Crossing to Safety (30 page)

But I had experienced far less than I knew. Though I had worked among people who traveled constantly, dispersing America throughout the postwar world, we had not been able to travel ourselves. Europe and the European past were to me words in books and reproductions on coated paper and exhibitions at the Boston Art Museum or the Gardiner or the Fogg. It thrilled me to think how the people of this little city had lighted mankind—both kindling and matches had been here in profligate plenty. It never ceased to amaze me to look across the river and see, small and sharp as if seen through a reversed telescope, a landscape of hills and cypresses cribbed from Leonardo.

Here I was not producer and stage manager but audience, pupil, respectful country cousin. Every white American who wants to know who he is must make his peace with Europe. He is lucky if he can conduct the negotiations, as we did, in the valley of the Arno.

To cap it, we were not alone, we could share it. We were once again four in Eden. And that is not a mere verbal flourish. We felt it, talked about it, argued its meanings. It affected our perception of the things we took in. We were conscious that we had been given a second chance.

Thus, visiting the Carmine to look at Masaccio’s
Expulsion from
Paradise,
studying his Eve clumsy with woe, stricken with desolate realization, and Adam stumbling beside her with his hand over his eyes, one of us wondered if Masaccio or anyone else could have done anything with the reverse situation. Ours. Could a painter capture in expression and posture the delight-touched-with-humility, the almost tearful gratitude and thankfulness, that ought to mark paradise regained?

It was the sort of question made to order for Sid, an intellectual hare that he went after like a terrier. Well, Milton had tried it, both sides of it. We had all read
Paradise Lost.
Had any of us read
Paradise
Regained? (He and I had, because we had been forced to.) And Dante. What better example? The
Inferno
boiled with hot life, but the
Paradiso
was theological meringue. The wicked and the unhappy always stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences. Technically, Christ was the hero of
Paradise Lost;
actually, Satan was. Fallen grandeur was always more instructive than pallid perfection. Or look at painting, all those Christs whose bland faces belied their bloody wounds, all those characterless angels. Saintliness had no possible expression but a simper. But Judas, now, sitting at the Last Supper trying to disguise his treachery, with that symbolic cat behind him, he was something else because of his human complexity. And if you were walking down the Tornabuoni and saw, at the same instant, Beatrice with her beneficent smile and Ugolino gnawing on Ruggieri’s skull, which would catch your eye?

As usual, Charity found these classroom verities less than convincing. Of
course
you could make great art out of happiness and goodness—look at Beethoven’s Ninth (we laughed); look at Fra Angelico. But most artists—writers too, you’re all alike—found it easier to get attention with demonstrations of treachery, malice, death, violence.
Sure
you’d notice Ugolino gnawing on his skull, but how long could you stand to go
on
watching him? Art ought to set standards and provide models. What model could you find in Ugolino? Dante used him as a horrible example, but he cheated too, he made Ugolino so horrible he drew attention to him.

Should he have walked on by? I wondered. Ignore him? Focus on the beauty of the flames of Hell? Whistle past the Ninth Circle?

Oh, come on, Charity said. Really. Art and literature have these fashions. Why don’t you just ignore all that stuff so many modern writers concentrate on, and write something about a really decent, kind, good human being living a normal life in a normal community, interested in the things most ordinary people are interested in—family, children, education—good
uplifting
entertainment?

She made her demand on me with her most vivid smile, her friendly, interested, outgoing, life-loving smile. She made it out of affection and good will, half taking it back even while she expressed it, saying it mainly because she wished it were possible.

I said I would think about it.

Whatever we thought about art and its relation to life, we knew that the Faulkner motto we had adopted in harder times no longer served. “They kilt us but they ain’t whupped us yit” was no watchword for this world so full of interest, instruction, suggestiveness, possibility, and friendship. So after a day or two of searching through Dante, Sid found us a new one, not so succinct but satisfying to Charity’s didactic imperative.

Considerate la vostra semenza:
fatti non foste viver come bruti,
ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

“Consider your birthright,” we told each other when fatigue or laziness threatened to slow our hungry slurping of culture. “Think who you are. You were not made to live like brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.” Very high toned. We all hitched our wagons to the highest stars we could find.

For me it produced an odd dichotomy. Part of my time I lived in a managed, controlled fictional world, the rest in this world of cultural wonder and discovery to which I was as submissive as cotton-wood fluff is submissive to the current of a ditch. Coming out of the morning isolation I had a sense of almost unbearable stimulation, of daily and even hourly growth. In the past I had had periods when I learned and grew very fast—when I came from dusty Albuquerque and my native cow college into graduate school in Berkeley, when we were assaulting the hopeful future in Madison, Wisconsin, when I first stepped inside the door of Phoenix Books on Beacon Street and felt all that challenge of a new profession to be learned, new people to know and work with. But I never felt any such explosion of capacity as I felt shuttling between the Albuquerque of my mornings and the Florence of our afternoons.

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me. I say
me;
I think I mean
us.
The Langs were as insatiable as we were, for they had been held back as long as we had—by the failure at Wisconsin, the hibernation of the war years, the demands of the new job at Dartmouth, the obligations brought on by a family of five children. Now, with one in graduate school, one in college, one at Exeter, one knocking around the world on a self-restricted shoestring, and one finally settled in the American School in Florence, they could continue what they had begun with enthusiasm in 1933. Not even all that eye-glazing marble of the Medici tombs, nor the icy stone floors of the Bargello that numbed us to the knees, could discourage us.

Sometimes we wondered what it would have been like to be part of the generation of Americans who discovered Paris in the twenties, and remade the world from the Left Bank. Had they felt as we felt? They were younger, some of them were greatly gifted, some of them were infected with fashionable literary despair, most of them were theatrically pleasure-bent. We thought them luckier. They had had only a war to damage them, and war’s damage is, when it isn’t fatal, likely to be stimulating rather than the reverse. Living through a war, you have lived through drama and excitement. Living through what we had been given to live through, we had only bad luck or personal inadequacy to blame for our shortcomings.

But one thing we did not feel. We did not feel any despair, literary or otherwise. We were having too good a time.

We were no lost generation, despite our losses. It was no Dada Nada that we hunted up and down the streets of Florence and through its museums and churches and out into dozens of hill towns and villages, but something humanized, something related to mind and order, and hence to hope; something that, as we kept reminding ourselves, was the dream of man.

I suppose we all wanted out of Florence corroboration of things we already believed, and Charity had her tendency to assert what she could not clearly discern. But every one of us, even she, was open to Florence simply as experience. We wanted contact in the most particular and sensuous ways, and we lived at a pitch of sensibility that was probably absurd. Given earlier chances, we would not have been such super-tourists. Being what we were, we seized whatever we could get. Every excursion was an adventure, and excursions were almost as common as sunrises.

Wasn’t it a
satisfaction,
Charity asked, to be able on our
stranieri
passes to drop into the Uffizi at any time, maybe for only ten minutes, maybe just to stand a while in front of the Primavera or ponder the lugubrious Byzantine Christs out of whom, strangely, all the glories of Florentine painting had evolved? Less lucky people might save up for years, just to be able to visit the Uffizi once, on some flying trip, between breakfast and departure for Assisi, under the rod of a brassy tour guide; and having seen it once they would hoard all their lives the postcards that were their most lasting benefit from the place. People even less lucky never
heard
of the Uffizi. And here we could go in and be enriched four or five times a week, whenever we weren’t too busy being enriched by Ghiberti’s doors, or Giotto’s Tower, or San Marco, or the Loggia dei Lanci, or the Bargello, or I Tati.

The Bargello was difficult for Sally because of the steep stairs. She tried them once on her own; after that Sid and I carried her up. But even so, we were there so often that Donatello’s David took to tipping his helmet when he saw us top the stairhead. As for San Marco, that was a favorite, especially of Charity’s. She dragged us there so often to refresh ourselves with Fra Angelico’s sweet innocence that the guides broke into smiles when they saw Sally coming on her crutches, and when we turned down any more of their assistance they would begin to intone, mocking their own spiels which they knew we knew by heart,
“. . . Delizioso! . . . Meraviglioso . . . !”

And not only Florence itself. Through a long spell of Indian summer, using either our car or the Langs’, or both if the trip was long, we grew familiar with Lucca, Pistoia, Pisa. We rehearsed the laws of the pendulum from the Leaning Tower and tried the acoustics of the baptistery with some barbershop harmony. Once, on a cool, sunny, windy day, we picnicked beside a country road on the way to Siena, taking shelter on the sunny side of the banked roadway, and a
contadino
on a bicycle, passing above us, gave us grave welcome, looking down on us with interest. Picnics generally look a little silly and uncomfortable and unnecessary to someone not participating in them. Not to this countryman. He came steadily, his feet going solemnly around, his head canted to look down at us benevolently.
“Buon appetito,”
he said gravely, and wheeled on. It was as if he had blessed us.

“I love it,” Charity said when we had quit laughing at his decorum and self-possession. Her eyes were snapping with the enthusiasm that rarely died down in her. She could never have a good time without calling her own and others’ attention to what a good time she was having. She wanted no experience, even the slightest, to go unmarked. “I love it that you’re finally rich, too, so we can do things like this together.”

I could have replied that, thanks to them, we had done quite a lot of things like this with them, long before we could have afforded them ourselves. And I could have cited her some figures—the Guggenheim stipend plus the rent on our Cambridge house plus the few royalties that dribbled our way, minus Lang’s expenses at Mills—and asked her if she thought they added up to riches. But I didn’t. All she meant was that she was glad we were out of the woods. We were too.

“Rich enough,” I said. “I’ll drink to that,” and Sally said from her high chair, looking stiff and incongruous for a luncheon on the grass, but very happy, “Amen. Who needs more than this? Is there any more wine in that fiasco?”

I filled the glasses around, and we sat sipping the acid Chianti. Birds came hopping close, looking for crumbs. Sid said nothing. Talk about money, his or anyone else’s, always bothered him. But I knew he felt our emancipation as we all did. That debt, which he had been unable to forgive because we would not let him, had been a weight on all of us.

The wind blew the roadside grass with a faint whistling sound, as if it ought to be cold, but our bank was protected and warm. Perfectly content, we lay a while with Sally sitting straight and looking down at us. We may even have slept a few minutes with our faces turned to the sun before we drove on.

Our daily schedule was like that of Battell Pond—mornings for work and study, afternoons and evenings for whatever we were attracted to and the weather permitted. We knew no one in Florence except the woman from whom we took Italian lessons twice a week; and needed to know no one. Like Frost’s farm couple who went from house to wood for change of solitude, we sometimes let our afternoons be guided by whim and association, but most of the time they were guided by Charity.

One day we went to Volterra, where they mine alabaster, a town that glittered faintly with crystal dust. Another, we went to Vallombrosa, just to check up on Milton and see if autumnal leaves did strow the brooks there. No leaves, no brooks, only a plantation of Douglas firs from Oregon, the Cascades rejuvenating the Apennines, and a pen of wild boars that would soon be
cinghiale
in some game restaurant.

In Assisi we pondered the shriveled mummy of Santa Chiara in the crypt, still devoted to St. Francis after seven hundred and fifty years. We spent an afternoon at Orvieto, up on a mesa that might have been imported from New Mexico. At Gubbio, where St. Francis civilized the wolf, we slept one night in an old monastery, a San Marco with comforts, and while buying gas at the local AGIP station the next morning, heard a passionate
cri de coeur
from the girl who manned the pump. She said she was trapped in this medieval prison of a town. She turned her lips inside out when we protested that it was the most picturesque town we had ever seen, a jewel-box of a town. Oh no no no no no. There was no news, no entertainment, no action, no life. She held her nose and gagged, yearning upward toward more breathable air. She wanted to see the world— Paris, London, America. She was disappointed and scornful when she learned that we came from places named Boston and Hanover, places she had never heard of. Americans who mattered came from New York or California.