But as for the second half of my aim since the age of sixteen, the joint intention to be a good writer as well as an inspiring teacher—well, though in the past year I’d completed two short stories which even Eudora Welty liked, I was realizing that (despite my excellent high-school teachers and the one undergraduate class I’d taken in imaginative writing) I truly didn’t know how to write. That’s by no means to say that I should have gone on, after Duke, to study advanced writing at what were then the only two widely respected such programs in America—at the University of Iowa and Stanford. I’m not at all sure I even knew about them.
And even now, after decades of teaching various sorts of undergraduate writing back at Duke, I never urge advanced writing-study on talented students. I’m more than convinced that the best writing of fiction, poetry, and drama is the result of intense independent work by a naturally gifted man or woman who finds the time—while working at whatever other job is necessary to pay the bills—to deepen those skills in the act of probing further down into what will prove to be his or her best subject matter, matter to which only he or she has guided him or herself, not a teacher nor a group of workshop colleagues. In long retrospect I feel that what I didn’t know, as I sat alone in Oxford or Florence, was the nature of my own creative metabolism.
What needs did my body have—of sleep, food, drink, sex, and love for instance—before it could write steadily? How fast should I expect to write well? What daily quotas should I set for myself? And what should I do if I failed to meet my quota? How best could I warm a brain that cooled or quit in the midst of some effort—or worse, at the start? And where would I go if I failed entirely? It would be another decade before I acquired reliable answers to most of those questions—and I’ve yet to meet a student who acquired them in graduate school—but at least I’d begun the process.
The story I was hoping to construct (in reverse, from my sight of Mont Blanc) was sitting, in my notes, at an upper corner of my desk in the Quisisana. I already knew that this would happen, followed by this and this and this, all the way to an ending; but when it came to managing the machine that would write that story down—the machine of my body and mind—those notes were poised in grinning refusal to enter me and move ahead.
Young and elastic as I was, I consoled myself with the thought that I was, after all, on vacation. American students are notorious for taking a hundredweight of books home for Christmas and never opening a single one. Oxford students were expected to do the majority of work for their degrees during vac time, and most of my young English friends told me how seldom that dream proved a reality. Why should I have thought that I could come to the cradle of the Renaissance and sit in a dim room, contentedly writing? Out to the streets then—and Jim often joined me—for further roaming.
* * *
The Ponte Vecchio with its tiny gold shops and the Pitti Palace, with its own great pictures and the surrounding Boboli Gardens, were nearby and unavoidable. The alarmingly green and white cathedral, with its revolutionary dome, retained not only Michelangelo’s Pietà but also the blood-smirched memory of the conspiracy of 1478 when the Pazzi family, in an attempted power seizure, succeeded in murdering Giuliano De’ Medici and wounding his brother Lorenzo near the altar. The adjacent Baptistery detained me for the better part of a morning.
Its astonishing bronze doors, with their gilded panels of biblical scenes, had not yet been replaced by the replicas that stand there now. The interior space, in its gloom, was a reminder that the infant Dante was baptized there; and the most distinguished of its adornments then was Donatello’s carved-wood statue of the penitent and toothless Mary Magdalen in rags. The nearby Medici Palace was the grim and long-dead hive of so much honey in the life of the city and of Western civilization. As boys—for instance—Leonardo, Botticelli, and Michelangelo were welcomed there for instruction and high-class dining.
The Medici Chapel, however, struck both Jim and me—and our tastes were, again, far from identical—as the city’s most imposing offering (even more so than the David, though he—even with his unhistorical uncircumcised penis—is as fine as his world-fame augurs). Like several of Michelangelo’s other gigantesque projects, the chapel—within the church of San Lorenzo—was never completed. Its austerity of space and color, an almost exclusive white and gray, may be far from his ultimate intention but is nonetheless memorably arresting in clarity and dignity. And its numerous sculptures—of Medici princes, of Day and Night, and the shyly tender Virgin and Child—have more than earned their canonical standing. The entirety may not generate a traditionally sacred air; but given the ruthless power of the family enshrined here, the chill space and its statues of such somber genius are merely characteristic.
So the two weeks rolled on toward our next destination. Looking back through more than fifty years, there’s a strange fact I can’t explain. Why did we meet no Italians, in Florence, whom we might later have wished to go on knowing? The Florentines are hardly the open-armed, big-bosomed movie stereotypes of southern bas Italia (a component, no doubt, of the city’s popularity with the English). But I was a talkative and genial-enough man, and Jim was far from forbidding. I encountered numbers of friendly-enough men and women in our pensione and in various museums, shops, and restaurants. Maybe that’s one more old-fashioned Yank tourist’s regret; but let it stand as a partial explanation of why I’ve returned only once to Florence, and then very briefly.
From the start of our trip, we’d planned to push on to Rome very near to Christmas Eve. Redmayne had given us the name of another reliable pensione, reasonably priced (though again located on a superb site only two blocks from the Via Veneto with its mischievous movie stars). Further, Redmayne’s recommendation boasted a name especially winning for me—the Bellavista Milton. Yet shortly before we departed Florence, our otherwise sedate landlady learned of our choice and urged us to switch our reservation to what she insisted was a far better place—a pensione very near the railway station in central Rome (she warned that the Milton was “distant from things”). We were so inexperienced, we’d liked her at the Quisisana, and her urging seemed so authoritative—she even said she’d phone and make the change for us—that we surrendered with no foreboding.
On December 22 then we left Florence by train. Even the third-class carriages were near empty; and all the way south, I sat by the window and read from my copy of Dante’s Inferno in the invitingly small bilingual edition published in London by Dent but purchased by me in Florence as a farewell souvenir (I have it still, much used in the interim but in good strong shape—Hell apparently resists destruction). Jim was still deep in his Plato in the old but eloquent Jowett translation, and we reached Rome almost sooner than expected—midafternoon.
5
WITH A CITY MAP in hand, we found our way on foot easily down the Via Nazionale—a busy commercial street—rode the elevator up to our pensione, and checked in. Immediately I was struck by an initially indescribable hint in the air of something peculiar. There was no offensive odor or (at that point) noise; but this was not the Quisisana, clearly. What was it though? After brief naps we found our way to the dining room in the hopes of a more or less decorous semi-British tea like the ones we’d enjoyed in the dim indoor Florentine light.
Wrong. The dining room had several tables occupied by our compatriots—boys roughly our age, dressed much like the off-duty American airmen we’d seen on weekends in Oxford, drinking beer or red wine and accompanied by Italian girls who appeared to be both waitresses at the Nazionale and something more (when they fetched the refills of beer and wine, they’d sit down briefly and laugh with the boys). Where had we landed? We were hardly alarmed. But Jim gave me more than one quizzically amused look; and since there seemed no chance for afternoon food here, we went outside.
Back toward the station we’d passed a place which advertised itself as “American Bar.” We turned in there. I know that I ordered two grilled-cheese sandwiches—a childhood comfort snack—and at length I was served two fa
irly convincing replicas of that American classic. When we returned to the street, I was struck by a local phenomenon which may long since have vanished—numerous pairs of young Italian men, many of them in army uniform, were walking arm in arm—and soon we encountered a small clutch of American acquaintances from Oxford.
With them, we exchanged a little mutual information—mainly useful local addresses. Their parked car had been robbed the previous night of all their ski equipment—they were ultimately headed for Switzerland—but on the advice of the police, had located it this morning at the central Roman flea market. Then one of them said he was sure he’d see us at the week’s oncoming big event, which he then previewed for us—two evenings hence there’d be a Christmas Eve mass at the ancient basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore. Jim had been reared Catholic but had left the church, I’ve mentioned my own withdrawal from formal worship, but the sound of the words Christmas Eve mass proved potent.
Back to the pensione for dinner—and an even more relaxed display of our fly-boy countrymen and their pensione-employee girlfriends. Neither Jim nor I was remotely censorious about healthy sex; but how much was desirable, here in the midst of the pensione’s only dining room? There were no overt displays, but there was a good deal of pinching, squealing, and occasional bear hugs and smacking kisses. For a very few minutes, it was likably amusing; but then it was unlikably odd, especially since we were paying for two meals per day but apparently had no choice in the matter of atmosphere.
Nonetheless, we got through a filling but disappointingly prepared dinner—a distinct letdown from Florence. Our landlady at the Quisisana was plainly misinformed; had the pensione changed hands without her knowledge? Our compatriots and their girlfriends were nothing less than cheerfully friendly, though. We had no fear of late-night black eyes or a burglarized room. While the Nazionale hardly promised to be the resort for writing and reading that we’d had in Florence, Jim and I kept our thoughts mostly to ourselves (apart from Jim’s amused looks and my occasional observations on the accents of the airmen, many of them Southern). So we spent the better part of the next day in the beginnings of an exploration of the literally endless fascinations of Rome. The weather was damp and chilly; so most of our explorations were indoors—the museums of the Capitoline Hill and then, in a brief patch of sun, a preliminary walk through the Forum itself and the adjacent forums of a few later emperors.
* * *
Two sights are still deeply printed in memory. On the streets there were frequent young women with as many as three snotty children and a babe at the breast, extending their hands for money in a smiling attempt at beggary. And actual shepherds from the hills beyond Rome, with lambs tied beside them, were playing their handmade pipes in what (for local ears) may have been recognizable Christmas tunes. I’m sorry to say that, in suspicious American-abroad fashion—were these real shepherds?—I failed to give even one of them a tiny gift from my already heavy pocketful of the featherweight aluminum coins of that era.
On Christmas Eve itself, by the time full dark had fallen, we were on the Avenue of the Imperial Fora; and without knowing our exact whereabouts, we walked ahead till we wound up gazing at the floodlit Colosseum just ahead of us—the real proto-Roman Colosseum, the sink of centuries of mayhem and blood, one of the magnets of my boyhood imagination. Films like DeMille’s rousing Sign of the Cross and my two years in high-school Latin classes, where our textbooks were crammed with nineteenth-century photographs of the remains of the ancient city, had given me a powerful appetite for walking through the originals (spruced up by Mussolini) and touching a stone that Augustus or even Nero might have touched, not to mention mad Caligula. In the ninth grade I’d even assembled, from pasted-together sheets of typing paper, a ten-foot-long scroll to which I attached every photograph I could find of the places I was now on the verge of touching. Near as I was to my twenty-third birthday, I’d never been this elated since seeing my first live elephant at maybe age five.
Here tonight, traffic was winding around the great arena as though this were the end of any business day. I kept reminding myself that Christmas was only a couple of hours ahead. Despite the appropriate live shepherds and begging young mothers, Italy had not yet adopted the visual Germanic components of American Christmas—the lights, the trees, and Santa. And my Christmas emotions were still off-stride. We dodged our way safely through a hundred honking Fiats and the ear-splitting Vespas and Lambrettas that were recent additions to the cacophony of Italian city life. Safe so far, we moved forward past no barricades or guards whatever and spent the better part of a black hour in winding through the arches till we paused on the lip of the vast oblong arena and tried to glimpse what was barely visible there below us.
It was probably a risky thing to do, at any hour, much less in the night (we’d asked for no guidance on coming here). Once or twice I thought I saw a faceless shadow moving beyond us—a homeless tramp or a silent cutthroat? But no one came near, no knife-wielding contemporary, no gladiatorial or Christian-martyr ghost. Maybe it was now too cold to be outdoors. Any Roman mugger or madman would have to be as inured to cold as Jim and I after two months in Oxford colleges and that seemed unlikely.
Eventually we made our way back uphill and asked the way toward the midnight mass we’d heard of at Santa Maria Maggiore. So it must have been well past ten when we entered the basilica—one of Rome’s most beautiful, dating in its earliest stages to the fifth century (seven centuries before Mob Quad). Already the long space was jampacked—no benches or chairs, everyone standing. If our American friends were there, we never found them, locked as we were in the fervent mob. The most we could see of the altar suggested that priests and their acolytes were at work in the complex Latin rituals of pre–Vatican II, far more beckoning than the later vernacular substitutes. Incense filled the air with its mystifying smoke and the lavish odor that seemed a promise at least of the sweetness of the child to be born as midnight struck. Several processions were winding their difficult ways through our midst, and a choir was chanting in the vault above us.
Though reared a Protestant I’d long been mesmerized by Catholic worship; and I was riveted now, despite a mild tendency to claustrophobia. For all that Jim had fallen away from the church, he held his ground too; and as huge deep bells began to toll midnight, yet another procession sought a path among us, slowed by the many who sought to touch its burden. Many young men were bearing on their shoulders an immense baroque reliquary with a crystal-sided central container holding what appeared to be worm-eaten boards. I overheard an American near me tell his female partner “It’s the actual manger from Bethlehem.” And so it claimed to be, brought here from Palestine some twelve hundred years ago.
As it passed, Jim declined his chance at touching it. I touched for us both and could think of no Christmas, among my twenty-two, that equaled this in its nearness to the actual cause of the celebration—a child’s arrival, that simple ineluctable core of the faith I was born in. Unchurched as I’d been in the year behind me, those wormy boards (whose crystal box I touched in the mob) reignited my absolute certainty that the babe they’d borne was, in some incomprehensible sense, God himself—a God designed to die in agony three decades later, then rise from the dead, and save us all: Platonic Jim and even me. I’d never truly doubted the fact; now its bedrock depth was uncovered for good.
When we reached the pensione again near two o’clock, the premises were fairly quiet. But by the time we’d shut our books and turned out the lamp between our beds, the nocturnal games were just cranking up beyond our door. We made a jocular remark or two about what the next hours might hold. We were each almost entirely exhausted; but all night long I’d be roused long enough to hear what seemed to be touch football played along our hallway, cheered on by squealing girls and bystanding drunks (the sudden shouts were all in American English). I’d seen no sign of other paying guests for our military comrades; and since Jim and I were more or less unconscious, there were no complaints.
Certainly
no one from the all but invisible management requested any reduction in boisterousness. Still, just when I’d think I might as well dress and head back out to walk till dawn, the din would go completely silent as though all the players and cheerleaders had retired to their own beds for whatever after-game sleep or alternate entertainment was pursued. But then occasional shouts and grunts would revive in the hall till maybe an hour before real dawn, when silence slowly descended; and I must have then got two hours of sleep.
* * *
More church bells woke us in broad daylight. Jim and I wished each other Merry Christmas, brushed our teeth, and staggered toward breakfast (could food be offered after such a night?). The dining room bore signs of the recent capers; but none of our countrymen had stirred, not upright at least. Two or three of the dark-haired girls I recalled from yesterday wished us “Buon Natale,” brought us coffee, rolls, butter, and apricot jam; then—a little shamefacedly—withdrew to the kitchen. No sooner were they tucked out of sight when Jim and I met one another’s whey-faced grins, confessing our first big continental folly, and burst out laughing.
All but in unison we mouthed in stage whispers what even a baby boy might have guessed two days ago—“We’re staying in a whorehouse!” I may have been a little more temporarily pleased by the fact than Jim. In his calm but firm voice, he reminded me of his intention to complete a reading of all the Platonic dialogues in the next three weeks. Could Socrates continue his explorations of virtue, truth, and beauty here? Jim didn’t quite ask me, but I was a little chastened by his gravity; and in another few sentences, we’d devised a plan. We’d find the Pensione Bellavista Milton and go on our knees if necessary in the hope of reclaiming the reservation (canceled by our Tuscan friend). If all else failed, we could claim she was dotty and had made a big mistake. Well, she had. But why? We’d never know.
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