A Time of Gifts (12 page)

We soared through the liquid city and up into the wooded hills and alighted at a large villa of concrete and plate glass. Our host was a blond, heavy man with bloodshot eyes and a scar across his forehead. He hailed my companions with gallantry; me, much more guardedly. His dinner-jacket made me feel still more of a ragamuffin. (I cared passionately about these things; but the fact of being called Michael Brown
[4]
—we had to stick to it now—induced a consoling sense of disembodiment.) Perhaps to account for my lowly outfit among these jewelled figures, he introduced me to the women as ‘der englische Globetrotter,' which I didn't
like much. Men guests who were unacquainted toured the room in the German way, shaking hands and reciprocally announcing their names: I did the same. “Muller!” “Brown!” “Ströbel!” “Brown!” “Tschudi!” “Brown!” “Röder!” “Brown!” “Altmeier!” “Brown!” “von Schröder!” “Brown!” ... An old man—a professor from Tübingen, I think, with heavy glasses and a beard—was talking to Lise. We wrung each other's hands, barking “Braun!” and “Brown!” simultaneously.
Snap!
I avoided the girls' glance.

Except for the panorama of the lights of Stuttgart through the plate glass, the house was hideous—prosperous, brand new, shiny, and dispiriting. Pale woods and plastics were juggled together with stale and pretentious vorticism, and the chairs resembled satin boxing-gloves and nickel plumbing. Carved dwarfs with red noses stoppered all the bottles on the oval bar and glass ballerinas pirouetted on ashtrays of agate that rose from the beige carpets on chromium stalks. There were paintings—or tinted photographs—of the Alps at sunset and of naked babies astride Great Danes. Everything looked better, however, after I'd swallowed two White Ladies taken from a tray that was carried about by a white-gloved butler. I helped myself to cigarettes from a seventeenth-century vellum-bound Dante, with the pages glued together and scooped hollow, the only book in sight. Down the dinner table, beside napkins that were half mitres and half Rajput turbans, glittered a promising arsenal of glasses, and by the time we had worked our way through them, the scene was delightfully blurred. From time to time during dinner, I intercepted a puzzled bloodhound scrutiny from the other end of the table. My host obviously found me a question mark; possibly a bit of a rotter, and up to no good; I didn't like him either. I bet he's a terrific Nazi, I thought. I asked the girls later, and they both exclaimed “Und wie!” in vehement unison: “And how!” I think he found something fishy, too, about my being on
Du
terms with his unwilling favourites, while he, most properly, was still restricted to
Sie
. (We had drunk threefold Brüderschaft and embraced in the Cologne style the night before.) When we were back in the
salon
, the men armed with cigars like
truncheons and brandy rotating in glasses like transparent footballs, the party began to lose coherence. The host flogged it along with a jarring laugh even louder than the non-stop gramophone, between-whiles manoeuvring first Lise and then Annie into a window-bay whence each extricated herself in turn like a good-humoured Syrinx. I watched them as I listened to my namesake Dr. Braun, a learned and delightful fogey who was telling me all about the Suevi and the Alemanni and the Hohenstaufens and Eberhardt the Bearded. When the evening broke up, and Lise and Annie were back in the car, our host stood leaning against the top of the car door, idiotically telling them they looked like two Graces. I ducked under his arm and slipped in between them. “Three now!” Lise said. He looked at me with disfavour. “Ah! And where shall I tell him to drop
you
, junger Mann?”

“At the Graf Zeppelin, please.” I sensed a tremor of admiration on either side: even Lise couldn't have done better.

“Ach so?” His opinion of me went up. “And how do you like our best hotel?”

“Clean, comfortable and quiet.”

“Tell the manager if you have any complaints. He's a good friend of mine.”

“I will! And thanks very much.”

We had to take care about conversation because of the chauffeur. A few minutes later, he was opening the car with a flourish of his cockaded cap before the door of the hotel and after fake farewells, I strolled about the hall of the Graf Zeppelin for a last puff at the ogre cigar. When the coast was clear I hared through the streets and into the lift and up to the flat. They were waiting with the door open and we burst into a dance.

* * *

At half-past nine next morning, we were waving good-bye across a tide of Monday morning traffic. I kept looking upwards and back, flourishing my glittering wand and bumping into busy
Stuttgarters until the diminishing torsos frantically signalling from the seventh-storey window were out of sight. I felt as Ulysses must have felt, gazing astern while some island of happy sojourn dropped below the horizon.

* * *

I followed the banks of the Neckar, crossed it, and finally left it for good. Suddenly, when it was much too late, I remembered the Kitsch-Museum in Stuttgart; a museum, that is, of German and international bad taste, which the girls had said I mustn't miss. (The décor last night—for this was how the subject had cropped up—could have been incorporated as it stood.) I slept at Göppingen and tried with the help of the dictionary to write three letters in German; to Heidelberg, Bruchsal and Stuttgart. Further on I got a funny joint answer from Lise and Annie; there was a rumpus when Annie's parents got back; not about my actually staying in the flat, which remained a secret to the end. But the bottles we had recklessly drained were the last of a fabulously rare and wonderful vintage that Annie's father had been particularly looking forward to. Heaven only knew what treasured Spätlese from the banks of the Upper Mosel: nectar beyond compare. They had prudently blamed the choice on me. Outrage had finally simmered down to the words: “Well, your thirsty friend must know a lot about wine.” (Totally untrue.) “I hope he enjoyed it.” (Yes.) It was years before the real enormity of our inroads dawned on me.

* * *

Now the track was running south-south-east across Swabia. Scattered conifers appeared, and woods sometimes overshadowed the road for many furlongs. They were random outposts, separated by leagues of pasture and ploughland, of the great mass, lying dark towards the south-west, of the Black Forest. Beyond it the land rippled away to the Alps.

On straight stretches of road where the scenery changed slowly, singing often came to the rescue; and when songs ran short, poetry. At home, and at my various schools, and among the people who took me in after scholastic croppers, there had always been a lot of reading aloud. (My mother was marvellously gifted in this exacting skill, and imaginative and far-ranging in choice; there had been much singing to the piano as well.) At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary. (I was at the age when one's memory for poetry or for languages—indeed for anything—takes impressions like wax and, up to a point, lasts like marble.)

The range is fairly predictable and all too revealing of the scope, the enthusiasms and the limitations, examined at the eighteenth milestone, of a particular kind of growing up. There was a great deal of Shakespeare, numerous speeches, most of the choruses of
Henry V
, long stretches of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
(drunk in subconsciously and only half understood, by acting Starveling, the shortest part in the play, at the age of six); a number of the Sonnets, many detached fragments; and, generally, a fairly wide familiarity. Several Marlowe speeches followed and stretches of Spenser's
Pro
- and
Epithalamion
; most of Keats's Odes; the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge; very little Shelley, no Byron. (Amazingly to me today, I scarcely considered him a poet at all.) Nothing from the eighteenth century except Gray's
Elegy
and some of
The Rape of the Lock
; some Blake;
The Burial of Sir John Moore
; bits of
The Scholar Gypsy
; some Scott, fragments of Swinburne, any amount of Rossetti, for whom I had had a long passion, now quite vanished; some Francis Thompson and some Dowson; one sonnet of Wordsworth; bits of Hopkins; and, like all English people with any Irish links, Rolleston's translation of
The Dead of Clonmacnois
; a great deal of Kipling; and some
of the verses from
Hassan
. We now move on to Recent Acquisitions: passages from Donne and Herrick and Quarles, one poem of Raleigh, one of Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of Herbert, two of Marvell; a few Border ballads; an abundance of A.E. Housman; some improper stretches of Chaucer (mastered chiefly for popularity purposes at school); a lot of Carroll and Lear. No Chesterton or Belloc, beyond bits of the
Cautionary Tales
. In fact, apart from those mentioned, very little from the present century. No Yeats later than the Ronsard paraphrase and
Innisfree
and
Down by the Salley Gardens
; but this belonged more to singing than reciting; of Pound or Eliot, not a word, either learnt or read; and of younger modern poets now venerable, nothing. If someone had asked me point blank who my favourite contemporary poets were, I would have answered Sacheverell, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, in that order: (
Dr. Donne and Gargantua
and
The Hundred and One Harlequins
had appeared in white paper pamphlets while I was at school; I felt I had broken into dazzling new territory). Prose writers would have been Aldous Huxley, Norman Douglas and Evelyn Waugh. This is the end of the short section; but if the road stretched interminably, longer pieces would come to the surface: all
Horatius
and a lot of
Lake Regillus
, hardy survivors from an early craze; Grantchester; and the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
—intact then, now a heap of fragments hard to re-assemble. The standard drops steeply after this: as I pounded along, limericks pinpointed the planet from Siberia to Cape Horn with improper and imaginative acts, and when they came to an end, similar themes would blossom forth in a score of different metres. It is a field where England can take on all challengers.

My bridgehead in French poetry didn't penetrate very far: a few nursery rhymes, one poem of Theodore de Banville, two of Baudelaire, part of one of Verlaine, Yeats's Ronsard sonnet in the original, and another of du Bellay; lastly, more than all the rest put together, large quantities of Villon (this was a very recent discovery, and a passion. I had translated a number of the ballades and
rondeaux from the
Grand Testament
into English verse and they had turned out more respectably than any of my other attempts of the same kind). Most of the Latin contribution is as predictable as the rest: passages of Virgil, chiefly but not entirely, assimilated through writing lines at school: they went faster if one had the text by heart. As nobody seemed to mind who had written them as long as they were hexameters, I used Lucan's
Pharsalia
for a while; they seemed to have just the glibness needed for the task; but I soon reverted to Virgil, rightly convinced that they would last better: my main haunts were the second and sixth books of the
Aeneid
, with sallies into the
Georgics
and the
Eclogues
. The other chief Romans were Catullus and Horace: Catullus—a dozen short poems and stretches of the
Attis
—because the young are prone (at least I was) to identify themselves with him when feeling angry, lonely, misunderstood, besotted, ill-starred or crossed in love. I probably adored Horace for the opposite reason; and taught myself a number of the Odes and translated a few of them into awkward English sapphics and alcaics. Apart from their other charms, they were infallible mood-changers. (One of them—I. ix.
Ad Thaliarchum
—came to my rescue in strange circumstances a few years later. The hazards of war landed me among the crags of occupied Crete with a band of Cretan guerillas and a captive German general whom we had waylaid and carried off into the mountains three days before. The German garrison of the island were in hot, but luckily temporarily misdirected, chase. It was a time of anxiety and danger; and for our captive, of hardship and distress. During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.)

Hotfoot on Horace came Hadrian's lines to his soul—
The Oxford Book of Latin Verse
was about the only prize I carried away from school—and Petronius' ten counter-balancing verses, hinging on the marvellous line: ‘sed sic, sic, sine fine feriati'; then some passages of the
Pervigilium Veneris
. After this, with a change of key, come one or two early Latin hymns and canticles; then the
Dies Irae
and the
Stabat Mater
. (Of Latin poets of the two centuries between the classical and the Christian, I scarcely even knew the names; it was a region to be invaded and explored alone, and much later and with great delight.) Last came a smattering of profane Mediaeval Latin lyrics, many of them from the monastery of Benediktbeuern.
[5]
In the brief Greek coda to all this, the sound of barrel-scraping grows louder. It begins with the opening movement of the
Odyssey
, as it does for everyone who has dabbled in the language, followed by bits from the escape of Odysseus from the cave of Polyphemus; unexpectedly, not
Heraclitus
; nothing from the tragic dramatists (too difficult); snatches of Aristophanes; a few epitaphs of Simonides, two moon-poems of Sappho; and then silence.