A Westphalia Guest Column

by Craig Chambers

Craig Chambers is who he is -- a family man, realtor, trial lawyer and a writer compulsively reimagining a fictional character named Darwin Van Wye, who is also a family man, realtor, trial lawyer and a writer. Craig's mother, Mary Jane Chambers. a rather famous writer in her own time, told her son when he was very young to write about what he knew. We first met Craig a few years ago at the Tattered Cover Book Store's weekly writer's group, maybe the oldest continually active writer's group in Denver. For this week's Thursday's Column, Craig writes about what he knows -- the early life of an aging family man, realtor, trial lawyer and writer named Darwin Van Wye when Darwin was just a young guy out bumming in the world, looking to find his way.

SIR STEPHEN

by

Craig Chambers

When I lived in London, I had a friend who knew most of the great writers and artists of the 20^th Century. An acquaintance, anyway. Sir Stephen. A cultural icon in his time.

He was an old man, when I knew him. He was tall and distinguished. He wrote books and gave lectures at a college. The magazines ran articles about him. When he went to an event, it made the papers. He lived in a stone house in St John’s Wood. This was in 1980.

We met by accident at an art gallery. I started coming by his house at tea-time every month or so. I had dropped out of college. I was living in London, writing music reviews for bands to avoid growing up and getting a real job. I lived in a bedsitter apartment in a transient part of town.

I’m not sure why Sir Stephen spent time with me. I guess maybe I made him feel young. I dressed like a homeless person. I lived off beer and fish & chips and fruit that had gone off at the market. I spent my spare change on the meter-boxes to keep the heaters on in my apartment. I hung out with the English Beat poets who were mostly on the dole. Everyone I knew was poor except Sir Stephen.

He told the most interesting stories. He drank with Dylan Thomas because, who didn’t? Socialized with T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury. He hung with Hemingway in Paris and in Spain during The Spanish Civil War. He went to pre-WWII Germany with Auden and Isherwood. He had black and white photos of Sally Bowles to give away at book signings.

I’d look forward to these appointments. I took the bus and the tube and it took me half the day to get there. He’d serve me tea, and I’d scarf down whatever food he tried to feed me. We’d have discussions about poetry and art in which I was interested but actually knew very little. His house was beautiful and charming. Works by Picasso and Matisse graced his walls. “Henri gave me that one,” he’d say. “Pablo gave me those two.” 

There was no Google or internet back then. I didn’t know who he knew, what he did or what a fascinating life he led. All I knew is that he was nice to me and he fed me from time to time.

One day, I was at his house, I helped him take the paintings down and put them in storage. His friend Rodney was coming over for dinner. He was taking down the masterpieces and putting up his friend’s paintings just to flatter him.

Another time I heard he was rushed to the hospital, and I took the tube across town to visit him. The Sculptor Henry Moore was at his bedside. “Sir Henry, this is Darwyn Van Wye, a young American writer.”

Henry Moore, a very wrinkled even older man, nodded at me and smiled. He reached his hand across the foot of Sir Stephen’s hospital bed and shook my hand.

“Pleased to meet you.” He had a thick Yorkshire accent.

This was my one touch of fame. Moore’s big bronze sculptures were displayed on the grounds of the Tate.

Sir Stephen is long gone now, and long forgotten. Though I would never fit in, he made me feel part of the world if only for a while.