Cambridge 6

June 24, 2010

Maggie Norton haunts the Cambridge experience for me. I hear her Glenda Jackson voice, its girlish high notes, the vaguely sinister low notes, like one who has been keeping watch under a foggy bridge. I hear her “Now,” uttered when she had spooned out the final portion of supper, a benediction and a cry of victory. I think of her closets crammed with dresses she designed herself, so that her boarders had to live out of our suitcases. What has become of daughter Nicola, of son Mark, of Mark’s stunning friend from Wolverhampton? I hear Maggie calling “Nicola!” with a multiply nuanced organ-tone of propriety, concern, irritation. I think of leading (or rather following) Nicola through the streets on Guy Fawkes night, I being the only one home to bring her out onto the fireworks and goings-on. What became of the Canadian Naval officer who left Maggie with two children and a shambling house on Milton Road? When we were there, she was given a spread in Vogue, and the sitting room was buried under patterns and cloth and the tittering of the women friends who came to help. What on earth could she have thought of us? I went to see the house on Milton Road ten years ago. The tricycle in front suggested she was no longer there. Maybe I’ll go back again. Maybe I won’t. I’d love to see the garden, where Maggie claimed, without offering proof, there was a hedgehog. Let’s face it. It’s been 40 years. Nicola could be a grandmother. Mark’s insolence could have landed him in jail or in Parliament. The beautiful things in the house–there was some noble connection I have forgotten–may be dispersed into a hundred fashionable flats. There is nothing left but recollection.

Cambridge fills me with false nostalgia–longing for a time and place which I never actually experienced. What if I had gone here as an undergraduate? I doubt it would have made me a different person, but it might have given me easier, less self-conscious access to my higher self. Like any good Irish Ohio boy, I find the high culture I want to create and the heroic deeds I want to do also a little embarrassing. I think I would not be so hobbled by that had I been an undergraduate here. On the other hand, perhaps it would have made me insufferable. Perhaps it’s just that bit of mortification which renders me liveable.

We lit candles in Saint James’ Cathedral in Bury St. Edmund’s yesterday. I began it, to show the students it was allowable. When it came time to pray the prayer I had paid for, it was for J. Hadn’t expected that, but I honored my first thought.

The search for a good new living poet is almost always frustrating. This time it was not. I found Sheenagh Pugh. Not all her work is equal, but “M.S.A”, is a masterpiece,