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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  James and I were mesmerised, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved. It had become an episode in his past, just as the blessing of Billy Budd was in the memory of the elderly Captain Vere. Indeed, gazing at Pears, who was doubtless embarrassed and uncomfortable as he finally regained his seat, I reacted to him as if he were himself an operatic character—just as I had entered with spurious, or purely aesthetic, emotion into Charles Nantwich’s war-time adolescence, and the loss of his shell-damaged idol in a Hertfordshire mental hospital. It was an irresistible elegiac need for the tendernesses of an England long past. Then the lights went down, my grandfather said curtly, ‘I don’t give him long,’ and we all applauded the orchestra. I didn’t see Phil the following night as he was going for a drink with some friends and I couldn’t face the boredom and frustration of it. Besides, I would have been out of place, and a puzzle to his mates, who didn’t know—it was so soon, they couldn’t yet know—that he was gay. ‘Why don’t you go and see your friends,’ Phil had suggested to me, and I had retorted, ‘But, dearest, I don’t have any friends’—a hyperbole which expressed a surprising truth. There were people I was glad to see, but almost no one I would seek out, or invite for a meal or a drink. Instead, I sat up in the dining-room with a bottle of Scotch and Charles’s Oxford diary: October 26, 1920 : After a groggy start, over to Sandy’s rooms. He was as bad as I was, & said had he made a fool of himself with Tim (he couldn’t remember a thing after we left the Grid). I said probably, but Tim was surely used to it by now. S. had an eggnog & got dressed & didn’t look too foul; I read a letter from his mother out loud to him, imitating the prim tones of a schoolmarm (perhaps I shouldn’t have done?). She has the fantastic impression that S. does not drink. Back to Oriel & the others were already waiting for us—Tim Carswell, Chancey Brough, Eddie Lossiter & the rest. The rest went off in Hubert’s car with much honking and shouting, which made me doubt the wisdom of going—head less clear than a bell, & it was a dank, foggy morning so the ground wd be heavy going.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The beauty of the men is so openly displayed that it seems a reproach to lust. I felt anger & something akin to remorse last night when I thought of how this noble, graceful people has, until so recently, been stolen into slavery or mutilated into eunuchry. Also last night, a dream of Winchester (the events are vague to me now, but the mood was powerful); & all day I have been haunted by it, & felt the intensity of its passions all over again. Not the forgettable saturnalia (which of course I have not forgotten) but the adoration and devotion. I thought mainly, needless to say, of Strong & of Webster. If the truth be told it is them that I think of most often, when I turn out the light, when I wake here, in the hour or so before dawn, when all the night warmth has gone, & for a short spell, until the light begins, the cool wind blows & I unroll the blanket at the foot of the bed. At the same time my memory of them warms me, stealing out from somewhere within and permeating my person. Though it is usually accompanied by excitement, it is not in essence a sexual thing (that is Ross or Van Orde in Mob Lib, or Chancey Brough out at Burford or B. Howard in my rooms after the Commem Ball—or any of the others who stock my private case of lust—its dog-eared pages!) No, with Strong & (more) with sweet Webster, it was the dumb love, the somehow utterly graceful restraint … I wonder often, having no idea, having dreaded even to find out, what all those boys are doing now, hate to think that I remember them alone, while they—Brough where?, in the City? Webster doubtless in some easy colonial office—pass their days among casual acquaintances, returning home by train or trap in the evening to young wives, working out their plans … Strong I remember first in the bidets, in my first week in College (it might even have been my first day). In spite of everything to the contrary in the domineering, exalted ethos of the school, the bidets startled me from the beginning by their democratic nature—boys of all ages bathing in the same room, knees drawn up in the shallow tin baths. We’d had nothing like it at Mr.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  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.’ ‘Yes,’ he frowned, turning the page. It was Oxford now—the matriculation photograph, posed in the stony front quad at Corpus, the pelican on top of the sundial appearing to sit on the head of the lanky, begowned chemist at the centre of the back row. I looked rather anonymous in it and once Rupert had identified me we moved to some colour snaps of a summer picnic at Wytham.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw had a much bigger bark than bite, at least with me. She once ordered me to watch a TV show with her on a Friday night, a creepy murder mystery, the type of show Mamaw loved to watch. At the climax of the show, during a moment designed to make the viewer jump, Mamaw flipped off the lights and screamed in my ear. She’d seen the episode before and knew what was coming. She made me sit there for forty-five minutes just so she could scare me at the appointed time. The best part about living with Mamaw was that I began to understand what made her tick. Until then, I had resented how rarely we traveled to Kentucky after Mamaw Blanton’s death. The decline in visits wasn’t noticeable at first, but by the time I started middle school, we visited Kentucky only a few times a year for a few days at a time. Living with Mamaw, I learned that she and her sister, Rose—a woman of uncommon kindness—had a falling-out after their mother died. Mamaw had hoped that the old house would become a sort of family time share, while Rose had hoped that the house would go to her son and his family. Rose had a point: None of the siblings who lived in Ohio or Indiana visited often enough, so it made sense to give the house to someone who would use it. But Mamaw feared that without a home base, her children and grandchildren would have no place to stay during their visits to Jackson. She, too, had a point. I started to understand that Mamaw saw returning to Jackson as a duty to endure rather than a source of enjoyment. To me, Jackson was about my uncles, and chasing turtles, and finding peace from the instability that plagued my Ohio existence. Jackson gave me a shared home with Mamaw, a three-hour road trip to tell and listen to stories, and a place where everyone knew me as the grandson of the famous Jim and Bonnie Vance. Jackson was something much different to her. It was the place where she sometimes went hungry as a child, from which she ran in the wake of a teenage pregnancy scandal, and where so many of her friends had given their lives in the mines. I wanted to escape to Jackson; she had escaped from it. In her old age, with limited mobility, Mamaw loved to watch TV. She preferred raunchy humor and epic dramas, so she had a lot of options. But her favorite show by far was the HBO mob story The Sopranos . Looking back, it’s hardly surprising that a show about fiercely loyal, sometimes violent outsiders resonated with Mamaw. Change the names and dates, and the Italian Mafia starts to look a lot like the Hatfield-McCoy dispute back in Appalachia. The show’s main character, Tony Soprano, was a violent killer, an objectively terrible person by almost any standard.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "It is absolute bliss," Edie said. "You're so lucky, and so right to have come. I couldn't see why before, to be honest I thought it was quite potty, but you're absolutely right." I swallowed the blunt admission. "Voilà." "I must say it is rather peculiarly quiet." She looked at her watch. "I mean we've seen three people in the past twenty minutes, and now there's nobody in sight at all. That sort of might get to one." "Yes, things have been a fraction on the dull side since about 1510. But we do what we can to make our own entertainment." "So one rather gathered from your letter." She was not ungrand, Edie. My mother often said she came from "a very good family", which was her way of glossing over Edie's more gavroche and boozy qualities and suggesting I was lucky to be friends with a de Souzay at all. The de Souzays were great liberal philanthropists, though not, by and large, as keen as this one was to get in a pub and talk, at some length, about men and what they liked to do. She had an emphatic contralto speaking-voice, and a certain hauteur —undercut by a vulgar laugh that could set other people going in a cinema or cafe. She always used the same scent, a beautiful fragrance that was abbeys, aunts, tapestried country houses, dulled petals in china bowls before it was . . . whatever it was, the discreet phial put up by some Mayfair herbalist for powdered dowagers in black court shoes. It didn't go particularly with what she tended to wear—often made by herself and usually sexy, theatrical and vaguely disconcerting: she was my earliest experience of glamour, of bold exposure matched with dazzling concealment. Fifteen years ago I had seen her squeeze up her bust like a soubrette in a Restoration comedy, and watched with awe as her face, with its long nose and downed upper lip, was painted and dusted into a challenging and ironic mask. Even then she wore her mysterious perfume, so that to breathe it again now in my rooms was to go back through half a lifetime passed alongside her. It overwhelmed the yellow roses I had bought and stuck in a jug in the middle of the table. "I love it, dear," said Edie, opening the cupboards into which I'd tidied things away. "You could have a great romance in here." She went to the long back window and gazed down into the secret garden.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘In fact, I first got off with my current friend in a cinema in Frith Street. He was very shy afterwards about admitting that it had been him—in the dark, you know. He’s a very shy boy, actually, but in those places people seem to lose their inhibitions.’ Charles was not paying attention, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been telling this story. I still wasn’t wholly sure it had been Phil that I had felt up that day in the basement of the Brutus. Blushing, abstruse, he would not, when I put it to him, confirm or deny it. If it had been him, then he seemed to want it forgotten; if not, then he showed an odd readiness to be incorporated into some half-apprehended fantasy of my own. If it had been him, that squalid and exaggerated little episode must alter my understanding of him, open up the faintly sickening possibility of there being another Phil, whom I could not account for. He might have been at the Brutus at this very moment—or at the Bona or the Honcho or the Stud … ‘It’s always gone on, of course,’ Charles recalled. ‘We had little private bars, sex clubs really, in Soho before the war, very secret. And my Uncle Edmund had fantastic tales of places and sort of gay societies in Regent’s Park—a century ago now, before Oscar Wilde and all that—with beautiful working boys dressed as girls and what-have-you. Uncle Ned was a character …’ Charles sat beaming. ‘I’m always forgetting how sexy the past must have been—it’s the clothes or something.’ ‘Oh, it was unbelievably sexy—much more so than nowadays. I’m not against Gay Lib and all that, of course, William, but it has taken a lot of the fun out of it, a lot of the frisson. I think the 1880s must have been an ideal time, with brothels full of off-duty soldiers, and luscious young dukes chasing after barrow-boys. Even in the Twenties and Thirties, which were quite wild in their way, it was still kind of underground, we operated on a constantly shifting code, and it was so extraordinarily moving and exciting when that spurt of recognition came, like the flare of a match! No one’s ever really written about it, I know what you mean, sex somehow becomes farcical in the past,’ Charles looked at me very tenderly. ‘Perhaps you will, my dear.’ ‘Are you finished, my Lord?’ Graham was enquiring in his complaisant basso.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘It’s another of my icons.’ He looked from me to an oval portrait which hung above the fireplace. From its mandorla of gilded oak leaves a livery-clad negro turned towards us. A sky of darkening blue was sketched behind him, and the shadowy form of a palm-tree could just about be made out. He appeared to be an eighteenth-century colonial servant; evidently a favoured one. ‘It’s Bill Richmond,’ Charles explained. No wiser, I stood up to look more closely at the pugnacious brown face with its thick lips, flat nose and short curly hair. It frowned ironically from the crimson and gilt of the high-necked footman’s coat. ‘I’m afraid he’s not as pretty as the King Akhnaten,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t in a pretty business, poppet. Well … he was a man with several lives: first of all he was a slave, then he got brought back to England by a General whatsaname in the War of Independence. He found him in Richmond, which is where his name comes from. Bill was one of those big strong lads we like so much, so the General trained him up as a boxer. He became quite well known for a while—along with Molineux, of course, that Byron sparred with. They were the first of their kind to break out, really—they were good fighters, so they made a figure in the world. Don’t he look kind of sad, though.’ ‘Very sad. He don’t—doesn’t look much like a boxer, either.’ ‘No. You see, he became a valet or what-have-you to some Lord. When he’d done with fighting he just carried on in service. Hence the livery. It makes for a good picture but a sad story. I’m sure the artist must have scaled him down, too. Byron says, when he met him later in life, that he was a great strong fellow. I’ll look it up for you some time. I believe he used to work in Molineux’s corner too.’ ‘You don’t know who it’s by?’ But Charles seemed to have lapsed into reflection on the fate of Bill Richmond, and wore a nostalgic expression as though he had known him personally. As ever, I let it pass; I was learning not to worry about silences in the conversation. I was happy to ponder his treasured artifacts and the secret metamorphoses that they enshrined. ‘A last leg, and a question,’ he proposed. ‘Both rather special.’ I took his arm again and we went out into the hall. ‘Are you interested in boxing? That’s not the question, by the way.’ ‘I suppose I am,’ I said. ‘I boxed a bit at school.’ ‘Oho! You be careful. You don’t want to get that pretty nose broken.’ ‘I don’t do it any more. Don’t worry.’ ‘It’s been a great interest of mine. You’ll have to find out about all that side if you go into this.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Pears was shuffling very slowly along the aisle towards the front of the stalls, supported by a man on either side. Most of the bland audience showed no recognition of who he was, though occasionally someone would stare, or look away hurriedly from the singer’s stroke-slackened but beautiful white-crested head. Then there was the protracted and awkward process of getting him along his already repopulated row. James and I were mesmerised, and seeing him in the flesh I felt the whole occasion subtly transform, and the opera whose ambiguity we had carped at take on a kind of heroic or historic character under the witness of one of its creators. Even though I felt he would be enjoying it, I believed in its poignancy for him, seeing other singers performing it on the same stage in the same sets as he had done decades before, under the direction of the man he loved. It had become an episode in his past, just as the blessing of Billy Budd was in the memory of the elderly Captain Vere. Indeed, gazing at Pears, who was doubtless embarrassed and uncomfortable as he finally regained his seat, I reacted to him as if he were himself an operatic character—just as I had entered with spurious, or purely aesthetic, emotion into Charles Nantwich’s war-time adolescence, and the loss of his shell-damaged idol in a Hertfordshire mental hospital. It was an irresistible elegiac need for the tendernesses of an England long past. Then the lights went down, my grandfather said curtly, ‘I don’t give him long,’ and we all applauded the orchestra. I didn’t see Phil the following night as he was going for a drink with some friends and I couldn’t face the boredom and frustration of it. Besides, I would have been out of place, and a puzzle to his mates, who didn’t know—it was so soon, they couldn’t yet know—that he was gay. ‘Why don’t you go and see your friends,’ Phil had suggested to me, and I had retorted, ‘But, dearest, I don’t have any friends’—a hyperbole which expressed a surprising truth. There were people I was glad to see, but almost no one I would seek out, or invite for a meal or a drink. Instead, I sat up in the dining-room with a bottle of Scotch and Charles’s Oxford diary:

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. I let myself in and shrugged my bag to the floor. In a few minutes I would lose the surprise, the disconcerting and exact sameness of everything in the house I had lived in all my life. My mother was out, it was dusk, and this was the silence that had been around us all the time, and that I had left her to. The rattle of the loose parquet, the jiggle of the door-catches and hesitant tick of the clock were sounds I had always known, echoing from surfaces my father had kept bare and polished for acoustic reasons. My mother had changed almost nothing in seventeen years—a new telly, a new Daihatsu Charade: and there were different library books on the hall table awaiting return, the latest issue of Common Knowledge, the local advertiser, caught in the letter-cage of the front door. I looked into the sitting-room, a smell of polish and lavender, the black mass of the piano, shadows thrown across the wall by the street-lamps and the tall unhusbanded privet hedge rocking in the wind. I hadn't meant to be back so soon in my room, with its wall of second-hand books, its air of determined privacy and make-believe. I glanced at the squeaky single bed; and there were the forlorn fauna of childhood, the one-eared rabbit and the dropsical trousered bear, passed by but still pathetically alert. I stood by my desk, where I had written a thousand adequate essays, and not a few sonnets, and looked down into the Donningtons' garden. Gerry had a rowing-machine now; the white buttock-scoops of the seat held pools of rain which gleamed in the unshielded light from their kitchen.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Jacksonians say hello to everyone, willingly skip their favorite pastimes to dig a stranger’s car out of the snow, and—without exception—stop their cars, get out, and stand at attention every time a funeral motorcade drives past. It was that latter practice that made me aware of something special about Jackson and its people. Why, I’d ask my grandma—whom we all called Mamaw—did everyone stop for the passing hearse? “Because, honey, we’re hill people. And we respect our dead.” My grandparents left Jackson in the late 1940s and raised their family in Middletown, Ohio, where I later grew up. But until I was twelve, I spent my summers and much of the rest of my time back in Jackson. I’d visit along with Mamaw, who wanted to see friends and family, ever conscious that time was shortening the list of her favorite people. And as time wore on, we made our trips for one reason above all: to take care of Mamaw’s mother, whom we called Mamaw Blanton (to distinguish her, though somewhat confusingly, from Mamaw). We stayed with Mamaw Blanton in the house where she’d lived since before her husband left to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. Mamaw Blanton’s house was my favorite place in the world, though it was neither large nor luxurious. The house had three bedrooms. In the front were a small porch, a porch swing, and a large yard that stretched into a mountain on one side and to the head of the holler on the other. Though Mamaw Blanton owned some property, most of it was uninhabitable foliage. There wasn’t a backyard to speak of, though there was a beautiful mountainside of rock and tree. There was always the holler, and the creek that ran alongside it; those were backyard enough. The kids all slept in a single upstairs room: a squad bay of about a dozen beds where my cousins and I played late into the night until our irritated grandma would frighten us into sleep. The surrounding mountains were paradise to a child, and I spent much of my time terrorizing the Appalachian fauna: No turtle, snake, frog, fish, or squirrel was safe. I’d run around with my cousins, unaware of the ever-present poverty or Mamaw Blanton’s deteriorating health. At a deep level, Jackson was the one place that belonged to me, my sister, and Mamaw. I loved Ohio, but it was full of painful memories. In Jackson, I was the grandson of the toughest woman anyone knew and the most skilled auto mechanic in town; in Ohio, I was the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wished I didn’t. Mom visited Kentucky only for the annual family reunion or the occasional funeral, and when she did, Mamaw made sure she brought none of the drama. In Jackson, there would be no screaming, no fighting, no beating up on my sister, and especially “no men,” as Mamaw would say.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Jacksonians say hello to everyone, willingly skip their favorite pastimes to dig a stranger’s car out of the snow, and—without exception—stop their cars, get out, and stand at attention every time a funeral motorcade drives past. It was that latter practice that made me aware of something special about Jackson and its people. Why, I’d ask my grandma—whom we all called Mamaw—did everyone stop for the passing hearse? “Because, honey, we’re hill people. And we respect our dead.” My grandparents left Jackson in the late 1940s and raised their family in Middletown, Ohio, where I later grew up. But until I was twelve, I spent my summers and much of the rest of my time back in Jackson. I’d visit along with Mamaw, who wanted to see friends and family, ever conscious that time was shortening the list of her favorite people. And as time wore on, we made our trips for one reason above all: to take care of Mamaw’s mother, whom we called Mamaw Blanton (to distinguish her, though somewhat confusingly, from Mamaw). We stayed with Mamaw Blanton in the house where she’d lived since before her husband left to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. Mamaw Blanton’s house was my favorite place in the world, though it was neither large nor luxurious. The house had three bedrooms. In the front were a small porch, a porch swing, and a large yard that stretched into a mountain on one side and to the head of the holler on the other. Though Mamaw Blanton owned some property, most of it was uninhabitable foliage. There wasn’t a backyard to speak of, though there was a beautiful mountainside of rock and tree. There was always the holler, and the creek that ran alongside it; those were backyard enough. The kids all slept in a single upstairs room: a squad bay of about a dozen beds where my cousins and I played late into the night until our irritated grandma would frighten us into sleep. The surrounding mountains were paradise to a child, and I spent much of my time terrorizing the Appalachian fauna: No turtle, snake, frog, fish, or squirrel was safe. I’d run around with my cousins, unaware of the ever-present poverty or Mamaw Blanton’s deteriorating health. At a deep level, Jackson was the one place that belonged to me, my sister, and Mamaw. I loved Ohio, but it was full of painful memories. In Jackson, I was the grandson of the toughest woman anyone knew and the most skilled auto mechanic in town; in Ohio, I was the abandoned son of a man I hardly knew and a woman I wished I didn’t. Mom visited Kentucky only for the annual family reunion or the occasional funeral, and when she did, Mamaw made sure she brought none of the drama. In Jackson, there would be no screaming, no fighting, no beating up on my sister, and especially “no men,” as Mamaw would say.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  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.’ ‘Yes,’ he frowned, turning the page.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There is nothing more easily destroyed than the equilibrium of the fairest places. A text remains intact regardless of our whims of interpretation, and survives our commentaries; but the slightest imprudence inflicted upon stone, the shortest macadamized road cut through a field where grass has peacefully grown for centuries, does something irreparable, and for ever. The beauty goes, and the authenticity likewise.] * Addition of 1958. There are places where one has chosen to live, invisible abodes which one makes for oneself quite outside the current of time. I have lived in Tibur, and shall die there, perhaps, as Hadrian did on Achilles' Isle. No. Once more I have gone back to the Villa, to its garden pavillions built for privacy and for repose, to the vestiges of a luxury free of pomp, and as little imperial as possible, conceived of rather for the wealthy connoisseur who tries to combine the pleasures of art with the charms of rural life. In the Pantheon I have watched for the exact spot where sunlight would fall on a morning of April 21, and along the Mausoleum's halls have retraced that funeral path so often walked by the friends of the emperor's last days, Chabrias, Diotimus, and Celer. But I have ceased to feel the immediate presence of those beings, the living reality of those events; they are near me still, but of the past, neither more nor less now than the memories of my own life. Our commerce with others does not long endure; it ceases once satisfaction is obtained, the lesson learned, the service rendered, the book complete. What I could say has been said; what I could learn has been learned. Let us turn, for the time that is left to us, to other work. N 258 — ISBN 0-374-5-0348.6 MARGUERITE YOURCENAR Memoirs of Hadrian Followed by Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian Translated from the French by GRACE FRICK in collaboration with the Author This novel, unique in its approach to a figure from Roman history, has had international acclaim from the time that it first appeared, in France. It has already been translated into fourteen languages of Europe and Asia. Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, the work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and by his contemporaries, both friends and enemies.

• 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'm quite a reluctant curator, you know"—almost with the implication I had somewhere claimed the opposite. "I certainly never planned to end up back here, where I'd begun. As I think I told you, my original field of interest was the seventeenth century; I spent a year at the Courtauld in London, with your famous Sir Anthony Blunt! Then I came back and taught in Amsterdam, and so on and so forth, I won't bore you." He was nervous these past few days, and I often found him, despite all my sympathetic politeness, my genuine delight in being with him, at least a step ahead of me, or to the side. I caught his arm to stop him as the tram came silently across our path. "I'm not at all clear how the Museum came about," I admitted; "I ought to be by now." "Well, that is perhaps where the problem lies, the problem of my talking nonsense. The point is if you have been spending years with Van Eyck and so on, and then with Rembrandt and even Rubens, and you have your own passion for Delacroix, or Manet, or Picasso, then Edgard Orst does not seem after all to be an artist of, shall we say, world standing. Then his sister is dying and she asks me to help her set up a trust, to make a permanent museum of his works; she says it was his wish and she thinks I would be the right person to run this museum, which is to be in the family house—where she, incidentally, continued to live, unmarried, to the end. That, very briefly, is the story of how this place pulled me back. And also perhaps explains a little of why I felt the need to protect him. Now if he were a Delacroix I don't suppose I'd worry." It couldn't be the whole story. I said, "Nowadays people are more interested if they know, say, that an artist had syphilis." "And even more so, don't you think, if that artist had the image of being austerely celibate? For years the pious people here saw him as a model of devotion, the scandal of his affair with Jane was completely forgotten, they knew nothing about it, they thought of him as a kind of hermit, like St Anthony or something. And like St Anthony he had his temptations." In the kitchen Lilli (could I call her that?) was chopping vegetables at the table, whilst Marcel sat opposite, picking bits and being indulgently ticked off. I thought how innocent he was and how Lilli and he carried on like a parody of a mother and child.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I never!" My mother smiled confidently. "Do you know what he said to me today?" she went on. "He came into the kitchen and said, 'Good morning, evening and night, and now I don't think I need speak to you for the rest of the day.' And he just sits there, you know, with his fingers in his beard." "Don't you think he ought to get help?" I suggested. "I'm the one who needs help, ducky. The fact is, if I may digress, that when he grew his beard I thought 'Oh, no', but then he couldn't play tennis any more, which was very hard for him, he had to have something to do. And after a while I got used to it, it even came to represent, ghastly though it was in itself, a kind of scratchy comfort and security. But now . . . I keep wanting to run up behind him and just chop it off! Never grow a beard, darling. There's a lot more to a beard than meets the eye." As she talked I was increasingly drawn under by a current of recollection that her presence, and the lines from Gray, had obscurely triggered—the desert air of that summer of 1976, in which she and Geoffrey had somehow played a part, a memory of sexual loneliness, which would later pull so much I did into its own fierce patterns. I remembered the day after that first time with Dawn, coming downstairs with a kind of wary astonishment, feeling I'd been given access to a world that lay just on the other side of the parquet, the fridge, the radio, the piano declaiming in the sitting-room. I looked covertly at my family, wondering if they too were inhabitants of this thrilling dimension. Perhaps Charlie was; but his accounts of life with Lisanne seemed oddly to leave out any mention of it. I felt both irritable and supremely tolerant at the same time, sulkily looking over my mother's shopping-list, but then when I got outside, dancing to the baker's like a character in a musical comedy. It wouldn't have been an early start. Throughout my adolescent holidays I got up wastefully late, as though to make up for the austerity of school mornings, the wintry dressing in the dark. Sometimes it would be 11.30 or 12 before I came down for a cup of coffee and was warned off spoiling my lunch. They were hours of luxurious tedium in the half-light of the bedroom, reading for a bit, dozing in and out of songs coming from downstairs, Schone Mullerin all that summer, my father flagging and dissatisfied. I evolved fantastic sexual situations around boys at school, dropping off in the middle of them, then waking and putting them through some further fabulous depravity.

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

  It gradually dawned on me that children of divorce and those in happy intact families live in separate albeit parallel universes. I would not have seen this without their descriptions of play, and the lack of it, in their backyards after school. This finding has important implications for our social policy. When visiting and custody plans are made, the child’s friendships and play activities are rarely considered by parents. The courts never acknowledge them. In the common scenario, parents are the major protagonists. Their schedules, wishes, and rights occupy center stage. In the hundreds of court evaluations and decisions that I have read and in thousands of conversations with parents, I’ve rarely heard a word about the importance of maintaining the child’s friendships and play activities. The only exceptions are where a young adolescent is a gifted athlete or shows special promise in another field. In the view of officialdom, the only thing of value in a child’s life is her time with each parent. It should be sobering to parents and others who allocate the child’s time to take the memories of this generation into account. Peer play looms much larger in their fond memories than afternoons spent with either Dad or Mom. Gary continued to reminisce nostalgically about his childhood. “Another memory I have was the crunch of the tires on my dad’s car when he returned from work at seven o’clock every evening. It’s funny but I can still hear that in my head. Supper was a family thing at our home. We had a special ritual. We used to go round the table and everyone said what they did that day. I still remember being included when I was three years old. I felt ten feet high!” A lot of adults from intact families remembered supper as an important family event. Like today, many of the mothers who worked outside the home tried to arrange their schedules so they’d be home after school when the children were young. They made a point of having sit-down meals in the evening. Most of the fathers worked long hours, including some weekends. But in most homes supper waited until the entire family was assembled, if not nightly then several times a week. Sunday dinner was special in many homes. With a few exceptions, these were pleasant memories with games, rituals, and conversation that included the children and the grown-ups.

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

  As I listened to Gary describe what it was like to play in his backyard, it struck me that children from divorced families do not talk this way. In all the hours I have talked with Karen through all the years, she never spontaneously turned to the subject of play. It turns out that children raised in very unhappy intact families also don’t recall playing with friends, but we’ll get to that in Chapter 7. As Gary remembered the forts that he and his friends built, how they screamed at each other like banshees, how they could have given Geronimo lessons, I realized that these were happy, sunlit memories. These were, as one novelist wrote, “those early amorphous years when memory has only begun, when life is full of beginnings and no ends and everything was forever.”2 Gary and his friends were playing the games that children have invented since the beginning of time. Of course the rough-and-tumble life of the school and playground has its heavy disappointments and its share of physical and emotional injuries. Children can be cruel. Those excluded from the inner circles suffer a lot. But as an adult, Gary remembered with amusement how he fell learning to ride a bike and his first soccer match when he ran down the field the wrong way and everyone made fun of him. When children of divorce did remember playing with friends as an important experience of childhood, the memories were from before the divorce. No doubt many of them rode bicycles, climbed trees, and fooled around in backyards, but they did not mention it. Carefree play was not what came to mind when I talked with them at the time or when they reflected back on their younger years, in elementary school. Instead of caring about who finds who in a game of hide-and-seek or who is at bat in the local softball game, children of divorce have other, more pressing concerns. Is Mom all right? Is Dad going to pick me up tonight? Can I bring my new friend over to the house to play if no one is home?

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I knew I would not begin to grasp it fully until a second or third reading, but what was clear so far was that the inhabitants of the balmy resort of Valmouth found the climate so kind that they lived to an immense age. Lady Parvula de Panzoust (a name I knew already from James’s reapplication of it to a member of the Corry) was hoping to establish some rapport with the virile young David Tooke, a farm boy, and was seeking the help of Mrs Yajñavalkya, a black masseuse, to set up a meeting. ‘He’s awfully choice,’ Mrs Yaj assured the centenarian grande dame. Much of the talk was a kind of highly inflected nonsense, but it gave the unnerving impression that on deeper acquaintance it would all turn out to be packed with fleeting and covert meaning. Mrs Yaj herself spoke in a wonderful black pidgin, prinked out with more exotic turns of phrase. ‘O Allah la Ilaha!’ she reassured the anxious Lady Parvula. ‘Shall I tell you vot de Yajñavalkya device is? Vot it has been dis thousand and thousand ob year? It is bjopti. Bjopti! And vot does bjopti mean? It means discretion. S-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-sh!’ It was such a long ‘Sh!’ that I found myself quietly vocalising it to see what its effect would be. ‘Quiet, Damian,’ the woman opposite me said to her little boy. ‘Gentleman’s trying to read.’ It was about nine when I reached home. The tall uncurtained window at the turn of the stairs still let in just enough of the phosphorescent late dusk to make it unnecessary to turn on a light. I enjoyed a proprietorial secrecy as I walked slowly and silently up, as well as the frisson of bleakness that comes from being in a deserted place as darkness gathers. There was something nostalgic in such spring nights, recalling the dreamy abstraction of punting in the dark, and the sweet tiredness afterwards, returning to rooms with all their windows open, still warm under the eaves. The door of the flat was slightly ajar, which was unusual. I was inclined to keep it shut as I was (or had been) often the only inhabitant of the house, the businessman in the main floors below being frequently abroad. And I had occasionally witnessed Arthur pushing it to, or checking as he passed through the hall that it was closed. My heart sank as I nudged it open and heard Arthur’s voice, not addressing me—he could not possibly have known I was there—but talking quietly to somebody else. The door of the sitting-room, which was open, hid whatever was going on; the light from that room fell across the further side of the hall.

• 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.