one

Grant left the island for Rome in mid-May, taking Holly with him. He had some business there, and they would spend a few days at the Rafaele, a small, ivy-covered hotel hidden in a square behind the Piazza Navona. Marisa was left to lounge beside the pool, where she spent her time with a glass of wine in her hand, leafing through an Italian fashion magazine. She was supposedly writing a piece for a Roman newspaper on Capri—her first real assignment—but I had yet to see her doing much research. “I am thinking about it,” she said to me, when I inquired about its progress over lunch. “When the article emerges, I will write it down.”

I had seen her in tears more than once, and asked if anything was wrong. “My life is wrong,” she said, rather melodramatically. I decided there was little I could do that would comfort her, so stayed away, unlike Vera, who grew especially attentive to Marisa with Holly gone. “I worry about the poor thing,” she said. “Rupert doesn’t take her seriously. I don’t think he even likes her.”

It occurred to me that Grant really didn’t like women at all, but I didn’t dare say this to Vera.

Grant had left me without a specific assignment. “Just get on with it, Lorenzo,” he told me. Get on with what? I wanted to say, but didn’t dare.

Vera told me that Grant had made few genuine friendships with other writers in Italy. He did admire Alberto Moravia—the uncrowned king of Italian letters—and they would periodically exchange letters or phone calls. And when in Rome, he invariably called on Gore Vidal and his companion, Howard Austen, who lived grandly in a penthouse overlooking the Largo Argentina with their dog, Rat. “Gore is the only celebrity I can tolerate,” Grant told me. “He has no morals. Morals are for those who can’t think for themselves.” Muriel Spark, an “English Tuscan,” as Vera put it, turned up periodically for a day or two on Capri, although she considered southern Italy a foreign country and, according to Vera, “whined incessantly about the heat.” Auden, once a close friend of her husband, rarely came to the island these days. “There is always a rivalry with Wystan, and Rupert dislikes competition,” Vera said. Even Graham Greene, a legendary figure on Capri (though he rarely occupied Il Rosaio, his villa in Anacapri), had remained a passing acquaintance. “He went to a minor public school,” Vera said. “And I find his books rather sour. There’s nothing more depressing than an English Catholic.”

I could not get a fix on Vera’s attitude toward “the girls,” though she referred in passing to her husband’s “goatish little hobby.” She had presumably come to an arrangement with him about their sexual life. In any case, she treated Holly and Marisa with respect, even affection—like fellow sufferers of an obscure disease.

Was the Grant arrangement what Patrice called a mariage blanc, a union without sexual content, a cover for their mutually independent lives? Or was this just a tony form of modern decadence? I knew about the Bloomsbury crowd, and Vera considered herself an heir of sorts to that sensibility. Her father, a wealthy entrepreneur who had come with his parents from Riga in flight from the Bolsheviks, had known Keynes at Cambridge, and Vera blithely referred to “Uncle Maynard” quite often. Her mother, from a famous county family, had also gone to Cambridge, and (as Vera said on more than one occasion) “once met Virginia Woolf at a party at Garsington,” a manor house near Oxford where the Bloomsbury crowd often gathered under the supercilious gaze of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

I gradually pieced together Vera’s personal history. After studying art history in England, she had spent a period in Florence at an expensive art school, where “the daughters of English gentlefolk apprenticed themselves to attractive older men in the pursuit of wisdom.” It was in Florence, at the Villa Barbaresca, the neo-Palladian home of an English baroness, that she met Grant, then in his early forties. He was recently divorced, famous, and extremely eligible. The fact that he had barely enough money to support the children of his previous marriage didn’t trouble her, as her parents had plenty and would be glad to supply her and a suitable husband with all the necessities, even a villa on Capri if that was their preference.

I hadn’t, at first, been aware of Grant’s social isolation, which was largely self-imposed. Because my arrival in April coincided with his birthday, my first impression was misleading. I was, in fact, dazzled by the company he and Vera managed to assemble on the beach that night. In a fell swoop, my address book filled with local phone numbers and addresses, and I had invitations to call at half a dozen villas. (“Who would have guessed you would be popular?” Vera remarked, calling on me in my cottage the next morning, bringing hot tea in a Thermos.) But I did not immediately attempt to widen my circle.

I sensed that Grant wished for the Villa Clio to remain aloof, a place where private fantasies were indulged, and where Art—his writing, Vera’s cooking and gardening—occurred unobstructed by anything but their own demons. The dinner parties, plentiful in my first month on the island, disguised a lack of genuine desire to mingle; Rupert and Vera invited people to watch them, not to interact; the conviviality was, in part, a facade, a means of structuring and confirming their isolation. By late May, fewer and fewer guests crossed our threshold.

Holly and Marisa, in their different ways, had bought into Grant’s vision of privacy and self-indulgence, and together with Vera and the servants they formed a solar system of sorts, with Grant himself the supernova at the center, supplying the necessary heat and light. Vera was the nearest planet, but a cold one, her atmosphere—layers of protective ice and fog—difficult for ordinary human beings to fathom, although she had sunlit clearings where great warmth and understanding could be found. Maria Pia was a little moon, circling Vera, as was Mimo, who glowered from the sidelines, a gardener who was more eyes than hands. Marisa and Holly were equidistant from the star, although they managed to sustain enough distance—emotional and physical—from each other to avoid clashing in their orbit around him. I was trying, anxiously, to find my place in this system.

Often I lingered in the cottage by myself, scribbling in my journal, writing home, rereading my brother’s letters from Vietnam. He would have been a marvelous reporter, with his eye for the luminous detail. He often placed himself in situations of danger, and enjoyed talking about them with casual detachment. I caught glimpses of a brothel in Saigon, an opium den in a village, a night patrol in a remote province, where the threat of ambush made every step, every cracked branch underfoot or wild animal in the brush, a cause for panic. “There are eyes in the jungle,” Nicky wrote, “eyes everywhere, and they’re fucking malevolent. There are no kind eyes in Vietnam. It’s all death here. Even the sex drips death like water in a dark cave.”

I told no one about Nicky, fearing their pity. That would have been unbearable. It came as some relief that they remained oblivious to the outside world, where wars raged, people starved, dictators dictated, and vast sums of money passed among a few controlling hands. The Grants read few newspapers and never watched television. The Villa Clio, indeed, had no television set. “You can acquire only one station,” Vera explained. “Nothing but bloody local stuff anyway. Telecapri is hardly a station at all. More like a peasant family feud.”

Politics rarely arose in conversation, though the Grants were essentially Tories. They despised Harold Wilson and the Labour government, who in their opinion appealed to “the lowest common denominator” in British society. The TUC, the national trades union organization, was ridiculed as “a gang of hooligans” by Vera. Oddly enough, I found myself nodding in agreement when Grant and Vera bemoaned the “bogus socialist notion of equality.” (Vera’s Jewish grandfather had been dislodged from a position of prominence in Latvia by the Bolsheviks, although she was born in London and completely absorbed into the British upper-middle class.) At that time, I shared Grant’s unequivocal belief in the superiority of the artist, in the privilege conferred by pure acts of imagination; I, too, disliked the “world of mass production” that was Grant’s favorite bugaboo. His blithe assumptions about class unsettled me, though I dismissed my reservations as American gaucherie. At least he and Vera never referred to the Vietnam War, which was probably of less interest to them than the Boer War.

Complicating my situation at the Villa Clio were my feelings for Holly. After our initial, botched, encounter on the beach, she remained wary of me, or so I thought. She barely acknowledged any gestures of friendship I put forward, as when I asked her to stop by the cottage one afternoon for tea. English girls could hardly object to invitations to tea, could they? “Yes, that would be nice,” she had replied, “but not today. Another time, perhaps.” She seemed to suggest—or so I imagined—that no day would be the right day.

Holly and Marisa, each driven by their own ambitions, got along surprisingly well under the circumstances. They often joined forces at the dinner table, with Vera, to tease Grant (who seemed to luxuriate in this teasing, which was a form of flattery). They shared a suite at the villa: two small bedrooms in a separate wing, at the opposite end of where Grant and Vera slept in a big yellow room with a view across the Marina Piccola to the Punta di Mulo, with its ragged angostine cliffs. I wondered how sharing such close quarters was possible, given their rivalrous connections to Grant. He seemed arbitrarily to pick one or the other to serve as his “research assistant” for the day, and this involved not only long sessions in his study but morning swims, walks, and “naps.” This was a form of what the behavioral psychologists called intermittent reinforcement: the most vicious and powerful type of reward, and one that turned laboratory mice into little neurotic fuzz balls willing to perform any species-demeaning task for a drop of sugar water.

In the early morning, I occasionally met Holly by the pool, where she sat with the manuscript of her Capri novel on her lap—it had recently topped a hundred pages, she said. When I asked to read some of it, she refused. “Only when it’s finished,” she said. “I don’t present work-in-progress.” The book was overly influenced, she claimed, by Evelyn Waugh, whose work I’d never read. “You must, absolutely must, read him,” she insisted. I was lent a copy of A Handful of Dust, and found it delicious as well as shocking. It also explained to me a good deal about the world of upper class British society, which until my arrival at the Villa Clio had been largely unknown to me.

“You fancy Holly, don’t you?” Vera asked, while her husband and Holly were still in Rome. We sat alone in the dining room, lingering over coffee one day after lunch.

“I suppose,” I said.

“Rupert won’t like that.”

I feigned confusion, and this annoyed Vera.

“Rupert tells me that she’s good at fellatio,” she said. “You’re familiar with the term, I presume.”

Vera was disconcerting, without emotional boundaries, and willing to say anything that came into her head.

“I don’t mind his girls,” she said. “I wish you could believe that.” Her intimate tone, the sense of trusting me with her private life, won me over. “You needn’t worry about Rupert and Holly,” she said. “She’s nothing special, not to him. One of many in a long string of amusements. Seize the day, darling. Isn’t that what you poets advise?”

“She isn’t interested in me,” I explained. “You see how she treats me.”

“Like a poor, dumb booby,” she said.

A poor, dumb booby.

“Poor baby!” Vera continued, “I’ve hurt your feelings.”

“A little,” I said.

“Have you made your sentiments clear to Holly?”

“Not really,” I said. “I should just give up.”

Vera sighed and put down her cup. “Are you queer, Alex?”

“What?”

“Queer. Patrice is queer, isn’t he? I don’t mind—the island is crawling with buggers.”

I did not respond, flummoxed.

She studied me carefully. “About you, I’m uncertain. But it’s bloody obvious that Patrice is queer.”

“Not to me.”

“You are not as alert as you might be.”

That was understating the case. I began to wonder if I could possibly navigate the world of Capri, where every goal was obscured by the mesmerizing light, refracted in a zillion ways. Motives were hidden or difficult to parse. Lo pazzo d’isola, as the locals called it, permeated everything, but it was worse at the Villa Clio. The island madness heaped here, spoonful after spoonful like whipped cream, with nuts sprinkled on top.

“Seize the day, Alex,” Vera said, with false urgency. “Isn’t that what poets do?”

“With Holly?”

“Why not?” she asked. “It would not, of course, delight Rupert. But who cares?”

 

The month of my arrival remained the peak of contact between myself and Rupert Grant, a period when he seemed determined to win me over. I had tried to impress him, too, roughing out the Tiberius chapter for him in four days by poring over a Latin dictionary well past midnight. Reading over my translation carefully, I decided it was not as rough as I’d first imagined. The prose was clear, even fluent, with graceful flourishes. I put the manuscript on his desk one afternoon with a barely feigned modesty.

“Come, sit beside me,” he said, lifting my typescript. There was a scold in his voice, a slight edge of disapproval. “Let’s see what you’ve accomplished.”

Warily, I pulled up a chair; he had a schoolmaster’s way of lowering his bushy eyebrows that made me highly self-conscious.

He donned his wire-rimmed glasses, his white hair like a waterfall in reverse. His manner bordered on interrogation, yet his presence thrilled me: he was an emotional and intellectual generator, and I wanted to clamp my cables onto him, to let his power flow into me. For at least twenty minutes he read to himself, occasionally mouthing a few words sotto voce, leaving me to gaze around the room.

I found it impossible to sit near a bookcase without studying the titles, alternately awed and depressed by the number of books I hadn’t read. In particular, I was drawn to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in twelve volumes, the maroon spines with gold lettering. Although I had studied Roman history at Columbia, I was hazy on the details, and made a vow to plow through Gibbon as soon as possible. The thought that Grant might quiz me about the emperors made me queasy. Before attempting this translation, I should have looked up what Gibbon had to say about Tiberius; it seemed unlikely that an emperor so esteemed by many had become a titan of self-indulgence—especially in the final years on Capri, when (to quote Suetonius) “having gained the license of privacy, he gave free rein at once to all the vices which he had for a long time barely concealed.”

“Pay attention, Lorenzo,” Grant said.

I leaned toward him, chastened, watching as he began to “correct” my work. Everywhere the fuzzy adjectives dissolved, absorbed into stronger nouns. “Adjectives are the writer’s enemy,” Grant said. “If you had got the right noun, you wouldn’t need these bloody qualifiers.” The same held with verbs, he said. I witnessed the blotting out of countless adverbs; often he transformed the verbs as well; thus “ran swiftly” became “sped.” “You must find the right word,” he said. “It needn’t be fussy, just full-blooded. Let it carry all the freight it can.” He quoted some lines from Eliot: “‘The common word exact without vulgarity, / The formal word precise but not pedantic.’ That’s the thing, what?”

With a thick horizontal line from his fountain pen he crossed out countless versions of the verb “to be.” “What’s all this was, was, was? Bad habit, Lorenzo.” He urged me to use the active voice whenever possible. Thus, “Tiberius was somewhat held in check by the presence of Germanicus” became “The presence of Germanicus held Tiberius in check.” “That ‘somewhat’ is foul,” Grant scoffed. “You’re equivocating. Resist the impulse.” I watched as prose I had considered quite sophisticated and polished became tougher, grainier, more direct. He glanced at the manuscript, with his multiple erasures and corrections, and seemed to understand what I was feeling. “Look here,” he said, “I’m not trying to change you, only to correct bad habits. There’s a tune there, in your writing. I hear it, and that’s a good sign. Every writer needs a tune.”

I knew this, and was afraid of losing a tune that, however small, I had cultivated with some diligence.

“Revision won’t kill the tune,” he told me. “It actually brings out the tune. That’s the point of it.”

I said, “I’d like to show you one of my poems.”

“By all means,” he said. “But I won’t spare your feelings. I’ve never known how to be tactful with young people about their work. It’s why I gave up teaching. Spent a bloody awful year as Professor Grant, in Malaysia, just after the war. That was enough for me, thank you. Threw in the towel when a young lady threatened suicide because I challenged her scansion.”

Many of Grant’s more colorful anecdotes were invented, but they held one’s attention. I assured him I wouldn’t try to kill myself, no matter how ferocious his critique, but his warning frightened me; it would be some time before I dared to lay a poem on his desk. Nonetheless, I left his study that morning encouraged by the unexpected tutorial in composition—better than anything I’d encountered at Columbia. He was right about my prose. I vowed to bring him more to read in a few days, and I promised that the work would be tighter and stronger.

“Good lad,” he said, dismissing me. Already his mind had turned to his own manuscript, the book on Capri, now gathering pages on his desk.