Peter's nature and my response to it came first and foremost to mind. On the one hand, he was a tiresome, bullying old man convinced that advanced age gave him a license for self-indulgence, for saying the same things over and over, for not only ordering people about but for doing so loudly because he was deaf. He used his deafness, too, as a way of justifying interruptions, of ignoring messages that might contradict his prejudices and preconceptions. His method is an inversion, of sorts, of the old Swiss proverb, "When he shuts one eye, he does not hear everything." When Peter shuts one ear, he does not see everything.
I had felt thoroughly uncomfortable sitting with him at dinner last night. All of his questions and directions boomed through the dining room, first startling then amusing the other diners. "What kind of shoes are they?" he bellowed at me as we moved toward our table, his gaze skeptically fixed on the duck boots I'd worn to get to the Hotel through streets and pathways covered with mixed slush, snow, ice and half frozen mud. "Give us more of that bread," he told the waiter in the tone of a colonel calling a regiment to attention. "I asked for two extra slices of lemon for my salmon. Where are they? Here take this plate, and get us all another vodka. Are they capers? They look like beans."
On the other hand, he was a gallant old warrior refusing any sort of retreat, a man full of a life and aspiration threatened by a mortality he both feared and despised. Every now and again he might feel a compulsion to accept the logic of surrender. At such times, he would rehearse preparations for withdrawal. Moods of that kind were, however, fleeting. Very soon he would be back to normal, full of rebellion and an unyielding determination not only to beat back the next onslaught but to move forward to some commanding height he saw, or thought he saw, in the near distance.
I remembered his intrusion into my office, just after I'd assumed the presidency, when I was in conference with Regis Ebner, fairly new to his position of V.P. for External Relations and almost wholly new to Peter. "What are you doing?" Peter asked without preamble as he burst through the door, his progress vacuuming my secretary out of her chair and into the doorway behind him. "Never mind that, Peter," I said as I greeted him, cocking an eyebrow at Nancy to let her know, as she closed the door, that I understood that she could not have, should not have, stopped him. "What matters is your health. How are you?"
I had two reasons for asking the question. I didn't want to have to get Peter involved in my fairly complicated talk with Regis, and I was honestly concerned about Peter, fresh from a rather long hospitalization and surgery for a prostatectomy and something else—both kidney stone and gall bladder removal, I think.
"Oh, I'm all right," Peter answered off-handedly and then paused, looking thoughtfully at the carpeting. "There's one problem, though," he continued with a childlike candor and ingenuousness astonishing in someone as wise in the ways of the world as he, "I can't get an erection." I shot a glance at Regis, whose eyeballs had bulged and rounded behind his glasses, and looked again at Peter as he finished his report with a tone of brave resignation: "I'm not complaining. After all, I'm 81. But when it happens, it sure makes you feel old."
As I made the sharp turn in Church Street, the sun brightened on the Abbey wall, delineating even more clearly the contrast between this part of the morning and its dreary beginning. Alpha and Omega, are the names, by the way, of the two cottages that mark the Banbury and the Stratford limits of Wroxton village. Yin and yang. Abrupt, illogical juxtapositions that mock every effort at order and coherence. I gloomily confessed that observing Peter, myself—people, life, the passing of days—seemed to me often like reading a text that was a pastiche of Beckett, Burroughs, Sarraute, and Robbe Grillet. Everything, myself, too, has too many faces.
Vaguely recollected images come to my mind of oriental gods mentioned somewhere in Proust. Something about whole groups of faces side by side or superimposed where one face would be expected. Nothing, nothing is single. (Didn't Schopenhower note that a balloonist feels the earth sinking down not his gondola ascending?)
For some reason, as I turned these thoughts over in my mind, I recalled the judgment of the unnamed old woman who is "Buddy's" friend in Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory." Responding to the remark of the mill owner's wife who wants to buy the Christmas tree the old woman and Buddy have cut down for their holiday—“Goodness, woman, you can get another one”—she "gently reflects" and replies: "`There's never two of anything.'" Right then, I felt uncomfortably sure Last night, walking these same streets, I had figuratively cringed from an awareness of the discrepancy between my separation from my home and the warmth and peace of Wroxton's villagers whom I saw through their cottage windows. One couple sat together on a sofa, watching the telly, the wife leaning over in playful awkwardness to steal a sip of the beer her husband held idly at shoulder height as he peered fixedly at the screen. Another pair simultaneously cuddled an infant. I felt despicably sorry for myself, but, even so, morosely fascinated by the idea of ironic simultaneities. The speculation found its concrete imagery in the trapezoidal plots of light thrown through the windows onto the dark dirt lanes, in the thumping vibrato and grace notes of a Hawaiian record being played at top volume in a 17th or 18th century cottage that I passed as I neared the college gates.
Starting this entry late this evening, I recalled other similarly incongruous yokings in my experience of the day. On a walk around the Abbey grounds in the morning, after breakfast at the hotel, I'd seen a moorhen, belly down, its wings spread in a gesture of flight frozen in the ice still on Lady Lake. A few yards further on, I saw beech saplings 2 or 3 inches in diameter supported by four inch thick stakes cut from dead trees just as, on the train from London, I had seen saplings staked in the same way in an old graveyard. Many of the tombstones had toppled, others were tilting, but the saplings braced by deadwood were growing, at intervals as carefully and regularly measured as the grave plots themselves. A minute's walk further on, I saw a dead blue tit bent double at the base of a soaring lime tree. Its glazing eyes looked sightlessly up toward the topmost branches. Fifty yards past that spot, I saw the Great Pond. Half of it, the shadier west end, I think, was a dull pewter color under ice. The other end, warmed by sun, was an olive mirror reflecting tree trunks, reeds, sky.
Bob, the night clerk, greeted me when I returned to the Abbey with a question: "Been to the hotel, then, have you?" It reminded me of another event at breakfast, the puzzle of the young girl who had served me. I had had to ask her twice for coffee, three times for honey, and dodge slightly when she hit and tipped over my partially full orange juice glass with a milk pitcher. She also kept me waiting a long time for my check, and even though I knew that that delay was owing primarily to Peter's having intercepted her in the corridor to have her prepare his bill—I could hear him thundering "What's this £5 premium?"—I was still pretty thoroughly unhappy with her. But she was smiling brightly and gushing apologies when she finally hurried over to where I stood making a physical statement in the dining room doorway.
She gave me the check—for £4.25+.75 V.A.T. She took the £l0 I gave her and at once both startled and inconvenienced me by handing me a £5 note as change. The inconvenience arose from my not having for use as a tip any of the coins I had counted upon her gratuity seeking instincts to include in the £5 I had coming. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm going to have to ask you for four one pound notes and some coins so that I can give you a tip." "Oh, that's not necessary, Sir," she replied, clearly uncomfortable, suggesting by her uneasiness that this was a totally new and—she hoped—an exceptional circumstance. "No, no, no," I insisted, pushing the five toward her. "I'll need change for the College phone anyway," I lied. The coins that she gave me, one 50p and five 10p pieces, did not add up to the 75p I had planned for. I hesitated clumsily for an instant after dropping the 50 and two 10s in her right palm, looking with a slight frown at the three 10p's I still had. "No, no, Sir. The gratuity was included, " she said, blinking her eyes shut and holding up her left hand in protest as she turned away with a musically cheerful "Goodbye, and thank you again."
What kind of waitress was I to look back upon her as being? The inept creature whose service was grade D? A comely and warmingly pleasant young woman soothingly soft spoken, good to look at, and cheering to be around? A naive sort of rustic too slow on the uptake to see that giving me a fiver might create some tipping trouble? I momentarily compared her behavior with that of an American hat check girl I met recently at a booth with a fixed price of 50c per item. When I gave her a five to cover the four dollar charge, she brushed aside a dollar she had in her box and gave me four quarters. Thus she offered me an opportunity not only to give her a tip—unnecessary under the fixed cost system—but to give her a bad one (a quarter or a half dollar) or a fairly good one (75c) or, in her view, a proper one (a dollar).
Should I see the breakfast girl as someone who would regard the calculating American woman as appallingly vulgar and scrounging, dispossessed of dignity by open greed? Or as someone devoid of ambition and drive, placidly committed to maintaining a dull but comfortable routine, rather irritatingly deliberate because working by rote? Or, maybe, as simply a representative of a culture altogether different from the beat-yesterday one to which the States had conditioned me? She was all of them, I supposed, and a few more that will occur to me later, and further complicate my view of an individual I will remember as a personification of the paradoxes much on my mind here. Thinking again later that the tip is built in in English hotel bills didn't substantially change my view of the waitress as a contrast to her American counterpart: if gratuities were included in American checks, waiters and waitresses would very quickly regard what was automatically included as no tip at all and would regard as generous—or worthy of real attention—only those customers who left something additional.
Finally, I recalled Robert Denton, our groundsman, and Jessie Cook, for 40 years in charge of Wroxton's post office, to which I had gone in mid afternoon to buy a Cadbury bar from the small candy shelf.
Mrs. Cook sat behind the counter, hunched over and peering at postal-savings forms. As I entered she squinted against the pale light filtering, through a window near which I stood, into the tiny, shadowy room. "Why it's Professor Savage," she exclaimed softly in some surprise. "I don't know why it was," she went on, "but I was thinking about you just the other day." There was no further reference to the fact that we had not met for over six years, but I suspected that she intended the seemingly casual comment as a grateful recognition of my return to the village—and of the return in her reminiscence of the older village days of which my appearance reminded her.
With no fear of any egotistical overemphasis on my importance, I believe that my turning up again pleased her greatly. Yet her manner hardly changed, just as it had not changed twenty years before when she told me of the death of a beloved neighbor. I am willing to believe that, privately, Mrs. Cook has her passions and dreams, secret rages and covert desperations. Publicly, however, she maintains in moments of emergency, joy, and grief, the same demeanor of calm and mild astonishment with which I have heard her discuss the raids of blue tits or wasps upon the puncturable caps of the pint bottles left on her porch by the milkman: "The wretched little beggars have been at it again. The birds make the holes, they do, and the wasps squeeze in. Devilish milk nickers, they are, the lot of them."
I had encountered Robert for the first time again during one of my walks around the lake. "Hello," he called out with a hint of a smile and immediately directed my attention to the poor condition of the "Christmas trees" planted among the much taller, much faster growing poplars. The poplars love the wetness of the particular boggy area we were in, he informed me, much more than the beeches and Norway spruce do.
A note of intense indignation sharpened his tone as he continued his characterization of poplars. (They are full of water. He has an instrument that measures water content of trees, and the poplar's is the highest. They are not much good for anything. They are not nearly as "griceful" as the beech. The wood is too soft for lumber, and they crowd out better trees.) He especially dislikes one species of poplar, to which he refers as an "almbow," or something similar.
He paused in his disquisition on trees to pick up his pitchfork and push and stir up the fire he had built to burn up the pile created by his clearing and pruning. I asked him if the droppings I had seen on the slope above the wooded plot in which we stood were signs of the munt jac deer that I was eagerly trying to get a look at. "No, rabbits, I should think. Come along here. I shall show you some deer pellets. They're long and thin, is deer pellets." He searched about in the carpet of wet leaves, swinging a heavy muddy boot left and right ahead of him as he moved along. "No. I must have disturbed them in the tidying up today. I saw them yesterday. That's cornus, there," he said, stooping to pick up a small branch waiting for the fire. "Dogwood. You have that in the States, don't you? Grows wild all over here, but the garden centers charge you one pound fifty for a potted plant this size."
I asked him about a fairly large burrowing hole I had seen near the Great Pond on my walk. "That'd be a rabbit. It could be a fox, but I should think a rabbit there. Here's one over here by this great old poplar stump." He pointed out the hole and then called my attention to a large wound on a nearby beech. "The rabbit did that," he said, shaking his head in dismay. "The rabbits, the deer, and the squirrels all damage the gardens and trees. John Seagrave has a slide of a beech sapling a squirrel barked in one day, the whole tree top to bottom. It's a masters the damage they can do. The whole tree stripped bare. I've never seen the like. The squirrel that did it didn't get away free. I shot it, I did. The people in the forestry service have to shoot some of the deer. They'd lose their trees, else. We have just two pair of deer here, so I don't trouble them."
We finished our talk and I left him whistling and thrashing at the clippings, not seeing him again till well after 5:00. Clad in garments the color of the earth and woodlands, he was driving a bright yellow tractor up the black-topped Abbey main road toward the village. As he drove, he cocked an ear at the racket of rooks in an oak he rumbled under. I watched him and recalled three earlier experiences with him.
The first was in 1966, when he was a young assistant to the Scot who was then head gardener. I called his attention to a holly tree near the walk in front of the Abbey, telling him that one of the branches was growing right out into the path. Did he think it should be cut back? He didn't. He was definite about that. "Ivery toim I koot it, soombody in the village doys."
The second was in the spring of 1967, when he was about 18 or 19 and I was about to board a coach in which I was taking a large party of undergraduates to Coventry. "Where are you goin', then, today, guvnor?" he asked. I told him, and he said, "Ah, Coventry. A smashing place, I hear. I should like to see it one day," he sighed, suggesting that it was a jet flight away.
The last occurrence was in June, 1984, when I talked with him about some trouble he was having with his kidneys. He was all right, he assured me, while he was in Wroxton. It was when he got to Banbury that he felt pain. "It's the hard paving underfoot," he said. "Here, on the sward I have no trouble at all." [2]
Just before he turned the tractor leftward toward the gate house at the meeting of virtually all of Wroxton's streets—Church St., Mills Lane, Main Street, Dark Lane—Robert turned and saw me on the path, under the oriel window. He stopped the tractor, climbed down, and hurried toward me. "I got the picture you left for me last year," he said, referring to an engraving of the Abbey. "It looks foin on the wall. Iverybody as cooms in comments on it. I've been wantin' to thank you."
He was clearly embarrassed, had probably been thinking throughout the day of the proper form for these remarks of gratitude. "You're welcome, Robert," I replied quickly. "I like it too, but I like the walking stick you carved for me much better." His whole body relaxed and a smile softened his face. "Do you use it, then? I'm glad of that." And he walked back to his tractor with which he breaks the earth of which he himself seems in part compounded, mounted it, and drove away, in the direction of his Wroxton House flat and his wife, an American from Buffalo.
Now, late at night as I write these lines, I sit here thinking about the relationship between the singer and the song. Who am I to encapsulate someone like Peter or the hotel girl or Robert Denton in sentences passing judgment, favorable or unfavorable? Whether or not I have said what I've said well or badly, whether or not my judgments are valid or invalid isn't the point. What is important is that I did the saying, the judging. I issued the pronouncements, admitted or excluded evidence and handed down verdicts. I, who felt inexplicable cold drafts upon the back of my neck as I bent over my tablet in the little pool of rusty yellow light in the dark of the vast old bedroom—the neck of someone not really the writer of these lines, I concluded, and shivered just a little.
________________________________________
[1] When I reread this entry several years later, I decided to add to it two comments on writers and their “selves.” One of them was Philip Larkin’s observation quoted by Richard Holmes in his Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage: `...a writer's reputation is twofold: what we think of his work, and what we think of him. What's more, we expect the two halves to relate: if they don't, then one or other of our opinions alter until they do.'" James Atlas, "Life and Letters: Holmes on the Case," The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 29, Sept. 29, 1994, p. 58. A second one concerns Samuel Beckett’s observation—where I forget—that he often thought that he was his own double.
[2] Robert’s comment reminded me of a brief bit I filed away from a NYTimes article of 9-24-74, p. 39. I forget who wrote it now, but it included the writer’s recollection of a Pinter-like character from Yorkshire “who detested towns because he `couldn’t walk on t’street…there were that many people about, I ‘ad to take big steps and little ‘uns, then big steps an’ little ‘uns again. Couldn’t get goin.’”
1 February 1985
At 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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
"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.
"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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 .
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.
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.
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 Times 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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."
On second thought, I think I'll wet my whistle with another "gin and..."
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.
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.
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.
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:
"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.
"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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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 .
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.
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.
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 Times 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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."
On second thought, I think I'll wet my whistle with another "gin and..."
Thursday, March 20, 2008
11 February 1985
The 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 Hamlet 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."
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.
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.
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.)
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]
About 12:15 I was nearing the final pages of an Edmund Crispin mystery, Buried For Pleasure. 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.
"`What did you see?'
`We was mollocking,' said Harry...
`She'm a rare one for mollocking, is Olive.'
Olive appeared gratified by this tribute. `Me Grammer,` she remarked,`allus says,"When oats be cutting, maids be riggish."
`Your grandmother,' Fen tells her,`is clearly a depraved old woman.'"
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:
"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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The grumbling in the walls was strangely like the garbled speeches of the Hamlet record, but in the Bedlam noises I thought I heard the lines "All is not well; I doubt some foul play."
_____________________________
[1] The English attachment to low-lumen lamps is apparently long-standing. In Margaret Halsey’s With Malice Toward Some (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]
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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 Hamlet 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."
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.
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.
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.)
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]
About 12:15 I was nearing the final pages of an Edmund Crispin mystery, Buried For Pleasure. 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.
"`What did you see?'
`We was mollocking,' said Harry...
`She'm a rare one for mollocking, is Olive.'
Olive appeared gratified by this tribute. `Me Grammer,` she remarked,`allus says,"When oats be cutting, maids be riggish."
`Your grandmother,' Fen tells her,`is clearly a depraved old woman.'"
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:
"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."
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.)
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.
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.
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.
The grumbling in the walls was strangely like the garbled speeches of the Hamlet record, but in the Bedlam noises I thought I heard the lines "All is not well; I doubt some foul play."
_____________________________
[1] The English attachment to low-lumen lamps is apparently long-standing. In Margaret Halsey’s With Malice Toward Some (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]
3 March 1985
It 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.
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.
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 Excalibur till about 2:00 a.m.
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.
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.
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 Excalibur but of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and An American Werewolf in London, 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.
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.
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 Rocky Horror..., 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.
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 The Throwback.
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:
"...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.
`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, The Throwback (Pan Books, London, 1980), pp. 129 134]
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.
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.
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 Excalibur till about 2:00 a.m.
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.
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.
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 Excalibur but of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and An American Werewolf in London, 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.
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.
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 Rocky Horror..., 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.
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 The Throwback.
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:
"...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.
`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, The Throwback (Pan Books, London, 1980), pp. 129 134]
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.
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