Italian Days!

Our book today is Barbara Grizzuti Harrison's magnificent 1989 masterpiece, Italian Days, a reliable entrant on my list of Top 50 Nonfiction Works of the 20th Century (I realize Modern Library also compiled such a list, but much as I love them, we don't always agree). There is an alchemy that transforms the best 'travel writing' into something more than the usual 'if it's Tuesday, this must be Waziristan' rigmarole the afflicts the genre, and that alchemy is everywhere in evidence in this big, wonderful volume. Harrison toured Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, the Amalfi Coast, and of course Calabria, and she wrote pieces on each location for whoever was paying - Harper's, Lear's, the Iowa Review, etc. But she was one of those mysterious writers whose every published utterance is actually a fragment of one enormous ongoing narrative, so they all fell together into a remarkably cohesive whole when the possibility arose of welding them into a book. The central unifying factor is not tone or word-count but Harrison herself, the bruised and wise and beautiful tone she maintains through every word and phrase.

She tips her hat to all the great writers who've gone to Italy and partaken of its inspirations. She mentions Goethe and Stendahl and Henry James and Hawthorne and all the rest of the usual subjects, but she comes closer to the mark when she acknowledges the great H. V. Morton, whose massive volumes of travel-writing ought to be perpetually in print, and whose A Traveller in Italy and A Traveller in Southern Italy were clearly templates for Harrison's own work.

But the cut and lyricism of her prose makes Morton seem like a plodder. Harrison's book is as rife with apophthegms as a Montaigne essay- if you underline them as you go along, you end up with an entire commonplace book. We're told "You pay a double tariff for great hotels: Hauteur goes with the cosseting."

"I have sometimes been ungenerous in my mind to expatriates," we're told, "and that is because I love another country better than my own."

"A group of giggly Italian schoolchildren pass the relics, pausing no longer than a minute," we're told, "it is as difficult for the young to believe that they will someday be old as it is for the old to believe that they were one day young."

Sometimes, her exquisite summaries are blinkered, other times biased. For all her ferocious study (this is one of the most literate, allusive books ever written for a wide audience), she can be wrong and not even guess it. "After the third or fourth day in Venice," she tells us, for example, "small pools of light in the side canals - lights filtered through shuttered windows - are ineffably sad. The magic of Venice contends with the accumulated sadness of centuries." Something of that is undeniably true, but it only activates when you know you're leaving Venice soon; tourists feel this way about the light all around them after three or four days, not longer-term residents. In this instance (and it happens again in her pages on Florence, and in her separate book on Sicily), Venice is paying an unfair price for the date stamped on Harrison's return ticket.

But it scarcely matters - the book is so gracefully powerful in all its descriptions that the reader doesn't care how long Harrison stayed wherever she went - there's just the happiness that she went at all ... and came back to share her often odd, tangential observations. Innumerable travellers have described these same works of art and architecture, but there's no mistaking Harrison's particular twist:

Michelangelo's David, washed in lovely light at the Accademia, is a different matter from the hefty women resting on the Medici sarcophagi. His youth and slim, tensile beauty are so much more than the sum of his parts - pendulous testicles, scrolled pubic hair, supple wrists, purposeful hands, curiously small ears, the tender line of his jaw, the very nearly coy tilt of one hip, the look of blank inward concentration ... Sublime, but not necessarily lovable. And one does wish one didn't know that Martha Graham once told her male dancers, "Now, dears, I know you've all just come back from Florence, but I want you to forget that ..." because one does know exactly what she means.

"This is how memory works," she tells us. "It curls, it is baroque." And she practices what she asserts - in the strange loops and adagios of Italian Days, we follow Harrison's often labyrinthine mental wanderings. It can be disorienting, but it is always, always a stunning, memorable experience. You'll be reading along as she deadpans on bad bathrooms or rickety elevators, and then suddenly you'll drift into a passage of startling beauty where you least expect it, as in this, what I consider the finest written evocation of Rome ever written in English:

... swallows wheel against the lantern of St. Peter's at dusk; cascades of green and star jasmine on ocher buildings, a flight of warm and curving shallow steps; unexpected, unexplained fragments of white statuary, marble busts, in bowers of oleander (apricot, rose, lavender) on terraced rooftops on the leafy Lungotevere as I drive by on a moonlit night, the Tiber smelling green; a small burnt-sienna house, green shutters, a cozy flight of outside stairs cluttered with the impedimenta of daily living - a broom, a mat, empty tins - and home to pots of straggling basil, thyme, geraniums, an umbrella turned inside out; fountains: water patiently following orders for a thousand years; a wheelbarrow in an ancient square piled high with new fruit ... the grand and the domestic present to the senses, at ease with each other and at once, as they are in dreams; the wild and comfortable logic of belfries and multilevel roofs; a blanket of rosemary in a ruin; ... honeysuckle, clumps of weeds growing from the Pincian wall, anointed by moonlight; and none of these things alone but all of them together, each separate part declaring the permanence of beauty ...

The light ravishes.

The light isn't the only thing that ravishes here. Whether you know Italy with long familiarity or have only been there in your dreams, you should find this book.

 

Feints and Jabs in the Penny Press!

 

Yet another banner issue of the TLS this time around (dated 6 August but only now reaching my benighted backwater of a PO box), and one with a couple of Open Letters echoes that involve yours truly.

The bigger of these kicks off the whole issue – someone named Caroline Blythe reviews two books on the great, bat-shit crazy Victorian polymath John Ruskin, and one of those books is Robert Hewison's big, beautifully-produced Yale University Press volume Ruskin on Venice, which I reviewed a little while ago.

I loved the book and consider it a masterpiece of Ruskin studies. Blythe pulls a standard book-reviewing sleight-of-hand, slapping the book's face left, right, left again, right again … and then calling it “important” or “impressive” or some such placid, portmanteau praise. It's hardly illuminating for a reader (to say nothing of gratifying for an author) to so obviously disparage a book and then backhandedly praise it. There's a figure of speech about eating one's cake and having it too …

The smaller of the echoes deals with Shakespeare's play Henry VIII, an odd, muscular little work I love more with every reading (and one I talked about here). Critics for over a century have maintained that one of the main reasons the play is 'odd' is because it's a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. As I mention in my own piece about the play, I'm not convinced – but either way, I get the impression I'd like the new Globe Theatre (Bankside) production a lot more than TLS critic Michael Caines did.

 

But the highlight of this issue was neither of these (they're just neat because we've touched on them before, and that's always a fun, eerie experience – you see such a piece in the table of contents, you feel a micro-second's irresolution, then you say, “OK, go ahead. I've done my best at rendering this particular book – let's see how you do”) but instead a slam-bang review by Claire Harman of Michael Sherborne's new biography of H.G. Wells.

I've yet to read Sherborne's book (its UK publisher, Michael Owen, may take that as a rhetorical sharp elbow in the ribs), but I could read Harman on Wells until the cows come home. This is exactly the kind of full, flowing, opinionated review that a wag once said makes its own object irrelevant; Harman is even adept at aphorisms. “The idea that he [Wells] owed nothing to anyone, even his own subconscious, was one he nurtured carefully all his life” is very, very good (actual Wells biographers have wasted whole chapters deriving that simple truth), and when Harman comes to Wells' legendary prolific output, she promptly outdoes herself: “At a stroke, Wells had both invented and almost saturated a new genre.” Oh, that's good stuff.

And then there's the little dagger in the letters page – a fierce, intelligent missive from one Tarif Khalidi that gives no quarter whatsoever:

Having just read the review of Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Hans Kundani, I wondered: Do either author or reviewer have any proper knowledge of Arab history, society, culture, or language? How in particular does one “assess” the impact of Nazi propaganda on the Arab world without a knowledge of Arabic, openly admitted in the case of the author (and reviewer)? Sad to say, the Arab/Islamic world is currently the last region on earth where non-experts can freely claim scholarly authority. Sadder still is that the TLS encourages such shoddy scholarship by publishing reviews that merely echo tired and tiresome Israeli propaganda, then go on to claim that the book in question is “important” in the debate (sic) about that tendentious phrase, “Islamofascism”.

 

That's fairly damning (despite the obvious fact that “Islamofascism” is a term, not a phrase) – we'll see what kind of response it draws from the author or the reviewer. I think it's extremely unlikely both of them will just sit quietly at home in the Cotswolds while they're called frauds. I'll keep you posted.

Geographica: Venice and BOOM!

It''s bad news and much, much worse news in this month's National Geographic. Don't get me wrong: the magazine itself is still fantastic, fascinating, and grippingly beautiful. But sometimes the balance of its tidings is decidedly tipped toward the glass-half-empty side of the wet bar.

Under the 'bad news' heading: Venice is still sinking, and Venetians are still being mulish assholes about it. Sigh. Some things never change. Although to be fair, Cathy Newman's article is so heavy on Venice-cliches ("What is Venice - so seductive, so lethally attractive - except the most sublime setting for the thrilling of the heart?" And so on) that it doesn't help things any.

The problem is the same one that's plagued Venice for its entire history: the incoming tides are swamping the city. When we're talking about tides of water, from the lagoon, the wrangle revolves around Venice's celebrated MOSE project, which would erect man-made walls across the mouth of the lagoon. The gates would rise into place when dangerously high tides are predicted, and the thinking is that this would save the city from any more excessive erosion. The MOSE gates will allegedly be finished around 2014, but the Venetians have been arguing about it for more than a decade now, and it's unlikely they'll stop any time soon - starting with the city's mayor, who often and publicly sneers at the idea of gates doing any good for his city.

And when we're talking about human tides, the problem takes on an even bigger scope. Venice is visited by roughly 2 billion fat people every day, each and every one of whom a) complains about how crowded it is, b) complains about how hot it is, c) complains about how everybody's talking I-talian, d) complains about how much stuff there is to see, e) complains about how narrow a lot of the streets are, f) complains about how expensive everything is, g) complains about the flooding, h) complains about the plumbing, i) complains about the long waits for all the famous restaurants and bars, j) complains about the smell of the water, k) complains about the Lido (its size, the quality of its sands, etc), l) complains about the dog-poop on the sidewalks, m) complains about how every living Venetian seems to expect a generous tip for every single thing they do within sight of even one tourist, n) complains about the fact that the houses and gardens of real Venetians seem permanently closed to them, o) complains about the differences between the real city and the one they've read about in Donna Leon (this complaint is most often heard during the many 'Donna Leon' tours that wind through the city every day), p) complains about how many churches are in their guidebooks, q) complains about how much of the artwork in those churches is so religious in nature, r) complains about the prevalence of typical American food in restaurants ("we came all this way for this?" etc), s) complains about the native food (too spicy, not spicy enough, too 'watery,' and the perennial #1: portions too small), t) complains about the noise during the day ("I can't hear myself think!" brayed by Methodists who haven't engaged in that particular activity since grade school), u) complains about the sounds at night (favorite American complaint among Venetian hotel staff: "There's a dripping sound"), v) complains about the fact that even restaurants, churches, and islands their guidebook assures them are "seldom visited" are, in fact, crammed to the rafters with people from Spokane, w) complains about how tiring it is to walk around the city (Venice is, roughly speaking, the size of your average K-Mart), x) complains about how rude the Venetians can be (on your average 1-week vacation, every single Venetian you talk to will be in the process of being evicted from their apartment because they can no longer afford the rent, but still ...), y) complains about how all these people are ruining Venice for the rest of us, z) complains about, for the love of God in Heaven, all the canals, then tosses all their plastic bags off their hotel room porch and gets back on their plane for home.


One sensible solution to this human inundation is floated briefly and sarcastically in the article then seemingly dismissed: charge people a lot of money to visit the city. I'm thinking 60 euros per adult, 20 per child, with a significant chunk of the proceeds going to subsidizing the rents of Venetian citizens.

But then, Venetian citizens might have worse things to worry about than long lines for coffee in the morning - and those things would fall under the 'much much worse' news: we're all gonna die.

Apparently, lurking underneath Yellowstone National Park (which, we're informed, contains half the geysers located on the entire planet) is a massive super-volcano that has erupted three times in the very distant past - each time with results several orders of magnitude worse than anything the living memory of the world has ever seen. Vesuvius? An after-dinner belch. Mount St. Helens? A minor night of food poisoning. We're talking about sooper-dooper eruptions that leave holes in the Earth big enough to be seen from Mars.

As Joel Achenbach writes:

Volcanoes form mountains; supervolcanoes erase them. Volcanoes kill plants and animals for miles around; supervolcanoes threaten whole species with extinction by changing the climate across the entire planet.

So we've got that to look forward to. Naturally, the various geologists interviewed in the article are cagey with their comments - nobody's willing to come right out and say when this sooper-dooper eruption will likely take place. Instead, like earthquake experts, they obscure things in the cant of probability - the odds are that, the likelihood is that, etc. But a caldera building towards a major eruption has many very specific signs, and the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone is showing all of those signs. You'd think at least one of Achenbach's specialists would say, "well, nobody can predict the future, but this sure looks like an area that's going to erupt in a big way, certainly in our lifetime." But noooooo ... the bastards.

By now you're all probably asking if there's any good news in this issue of National Geographic. Well, not much: life is still hell for refugees, policing efforts are still failing against fish-poachers in Kamchatka, and the issue still ends with that idiotic crossword puzzle instead of one last glorious photo.

Actually, there's your tiny bit of good news right there: the photos throughout are, as usual, excellent. I know that's not much to counter-balance stupid tourists and killer volcanoes, but hey, there's always next month.

Byron in Italy

Our book today is Byron in Italy by Peter Quennell, a slim and powerful account of the years the poet spent traveling after his scandalous behavior (alluded to in our last entry, in what is quickly degenerating into Stevereadsbyron) prompted English society to denounce him (most famously at Lady Jersey's party in 1816, in which he was 'cut' by an entire room full of people who only two years ago couldn't invite him out often enough) and England to become too bittersweet a place for him to live.

Byron is a gigantic subject, and Quennell's approach, giving precise detail to one segment of the life, is the most rewarding approach (this book can be seen as a sequel to his earlier work Byron, the Years of Fame, but it can be read entirely separate from that book). Rewarding, but also damn frustrating at times - despite the copious letters and jottings the poet left posterity, he remains maddeningly elusive. In scene after scene, anecdote after anecdote, as you read four or five accounts of one event or outburst, you'll find most of the details lining up toward some kind of unified picture - only to get the disconcerting impression that Byron himself is looking out of that picture's frame, at you, with a mocking smile on his face, as if to say, I wasn't really here; all of this bored me so.

Quennell's book makes its peace with this unsettling impression by piling on the facts and moving straight ahead - and this also is much the best tactic (Quennell's books are uniformly excellent - his biography of Hogarth remained the best work on the subject for sixty years, until it was gently but firmly supplanted in 1997 by Jenny Uglow's own Hogarth book). Here we have Byron and his entourage making their way from Venice to Ravenna to Pisa to Genoa, constantly squabbling and braying and pausing to sleep with the locals.

Byron is only 28 at the time, and he's the constant center in a never-stalling whirlwind of interpersonal drama, played out by the famous cast of characters we meet here again in Quennell's book. There's steadfast friend John Cam Hobhouse; there's opportunistic rogue Edward Trelawney; there's the poet Shelley and his wife; and of course there's poor miserable Doctor Polidori, so pathetically in love with the indifferent Byron. At one point Polidori whines to Byron that he can do anything that Byron can do, is just as good a man. To which Byron responds - you very much get the impression he's listing the first three things (from a very long list) that come to his mind - with three things he can do that Polidori cannot: "I can swim across that river - I can snuff out that candle with a pistol-shot at a distance of twenty paces - and I have written a poem of which fourteen thousand copies were sold in one day." It's a wonder Polidori had the nerve to speak at all.

Quennell is wonderful in giving the reader a sense of what Italy - and most specifically Venice - might have meant to the bitter and aching Byron:

Having touched the rock bottom of gloom and agony, his spirits bounded up again toward the surface, and burst into the sunshine of an ordinary sensual life. To his surprise, he had discovered that he could still enjoy himself.

Of course, even in Venice, where he eventually installed himself, his hangers-on, his mistresses, and his various captive animals in the great, foreboding Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal, there were impediments to complete enjoyment - foremost being the presence of his own countrymen. In one letter (not in Quennell's book, but still worth quoting!), Byron's mixed tone of contempt and humor is captured perfectly:

Mr. Hobhouse is gone to Naples: I should have run down there too for a week, but for the quantity of English whom I have heard of there. I prefer hating them at a distance; unless an earthquake, or a good real eruption of Vesuvius, were insured to reconcile me to their vicinity.

(Indeed, though Quennell is busy telling the facts of his story, it bears mentioning here that the letters of no other poet in the world are as much sheer fun to read as Lord Byron's - Auden thought them the best introduction students could have to Byron's verse, and reading even a small quantity of them handily demonstrates why: they glow with life).

For all his straightforward narrative intentions, however, Quennell is at his best when digressing to talk about poetry, human nature, and the creative arts. He says of Byron that he possessed "a peculiar degree of self-awareness (a quality very different from self-knowledge)," and he digs deep into the motivations behind the poet's famous excesses:

In every artist's nature, more or less acutely developed, there exists the impulse, which has been conveniently, if perhaps not very accurately, entitled la nostalgie de la boue. With love of order coexists a feeling for disorder; with desire for clarity, propriety, and delicate distinctions - lacking which a work of art cannot emerge from chaos - goes a taste for the kind of experience that is gross but lively. So rarefied is the atmosphere in which art is born that the artist, when he transfers his attention from art to life, often chooses to breathe a steamy and relaxing climate, the air of the brothel, the crowded restaurant, the smoke-fogged drinking party.

In other words, occasionally every great poet must have sex with a double-jointed Romanian.

(Byron himself, naturally, could be eloquent on the subject of his own creative drives, as in another ex cathedra letter:

I am glad you like it [Childe Harold]; it is a fine, indistinct piece of poetical desolation, and my favourite. I was half mad during the time of its composition, between metaphysics, mountains, lakes, love unextinguishable, thoughts unutterable, and the nightmare of my own delinquencies. I should many a good day have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.

All of Byron's famous mistresses are here - the terrifying, imperious Marianna Segati, the serene and oddly alluring Countess Teresa Guiccioli (in order to approximate the Venetian pronunciation of her last name, try to imagine what a hissing snake would sound like if it were drowning in its own spittle - that, or dirty water sluicing very quickly through a tangled grating), and Shelley is here too, an otherworldly creature whose fascination with what it might feel like to die seemed entirely to lack the awareness that once you succeeded in feeling it, you couldn't come back and talk about it. And Mary Shelley is here, faithful in the full knowledge of how fruitless her faithfulness was.

And most of all there is Byron himself, dressing like a Renaissance prince, rising late and singing to please nobody but himself (and working - the young poetasters who fashion themselves on Byron would do well to note how fast and steadily the pages flew from Italy to London during this period), lazily smarter than everybody around him and beginning to feel like a parody of himself. That Byron is Quennell's greatest portrait, and it deserves readers.