… As pines

keep the shape of the wind

even when the wind has fled and is no longer there

so words

guard the shape of man.

GEORGE SEFERIS, TRANS. WALTER KAISER

 

What do we mean by being alone? Rumer Godden is of the opinion that, from the day that a child has learned to read, he will never be so again. “When you learn to read,” she said to her own daughter, “you will be born again, and it is a pity to be born again so young. As soon as you learn to read, you will not see anything again quite as it is. It will all the time be altered by what you have read, and you will never be quite alone again.”

I think that there is something in this, in the sense that we do not look at a landscape again in quite the same way after we have once seen a great painter’s rendering of it: the blue hills of the Veneto come to resemble the background to Bellini’s Madonnas, the crete senesi turn into the landscapes of Sassetta or Sodoma. But I do not agree that it is an argument against teaching a child how to read, or if it is, then we must also exclude all telling of stories. ‘The Three Bears’ and ‘Little Black Sambo’, ‘The Constant Tin Soldier’ and ‘The Dog with Eyes as Big as Saucers’, have already become our companions long before we can read ourselves; they have already peopled our world. All that is achieved by the final act of reading to itself is to enable a child to summon up that other world at its own will. ‘My whole being’, wrote Coleridge of his boyhood, ‘was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read,—fancying myself into Robinson Crusoe’s island, finding it a mountain of plum-cake and eating a room for myself and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs.’

It is the extreme concreteness of a child’s imagination which enables him, not only to take from each book exactly what he requires—people, or genii, or tables and chairs—but literally to furnish his world with them. I can remember no time when I did not do this, nor can I remember when I learned to read. I only know that it must have been fairly soon, since a letter of my mother’s, when I was just four, speaks of my finding it easier to read in Italian than in English, and by six I could also read French. German I spoke from the age of four, but only learned to read it later on. This early teaching did not, unfortunately, make a good linguist of me, but it did leave me with the knowledge that any language will do for telling a story. Struwelpeter and Sophia were as familiar figures of the nursery as Humpty Dumpty, Pinocchio as Alice. It was only a little later on that it began to dawn on me that some things were said better, more naturally, in one language than in another, and indeed that I myself did not say quite the same things and was not the same person, in Italian as in English.

As to reading matter, all I knew was that there were always enough books about: picture-books, story-books, poetry-books; ‘difficult’ books, out of which the grown-ups read aloud and ‘easy’ books at my own disposal. Only one person was slightly disapproving, my English grandmother. “As you’re doing nothing, Iris—only reading”, was the formula, followed by “Come and help me to wind my wool, or to pick the sweet peas.” And sometimes she would add, “If you read so much now, there’ll be no books left for you when you grow up.”

This even then I knew (much as I loved and respected Gran) to be nonsense. Of all the pleasures of life, this is the only one that, at every age, has never failed me. But inevitably, I have paid for it with other limitations. ‘I cannot sit and think,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘books think for me.’ For many years that was true of me, too—not only did I not think, but I did not look or listen. I heard ‘the aziola cry’ in Shelley’s poem, but was deaf to the little night-owl hooting outside my window; I knew all the flowers that bloomed in Ophelia’s garden, but few of those in our own. Above all, the boys and girls whom I found in my books were so vivid to me that those I met in real life seemed by comparison a little tame.

In early childhood, my choice of books was directed by two contrasting, but simultaneous, preferences, one for the remote, the fantastic, the heroic; the other for a world exactly like the one I knew, only a little safer, more harmonious, more rounded. The latter satisfied my need for the reassurance of a set moral frame; the first, for an ‘expanding universe’. In very early childhood, indeed, there were a few much-loved books which gratified both tastes at once, which brought the fantastic and the marvellous through the gate at the top of the nursery stairs. Pinocchio was eaten by a whale and saved by la fata dai capelli turchini, but his long wooden feet were also solidly planted on familiar ground: he had to go to school, like any other little boy, and Geppetto had to pawn his coat to buy him an ABC. A little later on, I found a similar mingling of the fantastic and the quotidian in Mrs. Molesworth’s The Cuckoo Clock, and in the stories of Mrs. Burnett—not the odious Little Lord Fauntleroy but The Secret Garden and Sara Crewe. The turbaned Indian servant who stole across the roofs into Sara’s attic and transformed it, and the country boy, Dickon, who charmed birds and wild animals and helped Mary to bring the deserted garden to life again, both had a touch of authentic magic; but Sara and Mary were also real children, in whom another little girl could personify herself.

Real children, good and naughty, those were what I sought—they fulfilled my craving for company. No family was too large (not even the one in The Daisy Chain), no incident too dramatic, and, besides, I had a strong taste for what was, even then, old-fashioned. I had what most children nowadays would consider a positively morbid liking for stories with a moral. Leila on the Island, In England and at Home—an immensely long book of which I can only remember that poor Leila was set, for half an hour every day, to look for a lost needle in the sands of the desert island on which she had been cast—Holiday House, with the delightfully naughty Harry and Lucy, who rolled their birthday cake down from the top of Arthur’s Seat—these were classics of the Victorian nursery which still delighted me, and which led on to Mrs. Molesworth, Mrs. Ewing, Charlotte Yonge and Louisa M. Alcott.

Do any children still read these books today? With the exception of Little Women, which appears to be a hardy perennial, I think not. Yet I still think that they were very good. The world they described was, it is true, a circumscribed one—‘little ladies and gentlemen’ on one side of the fence, and ‘the village children’ on the other; strong omniscient Papas who were either country gentlemen, retired naval officers or parsons; and sweet, refined, often delicate Mammas—all living in a landscape of great trees and green meadows, of thatched cottages and spacious houses, in which Nanny, in a large apron, addressed her charges (although whipping them) as Miss and Master, and the kettle was forever boiling on the hob for nursery tea. But if the setting was old-fashioned, the characters were alive, and the moral values both crisp and true—and often expressed with dry humour as well as firmness.

There was another, wholly different world that also beckoned from books, the kingdom of magic and fantasy. It was the same world as that of a child’s secret rites and incantations; the line between the paving-stones that you must not tread on, the magic formula that will keep you safe on the dark corner of the stairs. Sometimes a single phrase would take you there—‘How many miles to Babylon?’ There lived the princess whose dress was ‘de la couleur du temps’; there was the little white cottage in the wood where Goldilocks found three chairs, three little beds and three bowls of porridge, the enchanted garden of Beauty and the Beast, the marble staircase where the Prince came to meet Cinderella and take her by the hand. This was the other country, the country of our dreams.

Gradually Cinderella and Goldilocks vanished, other forms began to beckon: The Lady of Shalott, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, Christabel. And now I no longer wished to travel alone:

Kennst Du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn?

Allons, faisons un rêve, montons sur deux palefrois.

The world of fantasy was fading into the world of romance, and childhood was coming to an end.

It was then that I read increasingly, not only in order to escape into another world but, as I believed, to learn about life itself. Mauriac has justly remarked in his Mémoires Intérieurs that ‘the characters invented by the novelist only awake to life, like recorded music, at our bidding. It is we, the readers, who offer these imaginary creatures time and space within ourselves, in which to unfold and engrave their destiny.’ Moreover it is by identifying ourselves with them that we do, in a sense, anticipate experience: we try on the parts of love and hate, of jealousy and desire, like our first grown-up dress. I became in turn Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, Catherine Morland and Natasha: ‘elles incarnaient mon destin encore voilé’. Their shadows are thrown upon the screen of my adolescent years with a vividness denied to most living figures.

During all this time, of course, I was also pursuing my formal education—but with how much less gusto! From my governesses I learned some French and German, though not as much as I could have learned had I liked these ladies better. For one brief, exciting term in 1914, when we were in London, I was allowed to attend Miss Woolf’s excellent classes in South Audley Street (though mortified by the contrast between my black velveteen frock from Liberty’s and the sensible tweed coats and skirts of the other girls) and was delighted to find myself placed, for literature and history, with the Seniors, three years older than myself. But these classes, too, came to an end and, in spite of my earnest pleas to be allowed to go to an English boarding-school, I returned to Fiesole and to the dull, solitary lessons with my governesses.

* * *

At the age of twelve, however, a piece of great good fortune befell me. Bernard Berenson, to whom I shall always be grateful, advised my mother to let me receive a classical education and even supplied her with the name of the brilliant tutor with whom I worked for the next three years, Professor Solone Monti. It was with him that I spent the happiest hours of my girlhood—perhaps the happiest I have ever known.

My first impression as I entered his study was of a haze of smoke, so thick that I could hardly see across the little square room, lined with cheap deal bookshelves, to the desk behind which sat a dark, stocky little man, with dandruff on his collar, and with such thick lenses to his spectacles that they seemed more suited to a windscreen than a human eye.

“Mind those books, signorina,” was his greeting, as I stumbled over a pile near the door, “they are meant to be read, not trodden on.”

I would have liked to ask why, in that case, great piles of them covered the floor, except that, looking about me, it was plain that there was no other place for them to be, every inch of the walls and tables being already filled.

“Wait a minute, the lexicon can go on to the floor too. Now sit here and we will take a journey to Greece and Rome. You know no Latin? And of course no Greek?”

I shook my head.

“And you have not yet read Dante?”

“No.”

“And Carducci and Pascoli are just names to you?”

I muttered something about Valentino vestito di nuovo.

“Yes, yes, I dare say,” impatiently, “but it’s the other Pascoli I mean, the great classical scholar. Well, we shall have a long way to travel—and we’ll pick a great many flowers on the way.” Then suddenly, explosively, taking off his glasses and gazing straight into my round, startled face, “But you like poetry, in the languages you know? You have read Keats, Shelley, Milton—perhaps some Goethe—perhaps Corneille? You read poetry for pleasure?”

“Yes, oh yes!”

“Then we’ll begin. Listen now, signorina. All you need to do today is to listen.”

And he took up Pascoli’s Epos—his anthology of Latin epic verse, of which the preface and the notes are still so vividly evocative that (in the words of another great classical scholar, Valgimigli, who had been Pascoli’s pupil) ‘it was like a fluttering of wings’.

The passage that Monti had chosen was the famous one about the Trojan camp-fires on the plain.

“This is how Pascoli describes the scene—for people like you who cannot yet read Greek:

“Da una parte la pianura scintillante di fuochi, con un cielo sereno di stelle (i Troiani erano all’aperto, in faccia alla loro grande città, e mille fuochi ardevano, e a ogni fuoco erano cinquanta guerrieri, e i cavalli stavano presso i fuochi, stritolando fra i denti l’orzo bianco e la spelta, e attendevano l’aurora); dall’altra il mare, tutto rumori e bisbigli. Giunti alle capanne e alle navi dei Mirmidoni, giunti a quella capanna, udirono un canto. Era Achille, che accompagnandosi sulla cetra predata, cantava le glorie dei guerrieri.”1

Monti put the book down.

“No, you needn’t try to make an intelligent comment. I saw that you were listening. Now, this is what one of your English poets, Tennyson, made of it:

“So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds  

Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.”

He closed the book, took off his spectacles and wiped them.

“That is the world you will see if you learn Greek—even if you get no further than Homer. Do you want to go there? Yes?”—for I was speechless—“I see you do. Well, here is a Greek grammar. Learn the alphabet and the declensions for next time, so that we can start reading at once. You know German, don’t you? And what a declension is? Well, then, be off with you. Oh, and get a lexicon, too; a small one will do, Homer’s vocabulary is very limited—and a Latin dictionary. And here’s a Latin grammar; you’d better learn those declensions, too, when you can. We’ll start at the beginning on Thursday.”

Before I had shut the door behind me, he was immersed in his own book again.

* * *

I realise now that Professor Monti was making an experiment. Having acquired a pupil who was not tied by school programmes and exams, he decided to try out on me the Humanist education given in the fifteenth century in Mantua by Vittorino da Feltre to Cecilia Gonzaga and her brothers—one in which Greek and Latin were learned together, as living languages. ‘To begin with the best’—that was the precept on which the education of the Renaissance had been based, in the days when poetry was considered the fittest instrument to train the mind. According to Bruno d’Arezzo, who wrote the first treatise of the Renaissance on what a woman’s education should be, ‘anyone ignorant of, and indifferent to, so valuable an aid to knowledge and so ennobling a source of pleasure as poetry, can by no means be entitled to be called educated’.

Monti agreed with him. If we did not precisely invent the Greek language together, like Benjamin Constant and his tutor, we did start reading the Iliad at once, he naturally translating most of the words for me as we went along, and pointing out equivalents or derivatives in Latin or in any modern language I knew, with a complete lack of pedantry or condescension.

“Look, the English rendering here is more satisfactory than the Italian, don’t you think?—or do you prefer this German one?” And then we would read the passage over again in Greek, this time with me stumbling through the translation, as best I could, by myself.

“Say it in any language you like, only feel the poetry.”

“Now, Virgil,” he said, when half the first morning had passed. “We’ll start with something easy: Sicelides Musae. This is the poem of the Golden Age.”

That day we did not get very far. For as we reached, in the second line, humilesque myricae, he told me what a tamarisk bush looked like, and took down Pascoli’s Myricae from his shelf, reading aloud some of its verses.

Then, back to Virgil again. But when, a few lines later, we came to the Child of prophecy—‘Tuo modo nascenti puer’—Monti suddenly realised from my blank look that I had no idea of who that child had been supposed to be during the Middle Ages, nor why, among all the Latin poets, it was Virgil whom Dante had chosen as his guide through the infernal regions—Virgil, who mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra.2 And then Monti turned to the first Canto of the Inferno, and read aloud:

“Tu se’ lo mio maestro, e il mio autore;

Tu se’ solo colui, da cui io tolsi

Lo bello stile, che m’ha fatto onore.”3

So in a flash the morning passed, and then it was time to go home and work and work, in an attempt to master the rudiments which would enable me to understand him better next time.

Monti did not, of course, let me off learning any grammar or rules; he merely required me to wrestle with them alone, not wasting our time together on such matters, unless I had a question to ask, or some point came up which he wished to explain. For ignorance he always made every allowance; you did not know, so you asked and were told. But stupidity or laziness were inconceivable. Why, if you suffered from these complaints, had you come to his little room at all?

I cannot remember the detailed progress of our work. I only know that for nearly three years, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I went to him, when in Florence, three times a week; that my imagination was entirely filled by the world he conjured up for me; and that, indeed, I owe to him, not only what he taught me then, but, in enthusiasm and method of approach, all that I have learned ever since. During those years, our relationship remained a curiously impersonal one. I do not remember him coming to my mother’s house, or ever speaking to him of anything unconnected with my studies: but in the time I spent with him, I was as entirely absorbed in his teaching, as convinced that this was absolute beauty and truth, as any young disciple at the feet of his guru.

The path of learning was sometimes made easy, too, and enlivened by an element of surprise.

“Do you know what Pascoli said to the kettle which wouldn’t boil for his dinner?” Monti suddenly asked one morning, “Pentola, pentola, pentola, bolli. Pentola, bolli!” Then he added, turning to an equally hungry friend in the doorway, “Che bell’esametro!”4

Taking a pencil, Monti wrote it down, marking the long syllables and the short—and so, in three minutes, the rhythm of the hexameter was fixed in my mind for ever.

At the end of each lesson he would say, “Now, a surprise!” and would read aloud to me a few perfect lines to carry back in my head during the hour in which the slow, crowded tram toiled up the Fiesole hill. So it was that I encountered for the first time L’ora che volge il desìo ai naviganti—and Leopardi’s Le vie dorate e gli orti, and Pascoli’s L’ultimo viaggio di Ulisse. Never was there a suggestion in Monti’s voice, as he read, that any passage was already familiar to him; he engraved it on the bare tablets of my mind as if for him, too, it were a discovery.

A little later on there was Lesbia’s sparrow and Alcman’s kingfisher ‘with never a care in his heart—the sea-blue bird of spring’, and then, in the last year in which I worked with him, Sappho’s last apple on the topmost bough, and the great Ode to Aphrodite. It was a morning in May, and even on Monti’s dusty desk his wife had put a small vase containing a single dark red rose; as I read, its scent reached me, together with the honeyed words. And I was fifteen—an ungainly, awkward schoolgirl, far more ignorant than any convent-bred child, but dizzy and quivering that morning with questions and unformulated dreams and longings.

“If now she loves thee not, she soon will love …”

Something in my stumbling voice made even Monti suddenly glance up from the printed page.

“That will do for today, my dear,” he said gently. “Take it home and read it to yourself. È primavera.”

As I rode home up the hill under the silver olive-trees, the creaking tram was Aphrodite’s chariot, drawn by swallows.

I only remember seeing Monti once outside his study, and that was in the little ruined amphitheatre of Luni—the scene of Marius the Epicurean’s ‘White Nights’—which lies in the strip of land, set among olive-trees and vines, between Sarzana and the sea. It is one of the most classical, gentlest landscapes in Tuscany and was then very little known, for no road led to it and one came upon the ruins quite suddenly at the end of a winding path from a farm. Gnarled fig-trees grew in the crevices of the walls and the centre of the amphitheatre was often piled high with grain, for the farmers used it as a threshing-floor, or, when it had been cleared, danced there on summer nights. I did not know that Monti and his wife often came to stay with friends near the mouth of the river Magra in the summer, and so it seemed nothing short of a miracle when, after bicycling to Luni at the end of a hot summer’s day (my mother had taken a villa by the sea nearby) I suddenly heard, as I approached the ruins, a familiar voice and saw, seated on one of the lower steps of the theatre in his rusty black town suit only enlivened by a very old Panama hat, with some peaches on his lap and a paper bag of dry biscuits, dear Monti, talking to his host’s two sons. When the greetings were over and we had eaten the biscuits and peaches, we begged him to say some lines to us before going home.

“It’s getting late,” he demurred, “and I feel lazy.” Then he added, “but you are right, children; it is the time and place.”

And very slowly, very quietly, leaning back against the stones, with his hat tilted over his eyes to shield him from the setting sun, he recited to us the famous lines in which Virgil grants to the bees something of the divine essence:

“They fly aloft,” he repeated, “and find their rest in heaven.” While he was speaking, the bees were still humming round us among the mint and thyme, but now the sun was getting low and they were withdrawing into their hives.

“Look, there’s the old Corycian going home.”

And, indeed, down the path to the farm an old man was making his way home, ‘like a king’, with his basket ‘of food unbought’—some fresh onions and beans, a few peaches and a cucumber—and an old goat hobbling behind him.

“Buona sera, signoria.”

“Buona sera, nonno, vai a cena? Buon appetito!”

For the first time I became aware of poetry as something not disconnected from life, but incorporated in it, and also realised how profoundly the classical tradition was still rooted in the Mediterranean world—transmitted not only in the cadences of words but in nature itself and in the most familiar objects of daily use. As I looked around me, there was nothing in sight that Virgil himself might not have seen: the olive-trees and figs and vines, the fat-bellied gourd trailing in the grass, the single clump of lilies beside the farm door, the pungent thyme beneath our feet, the oxen slowly plodding home, the goat (and Virgil, too, knew that the damage wrought by goats is even worse than that of drought or early frost), even the wooden flails leaning against one of the walls of the amphitheatre, the small curved sickle with which a bare-armed, dark-skinned girl was cutting a bundle of grass, and the round bee-hives placed, as the poet advised, beside a little channel of running water. So, too, many years later, when first I went to Phaestos, I saw in the underground store-room beneath the summer palace of the Cretan kings, a wooden scoop with which the oil used to be drawn out of the great Cretan oil-jars three thousand years before, which was of exactly the same shape as those that we still use for the same purpose on our Tuscan farm today.

In Virgil the same word, arma, is used for a countryman’s tools and for his arms. Perhaps a poet’s words are also not only instruments, but arms: his means of defending a pattern of beauty, an established order, as an incantation may preserve a rite. In Tuscany, more than in any other part of Italy, some of Virgil’s words may still be heard in common speech: a ploughman, when we first came to La Foce, would still sometimes call himself a bifolco, and the word reaches us with a patina similar to that of a Roman weapon or an Etruscan vase just turned up by the plough.

But these were, of course, later reflections. Too wise to improve the occasion any further—or perhaps just tired of teaching—Monti lay back dozing until the boys, becoming restless, tried to coax a lizard from his crevice in the stones. “Come, children, it’s late; we must go home.” Had I been able to go on working with Monti for another couple of years, I would perhaps have tried to become a classical scholar or an archaeologist, and my life might have taken a very different course. But in 1917 he suddenly died of Spanish influenza and when, in the following year, we moved to Rome, I was taken on by a teacher who was far too eminent a scholar for me, Professor Nicola Festa, who, having always taught pupils familiar with the conventional school curriculum, did not realise that the English schoolgirl whom he had only accepted because she came from Monti, concealed beneath her enthusiasm such deep wells of ignorance that she sometimes could not follow him at all. It had been Monti’s intention, I now realise, to reverse the usual processes of teaching, and—after forming my taste and ear and kindling my enthusiasm—to go back to the necessary spade-work, which would then have seemed worth while. Only now I was like a plant without roots, and very anxious, too, for Monti’s sake, to conceal my vast lacunae from his old teacher. The hours in which we read Sophocles together thus became desperate feats of ingenuity on my part, trying to understand what Professor Festa plainly considered elementary, and then wrestling at home, between lessons, with grammars and cribs. But, while I was of course impressed by Festa’s scholarship and by his dry, penetrating comments, the old fire was not kindled again. I had lost my guru.

1 Pascoli: Introduction to Epos, pp. xvii–xviii.

On one side, the plain shimmering with fires, with a serene, starry sky (the Trojans were in the open, before the great city, and a thousand fires were blazing and by each fire sat fifty warriors, and their horses stood close to the fires, champing the white spelt and oats between their teeth, and waiting for the dawn); on the other side the sea, murmuring and sighing. And when they reached the hut and ships of the Myrmidons, they heard a song. It was Achilles, who as he strummed on the strings of his stolen harp, was extolling his warriors’ deeds.

2 Who ‘showed us what our tongue can do’.

3 ‘You are my master and creator; from you alone I drew the noble style which has brought me honour.’ Inferno, I, 85–88.

4 “What a fine hexameter!” I have since found this story also in an essay on Pascoli by Manara Valgimigli.

5 … for a deity

There is pervading the whole earth and all

The expanses of the sea, and heights of heaven:

That from him flocks and herds, men and wild beasts

Of every kind, each at its birth drinks in

The subtle breath of life; and thus all beings

Soon return thither, soon to be dissolved

And so restored; nor for death is there a place;

But, living still, into the ranks of stars

They fly aloft, and find their rest in heaven.

Georgics IV, 221–30, translated by R. C. Trevelyan