by Irwin Shaw
The happiest moment of the voyage, so far as relations between Captain and passengers was concerned, came here, when I told the Captain to get the whaler off our deck and park it forever in the nearest boatyard. He was so delighted he didn’t charge me for the storage fee, the only such financial lapse he was guilty of in the six weeks of our voyage.
We left him to his task and hired a small motorboat with bright cushions. As we chugged around the peninsula, hundreds of sails were bobbing along the curve of coastline of Sestri Levante in the distance. Nearer by, perched on the sheer rock high above the sea, is the impressive dwelling of one of the great publishers of Italy, Mondadori, who published d’Annunzio and who loved that flamboyant man. Mondadori delights in telling you how extravagant d’Annunzio was and what enormous amounts he, Mondadori, advanced to the poet, who lived not like a poet but like a medieval baron. Once Mondadori tried to get d’Annunzio to scale his expenditures down to a more modest level and pointed out how much in debt to him d’Annunzio was and how nearly impossible it was for d’Annunzio to write enough to repay his advances in his lifetime. “That is true,” d’Annunzio said, with a lordly gesture. “But do not worry. You will make it all back on my royalties when I am dead.” “And,” Mondadori says, laughing comfortably as he tells the story, “I have, I have.”
A better poet than d’Annunzio lived in Portofino for a long time—Robert Graves, whose house still dominates the entire sweep of sea and mountains from a crest behind the town. But Graves has left Portofino for Majorca and the Chair of Poetry at Oxford, and if there are poets now in Portofino they are lost among the tourists and the pretty German mannequins.
RAPALLO
In Rapallo we picked up a tiny second- or twelfth-hand outboard motor, which functioned from time to time on a secret Italian schedule, the code of which had been lost with the defeat of Fascism on the peninsula. We anchored off Rapallo for a swim and lunch and were hailed just before we were to sit down by a catamaran rowed by an Inca-colored young athlete who acted with white-toothed good humor toward his passenger, an English lady who seemed well over sixty and who sat proudly on the catamaran’s planks in a gauzy pale dress, protecting herself with a parasol against the sun. She had been attracted by our flag, she said, which was the Union Jack, since she, too, was English. While the athlete kept the catamaran close to our sides, she disclosed, in rapid succession, the fact that she was English, that she was a cousin of the Queen, that she was a widow, that she suffered terribly from her back, which she had hurt falling down a flight of steps, that no English ships put in at Rapallo anymore, that Alfredo (the athlete) treated her charmingly, that she was lonely, since one could not invite to one’s house any of the people who had now descended on the Coast. Roguishly, she said, when I told her that, though we sailed under the British Ensign, we were American, “Ah—I suppose you’re going to have one of those lovely American Martinis before lunch.” I have met enough lady drunkards in my life to understand when I am being invited to offer them a drink, but I had the feeling that once aboard, with or without the athlete, I would have had to call on the nearest British Ambassador to dislodge her. So I played the role of the dull American who has to be hit over the head with a hammer before he can take a hint, and made sure our ladder was kept safely stowed on deck. Regretfully, with a hundred little cousin-of-the-Queen bird cries, she ordered the athlete to make toward port, the parasol a pink charlotte russe against the shoreline, now populated, sadly, by tens of thousands of people a lonely English lady could not possibly think of inviting for dinner.
PORTOVENERE
After Portofino we put in at another place that had had its poet in its time. This is Portovenere, a town at the mouth of the Gulf of Spezia from which, in 1822, Byron set out to swim to visit Shelley at Lerici on the other side of the Gulf four miles away. One wonders how many poets can swim four miles in the 1960’s and what their time would be for the distance.
A grotto is named for Byron at Portovenere and a plaque in rhetorical Italian commemorates his feat. Poets visit each other differently nowadays, if they visit each other at all, and one cannot help but regret the change. The imagination re-creates with zest the vision of the author of Childe Harold rising bull-shouldered and beautiful from the foam to greet that other odd Englishman on the sunny Italian beach nearly a century and a half ago, and it is interesting to speculate on what their first words were—“Here, have a towel,” or, “You must be dying for a drink,” or, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” or, “How’s it going these days?” Whatever was said, and even with our knowledge of how soon it was all going to be over for both of them, it all seems simpler and friendlier and somehow more talented than life among the Muses these days. How does Eliot greet Spender on Bloomsbury’s edge? What does Auden say to Ginsberg on 57th Street?
The town of Portovenere rises steeply from the waterfront. The houses are four or five stories high, but only one window wide, and everybody’s laundry seems permanently out to dry. The streets behind are the streets of poverty, narrow and climbing past meager shops and backyard grape arbors up to the hill above the town and the fortress whose stones bear witness to a more important past. The town does not seem to have attracted many vacationers, due perhaps to the fact that the swimming in the gulf is often spoiled by oil from the tanks of the ships that pass here on their way to the great naval port of La Spezia.
We climbed at sunset to the sixth century church of San Pietro, octagonal and hushed on its cliff high above the sea. An old woman was vigorously scrubbing the worn paving of the floor, combining sanctity and a housewifely love of cleanliness in the lucent stillness of the evening wind. Down below, on the town side, disregarding the stone presence of the centuries, some boys were playing soccer football on a field inside the ramparts, the quickness of their movements and the innocence of their sport intensified for the onlooker by the menacing grey crenellations of the walls, through which cannon had been trained at other times.
It was at Portovenere that I became conscious of a sound I then heard throughout Italy—a crisp rhythmic clicking, as though whole populations were engaged in a mass game of Ping-Pong. It came from the tap of wooden clogs on cement and stone, and it finally became a comforting, unhurried background to all our harbor-side activities.
Moored next to us in the harbor was a tiny sailboat, perhaps fourteen feet in length, with blankets rigged up to keep out the sun and a browned, athletic looking man with long hair sitting among what looked like hundreds of books, taking notes. When we spoke to him, he told us that he had sailed from England to Portovenere in six weeks, going through the rivers and canals of France to the Mediterranean and then along the French and Italian coasts to Portovenere. In conversation, it quickly turned out that he was half-Japanese, although it was impossible to tell it from his looks; that he was retired; that he was on his way to Africa in his little craft; that he had taught swimming in Japan; that he lived on three small bowls of rice a day, boiled in seawater; that he was awaiting his five-year-old daughter, who was arriving from England in a few days and who would then serve as crew for the rest of the voyage. He wrote, he said, a book a year, which is not bad for a man who considers himself retired. When I asked him what the books are about he said, simply, “Sport,” much as Tolstoi might have answered, when asked to describe the theme of Anna Karenina, “Love.” Then he added, turning back to his floating library, “Look up Yachting Magazine of May. There’s a big story about me.”
Much later, when I returned home, I did look up Yachting Magazine for May. I conscientiously went through every page. I learned a considerable amount about Norwegian coastal charts, about stabilizers for small vessels, and about building your own catamaran, but found nary a word about my literary friend. Perhaps I had the wrong May.
When we left Portovenere the next day, we waved at the little craft in which our friend was diligently writing before setting out for Africa with his five-year-old daughter. That morning
I felt that our ship was ludicrously oversized and that our voyage, compared to his, was about as adventurous as a trip on the Fifth Avenue bus from Altman’s to Saks.
VIAREGGIO
Viareggio, which was where we put in next, was, according to all reports, a charming seaside town, but it has been ruined by an overabundance of natural advantages. It has the best beach on the western coast of Italy, a wide stretch of fine white sand extending for miles against a background of pine forests. Now it is a solid mass of hotels and apartment houses built in an angular and unattractive modern style. The Italians, who, at least in the North, construct business buildings that are daring and strikingly original, fail miserably when it is a question of putting up habitations for non-commercial Twentieth Century Man.
At Viareggio the beach is lined by endless rows of bathhouses that look like barracks, the sea pullulates with swimmers, the main avenue that runs parallel to the beach is honky-tonk and gaudy and resounds to the strains of juke boxes from which come, endlessly, day and night, the hideous strains of Italian singers pretending to be Elvis Presley. Shelley, who was washed up on this beach with Plato in his pocket after the fatal storm, would certainly have chosen another piece of coast to memorialize if his boat had been overturned in our summer. Viareggio now is no place for poets to drown.
We tied up in an inner harbor that is reached by a canal. En route we passed a huge, ornate copy of a royal Egyptian barge mounted on dry land. This was used by a film company in the making of one of those historical epics with which the Italian movie industry has tried to prove that not all Italians are geniuses at making movies.
There were six or seven other yachts tied up in the small harbor, all close together in the stagnant and filthy water. Two ship-building yards gave on the harbor, sending forth a horrid volume of industrial noise, and our gangway led down off the stern to railroad tracks that ran within two feet of the water’s edge. When one thinks of cruising on a private boat on the Mediterranean, the image that automatically comes to mind is of white craft moored for the night in the crystal waters of some lovely cove, or anchored against a background of a spotless and charming fishing village. The truth, unfortunately, is most often completely different. Unless you are the captain of your own boat, you will find that given a choice of beauty or security for their vessels, all captains will make like homing pigeons for the snuggest and most crowded part of the most noisome harbor. Even during a stretch of three weeks of absolute calm and perfect weather, your captain lives in constant dread of The Wind That Is Liable To Spring Up In The Night. To forestall this threat, your honest chartered captain will tie up happily next to a Greek steamer built in 1887 which has been carrying fish-meal ever since, or next to a sewer outlet or a boiler factory, so long as he is assured that no vagrant wave or gust of wind can reach him. The result of all this is that the most elegant of vessels collect nightly in unhygienic slums of incomparable squalor, and their owners or lessees drink their champagne against a background more or less reminiscent of a southern adaptation of Gorki’s Lower Depths.
There is a new type of craft that is becoming increasingly popular on the Mediterranean—a swift cabin cruiser constructed with the rakish flair for design that has made Italian automobiles the most dashing in the world. They come in various sizes and can go up to thirty knots and are particularly suited to the kind of fair-weather cruising people enjoy on this coast, which is to make short, high-speed jumps from one port to another, with most of the living done up on deck. So the space below is rationed, most of the interior being taken up by the huge engines and the great fuel tanks necessary for them. Everything is cleverly arranged, like a Pullman roomette, for greatest efficiency, and the power of the engines makes it possible to outrun bad weather and get into port before the sea rises to its full malevolence.
A large cruiser of this type was moored next to us and we saw the crew, which consisted of a leathery sailor of about fifty and a boy of eighteen, doing a great deal of scrubbing and polishing until long after sunset. The owners were nowhere in evidence and we invited the two men on board for a drink, which involved nothing more strenuous than stepping over the two rails and onto our deck. The old sailor, speaking a mixture of French and Italian, chose whisky, but the youth, who had grown up in Italy’s American age, opted for Coca-Cola. After the second whisky, the old sailor, who had followed the sea since the age of fifteen, offered to show us around his boat. Everything was glistening and polished and in place, and we admired the pretty little coquettish master cabin aft and the gleaming bathroom with that utmost of yachting luxuries, an electric toilet. The boat was fitted out with all the most recent electronic equipment and the engine room, where hundreds of tools were neatly ranged in tiers against the bulkheads, was spacious and impressive-looking, with the two huge brutes of motors, oiled and glittering, lying bedded there, massive and potent. With all this, the old sailor was not enthusiastic about his job. It wasn’t a boat for sailors, he said. It went too fast, was in and out of harbors too often, vibrated too much, made too much noise, made nonsense of storm warnings. He always had a headache when at sea, he said, and he was always too busy when in port polishing things and keeping the complicated electrical equipment in order. He told me what the craft cost and I whistled in astonishment at the magnitude of the figure.
The owner, he said, was a lawyer and senator from Tuscany, and I climbed back to our boat depressed. On a holiday, when one had wanted to forget the sorrowful ins-and-outs of the world, one hated to think of what advice the lawyer had given, what votes the senator had cast, to amass the money for such an extravagant toy.
ELBA
At dawn we lifted anchor and went out the canal past the Egyptian barge to the open Tyrrhenian, on the way to Elba. In mid-morning we halted, the sea beneath us a thousand feet deep, and swam in bright blue water as placid as a pool, the movement of our arms making sapphire bubbles drip from our fingertips and the brilliant light refracted for fathoms below us making us feel as though we were swimming in acres of summer sky. Later we saw two small blunt-headed whales slowly humping and diving on the surface, following a school of sardines.
I think that probably the only visitor who did not fall in love with Elba at first sight must have been Napoleon, and he, as it turned out, had other things on his mind at the time. It is a green and fertile island, neither too small nor too large. That is, it is large enough so that you do not have the feeling of being trapped and not so large that you lose the peculiar, cozy sense that you are on an island. The harbor is wide and clean and capacious, the buildings of Portoferraio white in the sunlight. There is a fortress overlooking the city from a low hill that makes a pleasing silhouette against the sky and has the added charm of being obviously indefensible in this day and age.
Naturally, like good tourists, we followed the great imperial N’s painted as guiding signs on the sides of buildings to the palace on the hill which the Coalition, with a generosity no longer conceivable in our world, gave to Napoleon after his defeat. Fittingly enough, among the tourists making their way down the steep streets after a visit to the palace we heard only English and German being spoken, the descendants of Wellington and Blücher getting a renewed satisfaction, a century and a half after the event, in this souvenir of victory.
The palace itself, set on a hill in gardens that look out on a suitably majestic panorama of mountains and sea, is a delightful mansion, but it is understandable that Napoleon thought it tacky after Versailles and felt he had to press on to Waterloo and St. Helena.
We returned to the boat and took our dinghy to the mouth of the harbor to swim. Since we had bought the outboard motor my son had appointed himself admiral of our fleet. Like most admirals, he mistrusted the men who served under him and was nervy and short-tempered with all subordinates during maneuvers. We gave the name dinghy-fever to this development, and the phrase has stuck in the family vocabulary ever since, so that whenever we run across anyone who is making too big a production of responsibility in any
field, including driving a car or directing an actress or seating a large dinner, we mutter to each other, “dinghy-fever,” a convenient verbal shorthand to describe a widespread failing of the human race.
We swam at the foot of a fortress tower which had guarded the entrance in other times and which had been blown open by some naval assailant who didn’t want to be bothered with that particular obstacle anymore. Two enormous anchors lay rusting, half out of the water, at the base of the tower, to remind us that it had not always been sunny and peaceful on this green island, that brave ships had come this way and had been fought and sunk in these waters.
In the afternoon we hired a car and drove around the island, which is indented with protected coves and blessed with snug fishing ports and tilled green fields reaching down across the rolling hills to the edge of the sea. My wife, whose dream it is to have a house of her own on the coast of the Mediterranean, had already decided that Elba was the place for her and tried to make me promise to say nothing to excite a tourist’s interest in anything I wrote about our voyage. But I am not the man to shortchange a reader to pamper my wife’s desire for real estate, and it is my duty to report that, on a bright summer’s afternoon, Elba is an Eden populated by Italians and girt by a friendly sea, the like of which is not mentioned in Genesis. What’s more, the word is out, and according to everybody who is interested in these things Elba has already been discovered. In proof of this there are new hotels going up on the island, some of them very swank indeed, with swimming pools and American bars and, alas, announcements that there will be a dance band next week. Temple Fielding, who in his yearly books lays down the law on these matters to countless Americans, has already pointed out, in his rough-hewn but quite accurate prose, that Elba is a coming place, and I told my wife that I doubted that even my total silence would reduce the soaring price of land here by as much as ten lire a square meter.