Safe Passage

by Mary Burchell

  When they gave me short articles to write up, I was fairly happy, but in periodical make-up I was an infant in arms, and not a very intelligent one, at that.

  As fiction sub, one of my most horrible tasks was to arrange the proportional size of illustrations and copy. The original illustrations that come in are perhaps twenty by thirty inches. By a system of simple mathematical calculation, which to this day I have never grasped, a measurement along one side must indicate what the general size of the finished “pull” should be. Mine was the wildest guesswork. The pulls either came up like postage stamps or like recruiting posters, and I suppose I must have wasted a good deal of the firm’s money in useless “blocks.”

  Also, I was not at all good at estimating the space that the “copy,” or printed matter, would take up. Consequently, on press day I was faced with hair-raising and expensive cutting or with the even more grisly task of adding perhaps five hundred words to a story, without altering its sense, and so that no one could detect the “joins.” This was the only part of my work at which I became adept—presumably because I had so much practice. Again, dreadfully expensive to the firm.

  In addition, I had made as a condition of my accepting the post that I be allowed four or five weeks’ leave early in the new year. Louise and I had made all our preparations for another visit to the States. I was sufficiently honest to make it clear that if this proviso was unacceptable, I was prepared to forego the job.

  This proviso was accepted. What I had not sufficient sense to see was that for one member of a small staff—and the least efficient one by far—to go junketing off to the States during the difficult first months of launching a new publication could hardly make me popular with all and sundry.

  Even I knew that I took my departure in anything but a harmonious atmosphere. Nowadays, I would have enough sense to compromise and smooth things over. Then, I was crude, and silly enough to stand on my—undoubted—rights, and go off, feeling justified, if uneasy.

  In those early weeks of 1932, America was still suffering badly from the depression, and the atmosphere was very different from the gorgeous prosperity of our first visit, five years previous. Even so, there were vigorous signs of recovery. And so far as our own future was concerned, Louise and I saw things in pretty bright colours.

  I was hardly shining at my new job, but I expected things to improve. Meanwhile, I was earning a larger salary than in any job I had held previously. Though we had no definite plans, we certainly had vague expectations of returning to the States again and again. We had found our pattern and felt that our future depended solely on our efforts. In our naïve and rather ignorant minds, we could never have conceived of the rivers of blood and high tide of war that were to sweep between this visit and the next. I realize now that, even though we were in our late twenties, we were not entirely grown up.

  This time, the whole of our visit was spent in New York City. But the opera season was on, and we asked for nothing better. However, perhaps Fate had smiled upon us a little too often. Several things went wrong with this third visit. First, we arrived some weeks later than originally planned. Because of the financial upheaval, sailings had been altered and postponed. Of course, in those days there was no air traffic to ease the situation.

  Consequently, we arrived almost as Lita and Homer were due to depart on a South African tour, and that gave us only one day with them in New York. They arrived in town with everything packed and ready so that we could spend the whole day together. But it was cruelly short, and the very next day, we went down to the boat to see them off to South Africa.

  Louise and I felt thoroughly tearful, and possibly looked it, because I remember Lita whispering, “Don’t cry, girls, or I shall too, and it looks so bad for me to start out on a concert tour in tears!”

  Thus adjured, we preserved British calm and waved them away on a separation that lasted another two years.

  Secondly, we had arrived when the most glowing nights of the season were already waning, so there was only one Ponselle performance for us. However, this was Gioconda, one of her finest roles, and we had her permission to go around and see her “any time we were at the Met.”

  We arrived at the opera house, full of joyful anticipation—only to discover that she was ill. An inconsiderable substitute sang in her place. We sat stolidly and miserably through the performance, and at the end, because we simply had to tell someone, we told the woman sitting beside us how we had come all the way from England, that this was our one Ponselle performance, and we had had to put up with a substitute.

  She was full of sympathy and cried, “Isn’t that just too bad! Wasn’t Ponselle singing then? I never noticed.”

  We went back to our hotel hating everyone.

  However, the next day there appeared an announcement that Ponselle would be singing in a concert at the Metropolitan, well within the limits of our visit. Greatly cheered, we bought our tickets and went.

  This was the last time that Louise heard her sing in public, although I heard her twice more in Florence in 1933. I remember everything about her performance that night. She was in black, the dramatic black so suitable for her exotic beauty. With an almost backless dress, she wore long black gloves, and over these, the most magnificent, matching diamond bracelets. If anyone had described that get-up to me without my seeing it, I could have told who wore it.

  Afterwards, we went around backstage and were received very kindly. But we were shy, and depressed because she was leaving New York the next day; we could not possibly hear her again. Also, she told us that she thought it was unlikely she would be at Covent Garden that year. It seemed there was not to be an Italian Season. Everything was going wrong for the disillusioned Cooks!

  However, there was one tremendously bright spot in that visit: the first American performance of Simon Boccanegra. It was one of the finest productions I ever saw. Tremendously lavish, but everything had a real meaning. No slowly closing doors, unnecessary staircases or the other irrelevant clutter that often passes for “significant” staging today.

  The cast included Pinza, unbelievably magnificent in the comparatively secondary role of Fiesco.

  I had brought with me to America a specially dressed doll for Claudia Pinza. We had left it for her at the Metropolitan. Toward the end of our visit, we not only received a letter of thanks from her, but on the very last evening of our visit—after a superb Simon Boccanegra—we were taken home by the Pinzas to the Ansonia Hotel, where they then lived, and entertained at supper.

  In those days, Pinza knew very little English, and Louise and I, even less Italian. But we all managed somehow, and our last night in New York was very gay and charming.

  The next day, or rather late that night, we left New York for home once more. We stayed up on deck for a long while, watching the lights of Manhattan, as we slowly drew away into the darkness. Louise and I talked of returning soon, making tentative plans that were never to materialize. We did, I recollect, feel more than usually sad over our departure, but I am glad we had no inkling of what lay ahead in the years before we were to see New York again.

  5

  By the time we returned to England, it was still only mid-March and I found myself up against a situation as bleak as the weather. No one could pretend that I was good at my journalistic job. I was not. In addition, I had to live down what was considered my underserved luck for having had a wonderful trip to the States while everyone else had been working hard.

  At one point, I told one of my former colleagues at the Law Courts I had made a terrible mistake, and oh, why had I left my safe civil service job with its inevitable pension at sixty?

  However, dear Wynne never allowed defeats to depress her.—It was she who said to me on the day France fell, “Isn’t it a relief? Now there’s no one left to let us down.”—On this occasion she said, “Give it one week longer and see if things don’t improve a little.”

  So I tried once more. Perhaps that week I made just a few less silly mistakes, and t
he illustrations were measured up just a little more successfully. Anyway, I stayed.

  Then I had a stroke of real luck. At that time we were running a series of articles on, “Are you the So-and-so Girl?” “Are you the Little Sister type?” and that sort of thing. Miss Taft, who must have been wondering by now just what sort of dud she had brought in as her fiction sub, detailed me to do one of the series.

  “And try,” she said rather wearily, “to make it sound like C—S—” a very successful woman journalist of the period.

  I was really on my mettle and also pretty sure this might be my last chance. I went home, wrote my article and brought it back to Miss Taft next day.

  She read it without comment—which is always very disturbing—and then sent it up to the fiction editor. I heard her say on the phone, “I’m sending you up an article. Would you let me know how you like it and who you think wrote it?”

  It was my lucky day! Twenty minutes later, he phoned down and said, “I like it immensely. And there’s no question about who wrote it. It was C—S—wasn’t it?”

  That copying of styles to fill in those ghastly spaces had paid off at last. It was the turning point for me. Now I had clearly proved that it would be better to let me write more and calculate less.

  I was very lucky indeed to have Miss Taft for my editor. Not only had she been monumentally patient with me, but she had a great talent for getting the best out of people, giving just the right amount of encouragement at the right time. One day she said, “Did you never think of writing a short story yourself, dear? You are always subbing other people’s. What about trying something yourself?”

  I was hard up, as usual, and I thought, “Well, why not?” Louise was away at the Three Choirs Festival, and I was slightly bored that weekend. So I wrote a not very good story, which seemed to me a near-masterpiece, and took it into the office on Monday morning.

  Miss Taft looked it over critically and said, “It isn’t very good, is it? But not bad, either. Just good enough to use when we haven’t got anything better. I’ll buy it.”

  This was the first signed piece of fiction I had ever had accepted. I was paid eight guineas for it, and I am not sure now which was the more acceptable, the honour or the money. Anyway, after that story, I occasionally wrote short stories under my office name, Ida North. One of these stories, in May, 1933, helped me to achieve yet another opera thrill to add to the other unforgettable memories.

  Since we had said goodbye to Ponselle backstage at the Met that night in February, 1932, we had neither seen nor heard her. One Covent Garden season, as we had feared, passed without any Italian opera at all, and a second one was being launched without any sign of our favourite dramatic soprano. Then I learned, quite by chance, that she was singing in two performances of La Vestale at the Florence Musical in May.

  Determined to go, I rushed up to the attic, where I did most of my writing and, over the weekend, turned out what was really not at all a bad story. Miss Taft approved it and also put up my fee. Best of all, she agreed to let me take one week of my annual leave right away and go to Florence. Louise, to our lasting regret, was unable to come, so off I went abroad, on my own for the first time. To mark the occasion, and feeling utterly dashing, I flew as far as Paris and took the night train on to Italy. I saved no time, really, but it made me feel especially excited and important.

  I spoke no Italian and such inadequate schoolgirl French that I dared not address anyone on the way. By the time I arrived in Florence, my usually active tongue felt stiff with disuse. And I had a raging headache. However, as soon as I arrived, I went to sleep for an hour in hopes of feeling better by the time the first performance began that evening.

  I shall never forget awakening in the late afternoon, roused by the sound of incredibly sweet bells. Completely restored, I rushed to the window and looked out over the flat roofs of Florence. Everywhere, the mellow sunlight was reflected from pink-and-white-washed walls whose green shutters were turned out from the windows. And, close at hand, before my astonished and enchanted gaze, Giotto’s Campanile poured the sound of those bells.

  All my life, I shall remember Florence in the sunlight. In actual fact, it rained several times during my week there, but I recall very little of that. I see only the sunlight, hear only the Arno rushing under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio, and recapture the wonderful realization that I was to hear Rosa once more that night.

  The Politeama—now the Communale—had only recently opened, and I was not the only one to go there with lively curiosity and pleasure. Except for Rosa’s secretary, I did not know a soul in the audience. But looking round, I was thrilled to recognize Richard Strauss sitting in a box—the first time I ever saw him—and felt sorrier than ever that Louise was not with me to share my curiosity and interest.

  I knew Ponselle had been ill since last I had heard her, and I was acutely anxious lest she should not have recovered her full vocal powers. But from the first moment she opened her mouth, I knew I could sit back and enjoy myself. As everyone who has ever heard her will remember, she had the most extraordinary power of projecting a ravishing pianissimo that sounded exactly the same in the front row of the stalls as in the back row of the gallery. Quite early in the performance, she had occasion to do this, and I learned for all time what is really meant by the expression “you could have heard a pin drop.”

  The vast audience—most of them were hearing her for the first time—seemed literally to hold its breath, and except for that silken thread of perfectly supported sound, there was the deadest silence I have ever experienced. The place might have been empty—until the end of her first aria when, with the suddenness of a clap of thunder, the most extraordinary storm of applause broke out. I was so personally proud of her, I could have stood up and cheered. I probably did not yell, now that I come to think of it. The performance was held up for minutes on end. According to an austere note in the programme, encores were strictly forbidden, but the clapping and cheering went on and on. So did the opera, but no one could hear a thing.

  Finally, Ponselle came forward to the footlights and made a rather helpless gesture to Vittorio Gui, the conductor. And, overborne by events, he allowed a repeat of the aria.

  Not so many years ago, when I came face to face with Maestro Gui in the grounds of Glyndebourne, I told him that the first time I ever heard him conduct was for Ponselle in La Vestale, Florence, 1933.

  He smiled musingly and said, “You were there on that great occasion? Do you remember the applause after her singing of the prayer, how they demanded an encore, and I wouldn’t let them have it, and that finally I gave way? And do you know,” went on Maestro Gui, “why I gave way?”

  I admitted that, of course, I did not.

  “Because I heard a pathetic voice behind me in the audience say, ‘Who knows if we shall ever hear anything like that again?’ And I thought, ‘Who knows, indeed?’ and I let them have it.”

  After that great performance, I went around backstage to see Rosa and was received, literally, with open arms. I told her that most of her London adorers had stayed home from Covent Garden that night to listen to her broadcast—on a crystal set with a “whisker” in those days, of course—and she said in that “dark,” rather melodramatic speaking voice of hers, “To think they were listening to me in London!”

  She always loved London and the London audience, insisting that they were the most faithful and the most warm-hearted of all audiences.

  I spent an enchanting few days in Florence and, on my last evening, had a repeat performance of Vestale—my last Ponselle performance and the last time I was to see her or hear her voice for thirteen years. But I was not the only one to remember those two Vestales as landmarks. Years after the war, when he had retired, the great de Sabata visited the United States and went to Baltimore to see Rosa, who by then lived some miles outside that city.

  He told her that during that Florentine Musical May, he had been conducting orchestral concerts and unfortunately had engagemen
ts on both evenings of her performances.

  “However,” he added, “I managed to attend the rehearsals for your performances, and I have come to tell you that I still regard them as among the greatest artistic experiences of my life.”

  Later in 1933, Louise and I went to Verona. But we had not been able to have our holidays when we wanted them, and we had to leave Verona just before the open-air festival of opera began. It was a bitter disappointment of course, the more so since Les Huguenots with the magnificent Rosa Raisa—the creator of the role of Turandot—and Lauri-Volpi, then in his prime, was to be performed.

  However, our luck did not completely desert us on this occasion. On the very last day, we ran into Pinza, who had just arrived for rehearsals of the opera—I think Lohengrin—in which he was to appear. We were delighted to see each other, and he asked very kindly if there were anything he could do for us to make our holiday end well.

  I said, “Yes, please! Could you possibly get us into the dress rehearsal of Les Huguenots tonight?”

  Pinza made no bones about it at all. He merely remarked that all visitors had been strictly forbidden and added that he would collect us from our hotel at a quarter to nine.

  For the pleasure of Pinza’s many admirers, let me record that, at that time, he was just at the height of his stunningly good looks. Very tanned and dressed in white flannels—with more of what used to be called SA in our youth than I ever saw in anyone else—he certainly made a gratifying escort in the streets of Verona, and needless to say, Louise and I were enchanted to have his company.

  As our informal guide, he frequently paused in the street to address us as he would a public meeting, while pointing out some showplace or other. Invariably, he was recognized by the enthralled Veronese, and a small crowd would gather to share the lecture. Whereupon he would smile, push his way good-humouredly through the admiring throng, and we would continue our stroll, Louise and I scarcely able to conceal our amusement and pleasure.