“Just a quick note to let you know that I’m back in Oxford. . . . Sunday was St. Mark’s Day, the biggest celebration of the year at Keble College because John Keble was born on that day. Every major building in the college was dedicated on St. Mark’s Day.
I got to sit at the High Table for the first time that night because of being an MCR officer. Both of the men on either side of me were over 75 years old, old dons. It was extravagant . . . asparagus soup, salmon with mayonnaise-like sauce accompanied by a glass of white wine, then roast pork with potatoes and green beans accompanied by red wine, and finally apple and black current pie with cream and a cup of coffee. Quite lovely. The woman sitting next to the Warden at the High Table was the guest of honor—her husband had bequeathed £5,000 annually to be used for the St. Mark’s Dinner. (Everyone in college got this meal.) The whole college was quite happy. Afterwards I rejoined my friends on the lawn for further wine-drinking through the warm evening.
On the day after I returned, I had my oral examinations. I think that went well. The final results will be posted on May 4th. I went to a few lectures on topics that interested me, but generally am confining my work to the thesis.”
Bicycle Accident
Shortly after I returned to Oxford, I learned from K.P. that Victor had been hit while riding his bicycle near Oxford Brookes University in Headington. He had gotten glass in his eyes, which necessitated an operation that left him confined to his room. I didn’t want to appear too interested in front of K.P., so I did not ask for any further details.
But at the first opportunity, I rushed over to Victor’s flat. It was around tea time. I thought perhaps I could make some food for him. When I came in, he was lying in bed with a bandage over his eyes. I was quite upset by the possibility that he might not recover his sight, and I wondered if he had been deliberately hit because of his outspoken writing about Fiji. This was not a good situation. If someone was trying to silence him, he was now in an even more vulnerable position. Victor was quite nervous about me being there, so I did not stay very long. He asked me not to visit again, which made me sad. But he said that he would come over after he recovered.
Gothic
One of the few films that I saw during my first year at Oxford was Ken Russell’s film Gothic, which was in the theater during the first week of Trinity term. Richard Bevington and I went to see it at the Odeon Movie Theater on Magdalen Street. This is one of the few horror films I have ever seen, and I admit that it has shaped my view of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Polidori’s Vampyre, which were both conceived during this mad weekend at Lord Byron’s villa.
The film recounts the events of a summer gathering at Lord Byron’s Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816. Byron and his guests Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin (Shelley’s future wife), Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori entertain themselves on a stormy night by playing hide-and-seek, talking about sleepwalking and nightmares, reading excerpts from a book of horror stories, and having a séance. Historians suggest that they might have been smoking opium.
Gothic was extreme in so many ways—a seizure, oral sex, miscarriage, ghostly apparitions, supernatural physical phenomena, accidental crashing through a glass door, and an attempted suicide. By comparison, the modernist writers that I was studying seemed like a relatively stable group, but maybe not. T. S. Eliot had a nervous breakdown, James Joyce had numerous phobias, Ezra Pound was arrested for treason, and Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
What Lies Ahead
I planned to attend the MCR barbecue that was scheduled for Thursday of first week. But the events of that evening—May Night—warrant a separate newsletter on May 1.
For a preview of May morning in Oxford, see this clip from Shadowlands (1993), with Anthony Hopkins playing C.S. Lewis (starting at 1:36:50).
"Mad, all of them"..... "God knows., but does God care."