Summer Doorways

by W. S. Merwin

  He told me one about Yeats, whose poetry he knew I carried with me.

  Yeats had died on the 28th of January, 1939—“disappeared in the dead of winter,” as Auden wrote in his elegy. He and his wife, George, had been staying, that winter, at the Hotel Idéal Séjour, on Cap Martin near Roquebrune and Menton. Yeats’s health had been failing, in stages, for years. At St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, just over ten years after his death, with the war having come and gone in the intervening decade, I thought of what I had read of the accounts of his life and death in the biographies that had been written by then. I had an image of a hotel up on the mountain at Menton, and of his last days alone up there with his wife. But the Hotel Idéal Séjour, which George—Mrs. Yeats—had found a year earlier, and where they had spent the winter before, was in fact a quiet maison de repos dedicated to such winter retreats. They had much of the villa, and its garden overlooking the sea, to themselves, and Yeats was surrounded by friends, some of whom were spending the winter nearby. They included Dorothy Wellesley, and Hilda Matheson, Walter Turner, Desmond and Mabel O’Brien, and Yeats’s last paramour, Edith Shackleton Heald. Several of them were present on what Auden called “his last afternoon as himself.”

  Yeats had known for years that his time was limited, and he had told his wife that if he died there at Cap Martin he wanted to be buried in the nearby cemetery at Roquebrune, and then a year later dug up and taken to the one at Drumcliffe near Sligo, in Ireland, which he had named in the poem Under Ben Bulben. He had hoped that the delay would allow him to escape an Irish public funeral of the kind that had been organized for his lifelong friend, the writer George Russell. Yeats was buried according to his wishes, at Roquebrune, but before the year was out France and most of the rest of Europe were involved in World War II, and his body remained at Roquebrune until September 1948, less than a year before the summer when we sat talking about him across the bay. By then the age before the war seemed to have been gathered into a remoteness like that of the classics.

  But John told his story about “last year,” when the Irish navy had sent a corvette, the Macha, to Villefranche Harbor, just west of St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, on the way to Nice. According to John Lodwick, one of the Macha’s officers had been driven to Roquebrune for the ceremonial removal of Yeats’s coffin, and while there had visited an old Irish lady who had been in Roquebrune all through the war. She had been deeply disappointed, John said, when the officer’s gift to her, after those years, had been neither Bushmill nor Jameson whiskey, but a box of tea. While the visit and the ceremony of removal and the journey with honor guard from Roquebrune to Villefranche were going on, others of the Macha’s crew, John said, awaited the funeral cavalcade beside the small harbor of Villefranche, where there were convenient cafés, and there they had sampled the local products, and were well primed by the time the cars wound down the steep hill and drew up beside them. So well, in fact, that although they managed, with some difficulty, to load the coffin onto the waiting launch, when they got out to the corvette and were engaged in hoisting it aboard they bungled it and the coffin fell into the water and had to be fished out and bound securely before it could be swung onto the warship.

  Even at the time, I thought John’s tale remarkably reminiscent of the coffin accident on the way into Glasnevin cemetery in Ulysses, and I tried to find out whether others had heard it, and whether or not it might be true. I was in Villefranche once or twice before I left, that summer, but no one seemed to remember it, though it sounded like something that would have become legendary in no time. Eventually I inquired about it from several Yeats scholars and was assured that nothing of the kind had taken place. (R. F. Foster’s magisterial W. B. Yeats: A Life, volume II, Oxford University Press, 2003, tells us as much as we may ever know on the subject.) There had indeed been some confusion at the time of disinterment. When Edith Shackleton Heald returned in 1947 to the site of the original burial, she could not locate it. It turned out that the graveyard authorities had granted a concession for the grave for ten years (George Yeats had a receipt), but they had thought it was for five. The local record had been lost, and apparently the church officials had put the grave in a part of the cemetery owned by the township, in which as a general rule the leases were only for five years. At the end of that time they had exhumed the remains and put them in an ossuary. The French government was called in to sort the matter out, and they officially identified the remains (though how they did that we can only guess) and placed them in a new coffin, which was delivered with due ceremony to the Irish representatives in September 1948 for the return to Ireland. Rumors about the confusion spread at the time, and John may have heard some of them and improved upon them in his own version.

  Between Alan’s departure and Maria Antonia’s arrival, when we had the villa more or less to ourselves, my college friends Bill Arrowsmith and his wife, Jean, and Bruce Berlind and his first wife came for a visit. There was room for all of them in the small villa where we were staying. We went to Nice and explored the town. Bill grumbled and argued and was brilliant and difficult. His passions at the moment were Eliot and Pavese. He had extended his classical learning to include modern Italian, and he was already working on his translations of Pavese’s poetry and talking of that most powerful and memorable of Pavese’s prose books, the Dialogues with Leukó. Bill was several years older than I was, and as students and graduate students we had been constant sparring partners, but I had learned invaluable things from him, mostly about modern poetry and the classics. Before I knew Bill he had been one of Richard Blackmur’s first protégés, and prodigies, and he had been one of the founders of the literary magazine Chimera. He was jealous of his early eminence and anything or anyone whom he considered a threat to it. He detested and ridiculed John Berryman, and many of Berryman’s contemporary enthusiasms, from Auden, MacNeice, and Spender to Delmore Schwartz. I remain grateful to him for first leading me to the poems of Wallace Stevens, and for insights into the play of syntax and what it could render possible in poetry, which he had come to from his studies in the Greek and Latin classics, and which I could confirm in my reading of the poems of Yeats and of my other great early enthusiasm, Milton. But Bill was as cantankerous a companion in France as he had been at Princeton, and his responses were grudging and carping about most things, from the architecture of this degenerate post-Latin culture to most of the days’ activities. Bruce, on the other hand, has always been a peaceable man, and he spent much of his time trying to calm things down. Bill’s humor could often be improved by steering the conversation to subjects he was fond of, such as the music of Handel or the writings of Samuel Butler, whose notebooks he loved to quote. It would be years before our long association eased at last into something we both felt sure was friendship.

  One moment sets that interlude in the context of history at large. Dorothy and I are sitting in the café on the place at St. Jean Cap-Ferrat, with the Arrowsmiths and the Berlinds, unfolding the newspapers we have just bought there, and we learn from the headlines that the Russians have the bomb. The days of the cold war had begun. We sensed it as we sat there.

  30

  It was not very long before Maria Antonia arrived in her big dark red Buick convertible, with her small boys, Anthony, eleven, and Robert, seven, and her niece and nephew Johannes and Mafalda von Thurn und Taxis, from Austria, who were roughly my own age. At once we moved into a different reign, the final metamorphosis of that summer in the villa. The big living room seemed to come to life, with its tapestries on the wall and its view of the long garden at the far end, and of the bay, Beaulieu, and the crags of La Turbie, from the French doors along the side. When Alan had been there we had gathered in that room occasionally, but Maria Antonia seemed to make it her own—her sitting room, conference room, reading room, coffee room. The hall was full of the sound of people speaking other languages on the telephone, as Johannes and Mafalda and Maria Antonia talked to family and friends in Vienna and Paris, Lisbon and Monte Carlo. Maria Antonia arranged to settle
in at the villa, while at the same time arranging to leave it and set out on the next stage of her trip back to Portugal.

  The old White Russian prince who was the manager of the summer casino at Monte Carlo was a friend of hers. (I had not understood his name when Alan introduced us, and failed again to catch it when Maria Antonia mumbled it, and I did not get her to repeat it, so I never was sure of it.) She called and scheduled a meeting with him, and she and the boys and Dorothy and I drove over to Monte Carlo to see him. He and his beautiful, white-haired wife received us in their apartment in the hotel above the casino, where the windows looked down into the yacht harbor. His wife prepared tea in a huge samovar. He was writing his memoir. A volume or two had already been privately published. He showed us the large bound volumes, removing them carefully, like cases of butterflies, from a shelf in a tall armoire in which his dress suits and uniforms were hanging. The volumes contained hand-painted portraits of the principal characters. The old prince had a reputation as a portrait painter, and I believe some or all of the paintings were his own. Over tea Maria Antonia made arrangements for him to paint portraits of her children, starting with Anthony. I was to bring him over every afternoon to sit for an hour or so. It became a routine that continued through most of the time that Maria Antonia was at the villa. After the first day or two, whoever rode over with us—Dorothy, Roberto, sometimes Johannes and Mafalda—went to the casino swimming pool while Anthony, and later, Roberto, were having their portraits painted.

  Johannes and Mafalda pored over the French and Monte Carlo rotogravure tabloids filled with gossip about the titled figures of Europe, their engagements, weddings, divorces, and above all their scandals of every variety. They seemed to know most of the principals and to know all about the others, with an intimacy that combined high-school social politics and the devotion of collectors. Their interests appeared to be comfortably contained within the margins of these sepia-printed pages and the current kaleidoscope of the Almanac de Gotha.

  Maria Antonia was in her middle forties. She had probably never been a great beauty. She had a rather dumpy figure that was thickening with middle age. But she was direct, decisive, kind by nature, with an easy grace and magnetism. Her voice was deep, throaty, with a very slight accent in English. She spoke French, German, and her native Portuguese with equal ease, and she treated me, from the beginning, with an air of special confidence, expectant but bounded, that seemed to assume a kind of friendship. If it was a manner, it succeeded with me. We sat and smoked together—the slender cigars that she preferred, which were sent to her by admirers from two continents and the Canary Islands—and I told her, cautiously at first, about the summer with Alan. The details of it seemed to sadden her but scarcely to surprise her. She spoke of Johannes and Mafalda as a couple of children, though Johannes, I think, was actually a year or two older than I was. That allowed me to see, or to guess, another reason why she had wanted to have a young American tutor, even one as ignorant of Europe and as devoid of social experience as I was, for her American-born sons. Her European Almanac de Gotha upbringing and background, which I was just beginning to glimpse, was fundamental to her life and outlook, but her marriage to Alan’s New York cousin, and her years in the United States with her children, her divorce and later independence there, had revealed to her another outlook entirely. Her children were half American, at least, and she did not want to have them deprived of that side of their life.

  It was the European side of her, the Braganza side, that was more apparent at the villa. She talked on the telephone with the Comte de Paris. There seemed to be some chance of his coming south while she was on the côte, and of their seeing each other. In the end it did not happen, that time. Too bad, she said. She told me I would like him. The rumor of her presence had spread, perhaps from friends at Monte Carlo, and among other invitations one came from a Princesse de Beauharnais-Lichtenberg, who had a villa over in Beaulieu. She and Johannes and Mafalda talked about that one, whether to accept it and go over to tea or drinks, or not. Maria Antonia’s older sister, Filippa, who was the titular head of the Portuguese monarchist party and far more fundamentalist in her approach to all such matters than Maria Antonia, certainly would not have accepted because the Beauharnais-Lichtenbergs bore an upstart Napoleonic title. Johannes and Mafalda were very doubtful about it, and rather in favor of declining. Maria Antonia accepted, for all of us, and drove us over to Beaulieu, found her way through side streets to a small, upright, urban villa with a fixed, frosted glass awning over the front door, where we were received by a pleasant, reserved woman in her late thirties, who might have been a kindergarten teacher, and her all-but-silent mother, both of whom curtsied to Maria Antonia. We had tea and cookies, the edges of a conversation, and it was all friendly, stiff, full of good intentions, and without direction or prospect.

  Johannes and Mafalda discovered the pedal boats down at the nightclub below the villa (officially boycotted, of course, when Alan was there) and they spent hours pedaling around the cove. Maria Antonia went on organizing the trip to Portugal. The luggage for all of us was a problem. There was too much to fit in the Buick. We conferred with the French railroad office about train tickets for Dorothy and me, from Nice to Coimbra in Portugal, and learned that it would require a complicated journey with several changes of train, in France, Spain, and Portugal, and it would be far more expensive than if we all went by car. I suggested a trailer for the luggage, and Maria Antonia liked the idea. It seemed to appeal to an adventurous, deliberately unconventional streak in her. I went down to talk to the local garage man who had Alan’s ancient Ford in his keeping, and he said that he had just the thing out in back. It had come in the day before, after the summer trips: a nearly new car trailer, the right size, with metal sides and a hatch back. It should take all our trunks, and the cost of it was considerably less than the price of two train fares, with luggage, to Coimbra in Portugal. He would have to weld a trailer coupling onto the rear bumper of the Buick. I was not sure whether the princess would like that, but when I told her she seemed to think the idea rather dashing, and she and I took the Buick down to the garage and walked back to the villa. The garagiste delivered the Buick the next day, with its new trailer, and showed Maria Antonia and me how to uncouple it, with the cables connecting up the trailer’s brake lights and signals to the Buick, and how to couple them again. The car and trailer sat waiting in the courtyard on the gravel from then until we began to pack them, on the day before we left. The trailer transformed the Buick into a piece of wanderers’ equipment, a reminder of things to come. Maria Antonia seemed to like having it there, as though it were a costume for a future event. Josephine referred to it, without inflection, as a roulotte, a gypsy wagon.

  By then we were well into the month of September. The Fratacci family had left a week or so before. Georges Belmont and his family were about to leave for Paris. The weather, and the light on the côte, were more beautiful than ever, with a shade of amber at the days’ ends, and the mornings cool. I had grown fond of Josephine, with her unsweetened perspective and her affection, and of Georges Belmont and his company. I felt sure I would come back, and they would be there.

  We began to load things into the trailer a few days before we left, and we finished packing it on the morning we were going, in the cool, gray first light, our footsteps sounding loud on the gravel, and the long trimmed walks of Joseph’s garden echoing as we went back and forth. After we had made final trips around our rooms to make sure we had left nothing essential behind, André and his wife, and Joseph and Josephine, gathered to see us off. The big car was crowded when we rolled through the gate and down the road and along the coast, westward, to Marseilles, where we stopped for lunch, and then on to Foix, in the Pyrenees, where we spent the night.

  The next morning on the terrace outside the hotel, sitting over coffee with the mountains around us, the taste of the bread, the smell of the woods, the shadows on the peaks, remain vivid many years later. That day we drove on and crossed the
Pyrenees into Spain, a moment of great excitement for me. Spanish was the first European language I had tried to learn, and the landscape of Spain was the first part of continental Europe that I had tried to imagine. I felt a link, expectant and possessive, with the country of the Spanish romances and the poetry of Manrique and Lorca and Machado. Whatever I saw of the country was resplendent by definition.

  Long stretches of the main roads in northern Spain had not been paved but simply graded, and we drove more slowly than we had in France, although often for miles we were the only car, the only vehicle on the road. Maria Antonia preferred to do most of the driving. Johannes urged her to let him spell her, and occasionally she did, but she was not completely at ease unless she was at the wheel herself. We drove through long valleys on the southern side of the Pyrenees as the first light of autumn reached them and the colors deepened. We stopped for a rest in the shade of oaks and then drove across the rolling plains of Castille, by vast pastures full of dark cows and fighting bulls. As the sun began to go down we stopped, north of Burgos, in a wide landscape filled with the orange and red westering light before sundown. The light was in our eyes, and it was a good moment for a break, to walk along the road and watch the massive black shapes wading slowly in the ember of day, and talk of what we had seen in two days. The early September daylight lasted very late. It was getting on for dinnertime even in Spain. We got back in the car and drove toward Burgos. It was just starting to turn dark when Maria Antonia reached to put her sunglasses away in her handbag and found that she had no handbag. Then she remembered that she had put it on the roof of the car, with the sun still in her eyes, and had forgotten to pick it up when she got back in. In the bag was all her cash, her passport and driving license, Johannes’ and Mafalda’s passports, Antonio’s and Roberto’s passports, as well as everything else she might have wanted to have at hand.