Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  I do not think that I could say quite the same, at least not yet, though it would be true of many parts of my life. The child riding her donkey on the Nubian sands; the schoolgirl reading the Iliad with Monti; the self-conscious débutante in the English country house—they are me and they are no longer me. ‘We are like the relict garment of a Saint,’ said Keats, ‘the same and not the same: for the careful Monks patch it and patch it: till there’s not a thread of the original garment left, and still they show it for St. Anthony’s shirt.’

  Yet there is something that remains. If I think back, I can sometimes recapture certain intense moments of feeling: the hour beside the Nile when I saw that my father’s tent had been taken up and suddenly knew that he was dead; the evening on which I read, on the terrace of the Villa Medici, the letter from Antonio which, after six months of separation, renewed our engagement and determined the course of our life; the night, forty-four years ago, on which, immediately after Gianni’s birth, I heard the Florentine bells ring out and saw the sky lit up with fireworks for St. John’s Eve, and felt happiness sweep over me. Proust, who cultivated the art of memory as perhaps no-one else has ever done, would say that these recollections have always been part of me. He wrote in Du Coté de Chez Swann that in later life he was able again to hear certain sounds which ‘in reality had never stopped’, the sobs which had shaken him at a certain moment of his childhood. ‘It is only because life is now growing silent about me’, he wrote, ‘that I hear them afresh, like convent bells which one might believe were not rung nowadays, because during the day they are drowned by the city hubbub, but which may be heard clearly enough in the stillness of the evening.’

  If Proust is right, I am carrying within me (in spite of all the changes that have taken place) the whole of my life, from the day when ‘the arable field of events’ first lay before me, until the moment in which the typewriter is tapping out these words. And certainly it is also true that some of the memories I can now summon up have a greater intensity than the events themselves seemed to possess at the time, or rather—since memory has a filter of its own, sometimes surprising in what it suppresses or retains, but always significant—some of them stand out in disproportionate clarity to the rest.

  Bernard Berenson once said in his old age that if he were a beggarman on a street corner, he would stretch out his hand to every passer-by, begging for ‘more time, more time!’ I do not agree with him. I should like, of course—for I enjoy living—to have a few more years (provided all my faculties remained) in which to watch my grandchildren growing up, to see a little more of the world and of the overwhelming changes that are taking place in it and, above all, to see a little more clearly into myself. But the time I would really beg for, at any street corner, would be time in the past, time in which to comfort, to complete and to repair—time wasted before I knew how quickly it would slip by.

  Most of us, however well we may know that remorse is fruitless, carry in our memories some heavy burdens, and perhaps at least one so poignant that we can hardly bear to look back on it: a weight of sadness and regret, a knowledge that we have failed even those who needed us most—especially those, since with other people one is not upon that plane at all. Nor is it of much consolation to realise that almost everyone, while life is actually going on, is constantly being distracted by irrelevances. Just as, in travel, one may miss seeing the sunset because one cannot find the ticket-office or is afraid of missing the train, so in even the closest human relationships a vast amount of time and of affection is drained away in minor misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and failures in consideration or understanding. It is only in memory that the true essence remains.

  The question then arises: how much of these memories can be conveyed? How much can or should one tell? ‘I believe,’ said Keats, ‘in the holiness of the heart’s affections.’ But what is holy is also private: as soon as it is told, some of its essence may be distilled, diminished, perhaps lost for ever. Yet one should, I think, at least refrain from suppressing—unless this implies the violation of someone else’s privacy—what has given, in some period of the past, the greatest meaning to being alive at all, and now that this book is drawing to an end I realise that to have confined myself merely to a passing mention of Gianni, of Elsa Dallolio, and of one or two other friends, is so large an omission as to falsify the whole picture. One of the reasons why I have refrained until now has been because I was afraid of saying either too little or too much, and I still fear this now. Yet I found no difficulty in writing about my father. I think that this was partly because I was less than eight years old when he died, so that my memories of him, though poignant, are still a child’s, and I can call them up with a certain detachment. But with Gianni and Elsa I have never achieved this, nor do I wish for it. I remember Elsa once saying, in connection with the waves of longing for Gianni which would sometimes come over me many years after his death, that I should not fight against them, since they were what was left to me of him, his living presence within me. “Otherwise all that is left is memory, which becomes static, a composition of lines and planes, like the rows of graves in a churchyard.” But how can one recapture, except for those who knew him, the essence of a child? I can say: he was generous, gay, sweet-natured, apprehensive, gentle, and above all, loving—but what are all these, but a list of words? A child’s life is movement: if you arrest the movement, choose one quality and pin it down, you give the solidity of a grown-up person’s character; the fluidity, the ever-growing, quick-changing life is gone. He was not a particularly imaginative child, in the sense of living in a world of his own or of making up many ‘pretending’ games; all his imagination seemed to go into his intuition about other people’s feelings, and a consequent gentle considerateness and almost fierce loyalty. He had, too, a quality not unusual in sensitive children, but very difficult to define: a certain spiritual integrity, an instinctive rejection of whatever was insincere, gushing or slightly silly. His greatest security was with his gentle, serene, old English Nanny; his greatest friend, Ugo, the gardener’s little boy at La Foce; but he also had friends everywhere else, both among children and grown-ups. I used to like to watch him sitting on the lawn at Westbrook with his great-uncle Bronson, both apparently equally absorbed in serious conversation, or walking with Charlie Meade, looking up and saying: “Do you know, Charlie?” in a rather confidential grown-up voice.

  Gianni

  Many people who wrote to me after his death used the same word—‘radiance’—and indeed I can think of no better one. But it cannot bring back the love of life which would shine in his face as he burst into my room in the mornings, or which echoed in his voice, as he snuggled down in his pillow at bedtime, saying, “More fun tomorrow.” Of his long-drawn-out, terrible illness (he died of tubercular meningitis)—during which he himself asked me what death was—I cannot bear and do not wish to write. A few months after his death, some American friends, who had stayed with us in the country with their children a couple of years before, asked me if I would like to see a film they had taken at La Foce. I agreed, not realising what I would see—and then, as we sat in the darkened room, could not believe my eyes: there was Gianni running down the wood path towards me, running and laughing. It is so that I wish to remember him.

  * * *

  It is still more difficult, in a very different way, to write about my friendship with Elsa. For twenty-five years, whenever I was in Rome, we saw each other almost daily. We worked together during the war in the Prisoners of War Office of the Italian Red Cross—and sometimes, in the evenings, I would join her in her own house with a briefcase of papers, on which we continued to work before the little brick stove in her bedroom, eating our meagre rations, until it was time for me to return home late at night through the darkened, silent city. Later on, after two years of separation, during which she was living in her country house, which was completely destroyed by bombing, on the northern side of the Gothic Line, and I on the southern, neither of us knowing whether
we should see each other again—I arrived in Bologna with the President of the Italian Red Cross, two days after the Allied troops, to bring her and her ninety-two-year-old father, General Dallolio, back to Rome again. She was with me when both my daughters were born. She stayed with us, until her health no longer allowed it, at Lerici and La Foce, meeting Antonio there upon common ground, since she, too, was a countrywoman at heart. She helped me with every line of my books. I was with her when she died. She is buried in the churchyard at La Foce. These are the bare facts: they do not reveal the quality of the friendship. Differing in age, in nationality, in upbringing, in our circle of friends, we found, in Montaigne’s words, a friendship ‘in which we could no longer find the seam that had joined us together’. Possibly one thread in the bond between us was the fact that I found with her the relationship that I had always wished and failed to have with my mother, and that to her I was, as well as a friend, the daughter she had never had. But this is an oversimplification, and also suggests an inequality which was certainly not there. Friendship—any close friendship—is so various, made up of so many strands: companionship, the sharing of laughter, grief and anxiety, and then common work and common tastes—in people, books, art, manners, and above all, in values. In addition there is, or can be, between friends of the same sex, a great feeling of relaxation: less danger of emotional complications, nothing to suppress or conceal, but comfort, trust, security, and delight—and an exchange that makes no demands. One can afford to be—perhaps it is only in such company that one ever becomes—fully oneself. ‘Lui seul jouissait de ma vraie image, et l’emporta.’

  Not only did we work together during the war, but when it was over, Elsa was the first reader and critic of all my books. I am naturally, in my writing, both impulsive and inaccurate. ‘Three years later’, I would specify (when in point of fact it was five), and many pages would be scattered with incomplete quotations and inaccurate references or dates. All these she firmly set right—but her help came to a great deal more than this. Though she never published a line of her own, she possessed what Leopardi called ‘le grand goût, le goût veritable’, a touchstone for many of her friends, both in art and life. For it was always for other people that she worked, never for herself. Many widely different people relied upon her judgement, her unfailing recognition of what was or was not first-rate—among others, Marguerite Caetani, the founder of the international review, Botteghe Oscure, who seldom reached a decision without seeking her advice, especially about new young authors. Incurably averse to any form of limelight and solitary both by temperament and circumstances, she yet possessed, to the day of her death, ‘l’esprit jeune’, and it was this which drew to her high, shadowy, book-lined room a great many young writers from different countries. They might come the first time a little doubtfully, fearing to find a dull old lady: and then they came back again. For she had another quality, almost unique in the present day: she was always there. She found, too, a great deal of entertainment and interest in these contacts: people and books, these were what she liked best, and by this channel both came to her. In later years, too, many visitors began to tire her, but always her mind remained equally alert and inquiring, though the actual effort of concentration became a burden. Sometimes, then, I would still try to make plans for her—gradually dwindling, as time went on. First they would be for a very small country house in Tuscany, not too far away from ours, to take the place, at least in part, of her own house near Bologna, entirely destroyed during the war; then merely for a small balcony outside her room, on which she could sit out, and grow some flowers—plumbago, jasmine, petunias, and a rose saved from her own old garden—or an occasional drive on a country road or to some Roman sight she wished to see again. For she possessed, both for the beauty of the Italian landscape and for its works of art, the unfading, discriminating passion that is generally only granted to those who have in them also a drop of foreign blood. “I can never understand how one can get accustomed to Italy,” she once said to me: “for me it is always a fresh surprise, which catches at my heart.”

  La progettista, she would call me, as I turned up with another plan, and joined me in pretending that it might take shape. But slowly, inexorably, the horizon drew in. I still brought her occasional glimpses of the outer world, so long as they amused her: new books, picture-catalogues, stories about common friends or distant journeys (though these she thought rather unnecessary). What she liked to hear best was news of what was happening at La Foce, in the country life she most missed. “Go on,” she would say, “tell me a story che mi faccia compagnia.” Then, very gradually, even this became too much, too remote from the journey for which she was preparing. I learned fully to accept what I had known, but fought against, for a long time: that the changes that any of us can bring into a friend’s life, however close the bond, are very much more limited than one had believed in youth, that there is only a very restricted field in which we can help each other. Physical pain, acute anxiety, the accumulated burden of the past, these are matters that the most devoted affection may assuage but cannot change or heal. And yet, is this wholly true? In the long run—the very long run—of any deep relationship, who is the giver and who the receiver? In what scales can affection be weighed, and its transmuting power? How far may the ripples in the pool extend, even after the people directly concerned have ceased to exist? One cannot answer these questions: one can only wonder.

  All I know is that for many years, up to the last day of her life, to me as to her other close friends, Elsa gave a far rarer gift than any that we brought her: she gave us peace. I have never quite understood—I still do not—how this happened. There she would be, sitting by her window in her dimly-lit, book-lined room, full of papers, pictures and small objects, with a brown rug over her legs and a pen in her hand, sometimes correcting someone else’s proofs—almost always in discomfort, often in pain—and one would come in with a long list of worries, irritations and anxieties, or else of hopes and plans. She would listen and—or so it seemed at the time—hardly interrupt at all, except with an occasional smile or dry comment. But as one came away, one suddenly realised that all the anxieties and uncertainties had fallen into their right place, assumed their true proportions. We had meant to cheer her up and comfort her; we went away comforted.

  I should like to say something, too, about some of my other friendships with people of many different nationalities and ages, and belonging to very different social worlds. They have been men and women, old and young, writers, scholars and musicians, lawyers, diplomats and travellers, teachers and social workers, or just—without any label—people with whom I feel secure and at home. But—since I have never belonged anywhere to an enclosed and harmonious social circle—they have seldom felt equally at home with each other. They have had widely different backgrounds and tastes and have often disliked each other. On the whole, these friendships have brought me a more constant and steady happiness than any other factor in my life, and many of them still endure. But the only one that has been upon a plane similar to Elsa’s has been in England, and has been not only with one person but with a whole family—I would almost say, with a house: Pen y Lan, the country house in Wales of my mother’s cousin Charlie Meade, and his wife, Aileen.

  I first entered Pen y Lan forty-five years ago, on my first visit to England after my marriage and, until Charlie and Aileen moved to live in London a few years ago, it never occurred to me to go to England without staying with them—always assured of the same unfailing, warm, relaxed welcome. The doors and the French windows into the garden were always open—metaphorically and literally—with children and dogs wandering in and out, and the scent of cherry-pie, pinks and roses mingled with that of the wood-fire and the old leather bindings in the library. One came in, stood for a moment in the hall with its white columns and curved, broad staircase, looked down over the valley—and was enfolded by peace. Aileen might be in the garden, pricking out seedlings, Charlie at his typewriter, writing about the Himalayas (or pe
rhaps not writing much, but travelling back there in his memory, with his clear blue eyes lit up as by a celestial vision); one of the three enchanting little girls—Coney, Pin and Flavia—would be picking raspberries or strumming upon the piano, another catching and saddling her pony, and the youngest dabbling her toes in the garden pool. But as the car drew up, there they would all be around one, and one had come home. Occasionally too, Charlie’s Swiss Alpine guide and close friend, Pierre Blanc, would be staying there, and there would be endless talk between them about old climbs in the Alps or the Himalayas—“Bumbling”, said Aileen—and when suppertime came, “Ah, la bonne soupe!” Pierre would cry. “Ça rafraîchit les intestins, ca ramollit les boyaux!” A very few years later, Charlie’s son, Simon, was born—and it is now he who lives at Pen y Lan with his wife and children, so that the house we all loved is still alive.

  Yet in any case, I think, it would still be alive for all of us—since it was, like Heaven, not a place but a state. I still do not quite know how to account for that condition of security and bliss, which innumerable other guests have felt quite as strongly as I. Perhaps it was partly, as at Westbrook and Desart, the emanation of a singularly happy marriage (though of course I am not pretending that its owners, like the rest of us, did not have their share, in the course of the years, of anxiety and grief ), partly the gentle beauty of the lie of the land: the steep green hill behind the house, the little stream beside it, where cyclamen from La Foce swiftly took root and spread, and the wide valley below, with its poplars beside the river and (I always seem to have been there in summer) the fragrance of new-mown hay. Partly that the food was so delicious, that we all laughed so much, that everyone was free to do as he pleased—to ‘help’ (or more often hinder) in the garden, to climb the hill, to wander in the valley, or to sit in the broad library window-seat piled with books, old and new.