by Iris Origo
I got a good deal of pleasure, too, from several other ‘features’ of the Season: the Trooping the Colour, which we saw from the rooms of a friend of my grandfather’s at the Admiralty, with my cousin Gerald suddenly transformed into a symbolic figure, since he happened to be one of the young officers taking part; and also days at Hurlingham, Lords, and Henley—all the occasions, in short, at which I could be a mere spectator. I was even able to hypnotise myself, as I walked round and round Lords in my best pale blue dress with some Etonian friend of my cousin’s, or climbed on to one of the coaches for lunch, into not realising how very dull the young men really were, how little I cared about cricket, and how positively glutted I felt with strawberries and cream. Only sometimes a stifled inner voice would whisper, “This is called pleasure, but I am not enjoying myself!”
If this description, however, has left the impression that I was already blasé, it has been very misleading. During the long years of the War in Italy I had fallen in love with England—or rather with my idea of England, based chiefly upon my grand-father’s letters, my mother’s conversation, and a fine medley of the books I had read—from Six to Sixteen to The Most Popular Girl in the Fifth and, at a later stage, from Jane Austen to Rose Macaulay, from St. Agnes’ Eve to The Shropshire Lad. The world I had built up in my imagination was unlike any country upon land or sea. It was a phantasmagoria of Queen Anne country houses and Oxford colleges and libraries, of village cricket and nursery tea, of hollyhocks in cottage gardens and cathedral spires; of friends, friends, friends with whom I could be at ease, and of a deep swift stream perpetually gliding between green banks, while a young man (his contours still somewhat blurred) read poetry aloud to me. And whenever the real England offered me anything that faintly corresponded to these dreams, I fell in love with it all over again.
I fell in love with Eton on my first Fourth of June—wholly entranced by the beauty of the buildings, of the playing-fields and of the boys’ voices at Evensong in College Chapel. I determined to marry an Englishman so as to be able to send my sons to Eton—but unfortunately no candidates were forthcoming.
I spent a long week-end in Rutland with the family of the young man who had taken me to see the Wren churches, and for three days I believed that this was the existence that, for the rest of my life, I would like to lead. I attended the prize-giving of Uppingham School (with my host, a distinguished old General, giving the prizes) and handed out the lemonade at the tennis party; I helped my hostess to cut off the dead heads in the herbaceous border and to ‘do the flowers’ for the dinner-table. I got up very early one morning to pick mushrooms with John before breakfast in the green, lush meadows in the valley, while the grass was still glittering with dew; and, on another day, we bicycled across half the county to rub the brasses of some eighteenth-century tombs in another village. I fell in love with the whole setting: with the little Norman church of grey stone, in which some of my host’s ancestors lay with a Crusader’s Cross upon their breasts, and the General read the Lesson, as my grandfather had done at Desart (though not so well). I fell in love with my chintz-covered bedroom and its view of gentle meadow land and farm land, with the humming of bees and the scent of mignonette, and perhaps even with my elderly hosts—as rooted, immovable and right in their setting as the grey stones of their church. But I had enough sense to realise that I was not—just not—in love with their charming son, and above all, that he did not care for me. We parted good friends, though I shed a tear or two in the train back to London, not so much for him as for an England to which, I instinctively knew, I would never belong. What I did not, of course, then realise was that, by the time I reached middle-age, that particular England would have ceased to exist.
It was from this society that, after only a short interval at Villa Medici, I sailed in the autumn of 1920 to go through the debutante hoops in yet another setting; that of New York. For four years, during the whole of the war, I had been cut off from my American relations. I had, indeed, been back to see my American grandmother the year before, when I was just seventeen, but this had been merely a short visit, and though it had sufficed to reawaken my affection for her and for Westbrook, it had also made me aware of the rift between her and my mother, which had begun with the latter’s decision to bring me up in Italy and had been increased by her determination to return to England as soon as the war was declared in 1914.
I therefore set off for my American debut alone, or rather in the company of the sweet young Irish maid, only a few years older than myself, Alice Walsh, whose life has been intertwined with mine for much of the rest of my life. On the voyage I already felt torn between divided loyalties, and they were put to the test as soon as my trunk was unpacked. After one glance at the clothes it contained—the sage-green woollen dress from Woollands, the silver brocade evening-dress made out of an Egyptian shawl, the hand-embroidered but ill-cut linen dress from the Via della Vigna Nuova—my grandmother, who was herself the personification of chic and good taste, swept me off to Bendel’s for a complete outfit. Never had I seen such lovely clothes before! There was a deep rose-coloured taffeta evening dress with a long, wide-panelled skirt from Lanvin, like a Nattier painting, which, fifty years later, I can still remember and in which, I felt, even I would be confident. But was it fair to my mother to accept so many gifts, which not only replaced, but plainly by implication condemned, the clothes she had bought for me? My solution was not a graceful one: I wore the fine clothes, but (at least in my grandmother’s presence) grudgingly and scarcely saying thank you.
The process of becoming a debutante in New York in 1920 was a truly formidable one. Even for girls who had grown up together at the same nursery parties, dancing schools and pre-debutante dances, and whose brothers and cousins had also been through a similar mill, the pace was grilling, and for a newcomer like myself the whole routine was misery. The social day would start with a large debutantes’ lunch, entirely feminine, at which—dressed in our best silk or velvet dresses—twenty or thirty of us would be given an elaborate meal, the talk consisting almost entirely of gossip and shrieks of laughter about people I did not know, or competitive talk about dances and partners. A stranger like myself could do little but crumble her bread and eat. Then came a concert or matinee, and, as the evening approached, a new anxiety: would a white cardboard box be lying on one’s dressing table and would it be from the right young man? To have a ‘corsage’ (generally consisting of orchids or gardenias and costing far more than the giver could afford) was a sign of success; or rather, not to have one, was so certain a sign of failure, not only in the eyes of one’s friends but of one’s family, that I was told it was not unusual for an unpopular girl surreptitiously to send one to herself! If two boxes came on the same day, there was the problem of what to say later on, to the donor whose gift one did not wear—but this was a dilemma that seldom offered itself to me. Then came a large dinner-party, at which I was able to obtain an immediate if fleeting popularity by dividing my oysters between my two neighbours, and then, two or three balls in succession.
It was then that the real competition began. The ‘cutting-in’ system seemed to have been especially devised to ensure that a popular girl should increase her popularity, while a ‘pill’ would be progressively deprived of hope. The men all stood in the ‘stag-line’ at one end of the room, watching, and one of them would ‘cut in’ on any girl by tapping her partner on the shoulder. A popular girl would thus often only dance a few steps before she was ‘cut in’ on again; but a girl who was plain, danced badly, or merely happened to have few acquaintances, would slowly proceed round and round the room with her partner, mercilessly linked together like two figures in Dante’s Inferno. The longer her plight lasted, the less likely it was that she would be freed; for it would take a very polite young man or a very faithful old friend to risk being ‘stuck’ with her for the rest of the evening.
In addition, this was one of the Prohibition years. This did not mean that there was no drinking, but merely that th
e young ‘college boys’ who were our partners, instead of having learned to drink wine or good whisky in moderation at their parents’ table, now drank, from tepid hip-flasks in their cloak-room, liquor which was often sheer poison and of which a very small amount went straight to their heads. To have upon the stag-line a close friend to whom you could signal for help, if your partner was too obviously overcome or amorous, became extremely useful.
Here, as in London, it was the most formal entertainments that I enjoyed most, since I was then again able to become merely a spectator. My grandfather had been one of the first box-holders at the Metropolitan, and I still remember the glitter of jewels and the exquisite dresses on a gala night, as well as the galaxy of great singers whom I then heard for the first time. Every week, before this occasion, the same social crisis arose. “Have we got any men yet, for Thursday evening?” Music-loving and leisured men who wished to sit through a whole opera were scarce, and were apt to be booked for weeks beforehand by box-holding hostesses; young men of this kind were still scarcer, so that I usually sat (to my secret relief ) in the front of the box, bolt upright in my best dress and long white gloves, between my grandmother and another lady of her age, attended by two kindly, musical old gentlemen, and felt free to listen to the music in peace. It was thus that I heard Jeritza as Elsa, on the night of her debut in New York, and later on in the Walküre; Caruso in Pagliacci, on the gala night on which King Albert of Belgium was welcomed to New York in a frenzy of enthusiasm directly after the First World War, and Lucrezia Bori in Kovancina; and I was present, too, on the first night after the war, on which Chaliapin returned in the part of Boris Godunov to his adoring public. When, at the end of the performance, he came back to receive his applause and, tearing off his royal cloak and robes, stood in the blouse of a Russian peasant, the Russians in the audience, in a state of delirium, climbed up over the footlights and carried him off the stage; and when, a few minutes later, I was taken behind the scenes by a friend of his, it was to witness a charming scene: the comparatively tiny Lucrezia Bori, unable to reach up to embrace the giant properly, being lifted up by him on to a table, from which she could comfortably throw her arms around his neck.
Looking back on those three years, I am inclined to think that they were a considerable waste of time, for although it is perhaps necessary to learn something of the ways of the world sooner or later, I think I would have been both happier and nicer—because not constricted into a mould which was not my natural one—if I had been allowed to go instead, as I wished, to Oxford. There, working at the subjects I cared about and learning many things which I was later on obliged to acquire without assistance, I would have found my own level. As a debutante in London and New York I was constantly aware of values which I did not share, and yet was not brave enough (or perhaps merely too young) to disregard, and spent my time in striving for prizes I did not really care to win. To prove to myself, as well as to others, that I too could have some beaux, I encouraged young men whom I did not really like very much, and was then both surprised and distressed when they fell in love with me. For fear of being thought a blue-stocking or a prig, I learned to refrain from talking about the things that really interested me, but was extremely bad at talking about anything else. All this was not only a waste of time and energy: just as there are some books which are, in Salvemini’s phrase, ‘libri fecondatori’, from which new ideas are born, so there are some periods of one’s life which hold in them the seeds of growth, and some that do not. In those years I was deflected—by vanity, preoccupation, and lack of self-confidence—from my natural course. I was a less complete person, that is less completely myself, than the unfledged schoolgirl who had read Virgil with Monti.
In the interval, however, I was, in spite of these obstacles, growing up. I began to fall in love, rather often and rather intensely, but was not very clear about what was happening to me, since, in spite of all my precocious reading, I was quite unable to apply what I had found in books to any useful purpose in ‘real life’. And then some young men actually fell in love with me. I have sometimes wondered whether any of them realised how much gratitude, as well as ignorance, there was in my response. The one of these young men who surprised me most, and whom I met for the first time when I was still a plumpish schoolgirl of not yet eighteen and he a young man of twenty-eight, tall, dark and reserved, and possessed of more than his fair share of charm—chaperoning his younger sister at a small dance—was my future husband, Antonio Origo. It seemed to me so odd as to be almost incredible that he not only danced with me, but appeared to enjoy talking to me afterwards, and when, a month later, he sent me a picture-postcard of friendly, if formal, greetings, it provided enough food for a whole summer’s daydreams. It was not, however, until two years later that we met again—under very different circumstances, since his father was then dying of cancer and he was nursing him devotedly. After long nights at his father’s bedside, he would sometimes walk up the Fiesole hill in the early morning, and we might have a few minutes together, and sometimes, too, we would steal brief walks on country paths where we hoped we would meet no-one we knew. (We did, of course, meet a friend of my mother’s one day, but she had the kindness to remain silent.) It was then that we ‘reached an understanding’, which was sealed by a further meeting in Venice in the autumn, but my mother (who had extracted a promise from me some time before not to become engaged until I was twenty-one) now insisted on a total separation of six months—although she could offer no serious objections except that Antonio was indubitably Italian and a Catholic, and also, she said, too good-looking and too grown-up for me. We kept our promise scrupulously—the only infringement being a little crystal casket of lilies-of-the-valley which Antonio sent me (without a card) on Christmas Day, and which my mother promptly took to her own room, since she still found it inconceivable that anyone should send flowers to me. But on the day when the six months came to an end, a letter was waiting for me, and in the following summer Antonio went briefly to England to meet my English grandparents and then to join me at Westbrook, where our engagement was at last announced.
In deciding to marry Antonio I was not only making—although deeply in love—the personal choice involved in every marriage. I was deliberately choosing life in Italy, rather than in England or America, and, though ignorant of much that I was undertaking, was determined to mould myself to the way of life that my fiancé and I had chosen. Both of us were suffering from a strong reaction against the kind of life for which our parents had prepared us: I against the over-sophisticated, over-intellectual society which had been the background of my youth; Antonio against the world of business for which his education had fitted him, and which was incongruous, not only to his nature and taste, but to the atmosphere he had known in his father’s house. Marchese Clemente Origo—Roman by birth, with a Russian mother, Paolina Polyectoff—had cut a brilliant figure in his youth as a smart cavalry officer in the Genova Cavalleria, a man as tall and gaunt as Don Quixote and with something of the same panache. He bought his horses in Dublin and sent his fine shirts to be laundered in London, but devoted the second half of his life to the arts, becoming a well-known painter and sculptor. He divided the year between Florence and a small house on what was then a wild, lonely stretch of beach and pine-forest at Motrone, on the Versilian coast, with frequent visits to Paris and Venice, to Bayreuth and Munich—wherever, in short, good art, amusing talk and pretty women were to be found. His wife, Rosa Tarsis (previously married to Duke Pompeo Litta), possessed a singularly sweet nature and a charming voice, and their house soon became a centre for many outstanding musicians, painters and writers: Puccini and Catalano, Cannicci and William Storey, Mario Praga and Ugo Ojetti, and above all d’Annunzio, who for many years considered the Origos’ house as his own, wrote the best poems of Alcione at Motrone; and sent to my mother-in-law the only affectionate, unamorous letters he ever wrote to a pretty woman.
It was in this society that Antonio grew up, but as soon as he was old enough to
go to school, his father sent him to Switzerland, to be turned into a successful businessman. For a year, afterwards, he worked in a bank in Brussels and then in the champagne firm of Mumms’ in Rheims, but when the First World War broke out he at once joined up. After three years on the Carso and one in the Italian Military Mission in London, he came back to Florence, where we agreed to embark together upon a life entirely new to both of us. Some months before our marriage, we had bought a large, neglected estate, La Foce, in southern Tuscany, hoping to find there not only our home but the work that we both wanted. Antonio had, deep in his bones, the instinctive love of many Italians for the land, and wanted to farm in a region still undeveloped agriculturally, where there would still be much work to do. I had a strong, though uninformed, interest in social work. We both wanted to get away from city life and to lead what we thought of as a pastoral, Virgilian existence.
For some more months our marriage was delayed by my mother’s ill-health and mental distress, for her divorce from Geoffrey Scott was just going through, until our family doctor bluntly remarked that if we did not get married at once we never would. So married we were, on March 4, 1924, in the Villa Medici chapel. Only my mother’s sister, Lady Joan Verney, and her son Ulick were there to represent the English side of my family and my aunt, Justine Ward, the American side; with Antonio’s sister, Carla Franceschi, her in-laws, and a handful of our Florentine friends—and Doody to wave us goodbye as we drove away.