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Point of Departure
Donald Worster urges historians to stop separating culture from nature
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Lunching on Olympus
Then Auden asked me about Berkeley. I had just done my senior paper on Yeats and said something about his mysticism. “Oh,” he said, “don’t bother much about that. Just a contrivance, a device, a stage, more than anything else.” I gathered from the familiar tone that he knew Yeats, about whom “In Memory” says:
You were silly like us: your gift survived it all;
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
As the lunch drew to its close, we asked Auden what he liked best about New York, and he said Jewish jokes. He asked if we knew any. I said I was from Los Angeles and couldn’t really do a good accent, but my aunt from Brooklyn and my father told some good jokes. He laughed at the couple I told him, and then he told one of his favorites. A man from the Upper West Side goes to his psychiatrist. The doctor listens and tells him he is depressed and hostile. The doctor suggests a hobby or a pet, something to bring him out of it. The man says he lives in a small apartment; it would be difficult. The doctor says even a small pet would do. After several weeks, the doctor noted improvement, and asked if the man had bought a pet. “Yes,” the man said. “What kind?” “Bees,” he replied. “Bees?” the doctor said, puzzled. “I thought you said you had a small apartment. Where do you keep them?” “In a cigar box,” said the patient. “But how do they breathe?” the doctor asked.
“How do they breathe?” said the patient. “Fuck ’em.”
E. M. Forster:
“I will tell you when it’s time to go.”
In 1965, while I was a student at Oxford, nbc was trying to make a television show about the Genizah Scrolls from Cairo (an archaeological find second only to the Dead Sea Scrolls). But nbc wasn’t having any luck in getting access to the Genizah archives in the Cambridge University library. Fortunately for me, someone at a dinner party in New York said he knew a student at Oxford who might help. So, I got the job of producing the show.
In the course of visiting Cambridge, I arranged an introduction to the professor of Near Eastern languages and literature, and through him to the curator of the scrolls. Once the curator had gotten used to both the astounding news that television existed and the bemusing fact that I was American, he granted me some kind of honorary Oxbridge status and so the scrolls—actually scraps of parchment journals—were seen on television for the first time.
Because the show’s sponsor was the Jewish Theological Seminary, the professor asked me if I was religious. I said I’d had a bar mitzvah and been confirmed, but after that I had gone to services rarely—so, no, I wasn’t religious. He probed a bit further, laughed, and said, “You are a pagan. Would you like to meet another one?” I had no idea whom he had in mind, but said “Yes.” He knew I was reading English at Oxford and perhaps that explained his next words: “Write me when you have read all of E. M. Forster, and I will ask him to see you.”
Some months later I did, and I received a short note from Forster proposing a day and time when I might visit him and saying he hoped I had other business as it seemed a long trip to make only to see him. One gray, chilly March day in 1966, I planned to take the train down to London and then up to Cambridge. As I was leaving the college, I ran into my tutor, Christopher Ricks. “Remember you are meeting an old man,” he said, “so you should leave after about 20 minutes.”
At 10 the next morning, I walked into King’s College, one of the grandest Oxbridge colleges, whose cathedral-sized chapel is one of the most famous buildings in Europe. The porter gave me the staircase and room numbers and directions. I walked up the wooden stairs—five flights (a lot, I thought for an old man—Forster was then 86)—and knocked on the door.
It opened to reveal a small, slightly stooped, demure man, smartly but modestly dressed, who welcomed me in and offered me a chair. It felt straight away as if I were a visitor, rather than a student having come for a tutorial. He asked my plans for the day, as once again he said it was an awfully long way to come just to see him. I said I had no other plans and that compared to my travel from California, this trip was short. The visit with him more than justified it.
He seemed to want me to ask questions, but first he talked about living in college and how generous King’s had been to him and how much enjoyment he reaped from it and how convenient it was. He asked after my college at Oxford, Worcester—where were my rooms and did I enjoy it?
He asked what I had been reading lately. I said Dickens and George Eliot and that I was going to do the special paper on the novel in my exams. This to the man who wrote Aspects of the Novel. I asked Forster if we could talk about Lawrence and he responded “David or T. E.?” He told me that in his bedroom he had several letters from D. H. Lawrence. I told him my mother had picked Lawrence as my middle name after Lawrence of Arabia, and he laughed happily at that. But I found that I didn’t have much more to ask him. It was one of those moments, as in all these meetings, when my self-doubt was playing as hard inside me as my excitement.
I was hoping he would get out the D. H. Lawrence letters, but suddenly it occurred to me that it was getting to be around the 20-minute marker. I said he had been kind to see me and I ought to be going and leave him to his work and reading.
“Someone told you that you are going to see an old man and you ought to leave after a short time,” he said, and my expression told him that that was just what had happened.
“Anyone who says that should also remember when you go to see someone old, it may be the last time. Please stay, if you can, and I will tell you when it’s time to go.”
That exchange stays with me because of its simple kindness. I remember the moment better than anything else that was said, other than his asking me “Did you ever know Gide?”
“I know who he was,” I replied.
“No,” Forster said, “did you ever have lunch with him?”
I almost laughed out loud at the absurdity, but I just said “No,” and no more was said of André Gide.
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