NAPLES

The agent arrived, almost on time, at our berth in the harbor of San Gennaro, which is at the northern end of the town and is supposedly less objectionable than the other yacht harbor, which is in the same port used by the ocean liners and cargo vessels. Hoping that all would be well with the refrigerator and everything crisp and chilly when we got back, my wife, my son and I decided to improve our day by visiting Pompeii and after that going to the top of Vesuvius.

To get a car and a chauffeur we went to the office of the American Express, where, at a high price, we were presented with a large, shiny, but old Alfa Romeo limousine and a small, middle-aged man who wore a stiff-visored cap and spoke a kind of English. Since my wife and son speak Italian and I understand enough of it to get by, and since we could only understand one word out of ten that the guide spoke in English, we pleaded with him to communicate with us in his native tongue. But his pride forbade any such compromise, and as we sped down the autostrada in the direction of Pompeii, he kept pointing out various sights of interest to us and conducting a long monologue, from which I culled only two intelligible sentences—“That is a pillbox,” and “General Mark Clark came on this road.”

When we got to Pompeii, although it was only eleven-thirty and we had all had hearty breakfasts, our guide immediately went to a large barn-like restaurant where two tourist buses were already parked and tried to convince us to have lunch. After a struggle we managed to make him understand that we were not hungry and that even if we were, nothing could make us eat in that particular restaurant. Sadly, he permitted us to go to the entrance in the wall which now encloses the excavations of Pompeii. But we were turned back. For the first time in several thousand years Pompeii was closed. The custodians had gone on strike that morning for higher pay and the public would have to seek its ruins elsewhere. When my son tried to climb on top of the fence to get a glimpse of the dead city, he was ordered down by two policemen armed with carbines.

My wife said one or two things about the intelligence network of the American Express and we got back into the car. Disregarding all suggestions of our guide, we directed him sea-wards in search of a restaurant where we could lunch and be cool at the same time.

After lunch, in the blazing heat, we set out resolutely for Vesuvius. A good paved road winds through apricot orchards, vineyards and lava beds almost to the summit. The last lap of the ascent is covered by a teleferique which starts at a small café high on the baking hillside. Halfway up our car began to labor. Suddenly there was an explosion under the hood, it flew open with a jet of steam and pieces of metal erupted onto the road. With distracted cries of apology and alarm our driver stopped the car and went scurrying after the bits of Alfa Romeo that had become separated from the rest of the car in the explosion. There was no shade, and we sweltered in the naked heat while the poor man worked to put the parts back into their proper place. Since no one in my family can make any claims as an Alfa Romeo expert we couldn’t offer to help, but could only suffer with the chauffeur as car after car, all of them smaller and less impressive than ours, swept past us, their occupants favoring us with pitying looks, on their way up to the crater of the volcano.

Unhappily, the view of the Bay of Naples, which is justly famous, was closed away from us by haze, so we did not even have that pleasure to console ourselves with while waiting, pessimistically, for the repairs to be made. Finally the driver announced that he thought the car was ready to move again. We got in, and although some very strange noises issued from under the hood, we made the climb to the teleferique station. We noticed that the cable stopped moving just as we reached the station, but thought nothing of it until we went into the café to buy our tickets.

There we were told by the owner of the café that the machinery had just broken down and it would be at least a day before it would run again. This was too much for my son, and he burst out in his swiftest street-Italian with an angry account, for the owner’s benefit, of what he thought of the custodians of Pompeii, the American Express, and the company that ran the accommodations on Vesuvius. His tone was bitter, and while in general I approve of a certain amount of stoicism from children in the face of misfortune, I could not help but be sympathetic, since to be deprived of both Pompeii and Vesuvius on the same day is a bit hard to take at the age of eleven.

The owner listened interestedly, but at the end merely shrugged, offered us a Coca-Cola and said, with the utmost resignation, “Viva Italia.”

The driver, trying nervously to make up for the calamities that had accumulated around his head, suggested that we could climb to the crater on foot. It would only take about an hour, he said. Since even a man in an asbestos suit would have been broiled alive in that shadeless lava barbecue before going five hundred yards, we thanked him for his suggestion but felt forced to turn it down.

Glumly, we returned to Naples and went to the aquarium, the coolest place in town, and looked at pickled sharks.

Our luck was running no better when we got back to our boat. In our absence a movie company had moved in on the narrow breakwater to which we were moored, with trucks, generators, lights, Rolls Royces, actors, dozens of grips and carpenters, and assistant directors who kept shouting hoarsely while platforms were being hammered together on rafts around a two-masted yacht thirty feet away from us that was to be the scene of the shooting. The shooting, I was told, was going to go on all night. Policemen were doing their best to keep the curious crowds in check, with no great success. Our Captain came up with the news that nothing had happened yet about the refrigerator, and I had a long drink, thoroughly chilled with a large lump of ice from the chest on the deck.

At dusk, the Captain announced that he had spoken to the agent and the agent had told him it would take at least two more days to get the refrigerator fixed. Since by that time Naples had lost most of its charm for me, I told the Captain we wanted to go to Capri in the morning, establish ourselves in a quiet hotel and wait there while the Captain took the boat back to Naples and had the refrigerator fixed or blown up or had the boat completely rebuilt, as he saw fit.

Not wishing to dine in the ulcer-producing atmosphere of a movie company on location and not enjoying the prospect of being watched by ten thousand Neapolitans while I ate an English boiled dinner, I invited my family to one of the fish restaurants that spread their tables alongside the main harbor. We met the French writer Romain Gary there, and the conversation, between the fried squid and the grilled rouget, not unexpectedly touched on the subject of critics and the various ways writers react to bad reviews. I told of one playwright, rich, magnificently gifted and famous throughout the world, who sits down quite simply and weeps when he reads a bad review, even if it is only in Woman’s Wear Daily or The Partisan Review. Another writer I know celebrates unpleasant news of this kind by walking up and down Fifth Avenue, going into every shop and buying almost everything in sight on a wild, defiant spending spree. My own reaction to bad notices of a play of mine is either to sit down the next morning and start a new play or to call my agent and tell him to try to get me a job writing a movie, depending upon the state of my bank balance at the moment.

Gary has a better system. He does not publish a book until he has completely finished another, the idea being that he does not want the new book to be influenced by either praise or condemnation of the old one. But he is French and logical and writes at great speed, and I saw no possibility of an impatient but slow American writer profiting from this wise example.

After this happy seminar on disaster control we parted, Gary to continue on his way toward Paris, my family and I to face up to our tepid maritime way of life.

My son spent the rest of the evening composing a letter to the President of American Express, while the assistant directors roared on, the Rolls Royces passed and re-passed, the carpenters hammered, the crowds massed on the breakwater, and huge lights were turned on and off to the sound of the whirring generator. At three A.M., when I finally gave up trying to sleep, I went into the galley and stared for a long time at the refrigerator.