A Walk to the Tavern

A selection from Something of the Springtime, a novel by John King Spiezio (August 2024, Passage Press).

The bells of Saint Mary the Virgin struck noon. Precisely, or nearly, a day before, I had received a card from Thomas Trimblay asking if I would be pleased, weather permitting, to meet him by the church’s garden for a walk to the Isis Tavern and an early Sunday roast dinner thereat. I had managed, over the past week, to recover from our last outing and graciously accepted his offer. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Though the hunger I had saved from the previous night kept me mostly eager and alert for Thomas’ arrival, shortly after the resounding of the bells had dissipated I found myself gazing distractedly at one of the empty niches which gird the Radcliffe Camera for what must have been at least three quarters of a minute.

As ever, he caught me off guard.

“Hullo, man!” I felt his hand on my shoulder. I smiled, and turned to see Thomas doing the same. He put his other hand in my right for a firm handshake. We began walking down St. Mary’s Passage. An almond tree had recently been planted in the western corner of the church, right next to the arched entrance which opens upon the north side of High Street. I noticed as we waited there for a break in the oncoming carriages that the first buds were now coming in.

“I have to tell you,” Thomas said as we came up on the other side of High Street and began walking down Oriel Street, “I’ve just caught up over tea with a most interesting man whom I had not seen in the longest time. We read our Greats together when the Queen was as young as we pretend she is now. Then, much like you, he thought he had exhausted Homer. But instead of due north, he headed east. Of course now the government requires his dutiful service in translating our God and our Law into good Classical Sanskrit. And he’s more than happy to live in Bombay for ten years at a time eating mangoes and humming his ragas.” 

“Is that so?” I was content, at the moment, to fall into what was beginning to be the pattern of our conversations. 

“Yes,” Thomas continued, “Jonathan Fox. I’ll have to introduce you soon. He’s staying at All Souls.” He paused as we finished crossing Oriel Square and stepped before the Canterbury Gate of Christchurch. He puffed eagerly at his pipe, and I noticed for the first time the odd smell of the smoke that came from its bowl. He must have noticed me staring, for he removed the pipe from his mouth, raised it slightly in the air, looked me straight in the eye and said “He brought me this.”

“I didn’t know they grew tobacco in India.”

“They don’t! Here, try it.”

I accepted the pipe and drew lightly from its tapered end. The smoke did not come on harsh, but I found myself coughing slightly as I handed it back to Thomas.

“You’ll get used to it,” he said.

We turned onto Merton Lane, then down the narrow stretch of the Grove behind that college’s chapel towards the kissing gates that lead onto Christ Church Meadow. Having passed through these behind me and dusted himself lightly on their other side, Thomas looked at my face again.

“Not that, I blame you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For, for turning to the Pole Star,” he winked at me. “Life is only so long and variety its spice. And I must say I have thoroughly enjoyed what I have read of the stuff. But for me, the good life begins and ends on the Mediterranean.”

“Well, I was never much of a classicist myself,” I said.

“No?” he replied with genuine surprise. “I thought you all started out as philologers.”

“No.” The pipe was back in my hand. I had gotten used to it by now. My gait, which was already relaxed, now slowed to a stop at the dusty northwest corner of the fenced-off Meadow proper, where cattle graze within, along the Broad Walk which stretches from Saint Aldate’s Street all the way to the Cherwell. As I collected my thoughts, I turned towards the Meadow, beheld a particularly large pair of horns, then began walking with Thomas down the suitably-named Poplar Walk: an avenue of trees which forms the Meadow’s western flank.

“No,” I repeated. “Of course I read some at school. But when I was sent off to Harvard I thought I would be a philosopher. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it.”

“Oh?” said Thomas. “If that’s so, you’re the first philosopher I’ve ever met who would be embarrassed of his vocation. Most every one I’ve ever met is just dying to dangle everything he has out in front of you.”

“Well that’s precisely it,” I said. “And precisely why I fell out with it.”

“Why’s that?” 

“Because it seems to me,” I found all of a sudden that I had become very excited, “it seems to me that it is almost an open secret that these questions the philosophers deal with do not have proper answers. Is the universe limited or infinite, is man’s will bound or free? It’s not as if the right answer hasn’t been hit on yet, or that half of the philosophers in the world are either too thick or too stubborn to admit that the other half is right. The questions do not lend themselves to definite or final or incontrovertible solutions in the form of falsifiable truths.”

We stepped aside momentarily to let a governess pass with a pram, then continued our walk along the edge of the meadow.

“And yet,” I began again.

“And yet!”

“And yet!” I smiled softly. “And yet one still believes one thing or another. And not only does one believe it, but one will devote one’s entire life to proving it to you. At times, indeed often, by means of force. And it is here that I find the truly interesting question: why is it, when one cannot be sure of any abstract idea, that one nevertheless finds oneself believing one abstract idea or another? And what are the fruits of these ideas?”

We had now nearly reached the southwest corner of the Meadow, some yards short of where it meets up with the Isis. Thomas stood aside and gestured me through a second pair of kissing gates which would lead us by a narrow alley up to St. Aldate’s Street and onto Folly Bridge. I thanked him and continued. 

“Have I made myself clear at all? These are things I have thought about in great depth before, and written about articulately. Yet all of a sudden I feel as if I were talking nonsense.”

“Oh no, I understand you perfectly.” Thomas puffed the pipe thoughtfully. “You had the good sense to recognize all of this philosophizing as chasing after the wind. So instead you’ve become interested in what sort of person finds himself believing what sort of thing, in seeing how he arrived at this position and, well, how all that, shall we say, works out for him.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s it exactly.” Halfway across the bridge we both stopped, having become simultaneously transfixed by the driving technique of a farmer who passed with a modest cart of produce. He whipped his horse over the small peak in the center of the bridge with such regularity, so matter-of-factly, as a matter of course, and almost automatically that both he and the horse seemed totally bored through the flagellation and lost in their separate reminiscences of sunnier days and much younger lovers.  

After they passed, Thomas and I continued. 

“Of course,” he said. “I understand you perfectly. I’ve often had similar concerns myself. But those came at a younger age and kept me safe from getting involved with philosophy in the first place.” We reached the end of the bridge, turned to the left, and crossed over that smaller bridge which passes behind Grandpont House and onto the southern towpath of the Isis.

“What’s interesting to me,” Thomas resumed. “is that, presumably, you now think you find these answers in the Sagas.”

“I do. Or I hope so. Or, it’s in some parts in all literature. Or, it’s not that I find answers per se, but I see them come to life and explored.”

“Yes, as you alluded to earlier.” Several boats passed us on the river, eight men and a howling coxswain to each, preparing for the rapidly approaching Torpids. Thomas took a moment to strike a new match and relight the tobacco in his pipe before he continued speaking. “So you’re a psychologist.”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“And your books are your patients.”

“No, the books are my schedule. The characters are my patients.”

“Have you developed a diagnosis?”

“I do see some recurring tendencies, instincts that crop up across different places and times.”

“Such as?”

“Such as,” we stopped on the bridge by the swimming pool and watched the boys jumping a moment. The pipe passed back and forth.

“Such as,” we resumed, “a tendency in the patient to confuse himself with the outside.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I mean to say that characters are often confused with who they are in themselves and who they are in the collective mind, the Anima Mundi. Let’s look at your Homer. There, it’s the obsession of his characters with kleos, with how they will be celebrated after death. For the heroes of the epic tradition live in a world that itself contains the epic tradition. This is not the sense in which our world contains it: to us, it is a fossil, or a sarcophagus brought over from Egypt. I do not mean to place myself amongst those who assess the value of Classical literature with the eye of an antique dealer, to break it for parts and pawn what one can off to the proper sciences of history. No. I mean only to say that we cannot join the epic tradition, nor merge with it. As much as we may, and do indeed, enjoy these great works of poetry, we cannot become their subject. The hero can, and in a way, must.

“For the hero has a bitter awareness of this potential, which is vexed thereby into a duty. His cardinal drive seems to be achieving this kleos and becoming the subject of Epic History, to the point that his concern for how he appears completely overrides any concern for how he is. Do you see what I’m driving at here? The hero does not have a personal sense of happiness or fulfillment or purpose or meaning, or what have you. Rather, to be happy, ‘blessed,’ to him is to be seen as blessed in the eyes of others. So he performs the deeds and behaves in the way that will make his audience see him as blessed, even if doing so makes him miserable in the here and now. 

“One may be inclined to assume that Homer is bewitched by the same hex as his Achaeans. Very well: then what are we to make of Odysseus’ trip to Hades? Why does Achilles say there that his entire life had been a waste, that he had rather have been an unknown slave than a glorious hero? At that point, Homer must appear to be putting himself on trial, and indeed finding himself guilty. And so the epic tradition becomes, by its own assessment, something sinister, or worse, even paltry and childish.”

“And we’re both too sentimental to settle for that!”

“Why yes!” I laughed. “Why yes we are! Though for a while it did lead me to the conclusion that one should make art as our Lord commanded us to pray: hidden up in our rooms. Now I assume that Homer must have had motives much more profound. So what is Homer’s view? It seems he sets up his own characters for failure. He sees their motives as flawed, perhaps wholly misguided, yet seemingly grants them the very recognition they craved. He must have a reason for doing so. What, then, is Homer’s opinion of the motives of his own characters? What does he make of these men and their actions?” 

“Yes, yes, but neither of us can ask the gentleman since he’s stopped returning our calls.”

“Neither of us can say. But we can say that, one way or the other, he must have thought it was important. Out of everything he could have said or recited, he chose the stories that he did and he portrays the characters in the way that he does because he’s trying to get something across. And not only does he believe as much, but his audience does; otherwise, they wouldn’t bother listening to him. And the princes of the cities and palaces he plays in must think it’s important as well. That’s why they have it written down, when paper is not easily come by. And not only did they find it important, the generation after them found it important, and every generation even down to our age. And in this time, which many fairly disdain as obsessed with the practical and the rigidly material, still it is considered important. Yes: so important that they will pay you, a man who would otherwise be by many miles the most competent and efficient coal mine manager or railway controller or government bureaucrat or mid-level financier in all of England’s Upper South, nearly almost as much as they would pay a coal mine manager to read these texts and wax poetical on them mostly to yourself but perhaps to a small group of friends who also do nothing but the same in between glasses of port and strolls down the pub. And because of this, this, glaring anomaly, I have to think there is something indeed in it, and something of great importance!”

“Aye.” Thomas stopped for a second to puff on his pipe and look at the river.  “But you see, I would do it even if they didn’t pay me.” He started walking again. “Nor do I do it because I consider it ‘important.’ I’m not even sure what that would mean. No. I do it because I like it. And I imagine these princes you are so baffled by, going from Albert to Peisistratus, acted from very similar impulses.”

He slowed, held the pipe close to his bent-over face, and began to frown at it. He produced a matchbox from his pocket, drew fire from it, drew smoke from the pipe with several sucks on its lips, and continued walking. He handed the pipe to me.

“Now Homer himself,” he resumed, “may be an entirely different matter. He was not a prince. In fact, many say he was a slave. Perhaps his poetry was merely a career, a craft like any other. What relish he may have taken in it is beyond us to say.”

At this point, we had reached the Isis Tavern. Fog had settled in, and I began to feel rain on my hat and my fingertips. Thomas looked up at the sky, then down at the pipe in his hands. He knocked it against the bottom of his up-turned foot and shook the ashes onto the ground. He wiped the dirt off the pipe with the back of his hand, replaced it on his inner jacket pocket, and looked me in the eye. A smile curled half of his face.  

“Come on.”

He opened the gate and we entered.

John King Spiezio at The Wagon Box Inn of Story, Wyoming

This was an excerpt from Something of the Springtime, a novel scheduled to be released in August by Passage Press. Here the protagonist, an academic specializing in Norse and Old English literature, takes a stroll with his friend, a Classicist, in Oxford, England. The author studied and strolled in the same area many years after the story takes place.