Orientalisms South Opposed to East and North

For the London adolescent brooding on the smoggy cityscapes of Bayswater, described in the previous chapter, Joseph Conrad's writings had also suggested horizons of exotic possibilities beyond the railings of Hyde Park. His Rugby school-friend Joseph McCleod remembers the impact of Conrad upon him:

Conrad meant to him youth for example. [...] Conrad's youth made an enormous impression on him, this seeing the Orient for the first time and he always wanted to go to the East, for the sake I think, of being one up on Conrad, realising Conrad in himself. ¹

However, Stokes did not travel East until after graduating from Oxford University in 1923. The effort to outperform Philip resulted in a scholarship; aged only seventeen he went up to Magdalen College to read history, but soon changed to the then new degree of 'Modern Greats' which combined philosophy, politics, and economics. It might be imagined that Oxford would have stimulated Stokes's incipient architectural sensibilities as one of the few places in England with an urban intensity approaching that of Italy. Yet his reactions to the city show similar misgivings to those towards Hyde Park; as here in the first two stanzas of a poem sent back to the Rugbeian that may have been written at the time he went up for the exam for the history scholarship: Oxford is so massive, So dismally imposing. The giant grey blocks of clerical stone Frown down and breathe tradition. I looked for beauty up and down And only saw some bicycles. St. Mary's spire is massive, immense, So dismally imposing, Short, stumpy, lacking sympathy; And beauty? Only in the beggar's eyes Standing in the dismal rain. ² 36Oxford in the 1920s was a grey place — not the bright restored city of today. The sooty limestone, originally quarried from poor beds, had weathered badly and hung from the facades in leprous flakes. Buildings like St Mary's church, with its 'stumpy' spire, seemed to the aspiring undergraduate little different from the 'stern yet impotent' father figure of the Albert Memorial. This poem is strikingly congruent with the third in a sequence called 'In Adolescence' written late in life, which provides an explicit psychoanalytic reading of the crushing authority symbols of the juvenilia: A GREAT TOWER pointing sky Over the young and wrong inside The unforgiving lofty watch Of beauty, stone, cold grey An agony ol time. These fathers stable as they stretch Disapprove the one at home Make adolescent blood misgive To doubt his name To fuse as one the centuries of alarm. ³ Inside Out's only reference to Oxford also expresses disappointment: 'What does one expect of university towns? Only puffed clouds rolling over the scenes of former sophistry, over night alarms in crooked streets.' ⁴ He continues to yearn for an environment that can counter these commanding masculine shapes. In Inside Out he remembers the pleasure he felt, aged seven, of declining the firm vowels of the Latin mensa: a table. The declension prepared him for the experience of Italy by unfolding the image of

a simple table prepared for an alfresco meal, the family mid-day meal under a fig tree, with a fiasco of wine on the table, olives, a cheese and bread. With one word I possessed in embryo the Virgilian scene; a robust and gracious mother earth'. ⁵

On New Year's Eve 1921, on vacation from Oxford to winter with his parents at Rapallo on the Italian Riviera, he entered Italy for the first time to rediscover this 'Virgilian scene' of the dimly remembered table: a good mother-earth that embraced past, present, landscape, and architecture in bright immediacy:

As the train came out of the Mont Cenis tunnel, the sun shone, the sky was a deep, deep, bold blue. I had half-forgotten about my table for more than ten years. At once I saw it everywhere, on either side of the train, purple earth, terraces of vine and olive, bright rectangular houses free of atmosphere, of the passage of time, of impediment, of all the qualities which steep and massive roofs connote in the north. The hills belonged to man in this his moment. The two thousand years of Virgilian past that carved and habituated the hillsides, did not oppress: they were gathered in the present aspect. ⁶

Upon leaving Oxford his travels to India and the East would give him a larger perspective with which to return to Italy and to interpret this 'Rapallo aesthetic of life', primarily through the analysis of quattrocento architecture and art. Thus his friend Lawrence Gowing believed that 'getting to know what was really 37the epitome of the un-European, enabled him to isolate, when he went to Italy afterwards, certain things that were very specific to Europe, very particularly the property of the Mediterranean'. ⁷