‘But,’ I told him, ‘I saw it from the public gallery.’
‘L’accolade?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they embraced?’
‘They kissed.’
‘My God!’ He shook his head. ‘The French!’
As similar thoughts sometimes struck me about the Irish, I knew how he felt.
David Kelly, who was in Strasbourg to learn about journalism, could touch these off. He had attended the Benedictine boarding school from which my brother Stevie had had to be rescued, and I wondered, with some embarrassment, if he knew more than I did about why. To my relief, though, David never brought the thing up. He and I sometimes took walks, during which he warned that, if he were to unexpectedly climb a lamp post, I should know that this was one of his Benedictine mentors’ cures for the troubles of the flesh. At first I took this for a joke, then saw that it wasn’t. Recalling how, when our family was worrying about Stevie’s mishap, there had been hints that ‘sex came into it’, I wondered if he too should have learned to shin up lamp posts.
*
In May 1957 I finished my work in Strasbourg, so my parents suggested we meet in Florence, hire a car and explore the countryside. They loved wandering around rural monasteries and rousing sextons from their siestas. Tuscany, at that time, was a sleepy place.
On their last day we drove to San Gimignano, a hilltop town spiked with tall, slim, mediaeval towers. Smaller and surely cheaper than Florence, it would be a good place to settle in for a while, and try to write. Why didn’t I do that? Eileen coaxed hopefully. So while Seán lay drowsing on a bench with his hat over his face, she and I agreed that, if I stayed in Italy, they would come back in the autumn.
Then I drove them to the station where no sooner had their train pulled out than I began to miss them. Now that we had no reason to quarrel, we enjoyed each other’s company, though I was already having doubts about staying in San Gimignano. How could I forget the woman in Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread who is so charmed by a small Italian town that, unable to imagine its winter dullness, loneliness and underlying misogyny, she marries a local dentist? As one enticement quickens another, she walks straight into the trap laid by the narrative. Best, mindful of that warning, to stay somewhere at least as big as Florence.
What I needed, if I was to do that for any length of time, was to find someone who could point me in the direction of cheap pensioni, tavole calde and the like. So I headed for the National Library where I asked an American girl for advice. With some pique, she asked how I had known she was an American and, when told she looked like one, pointed out that everything she was wearing had been bought here. I tried to soothe her, learned some useful addresses and left to follow them up.
Clearly we were not going to be friends.
Americans in those years did stand out, but it is hard to say how. The words ‘open-faced’ and ‘bland’ come to mind. Globalisation was unheard of and national characteristics pronounced. French faces were often intensely focused, and American mens’ shorts gaudy, while English ones tended to be army surplus and bell out like lamp shades; Italian men wore tight suits … I regretted annoying the American girl.
Next day was my twenty-fifth birthday when, according to an old French saying, girls coiffent Sainte Catherine, i.e. become spinsters. Thinking about this, I realised that, though I no longer missed Jean-Paul, I did miss Paris and Rome. Both are enlivening and protean, and my learning their languages was no accident. France in the old songs was Ireland’s friend, and I had been ready to love it. I think, too, that I am drawn to cities which developed a complexity which our bit of the Roman Catholic empire failed signally to achieve. It is satisfying, when you have only known fragments, to encounter the realised model, though liking a Catholic metropolis can have less to do with belief than with codes and jokes which belong to an anti-Catholic backlash. When I visited Latin America in 1980, it was the satirical talk which made me feel at home.
Yet the man whom I was now about to meet would take me to a place with which I feel little affinity. Notoriously the US West Coast has its own beauty, but for my taste it is too spread out, lacks shadow, and is insufficiently urban; its oral skills are poor and I would never have gone there but for Lauro.
*
So back to my birthday.
Having dined alone, I walked out into the summery, noisy June evening and there he was, a lean, dark-eyed young man, wearing a seersucker jacket which marked him out as an American, sitting in an outside café in a group which included Anna Maria, the girl I had annoyed the day before and was now – though I didn’t realise this – annoying even more. She and I greeted each other, which enabled the men to invite me to join them and within minutes, when the other man said he was the librarian at the Villa I Tatti, which Bernard Berenson had bequeathed to Harvard, one or other of us mentioned Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, and soon we were all bickering about books – as Lauro and I still do. He is a historian and was then writing his doctoral thesis for Harvard, but he had also been to the Kenyon School of English, where he had worked under Kenneth Burke and William Empson, and had an approach to reading a text which impressed me. I had not majored in English, and at home there had been an anti-academic bias, a romantic approval of the writer as ‘inspired idiot’, even a notion that the brain hobbles the imagination. Some of this may be traced to the cult of ‘the people’ and some to my father’s reaction against the dry discipline of his own time at Harvard. There is truth in it, too – at least there is for me, but it is a small, limited one. I enjoy research but find that it can shrivel my ability to invent. This belongs to a part of the mind that takes over when the critical part closes down. Then, in a sort of dream, it gets to work on the raw material – facts – that have been left for it like offerings to a capricious daemon. Later, the dreamer’s work is checked by the monitor. You need both, and it was Lauro who taught me to use the second.
We met for lunch the next day, shared more meals and some days later – Lauro did not go in for climbing lamp posts – went to the station and tried to buy tickets for the next train.
‘To where?’ asked the ticket-seller.
‘Anywhere. We want to leave on the next train.’
This turned out to be bound for Arezzo, so that was where we went. In those years Piero della Francesca’s Pregnant Madonna was housed in a small free-standing chapel in the open countryside, so we visited and became particularly fond of this painting which, like all this painter’s work, has a thrillingly luminous tranquillity. We were to revisit it often.
*
Back in Florence, we moved into a flat on the Lungarno Vespucci and five months later were married in the local parish church. I was no longer a Catholic, and Lauro had never been one, though, by luck, he had been baptised in a Catholic church. I say ‘luck’ because now, in one of those appeals which blend cynicism with piety, Seán begged me to get married in the Catholic church.
‘What difference can it make to you?’ he pleaded. ‘It will mean a lot to your mother and me.’ I knew the argument. Ireland was run on its dodgy track. It reconciled the irreconcilable, shirked change and must have darkened many minds, but in the land of ‘great hatred, little room’ was a necessary tribute to tribalism. I tried it on Lauro. ‘What’, I challenged, ‘can it matter to you?’
He conceded the point but, with American candour, warned, ‘I won’t lie to that priest. I’ll let him know that I don’t believe in God.’ This baffled Monsignor Marani. Why, he plainly wondered, would an unbeliever want to marry in his church? Might I, he worried, be an heiress and Lauro a fortune-hunter? While he dragged out the paperwork, our landlady told us that his wariness was due to his having been duped in the past by a couple who, since the Italian state did not yet allow divorce, had chosen to marry in the Catholic church as it has always been prepared to annul a marriage if either spouse can prove to have contracted it with ‘a mental reservation’. Proof that, in this case, the bride had done this was established when
she was found to have written in shorthand next to her signature, ‘This is all balls.’
‘Palle! Excuse the expression!’ Our landlady’s lips twitched in amusement. ‘It’s what she wrote.’
‘In shorthand?’
She quenched a smile. ‘The monsignor couldn’t read it.’
His worries about us may have festered when no relatives attended our wedding. Lauro’s were in the US, and I had fallen out with mine. This happened when enquiries about Lauro, which Seán had made through Harvard friends, stirred up gossip and revived a small scandal.
A year earlier Lauro had had a fling with an undergraduate called Nina who, when checking out of her Radcliffe dormitory to spend two nights with him, mistakenly specified that she would be away for one. When she overran her exeat, the authorities fussed, made indiscreet phone calls and then expelled her, as they had the power to do. They had none over him, who was a PhD student living off-campus. However, the difference in the way the two were treated looked unfair, and the Dean of Students, McGeorge Bundy (later US National Security Adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson), had Lauro on the carpet, and told him that, if it had been up to him, he would have clawed back the Sheldon Travelling Fellowship which Lauro had won and which was to take him to Florence.
What may have given this tittle-tattle legs was the fact that Nina’s father was Leo Castelli, a New York art dealer who would be described in a subsequent biography as having ‘revolutionized the status of the artist in America and changed the rules of the art market’. He and her mother, who would later become a still more successful gallerist, pleaded with the Radcliffe authorities, reminding them that, though Nina was a prize-winning student, being kicked out of Radcliffe could prevent her from getting into another élite college. And indeed, this happened, and she had to settle in the end for New York University. New England Puritanism was making a late, last stand.
All this, condensed in the misleading phrase ‘he got a girl into trouble’, was hyped by Harvard professors with a verve which village gossips could not have bettered.
Seán, who even before meeting Lauro had been seeking grounds to discourage our marriage, now had them. Why, he challenged me, were we rushing it? The answer was that I was doing so because of him, who, I suspected (rightly as it would later turn out), had asked his Harvard contact to find an obstacle that would justify his and Eileen’s opposing it.
A maxim she liked to air gives a key to this. It runs, ‘Your son is your son till he marries, but your daughter is your daughter for life.’ I have since heard Englishwomen complain of the burden put on them by such expectations, but in Ireland, from which daughters had been emigrating since the Famine, these were often foiled. I once visited an Irish retirement home where a tearful widow beckoned me over and told me that I reminded her of her daughter in Australia. Other residents took up the lament. Their daughters, too, were far away, and one of Seán’s letters, written that year to a Harvard friend, comically cursing ‘the entire American nation for stealing my daughter’, echoed an ancient dirge. He could, he added, make his peace with the marriage if Lauro found work in New England, but feared we would both go mad if we ended up in the Middle West.
His concern, this implied, was not only for me but also for Lauro, with whom he now began to exchange letters.
‘I find’, he wrote in his second one (the first had been tougher), ‘that despite my concern for Julie which remains well based considering the harsh sort of impressions (just or unjust) that you can evoke in and about Harvard, I can also find room for much sympathy for you.’
This letter, which I still have, is typed, but the word ‘much’ has been inserted by hand. A puzzled afterthought? Did he mean it? If so, he may have been wondering on which side of the fence he now stood. With defiant youth as he had in the past? Or not? The excerpt quoted concedes that he may have been casting too cold an eye.
AN AMERICAN IN FLORENCE
Lauro and I, meanwhile, were heading for Edward Albee territory, just four years before Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was first put on.
Like that play’s setting, Reed College in Oregon was animated by brainy drunks, some of them as articulate as his leading characters. It was a pastoral playground for the clever young, staffed for the most part by ageing intellectuals who had somehow got stuck in a place which, though stimulating for students, was less so for them. Consequently they drank. And when accepting their hospitality, so did we. Dinner was often served a good hour or two after the one for which guests had been invited so as to allow time to have several stiff Martinis. Reed was reputed to be Red at a time – we reached it in 1958 – when a hangover from McCarthyism still poisoned the air, and the local town, Portland, ostracised Reed people. It was said that the children of successive central committees of the USCP had been educated there, but I can’t vouch for this, for when I, riding Lauro’s coat-tails, got a job there teaching French, the students struck me as unlikely to be politically active. They were polite, self-absorbed pre-hippies from places like Boston and New York, devoted to free love, bare feet and a tolerance which could have put Radcliffe to shame. Reed’s one drawback was that, as Seán and Eileen must have seen with dismay on the map, it was a long way from Europe. We stayed for four years – just as the students did.
I guessed from their style and ease that most of them were more emancipated than I had been at their age. But then, at that age I had just emerged from a convent school, where we had had to wear grim, grey gymslips with matching stockings and bloomers, whereas Reed girls didn’t even have to wear shoes. This distinguished them – perhaps deliberately? – from the local teenagers who flaunted lipstick and large plastic hair curlers at Portland bus stops. Perhaps Anna Maria, the girl I had annoyed in Florence, had feared I might think she looked like these girls. US snobbery, I learned, was, if anything, touchier than ours.
Thinking of Florence reminded me that of the five guests at our modest wedding reception there, three had been damaged by their elders. Of these, the one least likely to recover fast was probably Yvonne. A Cambridge (UK) graduate now working as a governess in a Florentine marchese’s family, she had been seduced by the marchese. Convinced at first that the sheer banality of her plight would protect her, she had found that even a playful replay of Jane Eyre could generate hurt. When we met the marchese, we saw she was right, for his talk of seeking a Mexican divorce from his wife was clearly an outing from reality. He enjoyed raising Yvonne’s hopes and liked showing off his English, but would not, we guessed, rock his domestic boat for her sake. Though a lot older than she, his sexual antics must have been vigorous, for once, leaping over her in bed, he almost broke her neck.
*
Both of our male guests were called Roberto and the one we called Roberto V was at odds with himself. He is the man I mentioned earlier who at the end of the war was beaten up by Reds because his father had died fighting in Mussolini’s army. Oddly, this led to his becoming an ardent Red himself, who sang lefty songs and strummed his guitar with what struck people who knew his story as displaced rage.
The other Roberto too had troubles stemming from the past. He was a general’s son which, he assured us, was a hard thing for an Italian to be. He claimed to have been repeatedly tormented by envious bullies, but never told us why. Had the now-dead general been a Fascist or a post-war democrat? We didn’t ask and Roberto didn’t say.
His sisters came to tea with us once, but refused to drink any. He explained later that they never used a lavatory outside their own home, so were fearful of ingesting liquids. I began to see why the bullies had felt irked.
*
Another man we met in Florence was a Harvard friend of Lauro’s who would later become a psychoanalyst and may already have been practising. He told me that what I should know about Lauro was that, though prone to losing his temper, he was always sorry at once.
I remembered this when we began having culture clashes over beggars. These started when we were still in the flat on Lungarno Vespucci,
near the Grand Hotel, a smart area where beggars would count on getting generous alms. This meant that I, who had promised to help stretch our funds to keep us in Florence for another year, felt two-way guilt when giving stingily to the needy who knocked on our door. Lauro, who spent his days doing research in the State Archives, at first knew nothing about them.
Back in Ireland beggars had had an acknowledged foothold in society. They brought entertainment to bored households and for years Eileen had regulars to whom she would sometimes give a meal, some cast-off clothes and a few coins. I particularly remember a man from Ballinasloe, where she had taught school for a while, who used to amuse her with tales of figures from its past. The glitziest of these was Belle Bilton, who was remembered in that bleak, boggy region long after her death. A popular English music-hall singer, she had so bewitched aristocratic young bloods that members of a group of these were said to have tossed a coin for her.
‘What I heard,’ Eileen liked to recall, ‘was that the Earl of Clancarty won her at cards, then took her to Galway.’
‘No, ma’am!’ The man from Ballinasloe sometimes corrected. ‘It was on the toss of a coin. He was Viscount Dunlo then and only became earl when his da died.’
‘They say the da opposed the marriage?’
‘He did indeed, which is why it took place in secret and why he tried to get it declared void due to the boy being a minor. When this failed he stopped his allowance and sent him to Australia. That left Bilton without a penny and obliged to take up with an old admirer.’
‘Falling into the wicked earl’s trap?’ Eileen could be all for young love.
‘True for you, ma’am!’ The beggar tended at this point to pause and chew a mouthful of Irish stew then, sustained by this, take up his story. ‘When news of the admirer reached Australia, Dunlo started proceedings against her for adultery and set off for London, but no sooner did he get there than the pair were reconciled. She could twist him round her finger.’
Trespassers Page 19