The Pub Stays Open Late

 

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub looks the way you’d want a seventeenth century pub in London to.  It sits off an alleyway—Wine Office Court–near Fleet Street, a small doorway leading into a warren of kitty-korner rooms illuminated by soft light and, near the bar, a fireplace.  The tables and benches are wood, rough and dark; colored glass catches the spare light, and brass fixtures gleam faintly.                                     

            The vaulted cellars are rumored to be the remains of a thirteenth century Carmelite monastery, and the Horn Tavern was erected on this spot in 1538, only to burn down in the Great Fire of 1666; a sign outside the doorway declares that the present building was built in 1667.

            Voltaire visited here, as did Dickens, Thackeray, and Twain.  But the pub’s proudest claim is that, situated near Samuel Johnson’s home, the eighteenth century writer wined and dined here with John Boswell and a coterie of writers.  The image is of a group of intellects, mingling drafts of prose and ale, parsing passages by candlelight, progressively inebriated, shouting and cursing.  They called themselves the Cheshire Cheese Club.

            Or so I was told when I began a literary club in high school.  We were looking for a name, and one of the members recited that story.  We liked it and so called ourselves the Cheshyre Cheese Club, producing a literary collection at the end of my junior year, just weeks before my family left Sacramento and moved to San Jose.

            But I remembered the name and the story, so when I traveled to England in 1985, I tracked the club down.   For one of the few times in my travels, I wasn’t disappointed.  All beamed ceilings, small rooms, tight benches, and amber glow; I went back, bringing friends, sitting some ten feet from the chair Johnson sat in.

            Perhaps.  It may all be apocryphal, but writing frequently chooses imagination over reality, knowing that sometimes the former clarifies the latter.  Even when we write about ourselves or the world we know, it is not our memories or our visions we reproduce, but the imagination that calls them up.

            This, then, is a site for my students and their work, products themselves of occasional late night sessions and a lot of discussion with the writers and their peers.  What they create enlightens me and brings the world I know into a clearer focus, but it also moves me, touching nerves from the discomfiting to the disarming to the ennobling.

            I am proud of what they have done and pleased to have shared moments of creation and insight with them.  If they never write again, I hope they know these pieces testify to their talent.  But some, I know already, have never stopped writing, pursuing careers with words and research.  If I live long enough, perhaps another Johnson will emerge from their midst.

-Jeff House