On a fine warm day in my twentieth year, in the summer of 1946, I started to write an essay about nostalgia, sitting on a bollard beside the sea on the Molo Audace in Trieste.
There are curious connotations to the name of this jetty, which protrudes into the harbour from the piazza at the formal centre of the city. It commemorates the day in 1918 when the Italian destroyer Audace, 1,017 tons, tied up there to disembark a company of soldiers and claim Trieste on behalf of the Kingdom of Italy – for the previous century it had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although the place was no more than half Italian-speaking, and was debatably part of the Italian peninsula, this was in effect a last coup of the Risorgimento. The Audace was ecstatically welcomed with bands and rhetoric, at least by the local Italians, and the pier was at once renamed for her.
She was not, however, originally an Italian warship at all. She was laid down in Scotland in 1912 to a Japanese commission, but was transferred to the Italian Navy when Italy entered the war against Germany in 1915. After her moment of glory at Trieste she continued to serve with the Regia Marina until 1943, when the Italians surrendered to the Allies in the Second World War: she was then seized by the Germans and went to sea with the Reichsmarine. In the end she was sunk in a battle off the Dalmatian coast by her creators the British – both Britons and Germans, I have no doubt, if not Italians too by then, altogether unaware of her place in history. When I sat there that afternoon I did not know the story of the Audace either: but in retrospect her career seems to offer, with its mingled allusions of pride and pathos, absurdity, irony and oddity, not a bad beginning for a book about Europe.
It was nostalgia I was writing about then, though, Trieste having brought on a vicarious spasm of it. The second German war had ended, and I was in the city as a member of an occupying army, during a hiatus before our transference to British imperial duties in Palestine. This was my introduction to Europe. Anglo-Welsh though I am, I thought of myself then as firmly British, and I looked at everything around me, I fear, slightly de haut en bas. As Alan Moorehead once wrote, in those days the British travelled all the world like the children of rich parents. Not for a moment did I think of myself as European. I was a privileged transient from another kind of country, an oceanic country whose frontiers extended from Tasmania to Newfoundland.
I was billeted in a tall old apartment block up on the cathedral hill, with a violent shimmering view over the bay – its blues hotly blue, its evening sunshine blinding; and having time on my hands, especially in the afternoons, I would often walk down the hill, past the Roman amphitheatre, down the ceremonial staircase built by the vanquished Fascists, over the Piazza dell’ Unità d’Italia where the British and American flags flew side by side above the former Governor’s Palace, to find a convenient spot for composition at the harbour’s edge.
I had come to Trieste across a shattered, bewildered and despondent continent, which looked as though it could never recover. We knew only the half of it then, the full horrors of the Second World War and its aftermath having not yet been revealed, but it was quite enough to make me feel that I could never experience Europe in any state of grace or glory. The continual civil wars which had wracked the continent throughout the century – French against Germans, British against Italians, Czechs against Poles, Spaniards against Spaniards, Gentiles against Jews – had reached a devastating climax, and I saw all its nations as in a fearful dream, blurred and disjointed. Millions of homeless people swarmed here and there across its frontiers, or lay despondent in refugee camps, bureaucratically categorized as ‘displaced persons’. Great cities lay in ruin. Bridges were broken, roads and railways were in chaos. In the eastern forests savage partisans were still at each other’s throats. Homesick armies were dispersing in triumph or in ignominy. Conquerors from East and West flew their ensigns above the seats of old authority, and proud populations would do almost anything for a pack of cigarettes or some nylon stockings. Europe was in shock, powerless, discredited and degraded. ‘When the waters recede,’ wrote Thomas Mann from his exile in the United States, ‘Europe will have changed beyond recognition, so that one will hardly be able to speak of going home …’
Although I had never been on the continent before, I had been brought up to a vision of it. My English mother had been a student in Leipzig before the First World War, and had brought home a taste for the easy charm of the Leipzigers that she consummated, I like to think, by marrying a Welshman. Her memories had coloured my childhood ideas of Europe. It was a roseate, Old German Europe that I chiefly had in mind, and I thought of it as a romantic whole. Great writers and musicians walking the streets – lovely parks with lakes and gazebos –architecture of ancient splendour – merry student life in sunlit cafés – grand old cities of culture and history – all these, and a muddle of other Mendelssohnian notions, added up to my European ideal. It was no wonder, when I compared the actual present with the fanciful past, that nostalgia was the subject of my afternoon essay; and to make it all the more poignant it happened that the particular city I saw around me, my first European city of residence, was not shattered at all. It is true that the Western Allies, with the apostate Italians, were squabbling with Marshal Tito the Yugoslav over the future of Trieste, while in Moscow Stalin schemed to get control of it as a Mediterranean outlet for the Soviet Union. But the city had been spared the worst of war’s destructions, and stood there a little forlorn perhaps, but virtually intact – one of the fortunate moiety of European cities to look almost as they did before the war began.
In its prime it had been the principal seaport of the Habsburg Empire, a free port linked by railway direct with Vienna. Its hinterland had been the whole of central Europe, and it had acquired the ample and assured physique of nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa. Around its medieval core a grand city of commerce and finance had arisen, lining the shores with quays and warehouses, stretching inland with ornate parades of banks and exchanges and agencies and shipping offices. There were coffee-shops where littérateurs and heroes of the Risorgimento had written and plotted. There was an opera house Verdi had composed operas for. There were memories of Stendhal, Svevo, Winckelmann, James Joyce. Schooners and elderly steamers still came and went from its harbour, as in old postcards, and across the bay there stood the sweet Victorian pleasure-castle of Miramare, once the home of a Habsburg archduke, by then the headquarters of an American general.
So I was able to summon an all but genuine sense of nostalgia (nostalgia comes rarely, after all, when you are nineteen years old). Trieste made me homesick for a Europe that was gone, that I had never known except in fancy, and when I looked over the city roofs to the harsh limestone Karst above, I could imagine all the famous European capitals that lay beyond, some ruined, some bemused, one triumphant: from Belgrade and Bucharest, not so far to the east, over the Alps to Vienna, and Prague, and Geneva – to Berlin still in nightmare, and an ambivalent Rome, and Paris humiliated, and Lisbon and Madrid untouched, and away to Stockholm and Oslo and Copenhagen (and over to London, too, the city victorious, except that I did not think of London as being in Europe at all …). In 1946 one no longer often saw the bill of lading ‘Via Trieste’, which had once directed so much of the world’s trade towards the heart of Europe: but it certainly applied to me.
I was sitting, there on my bollard, at one of the continent’s fulcra, where Slavs, Teutons and Latins met, or turned their backs on one another, where the Balkans began and the Mediterranean reached its northernmost tide-reach up the wide fjord of the Adriatic. Trieste, however, had lost the advantages of its situation. Thirty-odd years earlier it had become a historical backwater, when the Habsburg Empire came to an end and the seaport forfeited its true raison d’être. No longer was this the proud gateway through which the traffic of an empire passed to and from the world outside. A hush of limbo lay over the city, especially on such a hot summer afternoon, when only an occasional schooner loitered in from Istria, and a few men fished with their lines from the quayside, now and then wandering over to see how the fellow along the quay was doing. Around the bay Miramare stood hazy on its promontory. In my memory the light was dazzling that afternoon, and the limestone ridges running away into Italy looked bleached with heat and drought.
I never did finish my maudlin essay (though I still have a draft of it, in a dog-eared notebook under the stairs): but the sensations it tried to record were to mark me for life, and I was always to associate the city of Trieste with my conception of Europe. To this day I love its feel of mordant separateness, as though time is always passing it by. It suggests to me a watcher on the shore, looking back over the ridge to the places where history is on the go, and recognizing faintly within itself, as in echo from long before, all the grand movements of peoples, moneys, dynasties, armies, beliefs and aspirations that have formed the tumultuous continent beyond.
Now, half a century on, I have returned to Trieste to sort out my own lifetime’s experience of Europe, to write this introduction in a room above the harbour, and to use the city as a point of reference for my impressions and reflections – just as I tried, so long ago, to give form there to my nostalgia. Thomas Mann was wrong, I think. If he could come back to the continent now he would know he was home after all, and my fifty years of Europe have turned out to be fifty complex years of a return to glory, if not to grace. Decade by decade I have watched Europe recover from its wounds of war, endure and escape the traumas of Communism, regain its assurance, and try to make something altogether new of itself. Some countries have risen to fresh distinction, some have been abased, some have gone on fighting that incessant civil war, but after centuries of violent rivalry, and successive attempts to make a comity of it by fair means or foul, at the end of the twentieth century Europe really is tentatively shuffling towards some kind of unity – the only adult objective for a mature community of neighbours. I myself long ago grew out of my British imperialism, found myself in Welshness, and came to realize that I had also been a European all the time; and although I have always been a solitary traveller, an onlooker, in Trieste now I no longer feel an outsider (still less, unfortunately, a child of rich parents).
It is a great place for contemplative escape anyway, a great place for sitting on quaysides in the sunshine, thinking about history and toying with the idea of writing essays. I feed upon the city’s pungent blend of the pompous, the creative, the raffish, the significant and the melancholy, and see in it always the shade of Browning’s elusive Waring – ‘What’s become of Waring/ Since he gave us all the slip?’ For Waring showed up, as you may remember, wearing a wide straw hat in the stern-sheets of a boat in the Bay of Trieste: somewhere beyond the Molo Audace, I like to suppose, out there towards Miramare, bounding beneath a lateen sail ‘Into the rosy and golden half/O’ the sky’.