by Bryher;
A little while afterwards I read that Mussolini had forbidden women to read history at the universities. It was another sign that the unknown Englishman had been right.
First impressions are usually the most profound. If it had not been for the march on Rome, the Nazis might never have come to power. They took the fascist ideas and developed them with Teutonic ruthlessness. A number of English supported the Blackshirts eagerly because the beggars disappeared and the trains ran on time. Such things, my masters, if you would look beneath the surface, are merely a temporary opiate. They dissemble the barbarian craving for cultural destruction and universal conquest.
Douglas was installed in his own apartment on our next visit to Florence in 1924 and it is the long room facing the Arno, with the shelves full of books and the morning sun falling on his amber Indian hangings that I associate with most of our talks. There was usually a map as well, lying like a scroll on the table and kept flat by a piece of colored marble, “dug up near Naples, my dear.” He once gave me its fellow. By now he was N. D. and I was Br, said always with a little growl. I sat there so often, looking at the smudged brown stones under the green arches of the bridges while he carried on a conversation that he had begun with his notebook several hours previously over an early cup of tea, “the only time I ever drink the stuff and it must be pure Darjeeling.” There was no lack of variety in the conversation, he ranged from the lizards to be found in southern Europe, he was one of the few people whom I have known who could handle snakes and other reptiles with impunity, to the classic authors or even his books. “I was writing about cold hands this morning,” he began one day, “the cold hands of an Alpine salamander. Wonderful little claws but ice cold, like a Hindu’s hands. If you want mystery you must go to India, the men and women are perambulating flowers.”
“I would rather go to Greece again, we might in the spring.”
“This restless modern spirit! It will never get you anywhere. Still, who would work unless they had to?” He regarded the notebook somberly. “Watch the Arno. It is never the same. The color changes and the volume alters. Chrysoprase and celandine, what’s that other word for lemon yellow? Find a new word for the Arno every morning and settle sensibly in Florence.”
Celandine was thin, chrysoprase to my ears had a thick, milky sound although I knew that it was a hard green stone. Both were excellent words but I could only shake my head. I was a born wanderer and the globe called for exploration.
“Greece?” Douglas looked at me very seriously, he hated the country in spite of his love for the classics. “Do be careful what you eat. I still think powdered rhubarb is the most efficacious and there’s no harm in taking a bottle of castor oil along as well, even if it is old-fashioned.”
He was right, of course. The more beautiful the island at that time, the worse the sanitation.
“You had better come to Calabria with me instead. You can walk, can’t you, and eat cheese? Good. You’ll only need a rucksack. I will get you some clothes, suitable for a goatherd, and teach you how to move. It’s a girl’s knees, as a rule, that give her away. Then I’ll show you what made the Greeks write their poetry. Yes, you must come with me to Calabria.”
If I had had a grain more courage, I should have accepted the offer. I still wonder if I might have got away with it. With N. D. as guide, it could have been possible. I was so afraid of losing my nerve in the hills and disgracing him that my answer was inevitably “perhaps.”
“Or India. We could go to India.”
“When I wrote you first, I said that I ought to arrive here on an elephant.”
“An elephant! That would be something. I should have to hang the veranda with catmint. Do you suppose the beast would react to it the way cats do? Ha!” He shook with laughter. “I should like to watch it shake down all the rickety shutters in this street. And now, how about a pinch of snuff? They say the Scots introduced it into England.”
“A virgin! A virgin!” Another roar of laughter. “Delicious, my dear, and so refreshing, just persevere. What were we talking about before? The classics, yes, you must read Pliny. Much of what he wrote is lost and it is writing I regret but already the Romans had him, they were moralists, you know, whereas Athenaeus was non-moral, he was interested in life purely as it appeared to him.”
“But you belong to ancient Rome,” I ventured, stifling a second sneeze, I had seen a marble head in a small museum, some general or one of the later emperors, that might have been a portrait of him.
“Oh, at present I am sick of everything Italian.”
He wasn’t; actually Italy and the Vorarlberg were the only places where he was really at home but I think that Nepenthe called him at that moment. He talked of India and once I lingered too long and it was almost the forbidden hour of dusk when I started to walk back along the Arno. I looked up and there was a mirage in the sky. A Persian city was floating above the surface of the river. The courtyards and minarets were softer than Cairo, gray rather than white, but it drifted, almost touching the hills, for several moments before it disappeared. I thought as I watched it that the centuries were merely the colors that a painter changed at his will and yet time was not as continuous as it sometimes seemed; there would be subtle differences if Douglas ever revisited India and these were, and were not, the streets that I had first seen when I was eight.
People have written and spoken so much about Norman Douglas that it is strange to think that there may be one mystery left that is still unexplained. We used to go for long walks into the countryside and as I have written, we talked mostly about the classics. The angle of a window or the light catching a shutter in a once fine but decaying palace must have stirred some memory in his mind. He began to tell me about an Italian girl whom he had met and intended to marry. “I was engaged to her, my dear, for several years.” He spoke of her with the greatest respect in terms that he reserved otherwise only for his sister. There must have been a strong intellectual bond between them. They had met every day, always with a chaperone, “in an icy room, they were as poor as church mice” but her brothers had disapproved of the match and eventually they had parted. She had died shortly afterwards.
What quality did the Florentine girl possess that had held Douglas to those daily meetings for so long? No mutual friends seem ever to have heard the story but he spoke of her so often that I am sure that she must have existed. There was no reason for him to have invented the tale. He spoke freely enough about the girls of his youth, being discovered, and “I had to hop it, my dear, that very evening.” I should have been more curious, I suppose, but I liked simply listening to his talk as we wandered among the olive groves and gardens. I have since thought that she might have reminded him unconsciously of his sister. I do not think that he ever told me her name.
I was always ready to experiment with food but I drank no wine. Apart from a joke or two, Douglas never pressed me to take it, “You puzzle me, Br, you say you belong to the North but you have the Southerner’s temperance.” There was, however, the incident of the Toscana. I did not care for cigarettes, I wanted to have my hands free but I had always liked the smell of a cigar and felt it would be pleasant to smoke one after work was finished. Douglas used to bring me small Dutch ones but he insisted that they were things that he would not give to a boy, what I needed was a Toscana. “Blow your head off, my dear, but you’ll get to like it.”
One day I felt I must be courageous and tried: I spent a miserable afternoon. It was hard to know whether risking a Toscana or its predictable sequel delighted him more. “Saucy!” he said and brought me a leather case to take two of the little cigars that he despised. I could not smoke them in public so eventually gave them up.
We left soon afterwards for Egypt. It was an expedition that brought much inspiration to Hilda and that she and her mother always remembered but I seemed to have absorbed so much there as a child that, as I have written previously, it was pleasantly familiar but remained completely external. It was March by the time that we lan
ded at Naples again and we went across for a few days to Capri. This was a very different place from the resort that it has now become, almost solitary in parts with rocks rising, high above the sea, that were covered with wild asphodel.
I found a letter from Douglas waiting for me. He was about to return to Capri for the first time since the war. I was at the harbor to meet him when the steamer arrived and let nobody tell me that he was not loved there. The news of his arrival spread from mouth to mouth. I have never seen a political leader enjoy so great a triumph. Men offered him wine, women with babies in their arms rushed up so that he might touch them, the children brought him flowers. I slipped away as he walked slowly through a crowd of several hundred people, shouting jokes in ribald Italian, kissing equally the small boys and girls and patting the babies as if they were kittens. The signore had deigned to return to his kingdom and I am sure that they believed that the crops would be abundant and the cisterns full of water as a result.
I left him to his Caprese but next day I got a note inviting me to dinner. I had often had lunch with him but he had always said firmly that his evenings were his own. Seven o’clock came and I waited in the hotel lounge. He was always punctual to the minute and as time passed and there was no sign of him, I wondered if I had mistaken the day. I looked at the date in his beautiful handwriting and finally sent a message to his room asking if there had been a mistake.
He tottered down, looked at me with considerable vagueness and asked, “What time is it?” I should have been warned.
I still lacked experience and produced his note. He slapped me on the shoulder, another action that surprised me as we seldom even shook hands, and growled, “Kept you waiting, did I? Never mind. I’ll take you now to a brigand’s den where there’s been a dozen murders. But Carmelita (was it Carmelita?) is there, my dear, she’s the best cook on the island and she was the prettiest girl too, thirty years ago. She still dances the tarantella better than anyone else.”
I ought to have run away but all this was fascinating and we set off with Douglas leaning heavily on a stick or sometimes on my shoulder. “Most of these people don’t know how to cook. If you want to eat, you should have stopped in Florence. They’re a crowd of cutthroats,” he flung back his head and pointed at his neck alarmingly, “every inch of the island has been steeped in blood several times over. Proud, you know. We’re near Africa. But Carmelita will do us all right.”
I was puzzled why we never kept a straight line and why the stairs should be so difficult but eventually after more jokes and greetings we got to a table where an enormous lobster was eventually set down in front of him.
It was South Wind again, the bits that he had kept perhaps for a sequel, he began by describing some special lizards that he had found and from them he went on to the human inhabitants, a Capri of straw hats, long skirts and uninhibited passions that had ended even for him soon after 1900. I listened entranced until I noticed with horror that he was beginning to chew the lobster, shell and all. “Tough, my dear, how wise you were to stick to the omelette.” Finally Carmelita came to the rescue and I realized that he was wildly, gloriously drunk.
It was a warm evening, I could see the almond flowers even in the darkness and here and there deep gold where a patch of wallflowers grew out of some stones. All I wanted was to get home but I did not know the way. I had no confidence that Douglas was even leading me in the right direction but I need not have worried. We stumbled along terraces, climbed some steps and went down others until, to my relief, I saw the hotel. It was still early, tourists were strolling up and down, the sounds changed from Italian to English, I tried to slip away but he clung to my arm. “Let’s make a night of it, come up Monte Solaro with me.” I hoped my three compatriots had not heard him, they seemed to be schoolteachers who were walking briskly without loitering down the path, shocked I was sure to feel nature was so wanton: a moon had now risen above the over-heavy fruit blossom. “Don’t be so damned careful, it’s a stiff climb but you’re young. We’ll wait there for the sunrise.”
“Another day,” I murmured, five steps more and I should be safe.
“Another day! What is the matter with you this evening? How do you know you will live to see it? You may be stabbed or fall off a cliff.”
I did not answer. I guided Douglas as gently as I could towards the safety of his room. It was too late. At that very instant he saw the three schoolmistresses. He broke away from my grasp, pranced towards them, taking off his hat, and said courteously but in a voice that could have been heard on the other side of the Piazza, “Well, my dears, and whom are you tucking in with tonight?”
The years passed and it was natural that we should grow, not less friendly, but more distant from each other. Once I had given up Harré’s woad and deerskins (though never Harré’s heart), our day-to-day companionship was over because I became a part of that turbulent Western world he so disliked. We wrote each other, exchanged books, and it was through H. D. and myself that he met Kenneth Macpherson, the friend who cared for him so wonderfully throughout his old age.
Our last meeting was in London in 1946. It was cold and sad, there was neither sunshine nor wine and he babbled about Italy as if he were in a fever. Still, a few months later he was able to return to Capri and Kenneth’s devoted care for six more years.
A tradition has gone with him, his death marked the end of one form of culture. His books will survive but nothing that I can write will make you feel the forces of his love for the visible world. Some power would rise in him until, standing beside him, I have actually seen some bent, old woman whom he had known in his youth turn for a moment into a beautiful and happy girl. It is cold in the places that knew him. I listen for the click of the silver box and the familiar roar, “How about it, Br? Have a pinch of snuff.” It has taken me thirty years to realize how much I owe to a chance word flung at me over his shoulder as I struggled behind him up some steep and rocky path. I was only one of hundreds among his friends. What can words do but make him seem a shade? The legend will endure and not all of it will be true but Fate saw that it was correctly knotted, there were Scots and Austrians as well as his Italians with him when he died. Something of what I have become is due to him, especially his advice. Even now I seem to hear him saying at difficult moments, as he said so often with his head almost touching the amber gold curtains in front of the windows of his Arno room, “Never be uninterested, Br, that is what is ruining the race.”
SEVENTEEN
“When I want to remember England, I think of your books.” This was, I believe, the beginning of the first letter that I wrote to Dorothy Richardson. I had learned in Paris that writers sometimes responded if apprentices wrote to them and her prose had been a part of my life for years. I knew the people in her pages, the girls in Pointed Roofs were like my companions at Queenwood, I was passionately interested in the Miss Pernes of this world, I had met families like the Corries and the Orlys, whereas the characters in the novels of Virginia Woolf or Aldous Huxley, the two idols of the time, were in general unknown to me, or persons whom I should have disliked. It was Miriam’s determination to win independence at all costs that had gone straight to my heart when I had first read Backwater and that I feel as strongly today, almost forty-five years afterwards. She and Colette have been among the few writers whom I have read with equal pleasure from youth to age. I added various rumors that I had heard about her to the letter: that she never went out at night, that she often opened a window to stare at the street outside, that a famous male novelist wrote the stories under her name, (All proved untrue.) I composed my page as carefully as if it were the first chapter of a novel and received, as reward, an invitation to tea. I think it must have been the summer of 1923 because she spent the winters in Cornwall.
Dorothy and her husband, the artist Alan Odle, were then living in a small apartment in St. John’s Wood. It was a narrow, drowsy, still almost Victorian Street where only the scarlet of a pillar box broke the gray of the pavement and the
sky. Miriam (and she was Miriam) was just as I had expected to find her, with a stiff blouse and a mass of gold hair piled on the top of her head. It seemed inevitable that we should meet. A big table, sinking under the weight of Alan’s books and drawings, almost filled the room (I was told later that it had once cracked in two), and he sat behind it, smoking and smiling, always ready to rescue Dorothy or turn the conversation if it bothered her, and otherwise watching visitors or the way the light fell on a door, with his brown, draftsman’s eyes. A fireplace almost filled the wall behind Dorothy’s chair. They had pinned a row of postcards along its top, mostly of gargoyles from Notre Dame, and faded as these had become through smoke and fog, they were so essential a part of the decoration that I have never forgotten them.
I felt no surprise. I wondered only if people who perceived things in a certain way met at a given moment those of a like experience. It was not that we agreed about many matters, I was a generation younger and differently sensitive to my age, but I felt an immense respect for the way that she had fought literally for our liberty, “Nobody has written as you have about London,” I began, remembering how her characters had been my friends when I had gone on dreary errands during the war.
Dorothy stopped that conversation at once. “So you have been in New York? I have relatives in America, did you like it there?”
“Yes, but, oddly enough, it seemed more old-fashioned than here.”
“And are there some opportunities for seclusion?”