Greene on Capri Read online

  As we were leaving the Rosaio, in declining light, for the serpentine bus ride down the mountain, Graham pointed out the small white studio in which he worked. It was lying, like a beached boat or some marine habitation of the Peggottys, at the upper end of his walled garden. On a subsequent visit, he showed us its tiny cabin like interior. There was still, then, the wooden floor originally installed for silence and winter warmth. I recall narrow bookshelves within arched niches, where poets were aligned in short elderly volumes together with sets of pocket sized anthologies and Temple Shakespeares—all orderly, well cared for. There was a small divan, a chair, a lightweight portable typewriter on a solid old table by a window that looked on the garden. And there was the inexorable breath of Capri damp. It was a fine place to write: indrawn, inviolable—a refuge within the retreat, and all within an island.

  Graham was to leave Capri just before the New Year. In intervening days, we dined together at Gemma several times before going our diverse ways. One evening in the restaurant, soon after we were seated, a gently mannered Swedish visitor—possibly associated with the Axel Munthe enterprise at Villa San Michele, which draws countless Scandinavian, German, and other tourists to Anacapri each year—came from a nearby table and, begging our pardon for the interruption, asked to shake Graham’s hand; a fine boned, tweedy, herring like figure with a Sandburg cowlick of white hair, who, as Graham attempted to rise, told him, “Mr. Greene, I want to thank you for the pleasure of your books.”

  GG: I’m glad you like them.

  SWEDISH GENT: I also wish to apologise for the fact that

  once again, this year, my country has failed to award you its

  prize.

  GG: Not at all.

  SG, earnestly: Perhaps next year.

  GG, oracular: No. Next year, Patrick White.

  SG, perplexed: Is that certain?

  GG: Absolutely.

  (The following year, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—Patrick White being, as gossip had it, the runner up. White received the prize in 1973, donating the money to create a continuing award for Australian writers. White and Greene, who were not acquainted, maintained a mildly competitive interest in each other’s careers. When we returned from a trip to Australia in 1976, Graham—learning that we were friendly with Patrick White and had visited him at Sydney—questioned us about Patrick’s manner of living, and was curious as to whether the principles of material simplicity advanced in the books were reflected in the life. They were.)

  There was another evening when Graham brought with him a Capri personality, Dr. Elisabeth Moor—the Viennese “Dottoressa Moor,” who would become the “Impossible Woman” of Graham’s later memoir and an acknowledged source for his novel Travels with My Aunt. A squat, categorical figure, formless in winter bundling, the Dottoressa had the rugged, russet complexion of northerners long weathered in the hot south, prominent paleolithic teeth, and memorably pale blue eyes. She was wearing a grey mock Astrakhan fez, and did not take it off. As we sat down together, Graham told her, “You look just like Khrushchev”—which, though accurate, pleased her. Khrushchev was something of a ploy with Graham at the time. On the previous evening, we had been speaking of prescient themes in novels. I had said that the illusory “atomic” constructions concocted by the vacuum cleaner salesman in Our Man in Havana prefigured the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. And Graham had responded: “Yes. Khrushchev got that from me.” One had always assumed so.

  The Dottoressa Moor had evidently not expected to share Graham with unknown others, and made displeasure plain—barely acknowledging Francis and ignoring me altogether. Over dinner, Graham seemed amused by her surly directives. Possessive of his attention and flattered by it, she showed him a truculent devotion. They had known each other from Graham’s first visits to Capri, meeting through Norman Douglas, one of whose last doctors she had been; and Graham had given her solidarity during a series of cruel private tragedies. With her belligerence and self praise, and her gratuitous rudeness, she could not immediately endear herself to Francis or to me. Only the eyes were incongruous—anxious, appealing, the very colour of girlishness.

  Graham was inclined to assign parts to subsidiary players in his drama (and to take it amiss when they forgot their lines or deviated from their role). The Dottoressa had clearly enlisted as a character, the Impossible Woman of the subsequent script: “You are right, I am a wild one.” As far as we were concerned, she did not strike one as quite impossible enough: more like an amateur at impossibility. Whereas Graham was a pro: a formidable master of the impossible.

  Years afterwards, writing to Michael Richey, I mentioned in a postscript the Dottoressa’s unprovoked hostility on that evening. Richey replied: “I was amused by your note about the Dottoressa. I don’t think she liked women. She loved Graham of course and he was immensely kind to her.” Michael told me that once, in Rome, Graham had spent seven hours at the airport in order to see the aged Dottoressa safely aboard her belated plane: “Most people would have left her.”

  In regard to her projected memoirs, the Dottoressa had written: “I would like to live in a state of men only. Women should be eradicated.” She did her best in that direction throughout our dinner together. Ultimately, the evening we spent with her at Gemma was to have a sequel.

  On an afternoon following Christmas, Francis ran into Graham in one of the little Capri streets, and together they came to join me where I was reading indoors in the Gran Caffè. As they sat down at the table, I closed my book; and Graham, saying, “May I see what you’re reading?,” took it from my hand. The moment is vivid—early dark, and the lamps yellowish; wintry silence in the square; the two long limbed men seated on small cane chairs; the three of us drawn together. And Graham’s tone, gentler than I was almost ever to hear it—one would say, seductively so. And his extended, extraordinary hand turning the book.

  It was a work congenial to the Edwardian and Georgian aspects of his taste: Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. (I later saw, in one of Graham’s collections of travel essays, that it was among books he had taken to West Africa during the war.) He said, “Yes, it’s very good, isn’t it? You even come to like the father. There’s some loss of control near the end, but it hardly matters.” Of his own father, Graham, like Gosse, had developed more lenient memories—occasionally expressed in dreams, as he relates in A Sort of Life.

  Graham’s loyalty to those turn of the century writers, the literary elders of his boyhood, was, though discriminating, nearly familial. He was not in the least intimidated by the opprobrium heaped—for generations now, and collectively—on the Georgian poets; and was pleased when once I quoted lines, which he recognized, written in the South Seas in 1913 by the arch offender, Rupert Brooke:

  As who would pray good for the world, but know

  Their benediction empty as they bless.

  Greene has recounted the excitement of the “adventure” writers he had read in early youth—Henty, Haggard, Hornung, Kipling, Stevenson, Conan Doyle. His own writings testify to that influence, as did his life. One book, uncompromising and unclassifiable, had cast an enduring spell:

  When—perhaps I was fourteen by that time—I took Miss Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan from the library shelf, the future for better or for worse really struck. From that moment I began to write . . . One could not read her without believing that to write was to live and to enjoy.

  The Viper of Milan was published in 1906, when its author was a girl of sixteen. It remained a staple of British bookcases for generations, and was on our own shelves in my childhood. I have it still: a historical novel of the wars between the dukes of Verona and Milan (“Millun,” as we then pronounced it), with some of the flavour and detachment of Stendhal’s stories of those violent and prodigious times. A calm mingling of charm and horror sustains the reader’s attention and dread: on a spring night in a moonlit garden, the fragrant wallflowers are “the colour of blood just dry.” As Graham has suggested, the book made evil
interesting.

  Graham read, also, the popular periodicals of stories for boys, staples of the time. In my childhood, we had huge old bound volumes of Chums that came from my father: issues from 1914 to 1917, their chivalrous and whimsical tone, and their jingoism, steadily challenged by realities of the Great War. (My father, like thousands of others, presumably went straight from reading those high hearted tales of resourcefulness and honour to the trenches, where he arrived at the age of seventeen.) In the stories, there was much hiding and disguising, much suspense of being sought and caught, or of narrowly eluding discovery, a contest of quickwittedness that would have particularly pleased the boy Greene. Plots were seldom original: with fair frequency, there was the irrepressible, all betraying sneeze in the dusty attic, or the pepper flung in the assailant’s eyes. Through pluck and ingenuity, the slim young hero prevailed in the end, and made light of his triumph.

  Heading once for an appointment with a troublesome relative, Graham told us: “I’m taking a screw of pepper in my pocket, just in case he gets violent.”

  In The Quiet American, arcane and drastic allusion is made, I think, to those stories of his boyhood, when the narrator, hiding in a rice paddy, feels a sneeze fatally coming on:

  But in the very second that my sneeze broke, the Viets opened with Stens, drawing a line of fire through the rice . . .

  A thoroughly Greeneish juxtaposition of encoded sentiment and lethal violence; quite worthy of Miss Marjorie Bowen.

  Graham has described how his first reading of stories, as child and schoolboy, took place in solitary retreats of home and garden—corners of the comfortable, confident England that sheltered complicated and talented families like the Greenes in the early part of the twentieth century. Aspects of that world in which his infancy and troubled schooldays were passed—a world whose judgments were invoked with scorn and pain in his youthful fiction—had remained, or become, pleasing to him; and its emblems were densely if scabrously assembled, in 1975, for his last play, The Return of A. J. Raffles, which he styled “An Edwardian Comedy.” The period and its literary adventurers—wayfarers, explorers, sleuths, remittance men, double agents—had their permanent place in his consciousness: enigmatic, clandestine, or seedy originals who outclassed, for Graham, those forthright soldier and sailor heroes, representatives of empire and team spirit, who provided national exemplars in an era extinguished by the First World War.

  Graham’s volatile attachments were, as he intended, always hard to call—even in regard to causes to which he generally adhered. However, on the theme of his upbringing, he might on a good day have endorsed Auden’s acknowledgment that

  The class whose vices he pilloried was his own,

  now extinct, except

  for lone survivors like him

  who remember its virtues.

  We parted in late December with the expectation of meeting again on Capri in the spring. Graham told us, “I’m glad I forgot that line of Browning.”

  After Graham’s departure, Michael, Francis, and I dined together a last time at Gemma on New Year’s Eve. It was a cold clear night such as Rilke spent on Capri on the eve of the year 1907—climbing to the roof of his little house in the garden of Villa Discopoli to see “an earth of moonlight, of moon shadow”:

  And the night was a bright, distant one that seemed to rest above far more than just the earth; one felt that it lay above oceans and far out beyond, above space, above itself, above stars . . .

  In the same oceanic silence, Francis and I walked at evening along the deserted Tragara path, high above the sea, past the “Moorish” Villa Discopoli, which had not then been transformed into a costly condominium. Returning to the piazza and reaching the restaurant, we were startled by unprecedented holiday numbers and by hilarity that, as midnight neared, was swelled by the traditional itinerant group of costumed Capresi singers making hay with tambourines and with their curious traditional instruments derived from a remote past—“a weird, barbaric affair,” as D. H. Lawrence saw it, on the eve of the new year 1920, when he, in his literary turn, was wintering on Capri.

  Those outlandish instruments, some of them suggestively indecent in appearance and operation, have old dialect names: the putipù, the triccaballacco, and the scèavajasse (or “slutwaker”). The putipù, in size and aspect like a smallish portable drum with one central perforation, seems to have found its way round the Mediterranean since pagan times. In South from Granada, Gerald Brenan describes its miniature, and primitive, Spanish counterpart:

  The last festival of the year was Christmas . . . It was the solstice. The only special feature was the appearance of that disagreeable noise making instrument, the zambomba. This consists of a piece of rabbitskin or goatskin drawn tight across the mouth of a broken flower pot or drainpipe: a stick is inserted through the skin and, after the hand has been wetted, is pushed up and down, so that it gives a half squeaking, half moaning sound. The sexual significance is obvious, and no doubt it was originally intended as a magical rite to give strength to the declining sun. In Yegen it was chiefly the young men who performed upon it, and, when girls were present, they did so with a conscious gusto, and among much tittering and laughter. In the towns it has now sunk to being a children’s toy.

  There has been no such fallingoff in Capri. The puripù holds its own on festive and touristic occasions, wielded “with conscious gusto” not only by young men but also by pretty laughing girls with long coloured ribbons in their hair.

  We came back to Capri in the following spring. So did Graham. He appeared one May evening at Gemma’s fireside while we were dining with two friends at our usual table. With him was Yvonne Cloetta, who had on a leash her golden spaniel, Sandy. It was Yvonne’s presence at Antibes that had caused Graham to move there from England in the 1960s, following their first meeting, in Africa, in 1959.

  No pretty woman was ever more suited than Yvonne to the adjective petite. Heart shaped smiling face, short shock of strong white hair; slight, perfectly proportioned compact body dressed in trousers and a pastel shirt, with a shawl at evening. Good English, spoken with charming accent, made her an invaluable amanuensis to Graham at Antibes. A use of Italian enabled her to act, also, as intermediary during their Capri visits.

  Yvonne loved—one might say, idolised—Graham. On her love that moody man had established a reliance that endured through the last thirty years of his life. Seeing them together, hearing his tone to her, one found it impossible to imagine, in their attachment, the anguish or antagonism that had otherwise characterised, since youth, Graham’s relations with women.

  On that spring evening of their return, there was the welcome from the staff of the restaurant, where Graham had dined since the late 1940s; where he was addressed by the personnel, incongruously, as Signor Grin—and by Gemma herself, who spoke no English, as Grahmgrin, or Grahm. The unaltered simplicity of Gemma’s restaurant was a stable factor that helped make the island agreeable to Graham. Like many restless people, he preferred to find his ports of call unchanged. For Gemma, who would stand for a moment by his table, holding both his hands and smiling, Graham had an unusual degree of trust and fondness; and I think that this was not solely due to the fact that they could exchange no words. Gemma’s benign composure drew many of her clients to the restaurant throughout their lifetime and hers.

  She had founded the restaurant in the 1930s, with her husband, who was for many years the chef. Born into the rustic life of bodily labour usual to Capresi of her generation, she was one of a large family whose centre and support she became while still young. Two, and then three, generations of relatives were deployed in the restaurant, and Gemma’s fisherman brother masterminded the day’s catch. Gemma sometimes spoke of her parents, of their resilience under a hard life and the exigencies of numerous children. She spoke to us, too, of the famished years of the Second World War, when the island’s produce was impounded for the armed forces and when, with the wholesale bombardments of Naples in 1943 and 1944—monstrously compounded
by the eruption of Vesuvius in March 1944—crowds of poor Neapolitans rowed themselves out to Capri, vainly seeking sustenance and shelter.

  Gemma’s calm diffused itself through her restaurant even in the high season, from mid June to late September, when the large, glassed summer room, with grand view, was afloat with the colours worn by couples and families on holiday, and with the shimmer of fashionable figures who arrived to dine near midnight.

  If Graham delayed his spring or autumn visit, Gemma would ask if we had news of his return. When Francis, who had much affection for Gemma, once teased her, “Graham is more precious to you than I am,” she replied: “It’s true. He needs it more.”

  At Gemma’s death, in 1984, Graham walked in her funeral procession.

  On one of his earliest visits to Capri, Graham and Catherine had come unexpectedly to the island over Christmas, only to find everything closed on Christmas Day, including Gemma. At the Rosaio, Carmelina was spending the holy day with her family. “Discovering that we had nowhere to dine or buy food, Gemma asked us to Christmas dinner at her house. We were placed at her table, and found that no one else would sit down. The entire family waited on us, and nothing would induce them to join us.”

  Francis said, “You were the honoured guests. Something nearly Oriental.”

  “Yes. We sat enthroned like the pampered jades of Asia, and were served with all those dishes.”

  When “Catherine” came up, it was often in some recollection of Italy: “We were at Sirmione one summer, on our way back to England, and Catherine realised that she needed a hat for a Palace garden party the next day. At Sirmione she bought a straw hat off a stall. It cost eight shillings. She got the hat, and she wore it to Buck House.”