by Jay Parini
I hadn’t, at first, been aware of Grant’s social isolation, which was largely self-imposed. Because my arrival in April coincided with his birthday, my first impression was misleading. I was, in fact, dazzled by the company he and Vera managed to assemble on the beach that night. In a fell swoop, my address book filled with local phone numbers and addresses, and I had invitations to call at half a dozen villas. (“Who would have guessed you would be popular?” Vera remarked, calling on me in my cottage the next morning, bringing hot tea in a Thermos.) But I did not immediately attempt to widen my circle.
I sensed that Grant wished for the Villa Clio to remain aloof, a place where private fantasies were indulged, and where Art—his writing, Vera’s cooking and gardening—occurred unobstructed by anything but their own demons. The dinner parties, plentiful in my first month on the island, disguised a lack of genuine desire to mingle; Rupert and Vera invited people to watch them, not to interact; the conviviality was, in part, a facade, a means of structuring and confirming their isolation. By late May, fewer and fewer guests crossed our threshold.
Holly and Marisa, in their different ways, had bought into Grant’s vision of privacy and self-indulgence, and together with Vera and the servants they formed a solar system of sorts, with Grant himself the supernova at the center, supplying the necessary heat and light. Vera was the nearest planet, but a cold one, her atmosphere—layers of protective ice and fog—difficult for ordinary human beings to fathom, although she had sunlit clearings where great warmth and understanding could be found. Maria Pia was a little moon, circling Vera, as was Mimo, who glowered from the sidelines, a gardener who was more eyes than hands. Marisa and Holly were equidistant from the star, although they managed to sustain enough distance—emotional and physical—from each other to avoid clashing in their orbit around him. I was trying, anxiously, to find my place in this system.
Often I lingered in the cottage by myself, scribbling in my journal, writing home, rereading my brother’s letters from Vietnam. He would have been a marvelous reporter, with his eye for the luminous detail. He often placed himself in situations of danger, and enjoyed talking about them with casual detachment. I caught glimpses of a brothel in Saigon, an opium den in a village, a night patrol in a remote province, where the threat of ambush made every step, every cracked branch underfoot or wild animal in the brush, a cause for panic. “There are eyes in the jungle,” Nicky wrote, “eyes everywhere, and they’re fucking malevolent. There are no kind eyes in Vietnam. It’s all death here. Even the sex drips death like water in a dark cave.”
I told no one about Nicky, fearing their pity. That would have been unbearable. It came as some relief that they remained oblivious to the outside world, where wars raged, people starved, dictators dictated, and vast sums of money passed among a few controlling hands. The Grants read few newspapers and never watched television. The Villa Clio, indeed, had no television set. “You can acquire only one station,” Vera explained. “Nothing but bloody local stuff anyway. Telecapri is hardly a station at all. More like a peasant family feud.”
Politics rarely arose in conversation, though the Grants were essentially Tories. They despised Harold Wilson and the Labour government, who in their opinion appealed to “the lowest common denominator” in British society. The TUC, the national trades union organization, was ridiculed as “a gang of hooligans” by Vera. Oddly enough, I found myself nodding in agreement when Grant and Vera bemoaned the “bogus socialist notion of equality.” (Vera’s Jewish grandfather had been dislodged from a position of prominence in Latvia by the Bolsheviks, although she was born in London and completely absorbed into the British upper-middle class.) At that time, I shared Grant’s unequivocal belief in the superiority of the artist, in the privilege conferred by pure acts of imagination; I, too, disliked the “world of mass production” that was Grant’s favorite bugaboo. His blithe assumptions about class unsettled me, though I dismissed my reservations as American gaucherie. At least he and Vera never referred to the Vietnam War, which was probably of less interest to them than the Boer War.
Complicating my situation at the Villa Clio were my feelings for Holly. After our initial, botched, encounter on the beach, she remained wary of me, or so I thought. She barely acknowledged any gestures of friendship I put forward, as when I asked her to stop by the cottage one afternoon for tea. English girls could hardly object to invitations to tea, could they? “Yes, that would be nice,” she had replied, “but not today. Another time, perhaps.” She seemed to suggest—or so I imagined—that no day would be the right day.
Holly and Marisa, each driven by their own ambitions, got along surprisingly well under the circumstances. They often joined forces at the dinner table, with Vera, to tease Grant (who seemed to luxuriate in this teasing, which was a form of flattery). They shared a suite at the villa: two small bedrooms in a separate wing, at the opposite end of where Grant and Vera slept in a big yellow room with a view across the Marina Piccola to the Punta di Mulo, with its ragged angostine cliffs. I wondered how sharing such close quarters was possible, given their rivalrous connections to Grant. He seemed arbitrarily to pick one or the other to serve as his “research assistant” for the day, and this involved not only long sessions in his study but morning swims, walks, and “naps.” This was a form of what the behavioral psychologists called intermittent reinforcement: the most vicious and powerful type of reward, and one that turned laboratory mice into little neurotic fuzz balls willing to perform any species-demeaning task for a drop of sugar water.
In the early morning, I occasionally met Holly by the pool, where she sat with the manuscript of her Capri novel on her lap—it had recently topped a hundred pages, she said. When I asked to read some of it, she refused. “Only when it’s finished,” she said. “I don’t present work-in-progress.” The book was overly influenced, she claimed, by Evelyn Waugh, whose work I’d never read. “You must, absolutely must, read him,” she insisted. I was lent a copy of A Handful of Dust, and found it delicious as well as shocking. It also explained to me a good deal about the world of upper class British society, which until my arrival at the Villa Clio had been largely unknown to me.
“You fancy Holly, don’t you?” Vera asked, while her husband and Holly were still in Rome. We sat alone in the dining room, lingering over coffee one day after lunch.
“I suppose,” I said.
“Rupert won’t like that.”
I feigned confusion, and this annoyed Vera.
“Rupert tells me that she’s good at fellatio,” she said. “You’re familiar with the term, I presume.”
Vera was disconcerting, without emotional boundaries, and willing to say anything that came into her head.
“I don’t mind his girls,” she said. “I wish you could believe that.” Her intimate tone, the sense of trusting me with her private life, won me over. “You needn’t worry about Rupert and Holly,” she said. “She’s nothing special, not to him. One of many in a long string of amusements. Seize the day, darling. Isn’t that what you poets advise?”
“She isn’t interested in me,” I explained. “You see how she treats me.”
“Like a poor, dumb booby,” she said.
A poor, dumb booby.
“Poor baby!” Vera continued, “I’ve hurt your feelings.”
“A little,” I said.
“Have you made your sentiments clear to Holly?”
“Not really,” I said. “I should just give up.”
Vera sighed and put down her cup. “Are you queer, Alex?”
“What?”
“Queer. Patrice is queer, isn’t he? I don’t mind—the island is crawling with buggers.”
I did not respond, flummoxed.
She studied me carefully. “About you, I’m uncertain. But it’s bloody obvious that Patrice is queer.”
“Not to me.”
“You are not as alert as you might be.”
That was understating the case. I began to wonder if I could possibly navig
ate the world of Capri, where every goal was obscured by the mesmerizing light, refracted in a zillion ways. Motives were hidden or difficult to parse. Lo pazzo d’isola, as the locals called it, permeated everything, but it was worse at the Villa Clio. The island madness heaped here, spoonful after spoonful like whipped cream, with nuts sprinkled on top.
“Seize the day, Alex,” Vera said, with false urgency. “Isn’t that what poets do?”
“With Holly?”
“Why not?” she asked. “It would not, of course, delight Rupert. But who cares?”
The month of my arrival remained the peak of contact between myself and Rupert Grant, a period when he seemed determined to win me over. I had tried to impress him, too, roughing out the Tiberius chapter for him in four days by poring over a Latin dictionary well past midnight. Reading over my translation carefully, I decided it was not as rough as I’d first imagined. The prose was clear, even fluent, with graceful flourishes. I put the manuscript on his desk one afternoon with a barely feigned modesty.
“Come, sit beside me,” he said, lifting my typescript. There was a scold in his voice, a slight edge of disapproval. “Let’s see what you’ve accomplished.”
Warily, I pulled up a chair; he had a schoolmaster’s way of lowering his bushy eyebrows that made me highly self-conscious.
He donned his wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair like a waterfall in reverse. His manner bordered on interrogation, yet his presence thrilled me: he was an emotional and intellectual generator, and I wanted to clamp my cables onto him, to let his power flow into me. For at least twenty minutes he read to himself, occasionally mouthing a few words sotto voce, leaving me to gaze around the room.
I found it impossible to sit near a bookcase without studying the titles, alternately awed and depressed by the number of books I hadn’t read. In particular, I was drawn to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in twelve volumes, the maroon spines with gold lettering. Although I had studied Roman history at Columbia, I was hazy on the details, and made a vow to plow through Gibbon as soon as possible. The thought that Grant might quiz me about the emperors made me queasy. Before attempting this translation, I should have looked up what Gibbon had to say about Tiberius; it seemed unlikely that an emperor so esteemed by many had become a titan of self-indulgence—especially in the final years on Capri, when (to quote Suetonius) “having gained the license of privacy, he gave free rein at once to all the vices which he had for a long time barely concealed.”
“Pay attention, Lorenzo,” Grant said.
I leaned toward him, chastened, watching as he began to “correct” my work. Everywhere the fuzzy adjectives dissolved, absorbed into stronger nouns. “Adjectives are the writer’s enemy,” Grant said. “If you had got the right noun, you wouldn’t need these bloody qualifiers.” The same held with verbs, he said. I witnessed the blotting out of countless adverbs; often he transformed the verbs as well; thus “ran swiftly” became “sped.” “You must find the right word,” he said. “It needn’t be fussy, just full-blooded. Let it carry all the freight it can.” He quoted some lines from Eliot: “‘The common word exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not pedantic.’ That’s the thing, what?”
With a thick horizontal line from his fountain pen he crossed out countless versions of the verb “to be.” “What’s all this was, was, was? Bad habit, Lorenzo.” He urged me to use the active voice whenever possible. Thus, “Tiberius was somewhat held in check by the presence of Germanicus” became “The presence of Germanicus held Tiberius in check.” “That ‘somewhat’ is foul,” Grant scoffed. “You’re equivocating. Resist the impulse.” I watched as prose I had considered quite sophisticated and polished became tougher, grainier, more direct. He glanced at the manuscript, with his multiple erasures and corrections, and seemed to understand what I was feeling. “Look here,” he said, “I’m not trying to change you, only to correct bad habits. There’s a tune there, in your writing. I hear it, and that’s a good sign. Every writer needs a tune.”
I knew this, and was afraid of losing a tune that, however small, I had cultivated with some diligence.
“Revision won’t kill the tune,” he told me. “It actually brings out the tune. That’s the point of it.”
I said, “I’d like to show you one of my poems.”
“By all means,” he said. “But I won’t spare your feelings. I’ve never known how to be tactful with young people about their work. It’s why I gave up teaching. Spent a bloody awful year as Professor Grant, in Malaysia, just after the war. That was enough for me, thank you. Threw in the towel when a young lady threatened suicide because I challenged her scansion.”
Many of Grant’s more colorful anecdotes were invented, but they held one’s attention. I assured him I wouldn’t try to kill myself, no matter how ferocious his critique, but his warning frightened me; it would be some time before I dared to lay a poem on his desk. Nonetheless, I left his study that morning encouraged by the unexpected tutorial in composition—better than anything I’d encountered at Columbia. He was right about my prose. I vowed to bring him more to read in a few days, and I promised that the work would be tighter and stronger.
“Good lad,” he said, dismissing me. Already his mind had turned to his own manuscript, the book on Capri, now gathering pages on his desk.
two
At the beginning of his second month in Vietnam, Nicky was shipped out of Saigon. “I don’t want some patsy-ass assignment,” he wrote. He wanted to get “out there, where it’s happening, whatever it is. Like Saturday night back in Pittston. If you weren’t out, you were a dickhead, a wussy who got no pussy. Like you, Alex. Always home on the weekends, your nose in a goddamn book, dick in hand.”
Dear Asshole,
I went and did it, yesterday. Not a month up here, and—you guessed it—I fucking killed a guy. Some poor bastard, and I didn’t even mean to waste him. Was just sitting in a tree, minding my own business on the trail, thinking about nothing but pussy. Only half a mile from camp—playing lookout like we did as kids. We do it here all the time, taking turns on the trail near camp, keeping an eye open for the goddamn enemy. You just sit in a tree, M-16 on your lap. In daylight, you can read a book if you got a book you want to read. Or sit there and think about things. Or don’t think about things.
You ever notice how, in the middle of some goddamn mess, everything seems so quiet? There is life, crumbling under your feet, and it’s all smiles and kissy-kissy. Suddenly, wham. Reality sticks a finger in your eye. It’s all over you, and over before you know what hit.
So there I was, sitting like a tree frog happy as shit, and this Commie walks out of nowhere. Black pajamas, sandals, Soviet weapons, the works, but all by his lonesome. Like he stumbled out of bed in the middle of the day, going down to take a piss in his pj’s. A skinny little guy, walking along in a daze, kind of lost. I figured back in his village he was probably nothing special. A bike mechanic, maybe. The sort of guy who would bag groceries in Skettino’s or pump gas at the Chevron. But what do I know? All I really know is I caught him top down. Put a hole in the back of his head that took away the whole fucking front part, ripped it right off, the face mask. Caught him again between the shoulder blades as he fell.
Half a dozen guys came running. Our guys, not their guys. We never found anybody else from their team in the vicinity. (He must have been on some private expedition, looking for butterflies. This place has these big white butterflies—like snowflakes in hell.) My team, they were ready to mow, man. I mean, Micky Donato’s a big guy, and he came running ahead of everyone, spraying bullets from an M-60, his goddamn machine gun. Eddie was behind him, Eddie Sloane, the Iowa guy, my cornpone half-Injun friend, with his medical kit and a .45 caliber pistol, waving it overhead like the Lone Ranger and Tonto in one uniform. Then comes Jimbo Samuels, Black Jimbo, a skinny black kid from the Bronx, lugging his stoner, one of the those big motherfucker guns, and Fink O’Malley and Buzz Baxter. They were big-eyed, scared, excited
as shit. Fink especially.
I don’t know how he got to be called Fink, but it’s how he introduced himself. O’Malley is from Boston, and he keeps a Red Sox pennant rolled up in his knapsack, for luck. A mixed-up bastard if I ever saw one, a walking medicine chest, with dope and tranquilizers, uppers and downers, inners and outers. He’s got creams, too: for jock itch and toe rot, for blisters and boils. American skin wasn’t made for jungles. Buzz is, well, another story. A bear of very little brain. Doesn’t say peep to nobody, but he likes comic books—Spider-Man, Batman, Superman. One day he’s gonna fly away, they say. Surprise everybody and fly away from this fucked-up shithole of a country.
Yes, they all agreed, the motherfucker was dead. Fucking eliminated. So we dug a hole and shoved him into it. It was too close to camp to just let the shredded wheat rot on the trail, which is usually what happens here. I mean, you don’t go around packaging the goods, burying them. And they don’t come with choppers and body bags and flags and shit, like we do. We pick off ten guys, they say, for every one of us they get. Which is good arithmetic, unless you’re on the short end of the equation, which I don’t intend to be.
You can only get so much from scenery, but I got to say, the scenery here is something else, especially in the highlands. I was telling Eddie it’s like the Poconos only with palm trees and kamikaze mosquitoes. Vines and bamboos, all that Tarzan shit. I was thinking of Tarzan when that poor bastard in the black pj’s walked under my perch and got himself blasted on the old bean.