Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  The old Capri community—of shy children, modest women, courtly males, and other scourges of an unenlightened age—lingered in its elders, and in memories; spectrally present on mornings of late autumn, or on cold evenings of Rilkean stars.

  Capri has been a lucky island. Safe from Vesuvian eruptions, narrowly spared the horrors of a world war that devastated Naples, protected—first by the German high command, and then by the Allies—as a rest and recreation center for officers, it nurtured, in postwar decades, an extraordinary prosperity in utter contrast to the destitution of the shattered city across the bay. (“We are their America,” the Capresi said of their image in Neapolitan eyes.) Even in wartime, the officers’ rest camp had provided commercial opportunities for local profiteers. To accommodate and exploit the surge of a new tourism arriving in haste and en masse, elemental change was set in motion. Fleets of new hydrofoils outpaced the old leisurely steamers, and the port was enlarged to admit fast, capacious ferries. Scarcity of fresh water, which had plagued the island throughout its history, was resolved—after scandalous and venal obstructions—by a pipeline laid from the mainland. In consequence, the classic domed and vaulted architecture, incorporating the cistern for rainwater, passed away, as families hard-pressed for room converted that drained space into flat-roofed apartments. During Italy’s anni di piombo—the “years of lead,” in the 1970s and early 1980s, when the nation was torn by disaffection and by terrorism from Left and Right—Capri remained secure, accessible, its air and seas relatively unpolluted. At that time, speculation in property, encouraged by corruption, drove prices of even the simplest habitation to altitudes from which they have never descended. Avarice showed its fang; and there arrived from the mainland, along with fresh water, the taint of organised crime.

  The colours of Capri were also changing. Summer fires, carelessly or criminally set, periodically scarred the mountain. Seasonal detritus occasionally blighted land and sea. Barrel-roofed houses plastered in the old ivory or buff intonaco turned white overnight. The patched and faded rose, or flaking Pompeiian red, the bleached blue of Italy’s deep south now disappeared—along with the streaked green of outer and indoor mould that had, in the poorest habitations, created reeking humidity. There were few concessions to character or tradition: immemorial rot usually gave way not simply to comfort and cleanliness but to cubified chic. The lofty rooms of fine old houses were divided into profitable double storeys. Solitary cliffside walks fell into dangerous decay, while green sites considered sacrosanct were obliterated by new hotels.

  The generations, too, were retinged. Older women no longer effaced themselves in black, or covered their heads in church. The young went unisex, in jeans. Many sons and daughters still entered a family business—a shop, hotel, or restaurant; but other young Capresi completed the rigorous liceo, and went on to study law, or medicine, or political economy, or computers, at mainland universities. Still others took courses in hotel management and tourism at a special school on the island. Fishing fleets with new equipment came, from Sardinia and elsewhere, to rake the regional waters. The last olive press on Capri fell into disuse: grapes and olives were sent, in autumn, to Sorrento to be pressed.

  Late in the year, as boutiques and hotels close their shutters and the island recovers quietude, the exhausted Capresi—who once spent drear, arthritic winters repairing their houses and recaulking their boats—depart for spas and ski resorts, and for exotic holidays around the world. Families of ten or a dozen children, once common, are now a phenomenon of the past, and Capri’s population is stabilized at about 12,000 souls—more than fourfold the numbers of a century ago. It is a population as widely travelled, these days, as most of the visitors who reach the island’s shores.

  Thinking of those times of transition—and of their violations, contested in vain and now institutionalised and extended—a lover of Capri must gratefully wonder that beauty continues to prevail there—not as touristic prettiness, but in the grand and ultimate indifference of Nature to the antics of humankind. In a future age, perhaps, even today’s silliness may slide away, as have the courts of emperors, and the incursions of centuried invaders.

  I don’t remember that we ever discussed, with Graham and Yvonne, these transformations of island life. We were all conscious enough of uproar in far places, and one cannot be forever throwing up one’s hands at the world’s condition. To recount the forebodings of our Capresi friends, or catalogue official iniquities, would have been tedious. Graham’s scant information on island matters was mostly gleaned from the family who tended his property. His other Capri connections were few, and he didn’t seek to extend them. If, as he sat with Yvonne in the piazza before dinner, he saw us speaking with one of the islanders, he might later ask, “Who was that?” and want to know what we had talked about. Such moments were a flicker, only, of curiosity—into our own habits, perhaps, as much as those of the Capresi. The island had not “grown” on him: he came there, as much as ever, to be “away.” At the Rosaio, he could still preserve his working day, with interruptions only of his choosing.

  For us, arriving out of season and staying in a part of Capri where there are no cars, the island offered more than a ritual privacy for work. New evils and evildoers could scarcely now recast, for us, its daily adventure or storied continuity. Countless gentilezze and affinities had marked our years in that community: graces never intrusive, never impersonal. One had assisted at baptisms and weddings, one had paused for the tolling bell. There had been, as we chose, the liveliness of friendship, or the needful silence: stillness has ever lain at the heart of Capri’s drama. Speaking to Graham of our lives in cities, I once remarked that a quality of silence had become unattainable. He exclaimed: “The meaningless, insistent noise—I find it intolerable. The world is a raucous radio held to one’s ear.” He said, “Silence is now the most expensive commodity on earth. If you were to go to the desert, a plane would roar over.”

  Francis said we were harassed by new noises—the invented intrusions of machines. Sounds in nature often made part of silence.

  Graham laughed. “I like a storm.”

  The excitement of Capri’s titanic storms—how we enjoyed them: at night, safe in our beds, shutters open on nearly continuous lightning, thunder reverberating from the rock face of the mountain and rumbling in innumerable grottoes while sheets of rain sluiced the windows. Neapolitan, Tiberian storms, dreaded by mariners, farmers, and the mainland poor; old-fashioned tempests that can still suspend coastal sea traffic for a couple of days, restoring to islands the illusion of an old solitude.

  Graham was stoical about his health, merely remarking on infirmities of age or mentioning, “I had an operation.” He spoke of suffocating tests on his lungs.

  GG: They said I had lung cancer. That was a relief.

  SH: Why?

  GG: Because I knew I didn’t have it.

  In his early eighties, he seemed temperamentally unchanged. Bodily, he had never been robust—rather, there was the spindling tenacity that resisted age as it had resisted much else. The years showed in his “hurt, offended face,” which at times seemed stricken with all that it had borne, entertained, relished, resented, and expressed. Although writing continued to be the core of life, he showed less and less satisfaction in the completion of a book, even when it was strong and well received. In 1978, he had written to us about The Human Factor, on which he had intermittently worked for years:

  I thought I had shifted the albatross off my neck, but now it lingers on mouldering slowly. How I hate the publicity which has surrounded this book unlike the others.

  All subsequent books were short, and mentioned as if their publication had become burdensome. The discipline of daily work, however, never flagged.

  During our years of meeting and corresponding, Graham, based at Antibes, had travelled constantly. Letters had been written on the eve of “six weeks in South Africa,” or a trip to Panama, to Switzerland, to Spain; and once, on the quiet, to Washington. Journeys had often
been politically as well as literarily motivated, and fraught with the sort of obstacles that engaged Graham’s interest:

  I am afraid that after all events made it impossible for me to go to Poland. It seemed to me that under the circumstances I would not have freedom of movement and in any case anyone to whom I spoke could come under suspicion from the authorities, so I decided not to go. WAYS OF ESCAPE unfortunately would probably have been read and it would have been noted that on my visit in the Fifties I had smuggled a gold watch to a potential dissenter and had also been asked to carry with me a tape recorder even though I didn’t do so.

  Now, in his eighties, Graham was writing—

  A hasty line as I’m just back from Spain and preparing for Russia . . .

  The indomitable need for movement took a toll, perhaps. There was still less repose when Graham found a subject close to home. In the early 1980s, he and Yvonne had been seized with the marital difficulties of Yvonne’s daughter, Martine—an imbroglio that moved Graham to scrutinise organised crime along the Côte d’Azur. In the new year of 1982, he wrote to Francis:

  I have launched an attack on the milieu of Nice which means that I am all day on the telephone or the parlaphone and seeing an average of four journalists a day which is certainly not my cup of tea . . . The fight now is really with the criminal milieu here and it occupies all my time.

  That episode produced a brief polemical book, J’ Accuse. An ensuing court action dragged on for many months, to an equivocal conclusion. The ebb and flow of these events consumed Graham’s days, interrupting the rhythm of his Capri visits while he remained in France for attendance in the courts. When we did coincide on the island, he was exceptionally on edge, the need for an adversary not appeased by evils on what he called la Côte d’Ordure. There were times when almost any remark brought argument or flat contradiction. Coming away at the end of such an evening, I told Francis that one seemed to have strayed into the provincial debating society. (F. felt that, in our era, all debating societies are provincial.) One missed laughter, books, the conversational adventure; missed, I suppose, friendship.

  If we stayed away, Graham would ask why we hadn’t come. If we appeared as usual, he tended to hector. Often dispiriting, this was sometimes ludicrous.

  In those years, at summer’s end, abandoned cats and dogs wandered the island’s paths in search of patronage. Like others, I fed animals who came our way, attracting smiles and stares. One evening, on our walk to Gemma, we were tracked by three little boys who followed us to the piazza with loud meowings and fits of giggles. We were smiling over this as we entered the restaurant—where one saw that Graham, having had, possibly, too calm a day, was spoiling for trouble. In my notebook I find the following:

  GG (with blue glare): What are you laughing about?

  F. explains that s. feeds cats, etc.—info that would not otherwise

  be volunteered.

  GG (to me, in fury): You realise that you’re only prolonging the agony.

  SH: I suppose that’s what they said to the Good Samaritan. Pause.

  GG (with angry, conceding laugh): Oh well—I suppose a human being is more important than an animal.

  Yvonne was amused.

  I remembered [from

  The Heart of the Matter]:

  “One may love a dog more than any other possession, but one wouldn’t run down even a strange child to save it.”

  Later, FRANCIS: All I know is that we came into the restaurant laughing. Then laughed no more.

  With Graham, a woman did not get good marks for pert answers. In the way of censorious persons, he bridled at the idea that he himself was judged, even in small matters. Amusement shown by women rankled at length. Like the people of Aragon in the zarzuela, he could not forget, change, or pretend.

  There was a dinner at Laetitia Cerio’s, with guests from abroad. For such evenings Graham wore, instead of his usual and casual clothes, a dark suit, white shirt, red tie. Formality became him. He arrived in sombre mood, drank a bit; at table, talked to the unknown guests; fell silent. One of the foreigners was from the American press, not a good choice with Graham. After dinner, he came to speak to me where I was standing, ready to leave. He started up with a contentious theme that I had avoided the evening before: I told him that we would not agree, and that such a discussion would only annoy him. Graham flared into mindless rage. Those were the worst moments I ever had with him, irrational and cruel: paroxysm of the playground.

  At that time, there still proliferated in south Italy the phenomenon of the mozzo—small boys who at all hours delivered notes, packages, flowers; who, more professionally, could be seen, in white jacket, nimbly carrying through traffic and crowds a thimbleful of espresso on a tiny tray. On the evening after our dinner at Laetitia’s, Graham sent me a note, by hand of the mozzo:

  We hoped to see you tonight so that I could apologise for my evil temper last night. The truth is—I felt we had been hijacked by Laetitia (poor innocent!) for the journalist and his ghastly wife. I’m afraid I took it out on you!

  Throughout those hearings in the French courts, Graham was under an unfamiliar strain. He had again embroiled himself in a need to marshal factual realities; and had necessarily exposed his private life at Antibes to press scrutiny. The case was long in the courts. He could not compel the desired result. More than most people, he did not care to be thwarted.

  At the time of Graham’s engagement with J’Accuse, Harold Acton came to Naples for a few days—an Anglo-Florentine who delighted in Neapolitan energies, and in the city’s genial indifference to modern assumptions. In 1956, with The Bourbons of Naples—later extended by his companion volume on the last Bourbons—Harold had first brought the prodigious Neapolitan eighteenth century before a modern English-reading public. That history was complemented, in 1969, by Brian FothergilTs biography, Sir William Hamilton, which did revelatory justice to the remarkable man until then disregarded as merely the complaisant husband of the enchantress Emma.

  Harold had made his name in early youth, as a writer but, above all, as a unique and brilliant presence who was, in Graham’s words, “generous and fearless.” As with Graham, we had known him only since his middle years—beginning in the early 1960s, when we were much at Florence and saw him frequently. A self-described aesthete, he was vigorous, tall, muscular, with powerful neck and shoulders. His expressive face was smooth into late age. He was almost completely bald. (During the youthful years in China, a Cantonese servant, noting his employer’s loss of hair, had commented: “Soon all like face.”) Harold came into a room rapidly, eagerly, with tripping schoolboy walk and with a balance of animation and equanimity that conveyed good humour and good manners. (It was said of him that he had never preceded anyone out of a room.) At Florence, he lived grandly, but without arrogance or wish for cachet. The renowned courtesy was itself the mark of imagination and kindness, and of close attention. He had no need to “win.” In company, he could not see anybody excluded or humiliated.

  Harold’s subtlety of manner, often called “Mandarin,” was probably formed before his years in China. His talk had a Western brilliance of vocabulary and wit, a prevailing openness to seriousness as well as to variety and absurdity. His literary pleasures were not widely different from Graham Greene’s, though differently nurtured and expressed; and Harold, too, was immensely well-read. But their temperaments were utterly contrasting. Harold was knowledgeable, curious, passionate about every form of art, and moved by natural beauty whether in humans or of the earth.

  At Harold’s death, in February 1994, Alan Pryce-Jones, who knew him a lifetime, wrote that even in early youth

  he displayed one unequalled gift: that of throwing into the air a stream of dazzling talk. In this field he was entirely his own man . . . an incomparable builder of cloud-castles, with at his command a wonderful range of verbal modulation, which wrung every last drop from his own cleverness.

  That sonorous voice, at times nearly singsong, was the medium for a rich vocabulary
in which “forthwith” or “withal” or “albeit” were boldly refreshed and brought into play; in which “slake” or “pullulate” would be splendidly deployed. Harold’s enunciation of “writhe” or “wrest” made the w, and the contortion, palpable. All was unforced, unembarrassed, amusing and amused. There was no attempt to monopolise: he sought to stimulate the thought and talk of others, to bring the moments alive. Any signal of originality drew him to all manner of strangers, and bound him to friends. Peter Quennell has written that “Harold possessed the gift of raising the spirits, and electrifying the atmosphere, of any occasion he attended.” From his company one brought away unique lightness, tolerance, a sense of joy.

  Tragedy and loss had sharpened, perhaps, an intense sympathy for creativity.

  Having read, in More Memoirs, Harold’s brief account of being torpedoed in the Atlantic in 1942 (noting the calm fatalism of his comrades, he wondered whether one would “really relive one’s whole life in the moment of drowning”), we had asked him about his grim war. I remarked that, on a lesser level, the years without privacy would themselves have been an ordeal; and he at once corrected me: “But I always met such interesting people!” He said, “Everyone was reading, reading. On troopships, in barracks, in hospital, all were reading. They were drafting poems, and sending them to New Writing.” A fresh view, perhaps, of life under arms; but in fact John Lehmann’s magazine during those years carried many poems from the fire zones of the world.

  Harold had begun, in schooldays, precociously and even iconoclastically, with poetry and fiction. The early dream remained undeveloped. He was diffident about his achievement, saying that he would be known, “if at all,” as historian and memoirist, and as a translator of Chinese plays. For his life and personality, he made no claims. Once, on discovering that we regularly visited Uberto Strozzi, a frail Florentine figure of infinite civilisation who lived reclusively as custodian of a deranged brother, Harold exclaimed, “If he is your friend, then you know the most interesting man in Florence.” Francis said, “I think we know the two most interesting men in Florence.”