R2E Excerpt #57: Three to Thurber

In which I laugh until I cry, and am questioned about it. 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. Next, on to Olde England, to check out where that Shakespeare guy lived. In this excerpt, I’m visiting the home of a former professor, in the south of England. This will remind you not to invite me over any time soon.

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I WAS IN AMBELEY, fifty-five miles south of London, with no responsibilities, and notebooks filled with ideas for short stories and novels and an entire lifetime to write them. That is, unless rent or starvation interceded. And Elinor, my American host in town and the wife of a beloved professor in college, offered their house for my writing studio. She and her son Charlie intended to head across the ocean for the holidays. But then she fell ill, and Charlie developed a sore throat, and my professor flew to England, instead. 

Writing studio: poof. 

It makes me nervous, now, to read in my journal about my days of indecision, trying to figure out which key unlocked my future. And which future, anyway?

Head to New York, and commence a process I thought of as writer-ization, in parallel to the Vietnamization that had recently concluded with a complete rout of South Vietnam?

Spend the holidays in Chamonix, invited by college friends who were heading there to frolic like the undergraduates they were (but I no longer was)?

Seek an alternate hideout where I might stare at my typewriter in peace?

 

Questions outnumbered answers, as they do at that time in life. Plus, my welcome was rapidly wearing out at Smoke Tree Cottage. When pater familias arrived to supervise the sickbeds, there was no room for me. I was being asked several times a day, by each family member, when I thought I might leave. 

Under pressure, I did leave immediately, but only to walk in the South Downs. Thinking dark thoughts, I took main street through town, past the Black Horse Tavern and a tiny grocery store that sold the very best butter I’ve ever eaten (contented cows producing high-butterfat content on the South Downs, no doubt), across the B1239, my main hitch-hiking route out of town—run, lad, run!—and then up into the hills. 

At a sharp turn in Mill Lane, a footpath broke left, intersecting the South Downs Way, a chalk path that arced above town. It wasn’t exactly the Pacific Crest Trail: South Downs Way tops out at Butser Hill, 890 feet above sea level. But my own head was in the clouds up there, and I pointed my feet in that direction whenever I needed mental space. 

Like, when my writing haven evaporated before I’d uncapped my fountain pen. 

My goal, up there, was to rise above my worries about the future, near and far. My too-abundant writing plans and ambitions. My social responsibilities in my professor’s backyard. My yearnings for Aurora.

Wait. Have I not mentioned her yet? 

Aurora was yet another lovely riffle in the study-abroad tide that washed ashore in Europe that fall. I had moved 3,500 miles east, but I wasn’t that far removed from the college cafeteria where I had eaten all of my meals for four years. And part of the ritual there was something called the “salad bar crush,” where you’d encounter the apple-dumpling of your eye over the sliced cucumbers and cottage cheese.

Aurora was a highlight of those encounters. We were naturals, aside from how I never actually had anything to say to her, nor she to me, particularly, when our auras intersected. 

But I was ever so aware of her presence in a study-abroad program at a college in the north of England. So I was hatching plots to visit, sending charming (I hoped) postcards and dreaming of the day when We Might Be Together. I’ll say it again: One of the most annoying things about being young is that any number of lives feels possible, but also impossible. The butterfly effect is at gale force, and you have no idea which of the 17,000 species is flapping you in the right direction. 

And what if you’re a moth? 

Those were the fateful breezes I felt on the South Downs Way. The footpath led through open fields dotted with cow patties, with a 400 year-old barn here and a long view there. The path also ran past the hillside home of my new friends Jane and Bax, a childless couple who may have fancied in me a surrogate son. After the initial round of introductions by Elinor, they followed up with a second and third invite, including a couple of stays in their London flat when I was bingeing on theater.

I mean, theatre. 

They also had a personal connection to James Thurber, the exact details of which I didn’t bother recording in my journal, even though Thurber was my first literary love. Once, when I was reading A Thurber Carnival in the high school library, I was provoked to a steady flow of laugh-tears down my cheeks. (“Ok, have it your way—you heard a seal bark.”) A librarian walked over to ask if I was OK; I hadn’t noticed I was crying.  

Thurber’s pals Jane and Bax were cultured adults and they took my mission as a writer seriously. Perhaps more seriously than I did. They looked for Great Things from me, when I was swiveling my head to discern the compass heading for Great Things. 

Possible: Every thing! 

Likeliest depressing outcome: No thing. 

Hence my journeys uphill to what I called my star-seat—a fence stile designed to prohibit livestock from passing, but which permitted recent college graduates to sit with their improbable dreams. Touching the moon. Earning a living. Kissing Aurora (or any other attractive female I met, knew, glimpsed, imagined, or spent two hours watching onstage.) 

This particular fence stile (also called a “kissing gate;” if only) was set amidst a tumbledown stone wall erected a thousand years prior to the moment my keister settled on it. The landowners on the South Downs felt a public duty to ramblers, so they installed ladder steps up to the fence top, with a platform at its apex. Good for walkers. Good for me at all times of the day and night. Bad for escape-minded cattle and sheep. 

I still revisit that stile, in memory, when I need to take the long view. Often, it would happen with my first born snuggled against me during book-reading time. We had a poetry collection written by one A. Nonny Mouse, filled with poems by no known author. 

One of them, I thought of as the star-seat poem:

They strolled down the lane together, 

The sky was studded with stars. 

They reached the gate in silence,

And he lifted down the bars. 

She neither smiled nor thanked him,

Because she knew not how. 

For he was just a farmer’s boy

And she a Jersey cow.

Once, as my son and I were rolling down the dairy aisle in a Chicago supermarket, we began talking about cows. Out of that tiny forming brain, that poem issued in its entirety. Like his grandpa, he too was a memorizer of beautiful words. 

Oh, to know in advance that the beauty will continue to flow, from the most surprising sources and directions. But I couldn’t have foreseen that, then, which is what keeps a quest going.

“Authors of light pieces have, nobody knows why, a genius for getting into minor difficulties: they walk into the wrong apartments, they drink furniture polish for stomach bitters, they drive their cars into the prize tulip beds of haughty neighbors, they playfully slap gangsters, mistaking them for old school friends.”
― James Thurber

Or just, you know…