R2E Excerpt #56: I am a Bad Houseguest and Even Worse Novelist

OK if I spend a few nights at your house? I need someplace to hide my typewriter. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED BY PETER MOORE

When the mood strikes, I run excerpts 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. Then, on to Olde England, to check out where that Shakespeare guy was from. In this excerpt, I’m visiting the home of a former professor, in the south of England. This will teach you not to invite me over any time soon.

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IT WAS A BIT OF A THROWBACK to find myself at home with Elinor  in Amberley. The house was a recent build on the outskirts of the ancient village. It had a large garden with blooming bellflowers in the front yard, bearing the scentless blossoms that give the plant, and my former professor’s home, its name. Upon my arrival, Elinor was standing in the doorway with a welcoming grin, and took on the role of loco parentis to her husband’s former student. 

I have mentioned my polite, suburban upbringing. But I’m not sure I packed any Ps or Qs for the trip to Amberley. I was more like a wild animal in need of domestication. And lunch. I hate to think of the faux pas I committed while throwing myself on Elinor’s mercy and charity.

Memory fails for good reasons, too.

I went into Bellflower cottage, plopped down my bags, and assumed I was welcome. Length of visit: indeterminate. Probable level of concern on my host’s part: Defcon 4. Conversation immediately turned to our only topic in common: my recently-completed education. I wasn’t exactly looking back in anger at that point; college had given me a chance to shine at impractical things, like analyzing poetry (Yeats: meh) and organizing parties (I sponsored the Keg of the Week club—k.o.w.—and incited 100 people to attend a mimosa party, in their pajamas). But my glow was rapidly fading; I had mistaken sunset for sunrise, and had little idea about the chilly night ahead.

Elinor and I proceeded through all of the old names circulating around that small campus, and I managed to blunder into mentioning a professor, a colleague of her husband’s, who had been caught up in one of a faculty bed-swapping scandals straight out of a David Lodge novel. Her voice caught a hitch, as she processed how much I actually knew. Not enough to keep my mouth shut, evidently. 

Over lunch and tea, we also delved into Art and Literature, both of which I Capitalized in my Journal Entry that Day—aggrandizement through punctuation. It embarrasses me to think of what a pissant aesthete I was, filled up to my downy earlobes with rhyming couplets and memorized poetry and intimations of genius. 

Not my own genius, of course; but I was fine with a reflected glow. In Elinor I found a willing partner for art-patter, with her blooming garden, watercolor palette, and plein-air easel. 

Before my aesthetic droppings got too deep, her eleven-year old son burst through the door, home from boarding school for the weekend. Charlie was the polished apple of obsessive eyes. Elinor talked about him, and to him, as if he were the English incarnation of the dalai lama, touched by greatness at birth. I understand her idolatry now, with two even more perfect offspring of my own. But then I thought she was trying to will her hothouse weed into an orchid. Our first round of conversation, when he popped through the door, was about what an idiot one of his teachers was, for calling Charlie opinionated. Which he was.

Much angry discussion followed about the virtues of having an opinion; no acknowledgment that “having an opinion” was not the equivalent of “being opinionated.”

I kept my mouth shut; my guest skills extended that far. 

After  Elinor had s-mothered Charlie and me with tea and cakes and semi-conditional love, it was time for action. Squirrel, Frog, and Simon showed up at the door, and we were off to the Wild Brooks in search of German soldiers to kill. 

The presence of a long-abandoned bunker in the swamp, plus aggressive instruction in local history, convinced them that the Phony War—a two year period when a German invastion was anticipated, but never happened; it was also called the “Bore War”—might turn Real at any time, three decades after V-E Day. So four pre-adolescents and one wrong-footed young adult proceeded through a muddy-knees afternoon stalking Fritzie amidst the sweet ryegrass and tussock sedges of the Wild Brooks. 

You’re right: I was too old for this. But, just like these boys, I had spent my childhood re-living World War II, having been born just a decade after its conclusion. My dad told a story, at his own expense, of having had his closest call as a soldier in China, standing at a railroad crossing where a bomb had fallen—two weeks before. He was no warrior, but souvenirs of his service were still hanging around, with heavy uniform coats and an army-issue backpack we called “droopy drawers,” for its non-martial profile. And in my early TV-watching days, prime-time detonated regularly, with Combat!, Twelve O’Clock High, and Hogan’s Heroes. The Great Escape was a regular in reruns, as well, so we all held Steve McQueen up as our wiseacre hero. Too bad he didn’t quite make it over that barbed-wire fence at the end. 

All of this encouraged my friends and me, like Charlie and his recruits, to ramble through the woods with plastic machine guns, in bloody-minded pursuit of Krauts. 

I suspected that this racial hatred wasn’t quite right, even at the time. Our next-door neighbors, the Holzauers, were recent German emigres, spoke with heavy accents, and plied me with blueberries in their backyard when I took a break from pretending to kill their countrymen. 

It's a mystery how they happened to move in next door to us, in Connecticut. Fleeing what, exactly? They were one stiff-armed salute away from a visit by Simon Wiesenthal. 

In the Wild Brooks, I embraced the fantasy with Charlie, Squirrel, Frog, and Simon, and was immediately drafted into the troop. So it snapped my head a bit a couple of hours later, as I moved on to cocktail hour with Elinor’s adult friends Quentin, Dr. and Mrs. Stevenson, plus the lone Miss Ashley, whom I made no special note of in my journal, so she must not have been a temptation. But my big pivot from Jerries to sherries brought home my changeling status: I was a recent emigre from the children’s table, here in the land of adults. I was adjacent to both groups and belonged to neither. 

Among the grownups, conversation turned to my presence in Amberley, which wasn’t a logical first step in any career, except perhaps for an aspiring shepherd. Elinor had introduced me as a promising young writer, citing the 100,000 word-novel I’d recently expelled under her husband’s supervision. Elinor’s friends were polite enough not to ask what my backup career might be. (I know! I’ll edit magazines and ghost other people’s books for forty years!) But I was the only twenty-two year old I knew who had written a novel, so I considered myself “promising” for that alone. My classmate in college, the future Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, was applying to law school right about then, so my novel-writing precocity was safe for a few years, anyway.

Maybe I should have gone to law school in England, rather than freeloading at my professor’s house? Three years reading legal briefs might have driven me to Strout-levels of distinction, as well. 

“A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a ‘brief.’” – Franz Kafka, who trained as a lawyer, then went to work for an insurance company. No wonder he dreamed of turning into a cockroach.

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