For days I wandered around the Villa Clio in a state of dread, certain that the ax would fall. In one scenario, I imagined Rupert Grant appearing at the door of my cottage, blowsy-faced with whiskey, his eyes watering. He would tell me how much I had hurt him, accusing me of betrayal. I would be asked to pack my bags at once. In another vision, I saw him sending Vera in his place. She would come with sad eyes, and speak softly, and tell me that under the circumstances I should probably consider blah blah blah. In the worst scenario, Grant would burst into my cottage in a rage, a pistol in hand, demanding satisfaction. But nothing of the sort happened.
Instead, I remained in my cottage or strolled the gardens of the villa in a confused daze. One morning, I sat on the cliff overlooking the bay below the Villa Clio, listening to the sea grind its teeth below. Falling from great heights had always been a recurrent nightmare, and this particular cliff seemed to beckon. I went there to confront my fear, hoping to tame something inside of myself. I sat on the edge, dangling my feet, as if tempting fate. With a feeling of triumph, I walked away, having temporarily mastered some dark impulse toward self-destruction.
I had wondered about Vera’s reaction to the news, which I assumed would reach her—there were few secrets at the Villa Clio—but she was blithely unchanged. At one point, she mentioned that Marisa came from a “rough background” in Naples, and described her father as “a violent lout” who abused his daughter. But that was it.
The response of Grant had worried me the most; Marisa was, after all, “his” girl. To my relief, he seemed warmer than ever toward me, asking to see my latest poems. “Don’t be shy, Lorenzo,” he said. “I’d be delighted to see what you’re doing.” When I told him there were no latest poems, he instructed me to write some. “Write about whatever concerns you,” he said. “A poem is a shared burden.” He put a large hand on my shoulder, saying that I had done a good job of typing his manuscripts and answering his letters. He wanted me to take on more responsibilities soon—perhaps to dig into the Suetonius translation again. He suggested that I might get equal billing on the title page as cotranslator.
I was flabbergasted. Perhaps he was relieved that I had made love to Marisa? It was obvious that Grant favored Holly, but his exclusion of Marisa in the past month had begun to upset the rhythms of the household. Vera had commented, wryly, that Marisa had been neglected of late, and that her “mooning about” would send everyone around the bend. “You’re a great man,” she said to Grant in the kitchen one afternoon, when it was just the three of us, “but I don’t believe you’ve kept our darling Marisa satisfied.”
Vera raised the subject again only a few days after I’d made love to Marisa. We were having a glass of wine on the terrace behind the kitchen when Vera said, “I’ve seen the girl pouting by the pool. It’s ridiculous.”
“Perhaps Alex will lend a hand?” Grant said, bemused. “Won’t you take the girl to the piazzetta for a drink? A good chance to practice your Italian.”
“Alex has other fish to fry,” Vera said. “His prospects have apparently improved.”
“Tell all,” Grant said, as if I were not present.
“Miss Bonano is intrigued by her compatriot.”
“Ah, the Italian American connection!”
I shook my head in disbelief. They could simply not resist this kind of ironic banter, at my expense. And I was an easy target.
“Toni is quite attractive,” Vera said. “One could surely do worse.”
“One has,” Grant said.
The ubiquitous British “one” lodged at the center of so many sentences at the Villa Clio, deflecting scrutiny, enhancing the already thick air of unreality. “One” was never to blame, and “one” rarely offered apologies.
That Vera knew about my exploits in Anacapri startled me. I’d had only one conversation with Toni since meeting her at the Villa Vecchia, although we had made plans to have a picnic on Mount Solaro on the coming weekend.
Vera understood my confusion. “I had lunch at Da Gemma with Rose yesterday,” she said, referring to a popular local restaurant. “She mentioned that you and Toni had got on rather well. Apparently the girl is smitten.”
“I doubt it,” I said.
“Everyone is smitten with Alex,” Grant said.
“Indeed,” added Vera.
“Toni and I got along well enough,” I said.
“I don’t know why,” said Vera, “but I have a distinct feeling about this. Mamma Grant has a wonderful sense of intuition. Famous all over the island.”
“Vera hears wedding bells,” Grant said. “I rather think he’s having himself a good time. I don’t mind. A young man’s fancy, and so forth, what?” Grant winked at me. It was reassuring but odd. He seemed to like a sense of male camaraderie. I had slept with Marisa, and he knew it and didn’t seem to care. He also imagined—or so I guessed—that I had, or would soon, sleep with Toni. This wasn’t bad, since it meant I was not serious about Marisa, which would have made things complicated. He was probably relieved that my attention had wandered away from Holly. She was his focus, emotionally. His interests might shift in time, but at present she compelled his attention, and he didn’t want competition from me.
Unfortunately, Holly held my attention, too. I was consumed by thoughts of her, and found myself writing her name in my journal, over and over. Just to spell the name gave a kind of secret pleasure. I treasured all glimpses of her, especially if I caught her unawares: sitting by the pool, with her ankles crossed, or reading beneath an ilex in the garden. Large feelings of tenderness toward her welled up in me as I watched her. She seemed wholly self-absorbed at times, lost in some daydream of god-knows-what. I wished I could get inside her, not just inside her skin but inside her mind. I wanted to live at the center of her experience. She represented a kind of sophistication that I could only envy.
For me, most cultural knowledge had come through the pages of books; but Holly had been taken through the great museums of the world by her parents. She talked off-handedly of visiting the Prado, the Louvre, the Hermitage. She had been to operas in Paris and Milan, in London and New York. She could join in when Grant, in a moment of boozy inspiration, launched into an aria from Puccini or Verdi. She knew the names of the mythic characters in Wagner’s cyclical extravaganzas, and she could be found listening to Beethoven’s late quartets, which she knew intimately. By her bedside—I had crept into that room more than once, my heart pounding in my throat—she kept novels in French and Italian. Her only lapse in taste, as far as I could tell, was a volume of poetry by Kahlil Gibran. (I kept asking to see her own novel, but she refused. “I don’t believe in showing things till they’re ready. My drafts are frightfully rough,” she said.)
I summoned courage and typed one of the few poems that I considered finished from my journals and left it on Grant’s desk. It was, obliquely, a love poem for Holly. Everything I wrote came out that way, yet this one at least had the virtues of concealment, with the feelings that lay beneath it subdued by form. (I recalled a line from Emily Dickinson: “After great pain a formal feeling comes.”)
Grant asked me to come to see him for morning coffee, another ritual imported from Britain. He usually had coffee with either Holly or Marisa, although Marisa had not recently been invited. I had supposed that Grant and I would be alone, but found myself sitting beside him with Holly working at a side table in one corner of the study.
“Don’t mind her,” Grant said.
“I don’t,” I said, rather feebly.
But I did mind. I minded a great deal, given the subject of the poem, and my feelings about Holly. I had somehow wandered, naked, onto a public stage, and the audience was primed for a good laugh. I could feel the blood rising in my cheeks, my ears hot and prickly.
I watched Grant as he ran his finger down the page, as if reminding himself of the poem. Spidery red lines filled the whites of his eyes, and his finger trembled: a sign that he’d been drinking too much the night before. “I’ll say it aloud, Lorenzo. It’s often useful to hear a poem. The words, they take on another aspect. The flaws often emerge. One tends to miss them when reading to oneself…skip over them. What?”
He read slowly, giving each word its due weight, lingering at the end of each line, though my enjambment at several points begged for the sense to spill over onto the next one. There was a Celtic lilt in his voice that actually enhanced them, lifted them in unexpected places.
I wander alone beside the sea at dawn,
half wondering if I am real or not;
reality eludes me. I’ve been brought
by simple despair to this uncertainty.
Whatever it is that I must look upon
seems false, as I feel false. Propinquity
means nothing as I walk beside the sea;
its glassy surf seems far away, unreal.
I wonder what I’d feel if I could meet
that whirling darkness, deep below blue deep.
I wonder if she would remember me
years hence, if I should fall, if I should keep
a rendezvous with what I cannot see.
I wonder at my own obliquity.
“It’s rather a sonnet,” he said, after a longish pause during which I noticed that Holly had acquired a bemused look as she pretended to work. “Fourteen lines, in any case. But a mere fourteen lines does not a sonnet make.”
“What does it make?”
“A poem of fourteen lines.”
“It’s in iambic pentameter.”
“More or less. I don’t recognize the rhyme scheme.”
“I invented it.”
“Ah.”
“Wasn’t it Ezra Pound who suggested that a rhyme should occur only when necessary?”
“Pound was a fool, dear boy.”
“It’s only a rough draft.”
“And not so bad. Don’t mean to sound dismissive. Bits and pieces I admire. Propinquity / obliquity. Clever. If I understood the last line, I might consider it marvelous.”
“What confuses you?”
“I can’t imagine a young man wondering at his own obliquity. What would that entail?”
“Who am I? That sort of thing.”
“Ah. The question of identity.”
Holly laughed, then suppressed her laugh.
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Grant said.
“He does, too,” said Holly.
Grant gave her a sharp look, then smiled—a pike’s sidelong smile. “The opening lines trouble me,” he said. “The speaker half wondering if he’s real or not. Not believable, that. Somewhat adolescent, what?”
I saw it was jejune. I did, however, have an unreal sense of myself at times. I could not quite locate the center that everyone talks about, the vaunted and overly analyzed Self. As Proust once suggested, we each have a thousand selves locked inside us. Any one might emerge at a given moment. But how could one say this without sounding idiotic, facile, or immature? My poem was all those things.
Grant recognized my discomfort. “I do like the business of the sea appearing unreal. That’s better. And the way you use propinquity here—as I said, that’s nice.”
Nice. I hated that word, and it surely made no sense in this context. How could one’s use of a word like propinquity ever seem “nice”? (That I had borrowed propinquity from one of his earlier poems apparently had not occurred to him. If it did, he appeared not to mind.)
“Yet ‘deep below blue deep’ is my favorite bit. You resisted the temptation to say ‘depth below blue depth.’”
“That would have been too obvious,” I said.
“Exactly. And I rather admire the rendezvous business. Too bad everything collapses in the last line.”
I saw what he meant, and it was painful. My talents were terribly limited, and would remain so—at least, that was my immediate feeling in response to Grant’s critique. I felt terribly exposed.
“I must say,” he said, “there’s a facility here. One mustn’t dismiss that. It’s rare enough, God knows.”
I knew what he meant, and this pleased me. I didn’t find it especially difficult to churn out lines of passable pentameter. Perhaps sheer quantity would in due course yield excellent work?
“But, dear boy, you mustn’t let your facility run away with you,” he said. “A poet has to have amazing verbal facility. That’s a donnée, something we assume. The hard spiritual work has no shortcuts, unfortunately. In the end, you can’t write beyond what you are. Largeness of spirit, a complex range of emotions, a well-stocked mind, ferocious discipline—well, these are necessary. And more as well.” He appeared to look inwardly, with despair. “Much more. There are no end of requirements. And after this, one wants a further thing. Fortuna.”
“Dumb-ass luck,” I said.
He smiled. “It helps to be born in the right place and time. Elizabethan England was a fair start for Shakespeare. I rather envy Eliot, you know. Coming when he did, after so much Victorian fog. So many vapors in the air that wanted clearing.” He put a hand on my thigh, affectionately. “Try another on me soon.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve got some poems in my journals. Very rough.”
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
“I like that.”
“Valéry,” he said.
I looked vacant.
“Paul Valéry. Decent poet, but a better critic. A friend of Gide’s.” He straightened his back, he often did this before entering what I thought of as his lecture mode. “I have a copy of Eupalinos somewhere. I’ll lend it to you—dramatic poem. Rather fine in its peculiar way. Socrates is a character, and he argues, mistakenly, that the work of creation is more important than the work of self-knowledge. Wrong way around, as I said. Bloody cart before the horse.”
Holly and I were fixed on him, even transfixed, and he understood that he had attention. Like a bulb caught in a surge of current, he brightened, momentarily, then lapsed into the usual glow.
“Sorry, chaps. Must get to work,” he said. “Capri calls.”
He referred to the subject of the novel underway. He was making progress, as Holly and I well knew. Lately, reams of handwritten manuscript had landed on my desk—I guessed I was typing fifty pages a week, although a good deal of this was revision. I was astonished by the productivity of this man, who got to his study most days before I was awake, and who often returned to his study in the evenings, after dinner—even after several glasses of wine. He was driven by forces I could only just comprehend. (I once heard him say, “I’m chased out of bed every morning by a pack of hungry wolves, but they haven’t caught me yet.”)
“It’s absurd,” Vera said, one day, when I mentioned how hard Grant seemed to be working. “He’s working harder now than before. It’s the age, I suspect. Time’s chariot and so forth.”
“Wingéd chariot,” I said.
She wisely ignored my pedantry. “He has some absolute in mind—always whoring after it. He considers himself a failure, you see. Hasn’t quite matched his potential.”
“He’s human.”
“My God,” she said, in a feigned hush. “Don’t let him hear you say that. He doesn’t know.”
I went back to the cottage to rework my poem about Holly and draw a few more of Grant’s ink-scrawled pages into the deceptive clarity of type. My mind, though, was on our dinner at the Villa Clio that night. It was not the food that interested me—though Vera had already gone into high gear in the kitchen. The Grants were expecting dinner guests: Gore Vidal and Howard Austen. Graham Greene had arrived in Anacapri a couple of days before—the news had drifted through the piazzetta, and he’d been invited, too. The news had been delivered casually, by Vera. “Gore is coming tonight,” she said, when I helped Maria Pia bring the remains of morning coffee into the kitchen. “Howard will be here, too. They’re staying with the Bismarcks. Graham will join us.”
“Graham?” I asked, in near disbelief.
“Yes, Graham, as in Greene.”
Gore and Howard and Graham. It seemed a long way from Uncle Vinnie and Aunt Gloria.