by Iris Origo
I remember a house where all were good
To me, God knows, deserving no such thing:
Comforting smell breathed at very entering
Fetched fresh, as I suppose, from some sweet wood.1
And, in addition to all this, I could talk to Aileen, in particular, as I have never been able to talk to anyone else but Elsa: a completely free, unselfconscious exchange—I think on both sides—which has now lasted for over forty-five years.
Now the old life at Pen y Lan has naturally to some extent changed, but a very odd thing has happened. Charlie and Aileen have moved, partly for reasons connected with their health, to a flat in Onslow Square, in London, taking with them only a few pieces of their furniture and some pictures. Yet, in some strange way, it is still Pen y Lan that one finds in that small square sitting-room. Their children feel this, too, and—apart from their devoted affection to their parents—come back, when they can, almost daily to find it—not of course the space and the beauty, the glowing fragrant garden and the wide valley—yet something that evokes and includes all these.
As for myself, who now only go to England once or twice a year, I have only to come in by the door—greeted by the deafening barks of the small wire-haired dachshund, Tiger—to feel the years slip away and know that I am again secure. The brilliant window-boxes of the first years, containing in miniature the same exquisite mixture of colours as in the flower-beds around the pool at Pen y Lan, or in the posies on the visitor’s dressing-table, are now no longer kept up, but there are still patterns of brocade hanging over the back of at least one of the shabby armchairs—and still, as at Pen y Lan, one thinks it likely that, at one’s next visit, the chair will still be uncovered. Aileen’s welcome is still as warm, even if she cannot now clearly see one’s face, or read the books which used to pile up on her bed; and Charlie’s expression still has the same kindness and selflessness; there is still the same sense of harmony. And here too, as at Pen y Lan, the daughters and their children and grandchildren wander in and out—one bringing a basket of country apples or a great tub of flowers, another setting to work in the kitchen, and yet another just sitting down to gossip and giggle. Then another old friend comes in and reads aloud an absurd headline in the evening paper, or a poem from an old common-place book—and soon everyone is laughing, though I cannot quite remember why. What is it that makes it all so comfortable, so warm? Plainly it can only be something in the essential character of our hosts, that has overcome misfortune, straitened means and the passage of time. I think one can only call it goodness.
Do the walls of a house sometimes become imbued with the nature of its inhabitants? I think so—and indeed, why should it not be so? Many people would agree that there are certain places whose walls are impregnated by centuries of faith and prayer: I am thinking in particular of some little fishing-village churches in Britanny, and of the crypt of San Michele Archangelo on the Gargano, where, throughout the Middle Ages, pilgrims and Crusaders would come to pray before setting off for the Holy Land. And so, too, I believe that, on a more modest scale, the walls of some private houses may also be coloured either by good or evil: in short, by the character of those who live there.
With friends such as these, long ago, all assessments, criticisms or doubts have become irrelevant: one can cast off all unnecessary garments. And perhaps the easy, friendly talk that is then possible is indeed, as Virginia Woolf once suggested, a preparation for a final retreat. ‘Do you suppose’, she wrote, ‘that we are now coming like the homing rooks back to the top of our trees and that all this cawing is the beginning of settling in for the night?’
* * *
And now we are back where we started. If life is indeed ‘a perpetual allegory’, if what we seek in it is awareness, understanding, then the small stream of events I have set down here has only been a means—a means to what? I seem to have been diverted a long way from my original inquiry, but perhaps it has not really been so very far, since it has only been through my affections that I have been able to perceive, however imperfectly, some faint ‘intimations of immortality’, a foretaste, perhaps, granted to the short-sighted of another, transcendental love.
Looking back at the first thirty years of my life, two events have an outstanding significance: my father’s death, when I was seven and a half, and Gianni’s, when he was the same age that I was then. And both of these events are significant for the same reason—that neither of them was an ending. I do not mean of course that there was not the pain of parting—but that separation did not prevent my father’s personality from pervading my childhood, as Gianni’s has pervaded the rest of my life. Since then, a few years ago, there has been the death of Elsa, the closest companion of my middle age, and the same has been true about her. I am not speaking now about an orthodox belief in ‘another life’—nor am I entering upon the complex question of the survival of personality. All that I can affirm is what I know of my own experience: that though I have never ceased to miss my father, child and friend, I have also never lost them. They have been to me, at all times, as real as the people I see every day, and it is this, I think, that has conditioned my whole attitude both to death and to human affections.
It is very easy, on this subject, to become sentimental or woolly, or to say more than one really means. I think I am only trying to say something very simple: that my own personal experience has given me a very vivid sense of the continuity of love, even after death, and that it has also left me believing in the truth of Burke’s remark that society—or I should prefer to say, life itself—is ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’. Not only are we not alone, but we are not living only in a bare and chilly now. We are irrevocably bound to the past—and no less irrevocably, though the picture is less clear to us, to the future. It is this feeling that has made death seem to me not less painful, never that—for there is no greater grief than that of parting—but not, perhaps, so very important, and has caused affection, in its various forms, to be the guiding thread of my life.
At the time of Gianni’s death, I received a letter from George Santayana (who in his later years to some extent returned, at least in feeling, to his Spanish, Catholic origins) which expresses, far better than I ever could, my feelings upon this subject.
…We have no claim to any of our possessions. We have no claim to exist; and, as we have to die in the end, so we must resign ourselves to die piecemeal, which really happens when we lose somebody or something that was closely intertwined with our existence. It is like a physical wound; we may survive, but maimed and broken in that direction; dead there.
Not that we can, or ever do at heart, renounce our affections. Never that. We cannot exercise our full nature all at once in every direction; but the parts that are relatively in abeyance, their centre lying perhaps in the past or the future, belong to us inalienably. We should not be ourselves if we cancelled them. I don’t know how literally you may believe in another world, or whether the idea means very much to you. As you know, I am not myself a believer in the ordinary sense, yet my feeling on this subject is like that of believers, and not at all like that of my fellow-materialists. The reason is that I disagree utterly with that modern philosophy which regards experience as fundamental. Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things. These are the only things that, in so far as we are spiritual beings, we can find or can love at all. All our affections, when clear and pure and not claims to possession, transport us to another world; and the loss of contact, here or there, with those eternal beings is merely like closing a book which we keep at hand for another occasion.2
About more orthodox beliefs, I am very hesitant to write, for fear of saying a little more or less than I mean or than is true. I have spent a good deal of my life in various fo
rms of wishful thinking—trying to persuade myself, in one way or another, that things were a little better than they really were: my feelings or convictions deeper, and situations pleasanter or clearer, than was in fact the case—and I think it is time to stop. For this is what Plato called ‘the true lie’, the lie in the soul, ‘hated by gods and men’, of which the lie in words is ‘only a kind of imitation and shadowy image’.
Yet it is also true that all my life (though not steadily, but rather in fitful waves) I have been seeking a meaning, a framework, a goal—I should say, more simply, God. ‘Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne m’avais trouvé,’ was Pascal’s reply—but is this not too easy a way out for a fitful purpose and a vacillating mind? I remember a passage in Julian Green’s Journal: ‘Je lis les mystiques comme on lit les récits des voyageurs qui reviennent de pays lointains ou l’on sait bien que l’on n’ira jamais. On voudrait visiter la Chine, mais quel voyage! Et pourtant je crois que jusqu’à la fin de mes jours je conserverai ce déraisonnable espoir.’
That ‘unreasonable hope’ is always latent: one should perhaps open the door to it more often. Someone to whom I once spoke about these matters suggested that instead of nourishing a sense of guilt for what one cannot comprehend or fully accept, it would be better to start by dwelling upon what one honestly can believe. I think the advice is good, and have tried to ask myself that question.
I have seen and believe in goodness: the indefinable quality which is immediately and unhesitatingly recognised by the most different kinds of men: the simple goodness of an old nurse or the mother of a large family; the more complex and costly goodness of a priest, a doctor or a teacher. When such people are also believers, their beliefs are apt to be catching—or so I myself, at least, have found. It is the Eastern principle of the guru and his disciples: goodness and faith conveyed (or perhaps evil and disbelief dispelled) by an actual, living presence.
The outstanding instance in our lifetime has been that of Pope John XXIII. I do not think that anyone—believer or agnostic—who was present in St. Peter’s Square during the Mass said for him as he lay dying could fail to have a sense of what was meant by ‘the communion of the faithful’, or to receive a dim apprehension of his own vision of ‘one flock and one shepherd’, of the love of mankind as a whole. And if, since then, the realisation of this dream has been full of complexities, and many minds have been disturbed and confused by conflicts, upheavals and innovations, the vision still endures.
I believe in the dependence of people upon each other. I believe in the light and warmth of human affection, and in the disinterested acts of kindness and compassion of complete strangers. I agree with Simone Weil that ‘charity and faith, though distinct, are inseparable’—and I share her conviction ‘whoever is capable of a movement of pure compassion (which incidentally is very rare) towards an unhappy man, possesses, implicitly but truly, faith and the love of God’.
I believe, not theoretically, but from direct personal experience, that very few of the things that happen to us are purposeless or accidental (and this includes suffering and grief—even that of others), and that sometimes one catches a glimpse of the link between these happenings. I believe—even when I am myself being blind and deaf, or even indifferent—in the existence of a mystery.
Beyond this, I still do not know—nor do I feel inclined to examine here—how far I can go. Yet I derive comfort, at times, from a passage in one of Dom John Chapman’s letters. ‘There is worry and anxiety and trouble and bewilderment, and there is also an unfelt, yet real acquiescence in being anxious, troubled and bewildered, and a consciousness that the real self is at peace, while the anxiety and worry are unreal. It is like a peaceful lake, whose surface reflects all sorts of changes, because it is calm.’
A still lake, ruffled only upon the surface: a world of clouds, through which it is possible to break to the light—are these indeed metaphors more true than I can yet fully perceive?
Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.3
1 ‘In the Valley of the Elwy’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins
2 Published in The Letters of George Santayana, ed. Daniel Cory, London: Constable & Co.; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
3 ‘Man’ by George Herbert.
Index
Abruzzi, earthquake in the, 1n.
Alcott, Louisa M., 1
Allegra, Byron’s daughter, 1, 2
America, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Arbuthnot, Elnyth (Contessa Capponi), 1
Ardennes, forest of, 1
Arno, river, 1
Arnold, Dr., 1
Ashburton, Lady, 1, 2
Asquith, Herbert (Earl of Oxford and Asquith), 1, 2, 3
Assiut, 1
Assuan, 1
Bayard, Colonel Nicholas, 1
Bayard, Mr. and Mrs. Robert, 1
Bayard, Mrs. Samuel, 1
Beauvoir, Simone de, 1
Belmont, Mrs. August, 1
Benzon, Contessa Marina, 1
Berenson, Bernard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Berenson, Mary, 1
Beresford, Sir Marcus (afterwards Marquess of Waterford), 1
Beresford, Sir Tristram, 1
Bernardino, San, 1
Berrettini, Vera, 1
Bickersteth, G. L., 1
Bishop, Dr. Freddie, 1, 2
Blanc, Pierre, 1
Blaser, Schwester Marie, 1, 2
Blessington, Countess of, 1, 2
Bloch, Marc, 1, 2
Borgatti, Renata, 1
Bori, Lucrezia, 1
Boswell, James, 1
Bourbon del Monte, Marie-Lou, 1, 2
Bowes Lyon, Lilian, 1, 2
Bracci, Testasecca, Contessa Margherita, 1
Brooke, Rupert, 1, 2
Browning, Robert and Elizabeth, 1
Bruce, Lady Mary, 1
Bruce, Robert, King of Scotland, 1
Burke, Edmund, 1
Byron, Lord, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Cadwallader, John, 1
Caetani, Marguerite, Duchessa di Sermoneta, 1
Cagnola, Conte Guido, 1
California, 1, 2
Cambridge, 1
Campbell, Lady Elizabeth, 1
Canada, 1, 2
Canning, Stafford, 1
Capri, 1, 2
Carlyle, Jane, 1, 2
Carlyle, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Carson, Sir Edward, 1, 2
Caruso, Enrico, 1
Cecil, Lord David, 1
Ceylon, 1
Chaliapin, Fedor Ivanovich, 1
Chamberlain, Neville, 1, 2
Chanler, Laura, 1
Chapman, Dom John, 1
Chatsworth House, 1
Chianciano, 1, 2, 3
Choate, Joseph, American Ambassador, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Churchill, Winston, Rt. Hon. Sir, 1, 2
Clanricarde, Marchioness of, 1
Clanricarde, Ulick Bourke, Marquess of, 1
Clerici, General, 1
Cockerell, Patience, 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 2
Columbia University, 1, 2, 3
Colvin, Sir Sidney, 1
Combe, Dr., 1
Connetquot, river, 1
Corti, Dr. Gino, 1
Craig, Gordon, 1
Cromwell, Oliver, 1, 2
Crozier, Dr., Bishop of Ossory, 1
Cuffe, Hamilton, see Desart, Earl of
Cuffe, Henry, 1
Cuffe, John, 1, 2
Cuffe, Joseph, 1, 2
Cuffe, Otway, 1, 2
Cutting, Bronson, Senator, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Cutting, Fulton, 1
Cutting, Justine (Mrs. George Ward), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Cutting, Leonard, 1
Cutting, Olivia (Mrs. Henry James, Jr.), 1, 2, 3, 4
Cutting, Olivia Peyton (née Murray), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Cutting, Lady Sybil (née Cuffe) marriage 1, 2; reminiscences of father 1, 2, 3, 4;
birth of daugh
ter 1;
death of husband 1;
description of 1;)
travels of 1;
visits United States 1;
returns to Italy 1;
buys the Villa Medici 1, 2;
marries Geoffrey Scott 1, 2;
divorce 1, 2;
marries Percy Lubbock 1;
health 1;
visits Ceylon 1;
leaves Italy for Switzerland 1, 2;)
death 1
Cutting, William Bayard, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
Cutting, William Bayard Junior, marriage, 1; childhood 1, 2, 3;
recollections of 1;
describes opening of Parliament 1;
at Messina after earthquake 1;
death 1, 2, 3, 4
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 1
Dallolio, Elsa, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Dallolio, General Alfredo, 1
Datini, Francesco, XIVth century merchant, 1, 2, 3
Datini, Margherita, 1
De Robertis, Giuseppe, 1
Degas, Edgar, 1
Desart, Countess of ancestry 1; description of 1, 2;
engagement and marriage 1;
leaves Ireland for England 1;
death 1, 2, 3;
in Egypt 1;
at Villa Medici 1;
on author’s reading 1;
teaches author the Collects 1
Desart, Earl of, 1; on engagement of daughter 1, 2;
ancestry 1;
description of, 1, 2, 3;
life of 1;
leaves Ireland for England 1;
golden wedding 1;
death of wife 1;
death 1;
in Egypt 1;
at Villa Medici 1;