Back from the wars, and not an apartment to be had in the great rich city of New York. Landlords liked to say the city was “full.” Every time I was turned away, I had an image of people after a big meal, rubbing their stomachs. A painter friend of Saul Bellow’s, suddenly in the money doing covers for Fortune, bought a house in the country and gave me his ramshackle old studio on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights.
The painter was kind, large, oracular. He went in for explanations in a deep, deep voice, a voice that seemed to rumble cosmic theories from the storm center of his belly. Even when his sentences were not fully formed, his explanations were total. The studio, which should have been in pieces, was a tribute to his handiness, his superb confidence. He was a great explainer of his friends to themselves. Bellow was to put him into the lifeboat scene near the end of Augie March. He is a mad scientist who has synthesized protoplasm and wants Augie to join him in further biochemical triumphs. At the moment, their ship having just been torpedoed, Augie is alone with him in the lifeboat and has to listen, listen, listen. When Augie came out in 1953, I roared at Bellow’s growing sense of the ridiculous, of a world gone ridiculous. “Why did I always have to fall among theoreticians!” Bellow’s friends were always intellectuals, and intellectuals were his favorite targets. He felt himself cursed by them, enthralled, condemned to know only people who were one part of himself. “Did you recognize the man in the lifeboat?” he proudly asked me. He was astonished, outraged that I hadn’t seen the exact resemblance. “It’s your old landlord Amos!” he stormed. Like Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Isaac Rosenfeld, and many other once old-fashioned moralists, Bellow had been through a Reichian analysis and had learned to demand his rights at all times and with all people. We had been liberated. As Bellow became famous, his sense of his great powers was affronted by the stupidity of others. It would be my function in life, like that of all critics, to disappoint him.
My landlord was soon gone, and his sweet pomposity was not what I had to live with in Pineapple Street. The many pictures he left on the walls—“my real work, not that money work I do for Luce”—were of emaciated rabbis standing behind barbed wire in Nazi camps, skeletal young maidens drooping under the contempt of Nazi guards, Jewish children with eyes like black marbles waiting their turn to the gas chambers. The pictures wore a glossy impasto thick as chicken fat, and were hideously overcolored. Even in the dark they threatened me. Yet they surrounded me with such an air of judgment—Kazin had done nothing, we had done nothing, but look at us!—that after a week it occurred to me to take them down. They were bad, sick pictures. In New York outrage was easy.
The studio on Pineapple Street was in a beaten-up old family house on the edge of Fulton Street and Brooklyn Bridge. The halls smelled of an old fire. I told myself that the house dated from the days when the burghers on Brooklyn Heights could literally see their ships come in and in deep winter walked the ice to their offices on Wall Street. Across the street a plaque over the garbage cans behind the Greek greasy spoon marked the site where on July 4, 1855, a printer who worked only when he felt like it had himself set up in the printing shop of the Rome Brothers the first edition of Leaves of Grass.
Many noises rose up from a radio store on the block and a bar-and-grill popular with sailors in from the Navy Yard. At night, colored reflections played at my window from the madly over-bright electric sign towering over the Hotel St. George and the lights of the movie theater right across the street. In warm weather the projectionist kept his door open, and I would hear from the sound track unrelated snatches of background music and loud arguments.
I had a lot to listen to in my two rooms on Pineapple Street. My next-door neighbor, a Mr. Felippez from Colombia, woke me every morning at five when he started for his garage job in Bay Ridge by tramping through the long wooden hall of his apartment on the other side of my bedroom. Our two “apartments” on the top floor had been crudely boxed off by a beaverboard wall and a door that had been thickly painted over, sealed and locked and glazed down, every chink, to make sure that neither of us would use it. I could hear everything that went on in Mr. Felippez’s hall, and every dark morning my day would begin with the sound of Mr. Felippez clearing his throat, Mr. Felippez relieving himself, Mr. Felippez’s heavy feet passing down the hall, mounting along the wall of my bedroom, getting louder and louder as he neared the door, and finally crashing in my ears with a bang, carrying every thump down the wooden stairs with it.
There was nothing to do about it. I tried sleeping in my other room, but could hear him just as well. I once tried to persuade Mr. Felippez to depart for his job with a lighter tread. He smiled and smiled with many gold teeth, understood not a word, and after an enthusiastic handshake went off still smiling. The house was just a decaying hulk on the Brooklyn beach, very different from the mansion on Montague Terrace where Auden smiled, “Really, it’s all as quiet here as the country!” or the beautiful old brownstone on Columbia Heights, the very perch of the greatest harbor, where Mailer would soon establish himself.
Those sleepless hours in the morning dark were difficult and beautiful. The harbor was all around me as I lay in bed listening to tugs hooting a block away. By dawn I would get up to find my painter’s skylight and great north windows awash with sea light. I had coffee with Bach as I struggled with the unaccompanied partitas and then groped my way to the typewriter. I had started a loose unwieldy book about New York-at-large, based on my hypnotized walking of the city. Walking was my way of thinking, of escape into myself, of dreaming the details back. The book was all externals, buildings, loneliness, my daily battle with New York. After Mr. Felippez woke me in the early morning, I would lie there trying grimly to think the book out from the throbbings around me. I was alarmed every night I went up the usually empty steel-resounding elevator taking me to the street from the deeply dug Clark Street station. Walking past the blank back wall of the Hotel St. George, I faced the emptiness of those streets before I reached the Pineapple Street house; even the front steps smelled as if a fire had just been put out. My friends all lived in Manhattan and did not like to come out. In the night I could hear vague screams and menacing noises; there were apparitions in the dead quiet streets that made walking along the harbor a fearful confrontation with shadows.
At the foot of Pineapple Street, overlooking the harbor, a promenade below the backs of the old Victorian houses was being built. The whirligig of lower New York and the sight of Brooklyn Bridge leaping its way across made me think of my old neighbor Hart Crane:
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear …
Returning at night from my date with Louise in her chic little walk-up on Fifty-fifth off Fifth, I would barricade myself in under the painter’s skylight, shiver, and try not to think of my comfy entanglement. Pineapple Street was a clutch at my old innocence, like the book about walking New York that had everything in it except me. Louise thought I was foolish to insist on trudging back to Brooklyn night after night after making love in Manhattan. And it was a Manhattan that had never been richer, smoother, more expansive. The richness of postwar New York was part of Louise and my visceral infatuation. The old war had barely ended, but there was a new wartime excitement in the air as America and Russia squared off at each other. Old Communists could not stop lying and ex-Communists found it unnecessary to look war prosperity in the face. Government, protective since the New Deal, now had an authority so overwhelming that it was hard to admit the fear.
New York was triumphant, glossy, more disorderly than ever, but more “artistic,” the capital of the world, of the old European intellect, of action painting, action feeling, action totally liberated, personal, and explosive. Harold Rosenberg, always the most penetrating and skeptical of the old New York intellectuals, was to say that action painting was the liberty of the painter to “fuck up the canvas.” Where once the El had darkened cobblestoned streets, had romantic twilights for a Stieglitz, a John Sloan, an E. E. Cummings, New York was now rich in aluminum and steel buildings, buildings that resembled the massed file cabinets and coded systems they were built to hold. There were banks on every corner. The great New York light, the glare of New York, the unmatchable effrontery of New York had never been so open. It was a constant challenge just to walk up Park Avenue. The straightness of the streets—columns in a bookkeeper’s account book—made you run and claw your way to your goal. There was always an immediate goal. Up and down, straight and across, numbered and ranged against each other like a balance sheet, the great midtown streets were glowing halls of power. The sharpness of outline was overwhelming. The tritest word for the city was “unbelievable.” Its beauty rested on nothing but power, was dramatic, unashamed, flinging against the sky, like a circus act, one crazy “death-defying” show after another. Walking away from Louise’s little apartment at Fifty-fifth or her parents’ great big one at Madison and Seventieth, I found myself mentally retracing the straight lines across the avenues up and down the new buildings. Those too even lines were taking me where they would take me, not where I once had planned to go.
On the Queen Mary, loaded with returning troops, Louise seemed to be waiting for me whenever I left the enormous cabin I shared with dozens of soldiers who did not know if they were going to be discharged or sent to Japan. It seemed meaningless to avoid this warmly handsome, always silent girl who had lighted on me and aimed for love as if she were a bullet. We floated into New York Harbor one hot August night to find every shoreline lighted up as for a super-Christmas. Hundreds of thousands of people were lined up on Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, on Staten Island, on Governors Island, on the Battery, on every inch in Jersey. Red fireboats and tugboats blew their whistles; little fishing boats bobbed up and down the bay with great lettered signs: “WELCOME HOME BOYS. WELCOME HOME.” Every coil and indent of New York Harbor seemed stretched with light that night. New York made a single exultant beam from Sandy Hook up to Fifty-ninth Street. As Louise and I stood on the top deck watching the great return of Americans to America, there came from the hundreds and hundreds of soldiers hopping up and down around us one single scream of joy. We were home.
But Louise was not what I had come home for; I impatiently said good night at the pier. It was not until weeks later that I finally took it in forever that Natasha and I were no longer married. To my astonishment, I found Louise waiting for me one night on the battered steps of Pineapple Street. Then began a new life with this handsome, attentive, calmly passionate woman—my luxuriously silent woman—who nevertheless remained as distant as I myself was glad to be.
It was rather a businesslike affair. The calming effect of inherited capital was a revelation. Passionately drawn to me as Louise declared herself to be, it became clear that she did not altogether approve of me. Part of an illustrious German-Jewish clan, she had not the slightest understanding of Jews still spinning in the Russian turbulence. I was fascinated by—disbelieving of—her lack of all Jewish anxieties. Her college roommate had been an open anti-Semite. There were Jews for whom the Jews did not exist. There were so many silent limits to our pleasant arrangement that we seemed programmed for brilliant evenings in brilliant mid-Manhattan and lovely weekends at her parents’ Connecticut farm.
The lovemaking went like clockwork, and often resembled it. Life was full of benefits. I was losing my terror and it did not occur to me that as lovers we were just trying each other out like a new purchase. We were “adjusting” in the great American style. The age of plenty rolled out before me like the softest of beds. What lovely warm evenings those were walking back from Carnegie Hall, the Russian Tea Room, the theater, our favorite Italian restaurant on Fifty-sixth. Fifth Avenue glowed as I felt her warm silky back against my palm, and the thickly carpeted steps of her walk-up had the softness of her body under my body as, just behind her and already in a trance of wanting her, I watched her run up the stairs with the key already in her hand.
Nothing now seemed so awesome, deep, close to the hidden God who burned over my childhood. My parents still lived in the same Brownsville tenement. News of the big money had not reached this house painter and this “home” dressmaker. They were as poor and isolated from America-at-large as the day they had met. They lived where they had always lived, and more and more they lived without hope. But now they were surrounded by poor blacks more than by poor Jews. Any Friday night I went back for the Sabbath meal, I hungrily sought the smallest details for the childhood I was describing—the fresh dye in the clothes piled up outside a factory off Sackman Street, the seltzer bottles trundling off the rollers as if they were rolling in from Bessarabia, Vilna, and Minsk. I was desolated by the old Jews left over in Brownsville, with their ritual wigs, their legs bent like crutches, their boarded-up storefronts, their community kitchens for the destitute, and their bitter fears of the blacks.
Brownsville was a foreign country now, a forbidden country to prospering Jews who had once lived there. It was a poison spot on the New York map even to the hundreds and thousands of blacks from the South wearily making it into the ghetto vacated by Jews. Walking back into the country of my birth, I felt separated from everything except my youth. The new mass-housing projects in Brownsville were like mass fortresses that had dropped in from Mars. Like the city housing dominating the lower East Side at the other end of the Brooklyn Bridge, they displayed not a new city but old New York invaded, here and there, by the administrative bulldozer. There were enforced settlements where once there had been neighborhoods. A sentimental Jewish librarian in the Brownsville Public Library, working with disoriented, frightened, and angry blacks “relocated” by the city into the tenements the Jews had fled, was outraged by the lack of will and fight among the new migrants being dumped into Brownsville. They should have been more “working-class,” more militant. They soon were—against her.
The gifted French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, with whom I was to work on a book of New York scenes, was an aristocratic radical sweetly disdainful of the welfare state and the new mass-housing projects. It was old New York, the oldest New York left at both ends of Brooklyn Bridge, that gave pleasure to his genius eye as we walked the shady old wooden boardwalk down the center of the bridge.
“It breathes!” Cartier said happily about Brooklyn Bridge. “See how it breathes!” Brooklyn Bridge had been designed just after the Civil War, and the New York still left around it was old. Below the bridge on the Manhattan side was “the Swamp,” center of the wholesale leather industry, and old assayers’ shops, dealers in perfume and wines. John Augustus Roebling, the maker of the bridge, had planned storage space for wines in the great stone caverns where the anchorage of the bridge tied up. They now held the city’s nineteenth-century files; I imagined clerks who sat there on high stools amid ancient records and blueprints and looked as if they had stolen out of old London prints. Up above, in front of eighteenth-century City Hall, was Park Row and Printing House Square, where all the great New York dailies were once published; the statue of Benjamin Franklin presented by the printers of New York, the old New York World building, with its green dome, and the New York Tribune recalled history from Horace Greeley to Joseph Pulitzer.
On both sides of the Manhattan end were factories and warehouses still recalling New York’s iron age. On one of them was preserved a series of ornamental fire escapes sculptured with the figures of athletes out of the old Police Gazette. Above it was a gigantic dead clock, its hands forever resting at three o’clock. An age passed this way. Here New York first sank its piles in the river, always in sight of water as it began the age of plunder. The factory buildings remaining in the late 1940s, with their battered fronts and broken windows, the iron storage chambers and warehouses cut into the anchorages, were like the dirt-green scum left behind by the industrial rivers of New York as they wash against the rock.
Old New York, the bottom deposit of the commerce that began here and moved away. The clock never moved. Over it was lettered the name of a square to which it no longer belonged. Like the tenements and clotheslines across the way on the lower East Side, like the pillars of the El still darkening the Bowery, tying up the bridge in mountains of wire and blocks of stone, they shut in a world from time. But straight ahead were the bail-bond brokers and shysters whom Cartier-Bresson photographed on the steps of the county courthouse in Foley Square. He caught them with big cigar in mouth and overcoats open to show the silk lining. They comically posed for this mild-looking “tourist” with the Leica around his neck.
Cartier-Bresson’s great gift was instantaneous, breathtaking lucidity. A narrow eighteenth-century alley off Wall Street suddenly presented a man sitting between two walled surfaces. This man was not pathetic, not imprisoned between two walls. But neither did he belong anywhere else. The lawyer on the steps of the Federal Court House naturally presented his big successful belly to Cartier. The old gentleman we saw on Brooklyn Heights with the homburg, goatee, and scarf perfectly draped was as right to Willow Street as the GI sitting on a fire escape under the bottom iron layers of the bridge. Carrier’s genius was matter-of-fact. His light, noncommittal sympathy for the many wrecks living in the shadows of Brooklyn Bridge never swelled into anything more than an upper-class radical’s inventory of presence after presence in a New York closed to middle-class attention. His elegantly agile figure skipped along the littered streets, the Leica suddenly winging into his hands. In his English tweeds, his pleasant air of having an expensive camera to play with, he looked like an innocent, with nothing to do but use up some film. It was easy, bantering agreeableness to work with him. Then you saw what he had come up with after a long day, and felt pressed by the social logic with which he had taken the measure of New York.
Cartier was the photographer as thinker. Stieglitz had to love what he saw, had to make it his own. Walker Evans had been pitiless, reticent in his anger and distaste without concealing anything. Cartier saw people moving, always on the run, caught up in a motion of hurry and search, but stuck on the flypaper of their own minds. There was no exaggeration, nothing set up—above all, no mockery. For all his firm left-wing logic, he did not push a theory. What counted was the city man in the city setting, the man and the street as one. He started with the human passer-by in a social world that was the other side of himself, Carrier-Bresson. This passer-by, this stranger, was what I lived with every day of my life without always seeing him. Cartier was teaching us to see him.
Cartier did not overvalue the camera or himself. In an age of camera “artists,” camera wizards, Gullivers who thought they had poor old Lilliput at their mercy, he honestly saw himself as a reporter lucky enough to roam the whole world and to see the different parts of it in clear perspective. He was rich, cosmopolitan; he had an Asian wife. It was not from him that I learned he had been for three years a prisoner of war in Germany and had escaped to France, where he had organized underground photography units. The visual subject possessed him. On his relaxed evenings in an old wooden house on East Fifty-eighth Street near the cars shooting off Queensboro Bridge, he patiently painted at a modest little landscape. He worked the whole area over from every side of the rectangle, and then stared at his picture with his little smile and matter-of-fact eye.
He was soon on the wing to Egypt, Brazil, the Chinese Revolution. New York to Cartier was an assignment like any other, but it was the book of my life. Sitting on the roof garden of the chic new building of the Museum of Modern Art, looking straight across to the glass-fronted pyramids rising on every side of me, I felt myself swimming in the reflected surfaces of some great goldfish bowl. New York was gold skin, kaleidoscopic glass, snaky cactus on a roof garden conceived in the image of the reproductions and posters that framed you in. The Museum presented you, too, as an example of correct modern taste.
Below, the great avenues went up and down in ruler-sharp order. New York was the greatest living machine. The power it radiated was in my image of women walking Fifth Avenue in the sun; women wearing brass, leather; women reflected in the aluminum, steel, glass, tile they walked past. In the sharp-pointed clickety-clack of Louise’s shoes, the night-black sheen of Louise’s dress, the tiger cover over Louise’s perfume and Louise’s bed, I could not distinguish voluptuous New York from the soft sway of her figure going up the steps on Fifty-fifth Street. She shared with her casual power something I had always devoutly believed: New York had secret rulers. The silent girl I had met waiting on line outside the army post office in London now displayed the unmistakable authority that came with money. She made decisions, arranged dinners, weekends, the Cape, passage to Italy. The less we admitted our different values, the more she trusted to her powerful faith in herself to iron out difficulties. Her reserve about me, even when she seemed to be enjoying me most, was startling. It was a shock to notice how much the rest of you could be disapproved of by someone who regularly welcomed you in bed. I had suddenly gone from a world in which everyone and everything I loved seemed a more gracious extension of myself to one where I felt suspended in the clear cold light of some unending detachment.
After circling around each other for two years, we got married. That night, driving to her parents’ farm in Connecticut, she was so privately uncertain that for the first time in her life she drove straight into the back of another car. Limping, off we went for our honeymoon to Italy, both of us incommunicative, lonely, and excited. I had a Guggenheim and she knew the country. She was mad about Italians. For more than anything else except our son Tim, I would be grateful to her for Italy.
The Polish ship to Genoa was full of Italian Americans carrying over radios, electric appliances, cigarettes by the trunkful. There were also anti-Fascist intellectuals returning from their long American exile. Italy in the early summer of 1947 was a broken, busted country with an insanely inflated currency, bridges still missing above the rivers into which the Germans or Americans had exploded them, electric power you could never depend on from moment to moment, the obvious daily takeover of the big cities by a powerful restored Communist Party full of ecstatically credulous Italian workmen. The bus from Genoa to Florence—crammed with the first tourists in years, the corners of luggage covers on the open top beating against the back windows—whizzed past demolished railroad tracks and broken bridges, down mountain valleys, finally through Tuscan towns where leather-faced men in corduroys sat in the stony town squares before fountains framed by the immense shadows of dominating churches and palaces.
To an American writer seeing it for the first time, Italy was heaven. In Florence the lovely quiet old Albergo Berchielli on the Lungarno Acciaioli was virtually empty. When you entered from the street through the old-fashioned bead portières shielding everything inside from the sun, you fell into a cool blue lagoon made up of sepia photos of Michelangelo’s David, Cellini’s Perseus, the Duomo. You walked in sun, rested from sun. The city was a series of fine crystalline sensations. It was cherry season, and at every meal basins of cherries were served up swimming in cold water. Florence hushedly mirrored itself and dwelled on itself within every parlor and up every staircase. Culture peeped everywhere through old lacework. In the little stationery shop next to the hotel, the proprietor—surrounded by still more framed photographs of the Duomo—spoke a withered Pre-Raphaelite English. He was easily affrighted by every memory of the war, and so genteel that the Anglo-American Florence of the past was all before me. I expected to see the pale, elegant figure of Henry James’s Gilbert Osmond lingering in the doorway waiting for his American heiress to appear.
To the left, the Ponte Vecchio; to the right, the provisional iron structure that has replaced the Santa Trinità. The gallery that leads from the Uffizi Gallery to the Pitti Palace is broken in the middle; on both sides of the Ponte Vecchio a jagged heap of ruins, lit up under the solitary street lamp, has that crumpled, naked look of theater scenery the moment the footlights are turned off. In the daytime the ruins in Florence look incongruous—a tabloid headline in an illuminated manuscript—when you see them against the round towers and the slender cypresses, each cluster of trees supreme on its hill. The Germans were on one side of the river and the Americans on the other—hard to think of Florence being fought over on this street.
At the noon hour an old man in an old boat, moored in the middle of the Arno just below our window, is patiently, hour by hour, dredging up mud from the bottom, then just as patiently packing it away on every side of him. Across the way a boy swims off a little delta that has formed in front of his house. A scull shoots by, propelled by a young man in tights and wearing that smart beard—Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo—why did I think it was worn only by Fascist aviators and ambassadors? Just below the embankment, on the other side of the river, is the familiar whitewash slogan we saw on every wall as we came down from Genoa: “VOTE FOR THE COMMUNIST PARTY WHICH WILL GIVE YOU PEACE WORK LIBERTY.”
Florence’s old English community has come back—some never left—to reclaim property. “Their” lounge is an old family parlor, with the rubber plant on a lace doily over the upright piano, heavy brass-framed pictures of hunting dogs and “The Stag at Eve,” old copies of the Illustrated London News. A withered English blonde sits in one corner, reading the Times, and from time to time calls across the lounge in a piercing county accent, recounting to another inglese her difficulties with the Italian law, “so unnecessarily complicated.” In another corner an art historian with the burned-out face of Oswald Spengler: completely shaven head, rocklike Prussian military skull, burning little eyes, a fierce wide scar running across his left cheek and deep into his neck like a singed envelope. Junker face, haughty with suffering: he never looks at anyone and prowls around the lounge smoking cigarettes out of a long jeweled holder.
All signs and instructions are first in English, then in French, occasionally underwritten in Italian. The atmosphere is that of a provincial British hotel in an eternity of Sundays, though they “no longer come to us as they used to. They, too, are passing through difficult days.” Americans, of course, are wonderful—so gay, so young, and so on; but the manager’s daughter, whose English is impeccable BBC, complains with a little pout that her friends laugh at her—“my accent has become a little coarse”—since the GIs were here.
A young American writer of Italian parentage originally came here before the war to finish a medical course. Now an ex-GI and armed with the previous green passport (which may save us in the last act as Roman citizenship saved St. Paul), he gets around familiarly in American Army circles from Leghorn to Pisa and has the friendliest relations with the brass. He and the grim-faced toughie we are saddled with every time we see him are engaged in some elaborate lira-dollar game. The lira is 650 to the dollar; last week it was 900. Everybody changes money on the black market; the writer is a black market, and goes around Florence with great wads of sweaty tattered lire (looking like soiled Kleenex) stuffed into one of those vertical leather zipped bags that are sold at home for packing a bottle of booze into a suitcase. “It’s even too dirty to wipe yourself with,” he says as he holds up a fistful of lire. He plans to put into his novel on postwar Italy a long section on money—money as infected blood, money jamming every sewer, the sweaty crumpled money falling totally apart as a final joke on the Americans who come over to grab it. He chats with me under the statue of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the latest New Yorker in one hand and his moneybag in the other. Looking at his money blows him up like an Oklahoma Indian who has just discovered oil.
His novel will feature enemies as allies, allies as enemies. There will be a chapter on German deserters and American black soldiers hiding out together in the woods, Italians and Americans during the fighting around Florence stealing each other blind. Meanwhile “I’m piling it up so that I can write the crazy novel of this crazy period. I’m going to make enough to stake myself to a year off and vanish.” Though he cannot understand why, he is clearly having the time of his life. The thing’s absolutely unreal: he’s way up there, in that new American world in Europe. After years of being a nobody at home, and no doubt a “wop” to the gentiles, he is now making the most of his Newark Italian, dines with generals, and patronizes the old country. Actually he does not seem to like Italians very much—says they “simply have no character,” and with a certain intellectual disapproval outlines the black market to me, specifying all the ways in which the government does not govern. The whole economy now rests on illegal buying and selling. The political situation is divided between “the priests and the Commies.” Personally, he assures me, he is a democratic Socialist, and rails against the surrender of the Italian Socialist Party to the Communists. But this with a bored, mocking air: what can you expect of Italians? Funny to see him among the really big American finaglers here who have come to pick up some real money. With all his commercial savvy and know-it-all air, he really hates Italy for being such a shambles. It has left him morally nowhere.
A painter from Odessa, exiled to Florence, drove us out to Settignano to see the Bernard Berenson villa, I Tatti. In the courtyard, which might have been the entrance to one of the retreats at which the storytellers in The Decameron flourished during the plague, there was a row of neat little lemon trees, each set in its black bucket with finicky care. The lemons all drooped in a plane, all exactly equal from the ground—with what immense and induced art it was not difficult to imagine. The elaborated niceness of the symmetry introduced me to Berenson’s mind even before I met him.
The butler seemed uncertain whether to admit us, Berenson being away, but Leo Stein, Gertrude’s brother, came out of the library and offered to show us around. Stein was a tall, gentle, gangling old man, seventy-five, who looked like a Jewish Uncle Sam—rustic, nervous, deaf, but full of talk and little wisecracks, all of them delivered in a flat, uncompromised American twang after forty years of Europe. It was strange to be taking in Stein’s mussed blue serge suit and hearing aid, the knapsack over his shoulder, in Berenson’s braided garden. He sounded as if he had never left Allegheny, Pennsylvania.
The Berenson house was Tuscan “rustic” in a rebuilt style, quietly showing off exquisite pictures Berenson had acquired in his many deft negotiations. The house featured one of the great private libraries of the world. The whole thing looked like a private chapel raised to the art connoisseur’s ideal experience, where every corridor and corner had been worked to make a new altarpiece for “B.B.” to display his adoration of art. The smallest detail revealed a man who had the means to reject all intrusions of mere necessity. He had shaped the whole with an inflexible exactness of taste that was just a little chilling. Its immediate effect was not so much to lead you to its pictures as to shame you into a fresh realization of how awkward, soiled, and generally no-account life could seem compared with art. In the dim light of the shaded corridor a Sienese saint gazed past me, lost in his own dream of time and interred in an oily gloss—his face tortured with thought and goodness, and somehow away, bearing my praise and awe with equal indifference. What golden and mysterious fish!
I noticed how jumpy Stein became when we stopped too long before certain pictures. Showing Berenson’s house must have seemed a bit too much; he had been in and out of the place for years, and came daily to work in the library. I was a little surprised, knowing of his lifelong concern with painting, to hear him confess that it was not the work of art that mattered to him so much as the mind of the painter. He was very much preoccupied with every sort of psychological question and told us that he had just (at seventy-five) finished psychoanalyzing himself. The devouring interest of his life was to discover why men lie. This was a problem that touched him very deeply. He had been showing us pictures and rooms with a certain irritation, and made affectionate, mocking little digs at Berenson’s expense (their rivalry is famous). Suddenly, in Berenson’s study, he went off into a long discourse about psychology and the need for scientific exactness in determining character. He spoke with an uneasy intensity, as if he had been held in on this matter for a very long time, and wanted our understanding with or without our approval. It was of the greatest importance, this practice of lying; it would be a key to all sorts of crucial questions, if only he could get his hands on the solution; it was, you might say, at the center of human ambiguity. As he went on, he would look up at us every so often, pull irritably at his hearing aid, and grumble, “What? What? You think what? I can’t hear you!” riding impatiently over us and his deafness for standing in his way, and rearing up against our stray comments. It was very moving in an old man, seeming to come straight from the heart: “It’s important! It’s the big thing! No one looks these facts in the face! Animals can’t lie and human beings lie all the time!”
He was, however, very happy these days; had got over a bad illness and was just publishing a new book of critical theory, Appreciations: Painting, Poetry, Prose. He talked about his writing with a mingled anxiety and enthusiasm, as if he were just starting out on his career; though very frail, he gave the appearance of a young writer speculating dreamily on all the books he was going to write. He had always suffered from being Gertrude Stein’s half-noticed elder brother. She had died within the year, releasing him to get on with his career—at seventy-five. His resentment of Gertrude shone through everything he said. Talking about their childhood in Europe, when they had been trundled around by a father “who didn’t think we could get any kind of decent education in America,” he remembered most how Gertrude had always lorded it over him. “But you know,” he said simply, “she was the kind who always took herself for granted. I never could.” And one saw that she had dominated the situation when they had decided to make their lives in Europe. “She always took what she wanted! She could always talk her way into anything! Why”—discussing their pioneer collection of modern paintings—“she never even liked Picasso at first! Couldn’t see him at all! I had to convince her. And then she caught on and got ’em for practically nothing.”
After all these years, the bitterness rankled, keeping him young. How often had he been approached only as a lead to his famous sister, and this by people who hadn’t the slightest knowledge of his interests? This, added to his long uncertainty about himself, lent that strangely overemphatic quality to his interest in “facts.” Facts—the masculine domain of elder brothers humbly and grimly toiling away at real things, like aesthetics and psychology. While Gertrude, the Jewish mother of them all, took Anderson and Hemingway under her wing, and did as she pleased. She put the English language in her lap like a doll, making it babble out of her undefeatable narrowness and humor. She always took what she wanted. There was Leo Stein, at seventy-five, going back and back to the old childhood struggle. They had transferred the cultural rivalry in that ambitious family to Europe and worked it in and out of the expatriate life, making of Paris and Florence new outposts for their fierce ambition.
A few weeks after our meeting, Leo Stein suddenly died, and was laid out in front of the altar in the village church. My painter friend from Odessa couldn’t get over the sight of dead Leo in front of the altar, worshipers walking around him. “He looked as if they had no other place to put him for the moment.”
I had missed Berenson in Settignano, but finally caught up with him in Rome at the grand Hotel Hassler just off Trinità dei Monti. It was almost November, very cold, and he sat in a corner of the sofa with a rug over his knees, as self-consciously correct (to himself) as one of his own sentences. Eighty-two: delicate little grand personnage with a little white beard, frail, an old courtier in his beautiful pale-gray double-breasted suit, every inch of him engraven fine into an instrument for aesthetic responsiveness and intelligence. Self-made, self-conscious in every breath, he spoke English with such ostentatious elegance, blandly delivering himself of his words one by one, that the words might have been freshly cracked walnuts he was dropping into my hand. The famous “B.B.” had turned himself into the glossiest possible work of art. How he shone before me, even for me—every new visitor was someone to be added to his court.
He took me in quickly, coldly, somehow fiercely. “Your name is Russian or Hebrew and of course you are a Jew? There seem to be so many young Jews writing in the States these days. How is that? Quite a difference from my time!” “Oh! and is there still so much anti-Semitism in the States these days? Oh!” He listened closely, tensely, a little suspiciously.
Just fifty years younger, I was not unrelated to this Jew born in Lithuania in the Czarist Pale, and taken at ten to Boston. Over the years the Butremanz ghetto had been transformed, not so much by Berenson as by lordly friends like Lincoln Kirstein, who once explained to me that Berenson had been “born into the Jewish aristocracy, the old gentry.” Berenson had grown up in the Boston slums, had turned Episcopalian at Harvard and Catholic in Italy. But once launched in the great art world as a prime expert and authority, the “authenticator” of Renaissance Italian paintings, being a “Jewish aristocrat” had probably become his carte de visite to the outside world, from President Eliot’s Harvard to Henry James’s London and Edith Wharton’s Paris. At that moment in Rome it was also a way of getting himself out of any possible entanglements he may have incurred by interesting himself in American Jews. To be a “Jewish aristocrat” did not diminish one’s foreignness—this immigrant lad lived for sixty years in Italy—but transferred it to a higher plane. There was once a Harlem black who went South with a turban on his head and was welcomed everywhere as a foreign potentate.
Berenson kept up feverishly with America, took every possible magazine and newspaper. There was even a copy of that shabby little Rome Daily American on his lap when I came in. He had remained in Italy during the war, had gone into hiding when the Germans were all over the Tuscan countryside. He solemnly affirmed that F.D.R. had alerted an American Army detachment to save him from the Nazis. Wartime hysteria in occupied Italy had also led to suspicion of Berenson as a German agent, and the renewal of his passport had been actually held up. At one point in our conversation he suddenly took the priceless green document out of his breast pocket and showed it to me with a flourish. But with all the uncertainties and suspicions that dogged Berenson because of his foreignness and the wealth he had gained from authenticating old masters to Lord Duveen’s millionaire customers, he was a master at receiving visitors.
He had become an international celebrity since the war. It was fascinating to see the public elegance he gave the freezing cold hotel room we sat in, the thermos of tea, and the comforter on his knees with the Rome Daily American perched on it. He held up both hands to show me how the printer’s ink had come off onto his extraordinarily long supple fingers; made a grimace. Thus he paid for keeping up with everything since the war. Every day he went through at least one Italian, French, Swiss, and English newspaper; took every review and magazine, even Time. It was all out of an intense curiosity in the political behavior of the human animal. Watching this perfectly composed picture of Olympian detachment, as finely put together as his great library, I was being asked to form a picture of him at I Tatti as Voltaire in retirement, a kind of European intelligence office—subtly remote from the pressure of events, each of which he filed away in some chamber of his apparatus for meditation.
Berenson kept coming back to Henry Miller; he had recently discovered Tropic of Cancer, which amused him in a contemptuous kind of way. He was not unfond of this sexual rogue. He vaguely shared my admiration for the moving long story in Sunday After the War that recounts Miller’s return to his parents’ home. With this thought under consideration he turned Miller into a dreary historian of the unnecessary lower-class bleakness of Brooklyn rather than the “cloacal” and confused rebel he had just put down. He slowly and ostentatiously pronounced “clo-a-cal” in a way that made me see all the refuse coming up from the bottom of the Tiber and gathering itself into the collected works of Henry Miller. And of course I shared in the general illusion that Kafka was a great writer? “There is a very small light of reason burning in the world,” he said portentously. “Mr. Kafka tries to put it out.”
He had small, firm, exact judgments on everything that crossed his path: his years, his fortune, his snobbery, and his taste had given him a freedom to ignore contemporary fashions that was stimulating if hardly satisfying. The aesthetic and upper-class world the young Berenson had broken into remained his reference. Picasso was a willful faker. Matisse had once known how to paint, Joyce and Eliot were just obstructions on the classic path of reason. Berenson the self-made, the art-made, for all his talk of “life-enhancement,” was not giving a thing to the living. We had been discussing the cultural inertia and the provincialism that become evident after one settles into Italy, and he thought that the decline had set in with the Risorgimento. The old élite had surrendered its prerogatives. Why, in his first years in Italy, the late 1880s, one could still pick up from Roman pushcarts first editions of English eighteenth-century novels that had come straight from the shelves of the old nobility! He found Italians now lacking in individuality. It was curious to see how he went straight to fundamental themes of “style.” His long romance with Italy had never included Italians—just old masters and landscape. But even Italy as he first knew it, and as he tried to keep it in I Tatti with such devotion and finesse, had had to bear a lot of jarring under the pressure of events. It is hard to possess fully everything we buy in this world.
We talked about his old college friend Santayana, who was living not far away in Rome as a guest of the Nuns of the Blue Sisters. They no longer saw each other. It was fascinating to think of those two old intellectual grandees finishing out their lives in Italy, one a Spaniard, the other a Lithuanian Jew, both formed by their early life in Boston and at Harvard. They had been together at the Boston Latin School, at Harvard, in Germany thereafter—Santayana always one year ahead, as he was one year older. Santayana the thinker was much admired by Berenson, who despite his great air was a very timid and somewhat artificial writer. It was only in talking about Santayana that he stopped seeming older and more distingué than anybody you had ever heard of. But they were estranged, and I did not need the oily and characteristically malicious tone Santayana took about him in his memoirs to guess that Santayana had ended the friendship.
In Santayana’s eyes, Art was nothing compared with Philosophy, and a professional “expert” on Art was even more removed from Truth than a good painter. In any event, Santayana remained a Spanish absolutist in his dislike of Jews. Berenson the great artifact, a Gatsby who kept up appearances to the end, was in Santayana’s eyes simply a pushing Jew. It was Berenson’s genuine passion for Renaissance painting that most aroused Santayana’s contempt. “Art” was just self-indulgent, a minor activity unlike divine philosophy. Despite Berenson at eighty-two as a frail and noble Magnifico, the soigné air, the echoes of Pater and Matthew Arnold, the great fortune built up by Berenson as the authenticator for that super salesman Duveen, the villa I Tatti, the “Jewish aristocracy” of Lithuania, one was compelled, after sixty years, to recall Berenson as a young immigrant given his start by Mrs. Gardner. As a work of art, Berenson himself was incomparable, but there was hardly anyone left to authenticate him. He said more than once that he felt a failure. In his own eyes he was. Perhaps, like so many immigrants, he tried too hard. “I was drawn to him,” said Elizabeth Hardwick, “because he was so unhappy.”
The last time I saw him, he was slowly walking with a party of friends in front of the Villa Medici, on the hill overlooking the Spanish Steps and much of Rome. It was a part of his schedule every day to look at the sunset. A young American, excited to recognize him, walked over in a babble of enthusiasm. Berenson coldly waved him away. “Young man! You’re standing in the way of the sunset!”
The military train took us from Florence to Udine, then to Villach in Austria. We stopped for a night at a British military camp, where officers in Bermuda shorts were at ease in the blazing Alpine summer. Then appeared a shot-up, gutted, blackened miserable piece of ex-Nazi rolling stock full of broken windows, which looked as if it had lugged the victims of the Master Race all over Europe. It was an unforgettable journey up to Salzburg. The tracks halfway to Bischofshofen gave out, the passengers climbed into trucks; standing, we bounded along for hours before we were led into still another bombed and blackened train, so wobbly on its tracks that as the w.c. door slammed shut, one window fell out. A train guard with the Hitler mustache that seemed to be horribly universal in lower Austria approached me with the bitter accusation that I had the window broken and that he must in all duty present me with a bill for having the window broken.
At each station on the way to Salzburg, the stationmaster came out to salute the passing train. Flower boxes were lined up along the station platform; a fine powdery dust flashed in the air; an incessant crowd sweated heavily in leather breeches, leather jerkins, snappy local headgear with protruding tiny whisk brooms. Salzburg, the American military headquarters, was a clotted, moiling crowd scattering summer visitors to the music festival, American personnel and their Bavarian-Austrian domestic help into military compounds and American-style ice-cream parlors, homeless stateless Jews into a transient camp of their own, variously assorted DPs awaiting transport somewhere else.
At Schloss Leopoldskron, Max Reinhardt’s rococo “castle”—in Mozart’s time it had been the seat of the Archbishop who had done so much to keep him hungry—European students and intellectuals had gathered to advance their knowledge of America in a vast seminar organized by Harvard graduate students. The lecturers were F. O. Matthiessen, the great economist Wassily Leontief, Margaret Mead, Walt Whitman Rostow, the old anti-Fascist historian Gaetano Salvemini, just returned from his exile at Harvard. The castle Max Reinhardt had fled had been taken over by the local Gauleiter. There was a hole in the roof from a misplaced American bomb, portraits of the detestable Archbishop, porcelain stoves in the bedrooms, three Australians, the great Italian scholar Mario Praz, an ex-Luftwaffe pilot, young Frenchmen from the Maquis, an Austrian Socialist who had fought Franco. There were Norwegians and Swedes, Belgians and Dutch, Finns, Greeks, Hungarians. A British intelligence officer listened suspiciously to my lecture on E. E. Cummings and sent in official word that we were up to something. Three Czechs appeared—it was the summer of 1947—and Czechoslovakia, though going fast, was still itself.
There were students without a country—a young Latvian DP who had been studying at Innsbruck; a White Russian who had been brought up in Yugoslavia after the First World War and was now neither Russian nor Yugoslavian; a Hungarian DP who worked for the U.S. Army in Salzburg; a Rumanian-Jewish girl whose mother had been shot by the Germans before her eyes and who had spent more than a year in Auschwitz. Poland was asked to send students, but after long deliberation decided that Matthiessen’s failure to include Upton Sinclair in his reading list showed a prejudice against Socialist literature.
The three Czechs all spoke Russian and were enthusiastic about Russia. The Nazi test pilot had had his life saved by a German refugee, now an American lieutenant, who warned him that the Russians were, just then, shooting Nazi test pilots out of hand. One of the American assistants, a navigator in the Air Force during the war, had parachuted down somewhere near Salzburg and had been a prisoner for weeks in the worm-eaten barracks down the road that was now a transient camp for Polish Jews. One Italian student, just twenty, made me realize what the Resistance had done for his generation. He had been born in France and saw Italy for the first time during the war, with a French-Italian partisan group that operated in the North. One Spanish Republican boy came to us from France; he had been a refugee all his life. He told me his story on a Sunday afternoon as we walked back to the Schloss from town after listening to Otto Klemperer conduct Mahler at the Festspielhaus. We were walking in the sticky white dust of Leopoldskronstrasse, making our way between American jeeps and military cars, wooden-faced Austrians having a Sunday walk in their ceremonial Tyrolean jackets and dirndls. We passed a camp for Baits who had come to Germany and Austria during the war as forced or willing labor for the Nazis, and were now afraid to go back to their homes in Soviet territory. We passed a detention house for Germans and Austrians rumored to be “minor political offenders.”
My ears were still chiming from the Chinese effects in Mahler’s Song of the Earth. I had been thinking of the giant Otto Klemperer, whom I had last seen in the Hollywood Bowl, still conducting after his stroke—shuffling and staggering his way to the podium. He was more impressive than ever as he stood over the Vienna Philharmonic. Klemperer the Jew was now an honored figure. Max Reinhardt, who had died in Hollywood, was another honored figure. Yehudi Menuhin was in Salzburg playing the Beethoven Concerto under the direction of his good friend Wilhelm Furtwängler. The exquisite Festspielhaus was staging Wozzeck and Dantons Tod. Austrians, the most enthusiastic Nazis in German-speaking Europe, were officially a “liberated” people. Now I was listening to stories of Spanish exile in Mexico, America, and France, looking at the unrelated migrants walking past each other in Leopoldskronstrasse. Many of them would gladly have killed each other right there.
In Rome I had heard the story of American Negro deserters and Nazi deserters hiding out together in the woods of northern Italy. I had seen old Polish Jews, temporarily lodged in Rome, being moved on by the Joint Distribution Committee. After playing the Beethoven Concerto with the good German Furtwängler, who had led the Berlin Philharmonic all through the Hitler period, Menuhin was bitterly upbraided outside his hotel by a group of Jewish DPs from the transient camp down the road. He had evidently been called down from his room as he was undressing; he was still in his white evening vest as he stood on the steps under the light from the hotel entrance. The crowd of Jews, hardly in evening clothes, muttered at him in angry restlessness. They had collected in the street and the street was dark. Menuhin, directly in the light, was a vivid figure with his tousled blond hair, his brilliant white evening vest. He made sweet, soft, almost weeping efforts to persuade the crowd that he had done “no wrong to the Jewish people” by appearing in Salzburg with Furtwängler. “Yehudi, what are you doing here?” cried out one DP.
Who belonged in Salzburg—the natives, the homeless Jews in the DP camp who told me that they were waiting for a “contact,” the bored-looking American liberators roaring past in their jeeps and shiny new Cadillacs?
F. O. Matthiessen, the star of the Salzburg Seminar, was to have a strangely personal political effect on some of our young European students. Bald, short, as neutral-looking as a clergyman, he was amazing in his sudden vehemence, his intellectual rages in front of his audience, all mixed into a deadly brew with literary and political pieties. He interested and alarmed me. This solemn and devoted literary scholar seemed wired to go off like a bomb. From the moment I heard him lecture on such uncombustible subjects as The Portrait of a Lady and Four Quartets, I awaited drama. There was always a barely smothered violence. It was merely “personal,” as Gatsby said about his dream woman’s marriage to another man. Matthiessen fascinated the audience of wildly assorted Europeans by the obvious urgency to himself of Eliot’s Christianity. His lectures, usually genial and accommodating, carried an undercurrent of intensity that was mysteriously personal. The tension, the unforgettable fixity of his manner and voice in that seemingly mild-looking Harvard professor, became a need to bind that audience to himself, to find affinities. I have never known another teacher whose influence on students had so many harsh personal and political consequences. His suicide in 1950 was to magnify this.
Matthiessen at Salzburg movingly described his favorite Americans, James and Eliot, as the angels, the heavenly messengers of his faith in America and Christianity. But lecturing to foreign students, he transmitted himself more than he did his literary ideas. He was not a literary radical; nothing I ever heard him say showed belief in literature as an instrument of change. His taste was traditional to the point of being theological. Students did not easily understand this about him. For Matthiessen, Eliot represented Christianity, and Theodore Dreiser—a novelist about whom he wrote without conviction—American “radicalism.” Matthiessen was obviously a man hungry for ideology, and he seemed to find all he needed in what European students called “the age of American literature.” There was now a standard repertoire of American masterpieces. But what hushed, mystified, and spellbound Italian Socialists and German Nazis in the great hall at Leopoldskron was the lonely passion of the man. They were not familiar with the many volcanoes seething in the United States. A secretary innocently coming up to Matthiessen with a telephone message—he was lecturing—made him scream with anger.
Matthiessen moved on to the Charles University in Prague just in time to misreport the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in a book of total political innocence, From the Heart of Europe. He was to turn steadily more defensive of Stalinism, and to carry various students with him. The native McCarthyites in Boston expressed their jealous hatred of Harvard by steadily attacking “this professor.” Early in 1950 he went to a mean hotel in Boston opposite the North Station, carefully laid aside his Skull and Bones key from Yale, and jumped to his death. He had been catastrophically lonely since the death of his painter-friend, Russell Cheney. But he now became a “casualty of the cold war.”
Matthiessen’s death, not his teaching; his personal drama, not his books, made him famous. A heroic beleaguered American radical had been driven to his death. The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, Sarah Orne Jewett, Translation: An Elizabethan Art, American Renaissance, Henry James: The Major Phase were books that solidified literary opinion in America within well-recognized lines. They had no interest for the larger public. In Europe, even Silone counted Matthiessen among the victims of the political wars. There was some clear derogation of literature as the halfhearted, wistful “progressivism” of this tormented man was promoted after his death. The age demanded a cause. As Harold Rosenberg said of Whittaker Chambers, “This man is not interested in politics.” Politics, the confrontation of interest groups, even of the two great superstates, did not interest Matthiessen’s elegists. The “progressive” camp, when it was innocently non-Communist, rejoiced in victims. The age was not severe enough and demanded fresh martyrs.
Matthiessen at Salzburg addressed himself lastingly to certain students. He seemed to be sustained by the passionate attention and loyalty of those students, some of whom were to be with him at Prague. His idea of power was entirely moral and verbal; he did not know that students at Charles University who explained Czech politics to him had links to the secret police. Nothing in Matthiessen was so striking as his intense relationship to students—especially since lecturers at the Salzburg Seminar like Walt Whitman Rostow, describing the American economy through a pipe clenched in his teeth, talked to students without looking at them, as if they might be tolerated but never enjoyed.
Rostow was already an official type. Between lectures he sat on the grass busily writing important memos on a portable typewriter in his lap. In London during the war he had been an O.S.S. man helping to select bombing sites; he had been in the State Department and would soon return to it; he was just on his way to the European Economic Commission in Geneva; he would soon be on his way to something even more important in Washington. Yet for all his absorbed, distracted, impatient air, he managed to communicate some professional boyishness. You might have thought his a life dedicated to tennis, not power. He had not yet attained the lofty condescending style of his Johnson-Vietnam period, when he glared in disbelief at students asking for an explanation of the war. His conversation was charmingly shy.
The European students watched the American lecturers with awe. They were the audience, and we in Europe were the main event, absorbed in ourselves, in the rich, overplentiful runaway society whose every last detail we discussed with such hypnotized relevance to ourselves. In this still war-torn year of 1947, the Europeans could not help becoming aware that they were simply out of it. We were the main event. We were America. Even the most timid-looking academics, simply by being part of this immense productivity, this endlessly self-fascinated society, had an immense advantage over our students. They fastened and battened on the most tormented of us, like Francis Otto Matthiessen, and could not get over their surprise that the brilliant Russian-born economist Wassily Leontief, whom in his gaiety and originality I christened the Mozart of economics, should give the main address on the American economy. Leontief’s unconquerable Russian accent so infuriated one ex-Nazi, whose faultless English had been polished working for the Americans in Wiesbaden, that he asked in some futile attempt at mockery, “Is that an American accent?” “The very latest!” we cried.
To be an American was to share in this bountiful feast of money, of information, of books, of the personal chumminess that flowed from Americans at first meeting and so easily deceived Europeans into thinking that this heartiness was meant as friendship. At Salzburg, Europeans and Americans were steadily proclaimed free and equal, equally open to the human strains in this little old neighborhood that led Margaret Mead, our den mother, to promote research projects into the local life as if we were in Middletown. And if American intellectuals in their unending commentary on the American scene were not enough to convince open-mouthed Europeans that America and Americans were different, there was the U.S. Army’s ice-cream factory just past the great rock wall that bore the archiepiscopal coat of arms testifying to the thousand years’ rule, from Salzburg, of all this Catholic country in Austria and Bavaria.
Across the street was an ice-cream parlor that featured curb service. The smart Austrian Inn was occupied by American officers and civilian personnel; the old Mirabelle club, next to the gardens, was a Red Cross club. Salzburg was full of American signs and cars that made it look like an American shopping center. There was so much careless driving that the Army promoted a safety program. Where accidents had occurred there were markers—in English—that showed an arrow and the grim warning “DEATH STRUCK HERE … DRIVE CAREFULLY.”
We were living in a city occupied by troops from our own country, and we had less contact with them than with the suspect natives. The young American soldiers drafted after the war’s end were bored to stupefaction. I watched them sitting over rows of Coca-Cola bottles in the Red Cross club, a great empty ballroom hung with dusty paper ribbons and lined with tarnished gilt paneling. On the walls hung crude images of Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, Richard Strauss. Every afternoon a young Austrian knocked out boogie-woogie on the grand piano, but the soldiers looked like tourists in a Paris dive waiting for something sinister to happen. Some afternoons they played bingo. The Austrian doorman wore a cap lined with spangles, discarded GI fatigues, and a moldy frock coat in which he looked as pleased as Groucho Marx. Yet there was an inconclusive look about him, as if he could never decide whether he belonged with the haves or the have-nots. Inside, metallic blondes took orders for hamburgers and sundaes. They talked a functional English and smiled constantly.
The loneliness in the Red Cross club was familiar. In the moroseness of the Austrians out on the street there was bitterness and hunger. A woman came up to me crying, “I don’t have enough to live on!” For the bumptious overfed new draftees in the Red Cross club, the war was already anyone else’s war. They glowered with a boredom that sent out waves of decay. But American plenty in Europe meant different things to different people. An American movie company was making a film that summer in Frankfurt called Berlin Express. The film’s press agent told Stars & Stripes that they were lucky to have a setting—bombed-out Frankfurt—“which would have cost Hollywood a million dollars to construct.”
On the way back to the castle I would sometimes stop in at Camp Riedenburg, a transient camp for Jewish DPs. There was an official entrance to it, guarded by a militant boy who wore a brassard marked with the Star of David and would not let me in—everyone in Salzburg was suspect. I got in by climbing the fence. There was a couple named Fagelman, whom some of us were helping to get to America.
Riedenburg was another world. There were some fourteen hundred adults in it and five hundred children, half of whom had lost parents in the camps. The Nazis had vacated it to a British force; one of the buildings had a sign slipping from a nail noting that it had once been George VI Hall. The moldy shacks making up the camp lay next to the main street. At night, returning from a concert at the Mozarteum, I could see people lined up in front of the privies in the yard, moving about in rooms that looked like minute cells just above the ground.
Mr. Fagelman was the camp policeman, a dimly amiable young Polish Jew who lived in one of the better shacks of Riedenburg with his wife—who was his brother’s widow—and his brother’s child. Whenever visitors came in, he would grin happily and rush out to get some U.S. Army beer brewed in Salzburg. He would show us letters from his relatives in Rochester, then talk about the war. He would tell us his story; then his wife would tell us hers. It was the Holocaust Haggadah; where one left off, the other took it up. The wife’s story was different from the husband’s story, and it was the story of the Polish Jews from 1939 to 1945. “I wish to share with you the horrible reality that I experienced as a Jew under Fascism.
“At six in the morning the Nazis surrounded the town and captured approximately two thousand men, women, children. They took them outside the city. They undressed them naked. They lined them up against the walls of a warehouse. They shot them dead. The bodies fell into a huge burial hole. The many living yet with the dead. Indiscriminately the Nazis poured gasoline and set the bodies in flame. I was working as an apprentice in a baking shop. The Nazis walked into the shop and asked are there any Jews present. A Christian boy who worked with me said no, there aren’t any Jews. The boy directed me to a shabby cold attic where he locked me in from the outside. From the attic I heard the cries and shouts from the people in the city. Among the people killed in that crowd were my sister Sheyna and her husband.
“We were liberated 1945 by the Americans at eight in the evening, April 28th. Your soldiers were very nice but did not understand why we were in ‘prison.’ ”
Mrs. Fagelman told her story with a little smile of self-deprecation. Perhaps I am not able to convey to you the horror? Mrs. Fagelman lived her story over every time she talked to me. As she stood up there in that little room, she clutched her daughter as if she had talked herself back into the exact moment in 1942 when the Nazis arrived in their town.
Riedenburg was a coldly necessary stopgap for Jews with no place to go to. Everything the Fagelmans used had been given to them as rations after a disaster—for so many displaced persons, so much food, living space, light, and blankets. Everything around them reminded them of what they had gone through. They occupied the camp like people waiting for a train they are not sure will ever arrive. The American soldiers in the next street who looked after them and the Austrians walking by just outside the fence were equally strangers. They were far from hopeless. But to wait and wait for a country to go to while living in the middle of “liberated” Salzburg was intolerable, a self-contradiction.
One afternoon Mr. Fagelman took me around the camp. There was a cobbler working just inside the yard; in a corner a little old man was selling pears that he had bought in town that afternoon. In the crowd outside the administration building a white-haired old man was arguing food allotments with an American sergeant and saying in a velvety accent, “But why do we never get white bread any more? We used to get white bread!” The sergeant explained that the Army thought white bread was too expensive, but the old man did not seem to think this was a very good reason.
In one “family building” a man was sitting at a window peacefully reading the Jewish Daily Forward from New York; he looked like my father, returned from work on another summer evening, reading the Jewish Daily Forward, We looked at the tailor shop, the shoe-repair shop, and a shed in which men were dismantling a broken army truck they had picked up somewhere. In a room that was both school and orphanage there were maps of Palestine and pictures of Herzl and Chaim Nachman Bialik; little girls were walking about, tended by a young nurse.
And then we went into a long basement room. It looked like another detention camp. There were twenty-four people living in that room, including the sick. The beds were wooden slats just above the floor. There were pails, some with uneaten food, some with garbage, next to the wall, and little burners on which the women did their cooking. The tables were covered with Yiddish newspapers from New York.
In the group at the door was a woman wearing a black dress and small gold earrings. Her face was finely sculptured in defiance. There was so much pride in it that her bearing made the room seem even more squalid. Unlike her sister, who was waiting to go to America, she would hold out for Palestine. That room had dying people in it, and this was a woman who looked as if she held life in her hands and didn’t know where to put it. I touched her shoulder to say goodbye. With a mocking grin she looked at me: “Nu? So how do you like the way we live?”
This Roman revery, which seems so sweet
to us and makes us forget all the
interests of active life.
—Stendhal
Later, when we have sailed home in midwinter to await the baby and I am struggling with “the book on New York,” I put myself to sleep by remembering my blissful early mornings in Rome, alone. The bountiful figure in the next bed is more real to me as a figure in my sexual mythology than as a wife. Sneaking out of our cottage at the entrance to the Villa Borghese and walking down the hill, I enter through the great gate into the Piazza del Popolo. The inner face, made by Bernini in 1655, reads “Felici Fausto Ingressui.” Just past the obelisk in the center, between the old sea gods on one wall and the flowering staircase of the Pincio on the other, is the tiny snack bar where I have my coffee.
It always works. No matter how distant Rome seems now, and how many new threats New York offers up, I have only to walk down that hill into the Piazza del Popolo, where every morning I see the same old woman sitting on the steps leading up to the obelisk, in order to feel a new lightness and ease, and comfortably drifting back, to fall asleep.
Daybreak in Rome. I will soon have a shower in the public bagno—the principe from whom we have rented the cottage keeps the winter’s coal in the bathtub. The “people’s square” is empty except for the old woman sitting on the steps leading up to the obelisk, a few tram-drivers drinking cappucino at the snack bar, a street sweeper brushing the ancient cobblestones with a broom of bound twigs. As the light spreads over the ancient roofs, it picks out the sculptured figure on the wall of Neptune with his trident. Patrolling the wall and watching me, a dark-faced carabiniere in a leather tricorne hat. There will be another Communist demonstration this morning, and he is already walking his rounds up and down just in front of Neptune and Minerva.
The cop studies me and I study Neptune and his fellow deities. Impossible to explain to the cop that all my dreams of women come dressed as Rome. I am floating in the past, surrounded by magnified bodies, bodies white and gigantic (even if they are moldering slightly), bodies stretched upon the open city of the Piazza del Popolo, bodies hovering over the great square still empty except for a few figures hurrying to work.
I walk down the Corso to the public bath. “Buon bagno!” cries the strapping, smiling bath attendant as she hands me a sliver of soap and the large rough towel that will soon envelop me like a toga. “Una doccia?” Showering early in the Rome morning, nestling in every fold of my skin the generous warmth, the steam flowing in the air, the heat in the wooden boards underfoot, feeling easy and abundant as I walk back early in the morning to where my wife is still asleep, I feel that I am walking in my sleep. On the Corso a green pagan figure, presiding over a fountain, is coiled like a snake and is sitting on its tail. Without disturbing itself in the least, it fixes me with a sidelong glance as I pass it. I have at last attained a perfect detachment. I am someone else. There are mornings walking around Rome when I believe in transubstantiation. I am someone who used to live in Rome, am as happily unreal to myself as that snaky green figure on the Corso reclining on its tail. I am free to love anything in Rome. Rome is a woman more real to me than the woman I live with.
In our bedroom back at the cottage hangs a reproduction of Leonardo’s Virgin with her mother, St. Anne. The “enigmatic” Leonardo smile over the slightly open mouth dissolves me as it beckons me backward in time. So the circular staircases leading up to the Pincio and the white plaster statues of excessively mustached nineteenth-century Italian politicians, the occasional carriage clip-clopping down the street, the Franciscan church on the Via Veneto lined with the skeletons of departed monks that Hawthorne described—everything seems to say that the present does not exist except as still another stage setting, that everything and everyone in Italy plays a role. I can actually watch myself melting into the scenery.
At siesta time I would again leave Louise asleep in our cottage to wander about in the hot afternoons. The corrugated iron shutters guarding the shop windows would come down with a bang, and I, still abroad at this hour, the hungry American pilgrim of culture, would find myself absorbed in shadows as ominous as the sharply angled streets of de Chirico. I had a not unpleasant, even picturesque sense of being alone—not lonely but certainly alone. We had come home together from England; we were married, in Italy on our honeymoon; we would soon have a son. I never lost the feeling I had that first day in London during the war. I did not know her. The controlled handsome face that responded regularly and precisely, right on the downbeat, was someone I would never know. She definitely disapproved of me. No wonder that in the mornings I would wander down the hill into the Piazza del Popolo as if in a dream. Italy worked on me so deeply that alone while living with Louise, I was open to every side of the past. But the picturesque surface was breaking up. The great patina of Italy was often false.
In the Piazzale Flaminio, Communist strikers regularly stormed against the “existing order.” Carabinieri, much too grandly dressed for the occasion, sometimes tripped on their swords as they rushed out of their American jeeps to clobber the demonstrators. Each week I read in the overseas edition of Time that these strikers had torn up trolley tracks, had overturned buses, and had set fire to automobiles. Even the Rome staff of Time Inc. never knew which lordly hands back in Rockefeller Center recast their cables as ammunition in the cold war.
America was the biggest thing in Italy. Americani were visitors from another world. Under the showy melodramatic Italian moon shining upon the restaurants and cafés in Trastevere, crowds sat staring at crowds eating at those long lines of tables, row after row between the hedges of gigantic rubber plants that marked off one café from another—an audience at the Roman play making up its own play. Wonderful to watch the long appraising stares, like those of an expert judging horseflesh, with which these open-air troglodytes looked each newcomer up and down. No one missed a thing. They may have looked bored and weary with that built-in bourgeois Italian weariness, scales over their half-closed eyes as they sipped at their minuscule espresso. All the time in the world: they had been sitting there with that same inch of coffee, that same spoon and water carafe, since the Etruscans. But in the air the preparatory vapors of seduction; these are buds that open only at night. As soon as we walked into this lighted den, unable to keep from making the grand tour up and around the long line of tables, faint waves chattered at us. Ah, some more of the americani.
Louise’s glossy black hair, set off by a gold-shining silk print, never ceased to astonish. “Aren’t all American women blond?” Carlo Levi said to her. He panted with public desire for her. He rolled his eyes, his chest heaved so that he always fell off his barstool. Even he, the fat Roman satyr who wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli, had never met so deliriously exciting a woman. She had a great effect on Italians. Three whores glumly sitting together looked Louise over, conferred, looked her over again. Cigarette vendors came screeching round like a flock of gulls maddened by the smell of food off the ship’s bow—old, young, sick, every age and every human condition in Italy, desperately selling cigarettes, especially counterfeit Chesterfields and Old Golds, each vendor with his stock in a little suitcase open before him like a tray.
Sigarette?… Nazionali … americani? Every five minutes new beggars appeared at the table—usually old women wearing black shawls and the look of the eternal mother of sorrows, leading little barefoot girls whose faces were gray, whose arms hung at their sides as if tired from scratching old sores. You found yourself not just responding to the situation but rewarding the performance. Under the table were more barefoot kids, in discarded GI pants and American Air Force jackets, hunting cigarette ends and storing them carefully in little tin pails; every slavered-over butt in the gutter would go to make new “American” cigarettes. In the history of Italy this was the Pax Americana, or the age of the secondhand butt.
The beggars covered the cafés and restaurants in waves, making sure never to come up in bunches or at too close intervals. As one beggar went from table to table, the next stood at the hedge like an actor waiting to go on. Despite their public indifference, the Italians gave, every time. They were bored and after the tenth approach exasperated, but with a shrug of shoulders or a languid protest (“Signora! This time some mercy! You think I’m the Bank of Italy?”), they came up with the usual damp crumpled lira notes. The crucial test was when some “big fork,” a big eater whose face was swollen with spaghetti, tried to look away. Hopeless. The beggar kept turning with him and stared him down. A left-wing faction of the Socialists tried to humiliate a right-wing faction by listing on the wall of Socialist headquarters the beastly long list of dishes that their opponents had consumed at lunch.
In the brilliantly humming summer night you could hear all those Italian café dwellers talking money, money, money, pushing at the world outside like a fly caught in honey. In the North, triumphant Communists were ritually drowning Fascists. I saw the picture: a Communist partisan leader sitting on the side of a boat solemnly keeping a condemned Fascist under the water with his legs. It was quite a “Roman” orgy. The politically virtuous Communist did not realize how pagan, sexy, and wild he looked with his legs on the other man’s shoulders. Vae victis!
The café crowd must include both victims and heroes of Italy’s struggle with Fascism, but one knows nothing. Too many heads merely packed with antennae; poised, alert, too wise. The faces generally lack that paunchy, pasty look of overfed Americans; you can still see the bony structure on older people. The general good looks among the young are amazing. Face after face with that focused sensuality that is the personal ticket of stage people. The air is damp with sex, but you can hear sums being recited at table after table; the whole piazza is one great bourse for the black market. Ottomilasessanta … quarantamilanovanta. A fierce-looking boy rides up on a bicycle and unerringly goes straight to the American faces and clothes. Wanna buy American cigarettes—real American cigarettes, not counterfeit? Wanna change your money, Mista? Hey, Mista? Will you for the love of God tell him something? You think he hasn’t got the dough? Takes out a great wad of the sweaty lire. “Listen!” he says disgustedly, about to ride off, “I buy anything you got! ANYTHING!” The long wailing singsong of the cigarette vendors, as the evening drags on, becomes simply “America!”
The returning anti-Fascist exiles were not very welcome. The historian Gaetano Salvemini, at seventy-five still the peppery South Italian after his years at Harvard, as unflinching as ever in his libertarian principles, was told that he “criticizes too much.” Salvemini launched himself like a torpedo at every lie and delusion in the soft corrupt body of Italian self-satisfaction, Demochristian and Communist. On the stage of the Eliseo Theatre in Rome, honored by Italian World Federalists, he bent over a table to hide his emotion when the crowd rose to welcome him home with operatic cries of Viva Salvemini! Then, crying Dunque! Let’s start! he took an enormous manuscript out of his pocket and, dropping each page on the floor as he read it, proceeded to denounce all the ruling powers, right and left, American and Russian, that cooperated to keep Italians “obedient” to the many “stupidities” in their past.
Salvemini was an unreconstructed man of the Enlightenment, still undiscouraged, secularist, republican. A political historian, his whole being was unbelievably dominated by austere moral principles that were the only things necessary to all political behavior. A democrat in a country dominated by authoritarian Catholics and Stalinists, he was too old in knowledge but actually too young in spirit to please the overheated atmosphere of “liberation.” He had an abrupt, laughing, fiery way of reducing wordy issues and wordy Italians to a question of good faith. “My only rule is to behave so that I won’t have to spit at myself when I shave in the morning.” There was something of the small-town buffoon in Gaetano Salvemini. He liked to break up a party, especially if pompous officialdom was attending. With his polemical-looking bald head, his thick round body, his “provincial” Southern abruptness and mockery, he made the most inflamed issues personal to him and personal in attack. Before he returned to Italy, an Italo-American politician, Ferdinand Pecora, innocently solicited Salvemini’s advice on “restoring Italy’s image.” Pecora means sheep, and so was pronounced “pe-cora” to make this unrecognizable. Salvemini was outraged by talk of “restoring Italy’s image.” He spat out in his comically raging way, “The real Fascists, Meesta Pec-o-rah, are not in Rome but in New York!” In Rome after the war Salvemini turned out to resemble nothing and no one but himself. “He criticizes too much.” “He expects too much.” “Perhaps he was away too long?”
My old hero Silone was even more deeply disliked. He had been the best-known Italian writer in exile, so it was a shock to the literati that the first Italian edition of Fontamara was sent over by Silone’s English publisher. It was difficult to find a book of Silone’s in the shops, but many writers talked against his work and scolded excited foreign visitors for loving his work—for having known it so long!
Silone, born with the century, and having spent the best part of his life in exile, was again a threat to Italian conformism. Guilt and envy had nothing to do with it. “He writes a crude Italian.” It was abominable yet comic to hear Fontamara, Bread and Wine, The Seed Beneath the Snow knocked down for reasons of “taste” by every little literary creature. One amiable hack, who did little articles and cartoons for the Socialist press, talked as if he were reciting only the latest and most widely approved opinions as he lectured foreigners on what he called the “outside world’s” absurd overestimation of Silone. This put him right in style, and gave him the only contact he had with opinion outside Italy, a country he had managed to live in throughout the Fascist period by showing how easy it was to agree with everyone around him. “You people cannot imagine how crudely he writes.…” Screwing up his shoulders with the stage-worn Latin gesture that expressed someone else’s error or folly, he went on long after everyone at table had given it up as hopeless.… “Silone! Per ignoranza! Always Silone! You people have never heard of anyone else!”
He wrote “badly” because he was a political, not really a “man of letters.” He was a member of Parliament, still an active Socialist, editor of his own political weekly. Nor did he shine in conversation, as Italians must, but seemed a “depressed and depressing character.” Foreigners visiting Italy ridiculously saw Silone as a symbol of the only Italy they knew—the anti-Fascist exiles. Obviously only the boldest dared to defy the state—and perhaps many of the people? “But after all, it was not so bad as Hitler. You have no idea how easygoing it all was until the war and the defeats. With us, even authoritarian government was a bit of a joke.”
Silone was not a “literary” writer, a deep matter in a country where “style” worked on writers like a narcotic. “My greatest pleasure,” said a writer of notable intelligence, “is spending the morning polishing my paragraphs.” So Silone was considered gross and, with so much of his time taken up with both inter-Socialist politics and the religious evolution evident in his later novels, a curiosity. There was still something of the Abruzzi about him—primitive, obstinate, forever solitary. As my friend Paolo Milano said, Silone was the one type Italians cannot accept—the moral dissenter. “He simply will not reduce everything to the canonical Italian level of the ‘family affair.’ ” His Socialism was not very practical; it represented more and more a longing to get back to the human relatedness with peasants and artisans he knew in the Abruzzi. What I had loved most in Silone was his feeling for the bottom people, for those whom Tolstoy called the “dark people.” But Silone, like George Orwell, had shown the intellectuals some dour ethical distrust of them. Betrayal from one’s own people was something Silone knew a lot about. The peasant types whom sophisticated Italians condescended to were for Silone just those “who do not betray.”
I wrote Fontamara in 1930, in Davos. Since I was alone there—a stranger with an alias to evade the efforts of the Fascist police to find me—writing became my only means of defense from despair. And since it did not appear to me that I had long to live, I wrote hurriedly, with unspeakable affliction and anxiety, to set up as best I could that village into which I put the quintessence of myself and my native heath so that I could at least die among my own people.
Sitting with Silone in a sweltering mob at the restaurant Re degli Amici—accordion players, Neapolitan blues singers, a one-man band loaded front and back with instruments and beating time to the upward and downward tilt of a rusty black derby over his eyes, wandering beggars and nuns collecting alms—Louise and I were surrounded by sociability unlimited. The King of Friends was then the haunt of all good Roman writers, Socialists, and members of the anti-Fascist “Action Party” that was just surrendering itself to the Communists. The Italian bedlam was beautiful, intellectual merriment, people calling and flirting from table to table, all one great family party. At such moments, thinking of my solitary morning walk into the Piazza del Popolo, I envied the public intimacy of these people with each other. The family motif binding Italians together seemed stronger than the personality of each one.
Even Silone looked almost happy that night, though, taking advantage of Carlo Levi’s valiant efforts to speak English, he put his face in a great mass of fish, meats, and greens and remained alone with his own thoughts. Curious to watch Silone with a writer like Carlo Levi—men of the same generation formed outside the shell of Fascism and better known in other countries, both fundamental types of the writer “engaged” to action, yet so different that the extremes of the Italian character had been called on to produce them. Silone seemed entirely apart, silent with political and literary disappointments—“He has been told so often that he is a bad novelist that he is ready to believe it.” But Silone was still defending firmly the deepest urgings of the oppressed among whom he grew up. After that beautiful record of an anti-Fascist’s exile in his own country, Christ Stopped at Eboli, Levi could not decide whether he was a writer or painter or professional amorist. He was already on his way to becoming a Communist senator and was always acting it up in public, relying on his Falstaffian girth and his too hearty Italianness to keep him afloat. How he sighed and panted in public for Louise! He looked at her, looked at me. I thought he would go through his pants. It was all quicksilver, Rossini.
But the Silone I loved was to be found not in a crazy-quilt evening, not in himself, but in his work, with its scruples, its awkward tenderness, and its humor. When I lived in Italy, that work was still my background; it was one more telling of the unchanging history of the “dark people”:
The government is always against the poor, but the present government is a special kind of government. It is against the poor, but in a special way. All its strength is directed against the poor, but in a particular way.
And afterward we toiled home through the sudden cold, stopping for an espresso, admiring the nymphs in the Piazza del Popolo, buying a bag of chestnuts from the old woman on the corner warming herself at the fire, while in the faint light of the lamps in the Villa Borghese, just beyond Michelangelo’s gates, that Roman god and emperor whose name I never learned still stood with his arm half raised, beautiful and indifferent.