What and whose triumph over whom our street celebrated, I never discovered. It led down to the Milvian Bridge where, in 312 AD, the battle between the upstart Constantine and the incumbent emperor Maxentius ended with the victory of Constantine who had, for opportunist motives, united his soldiers under the sign of the Cross. Their success confirmed the Christian God’s official and enduring tenancy in Rome. Constantine’s theology was his own: conversion did not inhibit him from approving the building of a temple to celebrate his own family’s divinity. Evelyn Waugh wrote a poor, pious book about the emperor’s Christian mother, Helena. We regularly crossed the Milvian Bridge to go to the almost deserted 1960 Olympic village, which continued to flaunt a well-stocked, never-crowded supermercato.
Although Rome was thronged with tourists and what the rest of Italy regarded as bloodsucking bureaucrats and venal politicians, it was possible, if not always permitted, to park in the centro cittá. We were advised, by our Australian doctor neighbour Bob Singer, never to pay the marked price in the shops. The trick was to ask, ‘C’é un sconto diplomatico?’ Is there discount for diplomats? ‘But we’re not diplomats,’ I said. Bob said, ‘Who said you were? All you did was ask!’
David Deutsch’s bosses, Nat Cohen and Stuart Levy, made only one stipulation before backing our movie: they wanted the title to be Nothing But the Best. The Best of Everything sounded too cold. It was another small piece of evidence that in the movies anyone can have a good idea. Nat and Stu left the rest to us: they preferred going to the races. Their greatest ambition, eventually achieved, was to lead in the winner of the Grand National. David encouraged me to be bold in ‘opening up’ the action; I was to make the piece as daring as the usual proprieties would allow. Thanks to the lively garrulity of my characters, I accumulated enough pages in the mornings for us to spend every afternoon going, with Paul and Sarah, to a gallery, a church or an archaeological site. Life and art were old neighbours in Rome.
Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita had been a shameless and scabrous hit a year earlier. We followed in the shadow of Anita Ekberg, in her ecclesiastical hat, as we climbed the tight stairs around the dome of St Peter’s and onto the roof with its wide view down to Hadrian’s Tomb and its sugary heaps of marble cannon balls. Jo Janni, whom I met again a few years later, thanks to David Deutsch, told me that the Vatican had been outraged by Fellini’s episode depicting the venal and superstitious exploitation of two slum children’s supposed vision of the Madonna. The appropriate cardinal announced that he was proposing to instruct the faithful to boycott the movie. Fellini was sufficiently alarmed to go, in penitential mode, as it were to Canossa. On his knees, he explained to the cardinal that he was a poor sinner, anxious only to show how degraded Rome had become and how simple people could be manipulated by the freemasonry of the media. Federico could scarcely restrain his tears. The cardinal promised that he now understood the sincerity of the film-maker’s motives. The maestro could rest assured that his visit had not been in vain. With one more realistic sob, the director kissed the cardinal’s ring and went, shaking, from the room. Back on unholy ground, in St Peter’s Square, Federico slammed his left hand against his right biceps in a crude abbraccio, the ‘fuck you’ gesture of the Trastevere working man.
To amuse Paul and Sarah, I dusted off the stories about ancient Rome that ruins or place names recalled, from the Horatii on the bridge to the cackling of the Capitoline geese, from the murder of the divine Julius to the accession of the clumsy C-Claudius and the fiddle-playing Nero. I tried to emulate Guy Ramsey in never talking down, even when talking downwards. At the weekends, we took the autostrada to Assisi or Urbino or Civitavecchia, where Stendhal had once been the French consul. D. H. Lawrence had explored the low-domed Etruscan tombs at nearby Cerveteri and made out the Etruscans to be his kind of dark, instinctive people.
In Italy one can suffer from a surfeit of uplifting refinement. The comic and the grotesque come as a relief. We feared that the Garden of Monsters at Bomarzo might give the children nightmares, but they ran cheerfully into the stone ogre’s mouth and gazed without a blink at the lichened muscular Hercules, poised on the point of ripping the inverted giant Cacus in half. Prince Pier Francesco Orsini built his little park of horrors in the 1570s, to vent his rage against fate after the death of his wife, Giulia Farnese. His counter-cultural parade of horrors was commissioned from the same architect, Pirro Ligorio, who finished the remodelling of Saint Peter’s in Rome after Michelangelo died. On whatever piano nobile, Renaissance artists were also the hirelings of show business, erotic, pastoral or sanctimonious, uplifting, morbid or brutal, as their paymasters required.
Ligorio also designed the Villa d’Este at Tivoli, some 30 kilometres from St Peter’s. With its surging fountains and tumbling man-made waterfalls, Cardinal d’Este’s summer place was adjacent to a restaurant with a wide terrace where the children could run while our abacchio was turning on the spit. Nearby, the Emperor Hadrian’s suburban retirement home embraced a country estate and a miniature town for the mournful emperor’s staff. Hadrian neither liked Rome nor trusted Romans; he preferred Greece, and Greek love. His elderly blues were induced by the death of Antinous, the comely Bithynian ephebe drowned in the Nile in 130 AD. Did he jump? Was he pushed? Rumour promised that Antinous was dismayed by the onset of hairy maturity. Fearful of losing the emperor’s affection, he soaked his cheeks in milk in the hope of staying Hadrian’s baby-faced darling. Perhaps, like Narcissus (‘that plain boy’, someone called him), he looked at his watery reflection too closely and fell into his soft mirror. By the side of the pool in Hadrian’s Tivoli retreat crouched a marble crocodile of the kind that inhabits the Nile.
Rome was an immovable feast. Tacitus, the most stylish of sourpuss historians, said that his countrymen had made the world into a desert and called it peace; Petronius was no less scathing and scarcely less of a prig, though a more outrageous writer. As a result of its legions’ conquests, Rome became the finest repository of stolen property in the world. The Vatican museum was the most sumptuous in the city. Its double helix of staircases confounded Heraclitus by ensuring that the road up and the road down were never the same road. Our favourite museum was the Villa Giulia. The most memorable sculpture in the Villa Giulia is of a man and his wife lounging, close together, on top of a terracotta-coloured sarcophagus. Known as ‘The Happily Married Couple’, they wear the perpetual, enigmatic smiles of those with the wisdom to keep the lid on their uxorious secrets. ‘Don’t never tell’ is a good conjugal rule.
On our way home, whether from Ostia Antica – the least visited, most businesslike of all wide Roman ruins – or from the Baths of Caracalla (an allegedly monstrous emperor who did the Roman people a monumental favour), we would stop at the Gran Caffe Giulio Cesare for capuccini and coppe Olympia (tubs of chocolate-chip ice cream) or the savoury rice-balls known as supplì. We found no accessible expatriate society of the kind we knew in Fuengirola; nor did I miss it.
Now that we had some money, I encouraged Beetle to buy Ferragamo shoes and gloves and to have stylish outfits made for her by a dressmasker recommended by the smiling Ella Singer. In the evenings, we often left Paul and Sarah asleep, under the supervision of the janitor’s agreeable wife, and drove across Rome to whatever restaurant featured in the Michelin looked appetising. I relished the overacting of the Alfredo renowned for his fettuccini. When they were ready to go to table, the lights were dimmed and the padrone came dancing in, purple flames leaping from the oval dish where the pasta writhed in creamy loops.
We saw the new movies (none funnier or more untranslatable than those starring Alberto Sordi) and we shopped on the Via del Corso and up the Via Condotti and on to the Via Veneto. No one questioned our right to a sconto diplomatico. I read Moravia, Pavese, Carlo Levi and Italo Svevo. I even began Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi. Writing Nothing But the Best allowed me the closet pleasure of impersonating the kind of heartless, double-dealing bounder whom I have always been, in practice, too squeamish to emulate. My script
was, in some measure, a displaced homage to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s film, The Scoundrel, which I had seen, between kisses, in company with Mary Jane Lehman in New York City ten years before.
Within a few weeks, I was able to send the first draft of Nothing But the Best to Richard Gregson. He responded, very quickly: it was the best script he had ever read. David Deutsch was eager that I come to England to discuss the second draft with his chosen director, Clive Donner. It seemed no trouble to get in the big blue Vanguard, cushion Paul and Sarah in the back, and drive north with the certainty that we would not be away for long. We went to stay with Joan and Baron Moss. They had moved into a handsome house, with a large garden, in bourgeois Woldingham, Surrey. Baron’s Bentley convertible was in the drive.
Clive Donner had just directed Some People, a worthy piece with Kenneth More, sponsored by the Duke of Edinburgh, about a boy band redeemed from delinquency by musical success. Clive’s reputation was based on his having edited the 1953 hit Genevieve, starring Kay Kendall. Based on the annual Brighton Rally of vintage cars, it had something in common with Lady at the Wheel. Leslie Bricusse had been appearing in An Evening with Beatrice Lillie at the time when ‘sexy Rex’ Harrison was having a flagrant affair with Kay Kendall while he and his wife, the delectable Lilli Palmer, were starring, as they had on Broadway, in John van Druten’s Bell, Book and Candle. It had required no great wit to emend the title to Bell, Book and Kendall. Kay Kendall was now dead.
Clive Donner came from the same part of north-west London as Beetle. Bernard Levin was his cousin. When Nothing But the Best was eventually made, Bernard played the very small part of a drama critic. Since Clive had gone into the movie business as an apprentice, his ascent had something in common with that of my script’s James Brewster, who – like the S Man – was bent on mounting the slippery pole of modern success. Clive was garrulous, friendly and imprecise. He wanted the plot to be expanded, but he had no clear ideas. I listened, I sighed and sometimes I saw, and sharpened, his point. In Stanley Ellin’s plot, which I had had no call to amplify in the tight television version, Jimmy Brewster enrols Charlie Prince, an upper-class remittance man, as his social tutor and then, having graduated as a plausible toff, murders him, puts his body in a trunk in his landlady’s cellar, and takes possession of his income. It then emerges that Charlie was the disgraced brother of the woman on whom James had fastened his purposeful affections. His daughter’s impending wedding leads her father to seek to recall her scapegrace brother from the wilderness. The TV version ended with a trunk, which the viewers knew to contain Charlie’s body, being delivered to the family house. Clive and David thought that the film needed an extra twist or two, which I promised to supply. Once again, arrogance and servility worked easily in tandem, the mark of the classicist.
We returned to the Via Trionfale, where I pinned a quick new tail on the script. There was still enough time left on the Contessa’s lease for me to begin a new novel. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews had been sent to me for review by David Pryce-Jones, who was on the staff of the middle-of-the-road Time and Tide. The magazine’s life was abbreviated by more fashionable journalistic traffic coming at it in both directions, but I have been glad to have David’s lively and unflinching friendship ever since.
Hilberg’s book had a programmatic callousness: his scope was limited by the cold determination to look solely at the means and machinery by which the Nazis and their acolytes, whether conscripted or enthusiastic, contrived to kill some four and a half million men and women and a million and a half children while engaged in a many-fronted war against enemies who made no conspicuous effort to deter them. Hilberg’s book, followed by Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, put an end to a decade and a half of – to put it decorously – reticence concerning Hitler’s genocide.
I began Lindmann with no precise scheme, but with an urgent verve which had nothing to do with my own petty experiences of English anti-Semitism. My main character was a duplicitous, conscience-stricken impostor. That Lindmann was not the Holocaust survivor he claimed to be gave me licence both to be and not to be the chronicler of events of which I, like my main character, had in truth no first-hand experience. Lindmann was an alter ego whom I could inhabit and satirise at the same time. The characters who surrounded him in his London boarding house were drawn from diverse sources, not least from Hans and Juliana, our neighbours in the Calle Tostón. Juliana had told me little about her father or her life in wartime Germany, but enough to furnish my imagination.
My experiences in TV and, more recently, in conversation with Clive Donner and David Deutsch had been enriching in several respects. They also gave me a sense of how commercial considerations trumped all others. Not least the fun of writing scripts lay in arming actors with words they were happy to say and impressing directors with one’s ingenious speed, but I was truly a writer only when alone with the page which, in my case, rarely stayed blank for long. Lindmann was an apology for having played the glad mercenary. The turning point in the plot came when the opportunist Milstein, whom I graced with the thrust of Tom Maschler, appropriated what he thought was Lindmann’s life in order to write a commercial movie about the sinking in the Black Sea of what I called the SS Broda. The first long-playing record we ever owned was of Nathan Milstein playing the Beethoven violin concerto (the second was of Amalia singing fado).
The script within the novel tracked the true story of the Struma, which had sailed from Constanza, in Bulgaria, in 1943, overloaded with desperate Jewish fugitives. Its passengers were denied visas to land in Turkey because the British refused to allow them to enter Palestine. Perhaps of their own volition, more probably under pressure from London, the Turks required the unseaworthy Struma to leave their territorial waters with all its passengers on board. A night or two later, it sank, or was torpedoed, in the Black Sea. There were said to be two survivors, though neither, so far as I knew, had been traced or told his story. In the case of the fictional SS Broda, I postulated one survivor, the eponymous Lindmann.
David and Clive were delighted with the work I had done on Nothing But the Best and promised to begin the process of casting. It seemed likely that our scoundrel-hero would be Alan Bates, who was about to star in A Kind of Loving, directed by John Schlesinger. A screenwriter can always recognise when he has done a good job: he becomes superfluous. The producer and, in particular, the director are likely to assume his work to be theirs. However amiable, they now want the attention of mechanicals and actors to be directed only at them. There might yet be more work for me to do on Nothing But the Best; meanwhile we had a period of grace. We also had the slender means to go to Greece and tempting proximity to it.
XXVI
IN MARCH 1962 we yielded her keys to the Contessa and drove down the Via Appia and across to Bari, where we stayed the night in a big modern hotel. I woke the next morning with a savage sore throat and a high fever. I took aspirin and whatever else the hotel doctor suggested, but I feared we were stalled in limbo. Bari has its charms, but not many. Beetle took Paul and Sarah out and came back again. I sweated and I slept. The next morning, when I took my temperature it was 101.5. I shook the thermometer down and told Beetle that I was normal. We packed and left. By the time we drove onto the dock at Brindisi, the fever was gone. We drove the Vanguard onto the ferry and set sail for Igoumenitsa on the north-eastern coast of Epirus. The Latin term for the Adriatic figured in the Gender Rhymes, which I learned at the age of eleven, appended to Kennedy’s Latin Primer: ‘Masculine will always be / Things that you can touch and see / Masculine will also be Hadria, the Adriatic Sea’.
I began to study ancient Greek – starting with luo, lueis, luei, I let go, you let go, he lets go – when I was ten years old. Not one of my teachers at any stage recommended going to modern Greece. As Byron put it, ‘Fair Greece! Sad relic of departed worth / Immortal, though no more, though fallen, great!’ The only period worthy of prolonged academic attention was the fifth century BC, in which the A
ttic language and the Athenian empire had the double flowering that would be matched by that of England under Elizabeth I.
The eclipse of Athens in the Peloponnesian War was famously said to have ‘taken the spring out of the year’. In fact, the city recovered much of its prosperity, if never the communal vanity that made the theatre, comic and tragic, both a civic embellishment and the crucible in which ideas and vanities were dissected in imagery and dialogue. In the post-classical Greek-speaking world, expanded by Alexander the Great’s bloody crusade, there were many clever Greeks and more clever Greeklings. Writers who lacked Hellenic blood could become, as the Syrian Lucian proved in the second century AD, at once insolent and brilliant in their second tongue.
Like the English language, first mangled and then renovated by fast-talking immigrants into the US, Greek had an elasticity often made snappier by non-native speakers. Traditional classicists pursed their lips at such iconoclasts. Lucian was notorious for deriding the great statue of Zeus that Phidias enthroned in his temple at Olympia (it was said that if Zeus were to stand up, he would take the roof off the building). Lucian’s contemporary, Dio Chrysostom – the man with the golden mouth – said, piously, that a single glimpse of the statue would make a man forget all his earthly troubles. Lucian, the emblematic jobbing journalist, had to think of something less deferential to say. He compared Phidias’s sublime image to that of a listless old man in whom no one any longer had serious faith. In this, he was the predecessor of Stephen de Houghton, whose blasphemous squib procured the decline and rise of Mark Boxer.
Byron visited Epirus when it was a Turkish province. As he rode into Joannina, he saw a human arm and hand hanging from a gibbet; all that remained of a Greek patriot called Evtinnio, who had been tortured for three months, before being hanged, drawn and quartered at the orders of the Turkish governor Ali Pasha, who asked Byron to dinner and admired his ‘fine white hands’ and small ears. ‘I’m very partial to Englishmen,’ Ali told him. ‘I particularly love English sailors.’ Byron, like many British travellers, was appalled and beguiled by ruthless tyrants, even though he was willing to risk his life to unseat the Turks who had out-Xerxesed Xerxes.
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