FRANK KERMODE
15
iam 's" farm, asking the way of a very old man. He was a retired miner in his
mid-eighties, exactly as old as Lawrence would have been had he lived. He
showed us the farm , hidden behind a clump of trees; and he told us about
its occupants in the years since the Chambers family left it. They did not
allow visits. He talked about the mines and pointed out the ruins of an old
mine on a hilltop. In his day it had often caused floods in the later and
deeper shafts, and once-he described the occasion very vividly-he himself
had to swim for his life. Then he told us how, as a boy, he had come upon
a vast fossil fish in the coalface . He specified the geological perio.d . I watched
Lionel watching him, that somehow priestly face-<:apable of registering
ironies fit for an Enlightenment
abbe- now
totally receptive. That a collier,
speaking in the unaffected accent of Lawrence's generation and his country–
side, should tell his story with such natural ease, in sentences well-formed
beyond the highest aspirations of his grandchildren, was memorable. I re–
member not the words but the listening face. Later that day we drove into
Newstead Abbey, where hundreds were paying desultory homage to Byron .
Seeing the crowd we decided not to stop, and drove on past a sign forbid–
ding access, jeered and gestured at by the law-abiding visitors. But the road
ended, to our surprise, in a desolate colliery yard; and we had to turn round
and run the gauntlet again and to the same accompaniment , which the Tril–
lings received with absolute seigneurial calm.
Another image: Palermo, a nasty dark hotel, damp and chilly Christ–
mas weather in the streets. We were astonished to receive an invitation to a
Christmas Eve party at the house of a tourist guide.
It
turned out to be se–
dately but decidedly festive . We pooled all our remembered bits of Dante .
Then our host explained that it was the local custom to playa certain game,
the rules of which he then expounded .
It
all seemed impossibly difficult,
but we said we should have to learn as we played . The game turned out to
be bingo . The family was large and had beautiful manners; by an act of def–
erence that seemed the most natural thing in the world Lionel was installed
in the patriarchal chair at the head of the table . He sat drinking fizzy wine
and looking every inch the right man for the part and the occasion, courtly,
amused, generous. Diana meanwhile won game after game . The Sicilians
knew we were professors, but to them that meant merely that we taught in
school , and they spoke accordingly . Lionel found this pleasing and accurate,
and in the years that followed continued to exchange Christmas greetings
with these kind people whom none of us will ever see again. It was a good
evening, and everything he did showed how he valued civility.
One last trivial image of that untrivial face-again in Palermo, at the
Opera House , where they were performing Auber 's preposterous opera
La
