Authors: David Leavitt
Florence (13 page)
During his years at the V & A, Pope-Hennessy had earned a reputation for severity, even brutality, yet we saw little of this side
to his character on the occasions when we visited him. By then, frail and ill, he merely presided over numerous teas and lunches. At these gatherings an uncompromisingly ‘English’ quality prevailed, which was surprising, given his status as a self-proclaimed exile. (Michael Mallon told us that Pope-Hennessy returned to London only three times after 1986.) No matter how hot the day, hot tea – as well as polite sandwiches and cakes – was served. Like most Italian residences, the apartment had no air-conditioning, but not for the Italian reason of habit: air-conditioning is damaging to art and furniture. The guests, mostly English or American, would mill around the living room, where Rutilio Manetti’s painting of
The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Catherine of Siena
hung over the fireplace, or chat in the dining room, under a view of Lake Geneva by Simon Malgo; after the Pope’s death, this painting sold at Christie’s for $178,500.
It was hard to recognize in our octogenerian host the ferocious advocate of ‘standards’ who had quarrelled so irascibly with Roy Strong, his successor at the V & A, or the critic who
had once claimed that objects meant more to him than people, or even the legendary
provocateur
who had balked at Mary McCarthy’s astringency (the pot calling the kettle black!). Indeed, on only one occasion did this side of his personality assert itself in our presence. We had just sat down to lunch when rather casually he mentioned that Sir Stephen Spender and his wife Natasha had been his guests the week before. Pope-Hennessy knew, of course, that Spender had sued me a few months earlier over a novel I had written. ‘I suspect I’m the only person in the world who’s had both Spender and Leavitt to lunch within the same week,’ he said, and chuckled quietly.
Pope-Hennessy’s funeral mass – like Acton, like Scott Moncrieff, like so many of the Anglo-Florentines, he was a Catholic convert – took place in a small church on Piazza Santissima Annunziata (but not
the
great church of Santissima Annunziata, where for generations Florentine families have celebrated their weddings, baptisms and confirmations; that would have been too showy). Fewer mourners turned up than we expected. Shirley Hazzard, the novelist, came up from Naples, where her
husband, Francis Steegmuller, had died only a week before. The music critic Andrew Porter flew in from London, Everett Fahy, director of European Paintings at the Met, from New York. Thekla Clark, an American long resident in Florence, and soon to publish a memoir of her friends W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, drove in from Bagno a Ripoli. Not surprisingly, several scions of the Florentine aristocracy were in attendance, as were several young (and not so young) exemplars of that species of Italian homosexual whose chief ambition seems to be to endear himself to the titled. Eye contact was assiduously avoided; a mass was intoned; few words were said.
Afterwards, at Robiglio, a good
pasticerria
not far from the modest church, the splendors of Florence could not have seemed more distant, even though the Duomo was rising up as startlingly as ever at the end of Via dei Servi. Talk of urban difficulties – smog, traffic, tourists – filtered through the coffee-smelling atmosphere along with cigarette smoke and the chorus, ‘It’s the end of an era.’ For the death of the Pope had followed in quick succession those of Acton (in February) and of Haslip (in July).
It really was the end of an era: in the course of less than a year, the famed Anglo-Florentine colony that had flourished and waned and flourished and waned over a hundred and fifty years had lost its last three monuments.
Of course, reading over the above paragraphs, I’m struck by the degree to which, without ever intending to, I seem to have adopted the very tone of the Anglo-Florentine memoirist that earlier I saw fit to decry. When describing Pope-Hennessy’s funeral, for instance, which names have I given? Those that you are most likely to recognize. And why, in any case, am I writing about Pope-Hennessy in the first place, when I met him only a few times, and when I could have written just as easily about any number of other people? Even today the bug of the colony, its obsession with titles and fame, is hard to evade in the Florentine fishbowl; it is so much an element of the view that it presses, as it were, through the glass, and becomes part of the viewer, too.
The key to the history of foreigners in Florence, like the key to Florence, lies in the city’s provincial character; once, much happened
here, but that was a long time ago, and over a century and a half, as Florence became more and more a museum, its foreign residents – many of whom started off as observers – came to be regarded, increasingly, as part of the exhibit. ‘Rather than face the uncertainty of a future in England,’ James Lord writes, Acton ‘fled to the other side of the earth … And when it was too late for a grand and uncompromising apotheosis, he found himself climbing over the back wall of the villa within which he would ultimately be confined like the legendary person known as Sir Harold Acton.’ For that legendary person, as for most of the members of the colony, Florence betrayed its own promise of a freedom unimaginable on other shores, the mirage of fulfillment (George Emerson’s elusive ‘it’) retreated into the distance, and the paradise of exiles revealed itself for what it really was: the most elegant, interesting and comfortable of prisons.
For help of many kinds during the researching and writing of this book, I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Roberts of the British Institute Library, Florence; Liz Calder, architect of this wonderful series; Colin Dickerman and Edward Faulkner at Bloomsbury; Jin Auh, Rose Gaete and Andrew Wylie at the Wylie Agency; James Lord; and most especially Edmund White, whose encouragement and support have mattered more to me over the years than he probably realizes.
For the general reader, I can recommend no better guide to the city of Florence than Christopher Hibbert’s
Florence: The Biography of a City
(Viking, 1993). This richly illustrated history not only provided a constant source of reference, but pointed the way to other texts that proved to be of value, most notably Monica Stirling’s
The Fine and the Wicked: The Life and Times of Ouida
(Gollancz, 1957) and Eric Linklater’s
The Art of Adventure
(Macmillan, 1947). Hibbert was also the source for quotations from Walter Savage Landor and William Holman Hunt on the ‘stinks’ of Florence, Henry James on
Vernon Lee, and Luca Landucci on the original moving of the
David.
Finally, a fascinating image of the second moving of the
David,
reproduced in Hibbert, provoked my research on that subject.
I began my study of the Anglo-Florentine colony by reading the only two books on the subject in English: Olive Hamilton’s
Paradise of Exiles: Tuscany and the British
(André Deutsch, 1974) and
The Divine Country: The British in Tuscany 1372-1980
(André Deutsch, 1982), by the same author. I also consulted Giuliana Artom Treves’
Anglo-Fiorentini di cento anni fa
(Sansoni, 1953; reprinted 1982).
Although many novels have been set in Florence, none approaches, in my view, E.M. Forster’s
A Room with a View
(1908; reprinted in the Abinger Edition, 1978) for its insightful portrait of the city’s character. Other novels set in Florence to which I refer are Henry James’s
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881; reprinted by Penguin, 1984), William Dean Howells’
Indian Summer
(1886; reprinted in the Library of America, 1982), D.H. Lawrence’s
Aaron’s Rod
(1922; reprinted
by Pengin, 1976) and Francis King’s
The Ant Colony
(Constable, 1988). Harold Acton’s ‘The Soul’s Gymnasium’ is from the collection
The Soul’s Gymnasium and Other Stories
(Hamish Hamilton, 1982). While not directly concerned with Florence, Sybille Bedford’s
Jigsaw: A Biographical Novel
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1989) offers a shrewd account of the rise of Italian fascism, worth the attention of any reader interested in this period.
Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1906
Wings
(tr. Michael Green, Ardis, 1980) provided a fascinating perspective on the Russian colony in Florence, as did the excerpts from the journals of Nazar Litrov quoted in
Tchaikovsky through Others’ Eyes,
edited by Alexander Poznansky (Indiana University Press, 1999). I learned about Vladimir de Pachmann’s time in Florence from Mark Mitchell’s
Vladimir de Pachmann: A Life Observed
(Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
Memoirs written by or about foreigners in Florence are legion. The ones on which I drew most heavily were Harold Acton’s
Memoirs of an Aesthete
(Methuen, 1948) and
More Memoirs of an Aesthete
(Hamish
Hamilton, 1970), and G. Pino Orioli’s
Adventures of a Bookseller
(privately printed, 1937). In Harry Brewster’s
The Cosmopolites: A Nineteenth-Century Family Drama
(Michael Russell, 1994), I found Adolf von Hildebrand’s remarks on Vernon Lee as well as Lisl von Herzogenberg’s on Clara Schumann, while Barbara Strachey’s
Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family
(Gollancz, 1980) was the source for some of the material concerning Mary and Bernard Berenson, Maud Cruttwell and ‘the Mikes’. I also read James Lord’s extraordinary recollection of his friendship with Harold Acton, ‘The Cost of the Villa’, included in
Some Remarkable Men: Further Memoirs
(Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996); Francis King’s
Yesterday Came Suddenly
(Constable, 1993); Jocelyn Brooke’s
Private View
(James Barrie, 1954); and John Pope-Hennessy’s
Learning to Look
(Heinemann, 1991). The lines from Michael Field’s ‘Variations on Sappho’ were found in
The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse,
edited by Stephen Coote (Penguin, 1983).
I obtained a multi-generational perspective
on the Anglo-Florentine colony by reading Janet Ross’s
The Fourth Generation
(Constable, 1912), her daughter Lina Waterfield’s
Castle in Italy
(Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961), and her granddaughter Kinta Beevor’s
A Tuscan Childhood
(Viking, 1993). An interesting coda to my account of Anglo-Florentine feuds was a campaign staged in 1993 by Beevor and her son, Antony, to force the writer Joanna Trollope to withdraw a novel she had recently published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. According to the Beevors, the novel,
A Castle in Italy,
paralleled too closely the life and memoirs of Lina Waterfield. Their efforts suggest that the Anglo-Florentines’ fondness for litigation and battle, as well as their tendency to regard personal history as personal property, have in no way diminished over the course of a century.
Passages on Florence by Henry James are taken from three essays in his 1909 volume
Italian Hours,
reprinted in the Library of America: ‘The Autumn in Florence’ (1873), ‘Italy Revisited’ (1877) and ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young Women’ (1899). The passages from John Ruskin to which James took
such exception are from
Mornings in Florence: Being Simple Studies of Christian Art for English Travellers
(Orpington, 1875-77). All quotations from Walter Pater are from
Studies in the History of the Renaissance,
originally published in 1873. My edition (Senate, 1998) is based on the 1893 text, the last known to have been revised by Pater himself. Remarks by George Eliot and the Reverend John Wordsworth on Pater are quoted in Denis Donoghue’s
Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Biographies of writers, artists and politicians who lived in or visited Florence yielded a wealth of information. Among the most illuminating was Caroline Moorehead’s
Iris Origo: Marchese of Val d’Orcia
(John Murray, 2000). I also consulted Frances Kiernan’s
Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy
(W.W. Norton, 2000), Selena Hastings’
Evelyn Waugh: A Biography
(Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), Frank Harris’ 1916
Oscar Wilde
(reprinted by Robinson, 1992), Richard Ellmann’s
Oscar Wilde
(Hamish Hamilton, 1987), Hesketh Pearson’s
Labby: The Life and Character of Henry Labouchére
(Harper, 1937), John
Mitzel’s
John Horne Burns: An Appreciative Biography
(Manifest Destiny, 1974) and Miriam J. Benkowitz’s
Ronald Firbank
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1969). A new biography of Firbank, by Richard Canning, is forthcoming. The Firbank novels from which I quote are
The Flower Beneath the Foot
(1923) and
Sorrow in Sunlight,
also known as
Prancing Nigger
(1924). Both are included in
Five Novels
(New Directions, 1981). All passages from Firbank’s letters and diaries are quoted in Benkowitz.
Poems about the Anglo-Florentines by Osbert Sitwell come from his collection
Poems about People,
or
England Reclaimed
(Hutchinson, 1958). In addition, I quote from
Noble Essences
(Macmillan, 1950), the last volume in Sitwell’s five-part memoir
Left Hand, Right Hand!
The cookbooks cited are Giacomo Castelvetro’s
The Fruits, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy: An Offering to Lucy, Countess of Bedford,
written while Castelvetro was in exile in England in the early seventeenth century (tr. Gillian Riley, Viking, 1989) and
Leaves from our Tuscan Kitchen
by Janet Ross, revised by
Michael Waterfield (Penguin, 1977). For those wanting to learn more about Tuscan cooking, I would recommend Pellegrino Artusi’s classic
The Art of Eating Well
(1891), recently translated into English by Kyle M. Phillips III (Random House, 1996).
