We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays

The anthem of praise raised by foreign writers—and in particular by writers in English—to Italy, to Tuscany, to Florence, has consistently sounded a note of relief. Its theme is that of a heaven-sent rescue: the rescue of the self from incompleteness. We realize that we had always dreamed we might dwell among such scenes and sentiments, and now we find our wish consummated. We celebrate an environment that is both a revelation and a repose to us, a consolation and a home. Like all love, this love of foreigners for Tuscany is easy to mock. Like all love, it is an object of envy on the part of those who feel excluded from it. (And let us remember the observation of Dr. Johnson: “A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority.”¹) We are told that it is not original, it is not realistic. It is true that there may be illusion in it, and a lack of what is currently defined as realism. But does it not seem to you, in these times, that in the name of realism we are being asked to mock our very souls?

Illusion is part of civilized power. Wherever there is civilization, there is to some degree illusion. Yeats says that

As E. M. Forster’s hero Fielding arrives in Italy from the Orient, Forster tells us that “a cup of beauty was lifted to his lips, and he drank with a sense of disloyalty…. He had forgotten the beauty of form…the harmony between the works of man and the earth that upholds them…. The Mediterranean”—says Forster—“is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorous or the Pillars of Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary.”⁴

The Mediterranean, as an ideal, is the human norm. Not a norm as a leveling, nor as la legge della media, but an equilibrium in which individual quality can rationally flourish. Comprehensiveness here, and comprehension, have time and again restored our disparate elements to form and healed us.

Winckelmann spoke for many of us when he said that “God owed me Italy, for I had suffered too much in my youth.”⁵ Release, expansiveness, the nurturing of elements intrinsic but denied—these are the themes even of such a rigorous observer as D. H. Lawrence. We embrace this culture as our own, in the beautiful phrase of Burchardt, “by a kind of hereditary right or by right of admiration”—not so much undergoing a transformation as acknowledging at last the Tuscan in each of us.⁶

That sense of rightfulness has its definable source in humanism. Outsiders have been drawn to Tuscany and to Florence as to the center and capital of their own civilized values. One might almost say that even those—and they are many—who come to Florence to buy new shoes and table linen do so, in some remote degree, in the name of humanism: for they have heard that Florence matters. Travelers from lands where humanism is unknown respond to the Tuscan phenomenon, and perhaps this refers to the humanist in each of us. In the newer societies beyond these shores I believe that we begin to see the death of humanism; and this is even urged on in the name of that unexamined “reality” and in unchallenged retreat from individualism although none can predict what loss of humanistic values will mean, or what will be the future moral bearing of humanity. These matters already have their strong effects on Tuscan life, but here we are nevertheless made aware that what was so many centuries in the making will not surrender easily. In fact, that sensation of relief that Tuscany has always afforded to outsiders has been recharged in recent years: for here, as yet, humanism labors under no disfavor and need not appear self-conscious. Like Machiavelli in his great letter from S. Andrea in Percussina, we shed here much nonsense unworthy of our better selves.⁷

An Australian of my generation grew up in raw ignorance of humanism, of the Renaissance, of Tuscan art. The themes of Italy were little developed in the Australian literature that came to our hands; and although we encountered it in literature more generally, our own circumstances and those of the globe before and during the Second World War made Italy remote from us. We were given no inkling that the immemorial influences of this land had helped to form the Australian social order, and—to speak generally—Australians of those years were often inaccessible to unfamiliar concepts, and hostile to aesthetic revelation. It is notable that these Tuscan places that played so prominent a part in English and European literature figure only exceptionally in Australian writing of past generations. Even now, I think of rather a few strong examples, but rather of passing incidents. In Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot, well-to-do Australians are glimpsed in Florence at the turn of the century, in a sarcastic aside drawn from the diary of an unhappy matron: “Norbert indefatigable. Italy his spiritual home. Only a few nights ago he embarked on a long poem on the theme of Fra Angelico…. Now that we are in a villa of our own, hope to discover some respectable woman who will know how to prepare him his mutton chop.”⁸ And in the same novel an English girl writes from Florence to her estranged suitor in England in what the author tells us is a “somewhat literary strain, about the little green hills of Tuscany, with their exciting undertones of sensuous brown,” and we are informed that the recipient of the letter “had no inclination to read any farther.”⁹ Fortunately, perhaps, I had not read those lines when I first came to Tuscany and quite possibly wrote letters of a literary taint about its green hills—colline, infatti, di un verdolino luminoso. Sì, centavo anch’io, come tanti altri, le giornate radiose, I campi curati come un giardino, e I solchi disegnati a calligrafia. E più di tutti parlavo—sempre “in somewhat literary strain”—delle gentilezze incredibili di questo popolo. I lived in Siena in a scene described by a Tuscan poet—Folgore da San Gimignano—looking toward

I too, like so many others before me, sat outdoors in what Leopardi calls the “sovrumani silenzi”¹¹ in the Tuscan night under the moon, to hear the gufo in the cypresses; and woke on brilliant mornings to hear the farmer shouting to the two white beasts that drew the plow. That was another Tuscany, then—though not in time historically remote. The paired white cows that pulled the plow, the close lines of vines beneath the olives, the appearance everywhere of order without uniformity or excessive regularity. For the most part, then, Tuscany was a countryside of appropriate and long-established rural buildings. One drove from Florence to Siena on the Cassia, and those two hours seemed well spent. Or once in a while by the Via Chiantigiana, which took pleasantly longer. I was too knowing to speak of Tuscany as my spiritual home, but felt it to be so. And, although I never attempted “a long poem on the theme of Fra Angelico,” it was in Tuscany that I became a writer.

I have seen Florence under many conditions and have known this city in dark as well as golden days. I remember a beautiful June morning, just after daybreak, when, arriving overnight by train from Geneva, I crossed from the station to have my coffee at the Caffè Italia, where a waiter was hosing down the pavement. And I sat there, lacking nothing, in a state of perfect happiness I’ve never forgotten, realizing I was again in Tuscany. I remember too, years later, another arrival by train—this time on a December evening in 1966, when for a last freezing hour the train labored through the mud-laden flood. In those drastic weeks Florence lay as if stranded along the Arno; one looked upstream through the skeleton of the Ponte Vecchio; the familiar street ewer-befouled watercourses; and everywhere, indoors and out, the ghastly line was streaked along saturated walls. I remember, in streets and shops, the tears and courage, and the Florentine durability—the Florentine toughness. I saw the great Cimabue laid like a living casualty on a trestle-table, and the books heaped up like pulp at the Certosa di Galluzo. I saw a cat called Gianna who saved herself by clinging for a week to a ham suspended from the ceiling of a salumeria in Borgo Ognissanti. I remember that the cold was bitterest in Gavinana and San Frediano, where recovery was slowest, and in the poorer streets near Santa Croce. And I remember the hippies in their hundreds, digging out mud and sewage, sleeping on damp floors, and sitting down to eat in long rows at improvised tables. I recall the experts and museum curators, the art historians who converged on the city from Europe and America and raised funds abroad for restoration—funds that came from all around the globe; for the world was moved, and so was the Tuscan in each of us.

It is said to be a misfortune to be granted one’s dearest wish. How many of us, nevertheless—outsiders like myself, achieving our desire to inhabit this peninsula—have been rewarded beyond our dreams. Because beyond dreams there is life itself and the intensity of being. Tuscany has a wealth of healing properties, but Tuscany is not a casa di cura. It is not a tame place but a stimulus: in the truest sense, one of the world’s great powers. I think of Shelley at Florence in 1819 walking one day along the Arno to the Cascine in a hard west wind and coming home to write an immortal poem. Of that “Ode to the West Wind” he would note: “This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno…on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapors which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.”¹²

This lovely place, in its endless richness and hospitality, has touched many great and lesser minds to emulation in the noblest meaning of the word. It has touched the Antipodes, and Australians who have never visited Tuscany have known it by influence and in imagination. It has moved us to do our best.