In Italy we had wine; everyone drank it naturally, liberally, every day, young wine, local and cheap. Ours was chosen by Alessandro or the cook with the same care, no more, as the vegetables and the fish. It was not discussed at table. My claret evenings with my father were part of the world that was behind. Someone sometimes was offered a small glass of vermouth; brandy was kept on hand, Alessandro might be called upon to seal some masculine deal with grappa, besides these there were no spirits in the house nor was there talk about drink or getting drunk although there must have been the odd bucolic soak. Expressions such as having a drink problem had not entered civilised vocabulary. In America Prohibition was already in full swing; in Italy the excesses of alcohol were not yet a ‘socially’ expected topic.
Our life then during those Italian years was stable and domestic. Though perhaps not that domestic if seen through other people’s eyes. Domestic in spirit, say, rather than tangible fact. We never had the same address for long and we can’t have had anything near a usual complement of household goods. We certainly never lived, as the French were to remark about us later on, dans nos meubles. Why not? Some cautionary instinct to remain in transit? Reluctance to stake upon a future better left undefined? Was it the times? – less than a decade from one war, more than a decade still from another – I do not know. Our attitudes to possessions were not consistent. Alessandro’s material belongings were sparse and neat, he dressed with unmistakable if unflaunted elegance on very little; my mother’s were profuse, not often utilitarian, seldom to hand and prone to disrepair. While she thought nothing of our living year in year out in other people’s sheets and chairs, she seldom travelled without voluminous and unusual luggage. (Never shall I forget the horror, compounded by missed train connections, of her taking a goldfish bowl in live working order.) Still, in those days people did take trunks on railway journeys; my mother’s encumbrances shrink in retrospect when I consider that they must have comprised a very fair share of her entire worldly goods. As for myself I had already gone a fairish cycle of from rags to riches, or rather riches to rags because when I was an infant and dwelt in a nursery – the real thing: day nursery, night nursery, an English nanny – in the ugly opulent house of my father’s Berlin connections, the cupboards were choked with objects which could be said to have been mine. Doll’s house and stable, toy cook stove, toy grocery shop, toy village, clockwork toys, soldiers, puzzles, picture books, plush animals … The body of these treasures had been handed down, a few were lavish new personal offerings; I used the pick of them – with intense enjoyment – the rocking horse, the railway train, the building blocks, the tomahawk, the conjuror’s box, the puppet theatre, what grist they made for slow-laid, complex games (I nearly always played alone), what diverse lives they opened. At bedtime while I was being scrubbed or brushed I marshalled plans for next day’s work in earnest detail with serene absorption till switched off by sleep. It was heaven. Between the ages of three and a half and seven, as I now realise, I was able to lead a life given almost entirely to pleasure. By the time we returned to our house in Baden at the end of the 1914 War, that Aladdin’s cave had vanished. Few toys, if any – assuming that some must have been packed – survived our hazardous and protracted journey across a Germany in collapse and revolution, and although the cupboard when we reached Feldkirch cannot have been bare but stocked with relics of our pre-war vie de château, nothing would ever equal the glamorous profusion of the Merzes’ accumulated bounty, and in any case existence soon changed radically. My mother went, nanny not long after; what had once been my playroom was in a now unheatable part of the house too remote and spooky even in summer for me to visit ever again; my interests turned to outdoor and farmyard life. When there was time to play, I made my games with shapes I cut out from cardboard boxes, twigs and sticks and pebbles as well as the worn-out tennis balls. Meanwhile there was my father, chained to his possessions. The Collection: how I failed, being too young and know-all, to see any virtue or beauty in it (a catalogue of the sale by auction, turned up recently, shows that some of his things were beautiful); how I despised him for his attachment to ‘objects’, objects which I, conceitedly rational, wanted him to sell off so that we should not have to worry over being able or unable to buy other things. However unfeeling this was, the fact remains that the last years of my father’s life were almost entirely circumscribed, and not happily so, by his possessions. To this day I have to be careful not to look down on other people’s objects and would not own more than a minimum (a relative term) of them, serviceable ones at that, and would swap most potential acquisitions for the joys and comforts, ephemeral though they may be, of the day’s living. In my later youth, personal accumulations other than of a featherweight portable nature were not practicable or envisaged. I had a room of my own, blessedly, wherever I was staying. It was seldom the same room the second time round. If I left as much as a pair of tennis shoes, it would vanish. By the time I was thirteen I had attained to a state of possessionlessness appropriate to a monk.
What did we do about books, then, my mother and I? Well, we always had them. Florentine bookshops, parcels from England, finds off landlords’ shelves, the Tauchnitz Edition, those invaluable continental paperbacks of that time when even railway stalls would offer well-printed copies of anything from Dickens and Kipling to Temple Thurston and Conan Doyle. My mother’s bed was a-stack with books, notebooks, lists, letters: letters received, letters begun, long letters sometimes finished; the paper pond Alessandro called it, and only she knew how to fish it. The Criterion? Gibbon Vol. II? Your brother’s tailor’s bill? Here: under the tea tray, in that kitten’s paw (there were dogs and cats sitting on that pond in lieu of ducks and geese). No, we never lacked books, though the books too got lost, left behind, were replaced.
Perversely the sole items that were treasured, kept, passed from hand to hand, were compromising, not to say dangerous, possessions, not openly come by; I am speaking of copies of the New Statesman (eventually they included even certain copies of The Times). It was I who was charged with circulating the latest issue – children assumed to be politically innocent in the eyes of the strolling Carabinieri – to the dissident’s grocery shop or the suspended professor’s villa.
When did this begin? At first it was more an undercurrent, a concern shared by some we knew, a distaste rather than a menace, if never quite out of sight and mind; even in my earliest memories of Italy I cannot detach the country from the ubiquitous images of Fascism. Each time I returned there were more black-shirts in the streets, more marching and strutting, more boasts and lies in the newspapers, more posters on the walls. I saw what was to be seen, my mother interpreted and briefed me. What was being put over (by Musso & Co.) was, she was never in doubt, based on trickery and false values, sanctified aggression, pandered to false pride; it made ignorant youth feel important, gave foolish people spurious hopes – it was dangerous stuff. Alessandro, informed by an old, old patience, was more inclined to shrug it off: it was bad, there was little in politics that was not … Hadn’t they seen it all before, Invasion, Defeat, Occupation; Attila, Buonaparte, the Austrians … They come, they go, we survive, it will pass. Everything does, my mother would say, but when? And meanwhile …? Oh, Italians have no talent for public life, they may be for it – justice, disinterested administration – but they don’t know how to get it: they accept corruption. (Crack jokes about it as you do, Alessandro.) When their rulers are too bad, they duck; retreat into personal relations, family relations – there you’ll find riches of good behaviour, devotion and honour as well as endurance and courage. Out in politics they are opportunists and show-offs, clever when they ought to be straightforward, rhetorical when they ought to go home and think, and they haven’t learned how to compromise without treachery. (She would turn to me, Oh how lucky you are being brought up in England, I’m so glad you are getting a liberal education.) It won’t stick, Alessandro said, Musso’s dream: playing lions, days without pasta, little boys carrying daggers, it�
�s too silly, we’re not cut out for regimentation.
Not individually. But what about the yelling in Piazza Venezia? Crowds are vulnerable to a harangue, to torches and lit-up façades and the prospects of glamour, even sham glamour – and not only Italian crowds, are there many people who have learnt to be consistently human en masse?
* * *
As it happened I had just been sent for again so I was there in the summer of 1924 – we had taken a house on the Sorrentine peninsula – when Matteotti, the leader of the opposition as it were, was kidnapped and murdered.1 We were out at sea in an open fishing boat that August day when another boat hove to and men shouted the news that Matteotti was dead – his body had been found in a hole. How shocked we were then and how hopeful. In the ensuing weeks people came to us, buoyed, euphoric, counting straws in the wind – the regime would not be able to weather such outrage, Mussolini was going to fall. Too soon it became clear that it had indeed been a turning point, that the deed, the criminal deed, the big enough deed had paid off (as nine years on, the burning of the Reichstag paid off): Matteotti gone, opposition suppressed, il Fascismo acclaimed, getting the upper hand. And so more tales – only they were not tales – of official chicanery, neighbours and relatives sacked from university posts or refused renewal of their annual patent to practise as doctors and lawyers because they had failed to become party members or to vote sì at the plebiscites, house searches next door (always for papers, books, not drugs nor arms), purges, disappearances, nocturnal arrests became part of our daily experience. It was early and at first hand that I learnt what life can be like when there is no freedom of thought, and rule by decree, not law.
One of Alessandro’s brothers went off to live in Ireland with an Englishwoman he had met, another decided to continue his studies in Vienna; Alessandro himself suspended all thought of qualifying as an architect. We trundled along day by day: we swam, we walked, we played games, we listened to my mother; often there were stimulating guests. Cousins, too, strayed in, stayed on, a good-looking lot they were, every boy of them. And at the centre of it all was my mother’s marriage. What appeared of it, the surface of it was low-key, curiously ordinary as if they were both resolved to ignore their great disparity of age. (In actual years, he was nearer to me than to her.) His feeling for her showed mainly in a kind of watchfulness: whatever she was doing, whomever she was talking to, he was alert, aware of her in the room, in the next room, tense to be off and by her side even before the summons; yet his actual manner was bantering, light, smoothing out the recurrent crises – she was always late, always losing the essential objects, ticket, key, at the stage that mattered. His humorous, protective ease did not tally with the sombre despair of the very young man, the melancholy aloof young man of our first encounters. Was it being married that changed people so? And what of her? It was she who puzzled me. She seemed … well, content, complacent one might say, taking his attendance casually (as she did mine): it was well, it was daylight, settled, domestic. Had I dreamt it all? The wind of passion, the heart-piercing isolation, the sense of foreboding in the days when we were fugitives at Agrigento?
And then it would be time for me to go. The summer or the span of winter weeks was over; back to England then by another of my devious little journeys. Did I mind? Yes and no. Sad to leave Italy; looking forward to I didn’t know quite what (a notion that some day there might be other fish for me to fry in England?). I felt more free there in my detached existence with Susan and Jack, if not without a twinge of guilt about the misconceptions my mother appeared to accumulate about its nature and which I was wary to dispel.
* * *
Thus Italy and England as I grew older, as I grew up, were home base. Strictly speaking I had no home in either: I lived there, in those two countries – as I would in later life, intermittently, not definitely – lived, felt at home, at home on a visit. Italy I loved. At the beginning, in childhood, the love was romantic: I was carried away by a warmth of life and by the recognition, yet unformulated, that there among those artefacts and landscapes I stood on the ground of an intense and relevant European civilisation (the conscious taking in of the visual experience came later). My attachment to England was instinctive, a bid for, if not roots, a kind of self-preservation. From early on I had the absolute if shadowy conviction that I would become a writer and nothing else; I held on to the English language as the rope to save me from drifting awash in the fluidities of multilingualism that surrounded me. My German beginnings I discounted, sought to obliterate. In this I succeeded for a number of years until the force of circumstances became too great.
1 Giacomo Matteotti, if I may briefly recall the events, Secretary General of the Italian Socialist Party, then still legal, attacked the Fascist regime in Parliament on 30th May 1924 (the speech was published in the British Press); on 10th June he was abducted by hired thugs; on 16th August his body was discovered. There was an abortive inquiry. At the time the murder appeared to shake the regime up to a point; as we know, it survived.
PART FOUR
Anchorage: France
1
BY 1926 THE ANGLO-ITALIAN pattern was disrupted: less than two years after the murder of Matteotti, the Italian base was whisked from under my feet. A summons to join my mother came in an envelope that bore a French stamp with over-printed legend Sanary-sur-mer-ses-sites-son-climat. When I had managed to separate place from travel slogan, I went to look for it on a map: Sanary-sur-Mer in small print on the south coast of France between the great ports of Toulon and Marseille.
‘One autumn in the late nineteen-twenties for no particular reason at all, as it would seem, we began to live in France.’ So I wrote elsewhere. It is true, except that it was spring and in the mid-, not the late nineteen-twenties, and that the decision, my mother’s and Alessandro’s, to leave Italy was a reasoned and possibly a wise one. Without being substantially active as resistants, their views were evident to all who liked to pry. A New Statesman once too often under my pinafore. They were compromised. They neither fled nor were they exiled; they left discreetly. They were able to retain their passports – Europe was entering an epoch where having documents was vital – and became officially described as members of the Italian colony in France. So far so rational. It was the choice of their destination that was fortuitous. They were on a train, it was evening, they had crossed the border: they were out of Italy, bowling along the French coast encumbered with much luggage and their three Japanese spaniels, one of them a bitch and near her time. It was a slow train – they had muffed the better connections – stopping every few minutes. I have forgotten where they were originally bound for, Aix-en-Provence? Saint-Jean-de-Luz? They had laid some plans. What happened was that after a few hours my mother got tired, and tired of the train. She said they might as well call it a day and get off at the next stop whatever that might be. This they did. It was late, the station was a shed and dimly lit; there was a little country bus outside and it took them and their belongings to the nearest available hotel on a nocturnal waterfront. The Hôtel de la Tour. (Still standing.) Next morning they were able to take their bearings – a radiant day, a view on a small fishing port – and liked what they saw. Alessandro was for pushing on to where they had meant to go, my mother became reluctant to budge. Did it matter when one started a new life? And by now there were Chumi’s puppies: a hint from the gods to remain? Poor Alessandro, he must have been used by then to her superstitions and the fatalism that so easily served her tendency – alas inherited by me – to settle for the line of least resistance. Within a week they had moved into a furnished bungalow at Port Issol, one of Sanary’s small beaches.
That house, the first of many, was rented by the month, and when some time later I too was catapulted into the Département du Var, I saw my summer there as another transitory episode. I was fifteen. As it turned out I remained there for the best part of the next fourteen years. In this manner France became the nearest thing I’d ever known as home.
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