Last August Gina and I boarded the HMS Crown Princess at Southampton, England, and after a week visiting Scandinavian ports, spent three weeks crossing the North Atlantic (with stops in Iceland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia) before docking in Brooklyn, NY.
By any measure it was the cruise of a lifetime. The ports of call were memorable but what I'll remember until time dissolves my brain cells like an Alka-Seltzer in water were our fellow passengers, predominantly British citizens from England, Wales and Scotland. On the days at sea, and there were many, we shared lunch, high tea, and dinner tables with them. To me they were birds of a feather; and I loved listening to their accents and what they chose to talk about as if they were varieties of songbirds.
"Look what you've done with my language," at various points I wanted to tweet at them, knowing that if I were to, they, speaking closer to the way William Shakespeare spoke in 1500, might warble back, "look what you've done with our language, the language we gave you, by the way."
One of the accents easy for me to spot and (perhaps for you as well) was the upper crust British accent used by many Oxford and Cambridge University graduates. Each time I encountered it among our UK songbirds, hearing its lilt immediately took me back to the fall of 1970 and my first semester at the Iowa Writer's Workshop when I had the pleasure and honor of having the noted English novelist Angus Wilson as my writing instructor.
Those of you who have seen the movie The Imitation Game (2014) starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightly are aware of the code-breaking work led by Alan Turing at Bletchley Park outside London during World War II. Turing's group broke the Enigma code, which allowed the Allies to "listen in" on German military communiqués. After that, the Allied victory was only a matter of time, but the shame is that Turing, instead of being canonized as one of the great heroes of World War II, was instead prosecuted (in 1952) "for homosexual acts," and was made to accept "chemical castration treatment" as an alternative to serving time in prison. (Wikipedia, "Alan Turing")
Alan Turing was a graduate of Oxford, as was my instructor Angus Wilson. Not only were they contemporaries (with Alan's birth year being 1912 and Angus's being 1913) but during World War II they both served in the code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park, although Angus Wilson translated Italian Naval codes. If they weren't friends they had to have known each other. In 1970 there was certainly never any doubt among us workshop students that Angus Wilson was a homosexual, an extremely intelligent, dignified and well spoken one, at that.
I now realize how much of Angus Wilson's work can be traced back to the clandestine manner in which as an artist he had to cover his tracks in order to work and be accepted in the highly homophobic society he grew up in. Not for one moment did I believe the United States was any less forbidding a place for homosexuals who wished to express themselves freely, by the way.
And so today when I think about Angus Wilson's novels and the way he wrote them, I'm drawn to his heroic struggle to tell stories in a way that both casts a gossamer veil over his characters and their relationships and at the same time reveals them and uses them as an outlet to express the deeper longings, desires and tensions that he certainly felt but knew he could not express directly. He was under no illusions that there would be ugly consequences if he were to do so. He could land in jail or worse. In that respect Angus's achievement could truly be called "writing as though one's life depended on it," for it did. Not surprising to me was how many of his novels revolved around the theme of needing to treat each other more humanly and refrain from judging our fellow human beings.
I recall one workshop session when the class got into a heated discussion about one of our short stories in which a character who was in the midst of grieving for a loved one performed a horrible act. I don't recall what the character did, but I remember being shocked by it. And I remember Angus Wilson intervening and saying something to the effect that he for one would never judge someone who was in a grieving state for anything he or she might do. I remember him saying, "Who are we to judge?"
I also remember the effect his words had on me. They changed my mind.
If only Angus Wilson's advice could have been applied to judging homosexuals or any other group on a long list of abhorrents drawn up by, for example, the Nazis. Wasn't that why our forebears fought World War II in the first place, so that people like Gina and me could take luxury cruises across the Atlantic at our leisure and write the essays and read the books we wish to?
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