That Winter in London

In the gray November of 1963, I crossed the North Atlantic to England on a British freighter, the S.S. Bristol City, one of only five passengers on the ship. I'd boarded the ship in New York after a brief correspondence with the Bristol City Line and payment of the $154 one-way fare, and after quitting my job as feature editor of the National Bowlers Journal, in Chicago.

I'd discovered this adventurous way of escape, the winter before, while covering the annual American Bowling Congress tournament -- "72 pin-clashing days," held that year in snowy Buffalo, N.Y. -- for AP, UPI, and the 60 regional newspapers that subscribed to the magazine’s press service. The press room’s Western Union operator, a sweet, middle-aged spinster who regularly took trips on freighters, lent me her copy of Freighter Travel, an exciting little paperback that soon had me writing off to various shipping companies.

I was setting off now, with $1200 in savings, on something like Henry James's passionate, or D.H. Lawrence's savage, pilgrimage. James and Lawrence were my literary heroes then; their disparate lives, more than their disparate writings, alternately inspired me – though truth to tell my preferred model was Lawrence, whose sojourns in exotic places like Italy and Mexico, whose turbulent life with the lusty Frieda (never mind his lifelong struggle with ill health, the tuberculosis that killed him at age 44), was the stuff of dreams for the lonesome, horny young man I was then. Still, what I might have to settle for, I feared, was a latter-day version of James's sort of literary bachelorhood. That would be all right, I thought, so long as I achieved something of his success.

Of my fellow passengers on the Bristol City, three were composed of a plump, thirtyish, smart and very funny Marxist history professor, lately of Monteith College in Detroit, then an experimental branch of Wayne State University, currently unemployed; his attractive young wife, formerly his student; and his wife's younger still, equally attractive sister. The fourth was a chipper little Englishman from Crewe, returning home after the breakup of his marriage in the States. The Englishman and I shared a cabin. He was British working class, like Lawrence, I noted, while the ship's officers, with whom we shared meals at the captain's table, were definitely upper class, like the Anglicized Henry James. Their dry, merciless teasing of their fellow countryman was my introduction to the British class system. The poor chap's American car, for instance, part of our cargo, was a constant worry to him, and he was made to dash from the table one stormy evening when the officers impishly hinted it had broken loose in the hold.

We were at sea for ten days, wallowing through gale-driven waves all the way across to the Old World. Though an ex-Navy sailor, I got seasick. So did the other passengers, except for the younger sister, who never missed a meal. Presently we all had our sea legs and spent the remainder of the voyage quite pleasantly in the ship's lounge, reading, playing cards, talking about our lives. By the end of the voyage, we (that is, we fellow Americans) were intimate friends. Moreover, I was in love with the younger sister.

I was in love with her voice, its sweet alto. I was in love with her English-looking beauty, like the young Virginia Woolf’s; her shyness that was like my own, I thought. She was quietly intelligent, vaguely mysterious – there were depths in her I wanted to know. Still, she was far too young for me, not yet eighteen, while I was soon to turn twenty-nine. Besides, she was an inch or so taller than I was.

The evening before we disembarked, November 22, while steaming up the Bristol Channel, the awful news reached us over the ship's radio: President Kennedy has been shot. Then: The President is dead. The professor's reaction struck me as callous, almost gleeful: "This could mean revolution!" My own uncertain feelings were those of a bookish, apolitical, but essentially patriotic American. I was shocked by the fact that a man as important as the president of the United States had been murdered. Having absorbed a little of the professor's radical view of history, however, I imagined myself an exile now, one who, after leaving his flawed native land, looks back to see it in flames. With something like pleasant melancholy, I brooded on whether I would ever return.

The next morning, having docked at midnight in Avonmouth, the port for Bristol, we passengers were visited on the ship by Customs and Immigration officers, who inspected our luggage and interviewed us in the lounge. They were severe, it seemed to me, with the little Englishman, as if his expatriate years in the United States had been somehow a disloyalty to the Queen.

Questioning us Yanks, however, they were merely stiff and officious. After a few grave inquiries as to why we'd come to the United Kingdom and how long we intended to stay, they stamped our passports with three-month, renewable visas and allowed us to step ashore.

The Englishman said goodbye to us and headed north to Crewe. But we four, reluctant to separate just yet, explored Bristol together and then took a bus tour of Somerset, visiting Wells and Cheddar, among other places. We rode on top a double-decker through England's West Country with its rocky outcrops and enclosed little fields, its close little towns (at times the bus came near to scraping the eaves of medieval houses as it negotiated the narrow, crooked streets), and found it all wonderfully quaint to our American eyes. Everything we saw, the landscape, the buildings, seemed on a miniature scale compared to America. The phrase "tight little isle" came to me. This tightness included the masses of people that crowded all the towns and cities, and the droves of vehicles, odd-looking little cars, motorcycles, scooters, mopeds, which created incessant traffic jams and sent clouds of petrol fumes into the cold, drenched air.

After three days and back in Bristol, we boarded a train for London and there, outside Paddington Station, after three weeks of camaraderie and shared travel, I said goodbye to the professor and his wife and his wife's sweet younger sister. We promised to keep in touch, of course, to contact each other once we were settled, but I expected we'd all lose ourselves in the vastness of the great city and never see one another again. All at once I was alone, and already lonely, as I began my London winter.

I looked through newspaper classifieds and visited various parts of the city for their postings on neighborhood kiosks of places to rent. Most seemed too expensive, and those I viewed were extremely dismal; one especially, deep in the bowels of a sub-basement, invited suicide.

Within a couple of days, however, I found a tiny but adequate – and affordable – "flatlet" in South Kensington, an area within equal walking distance, I discovered, of richly hip Chelsea and somewhat grungy hip Earl's Court. Down the Old Brompton Road was an Underground station, where I could take "the tube" to Piccadilly Circus or, with transfers, to anywhere else in the city. I rented a typewriter, supplied myself with paper and envelopes, and settled in to write each morning and to explore the city each afternoon. I had James’s example, his first lonely days in London a century earlier, to inspire and sustain me.

As dark and wet November passed into even darker and wetter December, I played at being the expatriate writer in London. "The great grey Babylon," James had called it, and in my daily forays by tube or on foot – mostly on foot, armed with a map, and clad in a trench coat against London's penetrating damp – I searched out the places where James had lived in the city. His earliest abode, in Bolton Street near Piccadilly, no longer existed – indeed, the street itself seemed to have disappeared – but I found the location of his flat, identified by a plaque in front of a block of flats, at 34 De Vere Gardens, where James lived, obliquely across the street from Robert Browning, in the 1880s. It was said they occasionally waved to each other from their windows. Knowing such anecdotes, being on the scene, was intensely satisfying to me. It helped me to feel part of what they represented. It eased my loneliness.

And I was writing – at least in those first days, spurred on by my loneliness and James's productive example. I revised a couple of old stories and submitted them, unsuccessfully, to Stateside little magazines. I wrote a couple of new stories, immediate reactions to my new surroundings, and sent them to British publications, hoping by some miracle to crack that market. (I didn't, not then or ever.) I also, somewhat dutifully, forwarded the letters of introduction I had from my old boss in Chicago to managers of Brunswick Ltd. and AMF Ltd., affiliates of the American bowling firms, with requests for interviews as a journalist. I got my interviews, received tours of two or three of the new bowling centers in and outside London and, again somewhat dutifully, wrote a series of articles for my old magazine on "Bowling in Britain." The modest payments I received from the Bowlers Journal – plus a short stint writing publicity for AMF and being paid under the table – eased my anxiety about my thinning book of traveler's checks.

Freelance journalism, though, took time away from my serious writing; but then hadn't James himself boiled the pot with travel pieces, literary essays, book reviews? And wasn't I indeed (despite pub crawls in Soho and Earls Court, hanging out at my "local" or various coffee bars, in the vain hope of connecting with one of London’s "birds" in their short skirts and Avenger boots) becoming a literary bachelor like James, probably doomed, unlike Lawrence, to celibacy? James, therefore, must be my master; while Lawrence was a writer whose sensual experience would be forever, it seemed, beyond my yearning grasp.

Then, one particularly lonely evening in my boxlike room (I'd written a letter home, cheerfully disguising my homesickness, and was now disclosing my true feelings in my journal), the phone rang in the hall outside my door. It was the professor, inviting me to dinner. They'd found a place in Camberwell, across the Thames from me in southeast London, and would I come?

That was the first of many such invitations. I became a regular guest and then a hanger-on of the professor and the two sisters (the professor called me, an ex-Minnesota farm boy, "Huck Finn in the city," a label I very much liked the sound of) during the remaining months of that drafty, educational, completely memorable winter in London, until – after traveling with them through England's "Black Country" and across Scotland on a speaking tour of the professor's; being put up by "the comrades" and talking socialism in the pubs; accompanying them that spring on a month-long tour of continental Europe; finally joining with them the circle around C.L.R. James, the late West Indian writer and Marxist intellectual, and taking part, as a Red "fellow traveler" (I had strayed that far from the writer whose mind was too fine, T. S. Eliot said of Henry James, to contain an idea), in the writing of a socialist pamphlet called Negro Americans Take the Lead (Facing Reality Publications, Detroit, 1964) – I was deemed "family," and the younger sister and I were considered a couple. We were a couple, but only in the Jamesian platonic sense, though the worldly comrades assumed otherwise.

In May 1964, after six months in Europe and everybody broke by then (besides, I, anyhow, was suffering twinges of patriotism from an overexposure to the comrades’ blanket anti-Americanism: I could no more totally reject my native country than I could totally accept the Gospel according to Marx), the four of us, via economy class Icelandic Airlines, flew home to an America turned restless after the Kennedy assassination. We landed at the former Idlewild Airport, now Kennedy International Airport, and began to learn of the burgeoning Civil Rights movement, the rising of a counterculture, psychedelic drugs, and the government's escalating involvement in Vietnam.

We lingered in New York, the professor's hometown, where he and the two sisters lodged with his mother, in Brooklyn. I stayed, as I had before boarding the Bristol City, in Brooklyn Heights with my old friend from our days together in journalism school at the University of Minnesota; took in the World's Fair with the younger sister; toured Central Park and Coney Island and various museums and other New York City landmarks with the professor and both sisters.

I followed them to Detroit, where I met the professor's circle of colleagues and former students and the sisters’ parents. The professor found me a billet near the university campus in a student communal house, where I watched a boy take peyote (my introduction to the Sixties drug scene) and promptly throw up. Before that I'd spent my first night in town in the basement of the sisters’ parents' house in east Detroit, from which I heard the younger sister being grilled about me upstairs by her mother. Her mother was a brisk former Girl Scout leader, her father a stern Ford Company foreman. Both regarded me with beady eyes.

Finally, after a week or so of mooning about, I took a bus to Chicago and then a bus to Minneapolis, where my mother met me at the station. I was given a room in my parents’ house outside Minneapolis and worked that summer on the golf course my father had built on what remained of our old farm. (On a wall in the house, beside iconic pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, my devout Catholic mother had hung a photograph of the martyred John F. Kennedy; later, after JFK’s rampant sex life had been revealed, the picture disappeared.) The younger sister and I corresponded.

That fall, ostensibly on my way to Mexico (I had Mexico in reserve), I swung by Detroit and found myself, after a couple of cautious, reacquainting days, agreeing to stay. For in a swoon like Gabriel's at the end of Joyce's great story "The Dead" (my imagination persisted in being literary), I had happily yielded my Jamesian celibacy for Lawrencian carnal knowledge, and my platonic affair with the younger sister was platonic no longer.

The following spring, we were married. And so we've remained.