We turned a corner. A troop of cavalry, all scarlet, gold and green, advanced towards us. The taxi stopped to watch them pass. Here were Mussolini’s fine young soldiers, stern beneath their heavy helmets, prepared to defend their emperor and empire to the last. I found it impossible not to compare them to praetorians. Another few hundred yards and we encountered a column of smart marching infantry followed by two armoured cars. Their gay awnings and polished brass giving texture to the scene, the cafes bustled with customers, windows reflected brilliant light flooding the whole city, creating a glowing aura. Every child, every animal, every plant took on an added reality.
Of course, Maddy Butter was familiar with all this. For me the change was a revelation. Maddy told me she, too, saw Rome in a wholly new dimension. Her senses had been brought fully to life by me. She spoke of me as her ‘mentor’. I, of course, was familiar only with Rome’s bohemian quarter in 1920, before Mussolini had saved his country from the tawdriness and failure of hope which had characterised it before. This Rome was scarcely the same city. Now the public monuments and modern buildings were as fine as anything raised in the great years of Rome’s ancient glory. She had been transformed. Again she was a city fit for gods.
Amused by my astonishment at this transformation, Maddy pointed out piazzas, avenues and statues erected since the coming of Fascism. ‘Signor Mussolini has a theatrical sense,’ she said. ‘A love of the dramatic. All this was designed personally by him.’
‘He clearly understands the purpose of architecture,’ I agreed, ‘which is to enshrine and encourage the aspirations of the nation. Such monuments give hope and a sense of security, but they also make people proud of themselves. They must appeal to our sense of myth.’
She nodded intelligently. She was a wonderful pupil. She repeated how lucky she was to have a lover so wise in the ways of the world. ‘The intelligence of a scientist. The sensitivity of an artist.’
I accepted her praise. ‘If, like Mussolini, one has a moral purpose, a duty to one’s fellow man, an understanding of the public will, then one informs one’s work with these qualities and makes them appeal to the mass of people. This is what one learns in Hollywood. With the talkies, I suspect, the habit of showing the public what one means — as opposed to merely discussing it — is disappearing.’
I have always had the ability to predict the future. It is a heavy burden. One I sometimes wish I never had to carry. Now Rome and Hollywood are lost, gone the way of Athens and Constantinople, merely names for things which were once great.
In those days Rome was again the repository of all we most admired and desired, the exemplar of all we most valued. She was a beacon of sanity and decency in a world beginning to fall into acrimonious civil unrest and cruel vendetta. She had become everything so many of us desired. Lesser men would destroy this dream, just as they destroyed Griffith.
Now the wind drifts through empty cloisters and abandoned rooms. Ruined statues, tattered backdrops, rotting costumes are testament to the power and the purpose of our ruined dream. Ash falls on hollow masonry, on spoiled brick and crumbling stone, on the machinery of all our hopes. At least I knew Rome and Hollywood in the blazing years of their power; at least I played my part in their triumph. I resisted for as long as I could resist. The mean-spirited little men dragged greatness into dirty anonymity. I raised my sword against Big Business and International Zionism. I was defeated. They stole our holiest names and made them wretched and worthless.
The taxi drove on through wider streets, between taller trees, through ordered sanity, through that indefinable radiance.
Suddenly La Butter seized my hand and drew it to her lips. I was not surprised by this expression of passion.
Everywhere was purity. Everywhere the white walls and red roofs of the narrow streets into which we now turned radiated warmth and comfort. Not only the great public buildings reflected national dignity and self-respect; that quality was evident in the most ordinary domestic scenes. I could not help but absorb it all with my cinema-trained instincts. Griffith himself might have taken the whole of Rome for his sets, positioned his crowds, his cameos, his long-shots, his pans, his close-ups. I half expected to hear a voice shout ‘Camera ready’ and another call ‘Action!’Thrilled, I looked around me knowing I would soon have the privilege of meeting the producer of this great miracle, the master architect of the New Europe.
Maddy Butter shared my joy. She pressed her soft lips to my cheek.
‘Welcome to the Future,’ she said.
* * * *
TEN
Between wakefulness and sleeping we have most of us had the illusion of hearing voices, scraps of conversation, phrases spoken in unfamiliar tones. Sometimes we attempt to attune our minds to hear more, but we are rarely successful. We call these ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’ — the beginning of the dreams we shall later experience as we sleep.
At first they were no more than nightmares dispersing when I opened my eyes. By the time of my second visit to Rome, I was receiving the most intense and terrible visions. I took them to be a warning.
At first there was just the one dream every night: against the black morning poplars a small woman walks her poodle up the avenue. We seem to be in France. Mist rises from the river, rippling silver, reflected in her eyes and skin. She turns to me. Her hair is white, touched with the dawn’s gold. A halo. My mother? Or Esmé? I am not sure. Sometimes they are the same. With agonised sadness in her eyes she murmurs the news. ‘Beware,’ she says. ‘Your good works betray you, for Satan is already triumphant.’
That dream was merely the disturbing prologue.
Later I came to witness all she meant.
They say that I deceive myself. I would suggest we all deceive ourselves. But some fundamental truths cannot be denied. Is a vision any less authentic because it is commonplace?
Those of you who recall D. W. Griffith’s magnificent epic Intolerance, with its profoundly subtle message, will remember how the gigantic ivory elephants come to life, threatening to crush the tiny figures of the people gathered before them. My second sight of Rome awed me just as those elephants awed the Babylonians. I half expected to be crushed by all that magnificence. As in a Griffith film, one wonderful reality overlaid another, ancient and modern, giving profound meaning to everything I saw. The arrogance and cruelty of the past were contrasted with the positive aspects of the present, assuring us that progress was possible and that the noblest human aspirations would ultimately prevail.
The film tells us that we have come far but have far to go and that, it seemed to me, was the message of the new Roman architecture rising among the magnificence of the old. A contradictory message, perhaps. A complex one, certainly, which required the highest type of mind to read it. Mussolini, in those years of his greatness, had that mind. He could see the broad picture. His genius inspired others to complete the details. Of course, his compromise with the Roman Catholic Church, his passion for women and his fascination with Jews brought him to a humiliating end as Hitlers puppet. He, who had inspired the movement of world fascism, was caught cowering in a borrowed German greatcoat, slaughtered and hung upside down like meat in the Milan marketplace. Yet when I knew Il Duce, he was worshipped with an intensity most Italians reserved only for the Pope.
Like Hitler in his first years, Mussolini made women ecstatic. He would have his aides select from the letters he received and deliver a fresh female to his office every weekday afternoon. The Italian people loved him for it. His virility reflected the virility of their race. This much I already knew from common talk and ordinary observation. Certain individuals carry a kind of magnetism which makes them irresistible to the masses and which Virginia Woolf called ‘It’. She, admittedly, was referring to the pornographer and arabiste whose films are so fashionable these days.
As far as I am concerned Lady Chatterton, Odysseus, Hank Janson and The Well of Loneliness are all the same. Janson himself agreed with me. He was the only one of that crowd I knew well. I help
ed him with the details he needed of the Spanish Civil War. He was not present, of course, but had been forced to live in Spain when the courts found him guilty. He had nothing but contempt for the others. They had all done considerably better out of their stuff, he said, than he had from his. He had made the mistake of selling the copyrights of both the books and his identity! Others were now writing new novels using his name!
Janson was a bitter man in his last years, as were Gerhardie and Priestley. Both were deeply jealous of Kingsley Amis and his angry young Turks and hated their crudeness. I met Amis several times. The first time was in the West End when he was posing for a suit commercial (he supplemented his income with endorsements of various products, especially wines and spirits). I knew the photographer. I remember Amis made fun of my accent and would not even listen when I offered him my manuscript and a chance to collaborate. At the time his words hurt me worse than the Cossack Grishenko’s whip. From the booze on his breath, the lighting man said they were amazed that he could still stand up. That filth he wrote already weighed on his conscience. There is Welsh blood there. I was unmoved by his insult. After all, I have rubbed shoulders with some of the finest artists in the world and have been on first-name terms with the most powerful men in history. But I was depressed that a national figure should so lower himself. I have since learned that rudeness and self-involvement is characteristic of all but a few writers. They are jealous, petty, envious creatures. Their sense of their own importance is astonishing! I have known dictators with more humility.
Years earlier I had fallen in love with Rome. Now all the pleasure returned, though tinged with a little sadness as I thought of Esmé, who had betrayed me in the end. I found it hard to blame her. She had been a child. She hardly knew what she was doing. For a little while, at least, I had rescued her from the squalid life she had now, doubtless, returned to.
Signora Sarfatti had, we discovered, been wonderfully generous. She had loaned us a magical little half-timbered house in its own walled garden, off the Via Pencioni, bordering the gardens of the Villa Borghese and near the zoo. Reminiscent of the Normandy Apartments in which I’d stayed while in Hollywood, the three-roomed cottage stood in its own tiny courtyard adorned with old masonry and an erratic fountain. Twice a day the dryads and sylphs who adorned it moved into dramatic action, spouting, pouring, gushing, gurgling from almost every orifice. The cottage was decorated in a mixture of rustic and modern taste, which I found pleasing, save for some of the paintings, which were in the latest neurotic styles. The worst of them I turned to the wall before collapsing on the bed.
I had been so eager to leave that I had not given myself enough time to recover in Venice. For the first few days, I lay in the massive bed, which Maddy turned towards the balcony so that I could see into the lovely garden with its fig trees, its orange and white bougainvillea, its profusion of golds and browns in the tawny sunlight. I stared, hour after hour, into a living tapestry. From the nearby zoo came the shriek of a large bird of prey or the yawning roar of a lion. Occasionally the scene would change and become the long, dark avenue of poplars, the winter river, the woman walking her dog turning to warn me. Then began my vision of the ministry of Satan upon Earth and in Heaven and Hell. Clad in the wealth of the Fall, Satan sat upon the throne of all three Spheres. God was overthrown. The arch-fiend triumphed. The Good and the Just were singled out for special punishment. What was our crime?
What was our crime? Perhaps we indulged ourselves in too many sentimental lies. We should have been better prepared. We should have understood our predicament. Now I stand humiliated before our grinning conqueror while the cruellest, the strongest, the greediest, the most wicked are rewarded, elevated to the highest command. The rest of us, who tried to make some positive use of our lives, are forced to bow before the will of the Great Lord and are used in any way that pleases him.
I understand such tyranny. I have been its victim more than once. I live in the shadow of eternal fear. Shall I become its victim again? My vision would not leave me, night or day. My vision still comes unexpectedly without warning. I am assured that eternity would be no better. I am doomed to perpetual torment. Such is my reward, for choosing the conquered side. My mistake was to believe in Jesus Christ. The price of idealism is disappointment. The price of idealism is despair.
Unquestionably someone had attempted to poison me in Venice. But I was recovering. The doctors Maddy brought were all baffled. If I had murmured the word ‘Cheka’, no doubt they would have understood too well and never returned! My old friend Brodmann was rarely far away in those days, gloating over what he had seen in the Cossack camp. No doubt he took particular pleasure in his recollections. At times like these the pain of the whip always returned.
I had not remembered Rome as so Mediterranean a city. Gradually I grew stronger. I took short drives with the fashionably dressed Maddy in the car she had rented. American girls are always resourceful. Their culture demands they be both men and women. I relaxed as she took charge. I delighted in white terraces spilling foliage and bright blossoms down into gardens filled with trees and shrubs. I was comforted by the orderly parks and squares. Mussolini was transforming the city architecturally, and making her the hub of the new Roman Empire. He had filled her with a fresh, inner light. Even the remaining poorer quarters, with their twisting medieval streets, the churches, shops, decaying villas, apartment blocks and public buildings all crowded together, exuded an atmosphere as lively as my own Moldavanka in Odessa.
Mysteriously, although we left messages for them, our two greatest friends were not in Rome to see us. We understood that both Fiorello and Margherita were involved in important affairs of state. At such times Il Duce commanded every moment of their waking lives. As soon as I was well enough, I took Maddy to some of the wonderful haunts I had first discovered with my darling Esmé. The increasingly delicious young American was learning what she called ‘Continental ways’ with eager alacrity.
We visited the Ristorante Mendoza, where I had spent so many happy hours. Had they seen Laura Faschetti or any of the old gang? They were nervously discreet, though friendly enough. These days it was no longer fashionable to have a left-wing clientele. I did bump into a couple of my old acquaintances but was deeply disappointed. Their only interest was in mocking me or describing with some bitterness how this or that person had ‘sold out’. The failure’s whine the world over. At least Mendoza’s fried artichoke was as wonderful as always. Maddy was amazed at the variety and richness of the food. She had believed until then, she said, that all Jewish food was lox, blintzes and latkes.
What Americans call ‘Jewish’ food is actually East European. Most of it is familiar to me. But the Jews had to pretend they had invented it, just as the Greeks cannot bear the idea that their entire cuisine is Turkish. They have a saying in Albania: How do you tell the difference between Turkish cuisine and Greek? Answer: One has pork.
Believe me, this is not a palatable notion, but it is the truth. Aggressive Moslemism (and it is by nature aggressive) is something I shall resist to my dying day. My quarrel with that fool across the street is not with his choice of religion. Anyone should have a right to follow his conscience; I have never said anything else. But I hate that grinning fool’s cynical wickedness as he passes off his kebabs and shleftikos as authentic. Not only does the public think he’s Greek, they think his hideous muck is typical. Maybe I should not blame him. After all, his customers are scarcely gourmets.
Rome in those days was also full of archaeologists. Il Duce had ordered a huge programme of public works designed to resurrect the best of the past and build new monuments which would be their equal. Everywhere you went you found some pit full of babbling foreigners chipping and dusting and studying for all they were worth. Myself, I had little time for them. Their unhealthy obsession with the past showed no respect for the future.
They are all the same, these people. They are suspiciously unwholesome. They grub around in antique filth as if this will give the
m some insight into the aspirations and inspiration of their ancestors. Is there some profit motive I do not understand? I saw this boy, he could not have been ten. He was selling a stained-glass window in the Blenheim Arms. Only I was outraged. Mrs Cornelius said it would look nice in her front room. Where would you keep it? I asked. What would you tell the vicar? He has no doubt robbed a church. Don’t be silly, she said, that’s out of one of them big villas up Talbot Road. Drink up and be happy, Ivan. She has a tolerance for thieves. Perhaps she is right. Most of her friends and relatives are rogues of some description. Until these middle-class novelists and TV producers started moving into the area everyone else in Notting Hill lived by and from crime. Fit company, I suppose. I am a fool to notice. Every shopkeeper in Portobello Road says I should ‘allow’ for some pilfering. They expect even their staff to rob them. It’s human nature, they say, pretend you don’t notice. I suppose it is cheaper than paying higher wages or having someone keep an eye on the stock every minute of the day. Live and let live? Where would we be today if Mussolini and Hitler had taken that attitude?
Once a week for many years I would meet my old friend Major Nye in the Lyons Corner House across from Victoria Station. He had retired from the army after the war. He ran a market garden somewhere near the Kent coast. He supplemented his pension, he said, by working as a bookkeeper for a firm of solicitors in Palace Street. But he kept in touch with his army chums. Sometimes I met them. They were rather pale, scrawny old men with white moustaches and neatly cut white hair. Embarrassed to be wearing civilian suits like ill-fitting uniforms, they were forever fingering their ties and asking after one another’s well-being. Colonels and majors and occasionally captains. All in Civvy Street during the 1950s. All spluttering at the speed with which, under Attlee’s Red hit squads, the empire was disintegrating. All their lives they had served an ideal. Now they no longer had a cause. Later, Major Nye worked in Lincoln’s Inn Fields at the Sir John Soane Museum. I spent much of my time there after I first came to London. Mrs Cornelius was not yet back from the Continent. Spain was finished. That was in 1939. Major Nye joined the museum in 1959 or 1960. He was growing a little frail. He had some tummy trouble. An ulcer, he said. I sometimes think stomach ulcers were the bane of that age. Everyone had them. Americans made entire films about those who suffered them. What was it making entire nations clutch their stomachs? I understand the feeling, all too well. In my case it was not an ulcer that caused my pain. Ulcers determined the history of the entire first half of the twentieth century. Drugs will determine the second half. Capital expands all possible markets.
The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04] Page 11
