by Iris Origo
When, two days later, I joined him at Hawkhurst, he was almost too worn out for grief—a very thin, frail old man. Yet he thanked us all, with his usual gentle courtesy, for coming, and made a great effort, very soon—so that his family should not feel him to be a burden—to resume normal life again. The constant support and companionship of his daughter Joan was a great comfort to him, as was that of all his grandchildren, particularly his youngest grandson, Desmond, who went to live with him in Rutland Gardens.
When, later on, he came back for brief visits to Italy, it was at La Foce that he was most at ease. In Florence, among my mother’s ‘artistic’ friends, he often looked lost and alone; he could offer no small talk about Venetian lacquer and the baroque, and they did not care about the reform of the House of Lords. But walking about our farm with Antonio, taking an interest in the successful crossing of our Large White pigs, imported from Yorkshire, with the lean black Tuscan swine, or comparing systems of tenant-farming, talking to me as I gardened or did the flowers, or playing with his small Italian great-grandson, he was upon more familiar ground.
His letters to me during those years are too moving and too intimate to quote. It was almost as if, in some indefinable manner, he had transferred to me a portion of the love that for fifty years had bound him to Gran, or rather it was like a continuation of the same love. When, in 1933, our only son Gianni died, he identified himself with our loss, almost as if his own were being repeated—yet he expected of me (as he had of himself ) to take up life at La Foce again without any fuss. ‘I think’, he wrote, ‘that you and Antonio have chosen wisely in going back to La Foce. No-one could advise in such a moment, but I think work and duty the nearest approach to an anodyne … You have done great work for your people at La Foce, and, apart from its inherent value, I am convinced that its continuance will be something of a solace to you.’
It was on his next visit to me in Italy that he gave me the gold Victorian locket—engraved with the word Mizpah, ‘God watch between us two’—which he had given to his fiancée, sixty years before when they were separated from each other, and with it some rough verses that were, I knew, his farewell to me:
In my old age on you I lean
As in my youth I turned to her.
Here or elsewhere in world unseen
In some shape may both loves endure.
In a letter, a few days later, he added: ‘In the circumstances in which Margaret received it from me, it was steeped in love, and was her companion in the many years of separation. Now, my darling, it goes to you with the same symbolism … Margaret and you are the outstanding loves of my life.’
These words were written only a few months before his own death, in 1934, seven years after his wife’s. During those long, lonely years his natural reticence and his feeling that he should not impose his sorrow upon younger people kept him from speaking very often about her, though I think there was hardly a moment of the day in which he did not miss her. For even then, his sense of proportion, his perfect reasonableness, did not fail him: he did not ask for exemption from the common lot. Being totally without self-pity, he dwelled upon the fullness of the past, not the leanness of the final years. Shortly after her death he wrote to me, ‘I believe that love in marriage is better than anything in life. Ambition and success are not in the running with it. My real life has always been my home—wife, children and grandchildren, and she saw and rejoiced in her great-grandchildren. It is a happy record.’
I think he would have liked me to end with these words.
1 Translated by W. H. D. Rouse.
2 I do not remember the origin of this nickname for my grandfather, but neither my cousins nor myself ever used any other.
3
My Father
When I think of my father, it is difficult for me to distinguish what I really remember from what I have read or have been told, just as my visual memory of him has been overlaid by portraits. It seems to me, however, that I remember him very much as he was in a snapshot taken in California with me, when I was about three years old: very slight, very young, in spite of the pointed Vandyke beard which he grew after an accident to his lip and which gave him both distinction and a curiously Latin look (though perhaps French, rather than Italian), looking down with both tenderness and amusement at the very cross little girl sitting beside him. He was, according to everyone who knew him, a person very difficult to forget. Even now, half a century later, I sometimes meet a friend of his, who says, ‘I remember the first day I met Bayard.’ But my own recollections, since he died before I was eight years old, are only fragmentary, and it has been from letters and photographs, from school and college reports and family stories that I have had to piece together some aspects of him, almost as if I were writing about someone unknown to me, and to try to reconcile them with the glimpses that I myself remember.
The serene and successful years came first. By all accounts, he was a singularly attractive child and boy, modest and affectionate as well as gay and brilliant, and at school, as gifted for games as for work, as popular with his contemporaries as with the masters. At home, though later on he was to react impatiently against the combined pressure of too much comfort and too much solicitude, he had a most affectionate relationship with his father and a very close alliance with his sister Justine, who stirred him up sometimes to rebellion and adventure. At Groton and Harvard his record was one of unbroken success. At Groton, where he was under the famous head-master, Dr. Peabody, he was, according to the school magazine, ‘by far the most remarkable scholar we ever had’; he was also the editor of the school paper, vice-president of the debating society, member of the baseball Nine and bass-violin in the orchestra. At Harvard he specialised in history, economics and philosophy, and, after three years, took his B.A. degree summa cum laude, but he showed an equally keen pleasure in the social side of college life. He was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa, the Delphic Club and the Porcellian; he played golf and football, he rode, shot, made music.
Perhaps this unflagging energy, this need to achieve success in every field, already held a trace of the restless quest for perfection, for filling every cup to the brim, which is often to be found in those in whom the seeds of tuberculosis are already latent. Certainly, however, there were no symptoms of this as yet. The philosopher George Santayana, whose pupil he was at Harvard, wrote after his death to his father:
His intellectual life was, without question, the most intense, many-sided and sane that I have ever known in any young man, and his talk, when he was in college, brought out whatever corresponding vivacity there was in me in those days, before the routine of teaching had had time to dull it as much as it has now … I always felt I got more from him than I had to give, not only in enthusiasm—which goes without saying—but also in a sort of multitudinousness and quickness of ideas.
Bayard Cutting
In the summer of his Junior year, Bayard was offered the position of private secretary to the American Ambassador in London, the Hon. Joseph Choate and, deciding to give up his Senior year at Harvard to accept it, he sailed for England. His letters to his friends and family, however, show that he was not really suited to diplomatic life. ‘It’s the drag of utterly insignificant work that galls …’ he wrote to Ben Diblee, one of his oldest friends at Harvard, ‘not the fact of working. You won’t anyway have the feeling I have that you are wasting endless hours in buying clothes or attending teas or dropping cards … this infernal social act.’
He derived, however, considerable amusement from the spectacle of the Opening of Parliament in 1901, which he felt to be ‘both the finest and most impressive ceremony, and also the most bizarre and ludicrous that I have ever seen’. I cannot resist quoting a few passages from his account, in a long letter to his mother, for the combination they show of eager interest and of the amused, critical detachment of a spectator who was not an Englishman.
When we got in, the peeresses and peers were beginning to arrive, the ladies all in black or with ermine capes
[mourning for Queen Victoria], and the men in full robes … I was astonished to see how cheap and almost tawdry the robes looked. It was like a chorus in an opera, and after they had filed in and taken their places, you expected them to break into a Glee … [The Dukes] were hardly a fine-looking lot, for the Duke of Northumberland is the typical Englishman of a French farce, red whiskers and all, the Duke of Marlborough is the meanest looking little fellow in the world, and as to the old and red-faced ones, their cheeks appeared to be on the point of bursting with a pop … Lord Rosebery looked old and fat, yet still wore the bad-boy expression … On the right front bench were the bishops, dressed as Spiritual Barons, in great ermine capes—rather fine. “You’re the kind that used to do all the fighting five centuries ago,” said Mr. Choate to the Archbishop … The peeresses, all in deepest black, were in low-necked gowns, and were allowed to wear diamonds and pearls, so that when, at the last moment, all of them flung off their capes and furs for the arrival of the King, there was a tremendous effect … I should say that the Duchess of Devonshire’s tiara was appropriately the most massive and the ugliest. Altogether the effect was tremendous.
Then followed a description of the Royal procession:
The Duke of Devonshire carrying the crown on a velvet cushion and looking as if he’d drop it any minute, Lord Salisbury as Old Father Christmas … goldsticks and silversticks and other fantastics … and finally the King and Queen, who were both quite gorgeous.
Then, summoned by the Black Rod, arrived the members of the House of Commons.
We could see the Speaker, in wig and gown, walking towards us, and behind him a running, shouting, pushing, fighting riot of members. It was the most comical thing you ever saw. The Speaker grave and slow, saluting three times to the House, and the crowd of the members making this infernal row behind, while policemen shouted “Steady!”, or tried to close the doors. The Commons kept up the best traditions of their order for turbulence and disregard of royal authority … Finally, (after the King’s oath against transubstantiation) the King stood up and put on his hat. He spoke loud and clearly with much dignity, but with quite a German accent … It was most perfectly medieval. They were bold barons and haughty prelates and fair dames and pliant courtiers, not the men and women one sees every day … The details were everything; the perfection of each detail was what made the whole so superb. Not a person there that was not plainly labelled so-and-so, by dress and position.
Gradually, Bayard’s circle of acquaintances and his range of occupations in London had become wider. He attended frequent meetings of the House of Commons, he spent twenty-four hours with George Santayana in Oxford (‘I never saw any place that came anywhere near it’), he joined a golf club, he met Sidney Colvin and Mark Twain. (‘Every word he said in his drawling twang held you more and more thrilled, like a great actor in a fine play.’) Gradually he began to see less of his official colleagues and more of some new English friends. In the spring of 1900 his daily rides in Hyde Park, in attendance on his Ambassador, had been enlivened by frequent meetings with an Irish peer, Lord Desart, and his pretty daughter, Sybil, and it was natural enough that, while Mr. Choate and my grandfather exchanged stories of legal and political interest, the two young people should ride ahead, engaged in no less animated, but far more theoretical, conversation.
I have before me a photograph of my mother as she was then: rather plump, very fair, with soft unmoulded features that in no way revealed the strength of her determination and the quickness of her mind. In her, for the first time, my father met a girl with whom he could talk and argue as freely as with a man, and who possessed a mental alertness that was to him a constant stimulus and delight. The Boer War, the Irish Question, the Indian Question, these alternated with discussions of the philosophers and poets. He lent her Santayana and William James and Royce; she brought The Stones of Venice and Shelley. And was Platonic love indeed possible? And what should a young man do with his life? So they talked and talked, ambling gently along Rotten Row—breathless, eager, extremely young. It was, at this stage, almost entirely an attraction of the mind, as sexless and yet intense as only the ardour of the very young and very intelligent can sometimes be.
During that summer, young Mr. Cutting was one of the guests invited to Desart, and was writing to Ben Diblee that his hosts were ‘some of the nicest people I have met in England’. There were long rides down the wide avenues of the summer woods, long talks between the tall hedges of the kitchen-garden, and finally, one whole day together in the sunlit heather, climbing the mountain of Slievenaman.
I have found myself wondering whether Bayard really wanted to get married quite so soon, or whether either of them yet quite knew their own mind, and one of his letters to my mother confirms this impression. ‘After Slievenaman’, he wrote, ‘I knew we were very close. I ought to have gone home, or at any rate been careful and strong. I couldn’t resist.’ But he added, ‘Thank God I couldn’t.’
During all this time, as their letters show, he was still calling her ‘Lady Sybil’ and they still behaved so formally in public that they believed their secret to be theirs only, though perhaps her parents were not quite so unobservant as Sybil liked to think, for one day, picking up a book that she had dropped—Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, with ‘W.B.C. Jr.’ on the flyleaf—her father returned it to her with a smile and a muttered Latin tag.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“‘In how many disguises the god’ …” said her father. “That’s roughly it.”
All the same, like most parents, he still thought of his daughter as a child, and it was a shock to him, no less than to Bayard’s own parents, when, only a few weeks later, he received a letter from the young American, formally requesting permission to ask for his daughter’s hand. Very soon afterwards Bayard, by his parents’ wish, returned to New York and discussions on both sides of the Atlantic repeated an eternal dialogue, each set of parents trying to impose what seemed to them best for their own child, and the young people resenting any interference, yet perhaps more swayed by their parents’ influence than either of them would have liked to admit. Certainly Bayard’s parents, who had cherished a dream of a charming American daughter-in-law, felt that it was too soon for him to commit himself, and perhaps he, too, now that he was home again, would have been willing to accept their suggestion that he should postpone any decision for a year, spending the interval in the West. But Sybil’s insistent letters came by every ship, stirring both his tenderness and his chivalry, while on their side, her parents, remembering how much they had suffered during their own long time of waiting, refused, if a further delay were required, to allow the engagement at all. So, early in the spring Bayard returned to London and, on April 30, 1901, after a good deal of family discussion about the date, the marriage took place, at All Saints’ Church, Ennismore Gardens.
A letter of my father’s at that time gives an inkling of how very little freedom was allowed to a well-brought-up young girl to see her fiancé, even in the last months before their wedding. ‘They won’t let me act as her escort in the evenings’, Bayard wrote, ‘or go and stay in the country with her at her relations’ houses, or even go to see her when they are out. I dine at Rutland Gardens about three times a week, but they don’t like her to go out the other days. So it really comes to tea and every other dinner, and never very long at a time.’
My mother has described the day on which, after their honeymoon, she and my father sailed for America. My grandfather went with them to Southampton to see them off. ‘Together,’ she wrote, ‘we showed him our little cabin, deep in the bowels of the great sumptuous ship. “Very nice, very convenient,” commented my father, “but a little like sleeping in a housemaid’s cupboard in Buckingham Palace.”’ She laughed, of course; but after they had come up on deck again for all visitors to go ashore and saw her father standing on the quay looking up at her, she suddenly realised, for the first time, that she was indeed embarking on a new and very different life
.
It was a year before the young couple returned to England again. Almost at once, the first shadow fell. During the winter in New York, my father had driven himself too hard, working at Columbia for an examination, and very soon after his return to London, three months before my birth, he had his first haemorrhage.
‘They tell me that I have got a weak spot on one of my lungs,’ he wrote to Ben Diblee, ‘but they can’t find the spot’; and he added, with the optimism so characteristic of his complaint, ‘It is a mere weakness and no disease and they expect I shall be able to lead a normal life after a month or two.’ He had only eight more years to live.
Meanwhile, however, he was sent to convalesce in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds; and it was in a cottage nearby, in the small village of Birdlip, that—on August 15, 1902—I was born. My christening, however, did not take place until nearly three months later, at Desart, and rather against my father’s will, since he was then going through a phase of intolerant agnosticism and considered it, as he wrote to the same friend ‘an awful shame to make pledges for her in her infancy’. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘I don’t think I should allow it in the case of a boy.’ As to my name, ‘Sybil wishes to call her Iris, and therefore will, I expect,’ but the officiating clergyman maintained that this name was to be found in no Christian calendar, so that my grandmother’s name, Margaret, was added. The associations in my mother’s mind were entirely classical—the messenger of the Gods and the rainbow—but, unfortunately, since the rest of my life has been spent in Italy, my name is more frequently associated with one of Mascagni’s minor operas, or a cheap soap made with orris-root.