A large portrait of Swift’s lover Claire painted the previous year and entitled Girl with Thistles, is also artfully designed. Claire, an American redhead who dazzled Dublin, is painted vividly, but in a way which belies her radiant self-assurance. She is slumped on a high stool, in a semi-foetal posture, while her hair and dress are reduced to Cinderella-like negligence. Pushed to the edge of the canvas, she is looking away from an opaque but luminous window, and her face, turned towards the viewer, seems ready to crumple into tears. Add some tall thistles and what you have is a memento mori.
The critic Tony Gray, quoted by Time, wrote that what Swift ‘unearthed’ from his subjects was neither ‘a decorative pattern, nor even a mood, but some sort of tension which is a property of their existence’.
Not having the money to pay for it, I did not expect to keep my portrait, but at the private view an ex-RAF pilot, who was courting one or more of the Ryan sisters, bought her portrait and mine and, apparently on impulse, gave each of us her own. I am ashamed to admit that I have forgotten his name.
The tension detected by critics in Swift’s portraits erupted that day and baffled those of us who didn’t know what was going on. As I remember it, Paddy and Oonagh left the party that day suddenly and unexpectedly for Portugal, where they married, and it strikes me now that the ex-RAF pilot, who kept guying himself with jokes about shooting people down in flames, may have been courting Oonagh more intently and, in Swift’s view, dangerously, than I guessed.
As I too left Ireland that autumn, and spent some years in Rome and Paris, I met neither him nor Swift nor any of the Ryans again. I did, though, run into Claire decades later at a party and learned that she was a poet. I had thought her so extraordinary that I was surprised to find her quite like the rest of us. Disturbing encounters can stay as fresh in memory’s deep-freeze as that ice-pale window in Girl with Thistles.
Mine with her had been sufficiently upsetting for Swift to associate me later with fright. What happened was that at the end of a Dublin party I and a friend, whom I shall call John, were stranded without a lift, and Swift, whose studio was nearby, offered us shelter for the night.
What, John asked, about Claire, who had left the party early in the company of an older and irritatingly successful painter? If she came back, would she mind our intrusion? But Swift was so sure she wouldn’t come that we accepted his offer. The walk to Killiney would have been about a dozen miles.
When John had constructed a barricade of pillows down one side of the one and only bed and motioned me into the furrow between it and the wall, we put out the light but couldn’t sleep. I could feel him, who knew I had a yen for him, try to shrink as he moved as far as he could from any overtures I might make, while simultaneously trying to avoid making any to Swift who was on his other side. John claimed to be queer, but had been known to enjoy an occasional dalliance with a safely married woman.
While I was thinking about this, the light snapped on! John, saying he felt responsible for me, pulled the sheet over my head, and Claire’s pleasantly mid-Atlantic voice produced a four-letter word. ‘To think,’ she followed it up, ‘that I should come home to this! You have a virgin in my bed. A tight little virgin. And I could have had a passionate night with Louis! I left him to come home to you,’ she castigated Paddy, while John’s hand clamped my mouth. ‘You clod! Get that virgin out of my bed. I won’t have virgins in my bed!’
‘Put a sock in it, Claire,’ John growled. Paddy said nothing, and I, even if I hadn’t been half smothered, was too paralysed with embarrassment to stir from under my sheet. Hearing Claire move around the room, I lay braced for a physical attack.
‘I could have had a passionate night,’ she kept repeating.
It struck me that she was having one now.
‘Come and have one with me then,’ Paddy coaxed. ‘Come on, sweetie!’
‘I don’t want you!’ Claire’s accents grew increasingly cultured. ‘I want John. I want to make love with John. His virgin won’t mind, will she?’
‘Shut up!’ John was yelling. ‘Can’t you shut her up, Paddy?’
‘Come on,’ Paddy coaxed. ‘I’ll give it to you, sweetie. Let me give it to you.’
‘I want John. You’ll never get another chance, John!’
‘Shut your mouth, Claire!’ John was kneading my arm so fiercely that I would have bruises next day.
‘Well, make love with your virgin, then,’ Claire suggested. ‘I won’t have you lying there, masturbating unhealthily in my bed.’
John nearly throttled me, and Paddy must have got hold of Claire, because the light went out, and mattress-heavings took the place of talk. After a while those too stopped, and after another while John uncovered my head so that I could see the window, which had grown less opaque and had thistles in front of it, which were greyer and stiffer than in the painting. It must have been about four in the morning. Astonishingly, I fell asleep. My last thought as I did was to wonder how many other Dublin Saturday party-goers had ended up in strange beds.
*
McGuire’s work, though influenced by Swift’s and Freud’s, would be both more decorative and less tense. But to write this is to look years ahead. In 1952 I saw only the bird – and the cabbage.
He was clearly more attuned to commerce, which he affected to despise, than Swift, for I see from the Internet that he won a number of prizes.
His room in Rome was either in the via Margutta or the next-door via del Babuino, two bohemian streets celebrated in a song of the day in which a foreign girl remembers her Roman lover:
Arrivederci, Roma!
Goodbye – au revoir.
Voglio ritornare alla via Margutta.
Voglio rivedere la soffitta
Dove m’hai tenuta stretta stretta accanto a te.
(I want to return to the via Margutta again. I want to see again the attic where he held me close.)
*
And so forth. It was a tribute to themselves paid by Roman men whose foreign girlfriends could never forget them. In upmarket trattorie, the itinerant singers all sang it, especially towards summer’s end, when young men brought their tourist conquests for a farewell dinner and, if singers failed to drop by, even waiters were prepared to burst into song.
Cheap eating places such as tavole calde and the philanthropic mensa comunale offered no such entertainment, but in them everyone talked to everyone else, and English- and French-speakers could make friends.
A series of what were called ‘surprise parties’ (pronounced ‘soorpreezpartee’) provided dressier occasions in private houses. I can’t remember how I came to be on a guest list for these, though it may have been thanks to Edward, who was well supplied with introductions to what must have been a smart set, since the houses were comfortable, the Turkish ambassador’s daughter was an habituée, and the rule that nice girls leave at nine was often ignored. Rome was more laid-back than Perugia – and the men behaved better.
Unfortunately someone – no doubt my father – had arranged for me to stay in a pensione run by nuns who did apply the 9 p.m. rule and threatened not to let latecomers in. For a while, I managed to sweet-talk my way around this, but in the end had to leave – regretfully, since the convent was in the city’s heart and practically next to the Pantheon. It was conveniently close too to the fashionable Jesuit church, the Gesù, where at Sunday Mass a brutal but brilliant preacher regularly eviscerated the Italian Left to the glee of a well-dressed congregation which clapped like a theatre audience each time he scored a point. As long as I stayed in the convent, I attended these sermons assiduously, marvelled at their venom, was shocked by their worldliness, and wished I knew some Communists who could tell me how to rebut the Society of Jesus’s arguments, if only inside my own head. People who roused such rage must, I felt sure, have something interesting to say. But I knew no Communists, and it was only when I moved to a room in the Prati, a district developed to house the city’s expansion after it became Italy’s capital, that I felt comfortable reading t
he left-wing press. I didn’t want to hurt the nuns’ feelings by leaving l’Unità or Paese Sera for them to find in my waste-paper basket.
ROME UNIVERSITY
I did, though, know one famous ex-Communist.
Ignazio Silone, a founder-member of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), was married to my best friend’s elder sister, Darina, who was acknowledged to be one of the most beautiful women in Italy and Ireland – she shuttled between them. Harry Craig, who was smitten, compared her to the legendary Queen Maeve, and years later, when I was scouting for Italian books for a US publisher, Italian editors grew misty-eyed when told I was Irish. Did I know la Signora Silone, Giorgio Bassani inquired wistfully. Was she as beautiful as ever? Of course she must be! Senz’altro!
As well as being beautiful, Darina was clever and unhappy. What man could resist the blend? She was generous, too. Not only did she take her sister, Eithne, and me to a Lancôme beautician, who taught us to make up our faces, she also arranged for Silone to invite me to dinner regularly during my Roman year.
The Lancôme session – of which he would have disapproved – must have been on one of my early Perugian trips, for in 1952 Darina herself was not around. Her marriage was clearly troubled, though she kept on faithfully translating Silone’s novels, which by then were world famous. I had read and admired these as they came out, and was excited to be spending time with their author, even though the actual occasions were sombre. Eithne had warned me that he could be moody, so I wasn’t surprised to read later that he suffered from depression. He even looked depressed, with five o’clock shadow, dark colouring and melancholy jowls. He warned me to be careful what I said in front of his and Darina’s maid, who had been told that I was a relative because, being from the country, she would have been shocked to see him dine alone with a young woman who was not.
This didn’t surprise me any more than his melancholy had. His novels were dark, and their characters tended to be victim figures: peasants who were at constant risk of being tricked, swindled and even killed by Fascist policemen – just as one of his own younger brothers had allegedly been killed while in jail.
*
Silone’s contribution to The God that Failed had, to my mind, been one of the best in the book, which consists of accounts by six writers from different countries of their reasons for first embracing, then turning against, Communism. It had come out in 1949 and its recollections of Silone’s native Abruzzi were sad, warm-hearted and angry. His mix of socialism and Christianity reconciled my own contradictions and, though that particular blend would not reach Ireland until liberation theology did, elements of it were already familiar from reports of French worker priests.
I have just reread his claim: ‘Franciscanism and anarchy have always been the two most accessible forms of rebellion for lively spirits in our part of the world. The ashes of scepticism have never suffocated … the ancient hope of the Kingdom of God on earth, the old expectation of charity taking the place of law … ’
I see no nostalgia here for the people’s opium – especially as his next remarks, while acknowledging the difficulty of discerning ‘the ways and means to a political revolution … ’, implicitly salute its necessity. The only choice open to people in the village where he grew up was, he insisted, either to rebel or connive with an exploitative and cruel system.
My guess that he would have taken a dim view of Darina’s taking Eithne and me to have our faces done is based, more specifically, on his wondering, ‘From what source do some people derive their spontaneous intolerance of injustice … And that sudden feeling of guilt at sitting down to a well-laden table, when others are having to go hungry?’
In the light of that, spending the price of two or more meals on a facial could hardly please him.
Yet he had married a woman whose looks and style excited his colleagues’ envy. Worldly, then – or unworldly? He was, Darina told her friends, a complex and often inscrutable man.
This was truer than she could have known when she said it – and it would be years before the whole truth hit the headlines.
What I relished in his writing was the vivacity of the day-to-day experiences described. They belonged, as did the films being made at the time by de Sica, Rossellini, Visconti et al., to the great blossoming of Italian neorealism, but reminded me too of the local news which the Killiney postman, my mother’s friends and our washerwoman would sometimes bring hotfoot from the village shop, and which my father would think of turning into a story.
Irish and Abruzzese history had a lot in common, although the wounds left by Italian wartime experience seemed uniquely raw.
‘Everyone hates us,’ a student I met in Perugia had lamented. ‘We Italians let everyone down: most of all the Germans, who were our allies.’
That outspoken youth may have recovered faster than the one who would be the best man at Lauro’s and my wedding in Florence in 1957. Roberto’s father had been a Fascist and died at the front, and he himself became a vociferous, guitar-strumming Red after being beaten up by Left-wingers who may have been trying to purge shames of their own. More than fifty years later, Lauro ran into him on a stopover in Florence. They had a drink together and Roberto, now a leading historian of Fascism, sent us a memoir he had recently published about his still unassuaged distress over the father, who, as his memoir pointed out, had had perfectly honourable reasons for fighting and dying for his country, even when its leader was Mussolini.
‘Several old friends’, Roberto told Lauro, ‘cut me dead in the street when I published that.’
*
Silone’s trouble with disappointing creeds did not only apply to Communism. By 1961 he would be describing himself to an interviewer as ‘a Christian without a church and a Socialist without a party’.
I can’t remember whether I nerved myself to ask him about his ideas during those shy dinners at his house in the via di Villa Ricotti, but I remember admiring him in spite of Eithne’s reservations. Indeed, it was because of him that I got into conversation with some unshaven and shabbily dressed Abruzzesi students at a restaurant in the university campus and found that the end of Fascism had not done them much good. They were so poor, they told me, that they only came to Rome to do their exams, then left. They couldn’t afford to stay and attend lectures. Instead they bought roneoed copies of these to study at home.
Absenteeism was not confined to students. A number of fashionable professors, while drawing salaries for teaching in Rome, were working and drawing larger ones in the United States.
Mario Praz, for instance, whose lectures I had hoped to attend, though officially listed as teaching in Rome that year, was actually, I learned from the janitors, in the US. These bidelli seemed to be the only people who knew – or were prepared to admit – what was going on.
‘That’, a student told me, ‘is because it’s bad luck to mention that gentleman’s name. He has the evil eye, so you, who just named him, had better fare le corna.’ Illustratively, he folded his two middle fingers, leaving the index and little one sticking out like horns. ‘It wards off evil.’ I wondered whether he believed this. Half believed, I guessed. I was used to half belief.
*
Unlike French ones, Italian university students addressed each other with the tu or familiar form and called each other collega. This seemed promisingly emancipated, but when the Abruzzesi tried to flirt, I found myself in an uncomfortable position. They were like escapees from Silone’s novels: poor, possibly hungry, despised and able to afford only the cheapest university meals. How could I snub them? On the other hand, wouldn’t it be unwise and indeed unkind to encourage them?
I told a persistent one that I had to get back to the convent, where I still was at the time, and when he, unaware perhaps of the 9 p.m. rule, started waiting all night outside its front door, I speeded up my move to the Prati.
*
Meanwhile, who should turn up but Harry Craig, who was in Rome to ghost-write the memoirs of a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, ca
lled – I think – Donald Armstrong. Harry had always been a Man of the Left, though always at a remove. So being a ghost-writer for a veteran of a lost war was completely in character.
He took me a few times to our embassy – or rather ministry. In those years, Ireland had to count its pennies, so we had few full ambassadors. In Rome, however, we almost had two: an embassy to the Vatican and a minister plenipotentiary to the Italian state. The minister was Denis Devlin, a distinguished poet who often had literary figures among his guests. One of these when Harry took me there was Alberto Moravia, who looked as if he too might have the evil eye, so I kept my hand out of sight so as to make le corna. Another was Archibald Macleish, and a third was an American girl called Peggy, for whom Harry promptly fell. She too was a poet and a protégée of MacLeish’s who, together with Devlin, warned Harry, whose reputation was known to both, that she was very special and must be treated accordingly. Or so I heard after Harry and she abruptly disappeared from Rome, took off on a whirlwind courtship in Carthage and Connemara, then got married.
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