A Chill in the Air

by Iris Origo

  JULY 20TH

  Last night Hitler’s speech. It is received here with almost universal approval; even those people who are not admirers of Nazism consider it a genuine effort towards peace and a last chance for England to save herself from destruction. That this destruction will be inevitable and will be swift, if Hitler does attempt it, no one doubts.

  JULY 23RD

  Last night Lord Halifax’s speech, removing any last doubt as to how England has received Hitler’s proposals. We sat in the American Embassy listening to it gloomily on the American radio: two Italians, one Belgian, three Americans. At the end: “Do you think the door to peace is still open?” asked one of the Italians. “Shut and barred,” said the other.

  This diary was interrupted at this point by the birth of my daughter on August 1st. In the autumn I decided, having a wonderful Swiss nanny to help me with my baby, that inaction was no longer bearable. Surely there must be some work, directed towards the relief of suffering rather than any war aim, which even I, an Anglo-American and a non-Fascist, could find to do? In the autumn of 1940 I began to work in the Prisoner’s Branch of the Italian Red Cross – and until the spring of 1943 had no more time for writing.

  1 Tomfoolery!

  2 A problem of Independence.

  3 Careerists.

  4 Predatory warfare.

  5 I’ll be interned.

  6 Farm manager.

  7 This is it.

  8 Combatants on land, sea and in the air.

  9 Long live the King, long live the Duce!

  10 This is it!

  11 I follow the political situation.

  12 A stab in the back.

  13 It is at this moment that Mussolini chooses to declare war. How to judge this act? France has nothing to say. The world that watches us will judge.

  14 I am the Empire in the last of its decline,

  That sees the tall, fair-haired Barbarians pass!

  15 Not too much freedom

  16 England is done for.

  Afterword

  Iris Origo’s handwriting was famously illegible. When family, friends and publishers despaired of deciphering her letters, manuscripts or notes, the experts would be called in. They included her daughters Benedetta and Donata, her long-suffering secretary and her publisher and close friend Jock Murray, who claimed to have mastered a special technique for reading Iris Origo. He loved to repeat the story of how, on his return to the office after a day in Manchester, he found the entire staff poring over a long letter from Iris. All had been – more or less – deciphered save the last sentence. He took the letter home with him. “The trick,” he said, “is to have the page at eye level, so I had a bath and a snifter, as Osbert [Lancaster] used to call it, and crept past the table on all fours. It read: ‘Dearest Jock, I can’t read what I have written. Please type it out and send a copy to me.’”

  So when a search for family photographs unexpectedly yielded a promising-looking brown box bearing the legend “Unpublished” in my grandmother’s familiar scrawl, I sent up a quick prayer for typewritten material. The brown box turned out to contain many folders of varying dimensions, mostly almost identical versions of standard typewritten pages untidily stapled together, some of them bearing the title “Italian Journal, 1940”. Unpublished – but not unknown to scholars of Iris Origo’s work, among them her son-in-law Giangiacomo Migone and her biographer Caroline Moorehead. Iris Origo herself quoted these papers in her autobiography Images and Shadows and refers to them in her best-known work, War in Val d’Orcia.

  Why then was this journal never published? Originally it was not meant to be, I believe, being a very private record in which Iris could give voice to thoughts and feelings she was usually forced to suppress, an occasion to reflect on the extraordinary events to which she was witness and could only discuss with her husband and a handful of friends. Iris was good at keeping her mouth shut and her ears open – she knew how to draw people out with a few strategic questions and her keen powers of observation never deserted her, not even when her sentiments were fully engaged and her sense of justice outraged.

  Initially she did not intend any part of her diaries to be published. War in Val d’Orcia was not meant for the public either, yet was published by Jonathan Cape in 1947, shortly after the end of the conflict. Iris was persuaded to take this step because she strongly believed the rest of the world should hear the other side of the story – how ordinary Italians in a remote Tuscan valley suffered the consequences of war and did not hesitate to rescue and shelter their fellow human beings at great personal risk. She must have considered her pre-war journal to be of little interest to others when set against these world-shattering events. Yet in the eighties she showed it to her son-in-law Giangiacomo Migone (husband of her daughter Donata), along with a short piece describing a trip to Libya in 1939 with her husband, Antonio. Migone, who in 1984 founded L’Indice dei Libri del Mese, Italy’s most prestigious literary review to date, immediately recognized the value of both works and encouraged Iris to re-read and set them in order. But as Iris’s health declined, she put aside all revision. Almost immediately after her death in June 1988, L’Indice dei Libri published her Libyan piece (translated into Italian by Iris herself) on the Italian agricultural settlements established by Mussolini on land confiscated from the Bedouin. The publication of the pre-war journal was put off to a later date, and then never took place.

  In my memories, my grandmother – Nonna, as her many grandchildren called her – has a pen close to hand, usually a leaky ballpoint that left stains on armchairs, chaises-longues and quilted satin counterpanes, which gave away her favourite writing haunts. At La Foce she wrote in her little study on the upper floor, which had much the best view of the Italianate garden, with Pinsent’s deceptively simple box-hedge geometries laid out at a glance. The delicately painted bookshelves were crammed to overflowing and every surface, even the window-seat cushions in leaf-patterned sea-green and white cretonne, was obscured by stacks of books of all shapes and sizes. There barely seemed to be room on her desk for her typewriter amidst much-thumbed paperbacks, huge dusty tomes, the odd garden catalogue and typewritten sheets of paper covered in a flurry of scribbles, scratched-out words and strips of paper ineptly glued on and curling at the edges. Research was fundamental and Iris would never shirk hours of painstaking labour simply because they yielded only a few extra words. She prided herself on being a historian and her best biographies draw on new material gleaned from archives and unpublished collections of family letters and documents (Leopardi, The Merchant of Prato, The Last Attachment).

  As a child, I was encouraged to write for her and presented her regularly with poems and short stories. Despite their obvious shortcomings I can’t recall a single word of criticism, only unconditional approval. It was never her way to correct or proffer advice – when pressed, if she deemed the author’s age adequate to withstand any implied criticism, she would only say: read it through. The more you read it through, the more you will want to leave out. If the price to be paid for all these deletions and afterthoughts was a supremely untidy manuscript, so be it. This being her philosophy, I can well imagine her irritation when her step-father, the literary critic Percy Lubbock, asked to explain the pristine condition of his drafts, said: “I think before I write.”

  Iris was brought to Italy in 1911, at the age of nine, by her English mother, Sybil Cutting. Her American father, Bayard Cutting, who died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty, had expressed the wish that his only child be brought up abroad. But her immensely wealthy American grandparents were opposed to Iris’s going far away and a bitter war over who should have the final say in deciding her upbringing and education was waged on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally Sybil, availing herself of her status as sole surviving parent (though a more unmotherly figure is hard to imagine) got her way. Iris grew up in the privileged atmosphere of expatriate Florence and the splendid setting of Villa Medici on the Fiesole hill, where the flower of Tuscan humanists once
gathered around Lorenzo the Magnificent. Iris was introduced to the wonders of Renaissance art by their neighbour Bernard Berenson. Edith Wharton, Henry James, Aldous Huxley and Somerset Maugham met in her mother’s literary salon, where architects Geoffrey Scott and Cecil Pinsent discussed their designs for Italianate gardens commissioned by Florence’s foreign community. However, Iris was a lonely little girl, who rarely had a chance to emerge from her ivory tower. Then in 1917 came the Italian army’s shattering defeat at Caporetto and an endless stream of refugees. “The face of humanity in flight” produced an everlasting impression on fifteen-year-old Iris. But apart from these brushes with reality, the young Iris had little chance to mix with Italians and observe the Italian way of life – until she met her future husband, an Italian aristocrat called Antonio Origo.

  On a blustery October day in 1924 Iris and Antonio, soon to be married, fell in love with a spectacularly wild and desolate valley in southern Tuscany, the Val d’Or-cia, and with a half-ruined fifteenth-century villa at the heart of a large estate named La Foce. They dreamed of turning the arid clay hills, where only wild broom blossomed, into fertile pastures and rippling wheat-fields, neatly groomed olive groves and new vineyards. They imagined bringing roads and schools and medical care to the destitute, largely illiterate farmers of the Val d’Orcia. La Foce and its people would become a shining example of bucolic peace and prosperity, the revival of an ideal community from a classical Golden Age.

  Extraordinary as it may seem, their vision came true. Between 1925 and the start of the Second World War, La Foce became the heart of a land reclamation project of truly epic proportions. Faced with the gargantuan task of bringing a forgotten valley back to life, Antonio and Iris laid out a pragmatic plan of action based on a profoundly romantic vision: “Neglect, indigence and suspense are etched on the faces of men and the earth alike. We heard the plea, measured our strength and decided.” The fact that Antonio, not Iris, wrote these words, gives us the measure of their unity of purpose and ideals. To the dismay and incomprehension of family and friends, they proceeded to invest all their capital and energies in La Foce, helped by incentives and loans provided by the Fascist government, in which agricultural policy played a major role.

  But then their only son Gianni died suddenly, aged seven, of tubercular meningitis. By a terrible coincidence, Gianni was the same age as Iris herself when she lost her father. Many marriages do not survive the death of a child and Antonio and Iris Origo struggled desperately to adjust, in their very different ways. Iris turned to her books and her writing and her friendships in England, where she came into contact with a world far removed from the practical agricultural and social problems of the Val d’Orcia or the political gossip of the Roman aristocratic salons. In London she visited Virginia and Leonard Woolf, attended pacifist rallies to hear Max Plowman speak and supported Lilian Bowes Lyon in her efforts to bring Jewish children to safety under the Kindertransport scheme. Back at La Foce, Antonio buried himself in agricultural work. Their marriage did not end, but they spent long periods of time apart and led separate lives. Yet Iris never entirely abandoned La Foce, coming back at regular intervals. In 1938 she took the momentous decision to return permanently and make it her home again, at the side of her Italian husband.

  Readers will ask why Iris almost never mentions my grandfather in any of her books. The answer lies, I believe, in both Antonio and Iris’s fundamental belief in safeguarding their privacy. Though immensely proud of his wife’s writing, Antonio would never have sanctioned any speculation about his personal sentiments and loyalties, his role as President of the Consorzio della Bonifica (the Fascist Consortium for land reclamation) or his growing feelings of shame and betrayal caused by the behaviour of his King and the Fascist government. Antonio set great store by bravery (he was awarded the Silver Medal of Military Valour during the First World War, bestowed on him by the Duke of Aosta, the only other man who could match his height of six-foot-five) and was a natural leader: his authority saw La Foce through many a difficult situation during the German retreat through Tuscany in 1944. Fluent in four languages, he could meet German officers on their own ground, negotiate with partisans (who offered many varieties of political creed and honesty) and reassure anguished peasants, all with the same ease. At the same time, he was a cultivated man who grew up in a house where the arts held sway. His mother was a singer and his father, the marchese Clemente Origo, was a talented sculptor and painter. Clemente’s great friend was the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, lyrical visionary, bloodthirsty glorifier of war, decadent aesthete and dandy: Antonio’s childhood must have been filled with people striking virile poses and declaiming patriotic verse. Possibly as a reaction, he chose to make his feelings less evident and preferred action to rhetoric, just as he preferred the wild beauty of the Val d’Orcia to frequenting aristocratic circles (on escaping tea at La Foce with the exiled Queen of Greece, he is said to have muttered: “They are unbearable, these unemployed queens”). Iris, though a true intellectual, was undoubtedly fascinated by his pragmatism and could not resist the opportunity to put her own ideals into practice at his side.

  On her definitive return to Italy in 1938, Iris had to face the changes her adopted country had undergone. She herself tells us, with some embarrassment, that as a young wife she was completely taken up with her personal concerns and oddly detached from events in Italian political life. The effort of passing from the cosmopolitan self-absorption of the Villa Medici to life on a Tuscan farm and her new role as wife and mother meant that the rise of the new Fascist regime went largely unheeded by her. Despite an instinctive dislike for those aspects of Fascism that it was impossible to ignore in everyday life, Iris remained for a long time very conscious of her foreign origins and reluctant to criticize events she felt she could not fully understand.

  Her feeling of being considered an outsider was certainly justified. My grandfather had access by birth to the stifling, closed circle of the few Roman aristocratic families that mattered and they undoubtedly looked critically on his reserved, blue-stocking wife, who spoke too quickly and could not pronounce her Rs. Throughout her life Iris put up with a certain amount of distrust and antagonism from a large slice of the Italian intelligentsia. Though revered intellectuals and antifascists such as Silone, Salvemini and Umberto Morra were close friends and praised her work in glowing terms, her gender, wealth and nationality counted against her in some Italian circles. She could never quite rid herself of the aura of the wealthy foreigner, whose marriage to an Italian nobleman did not entitle her to write of Italian history and literature. On the other hand, the farmers and workers on the estate at La Foce did not quite know what to make of the elegant, aloof lady who showed them such generosity and compassion. Florence, accustomed to eccentric expats and their literary salons, was more welcoming, but there Iris was uncomfortably close to Sybil Cutting and her backbiting, idiosyncratic coterie. This sense of rootlessness, of never totally belonging to a single place or culture – dating back to the very different family influences of her childhood and the cosmopolitan upbringing her father wished for her – was a leitmotif in my grandmother’s life, and one that she explored in her autobiography, Images and Shadows.

  I remember my teenage self being irritated by her relentless interrogations on this very subject. Did I feel more Italian or English? And how much did I identify with the background of my Argentinian father, with his Ukrainian roots? As the eldest grandchild, I spent a lot of time with my grandmother and received a great deal of attention from her. My father, a concert violinist, was often away on tour, and my mother sometimes accompanied him in the early years of their marriage. I was judged old enough to be left with Nonna, who read to me, drew up lists of books she thought I would enjoy (I do not remember her ever getting one wrong) and passed on to me in my earliest years her distinctive inability to pronounce her Rs. After me came six other grandchildren and Iris rediscovered the joy of having small children around her again, writing that “my grandchildren have b
estowed upon me the happiest hours of my old age”. She organized picnic parties, charades and plays and, above all, she read to us. In the flickering firelight of the library, which never quite reached its darkest corners, her rendering of The Black Ribbon, the family ghost story passed down by her Irish ancestors, caused each one of us to dread bedtime, with the barefoot rush down the smooth terracotta-tiled passage to the safety of our rooms and blankets pulled over our ears.

  The rite of passage for us all was when Nonna pulled out her dreaded “Gianni book”, as we called it, the heartbreaking account of her only son’s short life, complete with photographs of him at all ages and even – which was when our sobs, bravely held back till then, inevitably broke out – on his deathbed, surrounded by Madonna lilies.

  The name Iris Origo is linked, in most people’s minds, to a definite time and place. She is best known for War in Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943–1944, a terse, compelling account of how a small rural community in Tuscany survived the horrors of war. Iris and Antonio are committed to protecting the farmers who live on the estate of La Foce and the twenty-eight refugee children entrusted to their care. But soon they find they are unable to deny the same help to the “unending stream of human suffering” that washes up at their door day after day: runaway Allied prisoners of war, deserters from Mussolini’s army, ex-Fascist officials, partisans hiding in the woods and townspeople fleeing bombs and hunger. As the fighting moves nearer and Nazi paratroopers take over La Foce, the Origos find themselves on the front line. They must flee on foot, leading a group of sixty people (including four babies and twenty-eight children) through eight miles of mined fields strafed by Allied planes to the relative safety of Montepulciano.