PORTOVENERE

After Portofino we put in at another place that had had its poet in its time. This is Portovenere, a town at the mouth of the Gulf of Spezia from which, in 1822, Byron set out to swim to visit Shelley at Lerici on the other side of the Gulf four miles away. One wonders how many poets can swim four miles in the 1960’s and what their time would be for the distance.

A grotto is named for Byron at Portovenere and a plaque in rhetorical Italian commemorates his feat. Poets visit each other differently nowadays, if they visit each other at all, and one cannot help but regret the change. The imagination re-creates with zest the vision of the author of Childe Harold rising bull-shouldered and beautiful from the foam to greet that other odd Englishman on the sunny Italian beach nearly a century and a half ago, and it is interesting to speculate on what their first words were—“Here, have a towel,” or, “You must be dying for a drink,” or, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” or, “How’s it going these days?” Whatever was said, and even with our knowledge of how soon it was all going to be over for both of them, it all seems simpler and friendlier and somehow more talented than life among the Muses these days. How does Eliot greet Spender on Bloomsbury’s edge? What does Auden say to Ginsberg on 57th Street?

The town of Portovenere rises steeply from the waterfront. The houses are four or five stories high, but only one window wide, and everybody’s laundry seems permanently out to dry. The streets behind are the streets of poverty, narrow and climbing past meager shops and backyard grape arbors up to the hill above the town and the fortress whose stones bear witness to a more important past. The town does not seem to have attracted many vacationers, due perhaps to the fact that the swimming in the gulf is often spoiled by oil from the tanks of the ships that pass here on their way to the great naval port of La Spezia.

We climbed at sunset to the sixth century church of San Pietro, octagonal and hushed on its cliff high above the sea. An old woman was vigorously scrubbing the worn paving of the floor, combining sanctity and a housewifely love of cleanliness in the lucent stillness of the evening wind. Down below, on the town side, disregarding the stone presence of the centuries, some boys were playing soccer football on a field inside the ramparts, the quickness of their movements and the innocence of their sport intensified for the onlooker by the menacing grey crenellations of the walls, through which cannon had been trained at other times.

It was at Portovenere that I became conscious of a sound I then heard throughout Italy—a crisp rhythmic clicking, as though whole populations were engaged in a mass game of Ping-Pong. It came from the tap of wooden clogs on cement and stone, and it finally became a comforting, unhurried background to all our harbor-side activities.

Moored next to us in the harbor was a tiny sailboat, perhaps fourteen feet in length, with blankets rigged up to keep out the sun and a browned, athletic looking man with long hair sitting among what looked like hundreds of books, taking notes. When we spoke to him, he told us that he had sailed from England to Portovenere in six weeks, going through the rivers and canals of France to the Mediterranean and then along the French and Italian coasts to Portovenere. In conversation, it quickly turned out that he was half-Japanese, although it was impossible to tell it from his looks; that he was retired; that he was on his way to Africa in his little craft; that he had taught swimming in Japan; that he lived on three small bowls of rice a day, boiled in seawater; that he was awaiting his five-year-old daughter, who was arriving from England in a few days and who would then serve as crew for the rest of the voyage. He wrote, he said, a book a year, which is not bad for a man who considers himself retired. When I asked him what the books are about he said, simply, “Sport,” much as Tolstoi might have answered, when asked to describe the theme of Anna Karenina, “Love.” Then he added, turning back to his floating library, “Look up Yachting Magazine of May. There’s a big story about me.”

Much later, when I returned home, I did look up Yachting Magazine for May. I conscientiously went through every page. I learned a considerable amount about Norwegian coastal charts, about stabilizers for small vessels, and about building your own catamaran, but found nary a word about my literary friend. Perhaps I had the wrong May.

When we left Portovenere the next day, we waved at the little craft in which our friend was diligently writing before setting out for Africa with his five-year-old daughter. That morning I felt that our ship was ludicrously oversized and that our voyage, compared to his, was about as adventurous as a trip on the Fifth Avenue bus from Altman’s to Saks.