Read Online Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sara Wheeler
Ads: Link
honey-colored Early Tudor Old Quad and the college gatehouse on Radcliffe Square. Denys’s second-floor room overlooked the spire of St. Mary’s, the university church, and, beyond the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the dreaming Hawksmoor towers of All Souls. As the staircase was adjacent to the kitchens, in summer odors of cabbage and ham offered proleptic intimations of luncheon.
Denys started off reading law, but in his second year he switched to modern history, reckoning that there was no point in submitting to the tedium of the law reports since he was never going to practice. Nobody seemed to mind what he did. The college’s attitude toward work was reflected in the fact that undergraduates weren’t permitted to enter the library until 1897, the same year that heat and light made an appearance. A contemporary of Denys’s has written of “the roomy, uncrowded years” when an Oxford college was like “a small Utopia”; but it has never been crowded at Brasenose. The college was less a bastion of scholarship than a sporting club in which young men in gray flannels and Harris green coats could loaf at leisure, and most rules could be broken as long as one knew whom to pay. The supremacy of sport was unchallenged, and within weeks of arrival Denys got his first half-blue, traveling up to the Royal Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake to compete against Cambridge. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, he played golf nearly every day. The counterbalancing demands of strength and intricacy appealed to his imagination, and so did the way the links glowed greenly as his whole body worked in anatomical harmony. He grew addicted to the grandeur that blossoms out of a well-lofted slice, the dizzy instants of whiz, hover, and fall, the clipped satisfaction of a bunker chip slashed in an arc of sand. Open space compelled him, and golf is a sport welded to landscape. At St. David’s, his home course, he was in touch with the altered perspectives of the changing seasons. In spring, he could tell where the plovers’ eggs nestled in the gorse. He knew the deepening rough of June, the patchy greens and thunderstorms of August, the wet October smell of foliage as the links ripened and the lower angle of the sun brought the contours of the fairway into fuller relief. Golf satisfied his restlessness in many ways, from the quiet concentration required to solve a problem alone in the long grass to the shared slow drama of the foursome and the camaraderie at the nineteenth. It was a sport that exploited sharp eyes and finely tuned coordination, the same gifts that later enabled Denys to save clients’ lives on safari, and to kill Germans.
Denys was to play twice more in the Varsity match, and in his final year captained his team. At the Easter meeting of 1909, he also won the President’s Cup at St. David’s. (It was presented to him by the president—his father.) But despite his championship potential, golf, like everything else in his life, was never more than a game to Denys, and his attitude reflected his mysterious antipathy toward achievement. During one university match, a don among the spectators watched him concede a yard putt to his opponent. “Remember,” snorted the don, “you are playing not for yourself but for your university.” “Remember,” flashed the reply, “that you are playing for neither.” Denys was the apotheosis of the amateur. He was competitive only to a point, and too much winning would have been vulgar. At Oxford, he gave up cricket and soccer altogether. “He did not appear to take games seriously,” Alan Parsons recalled. Many years later, Karen Blixen based the character Lincoln Forsner in her short story “The Dreamers” on Denys. “I had myself been fairly keen for competition as a boy,” says Forsner as the dhow in which he is sailing tacks from Lamu to Zanzibar under a monsoon moon. “But even while I had been still at school had lost my sense of it, and…unless a thing was
Denys started off reading law, but in his second year he switched to modern history, reckoning that there was no point in submitting to the tedium of the law reports since he was never going to practice. Nobody seemed to mind what he did. The college’s attitude toward work was reflected in the fact that undergraduates weren’t permitted to enter the library until 1897, the same year that heat and light made an appearance. A contemporary of Denys’s has written of “the roomy, uncrowded years” when an Oxford college was like “a small Utopia”; but it has never been crowded at Brasenose. The college was less a bastion of scholarship than a sporting club in which young men in gray flannels and Harris green coats could loaf at leisure, and most rules could be broken as long as one knew whom to pay. The supremacy of sport was unchallenged, and within weeks of arrival Denys got his first half-blue, traveling up to the Royal Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake to compete against Cambridge. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, he played golf nearly every day. The counterbalancing demands of strength and intricacy appealed to his imagination, and so did the way the links glowed greenly as his whole body worked in anatomical harmony. He grew addicted to the grandeur that blossoms out of a well-lofted slice, the dizzy instants of whiz, hover, and fall, the clipped satisfaction of a bunker chip slashed in an arc of sand. Open space compelled him, and golf is a sport welded to landscape. At St. David’s, his home course, he was in touch with the altered perspectives of the changing seasons. In spring, he could tell where the plovers’ eggs nestled in the gorse. He knew the deepening rough of June, the patchy greens and thunderstorms of August, the wet October smell of foliage as the links ripened and the lower angle of the sun brought the contours of the fairway into fuller relief. Golf satisfied his restlessness in many ways, from the quiet concentration required to solve a problem alone in the long grass to the shared slow drama of the foursome and the camaraderie at the nineteenth. It was a sport that exploited sharp eyes and finely tuned coordination, the same gifts that later enabled Denys to save clients’ lives on safari, and to kill Germans.
Denys was to play twice more in the Varsity match, and in his final year captained his team. At the Easter meeting of 1909, he also won the President’s Cup at St. David’s. (It was presented to him by the president—his father.) But despite his championship potential, golf, like everything else in his life, was never more than a game to Denys, and his attitude reflected his mysterious antipathy toward achievement. During one university match, a don among the spectators watched him concede a yard putt to his opponent. “Remember,” snorted the don, “you are playing not for yourself but for your university.” “Remember,” flashed the reply, “that you are playing for neither.” Denys was the apotheosis of the amateur. He was competitive only to a point, and too much winning would have been vulgar. At Oxford, he gave up cricket and soccer altogether. “He did not appear to take games seriously,” Alan Parsons recalled. Many years later, Karen Blixen based the character Lincoln Forsner in her short story “The Dreamers” on Denys. “I had myself been fairly keen for competition as a boy,” says Forsner as the dhow in which he is sailing tacks from Lamu to Zanzibar under a monsoon moon. “But even while I had been still at school had lost my sense of it, and…unless a thing was
Similar Books
