A Summer in Europe— 1936
Introductory note
A summer abroad at twenty-two could not but leave many memories, the chief source of the present account[1]. It draws hardly at all on letters sent home during the summer and little more on public sources, though I have searched, unsystematically, to verify details such as exchange rates, dates, and street addresses.
Father and Mother financed that summer. The idea will have come from Mother, as others had before, always to my advantage. To Father she may have represented such a handsome present as a way to make up for their having spent less on my college education than they would spend on Art’s; my record had entitled me to free tuition in the last three years. And I was paying my own way in graduate school. Perhaps she urged the trip as a reward for having done well. In any case, she would have hoped to shake me up a little, as Father surely understood.
Considerations of the sort help to explain their offering me $900 for a trip to Europe in the summer of 1936. I was earning $1400 a year by teaching two classes (two–thirds time) in Freshman composition, of which Harvard took back $200 as tuition for two graduate courses (one–half time). Though I was putting something by, I should not soon have funds for even a short trip abroad, certainly not $900, easily enough for a whole summer.
In early spring, having applied for a passport, I asked friends about their experience, then, ignoring advice, engaged passage on a freighter of the Black Diamond Line, sailing from New York on or about 15 June: whenever enough mixed cargo had been loaded. Within two weeks one could expect to arrive at some port in England or Scotland. The fare was about $100.
It was an advantage, in my eyes, that there would be at most one other passenger. The Holland–American Line, the American Merchant Line, perhaps others, offered passage on some of their ships, but those were larger vessels, having room for several tourists. For the return voyage, of course, I should have to arrange in Europe, after deciding when to start back and from where.
I had no plans, just a few ideas. Charlie Pettee, a fledgling Yankee bookseller of my acquaintance, with a shop on Holyoke Street, was to be in London in July for orientation. Charlie, a recent Harvard graduate (1930), had been set up in business with the help of a London dealer, Charles A. Stonehill, Jr., who earlier had established a branch in New Haven.[2] I had an invitation—and the intention—to look up Charlie at Stonehill’s. I also meant to explore the London shops selling “old and rare” books, to compare with those of Cambridge and Boston. After a good look about London I would move on to the Continent. Traveling alone would leave me free to follow inclination. Accommodations and return passage ought to be easy to find: the number of Americans (and others) touring Europe, which had gone way off after 1929, had just begun to rise again.
College duties were finished in the first week of June. Mother and Father arrived on Tuesday the 9th. On the 11th they set out to take me to New York.[3] On the morning of the 13th we drove into the city and had a look at the docks along the Hudson on the lower West Side, where I was to embark; then they dropped me at the apartment of Tom Ratcliffe in the East 50’s.
As freshmen Tom and I had lived in the south wing of Weld Hall and had both gone on to Eliot House. He was a well-fleshed Southerner of good family, with easy manners, a great sense of fun, and wide acquaintance, well able to look out for himself. Although not close friends—I am not sure he had, or needed, any—we got on well and had kept in touch. After only a moment’s reflection I had asked to stay over the weekend, and he had readily agreed.
That evening we may have had tickets for Winterset, a “poetic drama” by Maxwell Anderson, with Burgess Meredith. Or I may have seen it earlier, on a trip down with J.D. McVitty. Tom had always been stage–struck—he was then working as a play editor for MGM—and could well have gone in the fall; Winterset was the hit of the season. Perhaps then we went to a movie. Anyway, in Tom’s company, the weekend passed easily. We had lunch with Kay and Ted Uebel; Ted had been a graduate student in Eliot House. And were we not joined one evening by John Cornell, a classmate (and my freshman roommate)? He was then working in the theater, as I recall, for his cousin Katherine (“Kit”) Cornell. Perhaps we saw also Jim Tower, another from the class of ’35—and member of the Dramatic Club—who had recently quit his job reading manuscripts for Frederick Stokes & Co. and was looking for a job in industrial management.
Monday morning, after calling, I took a cab down to Pier No. 43(?), that of the Black Diamond Line, and after a short wait, climbed aboard the S.S. Cold Harbor. It was one of the “Victory Ships” built in a great hurry late in the World War to replace tonnage sunk in “unrestricted submarine warfare.” It was by no means large, rated, as I recall, at 7,500 deadweight tons.[4]
Just before sunset, having finished taking on cargo, we pulled out. The view of ships and skyline and of the Statue of Liberty, however familiar from photographs, I watched as long as it was in sight.
I was directed to a plain cabin amidships, on the port side, a junior officer’s berth, one of a short row, in each a handbasin with a tap for seawater. It opened on a passage from the short main deck aft to the officers’ mess. On the starboard side, served by a parallel passage, were two other cabins and the facilities used by the ship’s officers except the captain (and probably the first mate): a head and a shower, supplied with seawater. The galley occupied the space between the two passages. They were joined by a passage aft the galley, between it and the officers’ mess, the latter flanked on the starboard side by the captain’s quarters, on the port side by the first mate’s.
The one other passenger, who shared the cabin with me, was a gangling fellow from the New York area, born in Germany at about the end of the war. Although his parents had emigrated only a few years later, he retained an accent. We found little to say and spent almost no time together during the voyage.
Dinner that first evening was reassuringly decent and ample. There was no general conversation. The captain, of Norwegian descent (called Nilssen?), below middle height, was in his fifties; precise, courteous, just perceptibly ironic. The first mate, a big New York Irishman in his forties, took little notice of anyone. He suffered, as one inevitably was to hear, from having had master’s papers for some years but no ship. The engineer was a tired–looking man of perhaps fifty, full of regret over having gone to sea. The radioman (“Sparks”) was a solid taciturn young fellow, who spent long hours sitting and listening in the radio room in the foc’s’le, on the starboard side, just down from the main deck. The ship’s carpenter, a lady–killer by appearance, would prove to be a great bullshitter. The steward was a young Glaswegian recently married, eager to talk; he looked as if not in the best of health. It seems odd I should have forgotten their names, all, that is, but that of the first mate, Mr. O’Connor.
The skipper later invited each of us passengers, separately, for a brief evening visit at his quarters, complete with ceremonial nightcap. He seemed to be a reflective, disappointed man. The S.S. Cold Harbor, he observed, was likely to be withdrawn from service from one voyage to the next, the insurance rates were so high. From being master of a ship of minimal prestige, one could see, he might at any time become master without a ship. He expressed great satisfaction at having bought pounds after the crash of 1929. The details escape me; he must have sold after U.S. and before British devaluation. In any case he had turned a profit, but the point was his faith in the pound sterling and his own judgment.
The crossing was peaceful. According to the steward, in winter it was all one could do at times to get about the icy deck, a storm in summer tiresome enough. I wondered briefly at my temerity in taking passage on a freighter. But the ocean remained seasonably calm, though the surface kept changing in appearance, as often described. Usually I sat in a chair on the main deck and studied Greek grammar, that being the task set for the voyage. For relief I walked to the afterdeck to listen to the carpenter, looked up at the bridge, or watched the crew at work.
The only incident, if it may be called that, was an outcome of the Louis/Schmeling fight on the 19th, the broadcast being followed intently on board. The lone German in the crew had laid bets with all takers, and the other A.B.’s were fit to be tied when Schmeling knocked out Louis in the twelfth round, the German issuing taunts of a political (only incidentally of racial) import. This episode was discussed at length at breakfast the next morning.
Late on the morning of the 27th we began moving up the Lea, amidst the variegated greenery of southern Ireland, past Cobh (once Queenstown) to the harbor of Cork. We docked after noon and began unloading cargo, the crew of Irish stevedores dwarfed by Mr. O’Connor, who kept watch over them. We two passengers, on being told we could go ashore for a few hours, hired a driver with a “jaunting” (pronounced “jaunty”) car—a two–wheeled horse-drawn cart peculiar to Ireland—to take us to Blarney Castle, a few miles away. Its massive walls and the dark, dank interior seemed to give immediate insight into life in a lawless time. My companion ventured to kiss the Blarney Stone, a vertiginous feat, performed lying down (held firmly by the legs), leaning over the edge of a battlement. I declined. The ride to and from the castle showed an ever–verdant countryside of mean houses, smallish cattle, and almost no wheeled traffic. The streets in town had the pleasing look of a composition of some Post–Impressionist; simple lines, approximately straight, no extraneous detail other than a flower pot or bicycle, earth colors. I should not have minded staying on for a second look.
But late in the day we pulled out for the run across the Irish Sea. During the night I grasped that we were proceeding with care, giving regular signals to warn of our position. When I got up, we were in a green translucent fog, which lifted as we came in to Liverpool. After clearance, we started up the ship canal to Manchester, our port of call. The canal, an engineering feat of the early nineteenth century, runs at times well above ground level, once crossing another canal, giving a good view of almost uninterrupted commercial and industrial activity.
I didn’t linger at Manchester but, having said my good–byes, left for Liverpool, the first step in a vague program for the few days before going to London. A young Liverpudlian architect, Denis Winston, cheerful, dry, and positive, a short chap with a long stride, had spent the year 1932/33 at Harvard, living in Eliot House and frequenting, as I had, the junior common room. At his suggestion I intended to have a look at public housing in Liverpool and the large Anglican cathedral under construction. There was an unacknowledged secondary motive: Henry James had begun in Liverpool his first stay in England as an adult. A program of any kind can be of great help in starting one’s first trip abroad.
Liverpool’s two-storey public housing, occupying a considerable area, was still a demonstration project, small relative to long–standing need. But it was of no less interest as such, in the light of debates in progress in the United States. In Liverpool, said Denis, there had been those to predict that the new tenants would live just as they had in the dirty primitive dwellings they had left. The housing, much of it more than ten years old, looked respectable, if uninviting.
Liverpool Cathedral, though it was to be the greatest in England, made less impression. It seemed curious, rather than admirable, that like its mediæval predecessors it was of all–masonry construction and was to be a long time a–building. Construction had started some thirty years earlier (even before the Washington Cathedral, which Aggi Burckhardt was to call “fake cathedral”) and would be finished far along in the century. I’m not sure it’s complete today.
The big sight was Liverpool itself, which looked as if it had been built in one mighty effort in mid–nineteenth century, the only addition thereafter the many–layered deposit of soot. The hotel recommended by Denis Winston,[5] not far from the central city area, was up such a “steep, black, bricky street” as the hotel at which Henry James had stayed. And breakfast in the hotel dining room will have been hardly less Victorian than his of late February 1869:[6] heavy china, strong tea or vile coffee, soggy toast, orange marmalade, greasy butter, fillet of plaice, the stiff rustle of newspapers on spindles.
Walking about town led me to the massive docks and warehouses on the waterfront, in truth monumental if already obsolescent. It must have been on that walk, passing an open stretch of harbor,[7] that I stopped at a bookshop and made my first purchase, a set of Byron’s works, in seventeen volumes (12–mo, in green cloth, London, John Murray, 1832–33). I paid about £2 ($10),[8] plus freight and insurance for delivery in the States.
After a day in Liverpool I took the short train ride to Chester, where I passed a reflective afternoon moseying about on the ancient town walls, still complete, grass covered, two miles round, stopping to watch an innings of a local cricket match, new to me. Chester was a busy market town and rail center. Yet the walls, the stone gates, and the narrow winding streets with their old “rows,” much like arcades—second stories protruding—seemed to bear the impress of a history reaching back to the fortified encampment (“Castra” became “Chester”) of the Roman occupation.
From Chester another short train ride took me to Llandudno (lan-did’-no), a “watering place” in Wales on the Irish Sea. I took a room in a boarding house back from the beach and spent the afternoon ambling along the shore and sitting in the sun, ignoring the numerous “sights” in the vicinity. It was still early days for trippers. From Llandudno I took a day’s bus trip south, touring the rugged green hills of North Wales, finally taking a train from Bettwys y Coed east and south through the vale of Llangollen. I must have fallen asleep, for no image remains of the trip through England, nor of arrival in London. That would have been the first day of July.
I went to stay at a boarding house recommended by Tom Ratcliffe, in Kensington Gardens. The other residents were young employees; in time, I might have struck up acquaintance with one or two. But I soon changed quarters after presenting myself at Stonehill’s. Visiting along with Charlie Pettee was Bob Barry, a few years older, the Stonehill representative at New Haven.[9] Another member of the party was Jonas Arnold, also from New Haven, where he had worked his way up in J. Press, tailors and haberdashers, by 1936 a senior salesman in the branch in Cambridge (Mount Auburn at Dunster Street). Stonehill’s shop was at the head of Museum Street (no. 26), just south of the British Museum, and the three visitors were staying at a rooming house in Gower Street just to the north, directly west of the Museum.
In Bloomsbury were many such houses, mostly occupied by people doing research at the Museum and students at a branch of the University of London to the north. At our house, bed and breakfast were to be had for perhaps 30 shillings ($7.50) a week; laundry may have been extra. The place was kept quite reasonably clean by a cheerful Welsh girl, maid of all work, called Megan. Wales furnished much of the domestic labor in and about London.
From then on I spent most days tramping about, with the help of my guide book,[10] picked up second–hand in Harvard Square. Weather was on the whole good, and I must have gone, back and forth, more than five miles a day, despite dawdling; the northern summer day is long. London was still agreeably English, or at least British, with little admixture from the Empire—one still existed—streets seldom crowded with people or cars, a good place for long walks. A summer of walking was to reduce further the superfluous flesh accumulated in Eliot House, the process having begun in the year lived on Kirkland Street, what with daily walking and with eating better (and therefore less).
In the afternoon I often returned, relieved myself, might rest for a short time, then went to Stonehill’s. Tea was served by the graceful brunette secretary, about thirty years old. She had a nicely modulated voice and was discreetly amused by the goings–on. Stonehill, in his late thirties, originally from Chicago, I believe, had studied at Yale and Oxford. He had been in London in the book trade since the mid–1920’s, perhaps a few years before. After learning the ropes, he had opened his own shop, presumably with family money. He was not quite of average height, going bald, liked to hear himself talk, had adopted upper–middle–class English ways to the extent of maintaining an ironic manner and a readiness to endure, or inflict, rudeness as appropriate.
Stonehill taught me a good deal, directly and in conversation with another bookseller called Raphael (last name forgotten), a tallish florid Britisher. They explained the workings of the “ring” (or the “knockout”), an arrangement by which a group of dealers at auctions allowed one or another of their number to bid in books well below what these might have brought in competitive bidding; afterwards the dealers would hold their private auction and split the proceeds. Another practice was to bid up prices as necessary to prevent a collector in attendance (such as Geoffrey Keynes) from getting much benefit out of dispensing with a middleman. It is doubtful whether the former practice then survived in the London market, it having been illegal since 1927.
Again, one day a “scout” brought in an unrecorded edition (let us say) of Lear’s Book of Nonsense antedating the first recorded edition. Stonehill paid him, say, £5. Later he said he could expect to sell it to another dealer soon for, say, £20; it might well pass through the hands of another dealer or two, always at a higher price, before resting in someone’s collection.
He made a related point when I came in a week or so later with a nice copy of the Foulis Press Virgil (2 volumes, large folio, uncut, Glasgow, 1778, gray–green boards, half–vellum). I had bought it, I explained, from a neighbor of his, McLeish & Sons, across the way in Little Russell Street. Being questioned, I acknowledged having paid one pound ($5) for it; “I’ll give you two,” he said. (One of the luckier finds of the summer; in 1981 Bill Hale appraised the set at $400.)
Once or twice I went with the Stonehill group to an auction at Sotheby’s. Only a London bookseller could follow the action; he would have examined the books in which he had an interest; looking about, he would know which bidders were apt to share his interest and could spot, even interpret, their bids. A few of the moves Stonehill pointed out; some others he explained afterwards.
The two most expensive purchases I made were both from his stock. One was a 1481 Divina Commedia (commentary by Cristoforo Landino, a large folio—carelessly printed—published in Florence), a defective copy lacking inter alia all the copperplate engravings after Botticelli. Such a copy was no great bargain at £14, being of small interest at the time to a serious collector, but I wasn’t one. An early (not the first) printed edition of this great work seemed desirable in any case. The other purchase was of five (out of seven) volumes of Latin classics, in large quarto, printed by Baskerville from 1761 to 1773, all first editions of that printing, in matched tree calf, “eminently collectable.”
A final lesson was occasioned by my last purchase from him, a modest octavo edition of Cicero’s De Officiis (Foulis Press, Glascow, 1784, in attractive contemporary binding). It was priced at 6/ ($1.50); in answer to an unspoken question of mine, Stonehill explained that it was old and scarce, yes, but in little demand, a principle self-evident when stated.
At the afternoon gatherings in his shop, Stonehill did most of the talking. Sometimes he dropped into anecdote. On a recent visit to Paris, he once said, his party had gone to a night club in the Rue Blondel, south of Montmartre, where a good many such places were to be found. This establishment was staffed with naked women; their waitress (or hostess), said Stonehill, picked up her tip “with her snatch,” presumably a specialité de la maison.[11]
Generally he talked about the book trade, sometimes allusively to his friend Raphael, so I wasn’t always sure what the point was. Such a case was their poking fun at Gabriel Wells, a bookseller who from very small beginnings in New Jersey had become an established figure in the London trade. Accounts written later by others suggest that Wells may have had the worst of some recent deal, and the word had gone round. In any case, for Stonehill, as an educated man of some means, with claims as a bibliographer,[12] the older man, of an earlier dispensation—and an American—was a natural butt of jokes.
Charlie Pettee and Bob Barry were, like me, ready to listen and learn. Charlie was well–mannered, not unwilling to speak up but very much aware of his limitations; he had grown up under the shadow of his only too facile older brother George, with results I well understood. Bob Barry was quiet, too, though at bottom sure of himself, having learned the trade young—the right way, he said, though perhaps not to Stonehill. A constant preoccupation seemed to be the needs of his star customer, Prof. Pottle of Yale, editor of Boswell.
What I saw and heard at Stonehill’s convinced me that one should collect books only for pleasure, not as an investment. I may have jumped to a conclusion, but experience confirms it.
Other than the old books mentioned above, I bought “modern first editions,” acquired in walks along Great Russell Street and Holborn (the continuation of Oxford Street) east to the warren back of St. Paul’s, an ancient haunt of booksellers; and in (or near) Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. One or two of the most desirable items I found in grander establishments in the West End. Two I bought as presents: a first edition (which?) of D.H. Lawrence for Tom Ratcliffe and one of The American Scene (Henry James) for my old Latin teacher (and Mother’s) Anna Susan Jones, by then some years retired in Glendale, California. The others I still have. Most have become scarce; one or two could be called rare. They include works by W.H. Auden, H.E. Bates, C. Day–Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats.
For Father I found a couple of maps as presents: one of “Partie de la Nouvelle France,” Hubert Iallot (sic, often written Jaillot), 1700; the other, “A New Map of North America from the latest Discoveries, 1763” (maker unknown). He had been reading a good deal since retirement, now and then in American history; I thought the maps might interest him. I was wrong: they were rolled up and put away until finally they came back into my hands. Today they hang on the wall, reminders of history, of London in 1936, and of a mistake in judgment, or in feeling.
Of course, while walking about I was becoming acquainted with parts of the city. The guide book gave a quick reading on the different quarters, addresses of famous residents of the past, and the “sights,” greater and lesser. I looked curiously, at times with a measure of recognition and understanding. But I entered few of the notable buildings, or even glanced to see at what hours they might be open. It wasn’t a policy; I was “doin’ a–what comes-a nachrally,” that is, without reflecting, or seeking advice. To be sure, I did look about in St. Paul’s, having read about it and its extraordinary memorial (and marmoreal) statuary. But I saw no more than what I had read. Once I visited the National Gallery, once spent a few minutes in Westminster Abbey, may have popped into a small Wren church.
That’s all I seem to remember, except for an occasion late in the month when, at his request, I accompanied Jonas Arnold to the east side of the City to visit “the Duke Street synagogue,”[13] built in 1701, the oldest in use in England. We must have gone by Tube, from the British Museum station to Liverpool Street. We stayed inside at least a half hour, anyway as long as Jonas wished, covered with borrowed yarmulkes, or rather (as I recall) by some token replacement. I was impressed by the apparent wealth and status of the small Sephardic community that had put up such a considerable building only a half-century after Jews had been readmitted to England.[14]
What seems extraordinary, on reflection, is to have no memory of visiting the British Museum, seen out the window each morning and passed several times a day, though I must have looked in at least once.
Apart from the visit to the City with Jonas Arnold, I walked by myself, without advice, unless you count the morning, early in my stay, when a layabout accosted me in Trafalgar Square. “Like me to show you something?” he asked. I followed him round to a point where part of the haft of Admiral Nelson’s ceremonial sword seemed to protrude like a half–hearted erection. This effect resulted from looking up at Lord Nelson’s statue on its lofty perch (nearly 200 feet from the pavement); on the same level with the statue, such an effect would not be seen. But the view went with his legend, reflected, I have read, in the language of darts, the game played in so many pubs: “Nelson” was said to refer to the score 111: one eye, one arm, and one—other member.
I noted some layabouts once on a walk in Southwark, my only venture south of the river, to see I’m not sure what. Just over the bridge, in an open space, several unemployed men were sitting, quietly looking on. English unemployment, then about one–third, was little evident in the tourist’s London—in the absence, that is, of a demonstration or strike. Some Englishmen were said to be hoping—vainly, in the event—for a “new deal” from the new king, Edward VIII, over the head of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
Hardly ever knowing where I might end a morning’s or afternoon’s walk, or how long it would be, I took a meal at noon, again in the evening, at the first likely spot, the “ordinary” of a pub, a small lunch room that served no alcohol, or a restaurant of some description. Sometimes I stopped in the afternoon for tea and scones (“scuns”). I don’t recall being dissatisfied with the diet, doubtless monotonous, often heavy. Some impatience may be inferred from efforts to vary the diet. A couple of times, perhaps once with Charlie Pettee, I lunched at a Corner House. On one occasion we had “an English meal” at the branch of Simpson’s then located off the Haymarket (below Picadilly Circus), the standing roast (or “joint”) wheeled to the table, where a piece was cut to taste, to be accompanied by potatoes, sprouts, and ale, all followed by a tart and/or cheese. I may have gone there again by myself. I walked down the Haymarket every two or three days, dropping in at the premises occupied by the American Express to cash a traveler’s check or two and to pick up mail. Letters from the farm carried less nostalgia than might be expected, for the Midwest was having the hottest summer in memory, so bad at times that the family all retreated to the cellar for relief.
I recall an agreeable dinner alone at an Indian restaurant in Soho. It was my first try at food from the subcontinent, very much to my taste, though I had to catch my breath after biting into the first piece of pickle. The standard was high, not always maintained on later visits to London. And it seems to me I remember having a bite to eat and a couple of drinks at the Café de Paris, not far from Picadilly. Finally, one evening the four of us—Charlie, Bob Barry, Jonas Arnold, and I—went to dinner at a well–regarded small French restaurant (in Regent Street? in Soho?). We had a corner table just to the left of the door on entering and up a couple of steps, perhaps a small room to ourselves. The party was lively, the meal was pronounced excellent—as Father might have said—though all I remember is a dish of raspberries, perfectly ripe and in taste and appearance as fresh as could be. We cannot have spent more than about $3 apiece.
Another variation from routine was a pair of side trips to Hampton Court and to Oxford. A Thames steamer carried a boatload upstream late one morning, a good crowd of trippers and tourists, past Kew and Richmond, to Hampton Court. Mostly rebuilt by Wren, the walls hung with a curious set of old paintings—historical and allegorical, as I recall—the Palace nevertheless seemed appealing on a contemplative walkthrough of the public rooms, perhaps in part an effect of the soft summer day, the gardens, and the river nearby.
The trip to Oxford revealed chiefly that the University was situated in the old section, by the river, of a thriving market town—now an industrial center as well, smaller, to be sure than our Cambridge or New Haven— something I might have learned from a reference book. Loosely gowned undergraduates were not to be seen in the “long vac,” and the colleges were understandably closed. There were towers to be seen, and gates, that was all. Of some interest were the commercial sections—in High Street and so on—and a visit to see old books and manuscripts on exhibit in the Bodleian (but what were they?). Otherwise the day would have been better passed in London, as I might have known. (I wasn’t to visit Oxford again for thirty-five years, when I was to dine at “high table” at St. Antony’s, of all places.)
Toward the end of my stay, there were purchases to make other than of books. At Burberry’s in the Haymarket I bought three and one–half yards of good blue suitings at 2 guineas[15] a yard (or about $36), at the suggestion of Jonas Arnold. The cloth was to be made by J. Press into a suit (with weskit) of their characteristic “Edwardian” cut. I bought also a blue Burberry, a coat for mild weather, a favorite, worn till the war, even a while after.[16]
In the same week I visited the offices of Norddeutscher Lloyd (in Picadilly or not far away) and took return passage on the Bremen, third class, from Bremerhaven to New York, sailing on 14 September. That came to about £30 ($145-150). None of the less expensive sailings, generally about $125, third class, would have allowed me a good five weeks on the Continent, while getting me home in time for opening of school. As it was, I should miss the Harvard Tercentenary celebration, ending 18 September. You see, it had come already to counting days, quite a change since buying passage to England in the spring.
In early August we went our ways: Charlie Pettee and Bob Barry back to the States and I to France. By then Jonas Arnold had left for the Olympics in Berlin. Stonehill and others had done their best to dissuade him, conspicuously a Jew, from venturing into Nazi Germany, but he went anyway. To have worked his way up in J. Press, he had needed, among other things, self–confidence. As it happened, he also was good company, most entertaining, for instance, on the way to handle the self–regarding undergraduates of the final clubs: “Keep them in their place; they love it.”
It seems that I left for France on the 8th of August; I rather assume than recall going from Dover (or Folkestone) to Dieppe, longer than the usual Channel run; the objective was Rouen, a short way by rail up the Seine. The first thing that comes back is the view from the train station in Rouen across an open space, a church on the other side. At the information desk, no doubt, I was referred to a pension not far away, a pleasant place, where I stayed two or three nights—for acculturation.
La patronne was a woman in her forties. She had the help of a buxom, smiling 18–year old, bonne à tout faire. At their table I made the acquaintance of red wine diluted with water. I smiled back at the 18–year old and invited la patronne to accompany me to a café looking across to the river, where we sat one afternoon, listened to the shrill singing of a small women’s group, conversed, and watched the river. Denis Winston, to whom I wrote a few lines from Rouen, answered approvingly, saying: the proper study of mankind is woman.
A universal topic of discourse in Rouen remained the sit-down strike of June. Whatever paper I read had a lot to say about the Popular Front, which had come to power partly as a result of the strike, and about the war just under way (since 18 July) in Spain, which all at once was a lot closer. The trial and burning of La Pucelle seemed, on the other hand, to be inconceivably remote to the Rouennais, and why not?
The brief stop in this pleasant town was encouraging: I could follow what was said to me, and make myself understood. So on to Paris. A train ride of a couple of hours took me to the Gare St. Lazare. I had located in some guide book a hotel near the station, up the hill about where the Metro turned west. I may well have walked there with my bag; the distance was not much more than a quarter mile. The hotel, in light colored brick, was probably l’Hôtel de l’Europe, on the Rue de Constantinople. It was hardly international, but North Americans were not unknown, and it was convenient to the Grands Boulevards, clean, and cheap. A room (without bath) cost 20 to 30 francs a night. With breakfast (coffee and roll) and laundry, the bill would have run to 250fr. ($8-$10) a week, the franc then running at about 25 (plus) to the dollar, as best I remember. One read that the franc was overvalued,[17] but that wasn’t evident. The bill for a week may have come to more in the hotel than in the rooming house in Bloomsbury, in any case hardly more than in a similarly modest London hotel.
In Paris, as in London, I spent most of the day walking about, making myself at home, with the difference that I had no company and didn’t look for books. As to the latter point, I had already spent as much on books as seemed prudent, and deliberately: London was the primary market for most of those I might wish to buy. Nor was there cause for regret: antiquarian bookshops in Paris were uninviting, as they would prove to be elsewhere on the Continent.
In a week or so, I came to feel much less at home than in five weeks in London. My wandering ranged from near the Bois de Boulogne on the west to somewhat beyond the Opéra on the east, from Montmartre at the north to the river on the south, in no case more than about two miles from the hotel. Apart from strolls along the river, these jaunts didn’t take me to the left bank, nor can I say why. To be sure, Montparnasse, home of the “lost generation,” was said to attract tourists by the busload, also many “pilgrims” wishing to have had a beer at Lipp’s, an apéritif at la Coupole. I just didn’t get around to it. Afterwards I regretted not having visited the famous bookshops of Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach in the Rue de l’Odéon (south of the Boulevard St. Germain). Even if, say, Mr. Joyce hadn’t put in an appearance, I might have bought from Mlle. Monnier a few French books, such being far from easy to acquire then in Cambridge.[18] It wouldn’t even have been far to go. As it was, the only French books I bought were a couple found at stands along the river.
One heard then, as one might still, that “everybody” leaves Paris in August, abandoning it to tourists. Many did leave, assuredly—and a great many more stayed. (Incidentally, a law establishing paid vacations for most employees had been passed only a few weeks before.) At night, as one might expect, the Grands Boulevards were crowded, and not, I thought, with tourists. Such were to be seen, of course, at the American Express (in the Rue Scribe, just north of the Blvd. des Capucins). But in a couple of hours at the Louvre I doubt I saw fifty people; of course it’s a big place. And the wide area before Notre Dame was almost empty while I stood there; inside there were only a few older women kneeling. An organist was playing, and it was quite dark; no service was in progress, but I soon left.
After crossing the Pont Neuf on the way to Notre Dame, I must have walked along the Quai des Orfèvres, passing the Palais de Justice, without taking note. One might conclude then that I didn’t yet know the Maigret stories, although it is true that the first read[19] were set outside Paris.
Walking down the left bank after leaving Notre Dame, past the restaurant La Tour d’Argent, I felt a moment’s dissatisfaction with my modest routine. Otherwise I was little tempted to vary the practice of eating at out of the way cafés—a couple of tables with umbrellas—brasseries, and inconspicuous restaurants à pris fixe. Once, to be sure, I had a hamburg at an American restaurant, where I saw a good–looking girl with an older woman. We exchanged glances, but they were nearly done and left before long. At the bistrots where I usually ate, there seemed to be no one with whom one might strike up acquaintance. The food must have been adequate, though I recall lunching out of doors upon bread, fruit, and cheese bought nearby. The idea may have come from watching others. A few times on later trips I have reverted to the practice; only, as I recall, in Switzerland.
Long resident in a city where it has become inadvisable to walk about at night, I find it curious to look back to nocturnal wanderings about Paris. A stranger, careful to a fault, I saw nothing troubling; even the girls—a great many of them, of course, mature women—that accosted one were not insistent; on the contrary, quite well behaved, if unappealing. There were stories about beautiful stylish prostitutes; perhaps I just didn’t recognize them as such and they didn’t regard me as a likely prospect. Anyhow, I don’t remember seeing any. I may well have been too timid to accompany even a most attractive young piece encountered, say, at a bar.
From Paris I made only one side trip, to Versailles, again a questionable choice. Arriving after a train ride of about a half hour, I walked straight to the gardens, spending all my time there.[20] Flat or gently sloping lawns, statuary, fountains, an artificial lake, a forest, gave some idea of what might have been innovative in the latter seventeenth century, making Versailles a “landmark” in the history of European taste—it could just as well be taken (I thought) as a monument to megalomania. On that weekday, visitors, all, it appeared, from the town and from Paris, mostly families, were not so very numerous. I stayed a couple of hours, chiefly as a result of falling into conversation with a young Frenchman. No clue remains as to what we said or who he was.
On Saturday the 15th of August, as I turned down the Rue de la Boétie toward the Champs Élysées, I saw that the streets were deserted. It was the Feast of the Assumption. I had been talking with a young bank employee from Windsor, Ontario (across the river from Detroit); he had an appointment to be shown the vaults of the Bank of France.
A short way down the street, a man dropped a wad of bills. I picked them up, hurried to catch him, and sputtered something in French. A reply came in stage Irish. As I took a second look, I saw the man seemed indeed to be a respectably dressed villager, no Parisian. He explained that he knew no French, and asked for help in finding some place to get breakfast. Being a sceptical young fellow, I wondered what his game could be, as he began telling his story. John, he was called; the last name I’ve long forgotten; in any event, he had always been John. Since boyhood he had worked as a stablehand, had not married, nor traveled beyond the next village, somewhere in the Irish Free State (as it then was). A while back, news had come that an uncle in Australia (as I recall) had died, leaving John a tidy sum, also a bequest to the Roman Catholic Church, with the provision that John himself should present it to the Pope.
That was how he came to be in Paris. A priest, doubtless from John’s parish, had him in tow. They had been to London town and were en route to Rome, staying over night in the guest quarters of some religious order. Finally, John brought out a couple of clippings to corroborate his story. By then he had finished breakfast, and we said good–bye as he started back up the street to rejoin the Father, who may have been wondering where his charge was and who had let him out. The Champs Élysées had attracted a good number of strollers, whom I soon joined.
A day later (16 August) I started out for Salzburg and Vienna. The first night, after a short day’s ride through increasingly hilly country, I stopped at Dijon, staying at a most agreeable hotel not far from the station. The hotel served an excellent dinner, almost enough to tempt me to stay on. I dined—always as I remember—on a sort of porch looking out past the lights to an open space.
The second day’s trip took me by late morning to Geneva, where I was to change trains. Having the better part of an hour, I walked out into the sunshine, down to the river bank, I think, though that may be superimposed from a later stopover. Then came a ride of several hours across Switzerland into Austria, ended short of Innsbruck at Oetzal, a station at the head of the valley of the Oetz, which rises to the south in an arm of the Alps. A guide book must have recommended such a stop. Several others also got off, and before long a bus came to take us part way up the valley to Oetz, a postal station and two resort hotels. I stayed at the newer one, comfortable, countrified, called Die Drei Mohren (or Die Drei Könige or ?). As before, there was no difficulty about getting a room.
The tanned faces and sportive getup of most of those staying in Oetz showed that I had landed amongst serious walkers—climbers, too, though I noticed none with technical climbing gear. Those guests, chiefly English–or German–speaking, appeared to be regulars and kept to themselves, as could be seen in the evening. Earlier they were out in the hills or on the local mountain.
I, too, walked that afternoon and the next day but just along the green valley, returning before meals to write letters. I remember writing at Oetz to our long-time neighbor Amanda Stout, who had taught ancient history at Central High School. I conversed only with an Alsatian professeur de lycée, whose subject was English, a pleasant fellow visiting, and not climbing, with his family.
On Wednesday the 19th, it would seem, I took the bus back to the station for a short train ride east, past meadows, between lines of hills, mountains always in the background, finally swinging up into Bavaria, along the Chiemsee, then back into Austria to Salzburg. As everyone says, Salzburg is sui generis, but I found a place to stay on a nondescript street, Wolf–Dietrich Strasse, in a banal hotel, Zum Wolf–Dietrich, again countrified, Zweite Klasse, close by one of the local mountains. (Street and hotel were inappropriately called after the renaissance prelate and prince Wolfgang Dietrich von Raithenau, his mother a Medici, who introduced the Baroque into Salzburg.) The hotel manager spoke, he said, all the usual languages, no doubt well enough for the purpose.
That afternoon I rambled about, enjoying the famous charm of the (momentarily) cosmopolitan provincial town in its high valley. It will surprise no one that I failed to have a look at the fabled Baroque interiors.
In the morning, as I recall, I walked across to the fortress Hohensalzburg and up part way, where I lunched, looking out over the scene. From late afternoon into evening I watched a showing of Jedermann (Everyman),[21] staged in the open space before the Cathedral. My German had hardly progressed to the point at which I could readily follow Hofmannsthal’s text, much less form an opinion of it as a rendering of the late medieval original.[22] The piece in any case took on a popular color from the local actors.
On the evening of the 21st I went to a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, directed by sad-faced Bruno Walter. I suppose one featuring Mozart would have been appropriate, especially under the direction of a native son, such as Paumgartner. But Bruno Walter conducting Beethoven made an impression, one of awareness of what might lie in store. The Festspielhaus[23] (the old archepiscopal stables remodeled) was of a reasonable size, if not of an ideal shape.
The next evening, I went to a church concert, but no longer recall what was played. It may have been after that concert, at a bar, perhaps over soup and a sandwich, that I met Alfred Pomerance, from some industrial city in the west of England. He was a commercial traveler (traveling salesman) in woolen goods, over thirty, of medium height, reddish brown kinky hair—or so I remember. He was relentlessly friendly, a great lover—I gathered—of the arts. It was not his first visit to Austria; he indeed had been at Oetz at least the previous summer. In conversation it came out that he was bound for Vienna the next day (as I recall). The Festival was to go on another week but I couldn’t stay long if I was to carry out my program. (And tickets for most remaining programs were sold out.) So we agreed to go together. “And,” said he, “there’s someone I’d like you to meet, a wonderful woman.” Of course, I said.
On the afternoon of Sunday the 23rd then, by my uncertain reckoning, we pulled into the station in Vienna and came to a stop. The Austrian women in the well–filled car began keening, “Träger, Träger” (Porter, Porter). When it was safe, we stepped out on the platform, even with the floor of the train, and there stood a blonde nun, or so it seemed, in a long black habit—no wimple, though. Then I was introduced to Terczi,[24] as it is simplest to call her; at the time she was, of course, Fräulein Frisch.
She suggested my taking a room in the Hotel Central in Taborstrasse, indeed (if I rightly recall) went there with me. It was just across the Danube Canal in Leopoldstadt (2nd District, historically the quarter of commerce and the ghetto), not far from the apartment she shared with her mother and, now and then, her younger brother Robert. Respectable (rated “gutbürgerlich”), by no means new, the Hotel Central was of a fair size, and cheap; for similar accomodations the rate in dollars was rather less than in Paris.
Pomerance, I suppose, went on to his own hotel before taking Terczi to dinner. In any case, we did not meet again, so I missed the chance to thank him for introducing me. He could hardly have imagined that that was to be his principal role in Terczi’s life. As I was to learn in later years, he had proposed marriage, had written often, giving Terczi’s brothers occasion to tease her unmercifully (as they were wont to do on any pretext).
Much of the following week I must have spent on my own, in orientation, always with reference to the variously–named sectors of the Ring–Strasse. Even more exclusively than London or Paris, Vienna with its imposing stone buildings had the look of a capital: the residence of a court and center of administration. At the same time, one might perhaps have guessed from walking about that the Habsburg empire was no more—politically; economic ties remained strong—though the universal effects of the Great Depression obviously counted for much. It was all symbolized, for me, by the squadrons of cyclists wheeling about the streets, a great part of the traffic and principal threat to a pedestrian.
Another thing: Vienna, a city of some two million, retained visible ties to the countryside: peasants selling fruits and vegetables. I remember especially, by the bridge (die Schweden Brücke) I usually took over the Danube Canal, the little woman selling Zwetch(g)en, small blue-to-purple plums with the shape of an American football, like those we had on the farm; also the fellow selling Kukuruz, fresh young field corn boiled on the cob, the name and the delicacy, very likely the corn itself, from Hungary.
Ordinary fare in restaurants was satisfactory, the dishes—Gulasch, Wiener Schnitzel, Paprikahuhn, usw.—more or less familiar, although not generally to be recommended (even, I may say, in the Vienna of forty years later). More welcome were small new potatoes boiled; salads of sliced tomatoes with bits of spring onion and a very little oil and vinegar; and the rich pastries, which I have, alas, outgrown. The only restaurant I recall was on Rotenturmstrasse not far from the Canal, a pleasant place with a garden, not at all expensive.[25]
Likewise agreeable were the coffeehouses, large rather bare rooms full of tables and newspapers, with not too many clients in the morning, when I visited. Besides coffee one could have pastry, of course, and—to make a sort of breakfast—a soft-boiled egg. The attentive waiters served coffee as required—I took mine with whipped cream on top: “Schlagobers” (or simply Obers)—along with two glasses of water, perhaps for those expecting to sit a long while, as many must have done later in the day, reading, or playing cards or chess. The choice of newspapers was not vast, a sign of the times. The only English-language paper was the “Diely Mile,” as best I can remember, though memories of my trip north through Bavaria and the Rhineland may account for that. As you may imagine, I took no note of whether a coffeehouse was old, of possible historical interest. I must have gone to one found on (or just off) the Rotenturmstrasse, possible one on the nearby Stubenring.
The first weekend in Vienna I was invited to meet Terczi’s mother, also her brother Robert, at their apartment in the Negerlegasse. I retain a memory of their courtesy in the face of this barbarian incursion; also of the room, with a grand piano and a few pieces of nice old furniture, left over from prewar days of prosperity. I can’t, however, imagine the course of conversation. According to later testimony, Terczi’s older brother Eugen and younger sister Rosine were present on such an occasion; they would recall my expressing the view that all great cities were much alike. Imagine.
Terczi told me a little at a time about her family. First she had mentioned the death of her father in the past year. In previous years, they had spent part of August in Oetz; so, she said, we must have been fated to meet. She had been for some time working for two patent (pronounced, as in British usage, as if they were self-evident) attorneys, as interpreter and secretary. Robert studied singing and had performed some of the classic tenor roles with road companies in Italy. He seemed to be the only one of the six children not to hold a degree from the university.
One of her older brothers, Paul, was in Paris, where he had started a patisserie; Eugen, the eldest, probably was already in the foreign service, though I don’t remember hearing about it. Walter, a younger brother, lived in Vienna, was married. Rosine, in medical practice, also was married, to a business man; we met them together one day on the street.
It is of course hard to keep separate what Terczi told me then from what she was to say afterwards. Besides the above, she may have mentioned her tennis club, though not its coach, the well-known Czech footballer Karel Kozeluh, nor her own career, and earlier eminence, in tennis. One thing she said later should be added here: she at first found it very hard to understand what I said; I had no hint of such a problem, surprising as now seems my failure to perceive it.
On that weekend, I believe, Terczi took me to call on her friend Trude (familiarly Trudel) Hitschmann, heavy-set, independent, obviously cultivated and well-off. On my next visit, waiting in Frl. Hitschmann’s drawing room, I sprawled on a small sofa. When she came in, she took me to task for such sans-gêne. After that, we got on well enough, amused without being attracted by each other. On that morning I went shopping with her, to the greengrocer, the fishmonger, the butcher, the baker. Another time, at my request, she introduced me at a shop where I ordered a leather handbag made for Mother.[26] It cost, as I recall, something over 100 schilling (or about $20). Frl. Hitschmann wished it to be understood that she was not getting a commission. I suppose one ought to have asked her to lunch.
Terczi appears in almost all recollections from then on—the last six days in Vienna. Just one other remains. Of an afternoon I saw “The Emperor Jones,” a film then several years old, starring Paul Robeson. In the 1920’s he had appeared in the play, one of O’Neill’s earlier ones, which would hardly have been filmed if not as a “vehicle” for such a star. In earlier scenes laid in the States, especially one of Pullman porters shooting crap, the German subtitles, inevitably, seemed hilarious. At the end Robeson’s presence lent effect to the scene in which the strong man goes wild with fear of the tribal drums.
That is one of the few times—maybe the only one—when I have seen a film or play, or gone to a concert, by myself. One would say I was killing time. Terczi had to work; as it was, she must have taken off parts of at least two days to go sightseeing with me. In the center of Vienna we of course walked. As an office worker, Terczi had kept the vigor of a skier, climber, and tennis champion and enjoyed walking at a good clip. We saw the cathedral of St. Stephen’s (Stefansdom or, more familiarly, Stefanskirche), the Imperial Art Historical (Kunsthistorisches) Museum, and finally the opera house (Staatsoper), where Terczi persuaded a caretaker to admit us. In shape—not in decor—the auditorium reminded me of the smaller Sanders Theater (in Memorial Hall at Harvard, built a few years later). But the stage was like nothing I had seen, deep and lofty, equal to the spectacular demands of opera at its grandest. Of St. Stephen’s and the Museum all I recall is, in effect, a couple of snapshots and odd items of information.
Terczi was the ideal guide, imbued with Viennese culture of all kinds, disdainful of local pieties, realistic about my limited knowledge and patience.
What today seems so striking is how completely we accepted each other. It hardly mattered that we were almost strangers. I must have grasped that she had been through a lot. She of course could see that I had little experience of the world. Such a difference may itself have been a bond, given that we seemed to see so much in the same light.
It’s hard to say what one took in. I don’t recall thinking about her beauty, though I must have been aware of it—the blonde hair, almost blue eyes, clear skin, smallish regular features in a rather broad face—a “Nordic” beauty. (Later she would tell how at a court ball—in 1918? her first?—she was chosen to be Germania, much to her embarrassment.) She was without coquetry, as near as may be, and for all my caution I was ready to trust her unreservedly.
One day Terczi took me, of course by tram, to Karl-Marx Hof, the large suburban housing project built in the early 1920’s while the Social Democrats were in power. It had been the site of fighting in early 1934 between socialist workers and troops called out by then Premier Dollfuss—a short man, popularly called Millimetternich—in the wake of a general strike.[27] Machine gun fire had left its scars on the walls. I seem to recall a point where two streets meet at a dead end, the project stretching out to left and right. The troops also had used light artillery. In the center of Vienna people were unaware of the fighting.[28]
Terczi did not have a great deal to say about Austrian politics, mostly, I suppose, because I should not have understood. But she did tell a story about the time Hitler was riding along in the country with his entourage and saw a man groveling by the side of the road. Hitler ordered a stop and asked what the trouble was. The man said he was unemployed, weak, and hungry, and was eating grass. Hitler in distress ordered, “Help that poor fellow into the car back there and we’ll take him to town, where you’ll see he’s provided for.”
On another occasion, coincidentally, Schuschnigg, then the Austrian premier—saw a similar scene, stopped, and asked the same question, to which he had like answers. “Idiot,” he exclaimed, “Why don’t you go back away from the road where it’s not so dusty.”
By that time I knew something about the great attraction for Terczi of things English and, even more, American. That is to say, she knew England and had English friends, but I was the first American to come her way. If I had been more self-conscious, I should have felt the weight of my responsibility. Germans, on the other hand, she could scarcely tolerate; fear and loathing of the Nazis added to rebellion against official German and domestic Viennese culture.
Her view of the local scene was of long standing. I don’t recall whether it was then or later that she told me about the evening, still in youth, when she stopped her escort on their arrival at a ball, saying a warning should be posted: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate qui (“Leave any hope, you that enter here,” the words over the gates to Dante’s inferno).
A story of the time will illustrate how she felt about Germans. Schiller, she said, wrote plays about many of the peoples of Europe, for example: the Scots, Maria Stuart; the French, Die Jungfrau von Orleans; the Spanish, Don Carlos; the Swiss, Wilhelm Tell; and the Germans, Die Räuber (Robbers). Terczi had read some American literature, and her dream was to go some day to America. I wondered whether we should—how we could possibly—live up to such expectations.
It was on Saturday, the fifth of September, I believe, that we spent the afternoon at Schoenbrunn, strolling and sitting in the gentle late summer heat. The imperial gardens in their variety were more inviting than those of Versailles, perhaps in part because they were not flat and seemed less formal; to be able to compare was one good thing about having gone to Versailles. In desultory conversations we developed themes already touched on, if expressing only a small part of what went through our minds. We both liked to recall that afternoon; Terczi was to send me in 1937 (?) a framed etching of Schoenbrunn.
The next afternoon, the Sunday, I spent with the Frisch family visiting their farm in the rolling countryside. Did we ride out with some one? I don’t recall. The house, not large, stood on a bank, a short way from a quiet dirt road, but at a higher level. The grounds were half-wild, as were the orchards, where grew, among other things, small round sweet (green-gage?) plums. I was beginning to feel quite at home.
On Monday evening (the seventh) Terczi and I went by tram to Grinzing, a suburb of vineyards north of Vienna, at an elevation. From the end of the tramline we walked up the hill to a row of vine-covered cottages in which was served the Heurige (“this year’s,” i.e. wine less than a year old), also called Maiwein.[29] The patrons consumed their wine, naturally, with singing and hilarity, and we walked back a way to a modern inn, with white walls, as I remember, below Cobenzl. We were alone in the dining room, having coffee and pastry, looking out over the lights of Vienna below.
I don’t remember the occasion as mournful or sentimental; only subdued and—in my case, at least—touched by the atmosphere of an earlier Vienna. Parting is harder on the one that stays; the one that is leaving has the advantage of the accompanying tension, with the rising flow of adrenaline. Besides, Terczi would remain all too near the storm’s center, while I should soon be far away in then invulnerable America. With these thoughts we talked disconnectedly about other things—the visit to the Frisch farm, the farm in Michigan, my trip though Germany. By about ten o’clock we started back down and took the tram into Vienna, where we said good-bye. I promised to write.
The next morning I set out by train, through Linz and Passau, across Bavaria north of Munich to Augsburg. (The decision to leave aside Munich had already been made; there was no longer time for big cities.) In Augsburg, after registering at a commercial hotel on the main street, I strolled about. It was more of a renaissance town than expected. There was no sign of Brown Shirts, banished, it may be, for the Olympic summer, though the obscene broadsides of Die Fackel[30] were plastered up here and there (as in other towns visited). On one street, or pair of streets, along the river Lech I walked back and forth over the bridges. My only sightseeing was to have a look at the Fuggerei, a model village of small, closely spaced cottages built by (and named for) the famous south German bankers of the Renaissance and maintained by their heirs—an early 16th century housing project.
A day later, on the way to Mainz, I stopped for most of an afternoon at Heidelberg, train schedules permitting, so as to walk out to the Schloss and climb up for a look over the lovely Neckar valley. Two Turks, who called themselves students, stopped off for the same reason. The town, empty of young men, I was to recall with a twinge of sympathy in the late 1940’s after reading about a student’s regretting the time when G.I. could refer only to Gaudeamus Igitur.[31]
At Mainz I stayed in a hotel not far from the waterfront, which I could watch while eating dinner—roast duck, very good—and listening to the waiter’s insistent praise of law and order restored under the Nazis.
Grandpa Shafer’s forbears of that name had come from near Mainz and must have known the old town with its fortifications, archepiscopal palace, and cathedral. As Protestants, they could have regarded such monuments only as symbols of oppression. They would have left by boat down the Rhine, as I was to do.
Of the hours spent in Mainz I recall only a visit to the printing shop assembled, or reconstituted, in honor of Gutenberg. The equipment seemed to be not altogether unlike what we had used in the eighth grade in a required course in “manual training”.
Of my day-long trip downriver to Cologne (Köln) I recall the agreeably misty scenery, jutting rocks and ruined castles, with their aura of legend. Traffic on the river, much greater than in Heine’s time, or Longfellow’s, was less of a distraction than expected. The sharpest memory is of a flock of Flemish matrons on board—often mentioned since—gabbling like barnfowl. The great thing about going by boat was to have leisure to look, and look again.
In Cologne I stayed two days, stopping at the pleasant hotel that then stood across the way from the Cathedral, conveniently, though sometimes criticized as being out of place on the Domhof, close by the old town. I took the usual long walks about town, at one point coming to an area devoted to the sale of eau de Cologne (Kölnisches Wasser 2711), “the real thing.” On impulse I bought a vial for Mother; goodness knows what she did with it.
One of the benefits incidental to travel is to find now and then that one can place oneself in imagination at the scene of some action, great or small, as was to happen a few years later, reading William Bolitho, Murder for Profit. One of the cases dealt with was that of a certain Haarmann, who supported himself in the starving time after the armistice of 1918—during a diplomatic standoff on food shipments to Germany—by seducing and murdering homeless young men, whose bodies he then butchered, retailing the meat to the hungry, incurious citizenry. This story, all taking place in Cologne not far from the cathedral, seems to have been absorbed into the legends of the region. Maria Horn, a small child in the mid-1930’s in Oberhausen down the Rhine valley (below Duisburg), would hear a nursery rhyme that ran (in part):
Warte, warte noch ein Weilchen,
mit dem kleinen Hackebeilchen
kommt der Haarmann auch zu dir…
(Wait, wait, still a little while,
with the small chopping hatchet
Haarmann is coming to you, too.)
In 1936 the Roman ruins in Cologne proper were decently buried, including a mosaic belonging to the cult of Mithras, found close to the cathedral in World War II in digging for an air raid shelter; and the command post of the Roman garrison, uncovered nearby by bombing (presumably directed at the bridge across the Rhine). These sights I was to see on an afternoon’s visit thirty years later. On that occasion the whole area was to look unfamiliar. Stopping in the old town at an establishment for coffee and pastry, I remarked on the fact to the waiter, asking, among other things, what had happened to a street called the Judenstrasse, a name perhaps dating from before the expulsion of the Jews in the early fifteenth century. “Oh,” said he with a smirk, “that’s now the Salomostrasse [Solomon street].”
Finally on the 13th, as planned, I took the train for Bremerhaven, the last lap of my Grand Tour. On the way, a tall brown German-American spoke up for the “Nays-eyes” to unresponsive fellow-passengers. In Bremerhaven, apart from a walk along the waterfront, I remember nothing about my overnight stay, or about embarking for the return voyage home during the morning of Monday the 14th. The Bremen, of some 5,000 gross register tons, one of the largest liners on the North Atlantic run—outclassed only by the Normandie—was one of the few that made the voyage to New York in six days—not quite five days from Cherbourg, our last stop.
Life aboard the Bremen—as customary, for those able and willing—was an almost continual round of eating, interrupted by short spells of lying back in deck chairs, half asleep. The fare was indeed ample and quite good enough; I remember the thin German potato pancakes, new to me. But I was not ready for such a regimen, maintaining the summer’s round of light meals and long walks. By the third day out there was a noticeable falling off in attendance. The three young people, short, round, rubicund—two women and a man—at my table, who had talked, mostly in Plattdeutsch, between, sometimes during bites, no longer came. The increasingly rough weather, which made me yet more cautious, had no ill effects.
Several days out, I noticed a familiar face, that of a youngish professor—dark, slight, medium height—in whose class I had sat in the fall term of 1935, studying Old English grammar and vocabulary. He and his family, returning from Germany, were traveling in first class; he had come down presumably in search of someone to talk to. His story, which was common knowledge in Cambridge, was a curious one. As a flyer in the World War he had shot down a young German. After the war he had somehow learned who it was, and had communicated with the family, later visiting them. His need to atone and his devotion to Germanic culture:Germany:culture, already intermixed in his mind—I should guess—in time led him into sympathy with the National Socialist movement. He was said to have visited Berchtesgaden, may indeed have been returning from another pilgrimage. At Harvard he kept silent about his inclination, in public, that is, perhaps after a warning from University authorities, perhaps by inclination.
In our shipboard conversation, which lasted only a few minutes, he made some allusion to his visit in Germany, which I let pass. I asked instead whether in speaking one language there was an interior echo of another. He said there was none, and elaborated. Of course I accepted that, if only because he was at ease at least in German and French. (He once had said his small children knew German far better than his graduate students.) Experience has in a way borne out his observation, but I wonder whether one’s first language doesn’t provide a ghostly accompaniment; sometimes I fancy I hear it. There’s an analogy: in the most rapid reader, we are told, there remains some velleity toward speech. That’s by the way.
He also spoke enthusiastically of the “purity” of Germany:purity of race, especially of course in contrast with the mongrel English. Here I seemed to detect—without remarking—Nazi doctrine. We parted amicably.
The last night out I spent a couple of hours in the third class bar, close to the bow of the ship. We were getting—it was said—the tail end of a hurricane, and the bow rose and fell, like a slow elevator in an old building. I was alone except for the barman and felt an access of euphoria, contemplating the end of the summer, the excitement of which had provided no release from a low level anxiety that had become almost second nature, no doubt reflected in the restlessness that had kept me on the go. I sat there with my drink, going up and down, feeling so well, so free, as seldom before or since.
By next morning—Sunday the 20th—the wind had died down, the air had cleared, and we came within sight of land, I suppose off the Grand Banks. We stayed at about the same distance offshore as long as I looked. That’s my last recollection of the trip.
There’s a faint image, as from a dream, of Tom Ratcliffe’s waving to welcome me as I came ashore, so we may have had a bite to eat, for it was after noon when we landed. But all that is a blank, as is my trip down east to Boston and the subway ride to Cambridge. (I do recall having more than enough money left.) According to an entry in Father’s travel notes, he and Mother had gone to South Station in the late afternoon to welcome me, had waited out a couple of trains, and had returned to Cambridge. I arrived at 8:30 in the evening at the room they had occupied before, on Sumner Road. On Tuesday, classes began, and Mother and Father started home.
Black Diamond Line 1
Charles A. Stonehill, Jr. 1
German 2, 3, 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
German, Nazi 8, 13, 14
Germania 13
Germanic culture
Germany
culture 15
Germans 13
Germany 14, 15
purity of race 16
Grand Banks 16
Harvard University 1, 3, 4, 8, 12, 16
J.D. McVitty 2
John Cornell 2
Katherine (“Kit”) Cornell 2
New York 1
Ted Uebel 2
[1]Unsurprisingly, recent studies suggest that the old best remember what they did at about age 20; more generally that one remembers best new, especially nonrecurrent, experience. New York Times, 23 June 1987, Section C (“Science Times”), pp. 1, 9.
[2]Still in business on York Street as C.A. Stonehill, Inc.
[3]Art went to Bar Harbor for a weekend visit with a classmate, Walter Burnet.
[4]Capacity (in long tons) to carry cargo, fuel, and stores.
[5]Hunt’s Hotel, Mount Pleasant Street, a short way up from the Central Station.
[6]For his breakfast at the Adelphi Hotel (at the head of Ranelagh Street, also just up from the Central Station), see The Middle Years, NY, 1917, pp. 4-6; more down to earth, the beginning of the first piece (“London”) in Essays in London and Elsewhere, NY, 1893, pp. 1-2. James placed his arrival at the beginning of March. Leon Edel has him arriving on 27 February and leaving the next day, see The Untried Years, Philadelphia, 1953, pp 281-2 (the first volume of Edel’s life of James).
[7]The Albert Dock, “the largest enclosed space in the world,” was later refurbished to house shops and museums. Wonderful to relate, the above-mentioned broad open space nearby was left open.
[8]The exchange rate was then quoted, as I recall, at about $4.80 = £1. The retail rate, at least when cashing travelers’ checks, was about $4.90 = £1. Here it seems best to round to $5 = £1. There were then 12 pence (denarii) to the shilling (solidus), 20 shilling (solidi) to the pound (libra), Latin terms and ratios being those of the common medieval money of account, the terms abbreviated in common English usage to l (£), s, and d.
[9]Still shown in 1986 in the ABA catalogue, but as inactive, the firm being headed by his son Robert Jr., his grandson (the third of the name) also being listed.
[10]Short Guide to London, edited by Findlay Muirhead, London, 1928, 2nd edition, in “The Blue Guides.”
[11]Not an uncommon practice, it would seem. In the late ’20’s an instance was reported to Edmund Wilson by a friend: a naked waitress in a Parisian “restaurant” would pick up a one-franc piece. See Wilson's journal, The Twenties, ed. Leon Edel, New York, 1975, pp. 330-1. The late Russell Hale recalled the same kind of thing in Baltimore; the waitresses could manage quarters, not half-dollars.
[12]He was known particularly as the principal co–author of a 4–volume work, Anonyma and Pseudonyma, published in London in 1926 in 325 copies (at his expense?), a trade edition following in 1927. The work has long been superseded.
[13]Properly speaking, in Bevis Marks, continuation of Duke Street (now Duke’s Place), the next street south and west of Houndsditch.
[14]The “resettlement” of the Jews came during the Cromwellian interregnum (1649–1660). Two other synagogues were built—one in Duke Street (Duke’s Place), the other nearby—in the late 17th century, one by the so-called Marranos, who by living publicly as Christians had been able to stay in England; the other (in 1690) by Ashkenazim. The latter building, still standing in 1936, was no longer in use; a few years thereafter (in 1941) it would be destroyed by bombing.
[15]The guinea, 21 shillings, obsolete as a coin, remained in use in pricing professional services, art objects, and the like.
[16]I’ve forgotten what it cost, probably not much more than the cloth.
[17]In the fall of 1936 it was indeed devalued.
[18]Schoenhof’s was to be established in Harvard Square in the early 1940’s.
[19]Among others, Liberty Bar; M. Gallet, décédé; Un crime en Hollande; L’affaire Saint-Fiacre.
[20]It may be that the palace was still undergoing renovation.
[21]Complete title: “Jedermann (Das Spiel vom Sterben des reichen Mannes),” literally: Everyman (the Play of the Dying of the Rich Man).
[22]In fact Hofmannsthal had considered also later versions, perhaps especially the popular 16th century rendering by Hans Sachs.
[23]Long since, I have read, the “old” Festival Hall, a new one having been begun before the war.
[24]“Terczi” is a Hungarian diminutive of “Theresia,” an Austrian form of the saint’s name.
[25]Possibly Lehner’s. I remembered it as being on the right “at the first street;” Terczi corrected me, saying it was closer to St. Stephen’s.
[26]Used by Mother for some years, though I was never sure whether she liked it.
[27]He had decided to enforce suspension of all political activity except by his party. Several socialist leaders had taken refuge in Karl-Marx Hof. That was what the fighting was about. Thereafter many notable Austrians had hurried into exile.
[28]According to Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern, Stockholm, 1944.
[29]Originally the Heuriger (so-called) was to serve only the wine he made with grapes from his own vineyard; I don’t know whether that limitation still held in 1936.
[30]Literally, “the torch,” gross anti-Jewish propaganda plastered up here and there; as I recall, put out by the group headed by Julius Streicher (which also published “Der Stürmer”). Not to be confounded with the fortnightly “Die Fackel” issued in Vienna from 1899 to 1936 (with gaps) by the brilliant social critic Carl Kraus, a clairvoyant anti-Nazi.
[31]The first two words of a medieval student’s song, a partly rhymed Latin stanza, which (as revised) ran about like this:
|
Let us rejoice therefore While we are young. After agreeable youth, After burdensome old age, The ground will have us. |
Gaudeamus igitur, Juvenes dum sumus. Post jucundam juventutem, Post molestam senectutem, Nos habebit humus. |