by Iris Origo
“Have you seen my Bartolo? He was with me on the bridge.” And then again, peering up into the next face that passed: “Have you seen my Bartolo?”
I went back to Fiesole, and persuaded my mother to let one of the refugee families move into the upper floor of our gardener’s house and, with Doody’s help, bought the necessary furniture, cooking utensils and clothes. After a few months, they were able to go home again, to their own farm near Belluno.
After this, life at the Villa Medici was never quite the same again for me, and during the following autumn, when we were staying in a villa which my mother had taken on the saddle between Capri and Anacapri, I had another enlightening glimpse of real life: the terrible epidemic of Spanish influenza which, in the autumn of 1917, swept across Europe, taking a greater toll of lives than any battle. In Capri, where the little white, flat-roofed houses stood so close together that one could stretch from one roof-top to another, the epidemic spread like the plague in the Middle Ages: there was hardly a house in which there was not a victim. It was then that I saw, at work, a man of whom, until then, I had only thought as one of my mother’s ‘clever’ friends, but a more for-midable one than most, Dr. Axel Munthe. During the summer we had spent a good deal of time with him, sometimes beneath a pillared pergola of his villa at Anacapri, San Michele—‘a strange mixture’ as Compton Mackenzie remarked, ‘of Scandinavian Gothic and Imperial Rome’—and sometimes in the Saracen tower, Materita, in the middle of an olive grove to which he moved, as tourists began to invade the island, for greater seclusion and privacy. Here I heard the sagas that he told my mother about the influence he wielded over kings and queens (and certainly their portraits and souvenirs were there in plenty); the peace that he had brought to dying men in the war, by hypnotising them into unconsciousness of their pain; the bird sanctuary he hoped to form on the island coast, so that the thousands of quail, arriving in spring from their long flight across the Mediterranean, might not sink to a wretched death on the nets smeared with pitch-lime which were prepared for them. Sitting silent in the background, mesmerised by his talk and yet faintly suspicious of it, watching the glance of his blue eyes (so sharp, in spite of the blindness that was already coming over him) I would wonder whether he was really one of the most remarkable men I had ever met, or merely a teller of tales, with a touch of Cagliostro. But during the epidemic, I saw a very different man. Fearless, resourceful, kind, he strode from house to house with unflagging courage and endurance; he saved innumerable lives, and brought comfort, when there was nothing else to bring. It is thus, striding like an ancient, bearded Viking through the narrow streets of Capri, with women stretching out their hands to him in doorways, imploring his help, that I remember him, no longer merely the protagonist of his own legend, but truly the physician and healer.
By then a new phase of my life was beginning, and when, in 1918, my grandfather wrote to me from London about the rejoicings over the Armistice, my one wish was to get to him and to England as soon as possible.
It was during that same summer that, for the first time, I realised that I was no longer a child, but did not yet belong to the grown-up world—a stage familiar to every adolescent, but intensified by my circumstances. This was the summer after Geoffrey Scott’s marriage to my mother, and every week-end, when he came down from the British Embassy in Rome to join us and I would be an unwelcome third in our picnics or evening excursions, I would feel, not jealous, but lonely. Sitting in the prow of the boat, in which we would row out at night to some isolated headland or bay for a picnic, while my mother and Geoffrey talked in low voices in the stern, or after the meal, climbing up over the rocks by myself, I would long, with the passionate rebelliousness and intensity of sixteen, for a life of my own, and friends.
Sometimes, too, other friends of my mother’s came to stay: Algar Thorold, suavely and benignly discoursing on Buddhism and presenting me with a little booklet on The Eightfold Path which I still possess; and Herbert Trench, who would join us on our moonlight picnics, declaiming lyric verses about feminine fragility and masculine chivalry, while I staggered up the rocky path behind him carrying the picnic-basket, or else after dinner reading aloud to us the blank verse of his magniloquent, interminable drama about Napoleon. Recently, opening a volume of Compton Mackenzie’s Memoirs, I was much amused to find this incident recorded there from an observer’s point of view.
“I read the play to Sybil and Iris last night,” said the poet to Compton Mackenzie, “and at the end they were like that.” He made a gesture of admiration and wonder, unable for a moment to find words to express it. It was on this occasion that he went on, his voice lowered into a reverential murmur, “You won’t misunderstand me, my dear fellow, when I say it is genius.”
‘The next day Lady Sybil and Iris were lunching with us at Casa Solitaria. “Oh, my dears,” said Lady Sybil, “Herbert Trench read his Napoleon play to Iris and me yesterday. It went on for hours and at the end of it we were both of us like that”—but the gesture Lady Sybil made was not of admiration and wonder, but of utter exhaustion.’
It was at the Casa Solitaria, the Mackenzies’ enchanting white villa built into the cliff just above the Faraglioni—the rocks on which, according to legend Ulysses heard the Sirens’ song—that to my mind the most exciting, if not always comfortable, evenings of the summer were spent, listening spellbound on the curved terrace above the sea to the stories of our host’s exploits in Greece, while indoors Renata Borgatti was playing Chopin, or the booming voices of two Russian singers, a baritone and a bass whom Mackenzie had nicknamed Bim and Boom, echoed out over the rocks. Compton Mackenzie has written in his Memoirs that he already then foresaw ‘a name in literature for me’. If only he had said so to me then! Both he and his wife Faith were unfailingly kind, but I felt a very stiff, awkward backfisch at their witty, Bohemian parties, and sometimes wished that I were taking part instead (but no-one had asked me) in the gay, unexacting musical entertainment which the boys and girls of my own age were getting up in the little town.
It was in the piazza of Capri, too, that I witnessed my first historical occasion—the proclamation of the Armistice, with all the island bells ringing out, the little square crowded with all the local population and foreign residents, the sindaco in his tri-coloured sash, and Compton Mackenzie in British naval uniform addressing the town councillors in Morgano’s café in a d’Annunziesque speech in Italian in honour of the tricolore, “… rosso col sangue dei combattenti eroi, verde come la terra della nostra Italia irredenta …”
All this took place on November 4, 1918, a week before the proclamation of the Armistice in England. We hastily returned to Florence, to find a letter from my grandfather describing the rejoicings in London and I wrote to him in return that my greatest wish was to get back to him and England as soon as possible.
‘I sympathise with you,’ he wrote. ‘I would not have been away from London then for anything (except direct national service elsewhere), and I do deeply regret that you have missed the national outpouring of heart in the centre of our united Empire … for no rejoicing in a foreign world can move the heart like that among our own people.’ He characteristically added: ‘No generation in history has seen greater days than ours and no-one can I think foresee the problems of the future, whose solution they have rendered necessary. In the midst of rejoicings the nations must pray for sanity’—a prayer which, as we now know, was only partially answered.
In the following spring, I was back again in England with him and Gran and then at Desart, though that visit was inevitably clouded by his deep disappointment over the failure of the Dublin Convention, and his anxiety for the future of Ireland. But the closeness of my bond with my grandparents was renewed and, though after only a few months I returned to my mother in Italy, my childhood at Fiesole was over.
1 ‘Pierino went to bed tonight, happy, because he had done a good deed’—‘A family celebration’—‘A gift to the poor is a gift to God’.
6
; Reading and Learning
… As pines
keep the shape of the wind
even when the wind has fled and is no longer there
so words
guard the shape of man.
GEORGE SEFERIS, TRANS. WALTER KAISER
What do we mean by being alone? Rumer Godden is of the opinion that, from the day that a child has learned to read, he will never be so again. “When you learn to read,” she said to her own daughter, “you will be born again, and it is a pity to be born again so young. As soon as you learn to read, you will not see anything again quite as it is. It will all the time be altered by what you have read, and you will never be quite alone again.”
I think that there is something in this, in the sense that we do not look at a landscape again in quite the same way after we have once seen a great painter’s rendering of it: the blue hills of the Veneto come to resemble the background to Bellini’s Madonnas, the crete senesi turn into the landscapes of Sassetta or Sodoma. But I do not agree that it is an argument against teaching a child how to read, or if it is, then we must also exclude all telling of stories. ‘The Three Bears’ and ‘Little Black Sambo’, ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’ and ‘The Dog with Eyes as Big as Saucers’, have already become our companions long before we can read ourselves; they have already peopled our world. All that is achieved by the final act of reading to itself is to enable a child to summon up that other world at its own will. ‘My whole being’, wrote Coleridge of his boyhood, ‘was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read,—fancying myself into Robinson Crusoe’s island, finding it a mountain of plum-cake and eating a room for myself and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs.’
It is the extreme concreteness of a child’s imagination which enables him, not only to take from each book exactly what he requires—people, or genii, or tables and chairs—but literally to furnish his world with them. I can remember no time when I did not do this, nor can I remember when I learned to read. I only know that it must have been fairly soon, since a letter of my mother’s, when I was just four, speaks of my finding it easier to read in Italian than in English, and by six I could also read French. German I spoke from the age of four, but only learned to read it later on. This early teaching did not, unfortunately, make a good linguist of me, but it did leave me with the knowledge that any language will do for telling a story. Struwelpeter and Sophia were as familiar figures of the nursery as Humpty Dumpty, Pinocchio as Alice. It was only a little later on that it began to dawn on me that some things were said better, more naturally, in one language than in another, and indeed that I myself did not say quite the same things and was not the same person, in Italian as in English.
As to reading matter, all I knew was that there were always enough books about: picture-books, story-books, poetry-books; ‘difficult’ books, out of which the grown-ups read aloud and ‘easy’ books at my own disposal. Only one person was slightly disapproving, my English grandmother. “As you’re doing nothing, Iris—only reading”, was the formula, followed by “Come and help me to wind my wool, or to pick the sweet peas.” And sometimes she would add, “If you read so much now, there’ll be no books left for you when you grow up.”
This even then I knew (much as I loved and respected Gran) to be nonsense. Of all the pleasures of life, this is the only one that, at every age, has never failed me. But inevitably, I have paid for it with other limitations. ‘I cannot sit and think,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘books think for me.’ For many years that was true of me, too—not only did I not think, but I did not look or listen. I heard ‘the aziola cry’ in Shelley’s poem, but was deaf to the little night-owl hooting outside my window; I knew all the flowers that bloomed in Ophelia’s garden, but few of those in our own. Above all, the boys and girls whom I found in my books were so vivid to me that those I met in real life seemed by comparison a little tame.
In early childhood, my choice of books was directed by two contrasting, but simultaneous, preferences, one for the remote, the fantastic, the heroic; the other for a world exactly like the one I knew, only a little safer, more harmonious, more rounded. The latter satisfied my need for the reassurance of a set moral frame; the first, for an ‘expanding universe’. In very early childhood, indeed, there were a few much-loved books which gratified both tastes at once, which brought the fantastic and the marvellous through the gate at the top of the nursery stairs. Pinocchio was eaten by a whale and saved by la fata dai capelli turchini, but his long wooden feet were also solidly planted on familiar ground: he had to go to school, like any other little boy, and Geppetto had to pawn his coat to buy him an ABC. A little later on, I found a similar mingling of the fantastic and the quotidian in Mrs. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, and in the stories of Mrs. Burnett—not the odious Little Lord Fauntleroy but The Secret Garden and Sara Crewe. The turbaned Indian servant who stole across the roofs into Sara’s attic and transformed it, and the country boy, Dickon, who charmed birds and wild animals and helped Mary to bring the deserted garden to life again, both had a touch of authentic magic; but Sara and Mary were also real children, in whom another little girl could personify herself.
Real children, good and naughty, those were what I sought—they fulfilled my craving for company. No family was too large (not even the one in The Daisy Chain), no incident too dramatic, and, besides, I had a strong taste for what was, even then, old-fashioned. I had what most children nowadays would consider a positively morbid liking for stories with a moral. Leila on the Island, In England and at Home—an immensely long book of which I can only remember that poor Leila was set, for half an hour every day, to look for a lost needle in the sands of the desert island on which she had been cast—Holiday House, with the delightfully naughty Harry and Lucy, who rolled their birthday cake down from the top of Arthur’s Seat—these were classics of the Victorian nursery which still delighted me, and which led on to Mrs. Molesworth, Mrs. Ewing, Charlotte Yonge and Louisa M. Alcott.
Do any children still read these books today? With the exception of Little Women, which appears to be a hardy perennial, I think not. Yet I still think that they were very good. The world they described was, it is true, a circumscribed one—‘little ladies and gentlemen’ on one side of the fence, and ‘the village children’ on the other; strong omniscient Papas who were either country gentlemen, retired naval officers or parsons; and sweet, refined, often delicate Mammas—all living in a landscape of great trees and green meadows, of thatched cottages and spacious houses, in which Nanny, in a large apron, addressed her charges (although whipping them) as Miss and Master, and the kettle was forever boiling on the hob for nursery tea. But if the setting was old-fashioned, the characters were alive, and the moral values both crisp and true—and often expressed with dry humour as well as firmness.
There was another, wholly different world that also beckoned from books, the kingdom of magic and fantasy. It was the same world as that of a child’s secret rites and incantations; the line between the paving-stones that you must not tread on, the magic formula that will keep you safe on the dark corner of the stairs. Sometimes a single phrase would take you there—‘How many miles to Babylon?’ There lived the princess whose dress was ‘de la couleur du temps’; there was the little white cottage in the wood where Goldilocks found three chairs, three little beds and three bowls of porridge, the enchanted garden of Beauty and the Beast, the marble staircase where the Prince came to meet Cinderella and take her by the hand. This was the other country, the country of our dreams.
Gradually Cinderella and Goldilocks vanished, other forms began to beckon: The Lady of Shalott, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Christabel. And now I no longer wished to travel alone:
Kennst Du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn?
Allons, faisons un rêve, montons sur deux palefrois.
The world of fantasy was fading into the world of romance, and childhood was coming to an end.
It was the
n that I read increasingly, not only in order to escape into another world but, as I believed, to learn about life itself. Mauriac has justly remarked in his Mémoires Intérieurs that ‘the characters invented by the novelist only awake to life, like recorded music, at our bidding. It is we, the readers, who offer these imaginary creatures time and space within ourselves, in which to unfold and engrave their destiny.’ Moreover it is by identifying ourselves with them that we do, in a sense, anticipate experience: we try on the parts of love and hate, of jealousy and desire, like our first grown-up dress. I became in turn Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, Catherine Morland and Natasha: ‘elles incarnaient mon destin encore voilé’. Their shadows are thrown upon the screen of my adolescent years with a vividness denied to most living figures.
During all this time, of course, I was also pursuing my formal education—but with how much less gusto! From my governesses I learned some French and German, though not as much as I could have learned had I liked these ladies better. For one brief, exciting term in 1914, when we were in London, I was allowed to attend Miss Woolf’s excellent classes in South Audley Street (though mortified by the contrast between my black velveteen frock from Liberty’s and the sensible tweed coats and skirts of the other girls) and was delighted to find myself placed, for literature and history, with the Seniors, three years older than myself. But these classes, too, came to an end and, in spite of my earnest pleas to be allowed to go to an English boarding-school, I returned to Fiesole and to the dull, solitary lessons with my governesses.
* * *
At the age of twelve, however, a piece of great good fortune befell me. Bernard Berenson, to whom I shall always be grateful, advised my mother to let me receive a classical education and even supplied her with the name of the brilliant tutor with whom I worked for the next three years, Professor Solone Monti. It was with him that I spent the happiest hours of my girlhood—perhaps the happiest I have ever known.