Flying Visits

by Clive James

  In Rome, the Italian resistance fighters grew tired of waiting. They ambushed an SS detachment in the Via Rasella, just down from the gates of the Palazzo Barberini, killing thirty-two men. Hitler ordered reprisals at the rate of ten to one. The SS, enthusiastically exceeding requirements, trucked 335 people out to the Fosse Ardeatine and shot them all.

  But back to those ruins at Anzio. I am still standing in them, a bedraggled figure washed by the rain. They are the ruins of Nero’s seaside villa. And back in time beyond Nero, on that low hill behind the town, Cicero had the country house of whose amenities he boasted in his letters to Atticus. In those days Anzio was called Antium. Further back than that, Coriolanus went into exile here. And even further back, at about the time the city of Rome was being founded – the year zero ab urbe condita – Antium was one of the main hangouts of the dreaded Volsci.

  The Volsci feature on almost every page in the early books of Livy. The Romans were still confined to an area about the size of Hampstead and whenever they ventured outside their seven hills they had the Volsci breathing garlic down their necks. Eventually, through discipline, the Romans prevailed. That was Livy’s message to his contemporary readers: remember your origins.

  Everything and everywhere in and around Rome is saturated with time. If you look too long, you will be hypnotised. I went out to Lago Albano in the Alban Hills. The lake is in a giant crater. High on the rim is a town called Marino, where Sophia Loren owns a house. The Pope’s summer residence is somewhere up there too. But take a close look at that sheltered lake. Imagine it in tumult. In Imperial times it was called Lacus Albanus and mock naval battles were held on it. That would have been my job in those days: writing reviews of mock naval battles. ‘Once again Hilarius Fuscus made mincemeat of the opposition . . . ’

  Until recently, Sophia Loren faced serious charges with regard to the national currency. She was accused of trying to export some of her money. Almost everybody who owns any has been doing the same, but Sophia is supposed to be a woman of the people. Even the Press has turned against her. Her latest film has been greeted with massed raspberries. I went to see it. The critics were right.

  The movie is directed by Lina Wertmüller and is crisply entitled Fatto di sangue tra due uomini per causa di una vedova: si sospettano moventi politici. This may be loosely rendered as ‘A matter of honour between two men because of a widow: political motives are suspected.’ My translation loses something of the original’s flaccidity. Ms Wertmüller has an international reputation but her idea of a joke reveals her to be a humourless scold. The movie is all about hard times in Sicily. Apart from Sophia, it is a disaster. Sophia, playing a passionate charcoal-burner, looks better than ever and acts a storm. It is ridiculous that so life-giving an individual should be made a scapegoat.

  The same thought occurred to me when I attended a Rome Opera production of Bellini’s I Capuletti ed i Montecchi. Romeo and Juliet both sang magnificently. The settings were a reminder of how a lot can be made out of little – Covent Garden please copy. The audience in the stalls consisted mainly of the Roman bourgeoisie. They behaved like pigs. A man near me recited the whole plot to his deaf wife while she ate chocolate which had apparently been wrapped in dead leaves. The stalls were empty before the curtain calls were half over. But the gallery went crazy with gratitude.

  Here was an opera company for any city to be proud of. Yet half of its members are in trouble with the police because of alleged corruption. While terrorists maim and murder at will, the cops are chasing contraltos. It’s a clear case of fiddling while Rome burns.

  In the Via Michelangelo Caetani a shrine of wreaths and photographs marks the spot where ex-Prime Minister Moro’s body was dumped midway between the respective headquarters of the Communists and the Christian Democrats. To the terrorists, Moro stood for compromise. It followed logically that his life was forfeit. Most of the terrorists are figli di papà – sons of daddy. If daddy spends most of his time making money, shooting him is a good way of getting his attention. Under the absolutism there is petulance.

  There have been bodies in that street before. As the Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance, the Caetani fought the Colonna who fought the Orsini who fought the Caetani. Rienzo called himself tribune and reunited Rome for a few days. The great families used the Papacy to further their earthly ambitions. But ever since the fall of the old Empire the very idea of a renewed temporal hegemony had been an empty dream.

  As Machiavelli bitterly noted, the Church, while not powerful enough to unite the country, was certainly powerful enough to make sure nobody else did. Machiavelli’s remarks on the topic remain pertinent today, when even the Christian Democrats are appalled at the prospect of a Pope who seems intent on discrediting the legislature over the matter of abortion. The last thing the country needs is any more dividing. Italy’s besetting weakness is government without authority. The result is not sweet anarchy but gun law.

  You don’t have to go all the way out to the Alban Hills in order to look down on Rome and discover it to be a small place. All you have to do is climb the Aventine. What you can see from there is just about all there is. When Rome ceased to be the capital city of an international empire, it reverted to being a provincial town. Though it has been officially called so since 1870, it has never really become the capital of Italy – not in the way London is the capital of England or Paris of France. Rome produces little. For a long time it has been a consumers’ town. Even the Renaissance was produced in Florence and consumed in Rome. Bringing Michelangelo to Rome was like bringing Tolstoy to Hollywood.

  Rome is a good place for madmen to dream of building empires. It is a bad place from which to govern Italy. Mussolini chose the first option, with the inevitable consequences. The most recent of Rome’s overlords, he left the fewest traces. Apart from the embarrassingly fine architecture of the EUR district out on the periphery, the city gives almost no indication that he ever lived. The Palazzo di Venezia is, of course, still there. You can pick out the balcony from which he shouted to the crowds and the window behind which he left a light burning at night to encourage the notion that he never slept. Wealthy ladies used to visit him there, but by all accounts his technique as a lover was long on preliminary chest-beating and short on follow-through. It seems that he just hurled them to the floor and passed over them in a shallow dive.

  The reason that the Empire could never be restored was that the world grew out of it. The Roman Empire died of success. It was already dying when Scipio Africanus became the first Roman to take a bath as often as once a week. It was already dying when the legions in Sicily met their first Greeks and began learning the ways of cultivated leisure. Livy’s history is one long lament for the old Republic – a warning to Augustus that the tribe’s disciplined impulse was on the wane.

  But Livy never saw that he himself was part of the problem. Nor did Tacitus at a later time. The city which had once been little more than a base camp had become a civilisation. It was changing at the centre. The decline was really a transformation. The Empire became the Church, which became other churches, which became the Enlightenment, which became the modern age. The centurions became the priests who became us. With the eyes history has given us, we can now see that to unite the world is no longer a sane aim. It has already become united, within the individual soul.

  Meanwhile the city of Rome is left with nothing but its heritage. There is a lot to look after. Things get stolen, or just fall apart. In the Piazza Navona I found the Bernini fountains plump with ice, like overfilled tubs of lemon gelato. In a dark alley behind the piazza stands the little church of Santa Maria della Pace. On the outside walls are the usual political graffiti. Inside there are some sibyls by Raphael. The doors are open only between 7 and 8.30 in the morning, for Mass. Outside the portico when I arrived, the body of a man was being hauled out of an abandoned car and loaded into a grey plastic bag. He was a tramp who had frozen to death in the night. A policeman signed for the corpse. Dirt, litter and decay. R
affaello Sanzio of Urbino was here once.

  But it’s unfair on Rome to let the weather get you down. In spring and summer the fountains ionise the air to the point that even the third-rate expatriate American writers who infest the city feel themselves brimming over with creative energy. Yet even then you can detect the weariness beneath the fervour. No less afraid of dying than anybody else, I still like the idea of what Lucretius describes as the reef of destruction to which all things must tend, spatio aetatis defessa vetusto – worn out by the ancient lapse of years. But I don’t want to see the reef every day.

  The Spanish Steps were a cataract. Climbing them like an exhausted salmon, I passed the window of the room in which Keats coughed out the last hours of his short life with nothing to look at except a cemetery of time. No wonder he forgot his own vitality and declared that his name was writ in water. As he should have realised, the thing to do when you feel like that is to pack up and catch a plane to London. Which I did.

  February 11, 1979

  Postcard from Los Angeles

  1 No Stopping Any Time

  SURFING in the jet stream created by the polar wind as it curved down across the Atlantic, my Pan Am Boeing 747 made landfall somewhere over Newfoundland, crossed into the United States over Minnesota and found clear air above the snowfields of Colorado. A storm took back the half-hour we had gained. We landed at Los Angeles just ahead of the rain.

  I didn’t really want to get off. The in-flight movie had been California Suite, in which there is a scene where Maggie Smith, playing an English actress flying to Los Angeles for the Academy Award ceremonies in which she will find out whether she has won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, watches an in-flight movie about herself flying in an aircraft through a raging storm. For this very role, the real-life Maggie Smith had just been nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Flying along with earphones plugged into my head while watching Maggie Smith flying along with earphones plugged into her head watching herself flying along, I had suffered a partial collapse of the will to live. The twentieth century was getting too complicated for a simple soul to cope with.

  When I finally staggered off the plane and claimed my luggage, it seemed only natural that Bruce Forsyth should come running towards me in the reception area. I couldn’t remember what I had written about him that had been so bad, but in these days of instant travel there was no reason why he should not have chosen LA airport as the site of my execution. I shut my eyes and waited for the blow. When I opened them again, it was to discover that he had run past me and was embracing somebody else.

  Los Angeles had been coming to me all my life, but this was the first time I had come to it. Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like – Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything – but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.

  The city’s layout is a tangle of circumferences which have lost contact with their centres. It all makes sense as long as you can drive. Unfortunately I can’t. Or rather I can, but nobody believes in my ability enough to give me a licence. So instead of hiring a car I had to head for my motel by cab. On the San Diego freeway it was like stock-car racing. Pick-ups with flambeau paint-jobs, fat back tyres and bulges on their bonnets went past on either side like bullets, nose down with a gear to spare. Painted like one of Altdorfer’s blue night skies fretted with flames, a customised van overtook us, paused long enough for us to absorb the fact that we were looking at the back end of the MIKE VANCE CREATIVE THINKING CENTER MOBILE PLANNING UNIT, and then zoomed away. Despite the comparatively low speed limit, nobody seemed capable of going slowly. A minatory billboard loomed. ‘I TRIED FOUR MORTUARIES – FOREST LAWN WAS LOWER.’ MRS JACKIE MULLINS.

  My motel, which I shall call the Casa Nervosa because I wouldn’t want you to come crashing in and spoil its exclusive atmosphere, lay on Santa Monica Boulevard, near where it bends towards Hollywood. Somebody had tried to make contact with the previous occupant of my room by kicking in the door. There was a swimming pool which by some fluke did not contain a floating body. This was the very motel in which Andy Warhol had filmed one of his nerveless epics. Not even the rain could completely eliminate the lingering aroma of Joe Dallesandro’s hair oil. As the sudden night fell, I waited alertly for the scream of Robert having his nipple pierced.

  But there was no time to waste. Barely pausing to change, shave and order another cab on a telephone still hot from Sylvia Miles’s breath, I raced to Outpost Drive in Hollywood. Here I was to attend the small buffet supper marking the opening night of Gore Vidal’s newly decorated house. The concrete footpath was still drying when I arrived. Hysterical with jet-lag, I narrowly avoided falling into it and thus becoming the first total nonentity to have his entire body immortalised in Hollywood cement.

  Ushered politely in, I leant weakly against the wall while vainly searching the magnificent interior for an unfamiliar face. Joanne Woodward, Paul Newman, James Coburn, Stefanie Powers, Anthony Perkins, Mia Farrow, Jean-Pierre Aumont and William Holden were all present. I was introduced to Paul Newman. Well, how else do you expect me to say it? That I was introduced to Paul Klutz? Newman looked at me with eyes like chips of frozen sky. He was fascinated. It had probably been twenty years since a face he didn’t recognise had got close enough to him for him to realise that he didn’t recognise it.

  Desperately I hunted for someone obscure enough to talk to. There was nobody. Finally I settled for George Segal. Momentarily diverted by the novel experience of conversing with somebody he had never heard of, Segal listened amiably while I told him how the film on the plane had been about Maggie Smith watching a film on a plane and in this film on the plane she was watching a film about herself on another plane. Segal looked very interested, as if he were rediscovering something. Success had cut him off from this kind of boredom. Stardom can be limiting.

  Next morning I was bowling along the freeway under a clear sky in a 1964 drop-head Cadillac chauffeured by Hector and Alphonse, two young men who until the day before had been working as carpenters in Vidal’s house but had now decided to start a new career as assistant journalists. Brilliantly overqualified for the task – Hector was a botany student and Alphonse a marine architect – they knew everything about LA.

  The city had long ago come alive for me in Rayner Banham’s classic book Los Angeles, but not even Banham’s electrifying writing can give you a full idea of the sheer size of the place. Around the original Spanish settlement, the Pueblo of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, has grown up a city seventy miles square. You can stay on the freeway all day without retracing your tracks by even a yard, and not for a minute will you ever leave Los Angeles.

  Over a period of less than a hundred years the city has been happening like a volcanic eruption that solidifies into people and places, but never quite stops moving. Los Angeles has an economy bigger than India’s. If California were to secede from the Union it would be the world’s sixth richest country. None of these statistics seems at all surprising when the inexhaustible productivity of the place is flowing past your shoulder.

  The sources of wealth are all in amongst each other, as if the buried cities of Troy were all on the one level and still functioning. The oilfields are in amongst the original citrus groves. The dockyards are in amongst the oilfields. Within the city limits, there are as many airports as film studios. Aerospace and electronics industries that set world standards share security fences with service industries that launder roller towels. Restaurants look like car washes, car washes look like art galleries, art galleries look like war memorials, war memorials look like fire stations, fire stations look like churches, churches look like restaurants. Everybody has an idea to sell, BALL PARK FRANKS SWELL UP WHEN COOKED. Some ideas look doomed to fail. DAVE’S ACCORDION SCHOOL.

  Except for Simon Rodia’s famous towers, Watts is a sad sight. Watts isn’t even a ghetto. It’s nothing. The inhabitants of Chinatown, Little Mexico and Little Japan at least know wher
e they live. But Watts is Little Nowhere. Yet even here the poverty is relative. Waiting around for some trouble to get into, the young blacks are sitting in cars only a few years out of date. There is land around the houses, and although all the walls are thick with aerosol graffiti the sidewalks are not much less clean than anywhere else in LA – which means, by British standards, that they are spotless.

  The anti-littering law is backed up by a $500 fine and a famously gung-ho police force equipped like an army. The LA cops will body-search anybody whose name is already in one of their computers. If you try to double-park in downtown LA they will cone you with searchlights, drop on you out of the sky and stick their finger up your behind.

  A few miles south of Watts and you are in amongst the biggest, richest port in the world. The oil pumps march straight through the harbour and out to sea. Oil refineries butt against one another like games of draughts that have only just begun. The docks are so enormous that at first the Queen Mary looks like a miniature of herself, but no, she really is the Queen Mary.

  Before you drive north along the beaches, you have to circumvent Palos Verdes on a climbing, dipping and winding road. This is rattlesnake country. Now the Pacific horizon is high beside you on the left. Suddenly you are in the Slide Area. NO STOPPING ANY TIME. At Portuguese Bend the road is like a Möbius strip made of toffee, daily getting further lost in its own contortions. Palos Verdes is still climbing out of the sea. Disaster movies like Earthquake are made from the heart. The whole of Los Angeles is built on top of a severe case of geological dyspepsia.

  From Palos Verdes you descend to the beaches. Really they are all the one beach, the Beach, running north in an unbroken sequence from here to Malibu. This is Beach Boy country, where the only challenges are to find the perfect wave and to stay slim. Onwards through King Harbor, Hermosa, El Segundo and Marina del Rey the signs unceasingly dare you to see how much you can consume and still float. BEACHBUM BURT’S CASUAL CUISINE (SUNDAY CHAMPAGNE BRUNCH). The season has barely begun but already the girls look good enough to eat. Despite its billing, so does the food. INCREDIBLE EDIBLES.