What have these three in common? Each was too eccentric to be typical of their nations, but their effect on typical people showed how their nation worked. Each was guided by something sensible people reject. Socrates, the most rational and humane of them, had his demon. The painter Filippo Lippi was inspired by Catholic beliefs that sensible Catholics today reject as superstitions. Henry James Prince, a devout, self-lacerating Anglican, strove hard to serve such an impossibly stern idea of God that at last he weakened by believing he and God were identical. The Socratic demon generated European moral philosophy, Filippo Lippi’s Catholicism inspired beautiful paintings, Prince’s faith achieved only a large rest home for a privileged few. Prince will be the least creative of my heroes being nearest today, when local and national governments openly promote private company profits instead of public welfare.
Several weeks ago Mastermind returned my Athenian chapters with comments on my translation of names. Expert, he said, was a good modern equivalent of Sophist, The Darling was suitable for Alcibiades, Olympian and Onionhead for Pericles, except that Athenians likened their prime minister’s head to a sea-onion, a marine growth. He regretted that Heavenly Reason was such a lengthy translation of Nous, Anaxagoras’ nickname, yet could suggest nothing better. And where had I got The Golden Mean for Theramines and High Anxiety for Nicias? I said I had invented these names to indicate their characters. He grunted then told me that buckles for footwear were a medieval invention – Roman helmet straps had them, but sandals were tied with thongs for centuries after Christ. Having got that detail wrong annoys me more than my trouble with Aristophanes’ Clouds. Mastermind had no helpful suggestions about The Clouds.
Between sleep and waking this morning imagined my naked body spread out flat like a landscape beneath me with many wee black circular openings like rabbit holes. I descended and entered one in my chest, then found myself talking to Lorenzo de Medici about the love that led God to make the universe. That dream is a reminder that when writers cannot write something, they should write something else. In the Library I found a Yale Publication on Filippo Lippi’s art with good big colour reproductions. It shows two frescos in which Filippo has a self-portrait. He is not the lean, sharp fellow I imagined but dumpy, with swarthy face and morose expression, more like a plumber or butcher (which his father was) than a womanising Bohemian. This reassures me. Apart from Whistler and poor dear Oscar, only amateur artists play at being narcissistic butterflies. Good artists, until struck down by disease or accident, are hard workers with great staying power.
One Sunday a fortnight ago I was searching Encyclopaedia Britannica for clues to how the Medici funded Brother Filipo’s monastery when the doorbell rang. In walked Yvonne, as suddenly as she walked out in 1999. She did not say how long she will stay this time, or why. Suspect she is estranged from a partner, as steady fuckers are called nowadays, and will stay until reconciled or finds another. Why do none of the women in my life tell me about themselves? (Memo: try to find out). Though she now refuses me full sexual intercourse it is good being back in bed with a woman again, however indifferent or rude to me they are out of bed. When asleep they sometimes snuggle up close and make me feel part of the universe again. Niki used to do that, clinging to my back like a sensual wee papoose or koala bear clinging to its parent. I would stay awake enjoying that for an hour or longer.
Alas, Yvonne now lies in bed as far from me as she can. Distressing. She was the first I ever had sex with easily, pleasantly, without worry. I can only feel her body now by moving carefully against it when she is sound asleep. It is better than no contact at all. Had I been fool enough to marry her she would now certainly be insisting on a separate bed, probably a separate bedroom. But her presence now, though not erotically fulfilling, does me good. When womanless I often lie abed glooming to myself until noon. Now, like when Nell and Nan were alive, I rise promptly at 7 a.m., bath, shave, dress, make breakfast and eat it in kitchen after serving Yvonne hers on a tray in bed. Then four hours of writing in living room, then off to pub lunch at the Rubaiyat or Aragon, then four more hours of research in university library, then homeward by way of Tennants. There I usually discuss my book with Mastermind. (Memo: he says Lisa Jardine’s Worldly Goods, Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, d’Eramo’s The Pig and the Skyscraper show concordance of art, architecture and successful capitalism.) Then home. Yvonne rings the doorbell some time before midnight, I make supper and to bed we go.
She has never asked for her own key, saying that being in the house alone without me gives her the creeps, perhaps the natural reaction to Victorian décor of someone who, a century ago, could only have been a scullion here.
Before closing time last night I was moving through the crowd toward the door when a man embraced me saying, “My old pal! Do ye still love me pal?”
“I don’t know you,” I said, detaching myself. I thought he was drunk. Outside the pub he started walking beside me saying, “You don’t know me, pal, but I know you. Because of my daughter.”
I saw that he wasn’t drunk but had pretended to be as a way of introducing himself. I asked if she had been to Molendinar Primary. “What you talking about? You know who I mean, pal!,” and he tried to nudge me. I asked who he was talking about.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know!” he said, exasperated. I stood still and faced him. We were at the corner of Ruthven Street. The pavement was busy with people who knew me but even without them he would not have seemed physically threatening, being only half a head taller than me with a haggard face, broken nose, and so thin that, from armpits of denim jacket to turned-up cuffs of grubby jeans, his sides were perfectly straight, without bulges indicating where waist, hips, knees were.
“Are you Yvonne’s father?” I asked, determined not to be intimidated. He asked me who the fuck Yvonne was. I said, “Are you Niki’s dad?” He shook his head. I said, “If you are the father of Is, she came to my house with friends over two years ago and ate my biscuits and scones and left without saying a word to me.”
He said, “Who the fuck is Is?”
I told him our conversation was pointless since neither of us knew who the other was talking about. I strode away and he followed me bleating, “Come on, pal! Come on! You know I’m talking about Zoe.”
“I don’t know a Zoe.”
“You must, pal! She keeps talking about you – says you’re the most cultured man she ever met. Zoe’s mad keen on culture – wanted to be a muralist when she was wee. Even now she keeps hanging around fuckin musicians with rings in their ears and noses.”
I faced him again and said I had never met a Zoe in my life and I am not a liar, so either she was or he was. He protested that Zoe was the straightest, honestest girl in the world – she never told fibs. He said, “I’m honest too, though I don’t pretend to be a saint. I’ve done drugs, pal, and been done for drugs, been in and out of jail ever since I left school. I’m telling you straight, I’ve never did an honest day’s work in my life – that shows you how honest I am.”
I asked if he was trying to frighten me. He shouted “Not at all, pal! I can see you’re no feart. I’m no feart either. I don’t care if I get done by the fuckin polis10 or by my fuckin mates because I’m used to it – in fact, tell you the truth, I quite like it being a bit of a masochist. I’m no feart of jail, I’m used to that too. I’m no feart of death because what difference will it make? None. The world will continue without me. Business as usual. Zoe cares for me a bit but I don’t fool myself, me dying would be a weight off her mind. But you, you’re a prosperous cultured gentleman and a scholar, pal. Surely you can spare me a tenner or two for Zoe’s sake?”
He was so abject that I gave him a fiver, saying that I knew no Zoe and adding that he would get no more money from me. He went away mumbling that I hadn’t heard the end of this. I wonder about Zoe. How can a man like me have made a strong cultural impression on a woman I cannot remember? The woman Henry James Prince raped in the year of the Great 1851 Exhibition was a Zo
e, but the Florentine Quatracento is a far more satisfying period. Concentrate on it.
Found note from Yvonne tonight saying, “Thanks for helping in a hard time but things have improved so I am off. You will not see me again but you are a decent old spud11 a lot decenter than I expected when you first picked me up. All the best and good luck from, Your Pal, Yvonne.” – a better goodbye note than none at all or a curse, which is what most nymphs leave me with. She has left the place tidy and seems to have taken nothing but a cake of toilet soap and tube of toothpaste. Still, it is a blow. I solace myself by concentrating on my amazing Brother Filippo.
The mural in Prato cathedral shows him last in a queue of folk attending Saint Stephen’s funeral, with beside him Diamante, the monk who was his painting assistant. Their dark grey gowns contrast with the red robes of an adjacent cardinal. Filippo has the glum face and wry mouth of a child suddenly deprived of a sweet or favourite toy. The head of Diamante looks toward his master with a firmer, more dignified expression. This was painted in the early 1460s when Filippo was about fifty-five. In 1469 he paints himself more prominently in the cathedral of Spoleto among attendants at the death of the Virgin. Here he wears a white robe open over his dark one, facing forward but his eyes looking sideways to the bier where the Virgin peacefully expires. His hand points her out to a fair-haired boy of about twelve who stands in profile beside him, holding a tall glass candlestick. This is a portrait of his son Filippino, and the boy’s clear, handsome, thoughtful face is very different from his dad’s worried, uneasy gaze, depressed mouth and dark chin. Filippo obviously regarded himself with interest but without admiration, a proof of high intelligence. In the same cathedral his finely carved head and shoulders, with the same pointing hand and wearing the same Carmelite robe, lean out of a roundel above the tomb Filippino designed twenty years after Filippo’s death, when the son was an artist as famous as his dad. Lorenzo the Magnificent commissioned that memorial. The bronze head and pointing hand in this carving are like those in the Spoleto mural, except that the face looks wise and kind. Was Filippino’s memorial to his dad more truthful than dad’s self-portrait? Can that pleasanter portrait of him also be true to side of his character he himself ignored? Of course it can.
I live in strange, strange times. Newspapers and broadcasts would make study and calm writing impossible if I attended to them, and they still erupt on me from pub television sets, from Mastermind, from headlines glimpsed on newsagents’ billboards. Shortly after Thatcher’s reign I saw billboards yelling LOONY M.P. BACKS IRISH BOMBERS! Mastermind, an old-fashioned Conservative, told me an English Tory M.P. had examined evidence presented at a trial of Irishmen jailed for a murderous I.R.A. bombing, and decided there had been no evidence to convict them, because a new law by a panic-stricken government had let the police arrest people on suspicion, and also use anything they said or signed after arrest as evidence against them, even if they later denied it in court. The British politicians, police, judges, newspapers and public wanted some Irishmen arrested for the crime, wanted that so much and so fast that the real bombers were never found. The “loony” Tory re-opened the case and the jailed Irish were proved innocent, “which could never have happened in Scotland,” a woman I met yesterday told me. She was intensely agitated by injustices and said, “Scottish M.P.s and lawyers are the most corrupt and cowardly in Britain. Hardly one of them has the guts to challenge a judge, a sheriff, the police or anyone with some authority. I’m a Socialist and Irish, so I naturally hate the English, but I have to admit some of them have a sense of fair play I see hardly anywhere in Scotland.”
I met her on the way back from Heraghty’s around lunchtime.12 On Gorbals High Street I entered an eating place called Hasta Mañana and found a seat opposite a small woman with a large nose questioning a waiter about his private life. Her voice was penetrating yet so fast I could hardly catch her words, though they were friendly. The waiter left after taking my order and she told me, “A very good man, that!” and a long story about his courage and decency. He was Spanish Moroccan and owned the place. One night he saw a stabbed man staggering on the pavement outside and rushed out with towels and staunched the wounds, saving the man’s life. “Not many Glaswegians would have the guts to do that,” she said. “Most of them would cross the road to avoid helping a stabbed man, afraid of being stabbed by his enemies. What do you do?”
I said I was a retired school teacher and asked what she did. “A criminal lawyer,” she said. “My clients pay me through legal aid, which of course the government is steadily abolishing. They only want justice for people rich enough to buy it. A teacher! What do you think of the Labour Party giving away all our schools?”
I said I had retired more than ten years ago and knew nothing about that. She said hardly anyone in Britain knew about it because Blair was continuing a Margaret Thatcher policy. When the Labour Party was in opposition it complained about such things and they were reported in news stories, but the New Labour measures had Tory support, so there was no discussion when the government created Private Finance Initiatives to transfer the grounds of schools and hospitals to private businesses who promised to build new schools where and when they are needed: “So of course more and more schools, especially primary schools, are being shut and pupils concentrated in fewer and bigger buildings far from their homes. Smart, eh? A great boost for the property market. Hospitals are being treated the same way. Each week Glasgow councillors give more and more public land to private businesses. Local people complain like hell, but with Tory support the Labour Party ignores them. Britain was never much of a democracy but it’s now becoming positively Fascist. Do you agree?”
I said the closing of schools was regrettable because for at least a century Scottish schools with very few pupils and teachers had given good starts in life to many professional folk from poor homes. I also said she was surely wrong to call Britain Fascist because we had no concentration camps or government hate campaigns against racial and religious minorities; and I avoided discussing contemporary politics because that interrupted my studies of Medician Florence. She said, “Well, you’re a nice old ostrich. There must have been a lot of decent Germans like you after Hitler came to power. I don’t suppose you want to know about the Bouncing Czech, the Enron rip-off and how British and American lawyers, bankers and governments connive to help millionaire company directors steal their employees’ pension funds.”
She went on to tell me about these things in great details until I paid for my meal and rushed out. I am not an ostrich but a Scottish Renaissance scholar whose spiritual home is Medician Florence.
10: A FLORENTINE MONASTERY
Florence, two thousand years after republican Athens, became a republic almost as wonderful. Unlike most cities when the Roman Empire dissolved Florence had not been ruled by a dynasty of war lords, so masterpieces of European literature were much later written by Florentine Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. The city was ruled by a parliament of craftsmen and tradesmen who excluded all noblemen, only admitting landowners enriched by trade. It imported silk from China, dyes from India, wool from England, turning them into rich fabrics sold all over Europe. This trade needed an international banking system, so the parliament of Florence was dominated by merchant bankers who manipulated the trade unions, priests and mass of people by a combination of bribes and by funding a high level of social welfare only approached by some neighbouring republics. The chief bankers were the Medici family who had branch offices in Milan, Venice, Rome, Geneva, Bruges, Antwerp, London; also agents in Baghdad and Constantinople. The Catholic Church still condemned capitalism as a sin but tolerated the Medici because they paid for bigger and better churches and monasteries which ran schools and hospitals. These splendid new buildings were designed and decorated by astonishingly fine artists born in Florence, and many attracted by its prosperity.
A wall of the Carmine Monastery was being painted with a brown rocky wilderness where hermits wearing Carmelite robes prayed singly or converse
d in couples. Brother Filippo applied the colours while Brother Diamante ground and mixed them. These two had a dispensation that allowed them to run their painting business from a house outside the monastery, and over breakfast that morning Filippo had again blamed Diamante for insufficiently haggling down the price of market vegetables. Though unwilling to greatly anger Filippo (a dangerous thing to do) Diamante wanted to be slightly disagreeable. He heaved a deep sigh.
“Regretting what you paid for those tomatoes?” said Filippo pleasantly.
“I was remembering Brother Guido’s wall in the chapter house of San Marco,” said Diamante on a melancholy note.13
“Nothing regrettable there! Guido painted it excellently if we remember the over-abundance of saints, abbots and popes he had to include.”
“Yes, the preaching friars have many saints; we Carmelites, alas, only two.”
“Why alas? Their saints are all modern: our founders are in the Scriptures.”
“The other orders say the prophet Elijah and John the Baptist are as much their progenitors as ours.”
“They envy our antiquity,” said Filippo smiling pleasantly. “They are newcomers founded two centuries ago, more than a millennium after the Crucifixion. The Prophet Elijah was a Carmelite a thousand years before Jesus was crucified. John who baptized Him was a hermit on the slopes of Mount Carmel. We came through Sicily to Italy a century ago, but our first monastery is still in the Holy Land.”
“Other orders say our rules have changed so much since we came to Italy that our order is now as modern as theirs.”
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