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| Morgan Forster's Sitting Room |
Remember the time we stood laughing like small children
Caught
in the rain and they took our photograph
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| Kate Wolf |
Tuesday,
June 2, 2015
Love of my Life,
They played
Kate Wolf at your Campus Memorial, singing “Great Love of My Life,” and as we
were walking out of the room there in the Alumni House, where we heard your
eulogies along with your many friends and colleagues, I could hear that song
playing once again. I know how much you liked Kate Wolf. And I would address
you by that song title, except I don’t think the ‘great’ is quite right, do
you? Catherine (Philippon) tells me that Christian (Philippon) always called
her l’Amour de Ma Vie. She tells me that
Frenchmen rarely call their wives by that phrase. So be it.
March, April, May always used to be
a happy trinity, heralding of new life, a flourishing of futurity. This year
the springtime months bore traces of your final illness: our pilgrimage from
Castle to Castle, as it were, the castles being Summit Hospital with its
Emergency Room, Intensive Care Unit, and at times of greater hope, Floors 4 and
5; the Oakland Rehabilitation Center; and a posh Assisted Living Facility – Bayside
Park. We made our last stop towards the end of May at the final Castle:
Piedmont Gardens. We were there, as you might recall, for something over a week.
And towards the end of May, what had
begun as, in a way, our Pilgrim’s Progress, you moving from strength to
strength, me following, carrying your small bundle of earthly possessions –
that long march now appeared as though it had always been a retreat.
Then it was Memorial weekend. Our
daughter was testing an alternate universe – one consisting almost entirely of
peers – in Seattle. Our son, who had stopped believing in parallel lives,
remained in San Francisco. You had one visit from the Chinese woman
(accompanied, of course, by her companion). I invited her. Your smile – when
you saw her – told all. Back in March she had forwarded an email you wrote her
to me, wherein you signed off, ‘Love, Anthony.’ I asked you about it. You said
it was nothing. You added: “You have always (yes, always) been the love of my
life.” L’Amour de Ma Vie.
It was untrue that your sign-off
meant nothing. Should I therefore disbelieve everything you wrote? I chose to
believe your words about your love for me. Just hours before that first day of
my life without you, you told me about her. I told you it didn’t matter. We
spoke for the last time of our love.
It has been nearly a year now,
since you have been gone. How I spent that year, I will tell you sometime.
Right this minute though, I want to return to another time when we were
separated. That year was 1980 – thirty-five years ago: over the summer I was in
New York, at times drifting along, at times unproductively fretting over a
career that would anyway be deferred. You were close to ready for commitment,
much more so than I was; you were passionate, deliberate, and waiting on me: waiting
there in Berkeley, your heart full of love and open to the future. And so you
began a conversation about our relationship, a seemingly one-sided talk that
you sustained despite my relative silence.
That year I gladly received every
one of the letters you wrote me throughout the month of June. I read them avidly,
if not always with delight, and kept them, first in New York, where I was
staying in Debbie’s (Debbie Chapman) apartment on 99th and Broadway,
and Oh, I am sorry to tell you, I just learned in a letter from Dana (Smith),
that Debbie has died, just this past
month now, in 2015; there will be a Memorial on her birthday in July. So I have
this letter from Dana, with whom I haven’t communicated for over thirty years,
the same swath of time, more or less, during which these letters of yours
stayed in the back of a drawer at a succession of California addresses –– Oh, I always new they were there – and it
was only in the fall of 2014 that I untied the little bundle and opened the
faintly crackly white pieces of paper on which you wrote them, paper like
tissue, and read your words of more than thirty years ago. Words written in
small, hand-crafted writing, scratched out in the clean, elegant letters of an exceptionally
intelligent man.
Love
Letters and Then Some
I
remembered these letters as love letters, and love letters they most certainly
are. But they are so much more than that. Informed by an immediacy that makes
them beautifully descriptive, your letters are, of course, intelligent, but
they are not particularly witty – their purpose is not to show off your powers,
or really even to woo. Here is a sentimental journal set in a New World to
which you are not yet habituated. These are explorations more than they are
declarations of love. You do not proclaim. Rather your words are animated by
emotions that you recognize directly and greet, as it were, on first sight. Only
later are you informed by those emotions you recognize upon reflection. Genuine
feelings are in the ascendant. They are there on the surface and deeper down. At
their core beats a living heart. Sometimes you analyze what you are feeling.
The brilliant mind does its work. But it is enough to recognize and to name feelings,
to give them their definition: love, longing, depression, joy.
As you write your way out of the
blankness that is sometimes there at the beginning, and you emerge from the
morning fog, always towards clarity, of course you are writing to a loved one
at the other end of thought, to me. But you are also addressing your soul, speaking
clearly without ruses, without false personae, without the too-clever devices
of the academy. More than usually on your own now, you look upon the nakedness
of things, and name them by their very names. A soul emboldened seeks its path.
Your paragraphs are shaped by your keen observations – always colored to one
degree or another by sentiment. What a gift you gave me at the time in writing
these. What a gift you are giving me now.
As I write
you I’m listening to “Abbey Road” on my iPod; right now the medley on side B is
concluding with, “And, in the End, The Love you Take/ Is equal to the Love you Make.”
Do you think that is true? I’m guessing you would say it’s not as simple as
that. Yes, that is surely what you would say.
Right now I’m sitting on the floor
in a hotel in Sonoma, one with a garden you would love: a garden in a courtyard,
garden with a fountain, fountain in a corner of the garden, consisting of three
basins generously passing on the water from the top basin to the one lowest
down: three fountains really; or perhaps I should say: Three Fountains in a Coin, since Tanya (Bulloch) and James’s (James
Balfour) room has the very best view-from-the-corner of the-garden, of the
fountain. I am staying here with Tanya and James and Alex (Bulloch) and Devon (Rufo).
You always liked to quote those
lines from the beginning of “Burnt Norton” – sometimes just the bird fussing in
the corridor: “Quick, said the bird, find them, find them. Round the corner.” Find
what? Echoes of memory. But more often you quoted those other lines that stand
in your mind for nostalgia: “Footfalls echo in the memory/ down the passage which
we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose garden.” Only
you liked best to quote from the poem without the footfalls of memory, so you
just had ‘us’ moving ‘down the passage we didn’t take. . . Towards the door we
never opened. . . Into the rose garden.’
And these lines about a garden. a
garden we never went into, would arise spontaneously at the sight of a rose
garden: as when we went walking along a graveled road and passed by a very
lovely rose garden at the side of the road belonging to a stately home that had
become the Thomas Hardy museum. And I opened a little white-painted wood gate
and walked into the rose garden – as I told you jokingly, just so it wouldn’t
become the garden we didn’t go into. You were not best amused. Since for you
these were tonal lines of melancholy, lines that introduced the motif of missed
opportunities that would not come back again, and therefore made the past both
inaccessible and precious; and you advertised your longing that way.
Now we went into many gardens
together, did we not? After opening the doors. There we dallied – yes, really
dallied – I don’t think people dally much any more – in pleasure gardens, in
secret gardens of the heart; we visited
the sensual, some would say perverse gardens of Hieronymus Bosch and the
mystical garden of William Blake, and we unlocked the chapel and entered it;
and we visited the romantic Garden of the Romance of the Rose, we entered, we
played, we abided therein.
Today I’m here in Sonoma for Judy’s
(Judy Bacskai’s) 80th birthday party, and we’re all here at this
hotel in Sonoma – your family – because we wanted to be together at this time,
a year after you left us for good and for all. That party of the wisest and
kindest of women among her guests, the wisest and wittiest of guests, many of
them friends for fifty years and more, tracing their friendships back to
Hungary, that party glowed with the kind of conversation and deep relaxation of
body and soul that can only be there for the fulfilled. There where Marika
(Somogyi) took funny pictures of us we also looked at photographs of Judy as a
young girl with her family. That party took place not in a garden but among the
vines you loved on the grounds of a winery, where Judy’s lovely daughters
lovingly created this magical phantasmagoria for their beloved mother.
And as we all stood and chatted
while waiting for the restroom, a local woman waiting in line asked the group:
“Where are you all from?” The accents, you see. And of course all of us were
Americans, the Hungarians having lived in the Bay Area for many years, for
decades. Then when she heard me speak, the
woman asked me, “Are you with them?” I said that I was. “But you don’t
have an accent,” the woman observed. “I’m working on that,” I told her. And you would have been among the first to
laugh at my joke, you who knew everything about being a stranger in a strange
land, about nostalgia for the homeland, about the imagined return.
It was not to be your fate to have
a party like that, with so many of your friends and dear ones gathered together
in one place. They were, and are, scattered all over the globe, And nor was it
your fate to watch your grandchildren (“What grandchildren?”) grow into
remarkable people.
But you had other sources of
fulfillment, other wonders and other joys: you had your own ancient fountains
of stone spilling cool water into the freshly awakening present. Of course you
knew pleasure. But you also had a remarkable facility at being awe-struck with
very nature. With beauty and love. And enduring friendship.
And see how quickly the page fills
up with names – names of friends, names
of our children even: yes, we had them, we had children, we married, the whole
love story trended that way – but these letters of yours, the ones I am
answering, were committed to paper before all that, they were just about you,
about me, about your generous burgeoning love for me.
And what of
my love for you? Where is that expressed? For there is no other bundle of
letters, no other packet to open and read. There is no set of marks on paper
offering answers to all of the questions you raised. I called you, I sent you postcards,
but I wrote no letters.
Today, we would email of course.
And so the conversation would not be so one-sided, but nor would you have
written these finely chiseled essays, trials of love: true glimpses of your
soul.
Monday, 2 June. 1980
Sweet Heart,
I was going
to start this last night, but when I found I couldn’t even pour my ovaltine
into the beaker without spilling it decided I should go straight to bed. I am blue that you’re away. I hope the flight was OK and you didn’t need
your aisle-seat; I thought of you later arriving at Kennedy and hoped that
maybe Naomi (Cutner) would come and pick you up – and then to a new bed in
Debbie’s (Debbie Chapman’s) apartment.
With new sounds, colours, smells, people outside. I hope you slept OK. At least by the time you get this you will be
settled in and will be getting some sense of familiarity. Do write and tell me how the journey went and
how it all feels.
Yesterday
stayed grey well into the afternoon. The fog was low, still, driving back. So it matched my mood, rather, of feeling
blank. A good shower and then a strong cappuccino down at Walnut Square helped,
and then round to Stroud-house to pick up Patrick and Sydney (Patrick and
Sydney Wilkinson) to go and look at the egrets. The fog was still covering the tops of the
Berkeley Hills when we left at 11:00 and bounced down the rough surface of
Ashby to the freeway, from which we could just make out the Golden Gate (when
we were down there earlier it was completely invisible). The tide was out, so as we went round the bay
to the bridge there were lots of marshy smells.
Mt. Tam covered in fog as we crossed the bridge, though it was still
exciting going up the rise of the bridge high over the grey water to swoop down
the other side – rather like a roller-coaster.
Grey all the way to Stinson Beach, but the climb up to the coast-road
through Mill Valley was still exciting – that coast gets so rugged and we found
it strange to think we were only half an hour from Berkeley. We got those huge sandwiches from the grocery
store (which P and S loved) and then sat down at the Ranch at one of those
tables, wrapped up in our parkas, getting deliciously covered in mayonnaise and
mustard. A blackbird squawked at us
impatiently waiting for crumbs and goodies, and we looked up at herons and
egrets flying in and out. I thought of
you a lot there – and you were just coming in to NY. I was worried that Patrick would find the
climb up to the look-out difficult, but in fact he was fine and we just went
very slowly. Going up was grey and foggy
and rather mysterious through the woods, but when we got there the sun broke
through and the walk down had lovely lighting and colours from the sun through
the leaves and the shadows of overhanging branches. The birds were marvelous,
of course. Their long plumage seemed
more in evidence – perhaps they were ruffled up against the cold. There were still some heron – eggs with the
parents standing on one leg looking down very boredly at their produce, also
quite a number of fights as siblings squabbled for food. As we sat there on the wooden benches Sydney
turned and said, “You’ve got your ‘snake’ face on”! – apparently it’s a pert
attentive expression, looking from side to side and about to say to her “Now
you’re not to get worried, but there are three rattlesnakes/a bear/a
mountain-lion just behind you.” And in fact I was just about to tell her
about the gopher snake! So I did, but this time no gopher. But there were a lot of vultures
circling about, so plenty of reminders of nature in the raw.
Then down and on through that lovely pastured
area, so different a landscape yet again ( do let’s go and walk there when you
get back) and up Tomales Bay to Marshall – windy and rugged – A drink at the
Tavern and then round inland – we worked out a slightly shorter route, cutting
out Petaluma, via Novato and on to 101.
I was very sleepy, and came too close once to bumping into
someone merging in for my liking, but I didn’t say anything to P and S and we
got back OK. It turned out that it was
Patrick’s birthday – 73 years old!! – so Ron and Connie (Stroud) had
laid on a lovely celebration dinner. Ron
(Stroud) had gone and brought a copy of The
Times, which they both miss terribly (Patrick turned straight to the
obituaries!) and Connie had made a wonderful chocolate cake, terrifically
goo-ey and with a pink candle on it.
Melissa (Stroud) dressed up to the nines – she earns about $30 a week
baby-sitting and is buying lots of clothes, apparently, and especially shoes
with three- and four-inch high heels on which she teeters up and down stairs
feeling very sophisticated. So last
night: 3” heels and hair piled up, with a long slinky skirt (with an
appropriate split, of course). Patrick
even got close to a cuddle with Ru, speculation that Ru runs away from men
because their voices are lower, so hilarious imaginings of Patrick wearing a
skirt and hat saying in a high queenly voice “Come along, Ru darling”!
I finished
Barbara Pym. Everybody alone by the end,
and visions of Humphrey continuing for evermore to bring absurdly extravagant
armfuls of peonies to a woman in love with someone else, while James drifts
rather shallowly through a sequence of ill-defined relationships, somehow
lacking the energy to commit. Not sure
yet what I think of it as an ending: they are all a bit self-centered by the
end (or self-serving), and seen locked into it, but on the other hand Leonora
has at last had a good cry with Meg and has more self-knowledge – Perhaps it’s
only the men who haven’t changed much, and then who knows if Phoebe won’t come
back from Majorca (or is that wishful thinking on my part?).
Oh my
darling Linda how I am missing you and how I dread feeling this way, as I know
I will, for a month. My bed is so empty
without you there to feel your body beside me as we go off to sleep and your
arms to wake me up to and your breasts to caress as we wake into another day. I love you so so much. Be well and take very good care. All my love, – in longing passion.
Anthony
So
thoroughly my native soil
abandoned
me, that – Search the ground
and far and
wide across my soul –
a single
birthmark won’t be found!
Each home
seems empty, each temple void,
All ties are
burnt, all ashes buried.
But if a
bush should appear on my path,
Especially a
rowan-berry. . .
–
Marina Tsvetaeva
Wednesday,
June 3, 2015
Love of my Life,
Of course! You would begin with Patrick and Sydney –
your home away from home, your parents, really: substitute parents. Patrick
interviewed you when you applied (“went up”?) to Cambridge. Indeed, for many,
Patrick Wilkinson was the gentle and genteel Janus-face of King’s: as Martin
Bernal saw him: “culturally conservative, politically liberal.” Martin, too,
was interviewed by Patrick; Martin saw him as boyish in a public school way,
and “slightly pompous.” (Geography of a
Life, p. 133).
Oh my, I never thought of Patrick
as pompous – not with that wonderful sense of humor. Nor was his personal story
that of a pompous man. Yes, he was public school, but largely due to
scholarships. You and Patrick had that in common. Tall, gregarious, clever, he
stood out, but – perhaps since he was also good at sports, his peers seemed not
to mind his brilliance. As top scholar at grammar school, he regularly led the
boys in procession into chapel, apparently without stimulating much resentment.
The fact that he was surrounded by boys from wealthy families did nothing to
suppress his spirits.
 |
| Patrick Wilkinson |
From spartan Bodeites to Charterhouse, Patrick excelled at academics but never really found his spiritual home. Like you, and like so many of your peers, he found it at King’s. What’s so special about King’s College. (I feel like I should write it as a declarative sentence, the way Dinesh D’souza writes the title of his book, What’s So Great About America.) King’s was special, you told me, because of the brilliance of so many Kingsmen (Patrick used to say that King’s College alone could lay claim to more Nobel Prizes in Science than all of France). You said King’s was special because it was the first college to admit Eastern Europeans, Jews, students from the Third World. King’s was special too because of its tolerance. Patrick’s mentor in Classics was J.T. Sheppard, the first openly gay Provost at Cambridge. As you liked to remind me, one wasn’t gay then, one was homosexual, and until 1967, homosexuality was illegal in England, that is to say it was considered a criminal activity, in a country where elite unisex education fostered many an adolescent love affair.
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| J.T. Sheppard |
When I was re-housing your library I found a wonderful collection of works by J.T. Sheppard, and Googled him to find out who he was. I liked him immediately, both because of his attitude towards sports (in one of the pictures in Google’s archive he is playing – I’m guessing cricket –– with his pipe in his mouth). And I liked him for being the first out of the closet provost. But most of all I liked him for writing such words as these in Music at Belmont:
Shakespeare remembered how. . .
when the lover learnt the truth, and fought and died, his “light ghost
blissfully” rose to the Seventh sphere, “And there he saw with full avisement/
The erratic Stars, harkening Harmonie, / with sounes full of Heaven’s Melodie.”
Thence, looking down, he saw this little world, with all its vanities. . . and
in himself he laughed and went his way to the place Mercury appointed. (p. 135)
But still I didn’t see why you had
all these things belonging to J.T. Sheppard in your possession. Nevertheless I
made three ‘shrines’ in among your Classics books: one for you, one for
Patrick, and one for J.T. Sheppard. And then several months later, while
reading Patrick’s memoir: Facets of a
Life, I discovered that John Tressider Sheppard had been his mentor, just
as Patrick was yours, so the three shrines were perfect: a kind of spiritual line
of succession.
Your letters though are not about
Patrick, they are about Patrick and Sydney. About this couple who were like parents to you, and who
represented the best of what Britain had to offer: charming, intelligent,
self-effacing, witty – and who, as a couple, owed their formation to Patrick’s
literary career, as their marriage was dear to them, as they were parents to
two much-loved sons.
Over the years you would tell me stories of
them, always in the comic mode.
Stories about Patrick at Bletchley,
and other tales out of history, like the one about Patrick and Sydney meeting
in Africa during the war: two gallant superpeople (in height anyway) whose
long legs tended inadvertently to collide beneath the table where they worked.
Wry stories about their acquaintance: lovingly recounted if about seven-year
housemate Morgan Forster, less so if about self-involved, Machiavellian
academics who won’t be named herein. How alien all this was to America, land of
no (intentional) irony. Patrick and Sydney were made of that finely blended
substance – of adaptation and accommodation and the chameleonic survival
strategy called mimicry, all viewed through the lens of quirky humor.
Sydney told me her impression of
the Japanese following her visit to Japantown and the Asian Art Museum in San
Francisco. “Of course the Japanese are so very gifted at imitation,” she noted.
And now here were the Wilkinsons, Angles in California, demonstrating how not
to fall for the blandishments of nature, society, utopia.
For surviving nature one had one’s
snake face. There one could be as vigilant as one could be pert. Amidst species
of birds almost gone extinct, one used this face, this mimicry of fear, to ward
off Evil. Evil of egret feathers used in ladies’ hats, was that it? Surely not.
The reach of female vanity, of which both Patrick and Sydney heartily disapproved,
was limited after all. These birds,
these gawky, elegant anachronisms, could harm little of Earth save her ecology.
One could use one’s snake face to
survive in society. They were, after all, a couple belonging to a community
that had long thrived amidst prevailing market conditions. And what were those
conditions today? Many suitors competing
for the hand of Mlle. Conaissance Pour la Conaissance (Learning for Learning’s
Sake, shall we translate?) and, thanks to La Thatcher, the young lady’s dancing
card was full. Before the ensuing brain drain, Patrick had survived, nay thrived,
due to his prolific writing, academic and other and by force of his
inspirational teaching. He never earned the Ph.D. Didn’t need it – to be Fellow
and Don, and non-religious Dean of King’s. Sydney survived by being, first of
all, Sydney Eason, daughter of a Harley Street physician, then Patrick’s wife,
more intelligent than he, as Patrick was fond of saying, but grateful
nevertheless to experience, through her husband, all those things that made
life wonderful.
As for utopias, the Wilkinsons had
met with many such societies planted among the green curving hills of England.
They remained untempted, and would be even less likely to succumb to any
American version of heaven on earth, albeit Blithedale or California Dreaming. They
would not be led astray. They were here to see and to learn. They were here for
you.
And long before you courted me so
passionately, you made a plan to get them to visit Berkeley, to see you in your
new home, to bring with them a patch of England. (And was it really me you
courted, or California? Or both?)
Were you homesick? Perhaps. But you
were also completely open to new experience. You had a big poster of Dolly Parton
the back of your office door. You wore
Western shirts and belts. You had a stack of Country Western records: Waylon,
Willie and the boys. Ron went with you to hear them, and where you romanticized
and identified, he found amusement at sentiments imbued with country kitsch:
“You picked a fine time to leave me Lucile,/ Four hungry children and the
crop’s in the field. . . “ Ron might
well smile at the poor man’s exaggerated misfortune, for he was in no danger of being abandoned by his charming wife, who
hid her keen intellect behind seven variegated veils of illusion, and
camouflaged her striking beauty with surroundings attuned to domestic comfort
and tranquility. The Strouds had taken you in, a foreigner with talent and wit
and so many stories to tell in your dulcet Cambridge tones, and that meant into
their warm and happy home, where almost despite their generosity, that
happiness of a well-matched couple, devoted to their children and to one
another, remained non-shareable, not capable of replication, elusive.
And what of you? Not with the
parental Wilkinsons, not imbued with ambience of Stroudlike domestic bliss, not
romanticizing me. Just you. You are beginning to write. You were missing me, I
know. But you were starting something new: a journal of your feelings and
observations. You know, lately I’ve been finding out about new research on
Reality (unreal Reality really not your sort of thing, is it? That speculative
stuff, but this new stuff is more supported by science); anyways: here’s the
gist: we have evolved for fitness, which is to say for reproductive success,
which does not necessarily predispose us to see the word as it actually is. In
fact there is what almost amounts to an inverse proportion between the ability
to perceive Reality accurately, and genetic fitness. Even at our most accurate,
we see but a narrow band of the perceptible universe.
And this brings me back to you, for
what’s so notable about you in this first letter is how very lucid and awake
you are, experiencing this so-called narrow band of world with all of your
senses.
Ah, it’s an adventure, that
roller-coaster ride down the bumpy surface of Ashby Avenue. It’s an adventure
in the New World, and you are guiding your dear friends from the Old World
through this (by them) uncharted terrain. Who but you, Anthony, would so
describe it? All begins in chaos,
amorphous, misty, grey. Twice you mention this greyness. Twice you say that
despite the fog, it is “still exciting.”
You detail then the surroundings in
which you are totally engaged through your senses: initially your eyes met by
fog, as you find the bridge first invisible, later barely detectable in outline
– this while registering the rough surface of the road then curving out towards
the Bay breathing in those marshy smells. From this vantage point you soar like
a bird: “it was still exciting going up over the rise of the bridge high over
the grey water to swoop down the other side” –– and again the grey swoop: you
tell me it was “Grey all the way to Stinson Beach, but the climb up to the
coast-road through Mill Valley was still exciting –“ Then taste: those
delicious sandwiches. And sound: “A blackbird squawked at us.” And finally you
get nature to mirror the swoops and dives of your driving. On the climb to the
look-out to see the egrets and heron, going up is grey and foggy and rather mysterious
through the woods, just as though you and Patrick and Sydney are perambulating
somewhere in Middle Earth, but when you get there, you three questers, the sun
breaks through, and the light and colours are magical where the sun forces its
way through the leaves, and through the shadows made by the overhanging
branches.
You miss me. Yes. But you are
finding your way.
Wednesday,
3 June, 1980
My darling Linda,
Oh, how I
miss you! I haven’t been able to settle
down to anything that requires any concentration – just fidgeting around with
little bits and pieces, feeling desultory and subdued. And I lose out both ways (as it were) because
I still don’t really believe that you are not to be here for a whole month
more. You are in my mind just all the
time, and I talk to you a lot, and that in addition to any sighings and
fixations about you.
Even my attempts to be practical yesterday
weren’t very successful. I decided that
I really do want that fuchsia –– (nothing wrong with a little
self-indulgence right now) –– and also the price is cheap – for the same amount
you get a fiddly little thing at the Walnut Square Garden Shop) so down I go to
San Pablo only to discover that they are closed Mondays. Double
frustration, because I had already taken note of that when we were down there
on Saturday. At least I repotted my
drooping Euphoria, but now 24 hours later it looks just as droopy and
completely unimpressed by my intentions.
So, round
to Morton’s (Morton Paley) for a drink, and there he is out in the back yard on
his knees in the earth digging a big hole with a trowel, stripped to old jeans
and an undershirt. I don’t think it’s
just that I don’t associate Morton with that line of activity, he really
doesn’t look natural somehow. His two
laurel trees had arrived, and he was busy putting them in, mixing quantities of
fir mulch in, and watering. He has
changed his mind and he is going to do the lawn himself, so there were 14
large bags of compost piled up at one side, to be mixed in with the topsoil
over the next week. It is going to look
good and and the laurels will be very handsome
Morton was in a
good mood as Gunnel (Tottie) had called. She has returned to Stockholm now that
her term is over, and leaving Lund (which she now won’t go back to till
September) has cheered her greatly. She is looking forward a lot to our
Mendocino trip, says Morton. Also Morton’s brother has been seeing the lawyer,
as against locking himself away, so M. is a bit or optimistic in that scene
too. We quaffed our scotches and had a meal at the King Tsin– lots of delicious
squid.
Then to
Kate Wolf with Ron. She was wonderful.
La Peña was completely sold out by 8:30, and the atmosphere was just terrific. I
so much wished that you were there. She was just everything, somehow: lyrical,
passionate, lively, wistful, sad. Throughout she conveyed a complete openness
about her own vulnerability, without ever being sentimental –– gentleness and a
streak of familiarity with the ambiance all the time, so that she just
‘touched’ us in everything she sang. She had two instrumentalists accompanying:
a guitar/ dulcimer player called Nina, and a fiddler called Tom, who were both
magnificent. We were all cheering and clapping for more, and they were
obviously thoroughly enjoying themselves, feeling relaxed and playing with
marvelous rapport. She did a lot from her new album, and almost a the end did
the one which I know would make me cry if she did (so I didn’t know whether I
wanted her to do it or not), The one we listened to last Friday: “I look into
your eyes and see the love I always knew, / only this time, in a long time,/
it’s in me/ looking back at you.’ Stunning. She played for 2 and ½ hours, and
we both left feeling just wonderful. She made me think of you/ us so much.
She’s doing a couple more concerts in the Bay Area in the next few weeks, then
going off on tour until mid-August, so I’m very tempted to go and hear her next
week. I wafted home feeling a mixture of exhilarated and sad.
I dreamt
about you an awful lot last night and was upset when you weren’t there when I
woke up. Grateful that I didn’t have too much preparation to do for my classes
and having lunch with Morton was good. Birds seem to be a
lunch-theme, because a blue-jay came and hovered around me as we ate.
Dear Patrick has read through everything I’ve been writing (the Callimachus
commentary, my contribution to the Cambridge History, etc.) and he gave me a
supervision this afternoon. So it’s all much improved.
Oh dear,
this is all about me. What I’m thinking about all the time is you. Wondering
how you are, wanting you to know that I love you, hoping that you are missing
me, but also hoping fiercely that you are having a really good time. Are you
drawing and painting too? I am about to start Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, and that is going to
put you much in my mind too, I know. And how can I tell you how much the
physical you is in my mind constantly? Your thighs, your breasts, those lovely
eyes How I want so much to make love to you.
He prattles
on. Discipline, discipline. To the
mailbox, and then to move your car.
I kiss you
all over. With all my love, Sweetheart,
Anthony
Thursday, 4 June, 2015
Love of My Life,
That pink fuchsia
– you got it eventually, and trained it against that white stucco wall of yours,
where it blossomed and thrived, by solar power, outside your door in Berkeley.
In the unsparingly bright light of California, against that dazzling white
wall, it blossomed pinky-red and lush. Deep-hued flowers on a vine that curves
around the white stone of a village doorway – putting you time out of mind, dazzling
you: color and light and white stone.
Reminding you of the Greek Isles, another place where the play of light is a
constant source of delight.
You often
free-associated Greek places and statues and images to California light, (more
typically in your early years as a California resident), so that your falling
in love with California was graced by images and icons of classical antiquity. Indeed,
California gained in stature, and was tremendously enriched, by that comparison.
You did not free-associate in the opposite direction. Greece didn’t need to be
illuminated by any such comparison; her rich treasures from antiquity, her art,
poetry, history, and science, had their own internal glow, incandescent and
perpetual.
But the
fuchsia in your letter is representative, too, as all good fuchsias should be.
It is a kind of symbolization that is seemingly spun from the airy nothingness
of your fancy to magic the ancient world, and all the dreams it held for you,
across oceans, across time. And then
again it is the fuchsia of your love, suffering now in my absence, needing to
grow something new. And then again it is the flower of your creativity, which
you want to water and bless.
For you
aren’t the only gardener here. Nor are you the only suitor, the only lover maintaining
the position of the first foot of the twin compass, that moves only if the
other foot moves. We are drawing our circle with me the one who is running
obliquely. And Morton and Gunnel are drawing their circle too: your friend
stationary in California while his lady love moves obliquely to Stockholm. She
will return in due course, and according to that image end where she began. So
will I return, your firmness making me draw my circle right and complete.
The women
travel. The men tend their gardens. But how differently you tend them. I just
left. You are dreaming about a beautiful something which you apparently didn’t
want enough at first to pay the price. Then you wanted it and went to fetch it,
But when you arrived on Monday morning, the
store was closed, as you had noted when last in the store: “Double
frustration”.
Your
first glimpse of Morton is when you see him stripped down to jeans and a
T-shirt, digging in the earth. So uncharacteristic! Morton is after all, a
professor of English literature, a specialist on William Blake. But he is
putting himself into this business of gardening heart and soul. While you have
been dithering and pining about a fuchsia, Morton has been landscape gardening
in a manner worthy of the gardener’s laborer on a country estate. He’s been at
this longer than you have, both the pursuing love business and the gardening
business. Indeed, if there’s to be any pining over a lost flower, Gunnel is
much more flower-like than I. Last winter she appeared as the guest of honor at
a party held by Morton. She had hesitated over baking her special bread,
because, as she told me, “Everyone in Berkeley has some special talent.” I
don’t recall whether she made the bread or not, but she made sure she was
noticed. Scandinavian and a true blonde, she
wore a playful grey frock with rose-colored accents and the fullest skirt I
have seen on a non-performing adult female.
Whence came
this Princess? She came from Sweden, where both of her parents had been
dentists, and her father had discovered fluoride. She herself was a linguist,
interested in negatives, and in cultural differences in different language
usages. She taught me how interrupting
is completely different in different cultures. This American business if waiting your turn to
speak is considered passing strange by Scandinavians, who regularly talk over one another as a way
of chiming in and supporting the speaker.
Gunnel
was charming and professionally peripatetic, and Morton missed her mightily
during her away-time. But he has no time for pining over a missing flower; he
has a garden to build. You look around and see that he has got fourteen bags of
mulch: he is planning to do the entire yard himself, and he has ordered some
laurel trees, which you think are going to look very handsome.
The
two of you have a drink and go off to a Chinese restaurant for squid. How
perfectly appropriate. Knowing your proclivities and Morton’s, I am sure there
were jokes about the squid.
And
it’s time for a concert by Kate Wolf. For the fixed foot of a twin compass, you
aren’t doing too badly. In fact you are in your element, and as with the drive
to the Audubon Ranch, you are fully engaged. I love what you say about Kate:
“She was just everything, somehow: lyrical, passionate lively wistful, sad.
Throughout she conveyed a complete openness about her vulnerability, without
ever being sentimental–gentleness and a streak of familiarity with the ambiance
all the time” so that she touched you in everything she sang.
And I think about who else those
words might apply to. Yes, to you. For you are just everything in these letters,
writing from a place of vulnerability, of longing, registering your moods,
sketching your impressions of people and nature, avoiding sentimentality, which
means displaying honesty, making your home in authenticity, and being free of
illusion – as free as possible – as free as you can be.
For
all of the warm attentions I receive in these letters, I have to remind myself
that I wasn’t your first choice. How could I be, when your first choice was to
remain in England? To spend your adult life as Anthony Bulloch, Dean and Fellow
of King’s College, Cambridge. And you would have done, had not Margaret Thatcher
come along and demolished the remaining jobs. You could have come here in
bitterness, and occupied a tight little enclave of Classicists and Ex-pats. But
you always were a people person, you wanted to get out there , to do, to see
everybody; so you taught classes of four?––Five?
Eight hundred students, advising thousands besides. You made the best of it ,
you opened you heart and mind. Now you were falling in love. Not quite with
America, but with California. With absence. And with me.
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