by Iris Origo
My first impression as I entered his study was of a haze of smoke, so thick that I could hardly see across the little square room, lined with cheap deal bookshelves, to the desk behind which sat a dark, stocky little man, with dandruff on his collar, and with such thick lenses to his spectacles that they seemed more suited to a windscreen than a human eye.
“Mind those books, signorina,” was his greeting, as I stumbled over a pile near the door, “they are meant to be read, not trodden on.”
I would have liked to ask why, in that case, great piles of them covered the floor, except that, looking about me, it was plain that there was no other place for them to be, every inch of the walls and tables being already filled.
“Wait a minute, the lexicon can go on to the floor too. Now sit here and we will take a journey to Greece and Rome. You know no Latin? And of course no Greek?”
I shook my head.
“And you have not yet read Dante?”
“No.”
“And Carducci and Pascoli are just names to you?”
I muttered something about Valentino vestito di nuovo.
“Yes, yes, I dare say,” impatiently, “but it’s the other Pascoli I mean, the great classical scholar. Well, we shall have a long way to travel—and we’ll pick a great many flowers on the way.” Then suddenly, explosively, taking off his glasses and gazing straight into my round, startled face, “But you like poetry, in the languages you know? You have read Keats, Shelley, Milton—perhaps some Goethe—perhaps Corneille? You read poetry for pleasure?”
“Yes, oh yes!”
“Then we’ll begin. Listen now, signorina. All you need to do today is to listen.”
And he took up Pascoli’s Epos—his anthology of Latin epic verse, of which the preface and the notes are still so vividly evocative that (in the words of another great classical scholar, Valgimigli, who had been Pascoli’s pupil) ‘it was like a fluttering of wings’.
The passage that Monti had chosen was the famous one about the Trojan camp-fires on the plain.
“This is how Pascoli describes the scene—for people like you who cannot yet read Greek:
“Da una parte la pianura scintillante di fuochi, con un cielo sereno di stelle (i Troiani erano all’aperto, in faccia alla loro grande città, e mille fuochi ardevano, e a ogni fuoco erano cinquanta guerrieri, e i cavalli stavano presso i fuochi, stritolando fra i denti l’orzo bianco e la spelta, e attendevano l’aurora); dall’altra il mare, tutto rumori e bisbigli. Giunti alle capanne e alle navi dei Mirmidoni, giunti a quella capanna, udirono un canto. Era Achille, che accompagnandosi sulla cetra predata, cantava le glorie dei guerrieri.”1
Monti put the book down.
“No, you needn’t try to make an intelligent comment. I saw that you were listening. Now, this is what one of your English poets, Tennyson, made of it:
“So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.”
He closed the book, took off his spectacles and wiped them.
“That is the world you will see if you learn Greek—even if you get no further than Homer. Do you want to go there? Yes?”—for I was speechless—“I see you do. Well, here is a Greek grammar. Learn the alphabet and the declensions for next time, so that we can start reading at once. You know German, don’t you? And what a declension is? Well, then, be off with you. Oh, and get a lexicon, too; a small one will do, Homer’s vocabulary is very limited—and a Latin dictionary. And here’s a Latin grammar; you’d better learn those declensions, too, when you can. We’ll start at the beginning on Thursday.”
Before I had shut the door behind me, he was immersed in his own book again.
* * *
I realise now that Professor Monti was making an experiment. Having acquired a pupil who was not tied by school programmes and exams, he decided to try out on me the Humanist education given in the fifteenth century in Mantua by Vittorino da Feltre to Cecilia Gonzaga and her brothers—one in which Greek and Latin were learned together, as living languages. ‘To begin with the best’—that was the precept on which the education of the Renaissance had been based, in the days when poetry was considered the fittest instrument to train the mind. According to Bruno d’Arezzo, who wrote the first treatise of the Renaissance on what a woman’s education should be, ‘anyone ignorant of, and indifferent to, so valuable an aid to knowledge and so ennobling a source of pleasure as poetry, can by no means be entitled to be called educated’.
Monti agreed with him. If we did not precisely invent the Greek language together, like Benjamin Constant and his tutor, we did start reading the Iliad at once, he naturally translating most of the words for me as we went along, and pointing out equivalents or derivatives in Latin or in any modern language I knew, with a complete lack of pedantry or condescension.
“Look, the English rendering here is more satisfactory than the Italian, don’t you think?—or do you prefer this German one?” And then we would read the passage over again in Greek, this time with me stumbling through the translation, as best I could, by myself.
“Say it in any language you like, only feel the poetry.”
“Now, Virgil,” he said, when half the first morning had passed. “We’ll start with something easy: Sicelides Musae. This is the poem of the Golden Age.”
That day we did not get very far. For as we reached, in the second line, humilesque myricae, he told me what a tamarisk bush looked like, and took down Pascoli’s Myricae from his shelf, reading aloud some of its verses.
Then, back to Virgil again. But when, a few lines later, we came to the Child of prophecy—‘Tuo modo nascenti puer’—Monti suddenly realised from my blank look that I had no idea of who that child had been supposed to be during the Middle Ages, nor why, among all the Latin poets, it was Virgil whom Dante had chosen as his guide through the infernal regions—Virgil, who mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra.2 And then Monti turned to the first Canto of the Inferno, and read aloud:
“Tu se’ lo mio maestro, e il mio autore;
Tu se’ solo colui, da cui io tolsi
Lo bello stile, che m’ha fatto onore.”3
So in a flash the morning passed, and then it was time to go home and work and work, in an attempt to master the rudiments which would enable me to understand him better next time.
Monti did not, of course, let me off learning any grammar or rules; he merely required me to wrestle with them alone, not wasting our time together on such matters, unless I had a question to ask, or some point came up which he wished to explain. For ignorance he always made every allowance; you did not know, so you asked and were told. But stupidity or laziness were inconceivable. Why, if you suffered from these complaints, had you come to his little room at all?
I cannot remember the detailed progress of our work. I only know that for nearly three years, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I went to him, when in Florence, three times a week; that my imagination was entirely filled by the world he conjured up for me; and that, indeed, I owe to him, not only what he taught me then, but, in enthusiasm and method of approach, all that I have learned ever since. During those years, our relationship remained a curiously impersonal one. I do not remember him coming to my mother’s house, or ever speaking to him of anything unconnected with my studies: but in the time I spent with him, I was as entirely absorbed in his teaching, as convinced that this was absolute beauty and truth, as any young disciple at the feet of his guru.
The path of learning was sometimes made easy, too, and enlivened by an element of surprise.
“Do you know what Pascoli said to the kettle which wouldn’t boil for his dinner?” Monti suddenly asked one morning, “Pentola, pentola, pentola, bolli. Pentola, bolli!” Then he added, turning to an equally hungry frie
nd in the doorway, “Che bell’esametro!”4
Taking a pencil, Monti wrote it down, marking the long syllables and the short—and so, in three minutes, the rhythm of the hexameter was fixed in my mind for ever.
At the end of each lesson he would say, “Now, a surprise!” and would read aloud to me a few perfect lines to carry back in my head during the hour in which the slow, crowded tram toiled up the Fiesole hill. So it was that I encountered for the first time L’ora che volge il desìo ai naviganti—and Leopardi’s Le vie dorate e gli orti, and Pascoli’s L’ultimo viaggio di Ulisse. Never was there a suggestion in Monti’s voice, as he read, that any passage was already familiar to him; he engraved it on the bare tablets of my mind as if for him, too, it were a discovery.
A little later on there was Lesbia’s sparrow and Alcman’s kingfisher ‘with never a care in his heart—the sea-blue bird of spring’, and then, in the last year in which I worked with him, Sappho’s last apple on the topmost bough, and the great Ode to Aphrodite. It was a morning in May, and even on Monti’s dusty desk his wife had put a small vase containing a single dark red rose; as I read, its scent reached me, together with the honeyed words. And I was fifteen—an ungainly, awkward schoolgirl, far more ignorant than any convent-bred child, but dizzy and quivering that morning with questions and unformulated dreams and longings.
“If now she loves thee not, she soon will love …”
Something in my stumbling voice made even Monti suddenly glance up from the printed page.
“That will do for today, my dear,” he said gently. “Take it home and read it to yourself. È primavera.”
As I rode home up the hill under the silver olive-trees, the creaking tram was Aphrodite’s chariot, drawn by swallows.
I only remember seeing Monti once outside his study, and that was in the little ruined amphitheatre of Luni—the scene of Marius the Epicurean’s ‘White Nights’—which lies in the strip of land, set among olive-trees and vines, between Sarzana and the sea. It is one of the most classical, gentlest landscapes in Tuscany and was then very little known, for no road led to it and one came upon the ruins quite suddenly at the end of a winding path from a farm. Gnarled fig-trees grew in the crevices of the walls and the centre of the amphitheatre was often piled high with grain, for the farmers used it as a threshing-floor, or, when it had been cleared, danced there on summer nights. I did not know that Monti and his wife often came to stay with friends near the mouth of the river Magra in the summer, and so it seemed nothing short of a miracle when, after bicycling to Luni at the end of a hot summer’s day (my mother had taken a villa by the sea nearby) I suddenly heard, as I approached the ruins, a familiar voice and saw, seated on one of the lower steps of the theatre in his rusty black town suit only enlivened by a very old Panama hat, with some peaches on his lap and a paper bag of dry biscuits, dear Monti, talking to his host’s two sons. When the greetings were over and we had eaten the biscuits and peaches, we begged him to say some lines to us before going home.
“It’s getting late,” he demurred, “and I feel lazy.” Then he added, “but you are right, children; it is the time and place.”
And very slowly, very quietly, leaning back against the stones, with his hat tilted over his eyes to shield him from the setting sun, he recited to us the famous lines in which Virgil grants to the bees something of the divine essence:
… deum namque ire per omnia,
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum;
hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
quemque sibi tenuis nascentem arcessere vitas;
scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri
omnia, nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo.5
“They fly aloft,” he repeated, “and find their rest in heaven.” While he was speaking, the bees were still humming round us among the mint and thyme, but now the sun was getting low and they were withdrawing into their hives.
“Look, there’s the old Corycian going home.”
And, indeed, down the path to the farm an old man was making his way home, ‘like a king’, with his basket ‘of food unbought’—some fresh onions and beans, a few peaches and a cucumber—and an old goat hobbling behind him.
“Buona sera, signoria.”
“Buona sera, nonno, vai a cena? Buon appetito!”
For the first time I became aware of poetry as something not disconnected from life, but incorporated in it, and also realised how profoundly the classical tradition was still rooted in the Mediterranean world—transmitted not only in the cadences of words but in nature itself and in the most familiar objects of daily use. As I looked around me, there was nothing in sight that Virgil himself might not have seen: the olive-trees and figs and vines, the fat-bellied gourd trailing in the grass, the single clump of lilies beside the farm door, the pungent thyme beneath our feet, the oxen slowly plodding home, the goat (and Virgil, too, knew that the damage wrought by goats is even worse than that of drought or early frost), even the wooden flails leaning against one of the walls of the amphitheatre, the small curved sickle with which a bare-armed, dark-skinned girl was cutting a bundle of grass, and the round bee-hives placed, as the poet advised, beside a little channel of running water. So, too, many years later, when first I went to Phaestos, I saw in the underground store-room beneath the summer palace of the Cretan kings, a wooden scoop with which the oil used to be drawn out of the great Cretan oil-jars three thousand years before, which was of exactly the same shape as those that we still use for the same purpose on our Tuscan farm today.
In Virgil the same word, arma, is used for a countryman’s tools and for his arms. Perhaps a poet’s words are also not only instruments, but arms: his means of defending a pattern of beauty, an established order, as an incantation may preserve a rite. In Tuscany, more than in any other part of Italy, some of Virgil’s words may still be heard in common speech: a ploughman, when we first came to La Foce, would still sometimes call himself a bifolco, and the word reaches us with a patina similar to that of a Roman weapon or an Etruscan vase just turned up by the plough.
But these were, of course, later reflections. Too wise to improve the occasion any further—or perhaps just tired of teaching—Monti lay back dozing until the boys, becoming restless, tried to coax a lizard from his crevice in the stones. “Come, children, it’s late; we must go home.” Had I been able to go on working with Monti for another couple of years, I would perhaps have tried to become a classical scholar or an archaeologist, and my life might have taken a very different course. But in 1917 he suddenly died of Spanish influenza and when, in the following year, we moved to Rome, I was taken on by a teacher who was far too eminent a scholar for me, Professor Nicola Festa, who, having always taught pupils familiar with the conventional school curriculum, did not realise that the English schoolgirl whom he had only accepted because she came from Monti, concealed beneath her enthusiasm such deep wells of ignorance that she sometimes could not follow him at all. It had been Monti’s intention, I now realise, to reverse the usual processes of teaching, and—after forming my taste and ear and kindling my enthusiasm—to go back to the necessary spade-work, which would then have seemed worth while. Only now I was like a plant without roots, and very anxious, too, for Monti’s sake, to conceal my vast lacunae from his old teacher. The hours in which we read Sophocles together thus became desperate feats of ingenuity on my part, trying to understand what Professor Festa plainly considered elementary, and then wrestling at home, between lessons, with grammars and cribs. But, while I was of course impressed by Festa’s scholarship and by his dry, penetrating comments, the old fire was not kindled again. I had lost my guru.
1 Pascoli: Introduction to Epos, pp. xvii–xviii.
On one side, the plain shimmering with fires, with a serene, starry sky (the Trojans were in the open, before the great city, and a thousand fires were blazing and by each fire sat fifty warriors, and their horses stood c
lose to the fires, champing the white spelt and oats between their teeth, and waiting for the dawn); on the other side the sea, murmuring and sighing. And when they reached the hut and ships of the Myrmidons, they heard a song. It was Achilles, who as he strummed on the strings of his stolen harp, was extolling his warriors’ deeds.
2 Who ‘showed us what our tongue can do’.
3 ‘You are my master and creator; from you alone I drew the noble style which has brought me honour.’ Inferno, I, 85–88.
4 “What a fine hexameter!” I have since found this story also in an essay on Pascoli by Manara Valgimigli.
5 … for a deity
There is pervading the whole earth and all
The expanses of the sea, and heights of heaven:
That from him flocks and herds, men and wild beasts
Of every kind, each at its birth drinks in
The subtle breath of life; and thus all beings
Soon return thither, soon to be dissolved
And so restored; nor for death is there a place;
But, living still, into the ranks of stars
They fly aloft, and find their rest in heaven.
Georgics IV, 221–30, translated by R. C. Trevelyan
7
Growing up and Coming out
One of the difficulties of the painful process called growing up is the absence of a standard of comparison. How is one to measure the importance of what is happening to one when every event is new? How to judge other people and how to assess oneself? Are one’s emotions shared, in secret, by other girls, or is one, perhaps, unique? Is one’s rebelliousness and discontent a sign of unusual wickedness, or as natural as physical growing-pains?