by Irwin Shaw
My wife said one or two things about the intelligence network of the American Express and we got back into the car. Disregarding all suggestions of our guide, we directed him sea-wards in search of a restaurant where we could lunch and be cool at the same time.
After lunch, in the blazing heat, we set out resolutely for Vesuvius. A good paved road winds through apricot orchards, vineyards and lava beds almost to the summit. The last lap of the ascent is covered by a teleferique which starts at a small café high on the baking hillside. Halfway up our car began to labor. Suddenly there was an explosion under the hood, it flew open with a jet of steam and pieces of metal erupted onto the road. With distracted cries of apology and alarm our driver stopped the car and went scurrying after the bits of Alfa Romeo that had become separated from the rest of the car in the explosion. There was no shade, and we sweltered in the naked heat while the poor man worked to put the parts back into their proper place. Since no one in my family can make any claims as an Alfa Romeo expert we couldn’t offer to help, but could only suffer with the chauffeur as car after car, all of them smaller and less impressive than ours, swept past us, their occupants favoring us with pitying looks, on their way up to the crater of the volcano.
Unhappily, the view of the Bay of Naples, which is justly famous, was closed away from us by haze, so we did not even have that pleasure to console ourselves with while waiting, pessimistically, for the repairs to be made. Finally the driver announced that he thought the car was ready to move again. We got in, and although some very strange noises issued from under the hood, we made the climb to the teleferique station. We noticed that the cable stopped moving just as we reached the station, but thought nothing of it until we went into the café to buy our tickets.
There we were told by the owner of the café that the machinery had just broken down and it would be at least a day before it would run again. This was too much for my son, and he burst out in his swiftest street-Italian with an angry account, for the owner’s benefit, of what he thought of the custodians of Pompeii, the American Express, and the company that ran the accommodations on Vesuvius. His tone was bitter, and while in general I approve of a certain amount of stoicism from children in the face of misfortune, I could not help but be sympathetic, since to be deprived of both Pompeii and Vesuvius on the same day is a bit hard to take at the age of eleven.
The owner listened interestedly, but at the end merely shrugged, offered us a Coca-Cola and said, with the utmost resignation, “Viva Italia.”
The driver, trying nervously to make up for the calamities that had accumulated around his head, suggested that we could climb to the crater on foot. It would only take about an hour, he said. Since even a man in an asbestos suit would have been broiled alive in that shadeless lava barbecue before going five hundred yards, we thanked him for his suggestion but felt forced to turn it down.
Glumly, we returned to Naples and went to the aquarium, the coolest place in town, and looked at pickled sharks.
Our luck was running no better when we got back to our boat. In our absence a movie company had moved in on the narrow breakwater to which we were moored, with trucks, generators, lights, Rolls Royces, actors, dozens of grips and carpenters, and assistant directors who kept shouting hoarsely while platforms were being hammered together on rafts around a two-masted yacht thirty feet away from us that was to be the scene of the shooting. The shooting, I was told, was going to go on all night. Policemen were doing their best to keep the curious crowds in check, with no great success. Our Captain came up with the news that nothing had happened yet about the refrigerator, and I had a long drink, thoroughly chilled with a large lump of ice from the chest on the deck.
At dusk, the Captain announced that he had spoken to the agent and the agent had told him it would take at least two more days to get the refrigerator fixed. Since by that time Naples had lost most of its charm for me, I told the Captain we wanted to go to Capri in the morning, establish ourselves in a quiet hotel and wait there while the Captain took the boat back to Naples and had the refrigerator fixed or blown up or had the boat completely rebuilt, as he saw fit.
Not wishing to dine in the ulcer-producing atmosphere of a movie company on location and not enjoying the prospect of being watched by ten thousand Neapolitans while I ate an English boiled dinner, I invited my family to one of the fish restaurants that spread their tables alongside the main harbor. We met the French writer Romain Gary there, and the conversation, between the fried squid and the grilled rouget, not unexpectedly touched on the subject of critics and the various ways writers react to bad reviews. I told of one playwright, rich, magnificently gifted and famous throughout the world, who sits down quite simply and weeps when he reads a bad review, even if it is only in Woman’s Wear Daily or The Partisan Review. Another writer I know celebrates unpleasant news of this kind by walking up and down Fifth Avenue, going into every shop and buying almost everything in sight on a wild, defiant spending spree. My own reaction to bad notices of a play of mine is either to sit down the next morning and start a new play or to call my agent and tell him to try to get me a job writing a movie, depending upon the state of my bank balance at the moment.
Gary has a better system. He does not publish a book until he has completely finished another, the idea being that he does not want the new book to be influenced by either praise or condemnation of the old one. But he is French and logical and writes at great speed, and I saw no possibility of an impatient but slow American writer profiting from this wise example.
After this happy seminar on disaster control we parted, Gary to continue on his way toward Paris, my family and I to face up to our tepid maritime way of life.
My son spent the rest of the evening composing a letter to the President of American Express, while the assistant directors roared on, the Rolls Royces passed and re-passed, the carpenters hammered, the crowds massed on the breakwater, and huge lights were turned on and off to the sound of the whirring generator. At three A.M., when I finally gave up trying to sleep, I went into the galley and stared for a long time at the refrigerator.
CAPRI
Since the time when Tiberius built his seven villas on the island and swam in the Blue Grotto with his favorites, Capri has probably lost some of its chic; but in good weather, just a little before the full season begins with its overwhelming crowds, it is a fine place for a short holiday. Although the eccentrics who once made it celebrated have been swamped by the bourgeoisie of five continents, the newcomers loyally try to seem eccentric, quite often with considerable success.
To add to the attractions of climate, landscape and architecture, there are no automobiles in the town proper, which is half-way up the side of the dominating mountain. It is surprising with what deep, subconscious gratitude the modern man responds to a place where he knows he cannot be run down, honked at, or poisoned by gasoline fumes. The streets are narrow, up and down, and gay with life. A variety of shamefully young and provocatively dressed olive-skinned girls seem to spend their time, out of pure public-spiritedness, merely walking back and forth all day long through the little square filled with people drinking at the café tables, or past the shops that offer brilliantly colored tight-fitting pants, bolero jackets, pink denim shirts, espadrilles, fresh-pressed orange juice, antiques, Pucci blouses, pizza pies, scanty bathing suits, and bottles of Capri wine from dawn to midnight.
In a gesture of literary nostalgia I bought Norman Douglas’ South Wind, which I had thought, when I read it at the age of fifteen, was one of the greatest and truest books that had ever been written. In re-reading it on the spot, I must confess I had to tone down my judgment somewhat. I think that Douglas, who plumped, in lapidary prose, for what he considered the healthy and forthright Mediterranean paganism of the island as opposed to the Victorian, northern puritanism in which he had been reared, would rewrite several passages today, if he could, upon studying some of the chromed and bikinied paganism now on view on his beloved island.
The s
wank crowd bathes and lunches at Gracie Field’s establishment, spread like a set for an old MGM musical on the rocks of the Piccola Marina. The really swank crowd owns boats, and languid ladies and surfeited bronzed Roman gentlemen, well in the tradition of Tiberius, are to be seen at about noon, which is the hour of their reveille, roaring off in Riva speed boats to distant watery rendezvous with other speed boats and similar ladies and equal Romans. In their aristocratic flotillas they while away the hours before the first cocktail of the evening in swimming, waterskiing, and competitive character assassination, out of sight of lesser folk who are content with plebian public immersion.
Still, there was a Gabor in a ruffly white bathing suit at the pool when we were there, and a liberty party of American sailors from Naples who spent the afternoon diving into the pool, led by a chief petty officer with a chief petty officer’s solid paunch, who asked for and received the Gabor autograph and a pearly Hungarian smile before catching the boat back to the mainland and the sober realities of the Sixth Fleet.
Two days later, the Captain appeared, lugubrious, the refrigerator unrepaired. Neapolitan sharp-trading had prevailed against him. The firm with which he had been dealing had, after warm promises of help, finally offered him the needed parts—but only on condition that he buy a whole refrigerator, which they had kindly offered to store for him in their warehouse, as there was no room on board for two refrigerators, one of which, of course, would not function. The Captain’s Scotch sense of economy revolted at this, and he had let the whole thing drop. Now here he was, ready to brave the rest of the Tyrrhenian Sea, and the Ionian and the Adriatic, lukewarm from beginning to end.
To prove to our friends on Capri that we had not been lying when we said we had a boat at our disposal, we invited them all for a day’s sail around the island and dutifully explored the Blue Grotto, which you can enter only in one of the rowboats stationed off its mouth, and for which you have to buy tickets from a launch moored more or less permanently there.
Our trip through the grotto was disturbed somewhat by the irate cries of other boatmen who, oblivious to the beauty and historic associations of the cave, followed our boatman around, shouting complaints and insults at him because, they said, he had broken the line and picked up fares out of turn. Having heard these exchanges for so many years between taxi drivers in Manhattan, it gave me something of a sense of déjà-vu as we trailed our fingers in the magic waters.
In our circumnavigation of the island we passed a cliff on top of which was perched a huge red building with a matchless view, the home of the writer Curzio Malaparte, who died several years ago. No one lives there now, we were told, except a caretaker, because Malaparte left it in his will to a doctor who tended him during his final illness in China. Since there are no diplomatic relations between Italy and Communist China, there is a fair chance that the building will fall into ruin before the poor Red doctor ever gets to set foot on his magnificent property.
It occurred to me that there must be, at this moment, in the city of Peking, a certain lung specialist with a clear title to one of the most spectacular properties in Europe, who deep in his heart is just a little politically disaffected and who must be nursing some rather severe criticisms of the policies of the regime under which he lives.
POSITANO
The other chief show-places on this stretch of coast, which curves south into the Gulf of Salerno, are Positano, Sorrento, Amalfi and Ravello, although to the cognoscenti only Positano counts, Ravello being too far from the sea and Sorrento and Amalfi merely for tourists.
Since Positano has no harbor, you have to anchor offshore and row into the beach, which, on the day that we were there, seemed to have been taken over almost completely by the English, with a light salting of Italian girls too bare, brown, and beautiful to be described in the language appropriate to travel literature. The town itself, built on a steep hillside, shares with Capri the boon of having no automobile traffic. It is an imaginatively irregular village, given over, as far as I could see, almost completely to the pleasures of summer, and it is the only town I have ever seen in which one of the main thoroughfares is shadowed from one end to the other by the leaves of an abundant grape arbor.
A gallery and summer art school has been set up in the generous rooms of a converted palazzo halfway up the hill, and you can buy the works of Italian abstractionists there for only a little more than you would pay in Rome, or you can take life classes for two weeks for a reasonable fee or find out how difficult it is to paint landscapes as romantically opulent as these under the bright summer sun.
One of the ladies who runs the art gallery is a vigorous young American who has been coming to Positano for several years now and who says, of course, that it has changed, it has been discovered, it has been spoiled, but that she likes it a lot better that way. She was obviously a woman of character, so we invited her to dinner that night.
AMALFI
When we anchored in the port of Amalfi for the night, we were approached by two rowboats, each of which contained several members of the Mafia who seemed between the ages of eleven and thirteen. Having been apprised, perhaps by telephone from Naples, about our refrigerator problems, they asked us immediately if we wanted any ice. I said we could use two cakes and demanded the price. “Three hundred lire,” said the helmsman of one boat. “Idiot,” a boy in the other boat snarled at him. “For a yacht it is at least four hundred lire.”
Since I had grown up during the Depression, when soaking the rich had seemed a most reasonable economic policy, and since I have never quite outgrown this influence, I gave the boys the four hundred lire when they delivered the ice. But still they hung on sullenly, and the only way I could get them to move off was to give them a cigarette apiece, which they smoked with sinful expertness, inhaling deeply, blowing rings, and letting the smoke come out through their nostrils. Using the coward’s usual excuse, I told myself that if I hadn’t given them the cigarettes somebody else would and hoped they would not all have spotty lungs by the time they were twenty.
If I had reflected a little, I would have given those poor half-starved young thugs twice four hundred lire rather than one cigarette apiece. Cigarettes are the coin of beggary, as all of us in the army discovered during and just after the war. There is almost no way you can avoid an unpleasant feeling of superiority when, either out of pity or for services rendered, you use them as legal tender. Connected with this is the widespread complaint heard all over the world that Americans ruin the natives wherever they go by over-tipping. In almost every work of travel literature one is warned against this vice. I heard it in its most virulent form in Cairo during the war, where a British base-wallah major, who incidentally was the most objectionable man I have ever met, bitterly insisted that Cairo, which according to him had been a Paradise to live in from the time of the German attack on Danzig, had become practically uninhabitable since the entrance of the United States into the war and the subsequent appearance in the city of Americans who gave as much as a dollar a day in salary to native servants and workmen. This was in a city in which servants habitually slept on the floor outside their master’s bedrooms and were beaten in the name of discipline, where a frightening proportion of the children were on a starvation diet and suffering from ophthalmia for lack of the simplest medical care, and where the average life expectancy of the working classes was about thirty years.
It is one thing to give a large tip to the concierge of a luxury hotel; he is probably wealthier than you are and your gift is merely a bribe, cynically offered and cynically accepted, to ensure services which are already noted on your bill but which you won’t receive if you neglect the concierge’s outstretched palm. It is quite another thing to give a gaunt porter a dollar for carrying two huge valises for a mile in the hot sun instead of tossing him the base-wallah major’s contemptuous one piastre, which at that time was worth four cents.
If, as the major said, the Americans are ruining the backward countries of the world for the likes of hi
m, let us consider it a proud achievement and one of the most agreeable manifestations of our national character.
Amalfi, which now numbers 6,250 inhabitants, was once wealthy and powerful and had a population of 70,000. But it was subdued by King Roger of Naples in 1131 and twice soon after that by the Pisans, and, since then, in the words of the guide book, its decline has been continuous. The entire Mediterranean basin, with its fretwork of once-great cities, its relics of vanished glories, its built-over ruins, is a kind of translation into stone of Ecclesiastes. Vanity, vanity, the crumbling columns announce to the merciless pure blue sky, all is vanity. Everybody has had his day here, everybody won for awhile, everybody lost for a much longer time, the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, the Turks, the Genoese, the Venetians, the Sicilians, the Saracens, the French, the English. Everybody took what he could, killed according to his custom, put kings on thrones and laws in the lawbooks, king and laws enduring until the next fleet was seen rounding the next headland. On almost every hilltop facing this sunny sea there is a watchtower or the ruins of a watchtower, whose garrisons, it now seems, must always have had the same news to report—“We are lost.”
RAVELLO
Ravello, which is a kind of purple passage of scenic splendor, outstanding even among the full rhetorical beauties of the rest of the coast, is reached by a winding road that cuts up the mountainside behind Amalfi, among miles of vineyards and lemon groves. Rich in the thirteenth century, independent until 1813, it is a small collection of splendid, Norman-influenced, bleached buildings adorned by the gardens of the Palazzo Rúfolo, which hang breathtakingly on a cliff a thousand feet above the sea. At the leading restaurant there is a pasta dish named after Puccini, and Wagner worked here. Music was in the air on the afternoon we visited it, because a concert was being given that evening as part of the yearly musical festival that is held here. In the cool interior of a half-ruined but capacious tower in the gardens a cellist was patiently practising Mahler, the conductor interrupting him again and again, his voice sounding thin and nagging as he sang to the musician to show him the way it should be done. Then the cello would start again, mellow and full, flooding the tower, echoing through the garden, right for Mahler, right for the place, right for the hot, flower-drugged, dreaming afternoon.