The Professor and Other Writings (3 page)

But they saved the best till last.
Zhose ughly girls get snooquered Beeg Time!
Along the far wall by the exit was a long wooden work desk with five or six seats attached, rather like a junior high school science class setup. Mounted at each seat was a beautiful old-fashioned viewing machine—a kind of antique stereopticon—made of brass and polished wood, with a double eyepiece and hand crank. It was all too exquisite and Proustian to resist. Like silent film cameramen, Bridget and I took our seats and eagerly began to crank.

Yet hellish indeed what assailed us. Trench-pix again, in lots of twenty, but now eternally fixed in a lurid, refulgent, Miltonic 3-D. Sickening and brain-twisting. A clicking, clacking kaleidoscope of atrocities. Don't forget the vertigo. Even as I sat and stared I felt myself lurching forward, into the bright intolerable sunshine of some ruinous as usual summer day in 1917. The light itself was a somatic wedge tilting one into the past. The cerebellum went walkabout.

Granted, the light preserved in old photographs can be unnerving at the best of times. I have a picture in one of my books of Mahler and Richard Strauss stepping out into bright sunlight after a matinee of
Salomé
in Graz in 1906. The Old World sun glinting off the side of Mahler's polished shoe, the sharp edge of Strauss's boater, the geometric shadows thrown onto the wall behind them: these teleport one instantly into the scene. You start remembering what the day was
like. But here the illusion of reality was fearsomely, even fiendishly intensified. The febrile glare, conjoined with the stereoscopic depth of field, equaled My God They're Right There. A corpse with flies. A headless body upside down in the sand. Two skulls on a battlefield midden. An obscure something or other in
feldgrau
. I got up in disgust after seeing yet another moribund horse, its intestines spilled out and glistening.

In the weeks and months that followed, nothing made very much sense. (After a surreal shopping spree at the vast Eurostar mall outside Calais, Bridget and I got back to Herne Hill without incident.) I confess I was moody. I was on sabbatical; I should have been happy. But I maundered and malingered. On the flight home to San Francisco I stopped for the weekend in Chicago to see Blakey. She politely admired the absurd keychain I'd brought her from Flanders: a laminated reproduction of a 1914 recruiting poster. A cadre of shrewish females exhorting their unfortunate men, “Women of Britain Say—Go!” (I myself had a plastic, finger-pointing Kitchener, the brave homo-warlord bristling like a 1980s Castro Street clone.) We took my photos of Tyne Cot and Franvillers to be developed at the Walgreens on Michigan Avenue. But then we had a big blow-up fight that evening and she rushed out of her apartment building in a rage. I had to ask the Polish doorman which way she'd gone and ran after her, gesticulating like a Keystone Cop, up Lake Shore Drive.

When I got back to California, friends asked about the trip. I gave brief, potted, cousin-rich recountings; sometimes I even described the stereopticon. But I felt like a bit of a sociopath, especially when one of my colleagues looked at me with revulsion as I related the itinerary. At the same time I became irrationally indignant when listeners seemed insufficiently captivated by my odyssey of death. In March I gave a lecture at an esteemed university where I hoped to get a job. (The people there knew that Blakey and I wanted to be together; I had been asked to apply.) The talk had to do with the
war and writers of the 1920s: Wyndham Lewis, Woolf, the Sitwells. I showed slides of Claud Lovat Fraser's sad little trench drawings and expressed, all too dotingly, my love for them. I even mentioned (obliquely) Uncle Newton. It was not a success. The department Medusa—a steely Queer Theorist in bovver boots—decided I was “wedded to the aesthetic” and needed “nuking” at once. And so I was. Hopes dashed, I fell into a pompous, protracted, maudlin depression, like Mr. Toad when he finds the stoats and ferrets have taken over Toad Hall. Friends kept saying “But they are the ones who look bad!” But I couldn't get over the ghastly cruelty of it all. I felt like a bullet-ridden blob. The cemetery trip had done something to me—induced a kind of temporary insanity?—but I couldn't get a grip on how or why. I was cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, and bound in to saucy doubts and fears.

A clue to the nature of my feelings came only this past autumn, haltingly, in the wake of the attacks on the East Coast. Even in balmy California there was no escaping what had happened. Televisions—especially the silly little army of them suspended above the treadmills at the gym I belong to—became existential torture devices. No more
Frasier
reruns or baseball; just Peter Jennings and dirty bombs.

The boys with tattoos flexed nervously. Even the female-to-male transsexuals looked shaken. (It's a gay gym.) I went through my own quiet days feeling gusty, shocked, and forlorn. Blakey was still in Chicago. One evening I broke down and called my father for the first time in months. He was surprised to hear from me. I mumbled that
I was “calling to see how he was,” that I was upset by the attacks. Long, baffled pause. He allowed that he was fine. Silence, followed by clotted
hmmms.
He seemed to apprehend that I wanted something. I started raging inwardly. After a long silence, as if goaded by tiny jumper cables, he morosely acknowledged that when he and his brother were evacuated to the North of England in 1940, he thought it was “the end of the world.” Two weeks later, though, he was feeling “somewhat better.” Glum Larkinesque half-chuckle. Now, this was all unprecedented self-revelation, but didn't help much. I asked after his wife and the trombone-playing nephew. He sank back into his customary Arctic mode. I hung up, swearing as always never to call again.

I'd got off the World War I thing after the job fiasco—couldn't bear to look at my lecture notes, had tried to put everything out of my mind. But now it came inching back. I was desperate for something to read in those disordered weeks, something to match up with the lost way I was feeling. I galloped through Ann Wroe's book on Pontius Pilate, but it was too weird and dissociated. I ordered Kenneth Tynan's diaries from Amazon but found I was in no mood for high camp and dominatrixes. I wanted something stolid and sad. With a sense of oh-what-the-hell, I finally picked up a book I'd bought on the trench trip and then instantly lost interest in: a new paperback edition of Vera Brittain's Great War diary, the very diary she later transmuted into her celebrated 1933 war memoir,
Testament of Youth
.
*

Brittain was hardly an unknown quantity. I'd read
Testament of Youth
in my twenties and had never forgotten the intensity with which she related the primal bereavements of her early years. (I had once observed my grandmother surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes while reading it in the 1970s; her own Great War losses—of fiancé
and only brother—duplicated Brittain's exactly.) Yet I couldn't say I had ever exactly warmed to Brittain, as either author or woman. For all the pain and horror she had suffered—and for all the integrity of her subsequent personal and political commitments—she struck me as abrasive and conceited. I tended to agree with Woolf, who, after devouring
Testament of Youth
, applied the usual backhanded praise in a comical diary entry from the 1930s:

And as I started in, it all began coming back to me: the Head Girl self-righteousness; the smug rivalry with other women; the gruesome fascination with period bores like Mrs. Humphry Ward and Olive Schreiner. (In her wartime letters to the doomed Roland Leighton, her nineteen-year-old fiancé, Brittain is forever comparing their poetical puppy love to that of the unfortunately named “Lyndall and Waldo” in
Story of an African Farm
.) Nor did I find much at first to obviate my ill humor. I've got big irritable underlinings, I see, at just that point early in 1915 when Brittain, still at Somerville, contemplates enlisting as a VAD nurse:

Yet as I continued to read, something else began coming through too—something less rebarbative. I started noticing, amid all the boasts and bitchiness and careening
ressentiment
, a more vulnerable side to Brittain's personality. I hadn't remembered—at all—what a phobic and self-critical woman she was, or indeed how deeply she had had to struggle, throughout the First World War, with what she felt to be her own pusillanimity. Now among the myriad painful feelings the attacks of September 11 had evoked in me—grief, despair, outrage—perhaps the most shame-making had been a penetrating awareness of my own cowardice. I worried incessantly about crashes, bombs, sarin gas, throat slitting, eye gouging, burning, jumping, falling. I brooded over horrific illnesses—anthrax, smallpox, radiation sickness, plague—and imagined my own blood, teeming with bacteria, oozing thickly from my pores. I became afraid of bridges and tall buildings and the incendiary, blue-gold beauty of the city in which I lived. My childhood fear of flying revivified, I shed tears of self-disgust when I saw the pregnant Mrs. Beamer, whose husband had died on United Flight 93, take the same flight a few weeks later to show her resilience in the face of disaster. While straining to appear normal, I felt a vertiginous dread—of life itself—soar and frolic within me, like an evil biplane on the loose. I was not brave,
it seemed, as men were, or even semi-stoical. I struggled with hysterical girlishness. It was an archaic and humiliating problem. I was female—and a wretched poltroon.

Yet signs of similar struggle—against girl-frights of such magnitude that she “ached,” she said, “for a cold heart & a passionless indifference”—were everywhere in Vera Brittain's journals. And perhaps because I was already alert to the theme, I found myself peculiarly affected by her testimony. I rapidly consumed the remaining diaries; reread
Testament of Youth
in a single great dollop; then turned to Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge's excellent Brittain biography of 1995. Before I knew it, I was up to my ears again in Great War matériel, but this time with a difference. I was getting a weensy bit more honest. To confess in public that you are afraid of death—and violent death especially—is to break a powerful taboo. Simple people will pity you and say nothing; the sophisticated will accuse you of being insufferably bourgeois. (“Spirited men and women”—or so maintains the title character in Bellow's
Ravelstein
—“were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death.”) Yet precisely in Brittain's unsentimental revelation of her fear and candid hankering after the kind of physical bravery she saw in the men she knew at the front, I found not only a partial clue to the meaning of my war obsession, but a necessary insight into my own less admissible hopes and fears.

Brittain's own anxieties, to be sure, were to some degree part of a difficult family inheritance. As Berry and Bostridge point out, she was a delicate woman: small and gamine in appearance, even in her starched VAD uniform. (Her brother Edward, who won a Military Cross on the first day of the Somme and died in June 1918, a few days after my Uncle Newton, towers over her by at least a foot in family photographs.) And in many ways she was delicate in spirit, too. Insanity ran in the family—she worried greatly as an adult about a “bad, bad nervous inheritance” in the Brittain line—and she was
prone all her life to irrational frights and fancies. In an unfinished autobiographical novel from the 1920s she recalls the panic produced in her as a child by the sight of a “leering” full moon:

Similar hallucinations plagued her later in life. In one of the stranger asides in
Testament of Youth,
she describes a “horrible delusion” she suffered after being demobilized in 1918. Returning to her studies at Somerville, traumatized and embittered by her war losses, she seemed to perceive, each time she looked at herself in the mirror, a “dark shadow” on her face, suggestive of a beard. For eighteen months she was tormented by this “sinister fungus” and feared she was becoming a witch. In the memoir she attributes the fantasy to the strain she was under and passes over it relatively quickly. (“I have since been told that hallucinations and dreams and insomnia are normal symptoms of over-fatigue and excessive strain, and that, had I consulted an intelligent doctor immediately after the war, I might have been spared the exhausting battle against nervous breakdown which I waged for 18 months.”) Yet one has a sense, here and elsewhere, of a woman painfully susceptible to mental distress. Despite her subsequent achievements as journalist, public speaker, and political activist—or so say Berry and Bostridge—Brittain had always
“to fight hard for what little confidence she achieved, and even in old age the predominant impression she created among those meeting her for the first time was of a woman who seemed to be in a state of almost perpetual worry.”