Trespassers (22 page)

The copy of
Nonplus
contained three prose essays by Patrick Kavanagh and seven poems – a contribution seen by his biographer as ‘extraordinarily generous’. My own sense was that the generosity was Patricia’s, who clearly felt an urge to protect Kavanagh. Many Dubliners had succumbed to that impulse, including my father, John Betjeman when he lived in Dublin, and, more surprisingly, the tyrannical Archbishop McQuaid.

His soft spot for Kavanagh was the first benign thing I ever heard about him, and the explanation which springs to mind is a second. For Kavanagh was unworldly, though perhaps less from choice than because the world was too much for him. His view of it could be caustic. Take the lines:

He did not himself repel women. On the contrary, verse like that is guaranteed to attract them, and there were reports of women who circled around him. But the hyperbole has a
drumbeat
which echoes the Metaphysical poets and some vernacular hymns – and may well have appealed to John Charles McQuaid. I suspect it might have pleased Seán, too, for he sometimes quoted early Gaelic poetry whose monosyllabic metre thumped out an even more insistently spasmodic rhythm.

The unlikely connection between poet and bishop was watched with interest by neighbours who exchanged stories about ‘the Arch’ arriving in his chauffeur-driven car to call on Kavanagh who, not wanting his patron to see the squalor in which he lived, allegedly piling up empty sardine-tins and used tea leaves in his bath tub, once sent down word that he couldn’t receive him because he had a woman in his flat. The Arch, to his credit, is said to have smiled and remarked that the woman, if there was one, was no doubt a
saintly do-gooder. And indeed Katherine Moloney, the same one who used to sing about her martyred uncle in cafés on the Île Saint Louis, seems to have done Kavanagh good, for in 1966 the two married. Before that, though, Patricia too extended largesse when he arrived in the small hours at her door in Wilton Terrace, drenched and shivering after either falling into the canal or – his version – being pushed. Patricia, a qualified doctor, knew how to help and did. She bought him a tweed outfit the next day, too, and now that she was his near neighbour often had him in for a drink. Judging by what we know of her relations with Larkin, she relished challenge when dealing with poets, whether lovers or protégés. And indeed, Desmond Williams, her last companion, was both brilliant and badly disabled. I saw her once feed him his dinner with a spoon, as you might feed a child.

Maybe Kavanagh also welcomed disability. Here is a scrap of his verse which I learned in my pious childhood when he used to visit Knockaderry on Sunday afternoons. While my mother made tea, he and I would show each other our poems:

I don’t remember having learned or even read the last two lines. Perhaps, when I was a child, they meant nothing to me. But ‘
clay-minted’
has the ur-Kavanagh ring. In his verse, earth and ‘the stony grey soil of Monaghan’ are out to destroy him. His hell substitutes fire with clay.

I have a notion that he may have courted my mother, not only because of those afternoons when he walked the ten or twelve miles from the city to Killiney just for a cup of tea, but because of five neatly handwritten poems which I turned up when going through the papers left in Rosmeen Park, the cul-de-sac where Seán and she lived at the end. One is dedicated ‘To Eileen O’Faolain’. Here are a few lines:

Neat and copperplate though the writing is, I may have misread some of it. ‘Hags’ for instance could be ‘Hogs’. But the motifs are familiar. Is the broom phallic though? If so, Eileen might have failed to guess this.

The two events which marked our time at Reed were the birth of our son, Lucien, and the publication of Lauro’s first book,
The Social World of the Florentine Humanists,
which, thanks to his archival work, was able to relate the thinking of
fifteenth-century
Florentine intellectuals to their economic and political circumstances. The book went to press in 1962 and thanks to it – and perhaps to Sputnik – he got a grant to go back to Florence, and later more grants, so we were able to stay there for four
supremely happy years while he worked on a second book and I did some translating from Italian, taught in the Scuola Interpreti and began to write short stories. As I write this, it is 2011 and
The Social World
is about to be reissued by the University of Toronto Press. Seán, Lauro reminds me, was both reassured and surprised when, on a trip to the US, he ran into a historian who told him what a good book it was. He had nourished divided feelings about Lauro and reproached himself for this.

The Florence we now came to know was livelier than the one we had known before. For one thing, thanks to the Italian ‘economic miracle’ of those years, people had more money and, for another, Lauro was now a fellow at I Tatti, so at its lunches and other junketings we met Florentine figures such as Berenson’s old friend and lover, Nicky Mariano, and her sister ‘the baronessa’, who invited us several times to her house in Vallombrosa. From time to time Harold Acton invited us, too, and so did Count Neri Capponi, who was an advocate at the Sacra Rota and a professor of Canon Law. He and his wife, Flavia, had links with Ireland, she because she had spent time there when her father was ambassador and had, to judge by Edward McGuire, left teasing memories of her young self with a generation of wistful young men. Neri’s connection was earthier, in being through his nanny who, he told us, had taught him how to say
póg mo thón
which is Gaelic for ‘kiss my ass’. Like the Capponi, other old Florentine names – Ricasoli, Corsini, Strozzi, Ruccellai, Gondi, Guicciardini, Antinori and the like – still belonged to the owners of the matching palazzi. We didn’t meet them all, but those we did were friendly and so were the owners of villas in the hills.

To make a small, token return for their hospitality, we decided to give a drinks party. The flat we were renting on the via San
Niccolò didn’t lend itself to dinner parties. It had a spacious reception room, a large, airy bedroom, and a large terrace canopied in wisteria season with mauve blossoms; but its kitchen was one floor up, at the top of a steep and narrow stairway down which anyone carrying trays of food could slither and fall. Cautiously, therefore, we stuck to drinks and invited everyone we knew. This proved to be a major gaffe, since it was now the Sixties. Academic friends tended to be left-wingers and the aristocrats wouldn’t talk to them. When, ignoring my invitations to mingle, the party split into two hostile phalanxes, a guest took me aside to explain why. He was Count Giovanni Buoninsegni Tadini who had driven up from his villa near Lucca.

‘Julia,’ he scolded, ‘you have invited us with Communists and people who plan to destroy us. You can’t expect us to socialise with them. It’s different for you. You’re foreign. But they want our property.’

Viewed from the British Isles, such Cold War terrors had rarely seemed real, so Tadini was almost the first person I met who took them seriously. Besides this, Communists in France and Italy had been arguing for so long that they must ‘wait for the right moment’ before trying to get into government that few now thought this would ever happen.

Next time we met, Tadini spoke more freely about his dislike of the Left. It was not entirely based on fear. There was also distaste. Florentines, he told us, fell into five groups, only some of which could be mixed. There were aristocrats like himself. Then there were the rich foreigners who lived in villas like Acton’s La Pietra, Violet Trefusis’s Villa dell’Ombrellino, and I Tatti in Berenson’s day. Both groups were his friends. Even foreign academics like Lauro were acceptable, because, unlike Italian ones, they knew how to handle a knife and fork. But Italian professors – ‘mostly Reds anyway’ – were out, and so were prefects, mayors and so forth, who weren’t too good with knives and forks either. The fifth
category were the demonic Communists, a few of whom, like the aristocratic, but also Communist, film director Visconti, were class-traitors to boot.

Tadini was the man I mentioned earlier, who liked to contend that the US army had taught Italian workers to wash more hygienically than people like himself, whose now outdated sanitary know-how came from English nannies. He was self-mocking, entertaining and could have written a lively guide to his own world. Mindful, however, of Poldy Loewenstein’s father’s riposte when the young Poldy wanted to become a doctor – ‘we do not become, we
are
!’ – I did not encourage Tadini to take up the pen.

He was right about cutlery, though. As another Italian friend remarked when rummaging in a London street market for long narrow spoons with which to serve osso buco, a supremely Italian dish, England was the place to find them, because it was deeply middle-class, and that class had invented table manners. Sure enough, the osso buco spoons turned up in London. Meanwhile Tadini’s view of Florentine manners was bolstered by a scene I glimpsed in a trattoria where a man whom the waiter had addressed as
professore
was instructing his children about that topic. Manners, he told them, were essential, and, to endorse the point, waved his knife in the air.

Left-wingers had their own snobberies. The Communists who ate regularly in a trattoria on a corner of the piazza della Signoria – a party-member owned it – were neater and cleaner than many aristocrats. Indeed, in their white shirts and perfectly ironed summer suits, they had an evangelical look, were exceedingly proper and called each others’ wives
signora.
They were easily shocked. Once Lauro and I went out to dinner with a couple of them and had a marital squabble in which I used a four-letter
word. The wife didn’t know English, and the husband was so fascinated by my impropriety that he couldn’t wait to tell her about it. Here was scandal. Here was bourgeois decadence. ‘What the Signora just said,’ he told her excitedly, ‘is VERY strong!
Molto, MOLTO forte!
’ His mouth trembled as though the wicked word were threatening to jump from it. Perhaps he wanted to use an Italian equivalent, but shrank from letting us know that she, too, knew it. I imagined him saying it when they were alone. Perhaps he would use several words to vent his pique at having had to wait. Which?
Fottere? Fica? Chiavare? Inculare?
Which did he pick? I didn’t like to ask.

Sometimes I was shocked as well. One evening Lauro and I went to hear the thrilling film director, Francesco Rosi, give a talk at the Circolo di Cultura, where he complained that the Neapolitan crowd, which he had recently used in his movie
Hands Over the City,
had been filmed so often that its members had lost all authenticity and now cartooned themselves. Self-cartooning was understandable, but his next comment surprised us. ‘That lot,’ he sneered, ‘are the lumpen!’ This contempt for what I had been brought up to think of as ‘the people’ confirmed rumours of
left-wing
big shots privately despising the masses. I had not expected this from Rosi. So when he went on to make some of the most darkly prophetic political films of the Sixties and Seventies, my memory of his dismissing fellow-Neapolitans as social scum – ‘lumpen’ – would add to the films’ unsettling impact. What was striking about them was that, though they often took the form of investigations, they refrained from answering the queries raised. Their narratives, several based on novels by the scintillating Leonardo Sciascia, mirrored an Italian reality which had begun to throb with indignation at the deceits which many people sensed, but for which fiction could only with difficulty provide coherent solutions. Anarchy was soon to usher in what would come to be called ‘the years of lead’.

Those would be seriously frightening, for the word ‘lead’ stood for bullets and random killings, as impatience with the PCI’s reluctance to take power led to its being outflanked by smaller, more trigger-happy groups.

Back in the mid-Sixties, though, at Harold Acton’s table, for instance, polemics were still as light-hearted as ping-pong games. Harold enjoyed teasing people whom he suspected of disagreeing with him, and didn’t mind saying why. The dimming of his popularity as a writer rankled. Criteria had shifted while he was absent from England and he seemed puzzled by this. Fine writing, he complained, was now despised. The definition had become a reproach. Why? Political correctness puzzled him, too. Blacks, he stated once, had only just come down from the trees. Or did he call them ‘niggers’? Quite possibly. He lived in a congealed expat world which was more courteous, but could also be rougher, than the one which had replaced it. He was a generous host, but Florence – in this, again, like Dublin – was a prickly place.

His guests could be prickly too. At one of his lunches John Sparrow, then Warden of All Souls, took a shine to Lauro and, on hearing that he had been taught by and admired William Empson, began running the man down. He and Empson had attended the same school, Winchester, where, Sparrow sneered, Empson had been a scholarship boy with ringworm in his head. Turning next on me (I may have been looking chilly), he guessed that I admired Roger Casement, which I did. I may even have annoyed him by quoting Yeats’s poem about ‘that most gallant gentleman who is in quicklime laid’. The English had hanged Casement after he was caught trying to run guns from Germany in 1916. Well, said Sparrow, Casement’s
Black Diaries,
which the Irish had claimed were British forgeries, were proving to be
genuine and so exposed him as a homosexual. Since both Harold and Sparrow were also homosexual, it was hard to know how to respond. Maybe, with luck, the pudding arrived to distract us. If it was riz á l’impératrice, which was often served at Harold’s, it would have appeared in what looked like a caramel-coloured glass bowl which, to the shock of first-time guests, a footman would shatter with a smart blow from his spoon. This was a trick, for the bowl was not glass at all but made of caramel, slivers of which would now be served with the rice to sweeten our tempers.