Borges and Me, page 2
My mother, too, kept asking, “Is there any point?” But what she questioned was my plan to return to Scotland, an unimaginable place. And my wish to leave her. She thought I should go to law school or just find a job of some kind. To this day I have a recurrent nightmare about opening a law practice in Scranton. I occupy the top floor of a nondescript building near the courthouse on North Washington Avenue. My mother sits at the metal receptionist’s desk, bellowing at would-be clients on the telephone or in person. This was a fantasy of hers, too: she wanted to sit at that desk, in control of all communications with her son, a dragon folded in the gate of Jay Parini, Attorney at Law. And woe to all who dared to enter this sacred space without her approval.
But I intended to make a profession of literature, as I announced one morning at breakfast with my father.
“Is literature a profession?” he asked plaintively.
I didn’t let on that I was troubled by the same question. Could I really make a go of writing—especially if what I wanted to write was poetry? There was always journalism, I told myself. I could write dogmatic book reviews for newspapers or do lofty interviews with writers or intellectuals, the sort of pieces that fatten the Sunday supplements and sometimes grow into books. Making a living by one’s pen wasn’t easy, I knew that much. You could write thrillers or detective stories, even tales of horror, but as I almost never read this kind of fiction, the fantasy of success in those genres was simply that, a fantasy.
The one thing I knew for sure was that I would never return to the safe, simple, unquestioning life that my parents had sought and found for themselves in northeastern Pennsylvania in the wake of a war that had killed sixty million people around the world. I had to get away from them and Scranton, away from all the long suffocating meals and nonsensical conversations, the fatal lethargy of “normal” life.
* * *
—
During my final year at Lafayette, I wrote to Professor Alec Falconer, chair of the English Department at St. Andrews, asking to be admitted as a Ph.D. student. I had very little awareness of what exactly my studies would entail, were I lucky enough to be accepted, or how long they might take, as the catalogue descriptions were opaque. The main thing, it seemed, was that “after at least nine terms of residence” one must submit “an original thesis of some length.” It would be “conducted under the supervision of the university.” That seemed like something I could manage, though I didn’t know the specifics.
During my previous stint in Scotland, I had discovered, in a used bookstore in Edinburgh, a volume of poems called Loaves and Fishes by George Mackay Brown. His tart, oddly inflected voice—like nothing I’d ever heard before—was a bell that rang in my head as I walked through the streets of that beautiful city. I had memorized half a dozen of his poems, and tried to write like him myself. Soon I discovered A Time to Keep, a slim volume of his stories set on Orkney, a remote island off the north coast of Scotland. The lyrical sway of his prose moved me, the way he dug into the emotional lives of ordinary people living in isolation from the rest of the world. The protagonists ranged from Viking raiders to lonely crofters and fishermen: figures so far from anything I had ever known but nonetheless present on the page in crisp, elemental language. I half wondered if one day I might not apply some of the same techniques to my own little world of Scranton.
In my application to Professor Falconer, I proposed a thesis on George Mackay Brown, talking knowledgeably about his unfolding career as a poet and writer of fiction, though I had only a few scraps of information about him and hardly knew the full range of his work. To my satisfaction and surprise, Falconer wrote back within a few weeks in his tiny hand with black India ink on letterhead. “The University has accepted your application for postgraduate study, and I think this is a reasonably good idea for a thesis. In any case, we shall discuss the matter, and I will be glad to admit you into the doctoral program under my supervision. Good luck in your journey from distant parts.”
I showed this letter to my parents, and we sat around the kitchen table discussing it. “Are we living in distant parts?” my father wondered with a smirk. My mother was less philosophical. “You can’t do this to me,” she said. I tried to explain that I was doing nothing “to her.” This was something “for me.” My father, bless him, suggested that “it could probably do no harm to try my hand at this sort of thing.” Upon graduation, I had been given an award by Lafayette that pretty much paid for my first two years of graduate study in St. Andrews, and I knew my father would help me financially as needed. He wasn’t sure what “graduate study in literature” meant, but the military option—going to Vietnam—held no mythic pull for him, never having himself served in the army because he had a hernia and flat feet, and he hoped (I think) that if I got out of the way for a few years, the war would pass, and I would return to Scranton and resume “normal” life.
In any case, I insisted that I was going to Scotland, knowing that my parents would not stop me. The alternative was Vietnam, as I noted. “At least you’ll be safe in Scotland,” my mother said grudgingly, “though Scotch girls have a bad reputation, and the men apparently wear skirts.”
* * *
—
And so, with anxiety and fear but also hope, I traveled back to Scotland. I dearly wished, as Thoreau put it in my favorite sentence from Walden, “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” It’s embarrassing to admit, but I wrote that too-famous sentence on the front page of the first journal I bought in St. Andrews at a little stationer’s shop on the corner of Church and South Street, in late September, when I was twenty-two.
2
WHEN I ARRIVED, in the fall of 1970, for my second period of study, St. Andrews seemed a universe to itself, out of communication with the rest of the world. The effects of the Second World War had not faded completely in Scotland, even after twenty-five years, and a kind of austerity persisted in the scantily heated rooms of residence halls and student flats, in the thin soup served up at lunch and dinner, and in the wizened faces of veterans who walked the streets on crutches or hovered over pints in dark pubs with a vacant look in their eyes. They had seen the worst, in far-flung parts of a world at war, and their wounds, physical and emotional, would never heal. I had one genial tutor, Cedric Collier, who never tired of talking about the Italian campaign, remembering the Eighth Army under Monty and their unhappy assault on German forces in Sicily. “In the rocky foothills of Mount Etna,” he would say, “they foiled us. What?”
That startled “What?”—the final beat in any statement of his—always took me aback. It was as if he were still reliving his bafflement and shame at Britain’s having been foiled in those remote foothills.
If there was an element of suppressed madness about the place, St. Andrews also inspired me with its beauty. Long beaches defined the town. On one side was the East Sands, an inlet full of fishing boats that had known more bountiful times. These salt-weakened vessels smelled of rotting fishnets and old lines and reeked with the memory of hauls gone by. A few barnacle-encrusted skiffs had been dragged onto the sands and waited for summer, the paint flaking on their hulls. I rarely visited this particularly scraggy bit of shoreline, which had an alien quality. The West Sands was another story. That brilliant wide beach curled westward around the bay toward an inlet of the River Tay. Its sands were glassy where the tide fell away and made an excellent route for runners, who would pick their way through bladderwrack and shells, the white bones of driftwood and the skeletons of fish or crabs. Oystercatchers called cheep cheep, wading into the surf with their orange beaks and spindly legs, while gulls swooped from the sky. The air tingled, and the water in the early morning or late afternoon was a shield of gold.
During my first term, I settled into a pattern of life that included an early run along the West Sands. This struck me as the most beautiful beach in the universe, a place where I could connect with a deep spiritual reality. God was there, in the sand and tumbling surf, in the blue-green bay. I followed my run with a long bath (I liked to read in the tub), coffee with fellow students in a nearby café, then a long day in the university library on South Street, where I found a chilly upper room in Parliament Hall where I seemed the only occupant. I settled at a table in one corner and began to write my thesis on Mackay Brown.
Professor Falconer had agreed to supervise this project in our initial correspondence, though he said unnervingly in a subsequent letter that “we should deliberate on the choice of subject when you arrive in St. Andrews. Brown is perhaps unsuitable for research. He is not a well-known writer, and he seems to be still alive.” That Falconer had already been prey to second thoughts on my thesis topic actually terrified me, and it only got worse on subsequent meetings, when his reservations became increasingly clear. “I’m not sure this is going to work out,” he would say. “Americans come here, but they don’t understand.” The problem was, I had no fallback position. If my thesis didn’t go forward, what then? I could too easily imagine myself being sucked back, caught in Scranton or Saigon—and sometimes I didn’t see much difference between them.
On the other hand, it was a little hard to take Alec Falconer seriously. He was a vaguely senescent fellow in his late sixties, a man who had been an officer in the Royal Navy during the war and had spent much of his subsequent life thinking about the relationship between Shakespeare and the sea. The Bard, Falconer argued, had shown a remarkable familiarity with shipboard protocol, so he must surely have been a naval man during his famous “lost years.” He made this improbable case at length in his 1964 “masterwork,” Shakespeare and the Sea. As Falconer suggested, “A naval officer of the twentieth century can have little difficulty in recognizing, even in its Elizabethan and Jacobean setting, a familiar world of intelligence reports, fleet orders, signals, strategy, maneuvers and royal naval ceremony.” He noted, by way of evidence from Othello, that when a second ship is sighted on the horizon, an age-old cry invariably went up: “A sail! A sail!”
It was, Professor Falconer told me, most unfortunate that “an American so-called scholar” from a “minor university in the hinterlands” had recently argued that during his lost years Shakespeare would almost certainly have been working in the legal field at the Inns of Court in London; otherwise he could never have written with such ease about these matters, nor would he have relied so heavily on tort law and jurisprudence for metaphors, as in Sonnet 46, where a litigation between the speaker’s heart and eye provides the explicit structure and context of the poem, complete with pleadings and a final verdict. Falconer, showing me a copy of this book, referred to his rival as a “mountebank and a fraud.”
Once on a wet evening I ran into Falconer on The Scores, a windblown street overlooking the bay near Castle House, home of the School of English. Holding his oversized fedora in place with one hand, he said to me wistfully, his face pinched, “It’s a cruel night on the sea, lad. A cruel night.” It didn’t surprise me to learn that a decade later he succumbed to dementia, ending his days in a mental asylum at Stratheden, a few miles from St. Andrews, where he spent his time writing Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory, convinced they were his own and amazed by the felicity of his pen.
The madness of all this didn’t worry me, so long as it didn’t interfere with my pursuit of George Mackay Brown. I determined to proceed, having decided that Falconer’s dithering might work in my favor. He would not resist me, I convinced myself.
At this time postgraduates had few living options in St. Andrews—there were only a handful of available rooms in Deans Court, the single residence hall for this category of student, and I couldn’t get one there. Eventually I moved into some rooms at the top of a house owned by a young lecturer in English called Tony Ashe. He and his wife, Susan, became close friends and confidants, almost surrogate parents. (Not a week goes by, fifty years later, that I don’t talk on the phone with Tony, now in his mid-eighties.) But for some time during my first year back in St. Andrews I rented a damp basement flat in a Georgian townhouse on Hope Street, one of the most elegant eighteenth-century streets in the old town (as opposed to the “new town,” where most houses were postwar construction). My landlady was the elderly Miss Ross, a minuscule woman with a purple beaked nose and a bun of gray hair; she wore thick woolen skirts that repelled the rain and would probably have repelled bullets. I paid her a sum of £7 each week for the privilege of occupying this dismal flat, and I was responsible for the heat, which depended on a shilling meter in a grate. This electric “fire”—a trio of horizontal bars—would blaze mightily and scorch your shins if you stood too close, though it generally cast more light than heat into the sitting room, which had a cramped table in one corner where I could eat by myself or entertain, at most, a single guest. (I often wrote at this table at night or early in the morning.) In the tiny kitchen there was a metal sink, a hot plate, a toaster, and a small fridge. In a narrow cupboard by the door I kept tins of tuna, tomato soup, beans, and boxes of Weetabix. A loaf of crusty brown bread from Fisher & Donaldson, a nearby bakery, invariably sat on the bread board by the sink, and it would disappear over three or four days.
What more did I need?
Miss Ross was a dour woman who attended a very “low” church, as she put it. It was Protestant with deep Calvinist roots. She assumed that as an Italian-American I was a practicing Roman Catholic so never tried to tempt me to her faith. (My father had in fact turned Protestant to marry my mother and was ordained as a Baptist minister in middle age. Faith, for him, had come suddenly and absorbed him fully, and I grew used to seeing him at breakfast with an open King James Bible in the Scofield edition beside his English muffin and grape jelly. He made endless notes in the margins and memorized whole chapters.) I occasionally went upstairs for tea, and we were often joined by her sister, also Miss Ross, who lived nearby in what had been the family home on Bell Street. My landlady referred to me as “my young American” and took pride in having a “postgraduate scholar from abroad” in her flat. “Don’t ruin your eyes!” she would say, echoing my mother’s frequent warning about the dangers of reading. “I see the piles of books in your flat, and with such fine print!”
At first the thickness of her accent posed an obstacle, but I soon echoed it back. “Do you ken?” she would ask if I looked baffled. “Aye,” I would say. “I ken.”
The pursuit of a research degree in English in St. Andrews was open-ended to a maddening degree. To my dismay, I learned from other students that it could take up to a decade to push through the academic underbrush to a doctoral end point, and sometimes I felt as if I had marooned myself in this unlikely spot for what might easily amount to a decade. Already I could sense that the kind of focused work necessary to attain a doctorate might exceed my patience. Complicating matters further, I didn’t know if I could afford to stay for more than two years without an extra bit of help from the university, though my father was happy enough to send regular checks to “tide me over,” as he put it. But his letters would often end: “I think you should be applying to law schools in Pennsylvania. There is room in Scranton for good lawyers. And your mother agrees with me.”
Of course she did.
My anxieties about being sucked back into life at home increased when, after only a month in St. Andrews, I received another letter from Scranton, one I’d been expecting with dread: a notice from my draft board. I studied the envelope (forwarded by my mother) closely—even smelled the paper—and, after some hesitation, put it unopened into the top drawer of my bedroom dresser. Other letters from the draft board would follow, amounting to a small passel, which I bound with a rubber band and hid beneath my underwear. It frightened me that the letters kept coming. Did they insist I report for duty? What if I didn’t appear? Could they come to Scotland and arrest me? Would a return to the States put me in legal jeopardy? I determined that I would never open those letters. Not ever.
In a gesture of self-liberation, one night I flushed my last bottle of tranquilizers down the toilet. There was relief in that swirl of water, a cleansing. I would keep myself alive and functioning without their help and deal with my anxieties on my own. (And I felt quite sure that they actually increased my panic, the sense of dread that had been dogging my days and lengthening my wakeful nights, when eternities opened between each fat tick of the clock beside my bed.)
* * *
—
One morning on The Scores I ran into a tutor from my undergraduate year, a woman of fifty called Miss Anne Wright, whose brisk cheer I had liked. She was Miss Jean Brodie (as portrayed by Maggie Smith in the film) come back from the dead. In her strangulated voice, pushing through gritted teeth with unbearable faux brightness, she said, “Ah, Mr. Parini! What a lovely name! I remember your name! Are you an Italian?”
“Hello, Miss Wright.”
“Why are you here?”
“Where?”
“In Scotland!”
I explained that I had come back to St. Andrews as a postgraduate and would remain as long as it took to get a doctorate in the School of English.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I hear determination in your voice. Never a good thing. But come for tea. We must talk.”
