A Private Journey Comes Full Circle

To his close friend John Schwent, Bradley had written in 1960: "When the next ten years are up, then is the time to evaluate your accomplishments. Remember one thing: never let down, never give up and most of all work on your faith in God." Halfway through that allotted decade, Bradley changed his mind, at least for a time. He let down. And his religion had become a source of more puzzlement than faith.

"I'm just a boy with my eyes wide open, absorbing all sorts of new things," Bradley told one visitor that fall, who made notes of the conversation.

On the day of his arrival, he walked well past sundown with Michael E. Smith, a fellow Princeton Rhodes scholar who roomed across the hall from him in Stairway Eighteen of the brown brick New Building. Smith recalled, "It was discovery time. Bill was discovering Oxford and himself. It was the first day of his new life."

What Smith observed in the coming months was "a lot of adolescent behavior that seemed odd. He was playing a lot, trying things out, goofing around."

Bradley got in food fights in Worcester's vaulted dining room, heaving buttered rolls at Britons garbed for supper in the required black ties and academic gowns. He played contact sports with abandon, for the first time since breaking a leg in football at age 9. He bought a used Volkswagen and raced it, in blatant affront to local ordinance, along the quiet roads outside town. He and Smith squeezed onto a Vespa motorbike, large men both, ridiculous figures with knees bent to their chests. Gown flapping behind him, Bradley clowned and waved to passersby.

One night in Greece, vacationing between terms, Bradley drank a quantity of ouzo and stood up in a night club, attempting to speak phrase-book Greek. In a booming voice, switching to English, he introduced "the famous jazz pianist, Michael Smith," to great applause. "What I did was to play 'Blue Moon,' " Smith said. "It was pretty good. It was, however, my only song."

Bradley did not only revel in escaping the limelight. He studied it. He discussed with Oxford dons, as former Worcester dean of men Harry Pitt recalls, the distorting effects of young celebrity. He assigned himself Daniel J. Boorstin's book "The Image," in which Boorstin described the transforming effects of high-speed printing, photography, radio and motion pictures. Combined, Boorstin wrote, they gave rise to "the means of fabricating well-knownness" and to the celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness." Boorstin noted: "Of course we do not like to believe that our admiration is focused on a largely synthetic product."

"In that first year at Oxford," Bradley said, "I remember reading Boorstin's book, and that spoke directly to what I was trying to puzzle through in my life, which was one of the reasons I chose to go to Oxford as opposed to playing professional basketball: to get out of the environment of well-knownness and to puzzle through what it meant. How do you survive in such an environment and be true to yourself?"

Bradley packed a six-foot shelf of novels and read more of them than the philosophy, politics and economics he had signed up for, plunging into new worlds of imagination. (Eventually, he sat for exams and got "third-class honors" in his own subjects, a barely passing degree.) He read Albert Camus' "The Fall," then traveled to Amsterdam to examine its setting; Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," then Italy. Joseph Conrad, with his themes of darkness beneath civilization's veneer, made an impression on Bradley he talked about for years.

One of Bradley's favorite activities at Oxford was a game Smith called "Let's pretend." He would strike up conversations with strangers, affecting to be someone he was not or to hold opinions that were not his own.

"In my imagination, it's like this," Smith said. "He can't have been confident that his understanding of the world and of others wasn't false, because he knew the world's understanding of him was false. If somebody says to you as a high school senior, 'You're going to be president'--to be told crap like that, over and over, it seems to me it's bound to sap your confidence . . . because you know the world is not responding to you. It's responding to some part of itself that is projected upon you." Bradley had to "touch the world, throw bread at it, find out how it reacts."

Bradley did not quite abandon his past. "It's possible to live life, close doors, but leave them ajar this much, so you've closed the door but you haven't locked it," Bradley said in an interview.