One Meets Anne Barton in Black and White
When I read about the death of Professor Anne Barton in 2013, I was transported back two decades to my first sabbatical, to a visit to Cambridge in which dinner with Barton was the strangest event of a passing strange day. London’s font of patriarchy, The Telegraph, called Barton an American academic who illuminated Oxford and Cambridge with her studies of English drama. My memories are rather less glowing.
On a damp and chilly February morning I walked from Mecklenburgh Square (where Dorothy Sayers and Harriet Vane once lived) up to Kings Cross to catch one of the little shuttle-ish trains to Cambridge, my briefcase packed with toothbrush, smalls, clean t-shirt, and a guest-gift bottle of single malt Scotch.
I had been invited to Cambridge. Or, perhaps, I should say one had been invited to Cambridge.
When I read about the death of Professor Anne Barton in 2013, I was transported back two decades to my first sabbatical, to a visit to Cambridge in which dinner with Barton was the strangest event of a passing strange day. London’s font of patriarchy, The Telegraph, called Barton an American academic who illuminated Oxford and Cambridge with her studies of English drama. My memories are rather less glowing.
On a damp and chilly February morning I walked from Mecklenburgh Square (where Dorothy Sayers and Harriet Vane once lived) up to Kings Cross to catch one of the little shuttle-ish trains to Cambridge, my briefcase packed with toothbrush, smalls, clean t-shirt, and a guest-gift bottle of single malt Scotch.
I had been invited to Cambridge. Or, perhaps, I should say one had been invited to Cambridge.
Not wishing to be pretentious, one took the bus to the city center, then wandered up slightly winding streets lined by the un-nerving mix one sees in cathedral towns: ancient book shops, Marks and Spencer, ancient churches, real shoe repair shops, Burger Kings with subdued signs, antique-ish shops, an array of pubs, ancient buildings of undefined function, Pizza Express, and five dozen banks. The Brits do love a bank. Quite by accident one found one's self at the entrance of Christ's College -- Milton's alma mater (or pater, to be more linguistically and theologically accurate.) One might call it fate. One might not. Anyway, there was a helpful (and, as one was to discover, unique) map of the college by the porter's lodge, so one could find one's way to the mulberry tree planted by Milton himself.
The gardens were lovely, with snowdrops and crocus everywhere, huge trees, turf of a most unsubltle green, and winding paths to keep non-fellows off said turf. The mulberry tree was duly admired and photographed, and very un-lovely it was. There seemed to be more props than tree. Also a variety of narratives, as subsequent reading revealed. This is either the mulberry tree planted by Milton or the mulberry tree planted in the year of Milton's birth (coincidentally, one must assume) or it is the mulberry tree under which Milton gained the title The Lady of Christ's. Still, one has seen where those feet in ancient times . . . .
After the thrill of the mulberry tree, one felt life had little more to offer, but the chapel at King's offered fan vaulting which was all it's cracked up to be and more, so -- after few detours into bookshops and a disappointing look at the river which was in the annual process of being drained so that dead bicycles could be removed -- one sat and admired stained glass and space until half twelve, time to arrive at Trinity College, where one's host Jeremy Maule[1] is variously located -- “variously" because of the obscure Brit system of academic titles. [Jeremy is a lecturer, which means he's tenured, and a member of the English Faculty, which is better than being tenured, but is referred to as Mr. Maule because he has not converted his Christ Church/Oxford doctorate into a Cambridge doctorate even though it is automatic for Oxon people after three years, but he doesn't want to because he says he likes being different. To an American, this definition of “being different" appears to allow for only the most elegantly slim margin of other-ness.]
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-jeremy-maule-1188609.html
After the thrill of the mulberry tree, one felt life had little more to offer, but the chapel at King's offered fan vaulting which was all it's cracked up to be and more, so -- after few detours into bookshops and a disappointing look at the river which was in the annual process of being drained so that dead bicycles could be removed -- one sat and admired stained glass and space until half twelve, time to arrive at Trinity College, where one's host Jeremy Maule[1] is variously located -- “variously" because of the obscure Brit system of academic titles. [Jeremy is a lecturer, which means he's tenured, and a member of the English Faculty, which is better than being tenured, but is referred to as Mr. Maule because he has not converted his Christ Church/Oxford doctorate into a Cambridge doctorate even though it is automatic for Oxon people after three years, but he doesn't want to because he says he likes being different. To an American, this definition of “being different" appears to allow for only the most elegantly slim margin of other-ness.]
[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-jeremy-maule-1188609.html
After walking -- carefully on the walks -- through the huge Great Court, which Let's Go (a REAL authority) says is the largest in Cambridge and the real setting of the college race in Chariots of Fire (which was filmed at Eton because Trinity refused permission), walking past the fountain that looks like cross between a well and a Baroque confessional and in which Byron used to bathe naked, walking into New Court (which, of course, is not new at all), one found Jeremy's staircase and went up to his room and entered, announcing “I have seen Milton's mulberry tree and life has little more to offer." “Sherry?" he responded. One allowed that life could, after all, perhaps offer sherry.
Sipping the predictably exquisite sherry, Jeremy explained that after a quick bite of lunch (one envisioned the Cambridge version of the Hub), he would show one to the seat reserved for one in the Wren Library where one could work until five when -- if one really wanted to take the trouble -- the Antony and Cleopatra class would meet. Here a “class" is five people. Then dinner in Anne Barton's rooms -- just the three of us, OH GOD -- and then Jean Wilson's lecture on Lady Anne Clifford as a monument builder, originally the reason for the whole trip. One allowed as how that sounded nifty. “So we'll just dash over and get some soup and a bite or two," said Jeremy, flinging on a moth-eaten cardigan.
Sipping the predictably exquisite sherry, Jeremy explained that after a quick bite of lunch (one envisioned the Cambridge version of the Hub), he would show one to the seat reserved for one in the Wren Library where one could work until five when -- if one really wanted to take the trouble -- the Antony and Cleopatra class would meet. Here a “class" is five people. Then dinner in Anne Barton's rooms -- just the three of us, OH GOD -- and then Jean Wilson's lecture on Lady Anne Clifford as a monument builder, originally the reason for the whole trip. One allowed as how that sounded nifty. “So we'll just dash over and get some soup and a bite or two," said Jeremy, flinging on a moth-eaten cardigan.
We walked into Nevile's Court, beautifully surrounded by a colonnaded walk which would otherwise be mistaken for a cloister and flanked on upper level west by the Wren Library, walked most definitely ON the grass -- even though it was quite damp and the cloister would have been better for both the turf and our shoes -- went up a flight of stairs, through an Alice-in-Wonderland invisible door in the paneling, and there we were at high table of the dining hall of Trinity College. One was impressed. Two floor-to ceiling oriel windows flanked the ends of the elevation, while the college tables ran the length of the paneled hall below, ending below the minstrels' gallery. Seemingly countless portraits hung on the dark walls, with pride of place given to a full-length rendering of the College founder, Henry VIII. In the bay of one window was bread and soup, then later cheese and cake; in the other were several groaning boards: cold ham, turkey, beef, a plate of jellied filets of salmon; hot versions of most of the same and “a game dish" and something Jeremy gestured to as “vegetarian," decently wrapped in pastry to conceal its meatlessness; and many of what the Brits call salads along with one bowl of what even an American would call a salad (meaning it wasn't glued together with mayo.)
After eating the soup (wild mushroom, a self-effacing servant murmured) and bread, we went to the groaning boards where one took salmon and various salads: china and silver, as a matter of course, but on the lunch-time informality of bare scrubbed oak tables. People live like this EVERY DAY. No, not in one's wildest fantasies could this be something one did every day. There was only one other female in the room (besides the women who took one's empty dishes), a fact one did not allow to pass unremarked. Yes, Jeremy responded, Trinity is still less than 10% female, even lower on female faculty. He said prejudices are no longer spoken out loud, but are no less acted upon. Somewhere in Cambridge, women are still eating prunes and custard. |
Back to Jeremy's room for coffee, a room he dismissed as “a former maid's quarters," but still twice the size of a Blake office, with a wall of casement windows and three walls built-in bookcases, and full of comfortable armchairs. He had been offered rooms in College, but had chosen to buy a house, so he says he'll have to wait for years until a sitting-room/library suite becomes vacant. One feels such pity for the man. So then we went off -- across the grass, of course -- to the library in which lies the only copy of Milton's early poems in his own hand, the very copy of Lycidas from which Virginia Woolf was turned away in A Room of One's Own. When Jeremy had said he'd booked a seat, one assumed some arcane formality. In actuality, there are only FOUR readers' seats in the Wren. Less fortunate souls, one supposes, work in the nearby modern library.
That one has worked in a famous library that has been cursed by a famous woman is a matter of supreme importance -- what IS the obverse of “indifference"? -- to this woman. Oh wow, this was almost too cool for one to bear. (Actually, as the Brits would say, it was literally too cool, as after an hour or two one's fingers began to turn blue and one was forced to retreat to the Ladies' [what else?] Room and run hot water over them.) Anyway, Jeremy introduced one to the appropriate people, gave a quick tour, then departed, leaving one to gaze at the bays of beautifully bound editions of god-knows-what and to look up one's own Milton collection in the card catalogue. One did not, however, call it up. One called instead some 17th century accounts of the Westminster tombs, then worked with a facsimilie of the mss of the early Milton poems. To get a book, one fills out a fetching slip. On the readers' table there is a metal box of flat rocks, naturally smoothed (but not vulgarly polished) into rounds and ovals and available for weighting down pages while taking notes. They reminded one of the river rocks one picks up in the Great Smoky Mountains of one's simple, rustic youth, and were thus a sort of objective correlative supplying a much-needed sense of reality. The pervading atmosphere, however -- unlike the Bodleian where one did not feel comfortable -- was benign and one made pages of notes, both from the things called up and from ideas gathered while staring into Wren's beautiful space.
At five one zipped back to Jeremy's room for the Shakespeare class. Contrary to what one has heard from those who claim to be playing with the British Ball, teaching at Cambridge is much of a muchness with teaching at Geneseo -- always supposing one could imagine teaching in such an office in bottomless armchairs and to only five students, all of whom were prepared to address both the play and Plutarch. Well, all but one, an ACTOR, Jeremy had warned me: they never read the plays. Some things evidently hold true on both sides of the Atlantic. (J. said: “When they come for interviews we ask, in very encouraging tones 'and are you interested in dramatics?' and if they light up, we ship them off to someone else. But if one slips in, he infects the others and it runs through the whole year like the flu. If they can't act, they stage manage; and that takes even more time!") So except for Sasha (of course he was called Sasha), the kids addressed the play no worse and no better than one has heard it addressed in Wells 209, considering that we don't make them read Plutarch. Still, one asked and said much the same sorts of things one asks and says at Geneseo, and the kids seemed neither over- nor under-whelmed, so one assumes it was not a shock to their Englishness to be taught Shakespeare by an unapologetic American. There were two women, Freya and Vicky, and Jeremy had said they would talk a great deal, but I didn't think they talked all that much, so either they talked less for a woman or my definition of a great deal of talking from a woman differs from Jeremy's. They departed, one reached for the sherry bottle, and Jeremy returned from the lecture he had been attending instead of teaching his own class (which he had planned simply to cancel.) At Cambridge, as at U of London, there's ALWAYS somebody famous from someplace else lecturing on something. How anyone finds time to write one cannot imagine. But perhaps there's a moment or two left over after grading those five papers . . . .
So then we sipped more sherry and the penny -- one had been waiting for it -- dropped. One realized (indeed one had speculated at some length about it at dinner at London House before leaving) that Jeremy's hospitality was excessive for any Brit, let alone a Brit so casually met at three or four conferences. So what did he want? One suspected, as one so often does in conference-ish circles, that this flattering attention might not be unrelated to one's public friendship with the Roche of Princeton, I Tatti, etc. And indeed, it wasn't. Jeremy wants into Tom's NEH seminar next summer. Well, that's a bit of a surprise, especially since he says he wants in even if NEH won't pay him the stipend. Who knows? He'd certainly be better than anybody in Tom's last two seminars and better than many in our 1983 seminar. After hearing the fresh-air-kid aspect of the seminars, he still insisted “but you and Marshall Grossman both took it." Well, that's true, but one must also admit to spending an enormous amount of that summer on and in various bodies of water with Freddie. And as for Marshall, well, the only child he and Ann have ever had was conceived that summer. Still, fair's fair, and I'll give it my best shot. One could only admire his placement of the topic: after lunch and the Wren; but also after having abandoned his class to one's American mercies, thus providing a counter-weight of favors and making me not a total prisoner of gratitude;; but before what he clearly viewed as what sweet old Bubba would call the piss of resistance: dinner with Anne Barton.
Dinner with Anne Barton. If it weren't for that exceedingly nasty review she wrote of David Norbrook's Oxford Anthology of Ren Verse last fall, one would have thought she must be dead by now. Not so but far otherwise. We went along to her rooms in Nevile's Court (she also has a house 50 miles north of Cambridge, but as the holder of one of the five major chairs in the University, evidently gets to have her rooms and eat in them), up a much grander staircase than Jeremy's, and into a white living room. The walls were white; the rug was white; the sofa and chairs were white; the bookcases where white (the books weren't all white, but they were suspiciously light-spined, as if the darker tomes had been banished elsewhere. Even the cats were white. Professor Barton was all in black. Black nylon or poly top with a v-neckline and a ruffle over black pleated, ankle-length skirt; her hair was dyed black-black. Daisy Buchanan on Sunset Boulevard.
That one has worked in a famous library that has been cursed by a famous woman is a matter of supreme importance -- what IS the obverse of “indifference"? -- to this woman. Oh wow, this was almost too cool for one to bear. (Actually, as the Brits would say, it was literally too cool, as after an hour or two one's fingers began to turn blue and one was forced to retreat to the Ladies' [what else?] Room and run hot water over them.) Anyway, Jeremy introduced one to the appropriate people, gave a quick tour, then departed, leaving one to gaze at the bays of beautifully bound editions of god-knows-what and to look up one's own Milton collection in the card catalogue. One did not, however, call it up. One called instead some 17th century accounts of the Westminster tombs, then worked with a facsimilie of the mss of the early Milton poems. To get a book, one fills out a fetching slip. On the readers' table there is a metal box of flat rocks, naturally smoothed (but not vulgarly polished) into rounds and ovals and available for weighting down pages while taking notes. They reminded one of the river rocks one picks up in the Great Smoky Mountains of one's simple, rustic youth, and were thus a sort of objective correlative supplying a much-needed sense of reality. The pervading atmosphere, however -- unlike the Bodleian where one did not feel comfortable -- was benign and one made pages of notes, both from the things called up and from ideas gathered while staring into Wren's beautiful space.
At five one zipped back to Jeremy's room for the Shakespeare class. Contrary to what one has heard from those who claim to be playing with the British Ball, teaching at Cambridge is much of a muchness with teaching at Geneseo -- always supposing one could imagine teaching in such an office in bottomless armchairs and to only five students, all of whom were prepared to address both the play and Plutarch. Well, all but one, an ACTOR, Jeremy had warned me: they never read the plays. Some things evidently hold true on both sides of the Atlantic. (J. said: “When they come for interviews we ask, in very encouraging tones 'and are you interested in dramatics?' and if they light up, we ship them off to someone else. But if one slips in, he infects the others and it runs through the whole year like the flu. If they can't act, they stage manage; and that takes even more time!") So except for Sasha (of course he was called Sasha), the kids addressed the play no worse and no better than one has heard it addressed in Wells 209, considering that we don't make them read Plutarch. Still, one asked and said much the same sorts of things one asks and says at Geneseo, and the kids seemed neither over- nor under-whelmed, so one assumes it was not a shock to their Englishness to be taught Shakespeare by an unapologetic American. There were two women, Freya and Vicky, and Jeremy had said they would talk a great deal, but I didn't think they talked all that much, so either they talked less for a woman or my definition of a great deal of talking from a woman differs from Jeremy's. They departed, one reached for the sherry bottle, and Jeremy returned from the lecture he had been attending instead of teaching his own class (which he had planned simply to cancel.) At Cambridge, as at U of London, there's ALWAYS somebody famous from someplace else lecturing on something. How anyone finds time to write one cannot imagine. But perhaps there's a moment or two left over after grading those five papers . . . .
So then we sipped more sherry and the penny -- one had been waiting for it -- dropped. One realized (indeed one had speculated at some length about it at dinner at London House before leaving) that Jeremy's hospitality was excessive for any Brit, let alone a Brit so casually met at three or four conferences. So what did he want? One suspected, as one so often does in conference-ish circles, that this flattering attention might not be unrelated to one's public friendship with the Roche of Princeton, I Tatti, etc. And indeed, it wasn't. Jeremy wants into Tom's NEH seminar next summer. Well, that's a bit of a surprise, especially since he says he wants in even if NEH won't pay him the stipend. Who knows? He'd certainly be better than anybody in Tom's last two seminars and better than many in our 1983 seminar. After hearing the fresh-air-kid aspect of the seminars, he still insisted “but you and Marshall Grossman both took it." Well, that's true, but one must also admit to spending an enormous amount of that summer on and in various bodies of water with Freddie. And as for Marshall, well, the only child he and Ann have ever had was conceived that summer. Still, fair's fair, and I'll give it my best shot. One could only admire his placement of the topic: after lunch and the Wren; but also after having abandoned his class to one's American mercies, thus providing a counter-weight of favors and making me not a total prisoner of gratitude;; but before what he clearly viewed as what sweet old Bubba would call the piss of resistance: dinner with Anne Barton.
Dinner with Anne Barton. If it weren't for that exceedingly nasty review she wrote of David Norbrook's Oxford Anthology of Ren Verse last fall, one would have thought she must be dead by now. Not so but far otherwise. We went along to her rooms in Nevile's Court (she also has a house 50 miles north of Cambridge, but as the holder of one of the five major chairs in the University, evidently gets to have her rooms and eat in them), up a much grander staircase than Jeremy's, and into a white living room. The walls were white; the rug was white; the sofa and chairs were white; the bookcases where white (the books weren't all white, but they were suspiciously light-spined, as if the darker tomes had been banished elsewhere. Even the cats were white. Professor Barton was all in black. Black nylon or poly top with a v-neckline and a ruffle over black pleated, ankle-length skirt; her hair was dyed black-black. Daisy Buchanan on Sunset Boulevard.
During the course of the visit, she looked directly at one only four times, when she shook hands and when she uttered each of the three remarks she addresses directly to one: “so you're a DOG person?"; “and how DO you know Tom Roche?"; and “you WERE at Brown and now you're where?" One admitted to the first, explained the last, and -- rather with a flourish -- trotted out (with due attribution) Anne Prescott's answer to someone who posed just that question this last MLA. Anne P, having said “let ME answer that," peered over her half-glasses and pronounced: “She's not his wife and she's not his daughter; she's something else, for which there is no word in English."
That went over moderately well in Nevile's Court, and Professor Barton recalled -- for Jeremy, not for the other woman in the room -- that Tom had escorted her to a May Ball when they were both graduates at Cambridge; she had been punted up the river for breakfast, as is evidently the tradition, but had upset him by refusing to be punted back and demanding that he call her a taxi. She rather implied that American's took these things over-seriously. And there, you see, was the real kicker. She's an American. One would never know it, of course, if she didn't make remarks about her childhood in Westchester and her pet alligators, brought from Florida in empty wooden cigar boxes by a business-traveling papa. They upset her Scottish nanny and therefore had to be given to the Bronx zoo. One was by this time beginning to feel trapped in a Masterpiece Theatre double feature.
The food -- served on an ancient oak refectory table before a sideboard (white, of course) filled with dark blue and gold antique china -- was pretentiously simple: sorrel soup (“the first sorrel of the season" she sighed in passing; “your own crop?" Jeremy asked on cue; “oh no," airily, “Marks and Sparks; I ran out and got it after I finished baking the bread"; “wonderful bread" one responded; “half rye flour, half whole-wheat" she said looking at Jeremy -- and this might be the place to say that while Jeremy is very sweet and looks like a youngish, if over-tall, bearded teddy bear, the real reason he wants to spend his summer in the States is that his male companion lives in New York); gammon with a posh sauce; steamed fresh spinach; steamed tiny potatoes; salad of fresh tomatoes, basil and B+ olive oil( one has one's standards, after Pienza); a cheese tray of great variety, featuring both Scottish goat and Scottish sheep. Very good wine. HOWEVER, back in Geneseo, Anne Lutkus can put Barton's sorrel soup in the shade in any season; Gary's bread is much better; all of us have better olive oil; and for all one knows, our new mega-Wegman's will offer Scottish cheeses. The wine, however, was undeniably excellent.
No time for coffee, as we rushed out to the talk. The poor talk, the reason one had made the trip, was now inevitably the stuff of anti-climax. In a modern room at King's, Jean Wilson (a Brit or Brit-clone who had taught at King's but had “not been kept on" and who now teaches a full year's load in fall semesters at Boston U so that she and her husband, who does the same, can live mostly in England where they have “a boy at Eton and a girl somewhere else") gave a fine reading of the monuments built by Lady Anne Clifford during and after her fight for control of her inheritance. [Parts of the talk made it into an essay in History Today a few years later: http://www.historytoday.com/jean-wilson/countess’s-pillar-westmorland ] There were some good questions (although she didn't give very good answers -- too defensive -- the #1 problem of women speaking on women writers.) One got to meet Graham Parry (an exceedingly useful book on James I's desire to be seen as new Augustus) and Pippa Berry (anti-Frances Yates book on Elizabeth) after which we all went to the pub. All, that is, except Prof. Barton who kept ostentatiously falling asleep during the talk and who was half-way out the door with out so much as a ta-ta before one stopped her to thank her for dinner (and if one hadn't dragged her back for that, one would undoubtedly have been damned for having no manners. And yes, I sent also a note in my own hand.)
The pub group included a less than exquisite surprise: Pamela Benson, one of one's least-favorite Kazoo people (anyone's least-favorite), is over here on a sabbatical and staying in Cambridge. She hailed one as a pal well-met, so considering she hasn't spoken to one in six years, it's safe to assume she's not a Cambridge favorite, either. Still, the pub interval was short. Pippa Berry invited one to lunch the next day which is the only thing which kept one from asking to be driven to the train station. One's cold was turning into bronchitis even as one sipped Green King and -- to be perfectly frank, dear readers -- one had had a quite sufficient dose of life in the turf lane. Still, Pippa seemed nifty and non-Barton-ish and one would wish to get the views of such a woman on a number of subjects. Besides, the rudeness of refusing Jeremy's offer of that rarest of Brit traits, hospitality, was a bit more than one's Southerness could wrap itself around. So we left the pub and walked 15 minutes to Jeremy's inevitably charming little house, complete with a garden in the back which one envies more than words can say. A garden of one's own. . . . He also has entirely un-enviable murals on his bathroom walls, but that's another story.
We drank single malt (one had schlepped a bottle of Laphroig around with one all day) and gossiped til well past midnight. One then braved the murals for a semi-shower and crashed. Alan, my Lithuanian office mate, would have liked the pillowcases: they were grey, the only ones one has ever seen. Jeremy had said he was getting up a 6 to prepare a lecture; he may have done so -- when one arose at 8 he was playing the piano. We had tea and talked Southern fiction, then walked back down to Trinity and took our leave of one another. Pondering the unwritten laws that ban handshakes in Oxford -- although one may kiss cheeks -- while permitting both at The Other Place, one then enbarked upon a four-hour book-crawl. Heffers, the Backwell's of Cambridge, is a religious experience. They had Doan's collection in paper and hardback. One bought, in the course of a morning well-spent, fifteen books -- everything from Mieke Bal's The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges to used Dick Francis mysteries in at Oxfam.
By now one's cold was really bronchitis and one's voice a croak, but that really didn't matter since Pippa Berry did most of the talking at lunch. She has tenure at King's (which has a cafeteria attached to its dining hall -- very different atmosphere, but we still walked ostentatiously on the soggy grass to get there), but is NOT a member of the English faculty because Anne Barton blocks all women, and especially dislikes women in Renaissance. “Even her male courtiers admit she always votes no." Gee, what a surprise; one would never have guessed. Pippa is considering shifting her focus to po-mo to escape entirely from an area in which she feels she can never be viewed as a success. “Of course everyone will HATE it if I want to teach that," she sighed, “but it won't matter as much because they'll hate the WHOLE THING, not just my work." She needs to meet Laura Doan. In fact, she's organized some sort of conference at ICA this spring, so maybe Doan needs to meet her, too.
We also talked about trying to get the historicist boys to see that psychoanalytic crit could exsist in the same universe with their Greenblattiness. “But this is an American problem," she claimed. “Here we're just emerging from scholasticsm." This, of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, but she does seem very isolated. Blocked out of the inner circle at Cambridge and yet preceived as too privileged for the women at red bricks and white tiles to be concerned about. She's written to the London Ren Seminar, which certainly sends packets of stuff to visiting Americans, and they won't send her anything. Well, hard to know how to read this on a single lunch. She did ask if one would like to plan to co-organize a special session for MLA in 94 and we said we'd write and call. Time will tell. Feeling any sense of pity -- and frankly, I put it down to the bronchitis -- for a woman tenured at King's was certainly the last experience one expected to have at Cambridge. And, indeed, it was the very last experience. She ran off to give a lecture on Jonson and one took a cab to the station -- pretention be damned; one was exhausted.
And as the train pulled out of the station, one could only regret that Jeremy hadn't taken his degree at Cambridge and made his career at Oxford. One wonders if Donne or Dorothy L. Sayers planted any trees. . . .
finis
That went over moderately well in Nevile's Court, and Professor Barton recalled -- for Jeremy, not for the other woman in the room -- that Tom had escorted her to a May Ball when they were both graduates at Cambridge; she had been punted up the river for breakfast, as is evidently the tradition, but had upset him by refusing to be punted back and demanding that he call her a taxi. She rather implied that American's took these things over-seriously. And there, you see, was the real kicker. She's an American. One would never know it, of course, if she didn't make remarks about her childhood in Westchester and her pet alligators, brought from Florida in empty wooden cigar boxes by a business-traveling papa. They upset her Scottish nanny and therefore had to be given to the Bronx zoo. One was by this time beginning to feel trapped in a Masterpiece Theatre double feature.
The food -- served on an ancient oak refectory table before a sideboard (white, of course) filled with dark blue and gold antique china -- was pretentiously simple: sorrel soup (“the first sorrel of the season" she sighed in passing; “your own crop?" Jeremy asked on cue; “oh no," airily, “Marks and Sparks; I ran out and got it after I finished baking the bread"; “wonderful bread" one responded; “half rye flour, half whole-wheat" she said looking at Jeremy -- and this might be the place to say that while Jeremy is very sweet and looks like a youngish, if over-tall, bearded teddy bear, the real reason he wants to spend his summer in the States is that his male companion lives in New York); gammon with a posh sauce; steamed fresh spinach; steamed tiny potatoes; salad of fresh tomatoes, basil and B+ olive oil( one has one's standards, after Pienza); a cheese tray of great variety, featuring both Scottish goat and Scottish sheep. Very good wine. HOWEVER, back in Geneseo, Anne Lutkus can put Barton's sorrel soup in the shade in any season; Gary's bread is much better; all of us have better olive oil; and for all one knows, our new mega-Wegman's will offer Scottish cheeses. The wine, however, was undeniably excellent.
No time for coffee, as we rushed out to the talk. The poor talk, the reason one had made the trip, was now inevitably the stuff of anti-climax. In a modern room at King's, Jean Wilson (a Brit or Brit-clone who had taught at King's but had “not been kept on" and who now teaches a full year's load in fall semesters at Boston U so that she and her husband, who does the same, can live mostly in England where they have “a boy at Eton and a girl somewhere else") gave a fine reading of the monuments built by Lady Anne Clifford during and after her fight for control of her inheritance. [Parts of the talk made it into an essay in History Today a few years later: http://www.historytoday.com/jean-wilson/countess’s-pillar-westmorland ] There were some good questions (although she didn't give very good answers -- too defensive -- the #1 problem of women speaking on women writers.) One got to meet Graham Parry (an exceedingly useful book on James I's desire to be seen as new Augustus) and Pippa Berry (anti-Frances Yates book on Elizabeth) after which we all went to the pub. All, that is, except Prof. Barton who kept ostentatiously falling asleep during the talk and who was half-way out the door with out so much as a ta-ta before one stopped her to thank her for dinner (and if one hadn't dragged her back for that, one would undoubtedly have been damned for having no manners. And yes, I sent also a note in my own hand.)
The pub group included a less than exquisite surprise: Pamela Benson, one of one's least-favorite Kazoo people (anyone's least-favorite), is over here on a sabbatical and staying in Cambridge. She hailed one as a pal well-met, so considering she hasn't spoken to one in six years, it's safe to assume she's not a Cambridge favorite, either. Still, the pub interval was short. Pippa Berry invited one to lunch the next day which is the only thing which kept one from asking to be driven to the train station. One's cold was turning into bronchitis even as one sipped Green King and -- to be perfectly frank, dear readers -- one had had a quite sufficient dose of life in the turf lane. Still, Pippa seemed nifty and non-Barton-ish and one would wish to get the views of such a woman on a number of subjects. Besides, the rudeness of refusing Jeremy's offer of that rarest of Brit traits, hospitality, was a bit more than one's Southerness could wrap itself around. So we left the pub and walked 15 minutes to Jeremy's inevitably charming little house, complete with a garden in the back which one envies more than words can say. A garden of one's own. . . . He also has entirely un-enviable murals on his bathroom walls, but that's another story.
We drank single malt (one had schlepped a bottle of Laphroig around with one all day) and gossiped til well past midnight. One then braved the murals for a semi-shower and crashed. Alan, my Lithuanian office mate, would have liked the pillowcases: they were grey, the only ones one has ever seen. Jeremy had said he was getting up a 6 to prepare a lecture; he may have done so -- when one arose at 8 he was playing the piano. We had tea and talked Southern fiction, then walked back down to Trinity and took our leave of one another. Pondering the unwritten laws that ban handshakes in Oxford -- although one may kiss cheeks -- while permitting both at The Other Place, one then enbarked upon a four-hour book-crawl. Heffers, the Backwell's of Cambridge, is a religious experience. They had Doan's collection in paper and hardback. One bought, in the course of a morning well-spent, fifteen books -- everything from Mieke Bal's The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges to used Dick Francis mysteries in at Oxfam.
By now one's cold was really bronchitis and one's voice a croak, but that really didn't matter since Pippa Berry did most of the talking at lunch. She has tenure at King's (which has a cafeteria attached to its dining hall -- very different atmosphere, but we still walked ostentatiously on the soggy grass to get there), but is NOT a member of the English faculty because Anne Barton blocks all women, and especially dislikes women in Renaissance. “Even her male courtiers admit she always votes no." Gee, what a surprise; one would never have guessed. Pippa is considering shifting her focus to po-mo to escape entirely from an area in which she feels she can never be viewed as a success. “Of course everyone will HATE it if I want to teach that," she sighed, “but it won't matter as much because they'll hate the WHOLE THING, not just my work." She needs to meet Laura Doan. In fact, she's organized some sort of conference at ICA this spring, so maybe Doan needs to meet her, too.
We also talked about trying to get the historicist boys to see that psychoanalytic crit could exsist in the same universe with their Greenblattiness. “But this is an American problem," she claimed. “Here we're just emerging from scholasticsm." This, of course, is a bit of an exaggeration, but she does seem very isolated. Blocked out of the inner circle at Cambridge and yet preceived as too privileged for the women at red bricks and white tiles to be concerned about. She's written to the London Ren Seminar, which certainly sends packets of stuff to visiting Americans, and they won't send her anything. Well, hard to know how to read this on a single lunch. She did ask if one would like to plan to co-organize a special session for MLA in 94 and we said we'd write and call. Time will tell. Feeling any sense of pity -- and frankly, I put it down to the bronchitis -- for a woman tenured at King's was certainly the last experience one expected to have at Cambridge. And, indeed, it was the very last experience. She ran off to give a lecture on Jonson and one took a cab to the station -- pretention be damned; one was exhausted.
And as the train pulled out of the station, one could only regret that Jeremy hadn't taken his degree at Cambridge and made his career at Oxford. One wonders if Donne or Dorothy L. Sayers planted any trees. . . .
finis