R2E Excerpt #55: "And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils..."

And other nauseating stuff William Wordsworth vomited up....WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

When the mood strikes, I run excerpts here on substack from A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG NINCOMPOOP, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. If you become a paid subscriber, you can access the complete archive here!) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere.

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AFTER MY JOURNEY DOWN TO AMBERLEY FROM LONDON, I had to hoof it a mile into town, and with each footstep I became more enamored of this ancient little village. It was bordered by a row of low coastal mountains called the South Downs, and its oldest cottages coalesced around Amberley Castle, occupying land deeded to Bishop Wilfred by Caedwalla, King of Wessex, in the year 683 AD. 

Wilfred was only King of Wessex for three years, but they were productive ones, as he was able to travel to the Isle of Wight, kill the heathens, and install Christianity (minus the Fifth Commandment, apparently) as the ruling sect. Amberley Castle is now an upscale hotel and restaurant, which proves George Santayana’s point: Those who forget history are doomed to afternoon tea in the garden, for £31.50. (For champagne service, it’s £53.)

During the time of my visit, Amberley Castle was transitioning from private residence to public ruin, which is about as romantic as it can be: The earth reclaiming its own, with wild roses and damp rot. Plenty of that in the surrounding Wild Brooks, which was indeed wild, but also dotted about with WWII-era concrete bunkers meant to keep invading Germans from overrunning England. These were remnants of the Phony War, also known as the “sitzkrieg” and the “Bore War,” an eight-month period spanning 1939 and 1940, when the Germans pillaged elsewhere. If only more wars were the bore, sitz, and phony variety! Less bloodshed, more stifled yawns. But, as Santayana also famously said: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”

The British built these bunkers in reaction to Hitler’s not-at-all-boring invasion of Poland, during which the Germans invaded from the north, south, and west. The Russians came from the east, because well, someone had to. A month later Poland was divided up and passed around to neighboring countries, sending a tremor through England. 

During my stay in Amberley, I would meet graying artifacts who, as children, experienced the transformation of the countryside from peaceful to paranoiac. Street signs were yanked down, to confuse invading Jerries, and concrete reinforcements were dropped in the middle of swamplands, in case there was a rush to claim strategic low points. 

But nothing happened there, aside from the passage of time and the persistence of concrete.

The South Downs, on high, were clean of martial artifacts. The major conflict up there was between foxes and farmers, with chickens as the collateral damage. The South Downs Way strings the low hills together with a sodden path, and cow-confounding technology keeps the livestock in its place. On a recent tourism video, the only soundscape is the squishing of the walker’s shoes. The man’s dog seemed happy, but I suspect he was part fish.

At one point seven minutes in, the video artist throws up a random subtitle: The View From Amberley. For me, that view included a random 22-year old who was trying to connect random footsteps into a satisfying narrative. All prologue, no denouement. 

AT FIRST, I WAS ON THE FULL MEAL-PLAN at Smoke Tree Cottage, my professor’s home-away-from-campus. His wife made up the bed in her son’s room; Charlie was off at a nearby “public” school in Pulborough—the kind of Lord-of-the-Flies institution where George Orwell and Roald Dahl were bullied into greatness. 

Elinor was an earth-mother, with an element of earth-smother in there as well. She was in place to manage her son Charlie, while her husband Charles was otherwise engaged with students like me. But also, more promisingly, students like Elizabeth Strout, who would actually write the novels she planned, and win a Pulitzer Prize for it. Soon after The Committee elevated Olive Kitteridge, in 2009, I got a letter from my former professor, asking if I’d heard the news. As if I could have avoided that loud ratification of her life choices, and the mockery of mine? 

I’m with Iago: Jealousy is the green-eyed monster that doth mock the novels Liz Strout published. That is, before I’d even read them. Now I know better. They’re great. Dammit!

As undergraduates, Liz and I had been classmates in Survey of English Literature, Part 2, which began with the Romantics and ended with Ted Hughes. So I was in a Romantic rapture when my professor read William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” aloud to the class. 

Here’s how the poem finishes up:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.*

Professor Charles had spent years in England, chasing Arnold Bennett’s ghost, so even though he was born in New Jersey, his speaking voice carried a curl of British wood-smoke. (Also Wordsworth: “Wreaths of smoke/Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! ...By his fire, the hermit sits alone.”) Anything my professor read aloud—Tintern Abbey, Mein Kampf, the BritRail schedule—would have touched my heart: Mine was sleeve-mounted, for easy access. 

After my professor finished that scrap of Wordsworth, in class, there was a silence, which he broke: “What do you make of that?”

Further silence. I could smell those daffodils!

Liz Strout, still thirty-three years away from her Pulitzer, spoke up: “It’s nauseating.” 

Charles raised his eyebrows and smiled: “It is nauseating, isn’t it?”

I wouldn’t have questioned Wordsworth’s daffodils any more than I would have challenged my father’s accounting skills. If you grow up with responsible parents, you respect authority (and daffodils) way too much. 

*Nauseating or not, William stole most of this daffodil stuff from his sister Dorothy.

“When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. We fancied that the sea had floated the seeds ashore, and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness; and the rest tossed and reeled and danced, and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind, that blew upon them over the lake; they looked so gay, ever glancing, ever changing.” —Dorothy Wordsworth, from her Grasmere Journals, in 1802. So what does Liz Strout know, anyway?

Is there too much motion going on at the bottom of this post? Rip me a new one for that, below!