Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (8 page)

Trieste suited Jérôme. He lived splendidly in a villa, not far from the waterfront, that had belonged to “Pharaoh” Cassis but which everyone called the Villa Napoleone; nowadays it is the Villa Necker, the Italian Army’s headquarters in the city, with an officers’ club attached, and a lush park behind. Jérôme thrived there, fathering three children and buying several ample properties as speculative ventures, and after his years in the city he never looked back. He went home to Paris, where his nephew had become Napoleon III, to be a Marshal of France, Governor of the Invalides and eventually President of the Senate. His son Jérôme Junior, better known to the world as Plon-Plon, was born in Trieste, and a plaque on the side of the Villa Necker acknowledges his loyalty to the city—“Never forget my birthplace Trieste,” he is said to have urged King Umberto of Italy, who happened to be his son-in-law. And nearly a century later the quasi-King of Westphalia’s grandson Charles, by his unfortunate American wife, became Attorney General of the United States.

SOME celebrated foreigners have come to Trieste to work, and their responses have usually been ambivalent. The French consul Marie-Henri Beyle, for example, posted here in 1830, was decidedly not happy, and it is not surprising. He was forty-seven years old when he was appointed, and since he was well-known for his advanced and outspoken political liberalism, he was hardly likely to be welcomed to their imperial port by the authorities of a reactionary monarchy. Still, he found himself a pleasant house on the city outskirts and he enjoyed the exotic nature of the place, its fine boulevards along the sea, its grand houses, the colourful Slavs and Levantines who frequented its waterfront—“amiable half-savages,” he called them, whose talk was “continual poetry.” But Trieste soon soured on him. The food was dreadful, the peasants were money-grubbing, the bora debilitated him. The Austrians gave him no peace, censoring his letters and watching all his movements, and after only five months they expelled him. It was his only experience of Trieste, but since he was also known as Stendhal, and within the year had published
Le Rouge et le Noir
, none of it really mattered anyway.

Charles Lever, the Anglo-Irish novelist, was British Consul in Trieste during the 186os, and his experience of the place was not much happier. When Lord Derby the Foreign Secretary offered him the post it sounded fine—“six hundred a year for doing nothing, and you are just the man to do it.” It sounded like a rest cure for a wandering littérateur who normally had to live by his pen, but he soon found Trieste detestable. “Of all the dreary places it has been my lot to sojourn in, this is the worst. “The British residents bored him. The only Triestines he knew were dull business people. His heart gave him trouble, the bora blew, his wife died and he was plunged into periods of melancholy. Before he himself died on the job in 1872, he did have time to set a novel in the Trieste region, but it was no
Le Rouge et le Noir
, and only a few years later his grave in the Protestant cemetery was described as “a rubbish corner of stray papers and old tin pots.”

Sigmund Freud was also frustrated here. In a city that later embraced his ideas with particular zeal, being organically inclined towards neurosis, he himself found only failure. He came to Trieste on the train from Vienna in 1876, commissioned by the Institute of Comparative Anatomy at Vienna University to solve a classically esoteric zoological puzzle: how eels copulated. Specialist as he later became in the human testicle and its influence upon the psyche, Freud diligently set out to discover the elusive reproductive organs of
Anguilla anguilla
, whose location had baffled investigators since the time of Aristotle. He did not solve the mystery, but I like to imagine him dissecting his four hundred eels in the institute’s zoological station here. Solemn, earnest and bearded I fancy him, rubber-gloved and canvas-aproned, slitting them open one after the other in their slimy multitudes. Night after night I see him peeling off his gloves with a sigh to return to his lonely lodgings, and saying a weary goodnight to the lab assistant left to clear up the mess—“Goodnight, Alfredo,” “Goodnight, Herr Doktor. Better luck next time, eh?” But the better luck never came; the young genius returned to Vienna empty-handed, so to speak, but perhaps inspired to think more exactly about the castration complex.

HERE is another cameo of exile’s disillusionment. On October 29, 1904, a small lonely figure sat on a bench outside the Sudbahn railway station, at the foot of an obelisk commemorating The Yielding of Trieste to Austria, which showed an allegorical Trieste, head held gratefully high, emerging from a pile of Roman ruins. The obelisk has long gone, but the memorial to the Empress Elizabeth, “Sissy,” has lately been re-erected in the garden opposite the station entrance, and it will do just as well for us. There we see the little figure waiting, hour after hour, wearing a bonnet and a well-worn travelling dress, and with bags and bundles on the ground around her. Now and then she glances at the station clock, and she watches anxiously along the road to the city centre. And here at last comes the man she has been waiting for. Tall, skinny, be-spectacled, in a buttoned tweed suit and a straw hat, smelling slightly of liquor, here comes James Joyce to comfort his worried young mistress Nora Barnacle, who jumps to her feet, clutches her hat and runs tearfully to greet him.

She was relieved to see her Jim, of course, but he did not give her an easy time during the years they spent in Trieste. The Joyces came here from Zurich, on the promise of employment at the Berlitz School of Languages, and James left Nora so long beside the railway station that day because almost at once he had got into trouble. He had gone off to find somewhere to stay the night, but instead had promptly fallen in with a drunken party of seamen in the Piazza Grande, and there the police had arrested him. It took a reluctant British Consul to get him out of jail, and poor Nora might well have thought it was a sorry omen for their future in Trieste.

She would have been right. Following them in retrospect through their time in the city is hardly a light-hearted experience. Joyce scratched a living as a teacher of English, partly at the Berlitz, partly privately, but he was hopeless with money, always in debt and frequently in trouble with landlords. Street after street remembers the couple, and you can still follow their progress from one drab apartment to another, first by themselves, then with a baby, then with Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, then with a second baby, then with his sister Eva and their two children, then with his sister Eileen—jam-packed, frequently testy and always hard up. They gave up once and went away for a few months to Rome, and they went away again during the first world war, but like so many others, if James Joyce was often disconsolate when he was in Trieste, when he was away from it he often pined for the place.

Nora was the one to be pitied, though, and it is her small waiting figure outside the station that is my own most potent Joycean image of Trieste. Joyce himself had his genius to keep him company. He wrote the whole of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in Trieste, and most of
Dubliners
, and he devised much of
Ulysses
. He also made close friends among his pupils and their families, most of them interested in the arts, and became an oddly welcome guest in some of the rich mercantile houses of the city. He even dabbled in business himself—there was a scheme to sell Irish tweed in Trieste, and another to start a chain of cinemas in Ireland. Then his son and daughter gave him great delight, and the city gave him inspiration. He called it Europiccola. He liked wandering its streets. He spent long hours in its churches, especially the Greek Orthodox church of San Nicolo, whose rituals fascinated him. There were hundreds of pubs, cafes and brothels to entertain him, and in general he enjoyed the flavour of
K u K
, which he found “charming and gay”

But Joyce also wrote the play
Exiles
in Trieste. For all his pleasures, it appears, he was never easy in the city, and no doubt this was partly because of Nora. She was bored there—“now I suppose you will think I am very difficult but one cant live only for the sun and the blue Mediteranean sea.” She was not in the least interested in Joyce’s art, she seldom accompanied him to the houses of his friends or the taverns of his recreation, and year after year she had to keep the household together on skimpy pittances. She was an Irish colleen, born to be merry and reckless, and perhaps in his mind’s eye Joyce always saw her, as I do, sitting there beside the monument on that first day, her bags on the ground around her, while the trains whistled sadly behind her back, and he drank with the sailors in the piazza.

During his later time in Trieste Joyce wrote to the young German publisher Kurt Wolff, in Munich, offering to send him an untitled novel he had written. Wolff turned down the unknown author. Long years afterwards he became my own original publisher, but I suspect that if he had published
Ulysses
he would never have bothered with me.

IN SOME ways it seems to me that Joyce and Trieste were made for each other. If Mr. Bloom had not grown up in Dublin he might have been a Triestine. Sandymount Strand might have been the rocks of Barcola, out by Miramare, and Molly might well have opened her legs in some sleazy backstreet of the Old City. Other expatriates in this city, on the contrary, were miserably alien to the temper of the place, and pre-eminent among these was Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was as un-Triestine a character as it is possible to imagine, a spectacularly alarming man who presented himself deliberately to the world as an evil genius, with terrifyingly cold blue eyes to prove it. He had fought and explored all over the world, and besides being a great scholar and the author of celebrated books, he relished every kind of subterfuge and anomaly. He had been to Mecca in disguise; he had explored the homosexual stews of Karachi and investigated the polygamy of the Mormons. He never denied the rumour that in Arabia he had once murdered a man in cold blood.

When in 1872, in his fifty-first year, Her Majesty’s Foreign Office chose Burton to represent Queen Victoria in this respectable seaport he was affronted and dismayed. He thought Trieste preposterously unworthy of him. His ideal foreign country was “a haggard land infested with wild beasts and wilder men, a region whose very fountains murmur the warning words ‘Drink and away!’” With his total command of Arabic and his profound knowledge of the Muslim world, he had expected the Consulate-General in Damascus, or at least Tangier. Instead he was shunted off to a place he considered a third-rate middle-class backwater on the edge of a hide-bound empire, where only the polyglot hubbub of the docks could speak to him of romance.

He hated the climate of Trieste, especially the bora (when it nearly blew his carriage sideways into the harbour one day he jumped out on the other side, leaving the driver to his fate). He was dispirited by its humdrum routines, which he relieved by teaching himself Russian and modern Greek and by translating pornographic literature from the Arabic. For years the Burtons lived in a large apartment near the Sudbahn railway station, up a flight of 120 stairs, but Richard liked eating out “to relieve the curse of domesticity.” “We have formed a little ‘mess,’ “he reported in 1878, “with fifteen friends at the
table d’hote
of the Hotel de la Ville. . . . At dinner we hear the news, if any, take our coffee, cigarettes, and
kirsch
outside the hotel, then go homewards to read ourselves to sleep, and tomorrow
da capo
. . . .”

He says “we,” but actually his wife Isabel was much more content in Trieste, which she characterized as “a dear old place.” She loved him passionately, but he could embarrass her. Local society, which welcomed her, was wary of her Satanic husband. His fearful reputation had preceded him, and he did nothing to refute it. When Isabel once entertained a group of ladies at their apartment, and they wanted to see what the great man was writing just then, they found carefully disposed for their inspection a manuscript entitled
A History of Farting
.

And yet it was in Trieste that this difficult diplomat completed his greatest literary work, his translation of
The Thousand and One Nights
, with its famously improper supplementary notes. Wherever the Burtons lived in the world, Richard arranged a secluded retreat, well away from the crowds, far from the office, just in case (as Isabel put it) “he was feeling seedy.” He was seedy for much of his time, now that he was in his late sixties, and the retreat he found was a set of rooms at a hostelry at Opicina, close to the Obelisk. This had been a posting inn, the last on the road from Vienna to Trieste, but by Burton’s day it was chiefly used by weekenders escaping the summer heat below. Opicina remained, however, an essentially Slovene village of the Karst, more often spelt Občina, and so perhaps offered the superannuated adventurer some faint echoes of more haggard lands and wilder men. Here it was that he completed his masterpiece.

The inn is still there, but derelict, with swinging shutters and broken doors and overgrown terraces. Around the side of it, down a basement tunnel, there is a plaque on an inner wall with a relief of Sir Richard, and an inscription recording the improbable fact that in this building he opened the eyes of the western world to the full glory of the Arabian Nights. I like to loiter around the place, looking down to the wide blue bay beyond the city, hearing the distant buzz of its traffic and the whistle of the wind through the pines, and thinking of the formidable old exile labouring away inside, seedy, proud and resentful, while he wrote of the flying horses, the harems, the wizards and the Caliphs of his other world.

FOR MOST of its exiles Trieste was not a bad place to be, after all, if only because a web of fellow-feeling united you with your peers. Ex-kings bowed to discarded princes, landless aristocrats visited each other’s salons, even Burton doubtless found himself a few congenial idiosyncrats. And James Joyce, reading a manuscript by the shy young businessman who wrote as Italo Svevo, recognised it at once as the work of a fellow-artist—living there in metaphorical banishment, like himself, among the clerks and the accountants.