Nostalgia

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Collected Essays (1998)

  I mentioned his great preoccupation with egotism, so many 24-0 NO BODY KN OWS MY NAME of his people being centered on themselves, necessarily, and disastrously: Vogler in The Magician, Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries, the ballerina in Summer Interlude. "I am very fond of Summer Intedude," he said. "It is my favorite movie. "I don't mean," he added, "that it's my best. I don't know which movie is my best." Summer Interlude was made in 1950. It is probably not Bergman's best movie-! would give that place to the movie which has been shown in the States as The Naked Night-but it is certainly among the most moving. Its strength lies in its portrait of the ballerina, uncannily precise and truthful, and in its perception of the nature of first love, which first seems to open the un iverse to us and then seems to lock us out of it. It is one of the group of films-including The Waiting Women, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Brink of LijC- which have a woman, or women, at their center and in which the men, generally, are rather shadowy. But all the Bergman themes are in it: his preoccupation with time and the inevi tability of death, the comedy of human entanglements, the nature of illusion, the nature of egotism, the price of art. These themes also run through the movies which have at their center a man: The Nalud Night (which should really be called The Clown' s Evening), Wild Strawberries, Ibe Face, Ibe Sev enth Seal. In only one of these movies-The Face-is the male female relation affirmed from the male point of view; as being, that is, a source of strength for the man. In the movies con cerned with women, the male-female relation succeeds only through the passion, wit, or patience of the woman and de pends on how astutely she is able to manipulate the male con ceit. The Naked Night is the most blackly ambivalent of Ber gman's films-and surely one of the most brutally erotic movies ever made-but it is essentially a study of the mascu line helplessness before the female force. Wild Strawberries is inferior to it, I think, being afflicted with a verbal and visual rhetoric which is Bergman's most annoying characterist ic. But the terrible assessments that the old Professor is forced to make in it prove that he is not merely the victim of his women: he is responsible for what his women have become. THE NOR THERN PR OTE STANT 241 We soon switched from Bergman's movies to the sub ject of Stockholm. "It is not a city at all," he said, with intensity. "It is ridic ulous of it to think of itself as a city. It is simply a rather larger village, set in the middle of some forests and some lakes.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  But I think we have to look grim facts in the face because if we don't, we can never hope to change them. These vanished aristocracies, these vanished standard bear ers, had several limitations, and not the least of these limi tations was the fact that their standards were essentially IN SE ARCH OF A MA JOR I TY 21 7 nostal gic. They referred to a past condition; they referred to the achievements, the laborious achievements, of a stratified society; and what was evolving in America had nothing to do with the past. So inevitably what happened, putting it far too simply, was that the old forms gave way bef ore the European tidal wave, gave way before the rush of ltalians, Greeks, Span iards, Irishmen, Poles, Persians, Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, wandering Jews from every nation under heaven, Turks, Ar menians, Lithuanians, Japanese, Chinese, and Indians. Every body was here suddenly in the melting pot, as we like to say, but without any intention of being melted. They were here because they had wanted to leave wherever they had been and they were here to make their lives, and achieve their futures, and to establish a new identity. I doubt if history has ever seen such a spectacle, such a conglomeration of hopes, fears, and desires. I suggest, also, that they presented a problem for the Puritan God, who had never heard of them and of whom they had never heard. Almost al ways as they arrived, they took their places as a minority, a minority because their influence was so slight and because it was their necessity to make themsel ves over in the image of their new and unformed country. There were no longer any universally accepted forms or standards, and since all the roads to the achievement of an identity had vanished, the problem of status in American lif e became and it remains today acute. In a way, status became a kind of sub stitute for identity, and because money and the things money can buy is the universally accepted symbol here of status, we are often condemned as materialists. In fact, we arc much closer to being metaphysical because nobody has ever ex pected from things the miracles that we expect.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You remember those trees down behind the CCF sheds. I don't know what kind they were, their crowns were much paler than the rest, they seemed to gleam in the dark." The dense twiggy mass around the trunk, like some involuntary eruption of secondary life, the leaves dusty and sticky, dropping on to the verandah of the army hut, which by a trick of memory appeared with taped-over windows, as if in wartime. The leaves would be falling even now, the life of the school must still be going blindly on: perhaps kids were huddling at this moment in the smokers' riverside bivouac beyond, or snogging intently in the dubbin-scented hut, unbuttoning each other in the glow of SM McGregor's breathy gas-fire. This was an aspect of the corps that Willie, who had been big in the army cadets, was unaware of; and maybe the hut seemed a glamorous rendezvous to me because I had opted out, and spent those long parade-ground afternoons in the alternative vacancy, the smoky idleness, of "community service". "Do you like being out at night?" I asked, not because I wanted to know, but so as to license what I wanted to say about myself. "I haven't really done it much. Except you know . . . in the car." "It may be too late for you now. You need to do it when you're a lad and you feel like part of a secret society, and an old, country thing, standing still and seeing night-sighted animals busying about." "Not being night-sighted oneself. . ." "After a while you are. I can't remember the individual nights, isn't it awful, that whole phase of my life has somehow rendered down to a few scenes—being out under the trees, lying in each other's arms looking at the stars, our naked legs in night breezes and moonlight, seeing a fox trotting round and round on the path by the gym, trying to levitate on the cricket pitch: you remember the levitation craze, I think I did actually levitate . . . and of course all the things we did to each other, well, it was levitation in a way, I don't need to tell you what love's like, but perhaps that's why it's all a mood or just an impression of blackness. I was too pressed up against him to see." "You seem to have seen a lot," said Willie kindly, perhaps touched by my moist-eyed, slightly fanatical manner.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Did he supply St Narcissus?" "Yes, he did—though in the war they had to make do with plain serge suits, which everybody else was rather glad about. In fact I believe the gold thread was all commandeered for military uniforms." Poor dimmed Narcissi! "And you lived above the shop?" "Yes—in St Thomas Street. I was there all the time until I went away to university. It was a nice old place, but odd having the shop downstairs—I remember playing behind the counter after hours, and a sense of being privileged but also being left behind." Which chimed distantly with Paul's situation now, at the Museum. He clasped his hands in front of him and studied his thumbs. "Various odd things happened in the shop," he said. "I didn't know for a long time why it was that people called late in the evening and used to talk with my father in the stockroom. They would come in during the day, as well, men and women, and in the school holidays when I used to work in the shop sweeping up and opening the door. I noticed how they would often ask for something rather unusual, some purple ribbon, and be shown through to the back, whilst I would be told to go out on errands. They used to leave with brown paper parcels which I thought would have held really a very large amount of purple ribbon. I did once try asking about it and my father took me aside very solemnly and said I must never mention it again. And of course that it wasn't a game." I pictured the future Rembrandt scholar running errands through the town and leaping to the shop door when its bell tinkled for a new customer—and with something of his present dignity already. "What did you think they were doing?" Paul smiled wistfully. "I mustn't exaggerate my innocence. You probably know about the Rexists, who were the French-speaking fascists in this country, and of course there were various Flemish groups of Nazi sympathisers. I think I just absorbed my parents' contempt for them, as a child does—though the picture wasn't entirely clear: several people on my mother's side of the family welcomed the idea of our becoming part of a vast new Germany. It's too complicated to explain. Anyway, I don't need to explain. Many of the Nazis went straight into the local militia the Germans raised. I remember a boy called Frank, who'd been an assistant at our shop and played with me when I was little, coming in one day in uniform and shouting 'Heil Hitler' when I opened the door." Paul muttered the infamous salute in a half-suppressed belch.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I rambled home from someone's house, alone but charged up by intense communings with virtual strangers, the compulsive unity that follows a funeral and its unambiguous end. The night was damp and still, the street-lamps hazed among the nearly bare trees, a moment I recognised when no one was about except barmen from pubs walking their Alsatians, taxis bringing passengers from the last train and leaving their perfume of burnt fuel. I turned into Fore Street and saw an unusual phenomenon: across the far end a great roll of pearly fog that gave the lamps at the common's edge the air of a promenade at a melancholy lakeside resort. Fog had become so rare in my adult years that I looked on it as something miraculous, lucent but opaque, unaccountable in where it lay. I walked towards it slowly, down the middle of the road, and when I got to the low fence, stepped over and into its drizzly embrace. To my slight surprise, it was almost dark inside the fog, but I soon hit the path, and the land was so familiar . . . I turned up my coat collar and found it misted with little drops. I was exhausted but hated the idea of going back to my room with my thoughts. The path steepened, and then suddenly the fog ended. I came up out of it into a different night of glittering air and a strong enough moon to throw long shadows in front of trees and bushes. I loped on up to the top with a shiver of exhilaration. The fog circled the hill, and lay thick away to the east—the Flats were submerged, beyond them only the leafless crowns of the tallest trees showed vaguely in its surface. To the south other hills rose out of the pale floe like inaccessible friends, who none the less shared the sense of occasion, the hour or two of local sublimity. I pictured the silent foreign streets I was going back to, under the same moonlight. It came to me that it must be tomorrow—no, later today—that Helene was to be married. Surely she couldn't sleep. I wandered along the ridge almost expecting to be able to see the city's towers. When I got to the bench I found I wasn't alone. It gave me a moment's gooseflesh, as if the person sitting there had abruptly materialised. I wondered if I'd been talking to myself aloud.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Phil, of course, had no idea what we were looking for. But he was very quick to spot that the subject of one photograph, taken from an odd angle so that he seemed to turn into a kind of naked coastline, was Bobby. And Bobby turned up quite a bit, in soulful vigil at a window, or in his whites, more dazzling then, against a bright white wall in Tunis, or, less convincingly, leaning into lamplight over an old book. There were some camp fantasies—Bobby as sailor; or as Airforceman, with perched cap and oiled kiss-curl. In one, dated eighteen years ago, he appeared, wearing only sandals and a cincture of vine-leaves, between two classical garden statues. Staines could have had no difficulty in inducing that expression of tossed-back pagan pleasure: degeneracy was already evident in the luscious good looks and the unclassical softness of his body. It seemed that Bobby must have run off with the much older man, by then perhaps an acclaimed society portraitist with the entrée to country houses. I imagined Bobby being pampered and disapproved of by their hostesses, and, though the Sixties were beginning, posing for the adoring Staines in the artistic, Sicilian manner of an earlier age. When Staines came back, empty-handed, I asked him about Sandy Labouchère and Otto Henderson. ‘There is a picture of them,’ he said, ‘somewhere. I didn’t actually know them much—I’m too young, you see, really to be of use to you … They were a gruesome couple when I met them: Labouchère was a hopeless drunkard, and so was Henderson. They stuck together, more or less, painting the most extraordinary pictures, morbid to a degree and full of decadent young men twice as large as life—in all respects. Otto was really a cartoonist, of course, though sometimes he managed to get work in the theatre. I saw some strange opera he did, with the most shaming caryatids and things, and slaves. It had the most uncomfortable-looking furniture in it; I remember one critic said, “Mr Otto Henderson was responsible for the misère-en-scène”.’ ‘What happened to him?’ ‘Do you know, he may well still be alive. I haven’t heard of him for an age: he was living, the last time I had news, in a basement in Earl’s Court, I think it was, with a sort of sect. When his friend finally drank himself to death, poor old Otto did become a bit queer. I’ve got a painting by Labouchère, by the way, if you’d like to see it. It’s rather specialised, so I keep it stored away.’ ‘I would be interested.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Now can you find me in this one?’ I asked. It was my first-year College photograph. I looked along the rows so as not to give him any clues; but I need not have troubled. It was with only a slight diffidence that he brought his finger down on me, standing in the middle of the back row. I looked utterly sweet, short-haired, and rather sad, giving the impression that my mind was on higher things. That this was not the case was made clear by the next photograph, of the swimming team. It was posed by the pool, where the springboard was anchored to the concrete; three boys stood on its landward end so as to make a two-tiered composition. The Matheson Cup, the perfectly hideous schools trophy which we had won that year, was held aloft by Torriano, the boy in the centre of the back row. But the most noticeable thing about the picture was what by then could fairly have been called my manhood. I had on some very sexy white trunks with a red stripe down the side; and I remember how, when the picture went up on school NoBos, with a list for people to sign who wanted a copy (normally not even all the members of the team in question), there was an unprecedented demand, and the trunks themselves, of which I was crazily fond, disappeared from the drying-room overnight and I never saw them again. On my face, rounder and saucier then, there was an expression of almost disturbing complicity. Rupert’s finger came down, hesitatingly though, on me. ‘That’s you,’ he said. ‘Who’s that?’ ‘That’s Eccles,’ I said reflectively, haunted for a second by the already period-looking photograph, in which the faces took on a greater clarity as time went by. The boy’s stocky body and outward-bulging thighs were untypical build for a swimmer, but he used to move with a bucking, concentrated energy. With his sleek black hair, long pointed nose and a smile showing his small, square teeth, he looked impishly young and, with his head tilted slightly to one side, would give, for as long as the picture survived, an impression of unqualified charm. ‘Is he the one that changed his name?’ ‘Yes, that’s right.’ ‘Why did he?’ ‘Well, it wasn’t so much him as his father, I suppose, or his grandfather even. He was Jewish, and before the war Jewish people changed their names so that people wouldn’t know. His real name was Ecklendorff.’ ‘Why didn’t they want people to know what their name was?’ ‘It’s a long story, old boy. I’ll tell you another time.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "It may be too late for you now. You need to do it when you're a lad and you feel like part of a secret society, and an old, country thing, standing still and seeing night-sighted animals busying about." "Not being night-sighted oneself. . ." "After a while you are. I can't remember the individual nights, isn't it awful, that whole phase of my life has somehow rendered down to a few scenes—being out under the trees, lying in each other's arms looking at the stars, our naked legs in night breezes and moonlight, seeing a fox trotting round and round on the path by the gym, trying to levitate on the cricket pitch: you remember the levitation craze, I think I did actually levitate . . . and of course all the things we did to each other, well, it was levitation in a way, I don't need to tell you what love's like, but perhaps that's why it's all a mood or just an impression of blackness. I was too pressed up against him to see." "You seem to have seen a lot," said Willie kindly, perhaps touched by my moist-eyed, slightly fanatical manner. "Urn, have another drink," and he leant across with the bottle and I let him pour as if unaware that I had to say when. The lovely confidence of that tarnished gold liquid in my grasp, the sense of being provided for, of knowing one could come through. I plucked off my glasses to rub my eyes and saw the lamp-lit room and my friend's pale face in an intimate crepuscular blur, like a little etching by Edgard Orst. And I felt the spirit of the time that I had summoned up pouring past me like a night-wind through woods around a lonely shack or long-abandoned Nissen hut where two boys squat and banter over a ten-minute fire of twigs and rubbish. My heart was thumping with the certainty that when I put my glasses on again Dawn himself would be leaning forward from the sofa, his teenage eyes and mouth unveiled by love. "Of course, we had to get away from Lawrence Graves." "Christ, I'd quite forgotten . . ." "Old Graves was mortally put out by the whole business. I tried to make him feel wanted, and I used to have Dawn round for Bruckner and Mahler sessions in our study, but Graves got into absolute paroxysms of irritation if we even smiled at each other. He'd be conducting away and though the music was all part of it, Dawn and I could almost forget it was going on somehow, we were so full of our own latest memories and plans, and he would catch us smiling at each other . . . I think he wanted to kind of hijack our affair, take it over or blow it up." "He was in love with you himself, presumably."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I think his father's decision to show me what he was at work on was spontaneous, and so perhaps regretted: a moment of mid-evening confidence when a quiet chat, politely repeating itself and running down until it was time for me to go, would have been expected and even welcome. He had gone ahead, while I was saying to Marcel with a new fake-sternness, "I should like, you would like", insisting on a pointless and unobserved distinction. I thought with surprising nostalgia of chasing velvety butterflies of vocab with Luc; and that in turn called up a summery haze of anxiety and desire. Echevin's study surprised me by being where it was: he had entered what I thought could only be a cupboard in the thickness of the wall but when I followed I passed through a short brick tunnel and climbed two steps into a bright, crammed office on the first floor of the adjacent building: the director's office of the Orst Museum. I wondered if he regularly came back here after supper for silent work uninterrupted by the phone or the half-curious public chattering up the stairs that I saw through an open door beyond. A public brought in by the damp lowland weather, obedient to a notice in a hotel hallway or to a Michelin guide: what would they take away from these cryptic works of art? And what would their creator have cared for these chance visitors? Echevin gestured to a portrait photograph high on the wall: a lean-faced man of fifty, with a short, pointed silvery beard, sitting with cheek tilted towards the jewelled knob of a cane: the fastidious ironic look of the heterosexual bachelor, half dandy and half clergyman, and an air of steely enigma, almost as if he sought to outdo the starlit sphinx he had painted, which now stood propped against the opposite wall with rubber corners shielding the coffee-coloured gilt of its frame. ("Just back from a Symbolist show in Munich," my host explained, proudly, but as if it were a bore.)

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Hunting moodily through my books for something to read at Dawn's funeral I came across Poems Old and New by Peregrine Dawlish, with an inscription to me, and beside it the copy of Merrifield's Love and Earth that I had felt bold enough to ask to borrow that day eighteen years ago, and had never returned. I felt dully guilty about it, but it was too late now. Flicking through the Dawlish I remembered that he had been a good Georgian poet with a tight lyric grace; it was later that he mistook his gifts, made painful attempts to get modern, shrilly took on free verse and low-life subjects and made a fool of himself. You could see why Squire might have praised him at fifteen: I suppose he used the same words as Dawlish had solemnly addressed to me. Looking back, I thought I could make out the suspect emotion of that afternoon, the old man's vicarious excitement in acclaiming talent he had only imagined, the tone of foolish self-congratulation. But at the time, it was so much what I wanted to hear that I took a nearly erotic pleasure in it. When, after a moment's hesitation, he lent me the Merrifield, and capped it with Poems Old and New, with the further wingbeat of wonder at finding what Perry was short for, I felt as if I'd been received into a succession. There was something about the light that day, the penumbra beyond which he sat in the leafy window, that fixed what he said in amber. I could still hear his hollow augury now; like the words of a fairground palmist, hard entirely to discount. Early that summer holidays I wandered up on to the common after supper. Charlie was just home from Cambridge with a Third that no one quite knew what to say about. His line was that he was a maverick genius, that exams weren't where he shone. There was a sort of smothered row (we never had any other kind) about his waist-length hair and its probable impact on anyone who might interview him for a job. He had a girlfriend at last, whom he deferred to on everything: "Lisanne says you shouldn't boil vegetables", "Lisanne thinks Schubert's really boring". After a couple of days Lisanne had become an invisible antagonist in our house, the subject of Charlie's veneration and everyone else's keenest loathing. We almost longed for her to come and stay, so that we could answer her back in person.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I turned to the photograph at the head of the article: it was grey on grey, the windows pewtery and opaque, the dead light of certain spring days. The young trees in the garden in front were orderly, suburban. "Une petite forteresse de reve", one old acquaintance had called it; another saw it as a crystallisation of Orst's cold, loyal nature, his "British" reserve and desire not to be too intimately known. For some reason I found myself thinking of it on the morning of his death: I imagined Paul running, cycling, to the house and hearing the news, a doctor making a brief last visit; and then the servants who communicated by gesture, stunned into natural silence, closing curtains and shutters, while the telephone rang, and the tables and chairs were left in the dining-room all day. 2 Under Woods Chapter 14 Rough common is a common and also a small town, south of London. The town was nothing much until the 1790s, when its principal inn gained importance as a posthouse on the way to fashionable south-coast resorts. A watercolour by David Cox, done in 1812, shows the white weatherboarded cottages with spindly verandahs that run along the common's edge; and in the brief broad progress of Fore Street, with its pollarded limes and Wednesday market, there is still a hint of the Regency sense that a good time might be had there. The post-road itself is now swept off into a chasmal by-pass, crossed by high footbridges that lead to new, remote parts of the town. I'd been there at night sometimes with people I'd picked up. The cars thrurnrning past below added a certain desolate glamour to my vertigo. The old part of town is all the quieter, as if its hubbub were subsiding to the wind-gusted calm of the common itself. The common has always been there, in its modest, unstinting way, rising beyond low railings at the end of Fore Street to rabbit-pitted sandy heights and thicketed folds. At the top it is suddenly steep—a scribble of path, a concrete bench and the blunt monument of a trig-point against the sky. From here, you look over a large pond, sandy-edged but black-hearted, and the beginnings of a wood that runs in a long dense belt to the common's further end. On a clear winter's evening the view from the trig-point takes in surprising distances of sombre downland and the skyward glare of the Kent and Surrey suburbs. The town stretches out along two sides of the common, westward past the Regency cottages on a socially aspiring curve that takes in the de Souzays' small mansion and other large houses before reaching the leafy dead end of Blewits, home of Sir Perry Dawlish; and eastward, descending past the row of mock-timbered villas where we lived to the crumbling thirties housing-estate, the Flats, with its useful late shop.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "It's brought so much back," I said. I went on about that summer, the horrible empty weeks which had just begun to haunt me with their apparent denial of what had come before and of the promise they had seemed to give of what was to follow. I jumped and told him about how good at drawing Dawn was: there was something sexily luxurious about the patient sittings, when the boy who had had me for real an hour before would perch across the room and stroke my outline on to paper, and I felt as if it was me who was drawing him, studying his absorbing gaze, his tongue on his lip where mine liked to be, or wetting his thumb to blur the charcoal with it. "Were you ever caught?" "I don't think we ever actually were. There were several occasions of absolutely split-second escapes, you know, when you leap into a deeply studious pose with your pubes trapped in your zip. Everyone knew we did it a lot, of course, and mocked at us out of envy, but though that wasn't a secret, the sex itself was, somehow. But it's like that, isn't it, it's amazing what you can manage, what you can fit in in the unsuspected intervals of the day." "I think I must have been a great innocent at school," said Willie, with a certain self-satisfaction. "We went out at night a lot of course. We used to meet up by the river." For an instant only I seemed to smell the damp mud and half-see the river moving in the dark, conspiratorial or perhaps indifferent. "You remember those trees down behind the CCF sheds. I don't know what kind they were, their crowns were much paler than the rest, they seemed to gleam in the dark." The dense twiggy mass around the trunk, like some involuntary eruption of secondary life, the leaves dusty and sticky, dropping on to the verandah of the army hut, which by a trick of memory appeared with taped-over windows, as if in wartime. The leaves would be falling even now, the life of the school must still be going blindly on: perhaps kids were huddling at this moment in the smokers' riverside bivouac beyond, or snogging intently in the dubbin-scented hut, unbuttoning each other in the glow of SM McGregor's breathy gas-fire. This was an aspect of the corps that Willie, who had been big in the army cadets, was unaware of; and maybe the hut seemed a glamorous rendezvous to me because I had opted out, and spent those long parade-ground afternoons in the alternative vacancy, the smoky idleness, of "community service". "Do you like being out at night?" I asked, not because I wanted to know, but so as to license what I wanted to say about myself. "I haven't really done it much. Except you know . . . in the car."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I saw him wince to have the city of his dreams mocked. I knew to him it was size and grandeur and fashion-shoots and nights at Heaven; it wasn't crap and decay, the maze trodden by the wispy-bearded youngsters who slept in doorways when you glamorously left Heaven at two or three. "Oh, it was great. I did a lot of work, you know, modelling? Everything from anoraks right down to jockey-shorts!" "And who was all this for?" "That was for C & A," he said negligently. "Soon I shall be on all the bus-stops." "And do you show off your dick in the C & A brushed-cotton slacks?" "No, you are not allowed to," he giggled. "They make you put it out of the way." So living models had to aspire, as one had sometimes surmised, to the generalised sexlessness of the old chocolate mannequins. He took the opportunity to change gear, I remembered it all now, up to the sing-song fifth of his fantasies and achievements, he set the cruise control button, he might go on for hours. "I met this really sexy man in the Bloomsbury area, he is in the fashion business—well, he makes window displays, you know, they call them charm pads, and—" "Charm pads!" "Yes, you know, charm pads for the jewellery and rings. What you call the charms. Well, he is an older man, but still very sporting and fit. He has a huge apartment with the most fantastic curtains . . ." What was an older man, I wondered? I was looking at Ty close to, and in a better light than when we had first met: he might be my age or more, to judge from the little creases around his eyes when he beamed at his own anecdotes, though in composure, and in a general innocent vanity, he was amazingly fresh and young. I began to admit to myself how like Luc he was, the high cheek-bones, the rather small, guarded, grey eyes, the thick fair hair. I hadn't realised before—of course, I hadn't even met Luc yet that night at the Bar Biff: I was looking at anyone in that first week as though they might be my friend and my future. I wondered if Ty had been an abortive first attempt, a dry-run, at Luc, who was made to the same formula, but was the real brute thing. " . . . anyway, he said, 'Why don't you come to my house, which is in the country, because we have a lot of things in common to discuss, and maybe, who knows, we can work something out.' So I said—" "I know," I broke in, "why don't you get me a drink. I find it hard to concentrate without one, somehow. Also, I'm fucking miserable, fed up." "Oh . . . what is the matter?" He looked round as if the explanation might be to hand. "Are you by yourself here tonight?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He'd been dead so long now that he moved in my mind like a figure from another age, a life in evening dress. Even at the time, when we heard him on the wireless, singing in the Daily Service or in a request for Three-Way Family Favourites, I remember the feeling that his voice was being brought to us from the beyond, from a cavernous other world screened by the tarred muslin of the speakers. We had been early possessors of a stereogram, a monstrous and luxurious teak coffer with discreet lights and grilles and a lid it was impossible to drop: some cushioning mechanism arrested its fall and brought it noiselessly to rest. It had good bass sound, which my father used to turn up to cover the hiss and crackle the machine exposed on his treasured old records. There it still silently stood, at the beginning of November 1991. And there was Beecham's baton on a stand like a pen-rest; and the ugly canterbury stuffed with music, Bach cantatas, Victorian parlour-songs that were enjoying a kitsch revival when he died; and the shine of the parquet around the subfusc bulk of the sofa and chairs and under the black promontory of the piano. Nothing had been altered, nothing renewed. I felt the sense of return oddly exaggerated, as if my childhood went back further than it did. I sat about my room in my vest and pants, smoked a last cigarette and flicked the stub into the Donningtons' bushes—lilacs that would crowd over the fence in early summer and waft up to my window. Something awful had happened last week: I'd left the dining-room in the middle of Luc's lesson and gone upstairs for a pee, as I always did now, I'd become a reckless addict of the laundry-basket. I had the negatives on me and planned to run on up the further flight to Luc's bedroom, return them to the wallet in the desk and be back at the bathroom again in fifteen or twenty seconds. It was a simple but bold idea, and as the time came on to put it into practice I was less and less able to concentrate on the passage from Milton we were talking about. "A herd of Beeves," said Luc. "I'm not so sure what is a herd of Beeves."

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  “A few when I was little. I remember that my mom used to read me Winnie the Pooh. And I remember that one Christmas we had matching black velvet dresses. I was so proud that I could look like her—we even had matching headbands and shoes with bows. I have a picture of us then—Dad’s holding me on his shoulders and he has his arm around Mom and we’re all standing in front of an enormous Christmas tree.” Carol stopped abruptly, fighting tears. “I used to have that picture in my dresser drawer when I was older. When it was bad with Mom and Dad, I’d take it out after they’d left and stare at it. I couldn’t believe it was the same parents and the same daughter. They looked so kind in the picture.” • • • CAROL’S NOSTALGIC MOOD snapped. “My parents never should have had children. I never understood why they did. They were terrible parents. They never helped us with anything. We served at their pleasure. They told us what they expected and told us what to do and what not to do. We were there to be used. If we didn’t comply, we were out. You know, it’s funny about the mix of the good and the bad. I remember being really cared for was when I was sick. Mom would fuss over me and bring me sherbet and soda. But at five o’clock, she’d be out in the living room getting the drinks ready for Daddy.” I asked Carol if she could describe her parents’ marriage in a few words. She shot back, “Codependent, dysfunctional, and passionate.” This is a topic she had thought about for years. “I know this sounds crazy, but my parents really do love each other and are committed to their relationship. They’re both in their late sixties now and they still do things together every day. They don’t ignore each other. They sleep in the same bed. But since Dad had a series of heart operations, he had to curtail his drinking and Mom followed suit. They still have cocktails but they stop at one or maybe two. And there’s no more violence, although they still get into heated arguments about nothing. They still call each other nasty names. Go figure.” She shook her head. “It’s simply how they relate.” “What if your parents had divorced? What would have happened to you and your brother and sister?” “I remember wishing they’d divorce. My sister and I would talk every night about escaping. But when we talked about divorce we couldn’t figure out where she and I would go. How would things be better if we were with my mom or with my dad? They were both such bad parents. I spent eighty percent of my time imagining that I’d have a magic button that I could press and make both of them disappear.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Apparently his mother used to start sing-songs in the car and his father and he had sometimes remembered the practice since—they sang the same old Flemish folksongs as they had ten years and more ago. With us it had been hymns, all the way to Cornwall in the Humber's leathery heat, my father putting them deliberately to the wrong tune. I always chose grand Chestertonian ones, "Take not thy thunder from us", "Smite us and save us all", whilst Charlie reluctantly nominated the Geography Hymn. Sometimes we boosted the sunshine mood with "Summer Holiday" or "The sun has got his hat on"—a phrase that always troubled me with its counter-suggestion of cloud. Most difficult and lesson-like were rounds, in which you couldn't merge in the general din but came in alone and on time, although Charlie dragged and forgot and sang flat. "White sand and grey sand. White sand and grey sand. Who'll buy my white sand? Who'll buy my grey sand?" The words were always drivel but you had to pipe them out and hold your own amongst the unfriendly circling of the others. The hotel was stifling and deserted, but the sea had a grim beauty, seen from the window, while the hard valanced beds seemed to promise a cloudy luxury. I lay down while Marcel was in the bathroom, hearing only the hiss of the shower and the creak of the pipes. It was a lull in the chase, like one of the puzzling calm intermittences in love itself. I was still unused to hotels, I wanted to stay here for days, for months, perhaps, forgotten by the staff—they would wake us in spring with coffee, and newspapers like April Fool editions, full of just-possible absurdities. I dreamt that Gordon Bottomley was staying at the same hotel. I was filled with emotion, and took Luc to see him in his room. The poet was vigorous and well-preserved, and busily at work on a verse play which he had started in the 1930s and which was now over a thousand pages long. He threw open a wicker hamper in which the curling bundles of manuscript were carried from place to place. He said how much this work had cost him, what he had given up, of ordinary pleasures and griefs, in order to find time to get it right. I spoke to him about a poem of his that my father had sung in a setting by Finzi, but when he asked me what it was called my mind went blank: I said I thought it was called "Mud" and he said "Oh yes", though neither of us was convinced. Luc was polite but indifferent and after a while drifted off into the adjacent room—I saw him through the open door, masturbating calmly and talking to someone else out of view.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt it flourish, from deep nostalgic roots, and cast a dappled shadow across glass and concrete, slow-moving Africans outside discount stores, scaffolders high up. The whole recollection was beautiful, affirmative—it was hard to see why Paul had left it lying so long in the briars and the loam. "So you saw him again." "I probably would have wanted to, because of course I was a young romantic and to me ten minutes with a handsome stranger was clearly the same as true love, and besides it had the romantic complexities of danger, and sin, as I suppose I thought of it then. I can see now that it also conformed to the sense one had in those years that everything important was secret, and so anything secret must surely be important." "It wasn't a game." "Actually, it was he who asked to see me again. I didn't reallse at the time, because to me he was marvellous, but he must have thought himself pretty lucky to get a fresh and well, quite nice-looking seventeen-year-old, don't you think? Anyway, it seemed that we had fallen in love." I was silent, rather shaken. Paul went on quickly, "This probably sounds foolish to you—all I can say is it was wildly unusual then." "Not at all," I said warmly, to allay the recurrent note of uncertainty, as though he felt he couldn't measure up to some fast and cynical standard he imagined me to hold. I couldn't say without condescension how touched I was by his doubting, pedantic candour. We mounted the pavement and swung into the low mouth of a buried car-park. At each turn of the hairpin descent the Alfa's tyres squealed. It wasn't until the fourth or fifth level that spaces showed—Paul backed into a bay and stilled the engine and we sat looking out into the shadowy coffered perspective, shuttered concrete, stripes of yellow light, the weight of silent floors above. "Well, we kept seeing each other, Willem and I. I managed it because I had to. Often I used my visits to poor old Edgard Orst as a cover—I went to him for ten minutes in the afternoon and left the old fellow babbling and confused to cycle out to the Hermitage. We didn't think we dared meet elsewhere—in fact it was the perfect place. He came from a village a mile or two out, and lived with his old father. I outwitted everybody, at the same time being barely able to believe they couldn't tell something was up. It went on for a couple of months—of heaven and madness. We didn't at first, but later we did . . . everything with each other. Our meetings themselves were always terribly brief—I think we can hardly have talked."

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I wished we were there too. It felt selfconscious & absurd lying up on the leads as if we were laundry, & there was something so prurient about the nudity when I compared it to days on tour when all our party wd stop at a river, & the men strip off their shirts & drawers to wash them & spread them on the boulders to dry. I nursed those little idylls to myself, & thought of sitting among the bushes with my pipe while the men dived & splashed, or roamed through the muddy shallows. Then we were many miles from civilisation; here I made strategic play with the tepee of the paper while Otto & Sandy brazened it out in a strange discipline of their own. In the evening we wandered down to Regent Street. All along by the Café Royal people were swarming around & there was a mood (which was quite oriental) of clamour & grime with underneath it a great passive summery calm. Life in England is so little of the streets that it was delicious to loiter. There were fantastical characters about, & several girlish young men, at intervals, waiting & waiting. One felt how this corner of Town has seen so much of that kind of thing. Across the road in the monumental mason’s showroom, the angels hovered with outstretched wings and lilies in their hands: they seemed to reproach us mutely through the plate-glass windows—or perhaps they cast some benediction over us. Inside the Café there was an unreal, subaqueous atmosphere, early lights burning though it was still hot & bright outside, & layers of smoke drifting above the marble tables. I hadn’t been there since I was an undergraduate & it seemed as unlikely to me now as then that England cd have come up with somewhere so thoroughly democratic, where I, a Lord after all, might share a table with a bookmaker. Actually it excites a rather corrupt & non-democratic emotion in me—of the daring ‘chic’ of slumming it. I think Sandy feels this less, & goes there as a bohemian & for the fun.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  That year, I had volunteered to “adopt” a needy child, which meant that I was given a list by the local branch of the Salvation Army and told to return with a bag of unwrapped Christmas gifts. It sounds pretty simple, but I managed to find fault with nearly every suggestion. Pajamas? Poor people don’t wear pajamas. We fall asleep in our underwear or blue jeans. To this day, I find the very notion of pajamas an unnecessary elite indulgence, like caviar or electric ice cube makers. There was a toy guitar that I thought looked both fun and enriching, but I remembered the electronic keyboard my grandparents had given me one year and how one of Mom’s boyfriends meanly ordered me to “shut that fucking thing up.” I passed on learning aids for fear of appearing condescending. Eventually I settled on some clothes, a fake cell phone, and fire trucks. I grew up in a world where everyone worried about how they’d pay for Christmas. Now I live in one where opportunities abound for the wealthy and privileged to shower their generosity on the community’s poor. Many prestigious law firms sponsor an “angel program,” which assigns a child to a lawyer and provides a wish list of gifts. Usha’s former courthouse encouraged judicial employees to adopt a kid for the holidays—each a child of someone who previously went through the court system. Program coordinators hoped that if someone else purchased presents, the child’s parents might feel less tempted to commit crimes in order to provide. And there’s always Toys for Tots. During the past few Christmas seasons, I’ve found myself in large department stores, buying toys for kids I’ve never met. As I shop, I’m reminded that wherever I fell on the American socioeconomic ladder as a child, others occupy much lower rungs: children who cannot depend on the generosity of grandparents for Christmas gifts; parents whose financial situations are so dire that they rely on criminal conduct—rather than payday loans—to put today’s hot toys under the tree. This is a very useful exercise. As scarcity has given way to plenty in my own life, these moments of retail reflection force me to consider just how lucky I am. Still, shopping for low-income kids reminds me of my childhood and of the ways that Christmas gifts can serve as domestic land mines. Every year the parents in my neighborhood would begin an annual ritual very different from the one I’ve become accustomed to in my new material comfort: worrying about how to give their kids a “nice Christmas,” with niceness always defined by the bounty underneath the Christmas tree. If your friends came over the week before Christmas and saw a barren floor beneath the tree, you would offer a justification.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  512 Lecture 75: William Butler Yeats William Butler Yeats Lecture 75 Born in Dublin in 1865, he was the eldest child of a middle-class, Anglo- Irish family. His father briefl y practiced law before giving it up to study painting in London, where he moved his family when the future poet was just 2 years old. W hen the boy was 7, his mother—Susan Mary Yeats—took him and his three new siblings off to Sligo, where they stayed for two years. They then returned to London, and at the age of 12 William entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith—“an obscene, bullying place,” he later called it, where pretentious little English dimwits sneered at what one them called a “Mad Irishman.” None of them could have foreseen that he would eventually become the greatest Irish poet of his time. As a young man, he settled in London, where he launched the fi rst phase of his poetic career. Radiating nostalgia and a fascination with Celtic myth and folklore, Yeats’s early poems seek to recon fi rm “the ancient supremacy of the imagination.” Though he soon realized that poetry of this kind was escapist and that he had to shed the “old mythologies” like an old coat, he could never forsake aesthetic ornaments altogether, and like the women of “Adam’s Curse,” he knew that a poet “must labor to be beautiful”—even though labor alone could not ensure either beauty or art. In his plays and theater management, as well as in his poetry, Yeats labored to inspire the Irish through times of bitter con fl ict with England; much as he hated violence, he saluted the “terrible beauty” of the Easter Rising in 1916, Easter Uprising of 1916. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.