20
PARTISAN REVIEW
tel. I assume that all the guests occupied suites, as we did. Ours was a
suite on the ground floor and it consisted of a large bedroom, a bath,
and a good-sized sitting-room, furnished with sofa, easy chairs, tables,
and a giant sideboard equipped with an imposing array of glassware,
whiskey glasses, sherry glasses, wine glasses, brandy glasses, champagne
glasses. Although the sideboard could supply neither plates nor cutlery,
the hotel offered a limited range of food which was served at any hour
of the day or night. Yet there was no sign of hotel staff other than the
chambermaid who tidied for us each morning and then disappeared and
a towering male porter on twenty-four-hour duty, a great hulk of a
man who filled the cage-like office in the lobby near the hotel's front
door. At night, still in his dowdy uniform, his jacket unbuttoned at the
throat, he slept on the office floor. The door of the hotel was locked at
ten each evening; if we returned at a later hour than this, the porter
would rouse himself and ill-naturedly let us in. There were times when as
many as three Rolls Royces were lined up at the curb, none with a
chauffeur. Their owners had no doubt come in from the country for a
day of innocent errands in London but there were other enticing possi–
bilities to account for their presence.
Over the next months, my hope that we would become friends with
the Reeses was steadily realized. Or was it? We did indeed see Margie
and Goronwy more frequently than anyone else we knew in London or
Oxford but today, as I look back upon the relationship, the never-to-be–
answered question recurs to me, whether friendship is ever really possible
where people are not joined by a common past. Were we ever friends, I
wonder now, with any of the people who comprised our social circle in
England or did they simply represent for us a series of pleasant ports of
call on our journey away from home, while we represented for them no
more than a temporary change in their social landscape, new faces at the
old table? I come even to question whether one can ever go beyond
congeniality with people of a country other than one's own. Where
people haven't grown up together, the newcomer hasn't an assigned
place in the social scheme of things. The loyalty among friends which is
so much prized by the British has been built over the centuries, brick by
precious social brick.
It
is their most personal and p.articular expression
of class solidarity.
No doubt because of his Welsh background, Goronwy seems to
have been more aware than most of the stratifications of class in the
England of his time. He addresses this in the early pages of
A Chapter of
Accidents,
the memoir he published in 1972 in which he recalls his Oxford
experience and his loneliness and sense of apartness from the other
