We met all the local worthies and unworthies and there was much drinking and the usual expatriate bitchery and the stuffiness of a tiny colony. The island is beautiful—particularly the mountain—but I’d rather live in Porto than Forio.248
We spent the night on Ischia and returned to Naples next afternoon. Then yesterday drove to Pompeii and Vesuvius. After much hunting around, we found the pornographic pictures—Cadmus is far better—all hidden under wooden shutters. The strangely delicate chichi of the painting—a sad little culture, I felt, over which there’s no need to get sentimental. It was like excavating Tony Duquette. Most of Pompeii is just plain ruins, with the usual amount of shit and empty bottles in odd corners.
Then on to Vesuvius, which I didn’t reach the top of because I couldn’t face the chair lift. (My vertigo works chiefly upward.) Now I’m sorry. However, Don went up. He has been in very good spirits lately—except on Ischia, where he went through his usual reactions to large groups of strangers. But today his tongue is suddenly and mysteriously stained black. At least, we hope it’s stain. He’s worried about this, naturally. My current ailment is a disgusting taste of decay when I suck on my capped tooth, which worries me, of course.
November 7. Just got back from doing the Amalfi drive in a hired car—not quite all of it, but we went beyond Amalfi as far as Ravello, where we had lunch at a good but expensive restaurant, the Caruso, on a terrace overlooking the bay, and saw the wonderful church with pulpit supported by lions. We also went in swimming at Positano. It was a beautiful day, though a little hazy. The first view of Positano is one of the most sensational things I’ve ever seen in my life. You expect the whole town to spill down into the sea, and the cliffs to crash over and fall on top of it.
Yesterday was not such a success. I refused to go on the chair lift at Anacapri—more on principle than because it scared me—and Don did go and was late and we had to plunge vertically down to the harbor to catch the boat in a taxi, which made me sick to my stomach. But there was an annoyance before this—a typical piece of Italian trickery. We got in a motorboat to go to the Blue Grotto, and were only then told we’d have to pay extra for a rowboat to go inside, and there was a long long wait, while other boats jostled each other and passengers screamed as they lay down to pass through the uterine entrance. The grotto’s blue all right, but less impressive than I’d hoped. I think I might like Capri to live in, though. It has some of the suntrap snugness of Ventnor.
We have quite a nice hotel here in Sorrento—the Eden—with views of the sea and the mountains. Don has succeeded in scrubbing the black off his tongue. But my tooth still tastes foul.
November 11. Bad days. We got to Rome on the 8th, and are now staying in a room in a very untidy apartment belonging to Stanley Moss, an American poet who works on Botteghe Oscura,249 and his beautiful Spanish wife. On the 9th I had to go to the dentist to see about my tooth. He pulled off the cap and a torrent of rotting food matter came out. He hopes he can save it.
Yesterday, Don had an outburst about the rudeness of a young writer named Bill Weaver, and today I cancelled all the dates Iris [Tree] had made for us. Her feelings were hurt, but it was all to the good. I get so furious when I feel I’m being socially exploited, and why should I be, on holiday?
Torrents of rain yesterday—but we saw St. Peter’s, and today we went to the Forum and the Colosseum, and it was warm and lovely. Chief impression of Rome: dampness, mottled walls, dim green gloom, the smell of the past. The cats of Rome, everywhere—defying Iris’s muzzled dog. And the awful insane traffic tearing everywhere—especially the auto-scooters.
Iris is very sweet and quite pathetic—very low on money—trying to get on with her novel, which is charming.
With her usual genius for house finding she has discovered an apartment on the roof, overlooking the Spanish Steps. It has a fountain in the wall of the bed-sitting room, and you reach it by a circular iron outside ladder (against which I bumped my head agonizingly this evening). The first time we went up there, Iris wasn’t home, so we waited on the roof outside her door. And so it came about that we saw that amazing sight—the thousands of starlings (or swifts) circling and swooping in clouds, thickening to dark blobs, diving with an uncanny, frightening speed down over the rooftops out of the yellow sunset sky.
November 12. I just wish to record that I’m unhappy, tense, and worried. But that will pass. The weather is beautiful again this morning and it’s still early. I’ve just written cards to M., Stephen, John Lehmann and Willie Maugham about our impending approach. Now I must get up and go to the dentist. We have gotten off on the wrong foot here—spent too much money already and isolated ourselves by refusing Iris’s plans for getting us invited. And yet I suppose, in retrospect, sightseeing memories will loom bigger than the discomfort of this apartment and the constant worry about Don—he’s in a difficult, neurotic state, and seems about to start a cold.
This morning, waking up, I thought how we kept saying, that night in Tangier, “I have taken hashish”—and how, throughout one’s life, one ought to keep reminding oneself, “I have taken maya. This is just an intoxication. It isn’t the reality.”
Iris talked very interestingly about Krishnamurti last night. I think he has been her really big experience as a teacher, and she made him sound very convincing. But I know that his way isn’t mine, and he could never have helped me as Swami has.
November 14. It’s hard to imagine just how this period will appear in retrospect. At present, I’m not really happy here. We’ve found nothing to do with our evenings—no movies or plays we can understand (except some uninteresting U.S. films) and few people we can see, and apparently almost no amusing café or bar life. Yet Rome imposes itself solidly. The unexpected glimpses—the sudden coming upon a fountain or a pillar or a cypress seen through an archway—those are the most memorable.
With Iris again yesterday—long rambling talks about the people she knows. And she read us poetry—sympathetically but not well. I see her somewhat marooned here, in spite of talk that it’s so much better than California. But is it? Milton Gendel, her nice friend who works for Olivetti, confesses he finds the place provincial and only half-alive, though he loves the city. And if it’s so wonderful, why does every Italian (allegedly) want to emigrate to the U.S.? It can’t be just the lure of TV and automobiles. Or can it?
Bill Weaver, with whom we had lunch yesterday, says Clare Luce250 is despised and hated here, and Spellman is known as Cardinal Dollars.251
Rain threatens again this morning. It’s a real nuisance and menace. We are going to a place where you can get a bath—then hunting old movie magazines, shoes and shirts. Don is restless, but was better yesterday. In some way, this travelling makes him feel more than ever insecure. He acts badly and then, as he admits, hates me for making him feel guilty. As for me, I’m depressed by my growing fatness, brought on by all this fried food. But yesterday evening, at Don’s suggestion, we went to bed without supper. Am reading John Symonds’s life of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast. What a dreary mess!
Am disinclined to take mescaline at present. The circumstances are all wrong. No calm.
The truly awful thing about Crowley is that one suspects he didn’t really believe in anything. Even his wickedness. Perhaps the only thing that wasn’t fake was his addiction to heroin and cocaine.
November 15. Milton Gendel drove us and Iris out to Tivoli today. But it got very cold and rained and we did not get to see the Villa d’Este or Hadrian’s Villa. Yesterday we went to Denny [Fouts]’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery, and I cried. It all seemed such a wretched tangle—his life, and mine too. I’m depressed here, and I guess I depress Don too. Europe, in its autumn, reminds me of my own. And I seem to myself to look older every day. And I feel no ripening, no resignation. I don’t want to get old or die. “Instead of ripening like an apple, I’m getting older like a worn-out boot.”
November 19. It has turned much colder, and this unheated room is pretty wretched—not to me
ntion the misery of washing and shaving in cold water. Also, Don is sick. His tongue keeps turning black—despite his drastic scrapings of it. This afternoon we’re going to see a doctor. I’m more worried about this than I admit to him.
Otherwise, however, things are much more cheerful. Four nights ago, we ran into Chuck Turner252 at a party, and he has been very sweet and helpful, driving us around in his car. We’re planning to drive with him to Milan, the week after next. In the interim, we juggle plans around—either to go to Venice first. Or to pay a flying visit to Athens and Istanbul.
Yesterday we went to the Vatican museums. The Sistine chapel is certainly terrific, but I don’t like its shape or all the surplus decoration—the non-Michelangelo pictures. And I hate the forest of white new plaster fig leaves on all the statues. What I really liked best was the Angelico chapel, which no one ever told me about.
Chuck drove us out to lunch in Ostia, with an Italian friend of his, Enrico Medioli. Enrico told us how, during the war, his family used to play a joke on friends, serving an “economy lunch” consisting of salted hot water, boiled bones, and a “Swedish dessert,” snow with a drop of wine on it and an apple skin. The guests were, of course, too polite to protest. Later they were given a proper meal.
Last night, at a party at Bill Weaver’s, I met [Alberto] Moravia, a worried, aggressive, unhappy man with a limp. He spoke of his play about the Cenci and told me [Frederic] Prokosch’s novel wasn’t much good.253 Fritz [Prokosch] was there too, and he too seemed restless and unhappy. He has quite lost his wonderful good looks.
The city is all yellows and browns—the buildings and the autumn leaves. It seems relatively very small and exceedingly provincial. The only “important” play is Visconti’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Everybody knows everybody. The scandal mongering is of the usual snickering-snobbish Latin kind.
November 20. Don’s tongue was due to a harmless fungus, possibly caused by taking penicillin. This was the diagnosis of a nice Dr. Hirschfeld (a distant relative of Magnus) who knows Tennessee and Truman Capote and had read Goodbye to Berlin.
Another bad evening. We went out with Bill Weaver and Don got cross because Bill ignored him in conversation; he wanted to go home, and then I got cross. It’s hardly worth recording, but it’s well to remember the downs with the ups. And I have to watch myself all of the time.
This morning we more or less decided to cut out Athens and Istanbul and go instead to Venice during the interval before leaving Rome for good. The other project is just too expensive, especially as we know nobody in either city.
So cold here. The Mosses lent us their stove and it smoked. Got a hot bath, however.
November 22. Yesterday we started into a phase of fine and warmer weather—long may it continue! We have now definitely decided to leave for Venice tomorrow. Athens and Istanbul are to be skipped, or visited later, on the way back to the States.
On Sunday (20th) we went out to Hugh Chisholm’s villa, on the Old Appian Way. Hugh and Brad Fuller are leaving very soon for the States. Hugh, now grey haired and silvery voiced and a little sad and infinitely gracious, is suffering from ulcers—so he must not be worried about anything. He has to keep very very quiet. He has the air of lowering his voice in the presence of his own sickness. His hands shake a little. When he leaves the room, Brad takes his arm.
Among other guests, we met a youngish dark man with a stoop, named Filippo Sanjust, who is a painter.254 He turned out to be a highly informed fan of mine, and also a mine of information about Rome. Yesterday he drove us out to see Hadrian’s Villa and the Villa d’Este, which is almost the most wonderful thing I’ve seen so far—a cathedral of water. The sun was setting and the gardens can never have been more romantic. What makes them so marvellous is that the place is so small and enclosed. You feel the power of the water. It seems to be all around you—spurting up at you, bursting out over you, shooting out horizontally from every angle. And the dank alleys of cypress and the mottled stone stairs—
Meanwhile Filippo held forth, without ever stopping, being both brilliant and boring simultaneously. He talked as if he hadn’t talked for a week. He claimed that no great artist has ever been a Roman—that Rome is an imaginary city which has existence only as an artistic ideal.
Later. We just saw Iris who told us, quite casually, that Friedrich has divorced (or is divorcing) her to marry “one of his followers” who is going to have a baby. She added: “I think he rather hates the whole thing.” She seemed sad and nervous, and I was really distressed to hear this about Friedrich, because, in some way, they belong together although they spend so much time apart.
Speaking of Filippo Sanjust, I was struck by the casual, proprietary way he struck matches and climbed up on the altar of the church on the Piazza del Popolo, in order to show us the Caravaggios.
November 24. It’s incredible, but we are really and truly in Venice—and outside our hotel window is the end of the Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute and the tower of San Giorgio away to the left across the water, just as in all the watercolors and oils and photographs I’ve known since childhood.
We arrived last night, after a long long train ride from Rome, and came up from the station on a motor launch in a thick fog. Nothing but a few blurred lights visible. And the utter dank canal cold in our bones. Today has been only misty, with beautiful faint golden sunshine—Venice by Turner, not Canaletto. Tonight it’s quite clear—the lights sharp, and canals full of lamp glitter. We’re off to a Thanksgiving party at Peggy Guggenheim’s.
November 28. Peggy Guggenheim turned out to be a bottle-nosed, potbellied woman with dyed black hair—“good-natured,” I guess, in the rough and tough manner of rich American women. She tried to sell me a picture by an artist she’d discovered. But the chief advantage of our visit was that we met Martyn Coleman and his friend Bill Ames. I used to know Martyn Coleman in the days when he was in Los Angeles at the beginning of the war. We’ve seen them both several times since then and they’ve shown us around. Martyn reminds me so much of Chris [Wood]—his battered slimness, his anti-American grumbling and his general determination to retire into a shell. They are fitting up an apartment overlooking the Grand Canal—taking the kind of trouble over it which never fails to depress me and make me feel guilty. Building the house upon the sand. Incidentally—and this is also very Chris Wood—Martyn has let his British citizenship lapse and now he’s stateless, unless he’s ready to settle for seven years in England. He says he wouldn’t live anywhere but in Italy.
Tonight we leave by train for Rome. Two days there, then off again with Chuck Turner in his car to Milan.
Impressions of Venice: The gondolas, black against the glitter of the water, with upcurving bow and stern, and the rowers bent forward at such an angle that their movement seems to have an extreme urgency. The dark cold of black canal water between sunless walls. The terrifying pigeons of St. Mark, whizzing past your ears like jets. The tidy, leafy streets of the Lido, like a German town. The Tintoretto crucifixion.255 The incredible heavy gold ceilings of the Ducal Palace. The soapsuds flooding the canal from hotel washing machines. The snugness of lighted restaurants in the narrow streets. The strange sinister silence of the winter afternoon on Torcello, with its deserted gardens and fields, and the mud flats all around. The gold of the Fenice Theater—but what’s the use of writing all this down? There is nothing left to say about Venice. There’s just the incredulity of finding oneself there—like having stepped into a picture.
December 3. This is being written merely in order not to break my record. So much has happened so fast that I can’t go into details. Also, I have to go out to supper with the others in a few minutes.
We are in Florence.
On Tuesday last, 29th, we got back to Rome. Left on December 1st by car, with Chuck Turner. Spent that night in San Gimignano. Spent last night here.
Mixed impressions. The towers of San Gimignano, which I’ve known all my life from M.’s pictures, very Gordon Craig
,256 especially at night: the light tower against two dark ones. The nervousness of Viterbo, on a dark day, very depressing and not even sinister: one saw how awful the Middle Ages must have been when it rained. Florence doesn’t so far impress me greatly as a city—but the statues! and the paintings! Favorites: Michelangelo’s David (oddly enough) and the Duke of Urbino in meditation and Night257 and the Victory.258 The bronze doors of the Baptistery facing the Duomo—particularly the deceit upon Esau.259 The satyrs around the fountain of the Piazza della Signoria. The staircase of the Laurenziana Library. At the Uffizi—Cimabue’s crucifix, Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, van der Goes’ Adoration [of the Shepherds], Dürer’s Adoration [of the Kings], Altdorfer’s Martyrdom of St. Florian, Bellini’s Sacred Allegory, all the Caravaggios,260 the two Guardis,261 the Magnasco,262 Rubens’s Isabella Brandt. But my head is whirling—and tomorrow we have to see the Pitti, and leave for the next place!
Don’s tongue is still black, despite treatment.
We left Iris with a mescaline tablet and begged her to lay in stores of sugar for the experiment.
December 7. At the Manin Hotel in Milan, with a cold coming on and a general fit of the blues. It’s grey and wintry up here in the north. Am just finishing Villette, which is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. Don is delighted with Wuthering Heights.263 I’ve made up my mind to cut down on food to a minimum and lose some weight. Never have I been more toadlike.
Chuck Turner left us yesterday evening, on the train for Paris. Tomorrow he sails for the States. He’s a strange cagey boy, underneath his surface charm—intensely ambitious and on his guard against everybody. Once again I see that bottomless American insecurity.
Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1 Page 82
