by Iris Origo
Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento
E queta sovra i tetti e in mezzo agli orti
Posa la luna e da lontan rivela
Serena ogni montagna.5
And only after seeing all this, and letting it sink into me, did I feel that I could even begin to write. For such journeys are more than a sentimental pilgrimage: they are more akin to the need felt by a man whose sight is dim, to pass his hands over a face.
Nevertheless, eighteen years after the publication of this book, I was dissatisfied with it. Some of its comments—especially on the Leopardi family and the Recanati background—seemed to me both glib and insufficiently informed; and the passages about his writings both thin and second-hand. So I decided to write the book all over again. One excuse, which I proffered in the introduction to this new version (which I called Leopardi, A Study in Solitude and which was published in 19536) was that, in the interval, two more volumes of the poet’s correspondence had been published, as well as some important Italian critical works and biographies. But the real reason was a different one: that, like a friend whose life one has shared for many years, I felt I had got to know him (and I might have added, his country) a little better.
In the particular case of Leopardi, moreover, I have not been the only biographer who has felt the need to retrace his footsteps. I remember telling the distinguished Leopardian scholar and critic, Giuseppe de Robertis, who was then engaged on the back-breaking task of compiling a subject-index of the Zibaldone, that after eighteen years, I was just beginning a second life of the poet. He began to laugh. “I see that you have caught it, too,” he said, “il vizio leopardiano. This won’t be your last book on the subject,” he foretold—and indeed he was right, since only two years ago, in collaboration with John Heath-Stubbs, I produced a volume of Leopardi’s Selected Prose and Poetry (John Heath-Stubbs translating the poetry and I the prose, with biographical notes). Here the main change in the prose section of the book, since its purpose was to serve as an introduction to Leopardi’s work in English and American universities, has been that I have only used my own words when they were indispensable, to state a fact, sketch in a background or frame a picture. The rest of the story is told by Leopardi himself.
For more and more, as I have gone on reading and writing about other people, it is the subject’s own voice that I want to hear. When a biographer can record what a man actually said, he awakens a degree of conviction denied to any other form of narrative. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” says Howell ruminatively to Mark Twain, and when the latter replies, “It’s so damned humiliating,” we know, without a doubt, that this is precisely what the great man did say. This is the kind of material, the small change of daily life, that I have always found irresistible, and that caused me to write, some time after Leopardi, two books about persons who (in their very different ways) would not otherwise have been my choice: Lord Byron, and the fourteenth-century merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini.
* * *
At this point I have necessarily begun to ask myself: has there really been any connecting link, however tenuous, between the subjects I have chosen? They fall—apart from my little wardiary, which was a straightforward account of personal experience—into two sections: studies of figures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, and of the nineteenth century both in England and Italy. The mediaeval studies are about a merchant and a saint; the nineteenth-century ones about two great poets; about (on a smaller scale) Byron’s little daughter, Allegra, and his Venetian friend, Contessa Marina Benzon—kind, florid, amorous, floating in her gondola down the Venetian canals (with a slice of steaming hot polenta, to nibble at now and then, concealed in her ample bosom); about some figures of Victorian England; Mazzini lecturing to Carlyle and Jane in Cheyne Row and being lectured back, Carlyle and Lady Ashburton caught in the meshes of their confused, tormented, innocent friendship and, finally, a figure totally incongruous to the others, that of Marie Lenéru, the French writer and playwright whose extraordinary Journal reveals the triumph—within her own terms—over many years in which she was both deaf and blind.
What, I must again ask myself, was it that drew me towards such different characters and backgrounds? I think that the answer is quite a simple one: I did not choose them because I felt especially drawn to poets, merchants or great ladies, to the disabled, or even to saints, but because of an avid interest in people. “L’historien” said Marc Bloch, “ressemble à l’ogre de la fable. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier.” Yes, that was what I was trying to find. Like E. M. Forster, I believe that ‘the true history of the human race is the story of human affections’. The biographer’s real business—if it is not too arrogant to say so—is simply this: to bring the dead to life. If he succeeds, it does not matter a rap whether his subject was great or humble, good or bad; and any other information that may come to light in the process is only relevant in so far as it makes the dead man a little more alive. Of course one cannot write a book about Leopardi or Byron without bearing in mind that they were poets; nor about Francesco Datini without referring to trade in the fourteenth century; still less can one write about San Bernardino without mentioning that he was a famous preacher. But unless what comes out of the book is a living person, whom you feel you might meet in the street tomorrow, it will not be a good biography.
The process by which this transmission of personality can be achieved varies, of course, very much. Sometimes a single phrase is enough. “This was a good dinner, to be sure: but it was not a dinner to ask a man to”—from whose lips could this remark have issued, but from Dr. Johnson’s? “When Poodle Byng comes here”—the comment is on a fellow-guest in a Victorian country house, and the voice is Sidney Smith’s—“all the hedgerows smell like Piccadilly.” And here is Carlyle, on his eightieth birthday, when some ladies presented him with a clock: “Eh, what have I got to do with Time?” he said. Sometimes, however, this shorthand will not do. In the case of Francesco Datini, for instance, his personality was so tightly bound up with his possessions and his trade that it was necessary to put together a very detailed mosaic of small facts before a man appeared. And with San Bernardino, whose tool was the use of words, harsh or compassionate, compelling, witty or persuasive, it was necessary to quote a good many of them, to reveal his vision of this world and the next.
I must, however, add a confession: my choice of at least two subjects—Byron and Datini—was not due to a personal liking for either of these two men, nor even to an especial interest in their achievements, but largely to the accident of stumbling upon some irresistibly good material. This is not generally, I think, a good plan: in literature, as in life, one is most perceptive about the people one likes best. (The alternative, as Voltaire showed, is hatred and contempt: ‘écrasez l’infâme!’). Yet to make use of such material is a very great temptation and the process, once it is found, of rounding it out, of ferreting below ground, of plunging, in short, into an entirely new world, is fascinating. I will not apologise for describing some of my experiences, in the hope that my readers will agree with the statement of the great French historian Marc Bloch: ‘Le spectacle de la recherche est rarement ennuyeux. C’est le tout fait qui répand la glace et l’ennui.’
* * *
My first acquaintance with Byron’s world (apart from a general acquaintance with his Letters and Poems) was made immediately after my first book about Leopardi, when it occurred to me to find out what had happened to the children of some of the great writers of the nineteenth century, and to inquire whether the forcing-house in which they had lived had stimulated their growth or crippled it. The book was to be called Poets’ Children and was to be a study of the children of Leigh Hunt (‘dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos’, said Byron), of Coleridge, of Byron himself, and of the Brownings’ idolised, pampered little Pen, driving in his velvet suit through the streets of Florence in a pony-carriage. This book was never finished. The only story I did write, except f
or a brief article on Coleridge’s son, Hartley, was that of Byron’s illegitimate daughter by Claire Clairmont, Allegra, whom he took away from her mother to join him in Venice and then in Ravenna, and whom finally, when he had tired of her, he packed off to a convent-school in the middle of the Romagna marshes, where she died of a low, lingering fever before her fifth birthday. It was then that I became acquainted with a Byron I had not known before: the man who prided himself on having become assimilated, through his love affair with Teresa Guiccioli, into Italian provincial society. ‘Now I have lived among the Italians,’ he wrote, ‘not Florenced and Romed and Galleried and Conversationed it for a few months, and then home again—but been of their families, and friendships and feuds, and loves and councils, in a part of Italy least known to foreigners; and have been amongst them of all classes, from the Conte to the Contadino.’7
It seemed to me that there must be a good deal more to learn about this aspect of Byron’s life, and with some trepidation I set off to Florence to try to persuade Count Carlo Gamba, the great-nephew and heir of Contessa Guiccioli, to allow me to consult the papers of his great-aunt. My fear of meeting with a refusal was not unfounded, since Count Gamba—an old gentleman of much taste, who was both old-fashioned and very deaf—had already refused access to several people, including André Maurois, to the papers of ‘poor dear aunt Teresa’. I don’t remember how I persuaded him to change his mind, since it is very difficult to be persuasive or reassuring at the top of one’s voice, but I suspect that he did so, not because of anything I said, but merely because his niece knew me, and he did not think that I looked too foreign or unreliable. In any case, he accepted my promise that I would, of course, show him anything I proposed to publish, and then, ringing the bell, told his man servant to bring down ‘Contessa Teresa’s chest’. “It’s all at your disposal,” he said courteously, indicating, as he lifted the lid of the carved mahogany box, many bundles of letters, tied up in ribbon (“These, I think, are Lord Byron’s—but I don’t know about the others”) and a variety of objects, to which Teresa always referred as Byron’s ‘relics’. There was the locket containing her hair and hung on a chain of her hair which Byron was wearing when he died and which Augusta Leigh sent back to Teresa; there was another locket containing Byron’s own hair which he gave to Teresa when he sailed for Greece. There—carefully wrapped up by Teresa, with an inscription in her writing—were a piece of the wall-hangings in the room in Palazzo Gamba where Byron used to visit her, his handkerchief and a fragment of one of his shirts and, from Newstead Abbey, a crumbling rose-leaf, the twig of a tree and a small acorn. There was a good deal more hair. And finally the Count drew out a fat little volume bound in purple plush: the copy of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, which Byron and Teresa often read together, on the fly-leaf of which he wrote one of his most famous love-letters to her8 (in English, refusing to translate it for her on her return).
In the book, a number of passages were underlined in the same ink as the letter. ‘I had learned to love’, one said, ‘from the poets, but real love is not like that. There is in the realities of existence something arid, which every effort is vain to alter.’ Finally, at the bottom of page ninety-two, there was a footnote in Byron’s writing: ‘I knew Madame de Staël well—better than she knew Italy, but I little thought that, one day, I should think with her thoughts … She is sometimes right, and often wrong, about Italy and England; but almost always true in delineating the heart.’
Count Gamba showed me these passages, and then replaced the book with the other ‘relics’ in the mahogany box, while the bundles of letters were transferred into a suitcase for me to take away. Even the most cursory glance at them, as this was happening, showed that there were many letters that were not in Byron’s writing: I caught a glimpse of the signatures of Lamartine, of Lady Blessington, of Pietro Gamba and of Teresa herself. Had the letters been listed, I asked the Count, did he realise that they were very valuable?9 But he waved my scruples aside: no, no, he did not know exactly what the letters were—perhaps I would tell him when I returned them. But how did he know, I persisted, that I would not lose some of them, or sell them to an American library? Would he not like a list to be made at once, and perhaps witnessed by his lawyer? He replied by telling his servant to put the suitcase in my car.10 And so, returning to my hotel bedroom, I emptied the whole case on to the bed and spent a fascinating evening. For as I glanced through Byron’s love-letters to Teresa (in a style often closely resembling that of an Italian letter-writing manual) and perused the seventeen hundred pages of her own Vie de Lord Byron en Italie, I realised that I had indeed come across a new facet of the poet’s intricate, complex personality. And, I wondered, might it not be possible to unearth some other local material, which would show him in this Italian world from the angle of his observers, instead of from his own? So I started looking. I received some lively accounts of provincial life in Ravenna in the 1820’s, as well as permission to quote from papers in their family archives from Conte and Contessa Pasolini dall’Onda in Ravenna; I consulted the libraries and state archives of Venice, Bologna, Forli, Florence, and Lucca. Gradually a very curious picture began to take shape. I saw Byron not only through the eyes of the Gamba and Guiccioli families and his other Italian acquaintances, but through those of his fellow-conspirators among the Carbonari, and of the Papal, Austrian and Tuscan spies, who dogged his footsteps.11
The process of unearthing all these accounts was very odd. It had (like any form of research) the fascination of a crossword puzzle, but it was also a little like walking in Madame Tussaud’s Gallery of Mirrors, in a world in which everything (and Byron himself most of all) was slightly out of focus, every motive misinterpreted, every image magnified or dwindled. I also learned a little more about a much more sympathetic side of Byron’s character—the one which, perhaps, in the end earned him a place in Westminster Abbey—‘his intensity and strength, his power and passion … in resisting the enemies of Freedom’.12 These qualities found full scope in his association with the Gamba family, since both Teresa’s father, Conte Ruggero, and her young brother Pietro (‘wild about liberty’, wrote Byron) were considered pecore segnate (branded sheep) by both the Austrian and Papal governments. It was through them that Byron made the acquaintance of the local Carbonari and soon became the head of one of their bands, the Cacciatori Americani. He met the conspirators in the pine-forest; he concealed their weapons in his house; he felt himself to have become, at last, a man of action.
Finally, before the book13 was finished, I was allowed to visit the villa at Settimello, near Pistoia, which had belonged to Teresa (then the widow of the Marquis de Boissy) in which she spent the last seven years of her life, and where she kept her books and Byronic ‘relics’. It was strange to take down her books and to find, in the fine, pointed handwriting which she had acquired at S. Chiara, her distressed, indignant comments at the manner in which Byron’s friends had treated what she considered the most perfect and unflawed romance. Often she confined herself to exclamation marks or to the words, ‘Non!’ or ‘Mensonge!’ or even ‘Pah!’—and in Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and His Contemporaries, ‘Faux! faux! Hypocrite! Menteur!’ In the margin of Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron, beside the passage describing ‘the bad and vulgar taste predominating in all Lord Byron’s equipments’, Teresa angrily scribbled, ‘Mais ce sont des mensonges, pour faire plaisir à Dorset’ (sic). On the other hand the simple remark, ‘Byron’s was a fine nature’ elicited the comment, ‘Oh, true!’ and a similar approval was granted to the passage in which Lady Blessington remarked that ‘all the malice of his nature lodged itself in his lips and the fingers of his right hand—for there is none, I am persuaded, in his heart’. But it was Moore’s Life which upset Teresa most. ‘The word “Adultery” is cruel’, she wrote, ‘and could at least be sostituted (sic) by another less odious.’ Her final comment is on the last page of Moore’s book: ‘It was a duty in his (Byron’s) friends to employ delicacy in this task. In wh
at manner they have satisfied it, this work must show sufficiently.’