Florence (9 page)

In-joke nicknames abound. One conversation alone features ‘Grim-lips and Ladybird, Hairy and Fluffy, Hardylegs and Bluewings, Spindleshanks and Our Lady of Furs’. At another moment the King of Pisuerga, upon being informed during a banquet that in the imaginary country of Dateland there is no such thing as china, replies, ‘I could not be more astonished … if you told me there were fleas at the Ritz.’ This chance remark, misunderstood by Lady Something, the British ambassadress, becomes the stuff of wild rumor, and eventually results in the owners of the Ritz suing her for libel.

Firbank saves his most biting parody for the aesthete ‘Eddy’ Monteith, son of Lord Intriguer, a character based on his former intimate, Evan Morgan. In 1920, the two had had a falling-out over Firbank’s play
The Princess Zoubaroff,
which he wanted to dedicate to Morgan. At first Morgan accepted his friend’s offer with gratitude; shortly before publication, however, he had a change of heart, and threatened to sue Firbank’s publisher, Grant Richards, if the dedication was not removed. (One is reminded of James’s horrified protests when Forest Reid dedicated
The Garden God
to him.) Writing
The Flower Beneath the Foot,
Firbank no doubt still nursed a grudge, for he ridicules Morgan’s ‘aesthetic’ tendencies:

Lying amid the dissolving bath crystals while his manservant deftly bathed him, he fell into a sort of coma, sweet as a religious trance. Beneath the rhythmic sponge, perfumed with
Kiki,
he was St Sebastian, and as the water became cloudier, and the crystals evaporated amid the steam, he was Teresa … and he would have been, most likely, the Blessed Virgin herself but that the bath grew gradually cold.

Eddy is the author of a volume of
Juvenilia,
the contents of which includes such works as ‘Lines to Doris: written under the influence of wine, sun and fever’, ‘Ode to Swinburne’, ‘Sad Tamarisks’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Doigts Obscènes’, ‘They Call Me Lily!!’ and ‘Land of Titian! Land of Verdi! O Italy!’ Later, and in a footnote, no less, Eddy dies while taking part in an archaeological dig near Sodom: ‘the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him … Alas, for the
triste
obscurity of his end!’

Another interesting character in
The Flower Beneath the Foot
is Count Cabinet, a ‘ “fallen” minister of the Crown exiled to the island of St Helena’. Though the nature of the scandal is never specified, nor his name included in the ‘who’s who’ of the novel that Firbank sent his mother, Count Cabinet’s banishment calls to mind strongly the fate of Lord Henry Somerset. When the righteous Countess of Tolga takes a boat to ‘intrude upon the flattered exile’, she brings as a gift ‘a pannier of well-grown, early pears, a small “heath” and the Erotic Poems, bound in half calf with tasteful tooling, of a Schoolboy poet, cherishable
chiefly perhaps for the vignette frontispiece of the author’. Count Cabinet lives alone on his island except for his ‘useful’ secretary, Peter Passer, whom Firbank describes as ‘more valet perhaps than secretary, and more errand-boy than either’. According to his account, the ‘former chorister of the Blue Jesus’ volunteered to follow ‘the fallen statesman into exile at a moment when the Authorities of Pisuerga were making minute enquiries for sundry missing articles, from the
Trésor
of the Cathedral…’ (Perhaps some eighteenth-century vestments, in which young Peter went around dressed as Cardinal Richelieu?)

Firbank’s account of the pair occasions some of his loveliest prose. While fishing from an open window, Count Cabinet, to his surprise, catches ‘a distinguished mauvish fish with vivid scarlet spots’, the sight of which provokes him to ponder ‘on the mysteries of the deep, and of the subtle variety that is in Nature … Among the more orthodox types that stocked the lake, such as carp, cod, tench, eels, sprats, shrimps, etc., this exceptional fish must have known its trials and persecutions … And the Count, with a stoic smile, recalled
his own.’ Like Wilde, the ‘distinguished fish’ is both stoic and beautiful in the face of adversity and dislocation.

Indeed, as Firbank describes it, the isle of the Count’s exile is almost Edenic in its tranquil (and Mediterranean) beauty. Here, when not ‘boating or reading or feeding his swans, to watch Peter’s fancy-diving off the terrace end was perhaps the favorite pastime of the veteran
viveur.
’

To behold the lad trip along the riven breakwater, as naked as a statue, shoot out his arms and spring, the
flying-head-leap
or the
Backsadilla
, was a beautiful sight, looking up now and again – but more often now – from a volume of old Greek verse; while to hear him warbling in the water with his clear alto voice – of Kyries and Anthems he knew no end – would often stir the old man to the point of tears. Frequently the swans themselves would paddle up to listen, expressing by the charmed or rapturous motions of their necks (recalling to the exile the ecstasies of certain musical or ‘artistic’ dames at Concert-halls, or the Opera House, long ago) their mute appreciation, their touched delight …

Among the ‘strangely gorgeous’ swans on whom the Count dotes, one pecks at Peter, ‘Jealous, doubtless of the lad’s grace.’ The boy, ‘naked as a statue’, is in his nudity the very paragon of the artificial. For the Count, as for Baron von Gloeden, Classicism justifies polite pornography, just as in
The Garden God,
the 1905 novel for which James refused a dedication, a boy called Graham poses his friend Harold in the attitudes of the faun, the
spinario,
the
Adorante,
and a youthful Dionysius with a face ‘like that of Leonardo’s Bacchus’. Once again, we are in Florence.

Toward the end of
The Flower Beneath the Foot,
Firbank lapses into a Proustian meditation on dusk that is not without its elements of Wildean paradox. ‘In certain lands,’ he observes, ‘with what diplomacy falls the night, and how discreetly is the daylight gone.

These dimmer-and-dimmer, darker-and-lighter twilights of the North, so disconcerting in their playfulness, were unknown altogether in Pisuerga. There, Night pursued Day as though she meant it. No lingering or arctic sentiment! No concertina-ishness … Hard on the sun’s heels pressed Night. And the wherefore of her haste; Sun-attraction? Impatience to inherit? An answer to such riddles as these may doubtless be found by turning to the scientist’s theories on Time and Relativity.

Instead of calling attention to the frozenness of the North, or using its unyielding winters as a metaphor for moral intolerance, Firbank here emphasizes the ‘playfulness’ of Northern dusks; in his hands, even the cold becomes invested with ‘arctic sentiment’. In the South, on the other hand, sunset is as brusque, as brutal, as an Italian farmwoman efficiently slaughtering a chicken. Night pursues day ‘as if she meant it’ (just as Count Cabinet has been pursued), issuing a lights-out order on his island paradise, and reminding us that banishment, even to the loveliest Gulag, is never without its acrid flavor.

All great writers are finally transformers, rather than scribes, of experience. Unlike Acton, who does little more than repeat the old gossip, or Sitwell, who makes of it a salon comedy, Firbank formulated from the Florentine
penchant for arch humor and social spite a unique literary strategy. An acute historian of the expatriate English in southern Europe (and elsewhere), he was also the most important advocate of a literary style the influence of which is far-reaching, revealing itself not only in the subtle satire of Muriel Spark and David Lodge (both of whom live in Tuscany), but in a whole tradition of homosexually themed fiction the practitioners of which, from Alfred Chester to Edmund White, owe a debt (sometimes acknowledged) to his legacy. In this regard, he justifies the more trivial of the Anglo-Florentine writers, most of whom have fallen into an obscurity as complete as that of his own weed-choked grave in Rome. Though future generations of readers will probably not recognize his name, they will feel, in the pages of the writers to whom he mattered, and the writers to whom they mattered, the subtle pull and pressure of his wit.

Chapter Four

No image in the history of Western art, with the possible exception of the
Mona Lisa,
has been reproduced as frequently as Michelangelo’s
David.
In Florence especially, his
doppelgangers
proliferate – Luigi Arighetti’s marble copy on Piazza della Signoria, Clemente Papi’s bronze copy on Piazzale Michelangelo, not to mention the mass-produced replicas in plaster of Paris, plastic, brass, and even onyx (a black
David)
on sale in the city’s gift shops, one of which is called ‘David’s Shop’. A copy of the statue stands guard at the city’s gay sauna, as at many other gay saunas in Europe. Outside the Palazzo Vecchio, postcard vendors peddle every conceivable view of the David, as well
as aprons printed with his torso, underwear printed with his crotch, postcards in which he and the fat Bacchus from the Boboli Gardens are juxtaposed under the heading ‘Before and After’, and perhaps most trashily, close-up shots of his genitals, some with cartoon sunglasses perched over the pubic hair and the words ‘WOW! FLORENCE!’ added near the top. Two years ago, for my birthday, my brother gave me a magnetized
David
paper doll whose varied wardrobe (speedos, dinner jacket, tank top and shorts) would have better suited an urban homosexual of the early nineteen–eighties than a Biblical hero or even an athletic Florentine boy at the end of the fifteenth century. Such vulgarizations, like Marcel Duchamp’s famous mustaching of the
Mona Lisa,
suggest a discomfort with the sublimity of great works of art, a desire to diminish their intensity through defacement or ridicule. At the same time, they attest to the statue’s carnal force, that physicality to which Pater gave voice when he wrote that Michelangelo ‘loved the very quarries of Carrara, those strange grey peaks which even at mid-day convey into any scene from which they are visible something of
the solemnity and stillness of evening, sometimes wandering among them month after month, till at last their pale ashen colours seem to have passed into his painting; and on the crown of the head of the
David
there still remains a morsel of uncut stone, as if by one touch to maintain his connexion with the place from which it was hewn’.

Now, examining the reproduction of the
David’s
face on a mousepad I purchased the other day at the Museum of the Opera del Duomo, I see the ‘morsel’ to which Pater refers. David’s expression is at once fretful and uncertain, as if he is questioning the very act of slingshot heroism for which he will be memorialized. In the reproductions, Mark notes, this look that dances on the edge of contrition hardens into something more like churlishness, and the face becomes pinched and mean. The real
David,
by contrast, has an odd delicacy about him, even a fragility, of which his very massiveness is the paradoxical source. What might be called the
David’s
pre-history is illustrative in this regard. The five-meter stone slab from which he was carved had originally been quarried in 1464 for the
Opera del Duomo, but was never used because the sculptor who had blocked it out, to quote a contemporary of Michelangelo’s, was ‘insufficiently acquainted with his art’. Some years later, the sculptor Andrea Sansovino tried to persuade the board of the Opera del Duomo to let him have a go at it; only Michelangelo, however, offered a proposal that did not require the addition of other pieces of stone, and for this reason, the marble was given to him. (Indeed, it is because of the exactitude with which Michelangelo made use of this slab that the morsel of uncut stone on the
David’s
head remains.)

‘In the
David
Michelangelo first displayed that quality of
terribilità,
of spirit-quailing, awe-inspiring force, for which he afterwards became so famous,’ John Addington Symonds wrote in his biography of the artist:

The statue imposes, not merely by its size and majesty and might, but by something vehement in the conception… . Wishing perhaps to adhere strictly to the Biblical story, Michelangelo studied a lad whose frame was not developed. The
David,
to state the matter frankly, is a colossal hobbledehoy. [Theophile Gautier wrote that he looked like ‘a market-porter’.] His body, in breadth of the thorax, depth of the abdomen, and general stoutness, has not grown up to the scale of the enormous hands and feet and heavy head. We feel that he wants at least two years to become a fully developed man, passing from adolescence to the maturity of strength and beauty. This close observance of the imperfections of the model at a certain stage of physical growth is very remarkable, and not altogether pleasing in a statue more than nine feet high. Both Donatello and Verrocchio had treated their
Davids
in the same realistic manner, but they were working on a small scale and in bronze. I insist upon this point, because students of Michelangelo have been apt to overlook his extreme sincerity and naturalism in the first stages of his career.

When the statue was completed in 1504, Botticelli wanted to put it in the Loggia dei Lanzi; others argued for the Duomo itself. In the end, however, it was decided that the
David
should be placed in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. Getting
him there was no easy task. First the walls of the Opera del Duomo had to be knocked down. The David ‘went very slowly’, Luca Landucci observed in his diary, ‘being bound in an erect position and suspended so that it did not touch the ground with its feet’. The move took four days, and required forty men.

For almost four centuries, then, the
David
led a relatively peaceful life in the Piazza, except for a bad day in 1527 when a riot erupted and his left arm was broken. The incident testifies, once again, to the odd fact that heavy things can be exceptionally frail. Bad weather took its toll as well, and near the middle of the nineteenth century, as Italy was being unified and Florence was preparing for its brief moment of glory as its capital, art historians, restorers and politicians started lobbying for the necessity of finding the
David
a new home. In 1852, a commission convened to report ‘on the dangers threatening the
David
and on the systems to be adopted to avoid its crumbling to the ground’ voted unanimously to relocate the statue, but failed to agree on a place. The Loggia of the old market was proposed, as were the Loggia dei Lanzi
(again) and the Loggia degli Uffizi, but for reasons ranging from lack of light to the fear that the statue would be subjected to the ‘ravages of the lower classes’, all three were rejected; so were the Medici chapel and the Bargello. Finally, in the late 1860s, another commission concluded that the only real means of providing ‘the most stupendous statue of the modern age’ with a place of ‘refuge’ was to build a temple for that exclusive purpose. This ‘tribune’ would be designed by the architect Antonio di Fabris as an annex to the Accademia di Belle Arti; remembering what had happened in 1504, the commission thought it prudent to move the statue to the site before construction began, so that no walls would have to be broken down.