The Fighter_Literary Essays

by Tim Parks

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  With the fall of Rome in July 1849, Venice was now the only rebel town in Italy. The Austrian army were dug in on the terra firma all around the town and they controlled the sea, if not the lagoon; capitulation was only a matter of time. As Keates’s story draws to a close his language grows more coloured and emotional, attractively so. He seems to have forgotten now his irony at the expense of the Bandiera brothers and their futile sacrifice. Close by inclination to the peace-loving and pragmatic Manin, he has nevertheless been seduced, as his readers will be too, by the heroism and excitement of the final, futile Venetian defence, particularly the disciplined resistance of Fort Marghera at the landward end of the railway causeway, where for many days a mixture of Neapolitan artillerymen and Venetian and Swiss volunteers sacrificed their lives under the fiercest bombardment, killing large numbers of enemy troops as they did so.

  A section of the railway causeway is blown up to prevent the Austrian advance across the lagoon. Cannonballs rain down on the city’s ancient churches and monuments. Little boys collect the iron balls to restock Venetian munitions. Artists are present to paint the smoke and fires reflected in the lagoon. Other more priceless paintings are destroyed. Patriotic operas are performed. Food is scarce. The hospitals groan with amputees. Cholera victims are dying in their hundreds. The people demand that ancient religious icons be brought out and paraded. The soldiers engage in orgies with prostitutes, male and female. Syphilis is rife. Meanwhile, trapped in a rhetoric of last-ditch heroism, everybody is afraid to advocate surrender. Defeatists have been beaten and lynched. Manin himself wavers. At the last, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the diminutive bespectacled lawyer with his frock coat and fussy beard is finally and officially installed as dictator only so that the responsibility for capitulation can rest on the most popular man’s shoulders. The final image of the gondola bearing the white flag reminds us how Venice transforms almost any event, however desperate, into an aesthetic experience.

  Had Venice become part of a free and unified Italy as a result of the heroics of 1848, then Manin would doubtless be a major presence in Italy’s collective memory. He was a man without glaring defects. He had none of Garibaldi’s ferocious anti-clericalism, Mazzini’s inflexible fanaticism. He was not a subtle and ambiguous politician like Cavour, nor a pompous incompetent like the kings of Piedmont. But it didn’t happen. Venice was added to a united Italy in the most humiliating way possible. After yet another Piedmontese defeat at the hands of the Austrians in 1866, Vienna nevertheless handed Venice to Paris who passed it on to Italy. So today, if I ask my children, educated from start to finish in Italian schools, who Manin was, they have only the vaguest notion. But then they have very little notion of the Risorgimento at all. Indeed it is hard to think of a single hero who is wholly revered in Italy in the way, say, Nelson has recently been admired in England. One problem perhaps is that almost every episode of the Risorgimento recalls divisions that are not entirely resolved today, in particular the tension between state and church, ideologies and nationalism. Exiled from Italy after the siege, Manin died in Paris in 1857. He was fifty-three. After unification his body was returned to Venice where the church authorities denied him burial in the Basilica of San Marco. ‘Every Italian’, Leopardi reflected in 1826, ‘is more or less equally honoured and dishonoured.’8

  The Superman’s Virgins

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  [Gabriele D’Annunzio]

  NOTHING DRIVES A narrative better than repression. When we hear in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure of Angelo’s ruthless purity we are already determined that it be corrupted. This man must be humiliated by lust. Nothing else will satisfy us. When we see a story entitled ‘The Virgins’, we are tensed for the deflowering. All the stories in this book are essentially tales of awakening, but not the kind that brings enlightenment. Rather, the lucid mind is overwhelmed by a compulsion before which every rule and taboo is suddenly obsolete. A river, usually no more than a distant murmur, has broken its banks. The everyday world is submerged in sensuality, utterly sexualised. Sensory perceptions fantastically enhanced, the will drowns in a flood of feeling.

  Transgression is usually taken as a sign of authenticity in a writer. The poet’s sins assure us that he is the real thing. Not so with D’Annunzio. On the rare occasions he does nudge his way into the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, it is always for the wrong reasons. He is the rabid nationalist who urged Italy to join the First War. He is the egocentric adventurer whose mad volunteers, in defiance of international law, occupied Fiume on the north Adriatic coast in 1919. He preached the superman (along with Carlyle and Nietzsche and Shaw), was friends with Mussolini. Even his sexual trespasses win him little credit. There is something farcical about the ageing man who orders the bells of his villa to be rung whenever he achieves orgasm with the nth mistress. An old alliance between piety and caution, between church and socialism – something we have recently learned to call political correctness – has written off D’Annunzio as a monomaniac. His style, they tell us, is excessive, verbose. They don’t want us to open his books. I was kept away for years.

  A dozen pages of ‘The Virgins’ will dispel these prejudices. D’Annunzio surprises. One of two unmarried sisters is dying of typhus. These young women have given up their lives to God and to the community, teaching catechism and basic grammar to children in their home. The priest arrives to give extreme unction. The host is placed on a tongue dark with blood and mucus. The evocation of a suffocatingly religious, peasant household, of a mortal sickness in all its ugliness, stench and mental stupor, is dense and marvellously paced. Sentence by sentence, we are waiting for the woman to die, begging for it to be over.

  Giuliana doesn’t die, and D’Annunzio is not just another practitioner of nineteenth-century social realism. Far from cancelling out the old Adam and ushering another soul through the pearly gates, the last rites appear to have returned Giuliana to a state before the Fall. She is back from the dead and intensely sensitive to the mystery of her healing body, as if experiencing the throes of a second puberty. A subtle symbolism informs the plot but, as with Hardy’s or Lawrence’s finest work, it springs naturally from the world we know, offering but never imposing a possible order. In the shameless hunger of first convalescence, Giuliana searches the house for food while her sister is away at Mass. She finds an old apple and bites deep to the seeds. A heady, rosy perfume is released. Giuliana laughs, as anyone returning to health would laugh, and laughter is of the devil. She finds a mirror, studies her face, then, more boldly, her naked body. All at once we have a fiercely sexed young woman, adult and virgin, dangerously innocent, living and sleeping beside a sister who, in her repressive religious devotion, seems ‘the corpse of a martyr’.1 It is Camilla who is dead. Not Giuliana.

  At last the convalescent goes to the window and draws back the curtain. The smell of fresh bread drifts up seductively from the bakery below, the blast of the trumpet sounds the hours from the nearby barracks where the soldiers whistle to the passing girls. The reader is gripped by a powerful sense that something tremendous is about to happen.

  Place is important. Pescara is at the same latitude as Rome on the Italian peninsula, but on the opposite coast, the Adriatic. Busy, provincial, backward, the town forms a ribbon of chaotic life between coastal pine woods and rugged hills that rise steeply to the high plateaux of the Abruzzo mountains. Winter rains and snow fill the streets with rushing water. Spring is an explosion of rich smells. The violent summer sun glares off white limestone, tortures the dark vegetation, glitters on the sea. Himself in love with extremity, D’Annunzio has an uncanny ability to capture every manifestation of climate and landscape, bucolic or grotesque, threatening or lush. Far from being superfluous, his descriptions set in motion the brooding drama of a huge and inexorable natural process, against which the moral pretensions of religion and society are increasingly felt to be meaningless. In one of these stories a bleeding woman stumbles into a house to collapse and die, while a soli
tary, blind old man taps uncomprehendingly about the corpse with his stick. Nothing could better express D’Annunzio’s sense of the fatal elusiveness of life and death to rational enquiry.

  Altered states of mind, sickness, passion, delirium are the norm. A woman and her husband’s brother are pampering her young daughter in the presence of his elderly mother. Adult fingers meet by chance in the child’s thick blond hair; unplanned and unwanted a passion begins that sweeps away the claims of parenthood, the duties of son to dying mother. ‘Aren’t you afraid of having a spell cast on you?’2 one character asks in another story. You should be, is D’Annunzio’s answer. It is this apprehension of the mind’s subjection to the magic of the world, or to organic processes if you like, coupled with a conviction that established prescriptions for good behaviour are quite obsolete, that will ultimately lead D’Annunzio to his cult of the superman, the figure whose will is so strong that he can stamp new patterns of value on life. That dangerous figure is absent from these stories, which present us rather with life’s victims, yet latent all the same, and understandable.

  Teaching proper Italian to their infant pupils, the two virgin sisters broke up the language into its constituent parts – la, le, li, lo, lu, they made the children repeat, nar, ner, nir, nor, nur … Returning to new life after her terrible illness, Giuliana listens to her sister repeating these formulae – ram, rem, rim, rom, rum3 – and finds them intolerable. She sobs and beats her fists on the pillow. These rigid patterns and divisions are death to those truly alive. The moment can be considered emblematic of the birth of modernism. From now on everything is to be mixed and fizzing with life: male and female, ugly and beautiful, sacred and profane, poetry and prose, above all good and evil. The most unexpected words appear together, sacred images disclose all their eroticism, erotic gestures are made in complete innocence. Decades before their day, this is the world of Lawrence and Joyce.

  A Pagan in Italy

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  [Lawrence and Italy]

  WAKE UP! THIS is the experience. At any moment Lawrence may say something startling. It could be brutal: ‘If I were a dictator I’d hang that man.’1 It could be hilarious: the Sicilians ‘pour over each other like melted butter over parsnips.’2 Or it might be at once surreal and rivetingly exact: ‘Cypresses are candles to keep darkness aflame in full sunshine.’3 But whatever the nature of the surprise, Lawrence infallibly reproduces the sensation he himself seeks when he travels: sudden confrontation with strangeness, that special alertness aroused by phenomena that demand explanation. ‘I was startled into consciousness’4 he tells us of one encounter. Or again. ‘I went into the church. It was very dark, and impregnated with centuries of incense. It affected me like the lair of some enormous creature. My senses were roused, they sprang awake in the hot, spiced darkness. My skin was expectant, as if it expected some contact, some embrace …’5

  We mustn’t ask Lawrence for information. It’s not a kind of knowledge he’s interested in. He won’t give us hard facts about Italy. They can be found in a guidebook. Surprised and touched by what he sees, he wants to touch and surprise us. ‘Rather gentle and lovely’, he tells us of a painting in an Etruscan tomb, ‘is the way the man touches the woman under the chin, with a delicate caress. That again is one of the charms of the Etruscan paintings: they really have the sense of touch; the people and the creatures are all really in touch. It is one of the rarest qualities, in life as well as in art.’6

  But one wouldn’t want this kind of abrupt and intimate contact with just anybody. ‘I should loathe to have to touch him’7 Lawrence tells us of a particularly ugly character at the train station in Messina. So if we’re going to get involved with a writer whose embrace more often feels like that of the wrestler than the friend, we need to know where he’s coming from. With Lawrence, biography is vital.

  Invalided out of teaching, or indeed any form of strenuous employment, by an attack of pneumonia in 1911, the twenty-six-year-old Lawrence at once plunged into the most strenuous love affair. In 1912, after only a few weeks’ acquaintance, he ran off with the German wife of his ex-professor at university. Six years his elder, a mother of three, Frieda Weekley, née Richthofen, was not sure how serious the affair was until, without her permission, Lawrence wrote to her husband and told him what was going on. She immediately and openly betrayed her presumptuous lover with a German friend.

  Lawrence and Frieda were staying with her family in Germany. Having prised her away from husband and children, Lawrence now dragged her from her new man and her mother to take a strenuous walk across the Alps from Bavaria to Italy. They set off with two male friends and Frieda promptly betrayed Lawrence with one of them. But on arrival at the northern tip of Lake Garda on the Italian side of the Alps, their friends went off and at last Lawrence had Frieda to himself. With the excuse that their finances were tight, he managed to rent cheaply in a small village on the western shore of the lake, the less frequented side. This is steep and rugged country between the alpine lake and the icy peaks. They had arrived in autumn with the empty, tourist-free winter ahead. It was hard to see where Frieda would find another lover now.

  Given all this drama – fidelity or betrayal, marriage or freedom, public morality versus private conviction – it’s not surprising that Lawrence tended to think of the world in terms of polarities. Ensconced in a house called Villa Igea, facing east across the lake, he now embarked on the most strenuous work programme. In the space of seven months he wrote the final version of Sons and Lovers, the story of the conflict between his father and mother, of his personal battle to become his mother’s favourite, then his battle against his mother to be allowed to have girlfriends. He also wrote two plays and much of the poetry collection Look! We Have Come Through! about his love and conflict with Frieda. And he also began the great novel The Rainbow, and another, The Lost Girl. Where, then, did he find time to learn Italian and write a travel book as well? And why, living in an area renowned for the electric sharpness of its bright air, did he call that book Twilight in Italy?

  Walking over the Alps, Lawrence notices the wayside crucifixes. Carved by untutored peasants, they depict a Christ absolutely trapped in his earthly, sensual existence yet eternally exposed to the empty brightness of the alpine snows and sky. Aside from the opposites set up here, the sensual life against the mental, dark and light, intensity and nullity, what at once has the reader alert is how Lawrence looks at these artefacts without any reference to Christian orthodoxy. The real world is always ready to take on symbolic sense for him, but it is a sense that arises from his concentration on the object itself. So even when he is in danger of becoming didactic, his eye is simply too open to be trapped in any scheme. Intensely observed, the landscape trembles with a readiness to be seized and transformed by the creative mind: ‘There was a blood-red sail,’ he tells us, looking from a parapet over Lake Garda, ‘like a butterfly breathing down on the blue water, whilst the earth on the near side gave off a green-silver smoke of olive trees, coming up and around the earth-coloured roofs.’8 On the other hand, we are always reminded that the hills are steep to climb and the air is cold.

  Opposites attract and repel each other, creating a force field of excitement and fear. So for many readers the essential Lawrence experience is that described in the poem ‘The Snake’ written a few years later in 1919. Going to get water from a drinking trough, the writer is startled by a snake. There is a powerful awareness of the otherness of the reptile; man and serpent share the same world and the same need for water, yet each inhabits a realm of consciousness unknowable to the other. It was the kind of encounter Lawrence had already described on a number of occasions, but perhaps most notably in Twilight in Italy in his meeting with the old woman spinning wool above Gargnano. It is from his reflections on this episode that we have the twilight of the book’s provocative title.

  On a terrace high above the lake, Lawrence finds an old woman, her back against a wall, head ‘tied in a dark-red kerchief, but pieces of hair, like
dirty snow, quite short, stuck out over her ears. And she was spinning.’9 The more Lawrence concentrates on the woman, the more she becomes emblematic of a different order of consciousness, or rather unconsciousness. ‘She was spinning spontaneously, like a little wind … All the time, like motion without thought, her fingers teased out the fleece …’10

  Lawrence tries out his still rudimentary Italian on the spinner but she is not interested. ‘She remained as she was, clear and sustained like an old stone upon the hillside.’11 And the difference between the two of them essentially is this: while Lawrence appreciates that her way of being lies outside his mental grasp, and hence is bound to accept that he lives in a multifarious world teeming with potentially disturbing encounters, for the old woman there is only her own knowledge, her own language, her own reality and environment, in which she is totally integrated. She doesn’t take on board his otherness. True, she hasn’t seen him before, but only in the same way that there are parts of her body she has never seen. ‘There was nothing which was not herself, ultimately.’12

  So in rural Italy Lawrence finds a form of pre-modern consciousness, something that always fascinated and attracted him. What happens when eternal opposites meet? At best, fireworks. Escaping from the woman because fearful that she will ‘deny [him] existence’,13 evening falls, the sun turns red and, very briefly, day and night become one: ‘on the length of mountain-ridge, the snow grew rosy-incandescent, like heaven breaking into blossom.’14 This, for Lawrence, is the fleeting consummation of alien worlds, a brief and magical manifestation of the oneness behind opposites.