Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  Poor Teresa! Yet, in setting all this down, I did not feel that I was betraying her great-nephew’s trust in me. His original purpose in suppressing the publication of her papers had been to safeguard her reputation—but indeed, when the whole story lies before us, it is she who comes out best. Of all Byron’s friends, she and her brother Pietro were the only ones who took him entirely seriously, who doggedly, whole-heartedly and against all evidence, believed in him. They believed not only in his poetic genius and his noble aspirations, but in his romantic attitudes, his kindness, his heroism. Pietro died in Greece—two years after the poet himself—for the cause that Byron inspired. And Teresa, her silliness and vanity fallen away from her in old age, wrote that it was her wish that all her papers, ‘whatever the effect upon my reputation’, should be published, for the sake of showing ‘Lord Byron’s good and kind heart’.

  * * *

  In the case of The Merchant of Prato, my researches led me into very different paths. I had written a monograph14 about the importation into Florence, after the decimation of the population by the Black Death in 1348, of foreign slaves from the Black Sea, the Balkans, and Africa: and in the course of my researches, I had come across the deed of sale to a merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini, of a little Tartar slave-girl of ten. In the letter in which he instructed his agent in Genoa to find such a child, he had been very specific. She was to be ‘young and rustic, between eight and ten years old, of good stock, strong enough to stand much hard work, and of good health and temper, so that I may bring her up in my own way’. Was the slave-trade, I wondered, one of this merchant’s many activities, or was he merely dealing with his own family’s servant problem? The latter proved to be the truth. But as I discovered this, I also realised that Datini’s papers—his long correspondence with his wife, his partners in Italy and abroad, his factors, his relations and his friends—might provide the material for a family picture of the fourteenth century as detailed and as vivid as that which emerges, for instance, from the Paston Papers or from the letters of the Ménagier de Paris to his young wife. This indeed proved to be so. Datini’s papers—which consisted not only of his 575 voluminous account-books and ledgers (bound in white parchment and headed ‘In the name of God and profit’) but of nearly 126,000 business and private letters—had lain for over three hundred years in sacks in a recess under the stairs of his own house in Prato (occasionally, but not badly, nibbled by worms or mice), and though in 1870 they had been discovered and filed, the use that had been made of them by historians and economists had chiefly emphasised his achievements as a merchant: those relating to his private life had only been very superficially surveyed. As soon as they were transcribed (with the assistance of a skilled archivist, Dr. Gino Corti) I realised that they contained precisely what I had hoped to find: a glimpse of the daily life of a household of the fourteenth century, the relationship of its members to each other, and especially, of Francesco’s own dealings with his active, intelligent, argumentative wife. Such a detailed correspondence as theirs was still very rare. Husbands and wives seldom had occasion to write to each other since, if the husband was away, it was probably on a Crusade or trading in foreign ports, where opportunities for letters would be few. But here was a wife living in Prato, to look after her husband’s house, while he was busy with his trade in Pisa or Florence; and their letters, together with the washing and the fresh bread and vegetables and fruit from the farm, went up and down between Prato and Florence on muleback once or twice a week. Yes, here was the chair humaine that I had been seeking.

  To trace the necessary information, however, was often a slow and laborious process. To discover, for instance, the extent of one single item of Margherita’s wardrobe it was necessary to examine many pages of washing lists, account-books, and letters merely to be able to write down, at the end of a day’s work, the two words ‘seven shifts’. Equally, to find out what Francesco ate and drank, I had to consult not only his bills and account-books but his letters to his apothecary and his doctors, who, in later years, forbade him to indulge in too many spices and also, oddly enough (since he suffered from constipation), in much fresh fruit. Among the most illuminating items—for few things reveal a man more clearly than the way he chooses to spend his money—were those which referred to his gifts: very extravagant ones to the rich and great, more modest ones (such as bales of herrings or crates of oranges) to kinsmen and the poor. After the terror, however, brought to Tuscany by the recurrence of the plague in 1400, and as he felt old age drawing near, his alms became much more generous: dowries to poor girls, ransoms for men in prison, gifts to hospices and convents. In the end, he left the whole residue of his large fortune to his Foundation for the poor of Prato, ‘for the love of God, so as to return to His Poor what has been granted to me as His gracious gift’.

  * * *

  Looking back, I do not regret the time spent upon these researches, nor indeed upon any of my biographies, though I do sometimes wish that I had devoted some of my energies instead to writing two books which are still lacking in English: full, up-to-date Lives of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and of Lorenzo de’ Medici—both men who not only saw, but to a large extent provoked, the dawn of a new era. But were I to write these books now, I think they would be somewhat different in tone and treatment from my earlier ones, for a reason which became clear to me, some years ago, after a conversation with George Santayana. During the last months of his life, when he was revising his Life of Reason, I asked him whether his opinions had become very different from those he had expressed some forty years before. “No,” he gently replied, “I feel I have much the same things to say—but I want to say them in a different tone of voice.”

  Essentially, this reflects a state of mind not unlike that of Dr. Johnson when, ten days before his death, he asserted that he was ‘now ready to call a man a good man, on much easier terms than formerly’. With the passing of time, a writer’s judgements are likely to become a little gentler and to be expressed in a quieter voice; and of course it is also possible that, in the interval, he may have learned a little more. This is not to say that the works of a person’s later years are necessarily better than those of his youth; something may have been lost, as well as gained. But certainly they will be different.

  They will be different, too, for other, less subjective reasons. Any writer who has gone on working for many years, is inevitably affected by the changes that have taken place during this time by the Zeitgeist, which is something more than a change in literary fashion. He will become aware that his earlier work has become, to a greater or lesser extent, ‘dated’. What Virginia Woolf, writing in the 1930’s, called ‘the new biography’—referring to the works of Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson and their followers—has not been so for a long time now. Indeed in recent years there has been a tendency to revert, especially in America, to solid lives in several volumes, less moralistic in tone than their Victorian predecessors, and generally more fully documented, but above all, factual. I think it is, on the whole, a salutary change. There is also a tendency to produce long, detailed records of some single episode, like a presidential election or assassination, or the Cuban crisis—books which to some extent make use of the technique, and convey the feeling of actuality, of a documentary newsreel. And, indeed, some technique of this kind must be evolved today, if only owing to the immense amount of material available to a writer, especially about a public figure. What must Franklin Roosevelt’s biographer have felt, surveying the forty tons of documents at his disposal? We live in a historically—or at least journalistically—minded age, and I understand that a certain American statesman was in the habit of having even his telephone conversations recorded in large notebooks. Certainly, too, a great change has been brought about by the radio and by television, which can satisfy people’s curiosity about their neighbours’ lives more directly and dramatically than any written page; every housewife in America could watch Alger Hiss on trial for treason, and follow the progress of th
e funerals of Jack and Bob Kennedy. And during this very summer, we have all watched, holding our breath, two men taking their first staggering steps upon the moon.

  I do not believe, however, that these new outlets for the imagination will necessarily destroy the old. The slow development of character, the processes of thought of the writer and artist, and above all, the relation of human beings to each other—these are things that fortunately cannot be simplified, and will always have to be set down, however imperfectly, in words. Only, perhaps, in slightly different words, and with a different emphasis.

  Marie Lenéru, when she was in touch with life again after some years of deafness and blindness, wrote that her desire was ‘to write, not as a form of expression, or even for writing’s sake, but in order to be, to enter more and more completely into one’s own thoughts and one’s own heart’. It is not necessary to have been deaf or blind to feel like this. But such an intention does imply that an inner change has taken place. If I were to start writing again today, with twenty or even ten years of energy and leisure still before me, I think I would write some quite different books, not in order to meet changes in fashion and approach, but rather in myself. Even when I disagree with what some young writers of today have to say, and do not always like the tone in which they say it, I am more interested in the world to which they belong than in that of my own youth. It is more violent, certainly, and cruder; but perhaps more vital and certainly more socially, religiously and politically involved, an involvement which I respect and from which I cannot now dissociate myself. The books I should like to write now, if any, would be connected with the subjects which most often fill my mind, and which belong, at least in part, to the vision bequeathed to us by the Second Vatican Council. They would probably be concerned with either sociological or religious problems and, even if they dealt with the past, would probably not be as detached as the works of my youth from the swiftly changing world in which we live.

  Not that I nourish any illusions that a partial agreement with the ideologies of the younger generation, or at least a vivid awareness that they exist, will necessarily bring me any closer to them. On the contrary, I think that people of my age should have the courage to maintain a certain loyalty to the taste that they have acquired through many years of devotion to one of the arts, and frankly to admit what they do or do not enjoy. One need never again, for instance, listen to an opera by Wagner, if that happens to be one of one’s blind spots, nor read the novels of Stendhal, nor the works of Simone de Beauvoir, nor look at a picture by Dali. But, on the other hand, what a subtle delight can be brought by a return to those works of which the flavour still endures or by the sharp tang of pleasure caused by an unknown young author’s new book—a pleasure enriched and enhanced by all that one has known before encountering it. Virginia Woolf has somewhere described an evening during which Roger Fry, in a friend’s house, was called upon to decide whether a certain picture was or was not by Degas. ‘It was a very good picture beyond a doubt; it was signed by Degas—he was inclined to think on the whole that it was by Degas. And yet there was something that puzzled him … As if to rest himself, he turned away and took part in a discussion that was going forward in another part of the room … Then there was a pause. Suddenly he looked up and said: “No, no, that is not by Degas!”’

  I do not know how old Roger Fry was when this little incident occurred, but I would wager that he was not a young man, or at least, that he had already been an art critic for a considerable number of years. For that long process of stepping back to reconsider and compare, perhaps not even wholly consciously, with a hundred other similar objects seen over many years, is precisely one of the great rewards of having analysed and savoured one of the first for a very long time, until the moment comes when one is sure and can say, “No, that is not by Degas”, or, on reading a work by a new young author, “Yes, that is a good book.”

  All this, however, only applies to the critical faculty, to one’s assessment of other people’s work. What about one’s own? Should one go on writing indefinitely—that is, as long as one can listen, read, discriminate and enjoy? This is, of course, a highly personal matter and has little to do with calendar years. But for most writers who are no longer young one obstacle may arise which is both painful and disconcerting. Just as many actors and public speakers form a habit—in order to prevent their speech from becoming lifeless—of singling out in their audience one responsive face and addressing their remarks to it, so a writer is almost always—consciously or unconsciously—writing for someone, for a friend or friends who, he knows, have a similar turn of mind, who will understand and like what he says, or will disagree in a manner as stimulating as agreement.

  At my age, however, it is almost inevitable that one should sometimes wonder for whom one is writing. It is not only that many friends of one’s own generation—the eyes in the audience which one was certain one could catch—have disappeared or are disappearing, but that they have taken with them both reassurance and zest. Yet, when I look at the question detachedly, I know that this is not its crux. One should surely try to go on renewing oneself, both in form and substance, so long as one is capable of thinking and feeling at all and—if one’s profession happens to be that of a writer—one should also go on writing, even for a changing and perhaps dwindling audience, as long as one believes that one has anything valid to say. In short, I would give to myself in old age the same advice that I have often given to young writers about to take their first plunge: write only because you must, but, if you must, do not let yourself be discouraged by either youth or age. For ‘of making many books there is no end’.

  1 Granite and Rainbow, p. 149: ‘The New Biography’.

  2 Poesie e Prose, II, pp. 5–6: Pensieri, II.

  3 “Here’s the little hunchback!”

  4 ‘The golden ways and gardens’: A Silvia.

  5 The night is soft and clear, and no wind blows;

  The quiet moon stands over roofs and orchards

  Revealing from afar each peaceful hill

  La sera del dì di festa (Translated by John Heath-Stubbs).

  6 Resissued by Pushkin Press as A Study in Solitude: The Life of Leopardi – Poet, Romantic and Radical, 2017

  7 Letters and Journals, V, p. 79. To John Murray, September 23, 1820.

  8 L. J., IV, p. 50, August 25, 1819 (quoted from Moore).

  9 The value was even greater than I myself realised. Only recently, at Sotheby’s, a letter of Byron’s was sold for £500.

  10 Eventually, with the help of Elsa Dallolio, all the papers were sorted, dated (when possible) and properly filed before they were returned to Count Gamba, who presented them to the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna.

  11 There were, for instance, the anecdotes of Conte Francesco Rangone, a literary nobleman and gossip of Ferrara, who wrote a pamphlet entitled, ‘Peep at a very cultivated, rich but strange Mylord … dear to the Learned and not less so to the Fair.’ There was the diary of Cavaliere Angelo Mengaldo, a persistent Boswell, who held a swimming-match with Byron down the Grand Canal and even ventured to scold him about his love affairs, ‘mais mes sermons n’étaient pas de son goût’. There were the reports of a Tuscan spy, Angelo Valtancoli, who, with some difficulty, since he was too much in awe of Milord to draw near to him, kept watch over his movements in Bologna and reported that ‘the true object of his residence is still neither his literary pursuits nor his amorous occupations, but the destruction of the Established Government’. And finally there were the accounts of Cavaliere Luigi Torelli of Pisa, known as ‘the spy of spies’, whose highly exaggerated reports caused the Tuscan Government to banish the Gamba family from Tuscany.

  12 From William Plomer’s address on unveiling the Memorial Tablet to Byron in Westminster Abbey, on May 8, 1969.

  13 The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, Pushkin Press 2017

  14 The Domestic Enemy: The Eastern Slaves in Tuscany in the XIV & XV Centuries, published in Speculum, vol. XX
X, No. 3, July, 1955.

  PART THREE

  9

  La Foce

  … superata tellus

  Sidera donat.1

  BOETHIUS

  It was on a stormy October afternoon in 1923, forty-seven years ago, that we first saw the Val d’Orcia and the house that was to be our home. We were soon to be married and had spent many weeks looking at estates for sale, in various parts of Tuscany, but as yet we had found nothing that met our wishes.

  We knew what we were looking for: a place with enough work to fill our lifetime, but we also hoped that it might be in a setting of some beauty. Privately I thought that we might perhaps find one of the fourteenth- or fifteenth-century villas which were then almost as much a part of the Tuscan landscape as the hills on which they stood or the long cypress avenues which led up to them: villas with an austere façade broken only by a deep loggia, high vaulted rooms of perfect proportions, great stone fireplaces, perhaps a little courtyard with a well, and a garden with a fountain and an overgrown hedge of box. (Many such houses are empty now, and crumbling to decay.) What I had not realised, until we started our search, was that such places were only likely to be found on land that had already been tilled for centuries, with terraced hillsides planted with olive-trees, and vineyards that were already fruitful and trim in the days of the Decameron. To choose such an estate would mean that we would only have to follow the course of established custom, handing over all the hard work to our fattore, and casting an occasional paternal eye over what was being done, as it always had been done. This was not what we wanted.