During the fall and winter of 1974-75, I was studying at University College London, where the poet Stephen Spender was serving as a professor of English. I was not ambitious enough to seek out the famous poet, novelist, and essayist whose acquaintances included Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward, Cecil Day-Lewis, David Jones, William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Raymond Chandler, Dylan Thomas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Colin Wilson, Aleister Crowley, F.T. Prince and T.S. Eliot, as well as members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf — and our own Donald Hall.
Instead, I stuck with Brenda Silver, the Dartmouth professor who led our exchange to study English literature in London, and my UCL tutor, Dan Jacobson, the writer whose birth and years spent in Johannesburg, South Africa, provided the inspiration for such works as The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, “two dramatic stories of inter-racial betrayal set on the parched South African veld.”
My Yorkshire friend, Jonne Oliver, and I would spend hours talking about writing and the literary life as we made a weekend trip to England’s Lake District, a Christmas break trip to Paris, and countless nights at the Old Eagle Pub in Camden Town.
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