Outright failure had probably been warded off, but a low 2:2. was the most I could expect and a third was on the cards. As I left the hall, my gown felt like a shroud. Suddenly I didn’t want to give all this up.
All this included May Week in its full splendour. Examinations out of the way, the lawn parties flowered. The June sun shone on them as if intent to prove that once in a way it could co-operate. As a minor luminary in the areas of theatre, literature and related arts, I had a fair sheaf of invitation cards - their timings mutually arranged by the hosts so as not to clash – but anyone with half a brain could figure out where the next party was and just walk in uninvited. The basic layout was the trestle table set up on a college lawn. In the men’s colleges, mostly the table was bedecked with nothing more grand than a bowl of fruit punch, the bowl borrowed from the college kitchen and the punch concocted according to loudly touted formulae promising instant oblivion to all who drank. Though for some imbibers this proved to be the case, if you kept your head you could move from one party to another and never reach the point at any of them when the ladle scraped the bottom of the bowl and came up with nothing in it except apple skins and orange pips.
If the girls were throwing the party, there was often something to eat and usually something better than punch to drink. I went to a white wine effort in Newnham which not even the presence of Consuela could ruin. She had such a triumph in As You Like It that she even forgot to cut me. I watched the production in Clare Gardens and had to admit that as well as looking maddeningly pretty she was actually pretty good. As a rule undergraduates don’t act as well as actors and she was no exception: but quite often they speak better, through being less inclined to make the lines their own instead of the author’s. Shakespeare, especially, rewards good speakers who are indifferent actors, whereas bravura actors who speak badly can only do him an injury. Consuela spoke surprisingly well for someone so histrionic. She took a long time to come on. There was an ornamental pool in the middle of the Clare Gardens acting area. Consuela held her head so proudly high that I thought she might walk into the water, but the lines fell like pearls.
Ros. But why did he swear he would come this morning, and comes not?
I could feel the eyes of a hundred of her friends on the back of my neck. No doubt I was being self-conscious. Why not? Everybody else was. It was the right place and the right time. Around the pool, among the flower-beds and between the hedges, the young, would-be, not-for-long actors deployed their hired costumes as they had been taught by some preposterously solemn young director who wanted to be Peter Hall or Trevor Nunn. In their element, the theatrical dons at the back of the natural auditorium threw decrepit fond looks at Orlando. They thought him charming. In that weather I thought them charming. They had their place in this enchanted forest. Absurdly I was sorry that I must soon lose mine.
Buddy threw a party in his back garden. Among the guests were what he described as one or two people from London. The champagne was endless. Under its influence I was able to predict that the young man with the huge mouth would never make it as a popular singer. Susannah York was there. She was so beautiful that I burst into tears. Luckily I was lying down by then, so nobody noticed. Karula dipped a napkin in the iced water of a champagne bucket and spread it over my face. I could see the sun through it. That should have been the most lavish May Week party. It was topped for opulence by Delmer Dynamo, who took over the whole back lawn of Pembroke and slew the fatted calf. Befitting his position as President and sole member of the Aubrey Attwater Society, Delmer had outfitted himself for the occasion in cream ducks, cricket boots, candy-striped blazer, straw boater and a monocle. The ensemble would have been suitable for receiving the Prince of Wales on board the deck of a steam yacht, somewhere around the turn of the century. Delmer could keep his monocle in place only by tilting his head so far back that he was shouting upwards, as if at a passing Zeppelin. Marenko, Strad and some other Americans wore rented white tuxedos with carnation boutonnières. As a barbershop quartet they stood in the rock garden and sang ‘The Whiffenpoof Song’. The Master and all the college dons were there. The Dean, somehow managing to keep his champagne glass empty without removing the pipe from his mouth, gazed upon Delmer with transparent fondness. Obviously the college would be sad to see him go. Equally obviously the college did not feel quite the same in my case. Finding myself trapped with the Dean, I was further unsettled to detect in his eyes a look which suggested that he considered himself trapped with me. He sought refuge in the past. ‘Brilliant boy, Oppenheimer. Jew, of course, but a real gentleman. Rutherford didn’t want to let him into the Cavendish, you know. Said he was too weak on the experimental side. But Thomson believed in him. Young Oppenheimer was really, really interested in my minerals. You should have heard him talk about birefringence. Brilliant, brilliant boy. You don’t get many like that now. There’s Dynamo, of course, but on the whole they’re a poor lot now.’ The Dean was making it plain that my very existence was an insult to his dream. His whole speech, the longest I had ever heard him give, was an exhalation: one long sigh.
I sighed myself when Delmer shyly confessed that his college had offered him an extra year just so that he could read in preparation for his graduate course at Columbia. ‘Hot shit, man,’ he crowed. ‘They coughed up.’ His monocle gleamed in the sunlight. He had done quite a lot of work and deserved his good fortune. I would have found it easier to be warm with fellow-feeling if it were not for the chill wind which I could feel blowing even in the fragrant, stationary air. Where else in the world would I ever fit in except here, where I had never felt the least urge to fit in? And truly I had no social ambitions in Cambridge beyond the tattered pink velvet jacket of the Footlights presidency. The Footlights committee had decided that if I could stay on for a year the jacket was mine for the asking, but the only way for me to remain a member of the university would be to enrol as a PhD student. For that I didn’t have the finance, and without at least a 2:1 result in the Tripos I wouldn’t be accepted for registration even if I had the money. So it was all over. In the grad pad, Brian C. Adams commiserated with me. ‘You hit the books at least a year too late,’ he said sympathetically. ‘Still, all that Footlights nonsense should come in handy if you apply for the BBC. Let me buy you another glass of sherry. The Amontillado’s really rather surprisingly fine.’ Brian C Adams was taking it for granted that he would get a first. So was everyone else taking it for granted that Brian C. Adams would get a first. There was a rumour that the College was considering taking him straight into Fellowship, so that he could sit up there eating venison where he belonged. Belonging must be a good feeling. Usually it was a feeling I got in or near Footlights, but the May Week revue, when I went to see it on the first nighty only made me feel left out. Romaine was in it. She did the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ routine with predictable results. There were people rolling about in the aisles like eels. Andy Mayer did his holy roller commercial. ‘Write away right away ... ’ I tried to be elated when my own material went well. It didn’t always and it mocked my physical absence even when it did. As far as I was concerned – which on this evidence wasn’t far – Footlights was unfinished business. In the Whim I sat anonymously, writing the kind of valedictory ode which treats personal disappointment as if it were the heat death of the universe.
Packed and all set to go, I turned up at Senate House to read the examination results with an air of fatalism which would have done credit to Sydney Carton, the only Dickens character I had managed to mention in the novel paper. (I had read the Classics Illustrated comic of A Tale of Two Cities when still a pupil of Kogarah Infants’ School.) When I saw that I had got a 2:1 I thought it was a misprint. When Brian C. Adams saw that he had got a 2:1 he thought the same. Eventually his fellow members of the Gray Society calmed him down by pointing out the truth: that he was simply too good for the Tripos and should have been doing a PhD all along, like Romaine Rand. For the first few days after he came out of shock, however, nothing except Nembutal wo
uld keep Brian C. Adams from throwing himself from his casement window into the courtyard. Exactly balancing his despair was my euphoria. I couldn’t see how I had done it, until Ron Maybey the Baby Don, breaking all the rules, told me. ‘Never seen such a spread of marks,’ he said, with evident disapproval. ‘Very, good score on the essay paper. Nothing at all on the Swift paper. Should be impossible. Ought to get something for writing your name. Think that worked for you in the end. They decided that you’d gone mad that day. No excuse at all for the novel paper. One of the examiners wanted to have you sent down for it. You be staying on?’ He was the only don, whether infant or adult, who had ever been sincerely interested in what I was writing, so I told him that I hoped to snare a research grant and be President of the Footlights simultaneously. ‘Don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘But I shouldn’t actually tell them that when you apply. Stress the academic side. Sherry?’
Suddenly it was all at least possible. I applied for a research grant on the basis of a burning desire to evaluate Shelley’s reading of the major Italian poets. The university wouldn’t actually decide whether or not it was going to finance this scheme until September. Meanwhile I told the retiring Footlights committee, who were about to leave on tour with the revue, that my research grant was in the bag. They handed over the pink jacket, which I stored with the rest of my stuff in the Pembroke linen room. My conscience was reasonably clear, as far as I could tell without actually examining it. If I didn’t get the grant, I could always give the jacket back. In the interim it seemed appropriate to go where Shelley had gone, at least up to the point where he drowned himself. Françoise was in Florence. To get there would be expensive. Luckily Robin was still in London. After hitting her for a small loan, I booked myself on the student charter flight which I have already described in my book Flying Visits. The reader will permit me the indulgence of making cross-references to my own work when I confess that the journey was never one I have been keen to repeat even in written form. I was exaggerating only when I said the plane swerved to avoid the Matterhorn. It didn’t swerve except when it was taking off. Most of the students really were seventy-year-old Calabrian peasant. women wearing black clothes and carrying string bags full of onions, and I really did have a nun sitting beside me who clutched my sweating palm as we came crabbing in to land. It was the way cheap flying was in those days. Today, the nightmare is in the crowded airport. When you get airborne you’re relatively OK. Then, the flight was in the lap of the gods. One of David Hockney’s early paintings had such a strong appeal for me that I kept a reproduction of it pinned to my wall wherever I moved. I liked its bright colours and cunningly innocent outlines, but most of all I liked its title: ‘The Flight into Italy’. Knowing that there was a chance I might have something to come back to made the letting-go all the sweeter, of course. If you can manage it, safe danger is always the best kind.
10. ATTACK OF THE KILLER BEE
Once again, Florence was my principal destination, but this time I had to go to Venice first, a detour I begrudged. Françoise was there on a fortnight’s study leave, to read manuscripts in the Marciana Library in the Piazza San Marco. Proust said that after he got to Venice his dreams acquired an address. For me the impact was, as you might imagine, nothing like so subtle. Never fond of the Vedutisti painters – Guardi, I thought, used too much lipstick and Canaletto was patently unreal – I was expecting a picture postcard. I knew all the jokes about Venice, of which the best was Robert Benchley’s telegram home: STREETS FULL OF WATER PLEASE ADVICE. The exquisite, I had persuaded myself, held no appeal. Give me the chiselled jaw and marble biceps of Florence every time. Thus prepared to be indifferent, I was in an ideal condition to be floored. Before the vaporetto was half-way down the Grand Canal I was already concussed. Heat focused by a nacreous sky like the lining of a silver tureen dissolved the surface of the water into a storm of sparks, which were projected as wobbling bracelets of pure light on the otherwise maculate façades of crumbling plaster and rotting marble. The whole place was being eaten alive by liquid luminosity. It was a vision of eternity as soluble as a rusk, God’s love made manifest as a wafer in the world’s wet mouth. Françoise had rented a little room just behind the Piazza San Marco. I set up house on her floor. While she read in the library I made a library desk for myself on a café table at the city end of the Rialto, just to the left of where the steps of the approach to the bridge formed a natural rostrum from which the characters of The Merchant of Venice might step down into the main acting area. The tourist season being at its height, most of the people who came stepping down were Americans. Isn’t it weird?’ a woman in a baseball cap asked another woman in a baseball cap. ‘When they say Accademia I can understand them but when I say ACADEMY they can’t understand me at all.’ The baseball caps were appropriate because both women were the shape of a baseball. Nothing could break the spell. There I sat reading, periodically lifting my head to confirm all over again that Canaletto had been so literal he might as well have used a Hasseiblad. Trying out for the Regatta, the Bucintoro swept by with whomping oars, a ceremonial dream boat dripping gold. Every gondolier sang like Gigli. From Françoise I borrowed a volume of Leopardi’s Zibaldone, the elaborate notebooks in which the great, crippled poet kept track of his vast learning. Religiously looking up every unknown word in a dictionary, I eventually broke through the almost tangible barrier that separates being only just able to read from being able to read with reasonable ease. I started to keep a notebook myself. Dignified with the name of Journal, it would run to a dozen volumes in the next nine years. ‘Volumes’ is a grand word for tatty exercise books. They must be somewhere amongst my junk. One day I must look into them and see what I thought important. Puerilities, I imagine. But the soi-disant journal doubled as a commonplace book, and to that extent it was useful. The habit of copying out was a good one to acquire. Though the main idea was to build up fluency in reading a foreign language, the beneficial side-effect was to fix a lot of good stuff in my head, if only at the level of the half-forgotten. The waiters soon learned to approach me only when I signalled. For a while I thought they were smiling tolerantly because as sons of the Most Serene City they were pleased to see a visitor inspired by intellectual effort. Later I learned that they were being even more tolerant than that. Like all the personnel of the service industries in Venice, they lived in the industrial satellite towns, commuted to work, and would have preferred to bring me a fresh glass of iced coffee every thirty seconds. They needed the tips.
When Françoise got out of the library we would have lunch in a cheap restaurant called the Trattoria al Vagon. You could get there by walking from either St Mark’s or the Rialto. The path was a maze in either case, crossing little bridges from island to island, and never turning a perfectly square corner within the island itself. We always had to allow half an hour for getting lost. Years later I tried to find the Al Vagon and couldn’t. Perhaps it was never there. It was so good and cheap that it might have been a dream. The pasta was always al dente, an expression which could be pressed into service as the name of a ferocious gangster. Lui Medesimo (‘he himself) was Al Dente’s conceited sidekick. Françoise generously laughed at these heavy jokes while I drank her share of the claret to top up mine. Even for her, who preferred to stay sober, there was always the sense that we were living out a carnival scene by Longhi – another painter whom I had previously despised, and of whom I was now starting to see the point.
Yet again, though, it was the Renaissance that carried the heavy charge. Hungry as always for the main event, I was disinclined to be sidetracked by the quirky, the decorative or the merely pretty. Two minutes’ walk from the Al Vagon, Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni rode sternly through the Piazza San Giovanni e Paolo. There were pigeons on his helmet and a barge full of empty coke bottles in the canal at his feet, but his grandezza was only increased. To every Australian schoolboy of my generation, Bartolomeo Colleoni was the Italian cruiser sunk by H.M.A.S. Sydney. The Sydney’s b
ows were subsequently built into the stone harbour wall near Kirribilli pier under the north end of the Harbour Bridge. But in Venice I could see the real Bartolomeo, the condottiere four centuries into his immortal ride, his image more immediate than the man himself, or any man alive, even me. The contained energy of that bronze horseman kept me occupied for what seemed like hours. Probably, it was less than that, but certainly I stared longer than Byron did, who in one of his plays – either Marino Faliero or The Two Foscari, I forget which – let slip the opinion that the grim rider was made of marble. It is very doubtful if Byron ever went out of doors in Venice. Recovering in his room between visits from insatiable noblewomen, he would totter asymmetrically to the window, check that the Grand Canal was still there, and turn back wearily to the rumpled couch. Poor bastard.
Françoise believed in her mission to civilise me. When the white heat of the early afternoon sky had eased to a tolerable azure, we would tour the outlying churches by vaporetto, on the hunt for Bellini. Most of his capital works were in the Accademia or else in churches close to the centre, but there were others further out, and anyway even his minor canvases were major. Until then, I had been under the impression that all Bellini had ever painted was Madonnas in blue anoraks nursing babies the size of high school children in front of a green shantung antimacassar, with distant landscape an optional extra. Now I saw the range of his humanity, his old men and infantile angels all shaped from pure colour, the painterly monumentality organically complete. In my journal I solemnly noted every painting, enrolling Bellini on my growing list of indispensable seminal figures. His namesake the composer was already on the list. So was Liszt. The honour roll was meant to be growing shorter, but no matter how ruthlessly I pared it down, there was always another genius around the corner demanding to be let in. My appreciation of Tintoretto was not much enhanced by being in his home city, which because of its wet walls has never been kind to the fresco, tempting the business-minded painter towards too-big canvases it took a football team of assistants to help him fill. Most of Tintoretto’s best paintings were done on a smaller scale and eventually exported: I had already learned to admire him elsewhere. Titian’s last manner, however, was well represented in the Venetian churches. ‘Like Shakespeare’s sonnets and Beethoven’s late quartets,’ I remember telling my journal, ‘Titian’s valedictory paintings have a divine carelessness.’ Veronese, I decided, was in Paris and London: to all intents and purposes he had left town. Lacking the means to get out into the surrounding Veneto, we saw little of Tiepolo. I decided to like him anyway: Giambattista, that is, not Giandomenico. I was very strict in my judgments. Françoise, who had heard my unshakeable convictions revised before, patiently upheld the reasonable viewpoint – a propensity which, modest to a fault, she considered her limitation. She also, I need hardly add, paid for the museum tickets, the vaporetto rides, most of the meals, and the bus trip to Padua.