‘What about books?’ Fish demanded. ‘What about all that fucking in Lady Chatterley? Was it squalid and demeaning to write that?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘But isn’t it obscene?’
‘No.’
‘Isn’t it indecent?’
‘No.’
‘Not even when Mellors treats her as a boy?’
‘I don’t know that he does.’ I took this evasive action swiftly. ‘I thought the bit you read was rather ambiguous or equivocal. You have to remember that Lawrence came from a simple class of society. They’re very straightforward in their fucking, the English proletariat. Anything not of the most jejune and frontal order would seem tremendously dark and perverse to them.’ I paused with considerable pride on this piece of sociological nonsense. ‘That’s all that Connie had to contend with.’
We continued with Connie to our considerable satisfaction for some time – I suppose with a healthy impulse to command a subject the real mysteries of which had lately had both of us badly at sea. But we were still two undergraduates at a loose end in Naples, commanding hardly a score of Italian words between us, and each of us as a consequence the other’s sole resource. We did, from time to time, edge towards irritation. But Fish was good at sensing this and heading it off.
‘These galleries and things,’ he said suddenly. ‘We’ve about had them for a bit.’
‘You’re telling me.’
‘I vote we garage the car and go over to Capri.’
‘Frightfully vulgar.’
‘There’s something called the Blue Grotto. It’s best from 11 to 2.’ Fish was consulting his guidebook again. ‘The sun rays entering through the water fill the cave with a magical blue light.’
‘They ought to have blue movies there. But what utter blue balls.’
‘Well then, there’s Ischia. It’s larger, Duncan, and would perhaps answer your notions of refinement better. It has radioactive mineral waters and an important thermal bathing establishment.’
‘Full of poxy old men making eyes at you. Quit being so ludicrous, Martin.’
‘Making eyes at you, not me’ Fish said mildly, and took a glance at me, scowling at the empty carafe. ‘You see that travel agency across the square?’ he said. ‘I think I’ll go over and cash a cheque there. What about you?’
‘No, I shan’t do that again until we do our right-about turn. I think that ought to be at Paestum. We should go down the coast as far as that, and make it our terminus. There’s terrific straight Greek stuff. Enormous temples. My father has told me.’
‘We could do my vulgar Capri first, and your austere Paestum afterwards.’
‘Oh, shut up, Martin. Stuff it, for Christ’s sake. It’s calling things vulgar that’s dead vulgar.’
‘I shan’t be ten minutes.’ Fish had got to his feet, and now chucked a packet of cigarettes in front of me as one might chuck a bun at a bear in the zoo. He was always extremely deft with his affectionate gestures. ‘Dear Old Sunshine Dunkie,’ he said mockingly, and plunged into the traffic.
I smoked a cigarette distastedly, and wished in a glum manner that I was as nice a person as Fish. Then I brooded on other matters – and in so deep an abstraction that Fish had to shout at me when he came back to our table.
‘Duncan,’ he said, ‘an extraordinary thing! He’s turned up on us.’
‘Who has turned up on us?’ I had visions of some bizarre and calamitous Oxford collision: the appearance of Stumpe, or of Killiecrankie, or of the Provost.
‘Lawrence.’
‘Lawrence died in 1930, you imbecile.’
‘Lawrence – and Connie as well. It’s incredible. Look!’
This time, what Fish tossed in front of me was a brightly-coloured hotel leaflet. I stared at it incomprehendingly.
‘Come again,’ I said. I was going through a bad spell, at that time, of what were supposed to be up to date colloquial expressions.
‘It’s about a pub at a place called Ravello. Have you ever heard of it?’
‘Max Beerbohm lives there.’
‘That’s Rapallo.’ Just occasionally, and when genuinely excited, Fish would betray familiarity with matters supposed to be exclusively my province. ‘Ravello’s about 65 kilometres south of us, near Amalfi.’
‘Oh, Amalfi.’ The name rang some faint bell with me.
‘This blurb-thing says that Lawrence stayed there while cooking up Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The pub inspired him to it, the Italian says. It’s rather uncanny.’
‘What awful nonsense! How could an albergo, or whatever it is, in Campania inspire a chap to write about a Priapic gamekeeper and a sterile upper-class hide-out in some God-forsaken stretch of industrial England?’
‘Well, that’s what it says. And there’s a poem by him, too.’
‘A poem by Lawrence?’
‘Yes. Listen.’ Laboriously, Fish plunged into the Italian tongue. ‘Pensiero di D. H. Lawrence, poeta e romanziere inglese, ospite dell’Albergo nel 1926. What would you say a pensiero was, Duncan?’
‘A beautiful and musing thought.’
‘You’re dead right.’
‘Is it in English?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then read it, Martin. You read verse beautifully. At least, I expect you do. So far, you’ve only entertained me with the other harmony of prose. John Dryden.’
‘No. You’ve got to read it yourself.’ Fish handed me the leaflet. ‘Because of how it’s printed.’
I took the thing and read:
“Lost to a world in which—I—grave no part
I sit alone and commune whith my heart
Pleased whith my little corner of the earth
Glad that I came not sorry to depart”
‘It’s a pensiero, all right,’ I said cautiously.
‘A pensiero di D. H. Lawrence, poeta e romanziere inglese?’
‘He might have written it in a hotel register or something – or in the manager’s wife’s birthday-book. Rather with his tongue in his cheek.’
‘It’s not exactly the familiar voice of D.H.L.?’
‘No.’ I felt rather like a candidate who suspects some low-down trick on the part of his examiners. ‘I suppose one could find out if he was really in this Ravello place in 1926.’
‘In fact, we’d better start researching into the problem now? It might be more amusing than either Capri or Paestum. And an addition to knowledge, Duncan. Your first contribution to The Review of English Studies. Just your niche, that organ of criticism and research. I’ve seen it in the college library.’
‘We’ll set off straight away, Martin.’ I played up to this at once. ‘There’s not a moment to lose. Harvard and Princeton may already be on the trail. Are you more or less sober?’
‘Of course I’m sober.’
‘Then you can drive like mad.’
It was thus, in a spirit of pure foolery, that we set off for Ravello, of which neither of us had ever heard. Fish, by his remarkable feat of serendipity in the travel agency, had rescued us from childish bickering over our plans. He celebrated this success by driving rather fast along a route cut hair-raisingly en corniche across tremendous cliffs, and offering the further hazard of stretches once vigorously bombed and as yet only tentatively shored up. I made the curious observation that Fish’s fear of death by water was inoperative as long as the destructive element lay hundreds of feet below him, even when his wheels appeared to be within inches of an unprotected verge. Half a dozen times I was very frightened indeed.
I find it difficult to write of Ravello as it first appeared to me, since it so happened that I was to live there, off and on, over a long period of years. No glimpse of this hovered as we drove into the town. I hadn’t in the remotest degree that sense, sometimes reported by imaginative persons in a similar situation, of immediate familiarity, of a mysterious presence whispering, ‘Here you are; you’re home; you’ve been here before’. The road up from Amalfi (we had hugged the coast, and so unnecessarily pro
longed our route) was daunting even to Fish’s car – a handleable little affair of an unobtrusively powerful sort. I was to see this track replaced by a splendidly engineered corkscrew highway equally hazardous only when taken at speed by motor-coaches the length of cruisers. In the little town itself builders and repairers were in various ways at work. It was observable that they weren’t much interested in the duomo, which dominated one side of a sleepy square in that state of extreme but miraculously suspended dilapidation characteristic of Italian churches in general. Three albergi including our own, however, were being banged about at a great rate. There weren’t any tourists, but turismo was already in the hopeful air. It was later going to come to something in Ravello but not too disastrously much: just enough for an agreeable touch of imported prosperity and bustle. One may account among the few blessings of our age the fact that the new itinerant classes are so wedded to stepping straight from their hotels into the sea. That what they call the Med is no longer a wholly salubrious fluid in which to immerse oneself doesn’t deter them in the slightest.
Fish and I, if incapable of elderly and atrabilious thoughts of this kind, were at least glad to get away from uproar suffered in the cause of art. Our hotel would have been quiet but for the workmen building an annex of hutch-like chambers in the garden; we ourselves had an ancient and enormous room the windows of which surveyed, across a deep ravine, a straggling small town demonstrably even less in the mainstream of life than Ravello itself. This was Scala, and it appeared to be by scale alone that these two places could communicate with one another except in some fashion unacceptably devious. We engaged in this odd sort of staircase mountaineering at once, and during the next few days pursued it obsessively all over the surrounding countryside. Aesthetic inquiry (although the pursuit of it through galleries is exhausting even to the young) had left a good many of our muscles unstretched.
It was literary inquiry that had brought us to Ravello, but here our researches for some time hung fire. A faded photograph of Lawrence, looking as if it had been clipped from a newspaper, was on display in the hall of the hotel; framed along with it was a scrap of typescript reiterating the reference to Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the pensiero, on the other hand, didn’t again appear.
However it may have been with Fish, I was myself quite impressed by this Lawrence business. It seemed to me beautifully strange that in the very room we now occupied Lawrence and Frieda might have slept at a time when all those fiery thoughts about Connie and her gamekeeper were beginning to stir in the novelist’s head. For the first time in my young academic life I missed the Bodleian Library, in which an hour’s rummaging would tell me whether there was anything in print about Lawrence staying in Ravello. But this thirst for knowledge didn’t make me pertinacious in personal inquiry, and Fish wasn’t much good at it either. We’d have regarded it as very impertinent, for example, to ask to see the hotel register for 1926; and such parleyings as we did have with the manager (referred to impressively by Fish as the albergatore) were unsatisfactory. It was his daughter, it seemed, who coped with the English language, and his daughter was away from home. Having discovered that we were students, he assumed, very properly, that Italian ought not to be wholly beyond us; and when he discoursed on Lawrence it was in this flattering faith. We shamefully pretended to understand much more than we did, a phenomenon not uncommon among educated Englishmen abroad. He was clearly claiming to remember Lawrence vividly, which was colourable in view of the fact that Lawrence was so very rememberable a man. His other point seemed to be that the unrivalled scenic splendours commanded from the hotel, together perhaps with the perfection of its cuisine, had conduced to Lawrence’s behaving in the manner of a poeta inglese of the most approved sort. At this point, indeed, words failed the albergatore, and he was constrained to mime the inspired bearing of his celebrated guest in a manner which might have been thought of as belonging to opera. Fish and I were much embarrassed by such extravagance, and offended by the extremely innocent commercial motive prompting it. Our investigation, therefore, came to a halt. Fish suggested that we should call on the parroco, as presumably the man of learning in Ravello, and beg his assistance. I objected that the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was almost certainly ill-regarded by the clergy, and that our application might therefore be offensive to this simple and pious man. Fish (who carried an Italian dictionary) then substituted the maestro di scuola as a possible resource. We both knew perfectly well that these were impracticable notions, and that our range of personal acquaintance in Italy was not to extend beyond beggars, policemen, and waiters.
I am attached to Ravello and don’t want to write a guide-book about it, but must here record that the environs run to two properties of superior consequence. The first, the Palazzo Rufolo, is one of the oldest houses of its kind still inhabited in Italy, and finds mention in The Decameron as the dwelling of a wealthy merchant of the region. Its garden, which is extremely beautiful to this day, is alleged in a local history to have prompted Wagner to write the music of Klingsor’s Magic Garden in Parsifal. Lawrence is thus not the first genius who may be said to have drawn inspiration from this quite obscure little town.
The other big house, the Villa Cimbrone, isn’t ancient at all, although it looks as ancient as a great deal of ingeniously incorporated mediaeval stonework and general knick-knackery can contrive. It is a folly built in the early years of the present century, with a standard eccentric nobleman, Lord Grimthorpe, at the bottom of it. Both houses have been in English, Scottish or American occupancy more often than not over a substantial period of time: a state of affairs obtaining in a notable number of such places throughout much of Italy. The gardens of both are furnished with stupendous views, and serve as pleasure-grounds for anybody prepared to pay a modest fee at the gate. Courting couples of the more substantial sort have frequent recourse to them.
Fish and I, although in fact remaining remarkably pleased with each other, had evolved without discussion a number of rules and conventions governing us as travelling companions. Now at one time of the day and now at another, we regularly parted for an hour or two and went our several ways. On our fifth evening in Ravello, which we had decided to make our last, this custom had taken me into the garden of the Rufolo and Fish into that of the Cimbrone – which is by much the larger of the two. I had found a niche still in sunshine (something which Ravello is rather short of at that time of day) and was more or less snoozing like a lizard when I heard a shout from without and looked up to find Fish gesturing at me through a wrought-iron railing. He seemed to have something of importance to communicate, but was indisposed to pay out a further 200 lire to join me.
‘I’ve found it!’ Fish shouted. ‘You must go and look.’
‘Found what?’ I got reluctantly to my feet, and went over to stare at him as if he were an animal in a cage.
‘The pensiero. It’s carved on a stone seat in the Cimbrone, close to that Belvedere thing. We ought to have spotted it before. Come on out.’
I did as I was told, and we walked down a narrow lane which ran past our hotel.
‘The place will be shutting up fairly soon,’ Fish said. ‘But you have plenty of time. Go straight through the garden and turn right.’
‘Aren’t you coming too?’
‘Certainly not.’ This was again a matter of 200 lire. Fish, like many people born to affluence, was chary of trifling disbursements. ‘I’m going in to get a drink. Take a good look at the affair. Estimate its antiquity. Bill Stumps, his mark.’
Meditating this Pickwickian clue, I went on my way alone, clattered a bell at the entrance to the Cimbrone, and entered the garden. Here there was more sunshine than at the Rufolo, since the place is planted at the highest point of Ravello. Great shafts of light lay across the lawns in alternation with dark bars of shadow cast by ranked cypress trees, and here and there on these warmer spaces lovers lay entwined, star-scattered on the grass. I passed them briskly by, having a learned and improving occasion before me. The unsurp
rising formal garden, dotted with its prescriptive statuary and mildly terraced into a succession of level parterres elevated or depressed by a few feet each from the other, stretches interminably ahead and then vanishes abruptly into air; a few steps more, and one is on the brink of an appalling precipice, with nothing but the blank Mediterranean a thousand feet below. If one’s head doesn’t too hopelessly swim one may sometimes distinguish, twenty-five miles away, those temples at Paestum which had been commended to me by my father.
There is, it is true, a parapet of sorts, broad enough for the foolhardy to sit or lie on. At one point, moreover, a little set back from the verge, stands a classical structure of some elegance, within which one can rest less hazardously on a curved marble bench, while supporting one’s back, if one is disposed, on the chilly shaft of one or another Ionic column. Here also there were lovers, I noticed in passing, since just visible between two pillars I had glimpsed on the bench two hands affectionately clasped. One seemed to be rather an elderly hand – but then in Italy quite mature couples will engage publicly in modest shows of affection. I walked on, and within a minute discovered the seat to which Fish had directed me. This was a simple affair in a rustic taste, and embellished with a verse inscription in a manner which I believe first became fashionable in the eighteenth century. The lettering wasn’t as old as that, but old enough to be in several places barely legible. I read the familiar lines:
Lost to a world in which I crave no part,
I sit alone and commune with my heart:
Pleased with my little corner of the earth,
Glad that I came, not sorry to depart.
Fish had certainly advanced our inquiry – but in a fashion opening up a wide field for conjecture. Had Lord Grimthorpe’s own Muse dictated these affecting lines? Or had he caused them to be transcribed out of some birthday album or keepsake book? Or were they really and truly by Lawrence, so that the hotel’s mendacious-seeming blurb was entirely justified? Alternatively, what about that ‘di’? Foreign languages are profoundly treacherous, particularly when it comes to prepositions. Might pensiero di D. H. Lawrence mean something like ‘a thought about D. H. Lawrence’ or ‘a poem which aptly comes to mind when the life and temperament of D. H. Lawrence are reflected upon’? I was much puzzled – and would have been more puzzled still had I then known that Lawrence, whether or not he had stayed at our hotel in 1926, certainly stayed in the Cimbrone itself in the following year, when the villa was in the occupancy of some wandering Americans of his acquaintance.
Young Pattullo Page 32