by Alex Preston
He arranges the recording equipment on the balcony of Pound’s apartment. Inside it is too cramped, crowded with books, dark. Pound lounges back in a deckchair, occasionally stroking his beard. It’s cold, a jagged wind pouring down from the hills. He doesn’t seem to notice. – I’ve been introduced to the Boss – Il Duce – several times now, Pound says as Esmond checks levels and adjusts the microphone. – I’ve never met anyone who understood my poems so quickly. He seemed to feel them on an instinctive, primal level. He’s a soldier, of course, but he’s also an intellectual. People forget that here.
That evening they have dinner at the villa of the violinist Olga Rudge. Pound sits between their host and his wife, Dorothy. Esmond is exhausted, downcast, and the dining room is unheated and chilly. He’s not sure he can use any of his conversation with Pound. They’d sat and watched the sun sink over the hills and Pound had spooled out his theories on usury and Social Credit and the Jewish problem and Esmond had felt as if he were back listening to William Joyce address a rally in the East End. There was so little subtlety to his argument, so much anger. They talk about Hulme for a while. – He was a dear, dear friend, Pound says. – Thoroughly brutal. I miss him still. Throughout, Pound’s wife sits in silence, looking over sombrely at Esmond as if he might help her escape along his radio waves to Britain. He retreats to his room as early as he can.
He stands at his window and can see the castle on the bay, patches of darkness on the water where ships are moored, young people walking along the seafront arm-in-arm. He’d brought his novel with him, but he can’t write. Perhaps, he thinks, he’s not supposed to be a novelist. Perhaps novels won’t even be read in the years to come. Maybe his legacy, the thing to make his death less hollow, is the recordings. He imagines a shell whistling down on St Mark’s, he and Goad dragging archives down into the crypt. The best way to speak to the future, Goad is saying, is with brilliant ideas.
The next morning, as the train winds down the coast towards Pisa, he leans from the window of his carriage and sends the discs he’d cut with Pound the previous day spinning out to sparkle for a moment in the winter sunshine and then crash on the rocks below.
Telegram: 10/2/38
Wiring E Lowndes five thousand lire for purchase twelve advertising slots as per agreement at meeting in Milan 6 Feb STOP Viva Il Duce STOP Bianchi Automobiles and Bicycles 7 Via Nirone Milan
MINISTRY FOR POPULAR CULTURE
VIA VITTORIO VENETO, ROMA
10/3/1938
Dear Esmond,
I was delighted and honoured at the introduction Mr Goad gave to my short speech on Radio Firenze last week. I have already written to him directly and apologise that I haven’t been in touch with you earlier. I very much enjoyed meeting you in Rome and was delighted to discover so many points of shared interest. I am sure that Italy (and England) will thank the day that Esmond Lowndes took an interest in the rapprochement of our once-close nations.
You shouldn’t let the success of your radio enterprise distract you from what I feel certain is your true calling – as novelist. I was fascinated by our discussion about T. E. Hulme, whose work I did not know. You are right that it is hard to find literary figures of the correct type – perhaps harder in England than in Italy. Here we have Ungaretti and Pirandello and, of course, the late d’Annunzio, whose passing we mourn each day and whose legacy (notwithstanding his regrettable assessment of the Axis alliance) I am now working to assure.
I like the idea of using the novel, with its mutability, its openness and its place at the heart of middle-class life, to address historical figures, situating them in moments of great political unease. Of course this is not new – your George Eliot famously treated the life of our own Savonarola; Manzoni’s The Betrothed is one of the great historical novels (have you read it? I enclose a copy in any case). But what seems new to me in your idea is to claim a figure from the very recent past and to use him to illuminate the current political landscape. I look forward very much to reading In Love and War when it is published.
As you can imagine, with d’Annunzio’s death, I have been terribly busy. I will try, nonetheless, to make it to Florence before the heat of the summer strikes and, if you will humour me, I would be delighted to continue my musings on the state of contemporary Italian literature.
With warmest wishes,
Alessandro.
Telegram: 1/4/38
Received with thanks four hundred pounds STOP Impressive STOP Mosley
Early morning. Esmond is sitting at his desk in the studio. He can still smell Ada’s lavender perfume. Voices rise up from the stalls on the Piazza Santo Spirito. The sound of a street sweeper’s broom is like the whetting of long knives. He sits in thought for a few moments, scratches his fountain pen across his notebook. He leans back, looks carefully at the last page, and gives a thin smile. He has finished his novel. With a sigh, he gathers together the pile of notebooks, puts a sheet of paper in his Olivetti, extends two fingers, and begins to type.
There is no such thing as historical fact. It is likely, however, that our hero, Thomas Ernest Hulme, twelve days after his thirty-fourth birthday, was standing in front of the Royal Marine Artillery battery at Oostduinkerke Bad, two hundred yards from the slate flushness of the North Sea. Witnesses – Captain Henry Halahan RN, for instance – say that Hulme appeared lost in contemplation as the shells descended. He’d just begun a book on Epstein, so it may have been this that caused his wood-cut features to smudge over, his ears to close themselves against the whistle of the falling shells, fired from the 15-inch Leugenboom at Ostend. His comrades threw themselves into the trenches, into the gun pit of the Carnac battery. Hulme just stood there, gazing over towards the long barges on the Yser Canal.
We know what the explosion sounded like, at least to Hulme. He’d had enough near-misses during his time in Flanders to know that, as he wrote to Ursula Lowndes, ‘It’s not the idea of being killed that’s alarming, but the idea of being hit by a jagged piece of steel. You hear the whistle of the shell coming, you crouch down as low as you can, and just wait. It doesn’t burst merely with a bang, it has a kind of crack with a snap in it, like the crack of a very large whip.’ On the 28th September, 1917, though, Hulme didn’t crouch. He stood there, in a dreamy moment, and he was killed. When the smoke cleared, some of his comrades were bellowing, others emitting miserable groans. Hulme had simply disappeared. Not a scrap of clothing, nor a shred of that burly, lusty body was left.
Here we move further from the sham certainties of history, deeper into Hulme’s beloved speculations. For in that moment before death, between the whistle and the crack, we’d like to imagine his mind cycling back through his short, sharp life, falling now on the figure of Wyndham Lewis, hanging upside-down on the railings at Soho Square after a row over a girl, now on the crow-like visage of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, his dear friend, dead not yet two years, now on his lover Kate Lechmere’s cyanope smile. And as the shells plunge and shriek like buck-shot birds, we imagine his mind going back to the night when, aged nineteen, he was sent down from St John’s College, Cambridge.
It was late and the boathouse was on fire, the flames tonguing the black Cam. Two policemen wrung river water from their jackets, shaking their fists and whinnying while a college porter waved his feet in the air, his upper half wedged in a dustbin. A rower stood in the light of the flames, his singlet and shorts dark-spattered, one hand clasped to a bloody nose. Two girls sprawled on the bright grass, sobbing. Hulme was swimming in the dark water, pulling his long body through the velvet iciness of the river, because he knew he had gone too far, and he would not feel this water, this river, again. Under the moth-eaten blanket of the sky he swam, and he felt the vague grief of the night, and the ruddy face of the moon leant over the fence of trees that lined the river like a red-faced farmer, watching him. He swam on.
Esmond stops and sighs again. It is seven in the morning. He stands, stretches and looks out for a moment onto the piazza below. He turns out his desk ligh
t and shuts the door of the studio.
Suico Atlantico Hotel, Lisbon
15/4/38
Dearest Es –
I wonder if you’d given up on me? There is, I understand, a small mountain of unopened mail waiting for me in Praterstraße; whether some are yours or not I don’t know. The house is being looked after by our neighbours, although the downstairs windows have been broken and the statues in the garden smashed. The last letter I read was from early in your Florentine days. You sounded miserable. I do hope things have improved. I’m sorry I didn’t write back – I’ve always been a dreadful correspondent.
Mutti and papa left for Lisbon two weeks ago. They’d been in Switzerland waiting to see which way the wind would blow. It’s one thing you can say for papa – he’s careful. Moving out of Leopoldstadt was my own concession to caution. I bunked up with Charlie Campbell – do you remember him from Emmanuel? He’s over on some sort of exchange programme teaching papyrology at the university. Put me up in his drawing room. Jolly decent of him. I earned my keep by bowling leg-breaks at him in the corridors of the Faculty of Ancient History. At least I took something from my time in England. I think I loved cricket almost as much as I loved you. Helps keep off the Kummerspeck too!
We told everyone that I was a cousin of Charlie’s over from the UK. I wore his clothes, spoke bad German with an English accent, ordered my tea with milk. But when the worm von Schuschnigg rolled over, and the true extent of the whole Heim ins Reich thing came out, it began to get hot. I left Vienna at night, wrapped in Charlie’s ulster, three days after the Anschluß. I took the train to Innsbruck where I fell in with a gang of Jewish students with pretty much the same idea – escape, get away from that vile little man, his swarm of vile little men. I followed my parents to Lisbon. There were people on the border – not good people, no one I could see doing it for anything but money – and they ferried us across. A week in St Gallen, then Geneva, then a night train to Genoa.
Can’t tell you how much it bucked me up just to be in the same country as you. I even dreamed, for a moment, of hopping off in Milan, taking a train for Florence and turning up on your doorstep. If only to see your face. But that hereditary caution …
It feels like things are rushing towards a ghastly end, as if everything is coming apart like something from Yeats. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ That was it, wasn’t it? I watched those violent men on the streets of Vienna, ugly snarls on their faces, and I knew that no good would come of Europe, that we are entering the new Dark Age, and those who would live must flee.
Another quote kept coming to me on the train, and then on the boat from Genoa to Lisbon. It’s Shelley – I think from his Defence of Poetry, but I don’t have my books with me – ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.’ This is what we’ve lost, our empathy. The Germans used to have it – Hölderlin had it, and Goethe and Rilke. But they don’t any more. Poets still have it – Auden does, and Spender, I think. Whatever you lose out there in Florence, Es, keep that. And for God’s sake put it into your writing.
Now the last, rather embarrassing thing. My parents are nowhere to be seen here. Presume they’ve hot-footed it to New York already. But I was rather relying on them for funds. While I was waiting for the clipper to New York, I met a Portuguese sailor in the Barrio Alto. I know, I know, but Lisbon is a rather thrilling place. You’d adore it here. I woke to find my watch and wallet missing. He left me a handful of escudos on the chair but they won’t get me far. I wonder if you could wire me a few quid, just to see me through until the boat leaves. In my name to the Central Lisbon Post Office, if you don’t mind.
You’re a good man, Es. I’ll always think awfully well of the time we spent together.
Philip.
L’Ombrellino
Piazza di Bellosguardo
Firenze
28/4/38
Would you like to come for dinner on the 3rd? Just a few of the old-timers. You might come and bathe beforehand. Bring Bailey.
Alice Keppel.
Telegram: 2/5/38
Money received with thanks STOP Far too generous STOP Actually now not going to States at all STOP Will join Charlie in Valencia STOP Always fancied fighting the good fight STOP Come and join us STOP Viva las Brigadas Internacionales STOP Philip
[Selection of twenty-first birthday cards, postal orders, a copy of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a fountain pen.]
He hasn’t told Goad, or Bailey or Ada that it’s his birthday. It’s past eleven and he’s sitting in the bar of the Excelsior, drunk. He orders a gin fizz and goes to the lavatory where he urinates down the front of his trousers, singing ‘Domum’ to himself tunelessly. At the bar, he orders another drink and slumps on the stool. Despite the broadcasts, the money, the novel finally finished and typed up and sent off to Faber, he doesn’t feel he’s made a success of anything in Florence. And yet, he thinks, if he’d been offered this a year and a half ago in Shropshire – to be running the radio station, hosting vibrant cultural discussions with Ezra Pound and Bernard Berenson, invited to parties at Renaissance palaces in the hills of Fiesole – he’d have fainted. It’s partly that his expectations move several steps ahead of the events of his life – Goad smiles expectantly at him at the end of every broadcast and the face he returns grows ever more heedful and resigned, as if to say they could do so much better if only they had better equipment, more staff, more luminous interviewees – and partly that he’s different now: he walks a little slower, talks more carefully, drifts away during most of the Fascist broadcasts and looks towards the window.
Welsh Frankton,
Shropshire.
1st June.
Dear Esmond,
I was delighted with your letter, as was your mother. It seems extraordinary to us, marooned as we are out here in the wastes, that our son should be at the very centre of things, hobnobbing with world leaders. We listened to your programme on Manzoni’s The Betrothed with great interest in the library this evening. Difficult stuff! Pavolini sounds a good sort – well done for getting him on. I understand that he has Il Duce’s ear, quite the coming man of Italian politics.
Great sense of relief that the problems in Czechoslovakia appear to have been resolved. Hitler perhaps not as bellicose as we had feared. Glad also that Chamberlain was so swift to bat down any talk of cosying up to the Russians. They’re the real enemy: remember that.
Good work on the latest instalment of advertising money. Be assured that it’s being wisely invested in the future of this great country.
Your mother sends her love,
Your Father.
P.S. I saw Pound in London – he’s barking but seems to have enjoyed your meeting. When do we hear the recording you made with him?
[Selection of letters and telegrams from: Birra Moretti, Wilier Triestina, Snia-Viscosa, Beretta, Danieli, De Agostini, La Stampa, Martini & Rossi, Romeo Motron. All confirm advertising subscription to Radio Firenze at the new rate of 1,000 lire per three-minute window.]
Hotel Las Arenas,
Valencia
15th July, ’38
Dearest Es,
Of the many things I might have become, I scarcely thought I’d end up a soldier. But that seems to be how it’s all worked out. Simply thrilling out here. We travelled up the coast after getting a boat round the Straits. We could see the shelling of Alicante – whole place lit up like the sun had toppled down. Rather beautiful, actually. We came ashore at a kind of sandy isthmus called El Perellonet and then, under cover of night, made our way into the city. Italian warships like glimmering palaces out to sea. They fire the odd shell every so often but things seem to have quietened down since we arrived.
I’m driving an ambulance. The Nationalists are really quite on our doorstep here, so we’re always getting called to
dash out and scrape up some poor chap who’s caught one in the head or arm. Charlie bought me a gun which I fire at pigeons on the roof. Not much of an aim yet, but I’ll need it soon enough, I would imagine, when the final confrontation comes. The Republicans are all thoroughly decent sorts. Lots of Brits, of course, but it’s the locals who up the pulse.
We’re staying in a hotel that’s been shelled. I can see the stars from my bed through a hole in the roof, but it’s mild enough and actually rather romantic. Charlie has insisted on teaching the chaps cricket. Rather a different game when it’s played between orange trees in the Plaça de la Reina after a few bottles of Rioja. I scored my first ever fifty as the light drew in last night, sound of gunfire and distant shells as I held my bat up to generally bemused spectators. Spaniards can’t play for toffee, of course. Charlie, who’s much better than me, hit a six that flew so far it ended up over enemy lines. I’m going to bowl a few grenades at him tomorrow. It’s all just too bloody exciting.
Anyway, I thought you’d want my address, and if you could spare some cash I’d appreciate it. Think of it as contributing to the forging of the heroic new me.
Philip.
One evening, light still trembling outside the windows of the studio. Ada signals the end of the transmission. They’ve recorded a programme on Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night, recently translated into Italian. It seems a very daring subject – the novel had, after all, been a choice of the Left Book Club – but it is, thinks Esmond, important that they engage with material like this. The novel imagines a future where the Nazis and Japanese have defeated the heroic Brits, and now squabble with each other over their Fascist empires. It is futuristic, bold, horrifying in the way it takes the unstable present and ramifies it into a vision of the totalitarian world to come. Esmond had enjoyed the book, Goad hadn’t.