A Sweet and Glorious Land

by John Keahey

  * * *

  Gissing arrived in Italy on September 23, 1897, his third journey to the southern Mediterranean in nine years, and spent time in Siena working on his critical study of Charles Dickens. He completed it on November 5 and sent it to his publisher. A short time later, after a few days in Rome, he launched his famous foray into the South of Italy to rediscover the cities that originally had been founded by the Greeks.

  The result of that journey, a travel narrative published in 1901, By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy, is what drew me a century later.

  His trip, so well documented in the nearly one-hundred-year-old classic, was taken after two earlier journeys to the Mediterranean, one to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Naples in 1888, and another a year later to Greece and Naples, where, according to biographer Korg, he experienced congestion of the right lung, “the first serious touch of the illness that was eventually to kill him” in 1903. Today, scholars generally believe he died of emphysema, although his death certificate is unclear about the cause.

  * * *

  Born in 1857 into a family of limited means, George Gissing grew into a dour man who seemed depressed much of the time and who often retreated into the recesses of his mind. He showed little outward emotion in life, took long, solitary walks in the English countryside, and acknowledged in his diary that he daydreamed about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

  His twenty-two novels and collections of short stories dealt with English life in the Victorian Age of the late nineteenth century, and focused on the disparity among the social classes, and on life along the mean streets of the newly industrialized, smoke-belching cities.

  Gissing’s personal life was not a happy one. As a young man, he had been a brilliant student, particularly in the mandatory study of the classics that English schoolchildren were subjected to in that era. But he was expelled from college and briefly imprisoned after he was caught stealing from classmates to support a prostitute, with whom he had become infatuated.

  In disgrace, he left England in September 1876 and eventually landed in Chicago. During this American exile, he tried his hand at teaching and later barely supported himself writing short stories of fiction for daily newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune. Later, he was an assistant to a traveling photographer, journeying throughout New England.

  Just before his twentieth birthday in the fall of 1877, Gissing returned home, eventually marrying the prostitute he had stolen for. This was the first of two failed and, by his accounts, miserable marriages. The marriage to Marianne Helen Harrison, whom he called “Nell,” caused him continual despair over her unrepentant lifestyle of alcohol and drug abuse. Through it all he continued to write. He and Nell eventually separated, but he continued to care for her through numerous health crises. In a study of Gissing’s image of women, Portraits in Charcoal, James Haydock writes that once, when Gissing took Nell to the doctor for one of her ailments, the physician detected the presence of venereal disease. When the doctor asked her about it, she blamed her husband. Later, Gissing, who did not have the disease, told a friend that he had felt trapped during Nell’s telling of her phony story to the doctor and “so endured the doctor’s angry rebuke in silence.”

  Nell died in February 1888, just a few days after her thirtieth birthday, from the effects of untreated alcoholism and, probably, syphilis. Gissing took care of her funeral arrangements, hiring mourners, paying the mortician, clearing out her squalid room. His diary entry describing the scene in that room when he was called by Nell’s landlady to identify her body is particularly compelling:

  “On the door hung a poor miserable dress and a worn out ulster [a long, loose overcoat of Irish origins, made of heavy material]; under the bed was a pair of boots. Linen she had none.… All the money she received went in drink.… Her associates were women of so low a kind that even Mrs. Sherlock [the landlady] did not consider them respectable enough to visit her house.… I drew out the drawers. In one I found a little bit of butter and a crust of bread—most pitiful sight my eyes ever looked upon.

  “She lay on the bed covered with a sheet. I looked long, long at her face, but could not recognize it … she had changed horribly. Her teeth all remained, white and perfect as formerly.… Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind. I feel that she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life. Poor, poor thing!”

  A book Gissing completed just a few months after Nell’s death, The Nether World, was, according to his biographer Jacob Korg, “his … most bitter book about the problems of poverty.”

  Gissing scholar Maria Dimitriadou, writing in the October 1998 issue of The Gissing Journal, says that Gissing acknowledged “that his intellectual desire was to escape life as he knew it and dream himself into that old world, and that the names of Greece and Italy drew him as no others did and made him young again.” Dimitriadou then quotes the Italian scholar Francesco Badolato’s observation that Gissing’s forays into Greece and Italy “provided him with the kind of refuge from the grim realities of the modern industrial and commercial world.”

  The Neapolitan shellfish market flourished along via Santa Lucia in the 1880s, when the Gulf of Naples lapped at the street’s edge and boats unloaded the day’s catch along piers jutting into the water. Gissing saw this market during a trip to Naples in the late 1880s and reveled in the excitement and aliveness of the street. Photo via the Internet, “Le Strade di Napoli”

  Gissing’s third journey to the South, coming after his second marriage started breaking up and as he was continually registering serious concerns about his health, represented what he may have perceived as his final “cheery excursion,” according to an editors’ introduction to a memoir of a Gissing contemporary, Brian Ború Dunne. “Gissing went to Italy to escape from the most profound and extended period of depression in his life, and he came there prepared to be happy.” Why not? Despite his troubled early years and disastrous second marriage, by 1895 Gissing was viewed by some literary experts as one of the three best late-Victorian-era writers, sharing company with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith. The Dunne memoir’s editors say of the final Italy trip: “Gissing thus entered what is now regarded as one of the happiest periods of his life.”

  This was the scene that greeted Gissing in late 1897: a “wilderness of dust heaps” was filling up the area along via Santa Lucia to allow this quarter of Naples to extend several blocks into the Gulf. Gissing feared that the buildings that would be placed on this landfill would turn the Santa Lucia into an ordinary street. Photo via the Internet, “Le Strade di Napoli”

  * * *

  In November 1897, standing along the Via Santa Lucia near the Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, Gissing looked across what was then a garbage dump-cum-landfill known today as the Santa Lucia district. That monstrous dumping of earth into the former pristine waters along that short Gulf of Naples stretch was part of a late-nineteenth-century public-works project. It extended the northwest crescent of this city hundreds of feet into the gulf. Old photographs, taken before this landfill was created, show how boats were directly tied up at a stone wall that bordered Via Santa Lucia. It was the site of the city’s old shellfish market, and each day’s catch was handed up from the bobbing boats to fishmongers who sold their wares on the stone embankment above.

  It was a colorful, noisy place during Gissing’s first and second trips in 1888 and 1889. He knew, by the time of the third trip a decade later, that this aliveness was being buried along with the tiny harbor area he witnessed being filled up with dirt and refuse.

  Today on this fill, much like the one that created the Marina District of San Francisco, are six- or seven-story buildings that appear to date back to the end of the nineteenth century, when Gissing had the last unobstructed views from Via Santa Lucia of the gulf, the Sorrento Peninsula, Capri, and Ischia.

  Santa Lucia is one of this struggling city’s few high-rent neighborhoods. But
it remains an area where people of mixed means live side by side—a typical Neapolitan lifestyle. Basement rooms in these elegant structures are occupied by entire families, and the ground-level and lower floors contain workshops, known as officine, and businesses of various types. The higher floors, piani nobili, are occupied by those who can afford the steep prices. Friends tell me this pattern is slowly shifting. As Naples becomes more Americanized, the poor and the affluent do not mix as much as they used to.

  Along Via Santa Lucia are churches, cafés, restaurants, a cinema, and a take-away pizzeria. One hundred years ago Gissing had an unobstructed panorama of the gulf from this old street that used to be lined by makeshift fish-sellers’ stands, replenished each morning from the boats that once were docked only a few feet away. Now the sea is three or four blocks farther south, and passersby along Via Santa Lucia get only occasional glimpses of the sea at points where newer north–south streets join at perpendicular intersections.

  A Rome friend, Maria Findlow, travels to Naples several times a week to teach. In an early 1999 letter, she described an event she witnessed in Santa Lucia that shows how the old continues to mix with the new.

  “I was walking along Santa Lucia during a morning of cold, windy, wet weather, and a funeral procession was winding its way towards a church. The mourners, following the coffin being pulled through the streets by a carriage being drawn by three huge, black horses, were carrying colored umbrellas contrasting with their black clothes and the black carriage.

  “It is obviously the funeral of someone important—probably a camorrista, a local crime boss—because the ornate gold and black carriage is reserved for the rich and famous, and the police are present, including two long-haired policewomen.

  “As the procession passes, men standing outside a small café make the sign of the cross, and other people come out of the shops to pay their respect to the dead. Children can be heard on the side streets shouting in Neapolitan dialect, ‘Vieni, o’funnarale!’ (Come, a funeral!).”

  What Gissing feared about this historic district losing much of its character as the land is unnaturally pushed out into the sea has happened. He remembered seeing a beautiful Via Santa Lucia that, during his brief visit ten years earlier in the 1880s, offered spectacular views of the Sorrento Peninsula and Capri. Those two landmasses serve as a partial natural breakwater, keeping the Gulf of Naples generally blue and serene for passersby along the little street. Now, when the panorama of Capri and the peninsula can be spied only at brief points, the view is often blocked by a screen of post–World War II industry-generated haze that settles in almost daily.

  As he looked over the fill—“a wilderness of dust-heaps”—Gissing could see that the Santa Lucia would become “an ordinary street, shut in among huge houses, with no view at all.”

  * * *

  Some things have not changed. The area above the still-cobble-stoned street was, in Gissing’s time—and for centuries before—a haven for smugglers. It still is. Now, however, a police car is regularly on duty outside the offices on the seaward side of Via Santa Lucia, but bribery of police remains commonplace, and there has been a much-publicized scandal reported about this in the Italian press.

  But that is hidden. Here now can be seen vegetable and fruit stalls displaying, even in winter, oranges, pineapples, tomatoes, and multicolored peppers, with garlic and red peppers hanging from the awnings. Just past a news agent’s stall is the church of Santa Maria delle Catene, Our Lady of the Chains. This sixteenth-century church at one time overlooked the sea; now it overlooks modern buildings built on the hundred-year-old landfill.

  Farther beyond, toward Via Partenope, which now skirts the bay at the far edge of Gissing’s “dust-heap,” are the fortress-like walls of Pizzofalcone, one of the city’s finest old residential quarters. Via Chiatamone leads off to the north from Via Santa Lucia toward Piazza Vittoria and the Villa Comunale, a beautifully designed park used by families and courting couples.

  Luxury hotels dominate the waterfront here, along the century-old landfill’s edge. The city is gearing up for Italy’s year 2000 Jubilee, hoping to become a “dormitory” for travelers when Rome becomes crowded with pilgrims. Via Santa Lucia ends at the waterfront, blending into a hundred-foot-long causeway over the water to the tiny island holding Castel dell’Ovo, a fortress built in the twelfth century C.E.

  Something else has changed in this neighborhood. Gissing talked about the Strada di Chiaia, on the opposite side of the Piazza del Plebiscito near the uphill beginning of Via Santa Lucia. When Gissing was in the city ten years before his late 1890s visit, he remembered the strada as being boisterous and noisy with carriage drivers clamoring for passengers. It had become, by the fall of 1897, strangely quiet for reasons unknown to him. Gissing need not have worried. In early 1998, the strada, now called simply Via Chiaia, is a street with traffic roaring through at high speeds, the modern clamor replacing the old, and the street’s former charm gone.

  * * *

  One hundred years ago, it must have been easier for Neapolitans to push into the bay rather than up the steep hills, where orange and lemon groves once released their fragrance. Now those hills behind me, known as the Vomero, are part of the city’s northwest curve.

  Lined with homes, multistoried apartments, shops, office buildings, and funicular stations, the slopes wait for Vesuvius to spew ash and lava, as it did in 1944, or for earthquakes to strike, like the one in 1980 that killed three thousand people, including a group of elderly who died when the poorhouse in which they were living, a once-grand eighteenth-century structure, collapsed.

  In the years since, the land under the western suburb of Pozzuoli continues to rise and fall periodically, a result of seismic activity not too far below the surface. Residents have gotten used to it—a kind of fatalism that does not get in the way of life’s everyday struggles.

  I am staying in the Vomero, in a small, clean, inexpensive pensione. It serves a typical “continental” breakfast—coffee, hard roll, butter if I remember to ask for it, and various kinds of jam. I came here because friends said it would be quieter high on the hill than in the congested city below.

  It requires a fifty-lira coin—roughly three cents—to take the tiny elevator to the fifth floor. The coin makes a hollow “clunk” as I drop it through the slot in the gray steel box inside. The elevator is so tight that my one bag and I completely fill the space. The car, wrapped in black metal bands, begins its ascent, suddenly jerking upwards the instant I drop the coin. After a moment it settles down and I move steadily upward toward my destination. Movie images come to mind of tiny European elevators jammed as an afterthought into stairwells in buildings built long before elevators were invented.

  I had made a reservation; the signora, who had pushed a buzzer to unlock the giant double door on the ground floor while shouting “Avanti!” through the tinny speaker of the intercom, awaits me. Surprisingly, for a Neapolitan and for a woman well into her sixties, she is nearly six feet tall. She is brusque, and her English is as imperfect as my Italian,

  She says my last name, horribly mispronouncing it, as do most Americans. I nod and she turns on her heel, saying something that sounds like “Go with me,” and leads me, scurrying to keep up, into the lobby. I want a room with a view. After all, we are on a mountainside high above one of the most beautiful gulfs in the world.

  “Con vista?” I ask hopefully when she quotes me the surprisingly low daily rate. “A view?” she asks incredulously. “Look all around,” she says. “All buildings everywhere.” Then she smiles. “All rooms the same. And clean and warm.”

  I give her my passport so she can record my vital statistics on the forms that all Italian innkeepers must use to log in their guests. She hands me a map of the city. “Return please, when finished,” she says. The map is glossy, full of creases. Points of interest are circled in many different colors of ink. Some street names are smudged into oblivion. Obviously it has been well used. I seem to be holding the community ma
p.

  Her words are short, direct. She is all business. But when she smiles I feel her Italian warmth. I like this place and decide I like her.

  She leads me to my room, pointing out the shower—“Please. Only one shower each day,” she commands—and other facilities en route. She points into a small room with a handful of small, round tables and light-green-checked tablecloths. “For breakfast,” she says. “You may have, if you hurry.”

  I turn to deposit my bag quickly in the large, sunny room overlooking the street leading to the funicular station whose slow-moving car brought me up to the Vomero from the frenzied Neapolitan street a mile or so below. I walk back into the hallway to get my breakfast and almost bump into a wheelchair holding an older woman, dressed in black and wearing a white shawl around her shoulders. I nod and say loudly, perhaps too loudly, “Buon giorno!” The old woman nods imperceptibly.

  “Mia madre,” says my hostess quietly, her face softening as she looks at her mother sitting there. “We hope you do not make noise. Her room is here, next to you. We care for her. This is her house.”

  * * *

  Gissing had set out from the harbor below, in a small coastal steamer, in the late fall of 1897 to begin his journey into Magna Graecia. Latin for Great Greece, the name encompasses the part of southern Italy where the ancient Greeks from across the Adriatic founded magnificent cities and temples dedicated to the gods. This was centuries before the native peoples of central Italy, living in tiny wooden and mud huts on the Palatine Hill next to the Tiber River, evolved into the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire.