IN THUNDER, AT NOON, in a leaden twilight, just outside the Pompeii station, a man said to them:
“Come to my Restaurant Vesuvius. The other restaurant is broken ... in the bombardment,” he added.
Inside the restaurant during the thunderstorm, there was one moment of pure happiness within the dark inner room when it started to rain. “Now thank God I don’t have to see the ruins,” Roderick thought. And he watched, through the window, the dove in its little rainbeaten house, with just its feet peeping out, and then, the next moment, not a finger’s breadth away, the same dove on the windowsill.
This happiness was spoilt for him by the proprietor’s continued insistence on what he was going to eat—when he was perfectly content, after an antipasto, with bread and wine: moreover now the rain had stopped he knew he damned well had to see the ruins.
Still he could have sat with his wife forever in that dark deserted inner room of the Restaurant Vesuvius.
Yes, it was wonderful in the restaurant here at Pompeii, with the train whistling by on one side, and the thunder crashing around Vesuvius on the other: with the rain—liquid syllables of its epilogue—the pigeon, the girl standing under the garden trellis singing, and washing dishes in the rainwater, and Tansy happy, if impatient, he wanted never to go out, to leave this scene. But when the full bottle of vino rosso was depleted by as much as one glass his spirits correspondingly sank, and almost for a moment he did not care whether he stayed or left. He cared all right though: he wanted to stay.
If only that rich flagon of hope would stay too, undiminished with them! Or if one could only go on looking at it as if it were some symbolic vessel of an unevictable happiness!
Roderick McGregor Fairhaven sat listening to his wife describe the scenes from the train yesterday (not this train, which was the Circumvesuviana, but the Rapido, the Rome-Naples Express), how fast it went, past the magnificent Claudian aqueducts, a station, Torricola—och aye, it was a rapido indeed, he thought, as once more in memory, bang: and they flashed through Divino Amore. (No stop for Divine Love.) And the white oxen and high tension lines, the lupine and hayricks, the bellflowers and yellow mullein, the haystacks like leaning towers of Pisa, a lone hawk fluttering along the telegraph wires, the rich black soil—Tansy had seen and recorded everything, down to the wildflowers whose name she didn’t know: “Lilac and gold, like a Persian carpet.” The precipitous, hilly country, and now on the narrow coastal plain, the feeling of the shape of Italy: “like a razor-backed hog.” Suddenly rain, and the castellated cities on the hilltops, a few dark tunnels, and beyond in the fields, in brilliant sunshine again, the men winnowing, the black chaff blowing from the wheat. And there had been nothing so beautiful, Tansy was saying, as the vermilion poppies blowing among the delicate tufted ivory-colored wheat. And then Formia, a dull station stop, but with a Naples-like town way off in the distance. They’d looked out of the window at more castellated towns built on gray rock, a blaze of poppies by a ruined wall, a flock of white geese paddling toward a pond where dark gray cows lay submerged like hippopotami. And “You should have seen them, I thought they were hippopotami,” Tansy said, though now there were a flock of goats, rust-red, black and cream-colored, being herded up a steep hill by a skinny little boy with bare feet and bare chest and bright blue trousers. And the signs: Vini Pregiati—Ristoro—Colazioni Calde ... What did one want to look at ruins for? Why shouldn’t one prefer the Restaurant Vesuvius to Pompeii, to Vesuvius itself for that matter? Roderick was now, in so far as he was listening, but delighted to hear her talk, vicariously enjoying the train trip in a way he hadn’t at all in the howling electric train itself. Another brief stop: Villa Literno. And the sign: E Proibito Attraversare Il Binario. These were the kind of things he’d planned to jot down for his students—but it was Tansy who turned out to be memorizing them. And as they approached Naples he thought, there is an anonymity in movement. But when the train stops, voices are louder, more searching it seems, it is time to take stock. To him of whom stock is being taken these are bad moments ... And there was an anonymity too in sitting still, in the dark restaurant at Pompeii, listening to one’s wife talk so entrancingly. And he didn’t want her to stop. Naples had been ruin enough in this year of 1948, and sad enough to have driven Boccaccio himself—Giovanni della Tranquillità indeed—right back to Florence without even having paid a visit to Virgil’s tomb—
“Pompeii,” Tansy was reading aloud from her guidebook—as now thank God it started to rain again—“an old Oscan town dating from the sixth century B.C., which had adopted the Greek culture, lay in the rich and fertile campania felix close to the sea, possessing moreover a busy harbor ...
“I know ... it exported fish sauce and millstones ... But I was thinking”—Roderick brought out his pipe—“that I’ve read little about the malaise of travelers, even the sense of tragedy that must come over them sometimes at their lack of relation to their environment.”
“—what?”
“The traveler has worked long hours and exchanged good money for this. And what is this? This, pre-eminently, is where you don’t belong. Is it some great ruin that brings upon you this migraine of alienation—and almost inescapably these days there seems a ruin of some kind involved—but it is also something that slips through the hands of your mind, as it were, and that, seen without seeing, you can make nothing of: and behind you, thousands of miles away, it is as if you could hear your own real life plunging to its doom.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Roddy—!”
Roderick leaned over and replenished their wine glasses, at the same time catching sight of his reflection in a flawed mirror in which also appeared the rain barrel and the rain-dripping trellis in the garden and the dove and the girl washing dishes, where behind the word Cinzano and to one side of a card stuck in the frame which stated enigmatically 26–27 Luglio Pellegrinaggio a Taranto (in Autopullman) he saw himself: beaming, merry, spectacled, stocky, strong, reflective, and grave, forceful yet shy, brave and timid at once, and above all patient, impatient only with impatience and intolerance, the liberal-minded and progressive Scotch-Canadian schoolmaster: he absolutely refused to credit himself the gloomy train of thought that had just been his, and indeed his mien contradicted it.
“... the eruption began on August twenty-fourth in the early afternoon with the emission of vast quantities of vapor, mostly steam, which rushed high into the air in a vertical shaft and terminated in a canopy of cloud ...
Watching his wife, admiring her, touched by her enthusiasm, a great feeling of tenderness for her overcame him. And then it seemed to him for a moment that this was not unlike tenderness for himself. In fact half watching himself watch his wife in the mirror he could almost imagine he saw the brightness and generosity of his soul flashing off his glasses.
“Roddy, it does look a bit brighter, doesn’t it? Well, if it doesn’t stop we’ll just go in the rain!”
And now, as the time drew closer to leave it, the Restaurant Vesuvius was already beginning to be invested with a certain nostalgia. And after another glass of wine he took delight in reflecting how something in the very depths of his wife’s being seemed to respond to a moving fluctuant exciting scene: Tansy, pretty, a bit wild, delightful, enthusiastic, was a born traveler and he often wondered if her true environment was not simply this moving ever changing background—he reached in his pocket for some matches and a news clipping fluttered out.
“Is that Dad’s latest news report flying away?” Tansy said.
Roderick’s father-in-law, who was a boatbuilder in British Columbia, near Vancouver, scarcely ever wrote his daughter at all and his correspondence with Roderick consisted of clippings from newspapers. Sometimes bits would be marked, sometimes not; very occasionally there would be half a page with some comment, in red carpenter’s pencil. The enclosure Roderick had received at the American Express in Naples this morning was rather more fulsome, and consisted of half a page, mostly given over to advertisements for consolidated brokers, limited petroleum companies and drilling companies, and crowned by the gigantic headline: OIL! OIL! OIL! Subsidiary headlines appeared: BRITISH COLUMBIA RIDING HUGE INDUSTRIAL BOOM, OIL GAS ALUMINUM SPEARHEADING COLOSSAL INDUSTRIAL SURGE $BILLION PROGRAM.
At first Roderick thought this was an ironic reference to their own small speculation, which had so astonishingly paid off. Then he saw the item the old man had marked: a small “filler” which apparently had nothing to do with British Columbia at all and ran:
SCARED TO DEATH
In Arizona, a 1000-acre forest of junipers suddenly withered and died. Foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement as to what caused the fright.
Eridanus. Now, in July, the forest, behind the pretty shacks built on stilts grouped around the bay with his father-in-law’s boat-building shed in the middle, would be in full bright leaf, celestially green and sunfilled, the winding path leading you through scent of mushrooms and ferns and dark firs to airy spaces where golden light sifted down through vine-leaved maples and young swaying hazel trees. Tansy’s rocky ten-foot garden would be blooming with foxgloves and wild geranium, marigolds and nasturtiums and sweet alyssum, fireweed and hawks-beard would have sprung up on the bank, the sea (between visits of oil tankers to the refinery over the bay),1 cold, salt and pure, would be glittering in the sun and wind below the porch, and beyond, the mountains, still with high patches of snow, would rise to heaven in a turquoise haze. The wild cherry and dogwood blossoms would be gone now, the huckleberries and the blueberries would be ripe. Every day the mink would emerge from the hollow tree where he lived with his family and prance and dart secretively along the beach, or swim, only a tiny vicious sleek brown head, importantly by. The fishermen would all have sailed north to Active Pass or Prince Rupert, and save at week ends there’d be nobody there at all save the Wildernesses and perhaps the Llewellyns and his father-in-law.2 And that was where he should be now—not in Paris or Naples or Rome, in Eridanus, reading, correcting papers and taking notes in the long summer twilight, chatting with Tansy’s father or drifting down the inlet in their rowboat, or taking Tansy and Peggy on a picnic—watching the constellations; mens sano in corpore sano.3 Sailing boats would sweep downstream or tack across the bay, and at night the lights of the little ferryboat would move silently down the swift dark stream among the reflections of the stars. And at night, when Peggy was asleep, he and Tansy would argue, have a moonlight swim, talk some more over a pot of tea about Time, Life, Thomas Mann, Communism, the Partisan Review, the sthenic confusion of technological advance, the responsibilities of education, Peggy’s future, Gurko’s Angry Decade—4
“In 79 A.D. the catastrophe occurred. For thirty-six hours Vesuvius poured down upon the town a rain of pumice stone followed by a rain of ashes and boiling water which mixture formed into a mass that covered the earth with a layer several yards thick. The survivors returned after days of terror.”
Suddenly Roderick remembered an evening last summer, remembered it with such intensity and longing he stared about him a moment as if seeking some escape from the Restaurant Vesuvius. A baby seal had come swimming up on the beach a few afternoons before, he and Sigbjørn Wilderness had picked it up, fearing it might be threatened or starve without its mother and they’d kept it for several days in their bathtub. This particular day they’d taken the seal for a swim and suddenly, in a flash, it slipped away and was gone. They’d swum after it hopelessly, they walked along the beach, searching, and his father-in-law, who rightly considered the whole procedure puerile in the extreme, had annoyed him slightly by choosing this moment to mumble to them at length a story about a mermaid he claimed to remember some fishermen’s having once picked up at Port Roderick in the Isle of Man and also put in a bathtub. (According to him they had boiled some eggs for the poor monster, but while they were doing this the mermaid escaped and he recalled distinctly that when they returned from searching for it along the beach, all the water had boiled out of the saucepan.) Because a killer whale—and not merely a killer whale but a white killer whale, an albino, the first seen in nineteen years—had been sighted from the control tower of the Second Narrows Bridge5 swimming its way into the inlet (one of a school, but it was the Melvillean qualification that had supplied the menace)6 they were anxious about the seal, cursed themselves for picking it up at all, questioning too the humane paradox of the whole thing since the seal was the greatest enemy of their friends the fishermen, and Roderick and Tansy had ended up sitting on the Wildernesses’ porch and talking ... Sometime later on—it must have been nearly midnight for it was dark—Fairhaven had gone back to his shack to get an ill-translated collection of ancient belles-lettres published in the nineties, and a damned stupid book too—Lamartine, Volney, God knows who7—he for some reason wanted to read from in answer to something Wilderness had said. And it was this walk through the woods and back that he particularly remembered now: the stillness in the forest, the absolute peace, the stars sparkling and blazing through the trees (high on a cedar his flashlight gleamed on the four watching shining timorous curious eyes of two raccoons), the stillness, the peace, but also the sense of hurt, the anxiety because of the renewed talk that evening of the possibility of the railroad’s coming through, or that the forest would be slaughtered to make way for auto camps or a subsection, so that their troubles had seemed all at once, or once again, like those of country folk in a novel by George Eliot, or Finnish pioneers in the sixties (or, as Primrose Wilderness had remarked bitterly, Canadians or human beings of almost any period): and the sense too of something else topsy-turvily all the wrong way; Roderick stood quietly on his porch a moment, listening to the conversation of the tide coming in, bringing distantly, shadowily, more luminously, an oil tanker with it. To him, standing on his porch, holding his book and flashlight, it was as if Eridanus had suddenly become, like ancient Rome, a theater of prodigies, real and imaginary. As though the white whale hadn’t been enough, the four o’clock news report from Vancouver heard over the Wilderness radio had related this in renewed reports from “several accredited sources” of the famous “flying saucers” of that period which had been witnessed that very afternoon from several different points traveling over Eridanus itself, and a sworn statement by the Chief of Police “now released for the first time to the public, that he had, while fishing with his son beyond Eridanus Port the previous Sunday, seen, cavorting there, a sea serpent.” Good God! This was all hilariously, horribly funny, and Roderick could laugh again thinking about it now. But the truth was he wasn’t really amused: these things taken together with his other deeper anxieties, agitated him with that kind of dark conviction of the monstrous and threatening in everything sometimes begotten by a hangover. And unable to fit these matters comfortably into the filing cabinet of a civilized mind it was as if willy-nilly he’d begun to think with the archaic mind of his remote ancestors instead, and the result was alarming to a degree. More alarming still was that with his civilized mind he had calmly taken what might prove a threat to the whole world with far less seriousness than he took a rumored threat to his home. Roderick saw that the tanker had stolen silently right past the refinery without his noticing it:
Frère Jacques!
Frère Jacques!
Dormez-vous?
Dormez-vous?
went the engines, if you listened carefully ...
And now, with an appalling chain-rattling, smiting and dither of bells, hubbub of winches, submarine churning of propellers, and orders sounding as if they were spoken half a cable’s length away, though she was two miles distant, and besides by now nearly invisible, all these noises traveling over the water with the speed of a slingshot, she dropped anchor: a few final orders floated across the inlet, then silence. Roderick stood gazing at the oil refinery, “all lit up,” as Wilderness had put it, “like a battleship on the Admiral’s birthday ... But if the oil tanker had seemed, for an inexplicable moment, to threaten the refinery, the refinery, with its hard brilliant impersonal electric glitter, seemed at this instant suddenly to threaten him. In a day of prodigies, the refinery, though as an anything but absurd one, now also took its place in the series. As if he had never seen the place before at night, or as if it had just materialized, electrified with impersonal foreboding, it seemed now a sinister omen.
The light was on in his father-in-law’s house next door, and he could see the old boatbuilder through the window, sitting in the warm soft golden light of his oil lamp that cast gentle shadows over the hammers and frows and adzes, the tools all sharp and oiled and lovingly cared for, smoking his pipe, but with his three other pipes ready filled for the morning beside him on the table, sitting under the oil lamp with his spectacles on, reading the History of the Isle of Man—
“The ruins are open to visitors daily, free of charge, from nine to seventeen o’clock. At the entrance, and even at the station, Italian, French, German and English-speaking guides (tariff!) press their services on the tourists.”
“God damn it, yes, what?” Fairhaven sighed, smiling at Tansy.
“The time required for a conducted round is from one and a half to two hours, but to view the place properly, four or five hours are necessary. Visitors are not allowed to take food in with them. Do you know, when I was a very little girl, my mother had a stereopticon,” Tansy said, “with pictures of Pompeii. Really it was my grandmother’s.”
“Hoot toot!”
“Oh, I wonder if it’ll look like those pictures! I remember them perfectly ... You haven’t heard a word I said.”
“Och yes ... they’re going to rain ashes and boiling water on us, and we can’t take any food in,” Roderick said. “But what about wine?”
—“All kind of different bird here,” said the guide, “snail, rabbit, ibis, butterfly, zoology, botanic, snail, rabbit, lizard, eagle, snake, mouse.”
There was no one else in the city of Pompeii (which at first sight had looked to him a bit like the ruins of Liverpool on a Sunday afternoon: or supposing it to have suffered another, latter-day catastrophe since the Great Fire of 1886, Vancouver itself—a few stock exchange pillars, factory chimneys, the remnants of the Bank of Montreal), just the guide; and Roderick, while returning Tansy’s glance of mocking wide-eyed pleasure at this mysterious statement, knew he’d done his best to avoid him.
It was not precisely because he, Roderick, was mean, Roderick felt, nor was it precisely because there happened to be few things more natively loathsome to him than the whole business of bargaining and tipping, no, he’d avoided the guide out of a kind of ridiculous fear. For he’d so signally failed to make himself understood on this trip, often, as just now at the Restaurant Vesuvius, in the most elementary commerce, that the failure was beginning to strike at his amour propre. And so, rather than spoil matters at the outset by making a fool of himself, he liked rather to wander, to drift alone with Tansy, letting this sense of the strange and utter meaninglessness, to him, of his surroundings, be absorbed in that of their happiness just of being together, which certainly was real, in her happiness at being in Europe—just as he would have liked to let it be absorbed wandering with her now around Pompeii. Moreover at such times he had some opportunity for imagining that he (as he damned well should be, as he really wanted to be) was the cicerone: Tansy was too intelligent to be deceived, but she was also too kind to appear undeceived; but in any case the ruse would actually work, and romance be begotten or preserved in the shape of a sort of mutual astral body of inattention outside which Tansy’s own intelligence and delighted personal response no doubt operated independently, yet out of which, as if it were a godlike cloud, Roderick could imagine his most banal utterance sounding useful and informative, such as just now, he had planned to say something like, “Temple of Vespasian,” or “Doric and Corinthian,” or even “Bulwer Lytton.”
But the guide had been waiting for them, sitting between two ruinations, and in the twinkling of an eye they were in his clutches. And as a matter of fact he half remembered Tansy saying that you couldn’t escape those clutches, you were legally bound to take a guide. He’d left the bargaining this time entirely up to Tansy, even though carried on in English. But Tansy was fortunately too caught up in her delight at the immediate situation to perceive Roderick’s shame which had not, however, inspired in him any antipathy to the guide himself, who vaguely reminded Roderick of his eldest brother. He was a swarthy, swift-moving, eagle-nosed fellow, of medium height, with a flashing eye, threadbare clothes, and a military walk.
“Pompeii was a school of immorality. No hypocrite life like ours,” he was announcing thoughtfully as he marched along a little ahead of them. “Blue mountains, blue sky, blue sea, and a white marble city.”
The Fairhavens smiled. The mountains and sky were indeed blue, now the thunderstorm had rolled away, and could one have seen it from this point, no doubt the Bay of Naples would have appeared blue too. But there was something extraordinarily eerie about the way the guide had said this to them, Roderick thought, as they followed him through the truncated and darkened stumps of the inundated and exhumed city, adding, proudly smiling to Tansy, “Sì, I am Pompeiian!” as though to him this old Cuernavaca-cum-Acapulco of the Romans, and manufacturer of fish sauce and millstones, were not a heap of ruins but were still here, gleaming, alive, peopled and thriving, and with the sea, now withdrawn miles away, at their very doorstep; “After Pompeii was destroyed,” he went on rapidly, but still thoughtfully, glancing up a moment at Vesuvius, “Christians make-a the strong propaganda. They say their God have destroyed Pompeii for its wickedness. Now Pompeiians they say: Pompeii is immoral town? If that were-a so, Vesuvius must-a come every day to punish us.”
Roderick smiled, liking the guide, and he also looked again at Vesuvius which, now clear, with its conventional plume of smoke, seemed too far away and insignificant to have done much damage anyhow. Still, out of fairness to the volcano it seemed proper to note that its physical insignificance must be largely due to the damage it had done, Roderick went on to say to Tansy.
Alas, poor old Vesuvius had really waged a war of attrition on itself in the last century. No longer did the fire-spouting mountain wax and grow taller on the sacrifice of those beneath him, all the territory it had demolished of late years had been at its own expense, every explosion and inundation it had sent forth had decreased its own stature until now, having literally blasted its own cone off, it appeared little more than a distant hill. Vesuvius was Paricutín in reverse. Though it might still, even now at this moment, be working up more fury, perhaps the god that wished to be believed in should be wary too often of speaking through fire, of giving too many direct signs of his presence.
Actually, he was frightened of Vesuvius, in so far as he could bring himself to think of it at all. All of which caused him to remember that Tansy and he had climbed it only the day before yesterday in the company—“visiting their old stamping ground,” Tansy said—of some Greeks. And he certainly would not have cared to belittle it then, Roderick thought, crossing himself as they passed the Temple of Venus and went on into the Forum. The cinders got into their shoes, the guides, with their staffs, shrouded in fog and resembling black magicians, had urged them on with loud cries toward the top, where Tansy lamented it was not now possible to descend, like Lamartine, into the crater because a recent earthquake had caused great clefts in the path down into the noisome and shattered abyss. Roderick had, by placing it in the earth, lit a cigarette to bring him luck.
It was difficult to keep up with the guide who now seemed to wear a somewhat different appearance, perhaps because his complete air of belonging, even of ownership, had begun to invest him with a curious and different dignity: he had, or had now, the aspect to Roderick of a stout, prosperous and jovial businessman, quite carefully dressed, in conservative business clothes: dark gray striped coat, light gray flannel trousers, dark gray tie, white shirt. His coat, from whose pocket papers protruded, was too tight over his stomach, the sleeves drew up on his shirt, while the trousers were frayed: this had given the effect of shabbiness. But at the same time he had this hearty soldierly quality about him, and this swift military walk of Roderick’s brother, a walk which carried him, and Tansy with him, often quite far ahead of Roderick’s measured pace. They crossed the Forum obliquely and disappeared ahead of him amid some huge blackened pillars.
“You see, Temple of Augustus,” he was saying when Roderick overtook them. “You see? Acorn and Laurel: force and power. The Romans say, ‘Each moment of love lost is a moment of happiness spoiled ... The Romans say, ‘Life is a very long-a dream with open eyes,’” he greeted Roderick, “‘when eyes closed all-a finished, all is-a dust ... Lovers just like-a beasts ... They spend life in honey, sweet life.” “He means bees,” Tansy explained to Roderick, turning to him conspiratorially. “Beasts, bees ... Acorn, laurel, butchers, fish beefmarket. Ventilation from sea, breeze come inside, to smell out.”
“Ah yes,” said Roderick ... “Der Triumphbogen der Nero.”
“What, darling?”
“The Arco di Nerone. Only I thought it sounded better in German.”
“Sì. Arco di Nerone ... The Romans say: ‘Life is a series of formalities, too seriously taken,’” the guide assured them, turning around. He possessed an admirable name: Signor Salacci.8
And there was no doubt about it, Roderick thought again, this town, that both was and was not here, was obviously very real and complete to the excellent Signor Salacci: he saw it all. And moreover he was utterly adjusted to it. In a far realer sense than an actor lives in his scene Signor Salacci lived here, in Pompeii. Meantime these arches and temples and markets created and uncreated themselves before Roderick’s eyes so that he almost began to see them with the guide’s eyes. What was strange was this tragic—tragic because almost successful—effort at performance. It looked sometimes as though the Romans here had made all their dreams come true in terms of convenience, wicked and good alike. Vesuvius had long since destroyed Pompeii’s old inhabitants, but there seemed an immortality about the conveniences, which was a disturbing thought.
“Pompeii may have been beautifully proportioned, but it was not, so far as I know, a town singular in its era for any remarkable nobility of conception,” he said. “On the other hand—”
“If you compare it with Bumble, Saskatchewan—”
“But what seems most remarkable to me is that no one has attempted to draw a moral from this relative survival of Pompeii, when so much breath has been wasted on the divine judgment of its destruction. Of the two the survival seems the more sinister ... Compared with St. Malo or parts of Rotterdam it’s a triumph. In fact alongside of what’s left of Naples it seems to me to have a positive civic grace.”
The junipers that died of fear ... Ruins, ruins, ruins—
—The first night they arrived in Naples they had taken a cab and driven for an hour behind the sidestepping horse along the promenade. What was left of this great city of stupendous history where Virgil had written the Aeneid and which was once the extreme western point of the Greek world? No doubt much had survived. Yet to him it had appeared, where it was not simply a heap of gray rubble, like a second-rate seaside resort, with ugly soulless buildings and mediocre swimming, on the northwest coast of England. Surely, he’d thought, as he held Tansy’s hand in the clopping and sideslipping cab, he could invest it with more excitement than that for her.
That night they wandered through the incredibly steep dark back streets of the Neapolitan slums, past the shrines, the niches, the children setting up Catherine wheels, up the long smelly wonderful stairways between houses, past the bedsteads set right on the street, the sailors lurchingly carrying the girls’ bags—the Rembrandt Supper at Emmaus around every corner. From a high top window of a narrow tall building a basket was lowered, little by little, and at the bottom filled with wine, and bread and fruit, and, jerkingly, withdrawn. And that was what travel was supposed to be, thought Roderick, like that basket that is lowered down into the past, and is brought back again, safely through one’s window, filled with the spiritual nourishment of one’s voyaging. And that, he profoundly hoped, would be what it was for Tansy ... Here were the poor, here were the ruins, but the great distance between these man-made ruins and the ruins of Pompeii was that the ruins for the most part had not been found worth preserving or had been carried away ... Life itself was something like the desolation that comes to one eternally wading through the poem of The Waste Land without understanding it.9 Awestruck by his callousness, his ignorance, his lack of time, his fear that there will be no time to build anything beautiful, fear of eviction, of ejection, man no longer belongs to or understands the world he has created. Man had become a raven staring at a ruined heronry. Well, let him deduce his own ravenhood from it if he could.
They came to the Casa dei Vettii, or the Domus Vettorium, the most famous house in Pompeii, which partly accounted for their guide’s haste; Pompeii closed at five and they had a late start.
Signor Salacci produced a key, unlocked a door, and they entered: “You want lady-wife to see pictures? Only marrieds can see,” he explained. “Each house a little town: garden; theater; vomitory, to vomit, and a love room inside.”
“And to the right of the entrance is a Priapus,” observed Roderick, reading from the guidebook, “only shown by request. However, Tansy,” he continued, “here ‘one has the best possible picture of a Pompeiian noble’s house since the beautiful paintings and marble decorations have been left as they were in the peristyle which has been furnished with plants. One portion of the house has been provided with a roof and windows so as to protect the surprisingly well-preserved and most wonderfully executed murals depicting mythological scenes. There is a kitchen containing cooking utensils, and adjoining a locked private cabinet (obscene paintings) which belonged to the master of the house and here too is a statue of Priapus intended as part of the fountain ... I hope,” Roderick added, “this is not what your mother showed you on the stereopticon.”10
“Basin for goldfish,” the guide was saying. “Peacocks and dogs. Put phosphorus on stone. White columns and a blue sky. Difficult to believe ... original ... Signor Salacci sighed.
“You mean—?”
“Water jets and flying birds and phosphorus in the pavement,” sang Signor Salacci, “and the walls lacquered red and then waxed, with Afrika leopard, and an erotic frieze—”
“They had torches burning so that the inside of this room was in red light to make everyone excited,” Tansy was explaining to Roderick, who’d been standing at a little distance. “But in contrast to this the garden was all in white marble, with cool fountains playing and open to the moonlight.”
“Usually gave these orgy feasts to the full moon,” the guide mused nostalgically.
“And during these orgy feasts?”
“Slaves had to pray for them—” they had arrived at a shrine to the household gods, the Lares and Penates (how would their old kettle be, their stove, Tansy’s copper pans?)—“for bachelors had,” he said devoutly, “too much to do bachelor.”
The guide was now opening the padlock on an oblong wooden cover, that he folded back to reveal, momentarily, an oblong framed picture, about eighteen inches long, and a foot wide, evidently some kind of unusual Cyrano de Bergerac,11 painted (and from all appearances quite recently subtly improved upon in Marseilles) in black, ocher and red, of a Cyrano engaged in weighing, it seemed at first sight, upon a sort of Safeway scale, his nose, which emitted curious carmine sparkles: “Where there is money, there is art, there is taste, there is intelligence, there is perdition, there is fight—that is Pompeii!” glowed Signor Salacci, turning the key in the padlock again upon this jealously preserved and athletic relic.
“I always heard there was a reproduction of the Screw of Archimedes in Pompeii,”12 Roderick observed. “But I thought he worked it with his feet.”
“But I don’t understand about the windows, Rod,” Tansy was giggling, perhaps to conceal her embarrassment, or her embarrassment at evincing before the guide that she was one in whom a natural innocence and decency were combined with a restrained yet wholeheartedly Rabelaisian appreciation.
“Well, it’s just as he said, Tansy dear. There aren’t any bloody windows, or rather there weren’t. Just as the walls weren’t marble, but covered with stucco imitation of marble facing. They’re simply paintings of windows to give the impression you’re looking through a real window.” Roderick filled his pipe. “Of course according to Swedenborg the real sunrise is an imitation too ... The technique seems vaguely literary in origin.”
“You’ve got to admit it has certain advantages of privacy—”
“Och aye ... In short, with certain obvious reservations it’s much the same bastard-mansard as ye olde Wigwamme Inne Cockington Moosejaw and Damnation-in-the-Wold—”
“What did you say, Rod?”
“I said, do you remember the man who wanted to pebbledash Gerald’s house? Or perhaps I was thinking of those sheets of fabric on Percy’s garage that are painted to look like red brick.”
“First wine, everyone will be drunk, and afterwards brothel,” announced Signor Salacci, locking the Casa dei Vettii behind them and with the air of an indulgent host in the middle of a debauch proposing further delights.
They left the house and drifted off at a great pace through the sunshine down the Vico dei Vettii, and after casting a glance down the Strada dei Vesuvio in the direction of the mountain, turned into Strada Stabiana.
“It was a silly place to put a volcano,” said Roderick as now, passing the Casa di Cavio Rufo on their right, they arrived at a crossroads made by the intersection of the Strada degli Augustali with the Strada Stabiana.
They turned right again into a narrow, rough, and extremely crooked and winding street that had the appearance of going on forever.
“Vico de Lupanare. Wine woman and song street,” crowed the guide triumphantly. “First wine, and afterwards brothel,” he repeated. “Bread and woman, the first element in life, symbolic ... All symbolic ... wait! One entrance—bachelors downstairs; marrieds, priests and the shamefuls upstairs.”
There are, unless you happened to be Toulouse-Lautrec, few things in life less profitable than going to a brothel, unless, Roderick reflected, it was going to a ruined brothel. This was a whole street of ruined brothels. The houses had been built of stone but it was necessary to use considerable imagination to people them, least of all with delights. To him they resembled at first rather a series of disjasked ovens, or, if one could imagine pigpens made of brick, pigpens, but with shelves and niches, so that they seemed to have been made to accommodate the consummations of some race of voluptuous dwarfs.
“Roderick, do look, honey, here are the mills where the flour was ground!—and the ovens, see, there’s even a petrified loaf of bread!”
“Sì, first bread, then wine, then woman on this-a street,” Signor Salacci was nodding importantly. “First elements of life, all symbolic!”
Roderick was aware now of a certain blasé obtuseness. Still, a whole street of dead brothels, that had so miraculously survived—relatively—the wrath of God—that was perhaps something to stimulate the lower reaches of the mind after all! Or if not, the ruined pharmacist’s, which the guide was pointing out so conveniently placed on the corner, might have indeed. It was abundantly clear too, that once again, so far as Signor Salacci was concerned, these places not merely existed, but were, for him, doing a lively, if ghostly, trade. Particularly their guide seemed pleased by the Cyranesque-priapic trade emblem that, set from time to time amidst the cobbles, indicated waggishly the direction in which even now the phantom bachelors of Pompeii were perhaps proceeding to their grisly quarters downstairs where, once ensconced, past them an eternal ascending procession of marrieds, priests and shamefuls floated on their way to be vampired and counter-whored upstairs. Signor Salacci’s romantic attachment touched and delighted Roderick. He was making the afternoon a success. It was not even impossible—Roderick saw him once brushing away what might have been a tear—some great grief, some romance, survived, for him, here.
Nonetheless Roderick found himself suddenly hating this street with an inexplicable virulence. How he loathed Pompeii! His mouth positively watered with his hatred. Roderick was almost prancing. It seemed to him now that it was as though, by some perverse grace, out of the total inundation of some Pacific Northwestern city, had been preserved a bit of the station hotel, a section of the gasworks, the skeletal remains of four or five palatial cinemas, as many bars and several public urinals, a fragment of marketplace together with the building that once housed the Star Laundries, what was left of several fine industrialists’ homes (obscene paintings), a football stadium, the Church of the Four Square Gospel, a broken statue of Bobbie Burns, and finally the remains of the brothels in Chinatown which, though the mayor and police force had labored to have them removed right up to the time of the catastrophe, had nonetheless survived five thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine generations whereupon it was concluded, probably rightly, that the city was one of the seven wonders of the world, as it now stood, but wrongly that anything worthwhile had been there in the first place, with the exceptions of the mountains. The guide had just said too that even the noise of traffic had been so deafening in Pompeii during certain hours they’d had to put a stop to it altogether, as one could well imagine on the stone paved streets—God how one must have longed to get away! And then he remembered that Pompeii was not a city at all, it was only a small town, by the, by the—
—Roderick had found his book among a collection of old American Mercurys that must have been there since he’d built the house, and started back; but when he came out on his porch he stopped: the beauty of the scene was phenomenal, terrifying, ominous and yet oddly reassuring at once. The moon had come out and now it shone high in a sky of fleece, in which were patches of sky the color of dark blue serge, twinkling with brilliant stars. The tide was at high slack, the water so calm and still the whole heavens were reflected in a dark mirror. Then he realized that it was not the moonlight or even the inlet that gave the scene its new, unique beauty, but precisely the oil refinery itself, or more precisely still, the industrial counterpoint, the flickering red pyre of the burning oil waste. Now over the water (so still he could hear the Wildernesses talking softly together two hundred yards away) came the slow warning bell of a freight train chiming on the rail over Port Boden as for a continual vespers,13 now closer, now receding, now Byzantine in its timbre, as it vibrated in the water, now dolorous like Oaxaqueñian bells, now a blue sound, now as it approached, fuller, more globular, then fading, but always as if some country sound heard long ago that might have inspired a Wordsworth or Coleridge to describe church bells borne over the fields to some wandering lovers at evening. But whereas the moonlight washed the color out of everything, replacing it by luminousness, providing illumination without color, the flaming burning vermilion oil waste below the moon to the right halfway up the opposite bank made the most extraordinary lurid color, enormously real, as it were, bad: as the bell continued to chime intermittently along the rail, the continual vespers not receding, or drowned by an occasional mournful whistle and distant clunking of wheels on iron, Roderick thought how different Eridanus would look from the refinery side. What would they see? Nothing at all, perhaps only the oil lamp in his father-in-law’s house and the illumined open windows of the Wildernesses’, nothing else, probably not even the Wildernesses’ pier which looked so magnificent in the moonlight, striking down into its reflection with its geometrically beautiful cross-braces, just the shadowy bulk of his father-in-law’s shed, perhaps, and then the dark bulk of the forest, and the mountains rising above; they wouldn’t see even the shapes of the shacks, or perhaps that there was a bay at all; the whole perhaps inseparable from its own shadow.
The Wildernesses’ cat debouched itself from his father-in-law’s house and followed him, bounding up the steps and along the trail, leading him back to the Wildernesses, stopping for him to catch up, then leaping on again. Once he stopped to pet the creature which suddenly seemed to him like some curious aspect or affection of eternity and for some reason, standing there in the forest, it had struck him as strange that cats must have looked and behaved exactly the same in, say, not merely Volney’s but Dr. Johnson’s day. Meanwhile with his flashlight he sought one of the passages from Volney’s14 Ruin of Empires that he’d recalled and wanted to read: “Where are the ramparts of Nineveh, those walls of Babylon, those palaces of Persepolis, those temples of Balbec and Jerusalem—” It was absolutely the most obvious kind of dithyrambic tripe, but considering when it was written might be, so he felt at that moment anyhow, interesting in his discourse with Wilderness, to compare with Toynbee. “—the temples are fallen, the palaces overthrown, the ports filled up, the cities destroyed, and the earth, stripped of its inhabitants, has become a place of sepulchres. Great God! Whence proceed such fatal revolutions? What causes have so changed the fortunes of those countries? Wherefore are so many cities destroyed ... where are those brilliant creations of industry ... ?”
Going through the forest that night with the bounding and whirling cat all at once it had seemed to him, as if he stood outside time altogether, that in some way these cities of Volney’s had not been exactly destroyed, that the ancient populations had been reproduced and perpetuated, or rather that the whole damned thing was happening now, at this moment, continually repeating itself, that continually those empires and cities were being created and destroyed and created again as it were before his eyes: then again he began to think that, far more mysterious than any of the questions Volney posed, was the fact that people still found it necessary to ask them, or answer them with unsatisfactory explanations. Had Toynbee really said anything new? Had Volney in his day? With his flashlight, while the cat impatiently sharpened its claws on a tree, he had recourse to the forgotten Volney once more. “Individuals will feel that private happiness is allied to the public good.” Well, that seemed a point worth discussing at any rate: but what was the public good? What was private happiness?
“In Germany, England, red light,” Signor Salacci was saying. “Roman better idea. Cock outside.”
Well, St. Malo was wiped out, Naples defaced, but a cock in the street outside an antique Pompeiian brothel still survived. Well, why not?
“Aesculapius snakes outside, a doctor ... the guide went on. “The chemist and public bathwash ... Soldiers, students, cheapest prices. Just before the war, in Mussolini time, they had just like this. Regular price is fifteen lire. For students and soldiers half price seven-fifty—but cheap is always dangerous ... Chemist and public bathwash,” he pointed down the Vico dei Lupanare. “In southern Italy is plenty clap. Seventy per cent of people have-a the clap but now is American penicillin—whissht, in a few days!—so nobody know percentage.”
Roderick purred ... Man, excellent in wit, had discovered how to cure clap in twenty-four hours. Without resource he meets nothing that must come! So with his resource therefore he saw, in this marvelous discovery, the possibility of catching a different kind of clap every day for the next seventy-two days, perhaps on the seventy-third an absolutely unique kind.
“Wine street, woman street, and public bathwash,” the guide was intoning in somber, almost biblical tones ... In Pompeii you pay advance. Many men come. Etrangers. Strangers, and sailors, you understand. No speak-a the Latin. But Romans make it easy. In every room is painted different position and man pick-a what he want. Ah, wine woman and song street! Wait,” he added, raising an admonitory finger as Roderick seemed about to say something. “All street symbolic. All anchored east and west, north and south. Except crooked street, wine street and woman street ... A man drunk can-a say, ‘I don’t know where I am. I don’t-a know where I was.’ So streets are straight except for curved, so he can’t say I don’t know where I was. Sì,” he said, as now they walked on down the circumambient Vico dei Lupanare toward the Strada dell’ Abbondanza. “So streets are straight except for curved so he can’t-a say I don’t know where I was.” He shook his head.
—Roderick’s last memory of Eridanus was of a colossal fire: the Salinas meekly unloading crude oil at the refinery, innocent rakish smokestacks aft, and then bang, and up went the wharf, sirens wailing as though it were suddenly the lunch hour; then the tanker backing out silently into the inlet, or rather pulling, breaking her mooring lines, and the flames on the tanker apparently subdued as a mushroom of smoke went up on its extending columnar stalk a thousand feet into the air from the refinery: bang, bang, as the oil drums exploded: the noise of crackling even at a distance of two miles and the huge hoses visible: bang and the freight train that rushed soundlessly through the refinery: bang, bang, watching the fire from the Wildernesses’ pier, for it looked like a major and terrifying disaster to the whole waterfront, his knees trembling so hard that he couldn’t hold the binoculars still: bang, and the Salinas now motionless right opposite, and the fire getting worse, the noise of crackling, roaring, and the two-toned moaning rockets of sound of sirens, whirring diminuendo, and then, after half an hour or so, the arrival of the magnificent turreted fireboat, neighing like a horse, from the town, like a urinating dinosaur, a monitor, a medieval but super-modern fantasy, a creation of Leonardo da Vinci—and the disaster averted—unless the oil on the ebbing tide should catch fire: and the trellis work of the oil company pier clearly silhouetted against the smoke and steam: the planes flying overhead trying to photograph it for the newspapers: and the Salinas that seemed to have no one aboard slowly, slowly and silently steaming guiltily down and away to Port Boden: and then the excitement over, and then all afternoon the maniacal aspect of the sky, the sun like a fiery hub to a gigantic black-disked wheel tired by a rainbow, and the stink of fried oil drifting over the water, and in the evening the curious sightseers rowing over to the hissing wharf: and then to see, the next morning, though the wharf seemed half destroyed, by God, the Salinas, with a guilty expression, sneaking slowly and silently back to the refinery from Port Boden: the cottage on the opposite green bank slowly sliding aft of the bridge, aft of the mainmast, aft of the funnel, as with her fire-scarred paintwork to starboard she now silently soundlessly and slowly and wearing that guilty expression approached the refinery again, on which wreckage a single hose was still playing like a distant flickering white line, the Salinas now wearing an expression like a drunk with a hangover approaching at early morning the pub from which she has been thrown out the previous night, the necessary flag pretended to fly on the stunted foremast like a ragged tie tied with trembling hand, and the American flag at the stern as if her shirt tail were hanging out drooping aft in the windless gloomy air of seven bells in the morning, obviously half wanting to give the refinery a wide berth, but just as obviously having to pass it (and as obviously wanting to stop in), invested as it was for her with her abhorrence and like some subdued roguish Don Quixote—because of excesses there, which she did not know or could not remember but in any case would probably be blamed for, tip-toeing past the refinery, but next moment—and by God she had guts, she had character to brave the irate and weary oiltender this morning—as large as life, as if propped on elbow against the ravaged and wrecked bar of the refinery, in exactly the same place as the day before ... “As I was saying, fellow, when we were so rudely interrupted ... And that evening, hours and hours later, with a shameless but unmistakably rakish raffish list to starboard toward the wharf, in exactly the same place, as if talking her head off. And then—so much for symbols and presciences of disaster!—the next morning dawning blue and clean and fresh, with white horses running past the refinery wharf, that now looked completely undamaged, and the Salinas gone, to be plunging innocently somewhere in the blue Pacific her hangover washed away and the fire gone, and the smell and noise and sirens gone, and the fresh green of the forest, the blowing blue and white smoke of sawmills against the green hills, and the maniacal sky gone and the mountains high and the sea blue and cold and clean and an innocent sun over all ...
“Where there is-a too much religion, is perdition—white, red light and a cock outside,” the guide mused, discovering another horizontal emblem in the pavement outside the ex-respectable lupanar. “Formalities!” He regarded this dislocated and unusual signpost—perhaps the great-grandfather of all signposts—a moment. “Friend ask—” he began. “But how to find this-a house? Friend say: go to fountain thirty paces on left pavement is cock pointing. Friend go ... He gestured significantly, as if having gone. “Why for this? He goes in. Very nice, very clean, separate rooms for love and fine garden where walk around first to get excited ... Signor Salacci was tired and sat down for a moment on a ruined wall. The abomination of desolation sitting in the unholy place. “Very dirty streets,” he added as now they started to move on once more. “Contrasts,” he said musingly, “in everything. Roman Empire start-a in Pompeii to-a going down ... old marbles a-broken,” he said sadly. He pointed to a lone bust, sad in the brilliant sunshine. “A facsimile of Apollo—exactly the same size but—” he hissed and made a long expression—“with a lady-face, because the Greeks make everything so sweet and gentle, but the Romans make everything like this:”—he drew down a growth of savage air from his chin—“with beards.”
“Roman exaggerations is,” he continued after a while, “each exaggeration in life is defeat, and therefore downfalls ... You see,” he said, pointing out an example of this phenomenon, “Lime is-a stronger than stone, stones worn out, lime still good. Attention, gentlemen, the curve!” He guided their steps around a pre-Roman Doric column. “In Italian we laugh and we say, ‘Attention, gentlemen, the curve.’ A pun,” he explained. “Curva also mean lost woman ... They approached a heap of rubble. “Americans drop bombs here ... Americans will drop bomb anywhere,” he lamented delightedly. “Students walking in garden.” The Fairhavens looked around but they didn’t see them. “Greek theater, soldier barrack, night theater, pine trees,” he hummed. “Where is too much religion is perdition,” he added; “white, red light, and a cock outside. Formalities! See, modern plumbing.” And Roderick reflected, looking at the twisted pieces of big lead pipes, that once upon a time it was true, the Romans did have modern plumbing.
Until a man has built (or helped to build—for he had helped the Wildernesses build their house) a house with his own hands, Roderick thought, he may feel a sense of inferiority before such things as Greek columns. But if he happens to have helped build so much as a summer shack upon the beach he will not feel inferiority, even if he does not understand in the aggregate the entire meaning of a Doric temple. The baseless shaft, the capital, and the lower fascia, that would connect the columns, at least become clear. The shaft was analogous to the cedar piles that they had sunk into the hardpan. Capitals they had achieved without meaning to, solely because it would turn out that a pile had unintentionally been sunk too deep for the stringer and the post to be square, so between the stringer and the post they would insert a block. The wooden stringer, say a two- or three-inch plank, corresponded to the lower fascia, though if one had been completely successful the stringer would rest directly upon the post: thus, the capital, as something deliberate, perhaps had no function, and was the result of an original disharmony, when people built with wood; someone had decided, perhaps on some occasion when a mistake on one side had been balanced by a similar mistake on the other, that it was an aesthetic improvement. These curious thoughts occurred to Roderick as, bent over his camera, he was trying to get Tansy and the guide, who were having a conversation over by the Temple of Apollo, into focus, for the light from the slowly westering sun was good now and the ruins were full of interesting, if pretty obvious, shadows. Ridiculous and far-fetched though it might sound, what he had been thinking gave Roderick, finally, a certain kinship with the builders of Pompeii ... But these Pompeiians—what had they built for? What was this instinct that made man herd together like partridges, like sardines in tomato paste, this cowardly dependence on the presence of others?
Suddenly he thought he knew what was wrong. This—in Pompeii, in Naples—this had happened to him, to Roderick McGregor Fairhaven, the visitor from Ultima Thule.15 What it amounted to was a feeling that there was not going to be time. Did you want to harrow yourself looking at what had been only temporarily spared, at what was finally doomed? And Roderick could not help but wonder whether man too was not beginning to stand, in some profound inexplicable sense, fundamentally in some such imperfect, or dislocated relation to his environment as he. Man once stood at the center of the universe, as Elizabethan poets stood at the center of the world.—But the difference between the man-made ruins and the ruins of Pompeii was that the man-made ones had not for the most part been found worth preserving, or had been carried away. Had some precious part of man been carried away with the ruins? Partly it was as if man built with ruin in view ... See Naples and die!
“Thank you, Tansy dear,” Roderick said, clicking the shutter. “Now may I take one of you alone, Signor?”
“Sì,” the guide said, evidently finishing something he’d been saying to Tansy. “Sì, I am Pompeiian.”
And suddenly laughing as if to please them, the guide, that perfectly adjusted man, made a Roman salute, and Roderick snapped him standing there—right arm upraised, so that it drew his coat very tight under his arms, and the papers stood out of his pocket—between the pillars of the demolished Temple of Apollo.
“We thank you very much indeed for everything, Signor,” Roderick said, winding the film forward and replacing the camera in his pocket.
They were about to leave Pompeii by the Porta Marina and Signor Salacci said to them: “The gate is built like a funnel, for a ventilation, to suck up fresh air from the sea, blowing up to the mountain and ventilate town—street banked very straight to the right. So when it rains, water runs to right, you walk dry on left.
“Slaves and animals on one side,” he reminded them as they shook hands at the portal. “People on the other.”
They all stood looking back over the ancient town toward Vesuvius and Roderick asked:
“And when do you think there’s going to be another eruption, Signor?”
“Ah ... Signor Salacci wagged his head somberly. And then as he regarded the mountain a look of enormous pride came over his face. “But yesterday,” he said, “yesterday she give-a the beeg-a shake!”
1 “the refinery over the bay”: The Shellburn oil refinery was built in 1932 in Burnaby, across Burrard Inlet from Roche Point and Dollarton. After the Second World War, the refinery’s operations increased dramatically; the Lowrys’ time in Dollarton coincided with a period of rapid growth for the refinery. A partial decommissioning program was implemented in 2005, but the Shellburn Terminal is still in operation today.
2 “perhaps the Llewellyns”: Ethan and Jacqueline Llewelyn are the protagonists of Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola. Like the Wildernesses, the Llewelyns lived on the foreshore at Eridanus. Threatened by eviction, they embark on a long, and ultimately unsuccessful, journey to Gabriola Island.
3 “mens sano in corpore sano”: “A sound mind in a healthy body.” From Juvenal’s Satires 10.356. (Lowry’s sano should correctly be sana.) Lawrence includes the phrase in “Why the Novel Matters” (see note to p. 60.): “We have curious ideas of ourselves. We think of ourselves as a body with a spirit in it, or a body with a soul in it, or a body with a mind in it ... It is a funny sort of superstition.”
4 “Gurko’s Angry Decade”: The Angry Decade: American Literature and Thought from 1929 to Pearl Harbor (1947), by Leo Gurko, a book of criticism of American literature of the 1930s.
5 “Second Narrows Bridge”: The bridge, first built in 1925, links Vancouver and North Vancouver. In Lowry’s time, the bridge was a rail bridge and had a car deck; it has since been rebuilt and car traffic now uses the adjacent Ironworkers Memorial bridge, opened in 1960. See notes to pp. 31, 35.
6 “Melvillean qualification”: Lowry similarly refers to a “Melvillean whiteness” in a letter (15 January 1953) to Gerald and Betty Noxon (SC 1.421).
7 “Volney”: see notes to p. 253.
8 Signor Salacci: The prurient guide’s name suggests “salacious,” the actual Italian for which is salace; the name is fitting, given Salacci’s delight in describing the ruins of the brothel to Roderick and Tansy.
9 “the poem of The Waste Land”: T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. See notes to pp. 122, 145.
10 Priapus: A Greek fertility god plagued first by impotence then by a huge, permanent erection.
11 Cyrano de Bergerac: A seventeenth-century French playwright, on stories of whose life is based Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), a play by Edmond Rostand, in which Cyrano, eloquent but ugly, assists the inarticulate Christian in wooing Roxane, with whom both men are in love. Lowry’s letters indicate that he knew the play well.
12 Screw of Archimedes: An irrigation device for moving water from a lower elevation to a higher elevation, the invention of which is conventionally attributed to Archimedes.
13 Port Boden: Boden was the family name of Lowry’s mother, Evelyn Boden Lowry.
14 Volney’s Ruin of Empires”: Les Ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires (1791), by Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney.
15 “Ultima Thule”: i.e., Greenland, used in the sense of “new territory” or “furthest region”; another example of Lowry’s fascination with Scandinavia. Lowry also uses the term in La Mordida and Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid.