At the moment these academic difficulties are far from Fred’s mind, which is fixed, as it has been intermittently for the past two months, on the collapse of his marriage. Before that, he had assumed that his wife Ruth, known to him as Roo, would be coming abroad with him. They had prepared for the trip together, read books, studied maps, consulted all their friends-Roo even more excited by their plans than he was.

But a domestic storm had blown up: thunder, lightning, and a torrential downpour of tears. Just before Christmas Fred and Roo parted in a cloudy, electrically charged atmosphere for what was announced to their friends and relatives as a “trial separation.” Privately Fred suspects that the trial is already over, the verdict Guilty, and the sentence on their marriage Death.

No good thinking about it, going over the bad memories of a bad time. Roo is not here and she won’t ever be here. She hasn’t answered either of his brief but carefully composed, neutrally friendly letters, and she probably isn’t going to. Fred is alone for five months in a London empty of joy and meaning, where a cold drizzly rain seems to fall perpetually both within and without. He is more steadily miserable than he has ever been in his life.

He had come here prepared, even without Roo, to have an intense, vivid experience of the city of John Gay-and of Johnson, Fielding, Hogarth, and many more. Dutifully and mechanically, he has gone alone on foot to the places he and she had planned to visit together: St. Paul’s, London Bridge, Dr. Johnson’s house, and the rest. But everything he saw looked false and empty: façades of cardboard brick and stone, hollow, without meaning. Physically he is in London, but emotionally he remains in Corinth, in a part of his life that’s ceased to exist. He is living in the historic past, as he had planned and hoped to do-but not in eighteenth-century London. Instead he inhabits a more recent, private, and dismal era of his own history.