The Headmasters Papers (18 page)

It feels good to write you—like having you here. Best love to Hugh. Don't tell him his uncle, the Headmaster, is folding up.

Love,

John

16 January
Little House

Mr. Jake Levin

R.D. 3

Petersfield, New Hampshire

Dear Jake,

I won't say things have settled yet, but there is enough regularity in the blur that I feel I can get in touch. Now that it's over, it's worse than I thought. You feel prodded by shadows, urged on by something vaguely awful.

Coming here doesn't help. The place evokes Meg and then, by a scrap of handwriting or by a half-knitted sleeve, documents her finitude. She keeps dying.

What I really would like to do is to drive up and see you. Is it possible? I mean now. At any rate, I'm clearing out of here in a few days. I'd clear out immediately, but I have accepted a dinner invitation from some nice, retired friends down the lane—how could they ever understand that my presence in their house confirms their luck and their fragile safety?

May I come? I'll call Monday a.m. at the college. If you can't do it, leave word. If you can, see you soon.

Best,

John

18 January

Little House

Mr. William Truax

President, The Fiduciary Trust Company

P.O. Box 121

New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Bill,

I don't have the fuel yet to acknowledge appropriately the enormous amount of help and love extended to Meg and me over the course of our ordeal, so I won't just yet. I hope you will convey to the board, though, that their efforts and their presence over the holiday period were deeply appreciated.

I am grateful, too, for this open-ended leave. Wells will certainly be better for it. It's a funny thing though; it puts me rather on edge.

Between you and me, hiding away out here was not a good idea. The effect is the opposite of relaxing—almost like being hounded by something. I suspect it's truancy guilt of some kind.

Again, deepest thanks. I shall be back in the saddle soon. I'll be in New Hampshire with a friend for a spell, then back down to Wells. Phil Upjohn and Marge Pearse have numbers to call if you need to get in touch.

Warmest regards,

John

18 January
Little House

Mr. Arnold Lieber
Director, Physical Plant
Wells School
Wells, Connecticut

Dear Arnold,

I can't begin at this point to acknowledge the gracious and feeling letters written to me after Meg's death, but I want to respond to yours before any more time passes.

I was deeply moved by what you had to say about Meg and the school. I don't think anyone else has seen as clearly what she did for the place or what she thought about it. You're right—she
was
the practical one. Unfortunately, perhaps, she was also the imaginative one and the diplomatic one. Wells School did not really have a headmaster; it had us.

Again, Arnold, no letter meant more to me than yours. I'm sure you know that you were always a great favorite of Meg's, and she didn't hand out such distinctions lightly.

I'll be leaving here in a couple of days and heading up to see an old friend in New Hampshire. It wasn't a very good idea to come here. Then on through a bit of New Hampshire and Vermont, then back to Wells—I almost wrote “home.”

I hope you and Phil Upjohn are getting on. He has numbers, should you need to call me for anything.

Gratefully,

J.O.G.

24 January
Petersfield, New Hampshire

Mr. Philip Upjohn
Director of Studies
Wells School
Wells, Connecticut

Dear Phil,

Just a note to let you know I am leaving Petersfield tomorrow and will be slowly winding my way down to Wells, via New Hampshire and some Vermont inns. I should be back in a week or so—no longer than ten days—and I will call from time to time.

I assume that all is in order, no doubt in rather better order than if I were pottering about at your side. I hope you know, Phil, how deeply grateful I am that you have been kind enough to stand in during this rocky stretch. I only wish that the additional responsibilities could have fallen on a less busy man. They could not have fallen on a better man.

My good wishes,

J.O.G.

27 January
Franconia House, N.H.

Mr. Jake Levin
R.D. 3
Petersfield, New Hampshire

Dear Jake,

Well, I've found one—and not just “one,” but
it.
It's a big old much appended-to frame house with creaky passages and stairways going off in every direction. There's a nice sweet sort of smell of pine soap and something harder to pin down: must and, I think, a little rot. There's a ripply-floored sitting room with a fireplace and clusters of odd chairs and sofas and end tables—all satisfyingly deserted, as the skiing is apparently terrible. Mr. Soughan—“call me ‘Harry'”—fixes the meals more or less on call. He is concerned that I don't eat much, and even were I hungrier, this would not be easy, as the fare is awfully tired looking when it is set before one in the dining room (laundry to be sorted on an adjacent table), and Harry is none too fastidious in his personal turnout. What could be better? So far I have borrowed three treasures from the sitting-room shelves:
Marjorie Morningstar
(Wouk),
On the Beach
(Chute), and
Sand and Foam
(Gibran). This trilogy, I have found, runs the full gamut of human possibility—earthly striving, earthly mortality, and transcendence. This is a wonderful place, and it is very quiet.

I hope my morose and even lachrymose presence was not too irritating for you. I could tell it was a little irritating. Nobody who is working should ever have to play host to someone who is not. I am afraid my picture of you in Petersfield was way off. I imagined hours of phoneless, reflective time in which you read, or composed, or dreamed into the firelight. How was I to know you worked so hard? I thought the university job was just a formality, a lucrative honor, like certain British crown appointments before modernity. You actually teach and mark papers and receive callers from their jeeps. And, I never bothered to anticipate, you have friends, among them more than one attractive woman. And you shop at a mall and cut wood and drive nearly a hundred miles a day. Unsettling for me to realize you are not a timeless hermit, but a busy, productive Modern Man, your poems written not by the brook's gurgle, but by the hum of the university library clock. Men are less busy, less modern at Wells school! Were it not for this enchanting place and for Harry, I might think the whole world—even its poetry-producing dimension—had passed me by. Thank God for
Sand and Foam,
for the eternal verities.

I want to tell you how I found this place, because the process is important and rare and nobody ever talks about it. I
willed
my way here, maybe even willed the inn. Without a guidebook, without a map, I was united, as if by a kind of spiritual magnetism, with the exact object of my imagination. I didn't ‘find' this inn; I joined it. I'm with the Jungians here. This inn was simply on my path. Only once before do I remember having this experience so vividly. Thirty years ago when I was reading English at Cambridge, I suddenly found myself preoccupied with minerals: crystals and gems. An obsession sprang without warning from my depths. It had also been an obsession during a phase of my childhood (ages eight till ten). Anyway, this crystal obsession finally eclipsed all else, and I remember springing from my chair one day and taking to the streets, driven in an altogether different way than I might have been for a sandwich. I, a relative stranger to England and to the Cambridge streets, wanted crystals. I stalked purposefully down Bridge Street past the colleges, past the shops toward the station, then suddenly turned up a narrow, coal-blackened lane called Silver Street, composed mostly of the backs of academic buildings; turned again up a dust-bin-lined alley, through an iron gate, up onto a loading platform, through two heavy service doors, down a passage or two—all without hesitation, all without encountering another soul—opened a heavy door and found myself in a large gray storeroom or laboratory. Black tile counters lined the walls; otherwise the room was full of dusty glass display cases—of bones, of rocks, and of crystals. On the tops of the cases and on the counters were little heaps of rock, and I somehow moved to the piles that were crystals: honey-colored, maple-colored, wine-colored, diamond-white. Some were fine as slivers of frost, others thick and tooled as smokey ice cubes. There I was, immersed in all the crystals I had ever wanted. Then the rest of the setting began to sink in: the dust, the bones, the cold gray stone crystal beds. It was all very clear. The message wasn't about crystals; it was about time. Something older and bigger and more important was getting in touch with me through those Cambridge rocks. I am reminding you, they said, that your business is just the surface skin of something very old and deep. Don't lose touch. It was the same sort of experience as finding this inn. A reminder.

Of what, though? That's the problem. Once I thought it was going to be glorious, a great achievement or discovery, an occasion even for fame. It is not going to be that, the inn reminds me. It might just be sordid. At any rate, I'm feeling a little jumpy, and I am obliged to leave Harry and Franconia House. Plenty more where this came from.

I can't quite bring myself to head straight down to school and to take it all on again, not just yet. On the other hand, every day I stay away, the less possible it seems that I'll ever be able to do it. How would I handle the first thing? Some mother will phone and complain that her son's roommate is unwholesome, and I will come undone. There will be no solution but to withdraw the boy at once. The mother will be astounded at such a suggestion, and I will stammer and apologize and perhaps ask what she thinks is best since she is a mother and knows boys. Soon the word will be out: Greeve's gone funny, can't think straight.

So what does that leave, my poems? They wouldn't go down with the university set, would they? Not airy enough. They might go down with the
Christian Science Monitor
set, though.
The Christian Science Monitor
has bought several poems of mine recently for up to $20 each. But could I sell them a thousand poems a year and make a modest living? No. That would overexpose me to the
Monitor
readership. No more Greeve! they would write the editor.

For the moment the problems of school-mastering and of poetry writing seem insurmountable. Perhaps a solution will present itself at the next inn.

It was good to see you, Jake. Everything about you and your world seems very substantial. Thanks very much for the company.

Best,

John

1 February
Peacham Place

Mr. Hugh Greeve
Pembroke House
St. Edward's School
Framingham, Massachusetts

Dear Hugh,

Have you ever been to Peacham, Vermont? Well then you really must go. It's like the illustrations for some almost too precious children's book. But it's true. These old houses and this old inn do sag with the snow in a reassuring way, and apple-cheeked men do stack cordwood, and at rosy-blue dusk scarf-swaddled children come home with their sleds and retire into lamp-lit parlors. If I were one of those children, I would never leave Peacham.

It looks, however, as though I ought to be leaving Peacham pretty soon. It's become February, and I still haven't been to school. You can get permanently behind, you know. It's a sorry state when the headmaster won't come back after vacation.

How are you? What with grieving and all the business of the funeral, I didn't see enough of you at Christmas time. I did value very much your being on hand, knowing full well you deserved and needed a proper release after your first harrowing term at St. Edward's. Thanks, Hugh. You and your family kept me afloat. I think you know how special you were to Meg.

From what I could see of her, your girl—Jill?—looks mighty appealing. And she is very clearly gone on you. Old Uncle John knows these things. Hope you managed to salvage some fun before New Year's.

Ah, Peacham. I have lived in New England more or less my whole life, and I do not take it for granted. It always takes me in, surprises me, breaks my heart. It's so very old—older than the colonials, older than the Indians. I could retire right here. I may well retire right here. A feeble nay vote for the Sun Belt.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep

Promises I had a lot of nerve making.

Write!

Love,

Uncle John

2 February
Peacham Place

Ms. Lisa Girvin
Poetry Editor
Yankee Magazine
Box 16

Dublin, New Hampshire

Dear Ms. Girvin,

I am not sure whether you, or anybody for that matter, takes handwritten submissions these days, but as I haven't got the means to do otherwise, I am submitting the enclosed “as is” for your consideration.

I don't know if you require background information from contributors, but for what it's worth, I am a schoolmaster and have had a number of poems and critical pieces published in magazines, scholarly journals, and in newspapers.