ROME, ON MY RETURN FROM ENGLAND, seemed more fetid and corrupt than ever. The whole stretch from the gates of the Borghese Gardens down through the Via Veneto, the Via del Tritone and the Corso Umberto to the Piazza Venezia has been, as Moravia says, converted into one great brothel; and in the evenings of the dog-star summer, we all seem stewing like lumps of flesh and fat in a cheap but turbid soup that washes through this winding channel like the bilge of a Venetian canal. Prostitution, with the Americans here, has become, from the Roman point of view, so unprecedentedly, incredibly profitable that many girls have been brought into the streets who might otherwise have stayed at home or worked at decent jobs. The standard price that they try to keep up seems to be thirty thousand lire—that is, thirty dollars; but in other respects the thing has certainly reached a very low level. Bill Barrett is under the impression that the soldiers go further here than has ever been done anywhere in peacetime in dispensing with even the most sketchy preliminaries: the G.I. simply overtakes the girl, cranes around to get a glimpse of her face so as to be sure she is not absolutely repulsive, then grabs her; she allows herself to be grabbed, but, backing against the wall, makes him stop for a discussion of terms. All the way along the Via del Tritone, these walls are lined with soldiers, who have been watching the parade every evening so that they have got to know the regular girls, and are fishing for the better ones, with whom they will attempt to drive bargains. If a respectable woman goes through here and hurries on without replying to greetings, she is likely to be followed by such jeers as, “She must be a hundred-thousand-lire broad!”
The hotels in the Via Veneto that have been commandeered by the A.C. are picketed by tarts and pimps. The air corps are great spenders on furlough and they are allowed to have women in their rooms, so that the aviators’ hotel in this section is the center of activity and gaiety. Women stream through the lobby, perch in the bar and flutter about the entrance like starlings. I saw one little girl coming out, wild-looking, red-haired and slim, who gave me the impression that she was having an intoxicatingly good time as well as making a great deal of money. In another of these hotels, one night, some soldiers threw a girl out the window and broke her back so that she died. Such incidents have antagonized the Italians, and the “better class” of people are disgusted by the spectacle of the Roman women—and many who have come into Rome for the purpose—making such a display of themselves, and by seeing what was once one of the handsomest and most fashionable quarters of modern Rome turned into a squalid market, where the behavior of Catullus’ Lesbia “in quadriviis et angiportis”—which I have never seen in public before—as a matter of nightly occurrence. There is a sign on an American army club which says, “Reserved for G.I.’s and Their Lady Guests,” and the Romans have picked up the latter phrase as a synonym for tarts. They say that the word signorina, from its constant use by the soldiers, has passed into disrepute.
In these days it is always reassuring to find people who have been working at the arts undistracted by war-work and unshaken in morale. One of the things I have enjoyed most in Rome has been calling, from time to time, on Leonor Fini, the painter. I had seen in New York a few of her pictures, which were half-Surrealist, half-Romantic; and to climb up to her apartment in an enormous old palace in the squalid Piazza del Gesù is to realize that Rome itself is not only intensely Romantic but even also rather Surrealist, so that such work loses the power to shock that was its aim and its pride in Paris. At night, with electricity economized, the place is entirely dark, and at first, among the many entrances that open on all sides of the courtyard, I would always become confused and have to summon the portiere. You need matches to achieve the ascent of the shallow and wide and deep interminable marble stairs, made for unimaginable grandeur, that the proportionately lofty arched windows illuminate only faintly; and by the glimmer, beneath the stone vaults and among the great funeral vases and the flower-carved entablatures, one has glimpses of Roman relics that appear, on their heroic scale, in a completely Surrealist key: the conventionally statuesque pose of a white naked hero with a sword would be followed by a similar figure in an unexpected half-squatting posture; a single finger from an ancient colossus, standing upright on a pedestal, loomed as tall as an ordinary statue; and a bearded man, seated on something and leaning forward intent on a book, had the appearance of reading in the toilet. As the staircase goes on so long that you finally lose count of the landings, you are likely to try wrong apartments and get the rooms of some lurking nobleman whose old butler peers out through the crack of a door apprehensively secured by a chain.
At last, taking a smaller stairway, you arrive, just under the roof, at what must once have been servants’ quarters but is now a duplex apartment. One comfortable large room serves as both studio and living room and looks out, in a commanding view, as I discovered on later visits, over the infinite lines and planes of the roofs and top stories of Rome, all gray-blues and dry pale buffs, which are matched, during the late summer sunsets, by the pale blues and pinks of the sky, in which the eternal swifts restlessly flock and twitter. The mood induced by the stairway and by my previous experience of Surrealists was so strong that when I went there first I mistook for a “Surrealist object” a large cat with a bandage on its head that was lying on the table like an ornament but that turned out to be alive when I tried to pick it up. And, as a matter of fact, the studio is remarkably and refreshingly free from what Signorina Fini, in speaking of another painter, once called the “voulu” aspect of Surrealism. Such “objects” as one did find about were mostly things she had used as models, such as a small glass case of moths; and the place, with its disorderly elegance, was quite free from the neo-Gothicism that one associates with, for example, Max Ernst. The pictures by Leonor Fini and her colleagues on the walls and tables and shelves had an element of fairy-tale enchantment and commedia dell’arte humor that prevented their being “modern” in the sense that Ernst and Dali are; and, in Rome, it seemed perfectly natural to pass to Signorina Fini’s paintings from the late Renaissance patterns, the decorated ceilings and strips of wall, that make a background in the Vatican Museum: hippogriffs that hang in a filigree of scrollery, vine-leaves and tendrils, winged sphinxes with the curling rears of seahorses, spindle-legged and needle-billed birds, hawk-beaked and double-headed eagles, feathery-tongued serpents with twining tails, cupids holding red spidery lobsters, allegorical figures or Graces that seem balancing like tight-rope walkers; and the satyrs’ masks, the lions’ faces, the unidentifiable female beings all compact of imperturbable complacencies. It was as if into this mythical world, conventionalized and quietly lively, Signorina Fini had brought an emotion more personal and more poetic, and motifs from a later time. Here the sphinxes are leonine, and immobilized in their first somber broodings or the maiden surprises of girlhood—a girlhood cut off from the world and queerly turned in on itself; here great ladies with dishevelled long hair and long enveloping skirts sit silent and self-absorbed in the grand but bare rooms of palaces, from the walls or arches of which big fragments have sometimes fallen; and a tousle-headed dubious-eyed girl with a pretty throat and round full breasts has flowered from a twisted root that sends out fibers and bulbous sprouts, in defiance of a death’s-head moth, two white paper animal skulls and a dead lizard with its pale belly up. These contrasts of brokenness and deadness with a warm and rich physical life that is unable to extricate itself are characteristic of Signorina Fini’s painting; they seem to express a tragic paradox. This is a soul that is sullenly and fiercely and yet wistfully narcissistic, self-admiring and self-consuming, at once blooming and checked in growth. She is entirely a female artist, occupied much less with the work, which the man will approach as a craft but which in her case is unequal in skill and taste, than with her dreams, her awareness of herself, her personality and role as a woman. And for this reason her pictures of men are the weakest part of her work. With women she sometimes succeeds through assimilating them to herself; but her portraits of men that I have seen are invariably sentimental: mere images that rise in the mind of the smoldering sequestered girl who, in the other pictures, waits too long.
In one corner, beside her own work, hangs that of the Marchese Lepri, a young man in the Foreign Office, whom Leonor Fini first met in the early years of the war, when he was consul at Monte Carlo and who, more or less under her tutelage, has recently learned to paint. These examples of his painting show that he has been making a rapid development: some of the latest ones seem to me extremely good. Satirical and fantastic, they do not exploit the anomalies which are the tricks of the Surrealist school, but attach themselves to a tradition that is Italian, almost mediaeval. I told him that as I was looking at a picture—done recently and one of the best—in which a party of sodden people in contemporary evening dress are seen gorging at a dinner table that stretches back in a long perspective, while the walls and the floor and the table itself are cracking up below and about them—all painted with the precision and clearness of a loggia in some early religious scene; and he replied that he had hoped he had got into it “a certain actuality, too.” On a table stood some drawings by Clerici: a young architect and classical draughtsman who has emerged from months of hiding in Florence to apply his firm and hollow line to violins spilling human intestines and bald indignant wigmaker’s dummies.
I did not find at first in Signorina Fini any outward traits that corresponded to the elements of moroseness and frustration that often appeared in her work, nor in Lepri any disgust with the society breaking up around him. Leonor Fini is a handsome and voluptuous, an extraordinarily attractive woman—with large dark round eyes and abundant dark hair, which she arranges in a style that is copied from the ladies in Venetian paintings: gathered up and tied with a ribbon behind, but with a mass of it pushed forward on her forehead; and though she lived in Paris for years before the war drove her back to Italy, she seems always, not Parisian in dress, but magnificently and generously Italian. She was wearing, the first time I saw her, an emerald-green taffeta housecoat with a kind of white-lace filigree bodice, and a pair of very high-heeled sandals. She is quite natural and talks very well—with perfect freedom and ease—about people and pictures and books, too sure of her personal taste, too intent on her own painting, ever to have been involved in that sectarian esprit de corps, that ardor for group promotion, that has possessed some of the other Surrealists. Lepri, in his white summer clothes, is quiet and cool and modest with, apparently, the indifference to current events and the skeptical lack of zeal that are supposed to be typical of Romans of the cultivated upper class. I liked to see them, and they were always most amiable. I would sit turning over the pages of Max Ernst’s demonological collages of illustrations from nineteenth-century novels or of bestiaries of curious woodcuts showing animals with human heads. It seemed to me that here was a center of real creative life in Rome, a live spirit that had not been extinguished.
It was, then, with rather a shock that I discovered one day that their dearest hope was to get to the United States before the summer was over. “You don’t like Rome, do you?” Signorina Fini had suddenly said to me. I confessed, feeling impolite, that I did not like it very much. But, “I don’t like it,” she told me. “I hate it!” She wanted to go to America and live in the country there. She had made a brief visit to the States, and she felt she could find there the freedom she needed—she described herself, I think, as “sauvage”—which she implied was impossible in Europe. Her position, as I knew, is, like Silone’s, not that of a great figure in Italy. She suffers, like him, from the handicap of having made a reputation abroad while many Italian writers and artists were taking the wage of the Fascists or submitting to the Fascist directives. Such exiles, returning, are met with a mixture of envious malice and of the uncomprehending hostility of an antiquated mandarin culture, which has also been lately condemned, by the restrictions of Mussolini, to a narrow provinciality. As for Lepri, however good a civil servant, he cannot look forward to much of a career in a government that seems likely to remain under the thumb of a foreign power or, if it escapes this, to go to the Left at a rate that he could scarcely follow. They are not at home, not serene—probably almost as uncomfortable as I am. The sullen women in the empty palaces, the swinish crew in the banquet hall, are the realities with which they live.
This is a period that is hard to accept, we are in it but we do not really believe in it. One day Signorina Fini showed me a copy of Vogue which she had just received from America and expressed an amused astonishment at an article on Buchenwald, with pictures of human incinerators, piles of tangled emaciated corpses and bodies hung up on hooks, followed immediately by new flowered hats and smart bathing brassières, with an article that ran over into the back among the cosmetics ads. This was embarrassing to me as an American, but her instinctive reaction to it was not itself, I thought, without a certain incongruity, for she had just been engaged in executing, with a good deal of finesse and elegance, a series of pen-and-ink drawings for the Juliette of the Marquis de Sade: dim figures of men and women hacking one another to pieces and performing other nasty acts. The Surrealists had cultivated deliberately a sadism of the parlor and the gallery; but now the times had overtaken and passed them in a manner so overwhelming that it was impossible for Leonor Fini not to be shocked by the impropriety of juxtaposing these wretched victims with the refinements of Saks Fifth Avenue. The Surrealist exponent of such horrors who makes out of them objects of art which the lover of art will enjoy, with a shudder of pleasure or pain, cannot help being startled at finding them served up as if they were detective or spy thrillers or merely a whet to the appetite in the enjoyment of articles of luxury.
At Leonor Fini’s, I met Alberto Moravia, the novelist. He took a gloomy view of the future of Europe. He had had to hide for weeks in a barn which was right on the line of battle, living on bread and the meat of the untended “veals” and goats, which he had had to strangle with his own hands. He had found this extremely distasteful. He was tired of being in danger of getting bombed or shot, and would like to go to somewhere like Greece, but for an Italian now Greece was out of the question. The partisans in the North—though this had not yet been made public—had killed twenty thousand Fascists; eight hundred in one small town. The Italians had been hoping that the Big Three would guarantee peace for a period, but it did not look like that now. Italy was controlled by England, but they might as well resign themselves to this: if the English moved out, the Russians would come in. The exacerbated nationalisms of the various nationalities were at this point making it impossible to have a European federation. It was plain from what had happened in the Soviet Union that you couldn’t have socialism without an intensification of nationalism.
My hotel, the Hôtel de la Ville, is at the top of the Via Sistina, and almost directly opposite, at the convergence of two streets, stands a curious flatiron-shaped house, in which D’Annunzio lived and to which, in the luscious eighties, the femmes du monde of Il Piacere are supposed, with faltering or eager steps, to have come to their rendezvous. A little farther down the Via Sistina is the house where Gogol wrote Dead Souls, designated now by a plaque with inscriptions in Italian and Russian, that has been put up by the Russian colony; in the next street, the Via Gregoriana, is a house in which Stendhal lived when he was making his Promenades dans Rome and which a couple of centuries earlier had been occupied by Salvator Rosa; and in a building just below this, at the foot of the Spanish Steps, is the room in which Keats died and which has been kept as a Keats museum. Not far away are the houses where Scott and Bernini and Goethe lived.
Now, at first I found myself rather stimulated by the thought of these illustrious neighbors—especially since it seemed an environment, this region around the Piazza di Spagna, where men had really lived and worked, not merely a Bohemian quarter where talent went soft or ran thin. But the longer I have stayed in Rome, the more the cultural accretions of its past have come to weigh on me and affect me as cloying. The climax of this feeling was a visit I paid to the celebrated Caffè Greco, which I had been told I ought to explore. Though it went back to 1760 and had been frequented by no end of great people, I could not like the Caffè Greco. Making a plunge through those sordid rope curtains that I always find distasteful in Rome, I threaded my way through three dingy compartments, which were narrow, inadequately lighted and lined with little black horsehair seats forbiddingly and uncomfortably squeezed in behind little gray-veined marble tables. On the walls hung bad portraits and landscapes and not very impressive medallions of famous men who had come to the place. One of the ridiculous little hallwaylike rooms that should all have been thrown into a single one was lit only by a dismal filtration from the dirty gray panes of the skylight. The waiter prides himself on his languages and has a humorous-familiar tinge, as if he were playing a role in some comedy of the eighteen-forties. He will show you the yellow old albums in which the great men have signed their names, if your interest is sufficiently keen and you back it with the hint of a tip. And you can pick up a little leaflet with a description of the place in four languages, each of which contains a list of names of celebrities of that nationality who have been habitués of the restaurant. I learned from this that the Caffé Greco had been visited by the following persons: Goldoni, Canova, Leopardi, Carducci, D’Annunzio, Stendhal, Berlioz, Corot, Gounod, Bizet, Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, Anatole France, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thackeray, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Wagner, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Gogol, Thorwaldsen and Mark Twain—as well as by many others only less famous.
But all these names and associations were too much for me to take in at once, and my effort to react to them appropriately had upon me the effect of an emetic and compelled me to disgorge, as it were, the whole mass of lore that I had swallowed before in connection with the genius-haunted past of Rome. For the moment, my only thought was that the Greco was chill, cramped and fusty, that it had no more relation to those artists than the leather of their old boots.
I started, before I left Rome, Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, which I had never read before, and I was amazed to find how close his reflections—mostly transferred, I believe, from his notebooks—had run to the kind of thing that I was putting down in my own. When I finally left the city, I was feeling, very much as he was, decidedly “tired of the sight of those immense seven-storied, yellow-washed hovels, or call them palaces, where all that is dreary in domestic life seems magnified and multiplied, and weary of climbing those staircases, which ascend from a ground floor of cook-shops, cobblers’ stalls, stables and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky [a description which still more or less fitted such places as the Palazzo Altieri where Leonor Fini lived]…disgusted with the pretense of holiness and the reality of nastiness, each equally omnipresent…half lifeless from the languid atmosphere, the vital principle of which has been used up long ago or corrupted by myriads of slaughters…crushed down in spirit with the desolation of her [Rome’s] ruin and the hopelessness of her future…in short, hating her with all our might and adding our individual curse to the infinite anathema which her old crimes have unmistakably brought down.” It is true that I was also to feel—although not until a year or so later, when I was back in the United States—the nostalgia of which he speaks when he writes that, after leaving Rome “in such mood as this, we are astonished by the discovery, by and by, that our heart-strings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again.” But, in the meantime, I was in a position to recognize the perfect accuracy of Hawthorne’s description of the effect of modern Rome on a Protestant Anglo-Saxon.
Later on, when I was back at home, I read Norman Douglas’ South Wind, also for the first time. It seemed to me that this famous novel had been very much overrated—for though it is clever and fairly well-written, it is really, it seems to me, hardly more than a superior piece of journalism about the life of the foreign colony in Capri. Douglas is up to a point successful in dealing with a subject very similar to that of Hawthorne in The Marble Faun: the influence on an Anglican bishop of the demoralizing atmosphere of Italy. But if one reads the two books side by side, one is made very clearly aware of the relative superficiality of the later writer’s treatment of the theme. The contrast is inescapable because—what I have never seen noted—Norman Douglas has reproduced the central incident of Hawthorne’s book and used it in just the same way to create a moral problem. The parallel is so complete that one assumes it to have been the result of some trick of unconscious memory, reviving the impression of a story which had been read and forgotten in youth. Thus in Hawthorne we have a woman, American but perhaps with some non-English blood, constantly pursued and plagued by a rascally discarded husband, who is in a position to threaten her with “blasting” her reputation. The moral crux of the book is the scene on the Capitoline Hill, in which she consentingly stands by while an Italian who wants to protect her pushes him over a cliff and kills him. In South Wind, an English woman is similarly pursued and blackmailed by an undesirable husband, and the moral situation is managed by having her push him over a cliff in Capri, where she has lived for so long that she has presumably caught what the author has already shown to be the local point of view on revenge and the taking of human life. In either case, the problem presented is how shall the crime be treated, not only by the persons responsible but also by those, New England or English, who happen to know about it; and the conclusion in either case is that the languor and animality of Italy are capable of dulling the conscience to a degree where such an act of violence does not seem so clearly wrong as it would in another country.
But the difference—a curious one—is that Douglas, the man of the world, who has now been accepted for thirty years (since the appearance of South Wind) as the touchstone of sophistication, should have made the whole thing too simple: a matter of black and white, with the two colors simply interchanged. The Scotch moralist in Douglas has always interfered with the epicurean Austrian (to assign, perhaps rashly, his mixed tendencies to the elements of his mixed blood), so that he cannot enjoy the pleasures which he makes it his business to celebrate without at the same time betraying a need to justify his self-indulgence by bringing charges of inhuman or anti-social behavior against people with sterner principles. But a hedonist should not be peevish; and Douglas’ doctrine of sybaritic Nietzscheanism, at once too soft and too cruel to catch the real exaltation of Nietzsche, suffers also from the handicap, in a Nietzschean fatal, of being nagged by a bad conscience. In South Wind, the point he would like to make is that the sun of Southern Italy puts the morality of the North to sleep and may lead us to regard as quite natural, perhaps even to approve as beneficent, actions that we should elsewhere condemn. But what it turns out that he cannot help doing is so to construct his fable that the killing by the woman of her husband becomes a positive moral act, which her brother the Bishop and the reader must endorse as not merely understandable but demonstrably, undeniably right—so that, instead of remaining a comedy or suggesting a psychological inquiry, the book ends as a melodrama, with the lady as surely a heroine as if she had killed to defend her honor. In real life, a woman who had done such a thing would certainly have had some qualms, and her brother would have at least been uncomfortable and his relations with his sister affected: the story would be only half told; and Hawthorne shows his insight and intelligence, his superior toughness of logic, by giving Miriam a complex character which makes her behavior plausible as well as a great deal more interesting (Douglas’ lady is all of a piece), and even partly redeeming the husband, who is less a Victorian demon than an unhappy and desperate détraqué where Douglas’ husband is simply a rotter; by having his Italian murderer driven finally to a Catholic repentance for his pagan Italian crime; and by presenting the painful embarrassment caused by both parties involved in the crime to their well-meaning American friends. It is here the provincial puritan, the grumpy American traveller, who complained about the emptiness of Italian museums and the shallowness of Italian painting and who wanted the nude statues clothed, who is the genuine man of the world where the cities of the soul are in question, and who knows that Anglo-Saxon and Italian share, after all, the same mixed nature.
Yet South Wind may be read with The Marble Faun as one of the best accounts ever attempted of the peculiar—and, to the Anglo-Saxon, dismaying—alteration in one’s point of view that may result from a long sojourn in Italy.
Philip Hamburger, also here for the New Yorker, has just come back from a trip to Trieste. The British did their best to dissuade him from interviewing any Jugoslavs or visiting the back-country. If he hadn’t had an American major with him, he believes that he wouldn’t have got anywhere at all. The British called the Jugoslavs “Jugs” and Jugoslavia “Jugland.” They talked about the natives in such a way as to suggest that they were hairy savages crawling around on all fours—as if they had once been good police dogs but had now turned into dangerous wolves, as if Hamburger and his companion were likely to be torn to pieces. The President of the Trieste Council had been locked up in jail by the British for reasons of “military expediency,” and he was speechless with indignation. They always referred to him contemptuously as “the fisherman,” because that had been his occupation—which had finally moved him to protest: “Well, after all, Christ was a carpenter!” When the Americans finally, after waiting for days, had been allowed to see a little of the hinterland, a British general had attempted to brief them. The Jugoslavs, he explained, always carried their politics with them. Hamburger had asked whether the British didn’t do that, too. The American major had become much incensed and described to Hamburger as follows one of the obstacles he had had to contend with: “A bicycle drove up, and out swarmed three top-ranking warmongers, all complete with pips and squeaks.” From Trieste they went on to Klagenfurt, where they were treated, says Hamburger, at the British mess, as if they were captured enemy officers. After dinner, an altercation had occurred. The British had announced to the Americans that England would now have to fight the Russians, “and you people will have to help us.” Hamburger and the major emphatically denied that they would have to do anything of the kind. One of the British—there is always one Englishman who is uncompromisingly opposed to what the rest of the English are doing, but who is helpless to influence the proceedings—suddenly blew up and denounced his fellow officers, telling them that they were two hundred years behind the times. This made things more acrimonious, and the Americans left the next day.
A few days before I left Rome, I was taken by American friends to dine in a black-market restaurant. We ate at outside tables in a little enclosure on the street. The clientele all looked more or less as if they were black-market profiteers themselves. We were sitting right next to the rail that fenced us in from the street, and I had my back to this, so that, absorbed in conversation, I did not notice at first that a crowd had gathered behind us and were reaching in to grab things from our plates. But the management soon sent out a bouncer, who knocked down an old woman with a blow on the head, and drove back the mob, mostly women and children, some of whom disappeared, while others, keeping their distance, stood dumbly and stared at the diners.