Milking the Moon (39 page)

I wrote Muriel Spark, saying “The Princess would like to publish your story,” and I said, “I must tell you how very much I enjoyed it.” Then she eventually turned up in Rome. She was this little middle-aged lady with a very English skirt and jacket. A well-rounded Scots lady in a rump-sprung tweed skirt. That look of English ladies who’ve been in the city or on a plane or something and their skirt has that rump-sprung look. She’d been in the Holy Land covering that trial of one of the war criminals. And she had this red hair that was beginning, you could see, to have one little silver hair in it somewhere. And she had these delicate little freckles that had come out in that pale Edinburgh skin when she was in the hot sun in the Holy Land—little golden freckles. And sensible shoes. She was adorable. An animated creature. Cat and monkey.

Then she was off to New York at the invitation of
The New Yorker.
They gave her a room to work in there. She stayed in America a couple of years. Three years or something. Then I got this letter saying “I’ve decided to come and live in Rome for a while.” The editor of
The New Yorker
said, “Why are you leaving New York?” Because they think it’s the end of the world, you know. The be-all, end-all. And she said, “I want to live in quiet luxury in Rome like Eugene Walter.” Because by then I was on the top floor of the palazzo where I lived for so very long with Leontyne Price on the floor below.

So I met her at the plane when she came back to Italy. And I looked and looked for Muriel Spark and couldn’t find her. Then I saw someone waving at me. And there was this very chic lady in high-heel shoes, very Parisian, very coiffed, very made up and looking about twenty-nine or thirty. That was the new Muriel.

I’ve seen about seven or eight Muriels. I’ve liked them all.

That New York lady loosened up a little and became rather more English country. You know, terribly, terribly British countryside. And then that turned into a sort of very elegant bohemian in Rome. And then she found this apartment in the palazzo, one of the cardinal’s apartments from the Renaissance. And I helped her arrange for this terrace to be enclosed with some trelliswork so she could sit out without all these close neighbors in these other buildings off the back of the palazzo. She wanted to make it grand.

That’s when she became our lady of the palazzo. With a chauffeur-driven limousine and the simplest of clothes. The kind of simplicity that you know costs millions of dollars. I mean, what we in the Old South call “chic as shit.” It means total simplicity that smells expensive a block away.

Anyway, all of her metamorphoses were enchanting because there is a lot of the actress about her. All poets and poetesses have much of the actor and actress in them. It seems to be a natural component of people who write in the concentrated style of poetry. And that was one of her greatest manifestations, our lady of the palazzo.

Now I remember when—oh, the actress, the one who was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting player for
Auntie Mame
—I can’t think of her name. Who played the secretary of Auntie Mame. Played on Broadway and in the film. I met her through Mary Chamberlin Harding, who appeared with her on Broadway in something. And introduced this actress to Muriel Spark. And also the painter Ferrill Amacker. And one evening Muriel invited us to her house, this actress and the painter from Poplar Grove, Mississippi, Ferrill Amacker. It was a four-acre room, and only one corner was furnished with some elegant sofas and chairs. The rest was just polished hardwood inlaid floors. It was this huge empty room, with a huge fireplace ten people could stand in. We were in this one corner. She had some very gorgeous Persian carpets that were about maybe eight feet long and rather narrow. And she had these cats she adored. So she suddenly came whooping into the room. She’s a very tiny, active lady, is Muriel. She had one of the Persian carpets, and on it sat the two cats proudly. She was riding them. “Time for the evening drive!” she said. She just ran around the room dragging this carpet and singing to these two cats just sitting there. And she’d go out of the room and come back dragging one of these carpets with one or two cats on it. She’d dance around the room pulling this carpet. The cats just sat there loving it, just loving it. If you had come in the front door and had never seen or heard her before, you would have thought it was a child running around with this rug and these cats.

And then, of course—I can’t think what this actress’s name was—she got up and sang a song from some musical revue she’d been in on Broadway. Cannot keep a leading actress down. Whereupon Muriel got up and sang songs she remembered from variety shows she’d seen as a child. “Daddy wouldn’t buy me a little bow-wow” was one of her hit songs. And Ferrill got up and sang some old Mississippi song with a chorus of “Rip, dippy, do da,” and recited something about Winken, Blinken, and Nod he’d learned in the third grade. Then I got up and sang something, and we put on the music and just danced the whole night away in the cardinal’s salon. We’d been to some restaurant and come back for drinks at Muriel’s. And that was a great evening.

*

T. S. Eliot had come to Rome to receive an honor from some university. He was on his honeymoon with that lady who’d been his secretary and such a comfort to him after his first wife, who’d been slightly demented, went totally stark raving mad. The princess asked me to arrange a party at Palazzo Caetani. They were cousins. He was Cousin Tom. Some distant, distant way back when in Boston. And that’s when I saw a good side of him. I had the feeling he was someone trapped, inside sixteen locked doors. I thought if I could get enough Jim Beam into him, he would really be great. So I made my 23rd Field Artillery punch. We brought up from the cellars of Palazzo Caetani a huge, magnificent old punch bowl that had not been used since around World War I. And I put a block of ice in it. And I made a little hole in the block of ice. And I put some sliced oranges and lemon in that hole. And then I poured two bottles of cognac over that. And then I poured two bottles of good white rum over that. And then I poured two bottles of very good English gin over that. And then I just filled up the rest of the bowl with cold champagne.

It tastes like the most delicious orange punch. You would never guess there is one drop of anything alcoholic in it. You think it’s just this sweet little you-all fruit juice. The people who taste it say, “Oh, you have such sweet oranges.” There are millions of punches like that on the Gulf Coast. For Mardi Gras. You know: “Want a little fruit punch, darling, before we set out for the ball?”

It’ll make a party go. After a while, people achieve a rosy view.

The princess had invited all the literary figures of Rome: Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzberg. Writers, writers, writers, writers. She was nervous, since there were two or three famous feuds among the crowd. You know, literary backbiters are the worst. And Italian writers are always feuding with other Italian writers. And there were all kinds of Italian lesser writers begging for Eliot’s attention just like the Harvard boys. We forget that
The Cocktail Party
was written God knows when, in the 1920s, and only got produced in the 1950s in London. That’s one of the things that put him on the map all over again.

I was careful to see that all glasses were kept full. Feuds were forgotten, and toward the end of the evening Mr. Eliot remembered some football cheers from Midwestern colleges, which he’d heard in his youth. He had a yellow rose in one hand and a punch cup in the other, wielded like a pompom, and my favorite was:

Rah-rah-rah

Sis-boom-sah!

Go to war,

Holy Cross!

Bim ’em, bam ’em,

Skin ’em, scam ’em,

Rip ’em, ram ’em,

Holy Cross!

He was doing that cheerleader after just two glasses of 23rd Field Artillery punch.

But overall he was rather hoity-toity. I know that if you live in England and you are of the English language, sooner or later you speak English English. There is no way not to, because it has something which we just pick up. We can’t help it. I would be doing it in ten minutes if I lived there. But he had the snob accent, not just the English accent. The snob-snob accent. It was a kind of artificial snobbism superimposed on artificial Englishness. After all, he
was
from M’zou. He was born in St. Looey. The hub of the bourgeoisie.

Yes, well, the Eliots of Boston. The one
I,
one
t
Eliots of Boston. There are laundresses named Elliott with two
t’s
and two
l’s
. But this was a one
l
, one
t
Eliot. You can discard the superfluous at a given moment of greatness. But still, he was born in St. Louis, Missouri. We mustn’t forget that. M’zou. Born in M’zou. Being born in North Haiti is superior to being born in M’zou.

When he was on his way to speak at the university in Rome, there was a mob of students running along his car and screaming in the street. And there was a piece in
The New Yorker
about Eliot in Rome by one of our
New Yorker
girls who’s become famous. We published her first short story, “The Statue,” in
Botteghe Oscure.
Jewish girl in New York City. Funny name. Ozick. Cynthia Ozick. And she says that his car, as he left for the university, was accompanied by these cheering students, and what a lift it gave him to feel so acclaimed by the populace.

That wasn’t the thing at all. I was there, fighting off journalists at the Palazzo Caetani. It was one of those sixties student things, and they were screaming for the director of the university to resign. There were a lot of younger students who wanted the university reorganized in a certain way and rather more free. And they were running along his car, and Eliot thought they were welcoming him. But they were saying, “Please don’t make the speech, you fool.” You know: Down with the university.

I’ve never understood the kind of sourpuss quality he had. He didn’t have a little edge of good humor that is basically American, which all Americans have. It’s very rare the American doesn’t have that little “yeah, well, you know” somewhere. Even the crankiest. There is a kind of generosity of spirit which is American. Even with the most closed in or most miserly or whatever. I mean, T. S. Eliot was not my idea of fun.

It’s all because he became such a cult figure. Just after World War II, all the Harvard boys—if you said T. S. Eliot, they got to their knees facing England, you know. They forgave him for being born in M’zou. I think he had too much of that adulation.

But his wife was a charmer. So intelligent, so polite, so humorous, so kind. The princess asked me to go with her chauffeur to take Mr. Eliot and Madame Valerie to the airport when they were leaving Rome. So, we were going to go, and he said, “I’ve never been to the graves of Keats and Shelley.” I said, “Yes, we do have time.”

Now this is one of those cemeteries where nobody is dead. It’s like Père Lachaise in Paris. One day in Paris I saw this bus that was going to the Père Lachaise Cemetery. So I got on it instead of the bus I should have gotten on to go to school or wherever I was supposed to go that day. Rode right up to the cemetery and wandered through. There was Molière. There was Abelard. There was Sarah Bernhardt. There was Gertrude Stein. There was Nijinsky. There was Oscar Wilde. And I thought: This is not a cemetery. This is a cocktail party. There were no dead people there. So about once a week I would pack a picnic and just go to a different part each time and sit on somebody’s gravestone and communicate. This particular cemetery in Rome was the same way: a great place for a picnic, because nobody is dead. Old friends gathered. Keats is there and Shelley is there and a Romanoff princess and other grand Russian refugees.

There are cats that live in the cemetery. There’s this little caretaker’s cottage, and they sit in front of it. Because they’ve seen so many people go to the grave first of Shelley and then of Keats, they accompany them like guides. And they walk a few steps ahead and look over their shoulders and say, “This way,” and then they turn at the right corner and turn at the left corner. So first we went to Shelley, and we were taken by a black cat. At the grave of Shelley, there was a tabby cat waiting. The black cat went back to the caretaker’s. The tabby cat took us to Keats, way over in a corner. And it says, “Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water.” And Valerie was busy picking violets off the grave to take back to her garden in England, and T. S. Eliot was saying, “I’ve always thought that inscription was rather supercilious.” And she said, “Dammit, laddered m’nylons!” It’s one of my favorite moments. She was a very down-to-earth creature with a great sense of humor. She’s cat and monkey. But there was something acid about him which I just couldn’t take. And I’d always disapproved of his poetry because I come from a subtropical country. How could I know melancholy and the bleakness of winter?

*

Ingeborg Bachmann was another one of those cats and monkeys that I collect. She was born at Klagenfurt, Austria, which is only a small ride north of Italy. She really had a lot of Mediterranean, but she was very Austrian and wrote in German, and I loved her. She’s quite hot shit in the world today; she’s
the
modern German-language poet. She submitted some poems to the princess, and the princess took them right away. Then Ingeborg was coming to Rome, I think for the first time, so she came to the princess. And the princess asked me to lunch. She often asked me to lunch to fill up gaps when there were people, especially Americans, catatonic-ized by the word
princess.
Tongue-tied. Spellbound. Fallen arches. Everything because of a princess. So she often asked me for the Americans. But then sometimes she asked me when she was getting an unknown quantity to run interference and giggle at the right moment. So this was a terribly shy German girl. She had this dead white skin and was dressed in kind of a colorless way. She had no makeup except a tiny little lipstick. She had reddish hair, and she was nearsighted and wore these glasses. When I saw her across the room, I thought, Oh, Lord, it’s the farmer’s idea of the poetess. But then when we shook hands, I got this electricity. And when I really looked in her eyes, I got something else. When we began to talk, there was something about her I liked right away. So I escorted her out to an elevator and said, “Well, wouldn’t you like to have dinner in Trastevere some night?” She was very shy. “I don’t know. I’m not certain what my plans are. I have these proofs to correct.” She was just too shy. She was Miss Vulnerable. The original Miss Vulnerable. But she was a rare creature. A rare creature.