From the Elephant's Back (38 page)

I am glad to have got in a visit with Pine to this gracious and evocative square. It wasn't only to visit Oscar Wilde but also to say hullo to Sheridan Le Fanu and Maturin.
[16]
By the time they fired the lovely building where the British Embassy was housed I was back in London. But I didn't neglect to pay my respects to Swift also as he lay buried beside Stella in echoing St. Patrick's. I dragged the reluctant Duffy with me this time and succeeded in mildly interesting him in the fact that Swift had endowed the first lunatic asylum in Dublin. According to the rhyme it was a very necessary act.

He gave the little wealth he had

To build a house for fools and mad

And show by one satyric touch

No nation needed it so much.
[17]

But now my visit was drawing to a close and Duffy said: “Sure, I guess you've just about inhaled the place.” Yes, that was it. Soft powder of snowfall on the Wicklow hills next day turned all the pleasant landscapes around Dublin into a Chinese watercolour. Then rain came, a soft grey rain falling across the long tender sweeps of Georgian building, ruffling the plumes of the river and making the seagulls plaintive as they wheeled over O'Connell Street and Halfpenny Bridge. Everything was sinking back into the mist and silence of winter again, after a few days of false spring. I went to kiss Anna Livia goodbye—her head is a keystone on the Customs House.
[18]
I wished her many more poets and drunkards to celebrate her charms. She is the symbol of the Liffey. Duffy was too sad to accompany me to the airport and I was glad. I hate goodbyes. It had been a good trip but too short. “Come again, sir,” said the girl with the cowslip complexion. “Come back for longer.” As the plane lifted and careened I saw that the grey mist had seized the island and blotted out its soft outlines. The sea looked black and cruel as we sped back to England.

Borromean Isles

1973

SOMETHING IN THE NAME
has always set up a sympathetic echo in my head—a hint of an Edward Lear
[1]
invention, a hint of
Through The Looking Glass
;
[2]
and while many years ago I caught a glimpse of them from the deck of a small boat wrapped in lake mist, it was only enough to whet my curiosity. Yet the idea of them stayed on tenaciously in my memory over the years. Borromean! Were the islands perhaps inhabited by Lewis Carroll's “borogoves?”
[3]
The word echoed on in my head, and then, at long last, came the chance to revisit them, the invitation I waited for.

Instead of fighting my way to the sea, I was to turn inland at Genoa and ramble across the midriff of Italy until I came to that comer of Lake Maggiore, with its twisting mountain ranges and shifting lake mists, its mauve and yellow sunsets wrapped in huge skeins about the sky. Italy is so shamelessly beautiful that one is constantly forgetting the fact of its beauty. As for the Borromean Islands, their romantic celebrity has always put them on a par with Capri or Corfu. For my part I found them so wonderfully, outrageously soft on the eye as to invite other, more symbolic associations—an Eden dreamed up by Blake or Poussin.
[4]

Part of the dream music of the name was connected with the story of the three little deserted islands that got somehow woven into the life history of the Borromeo family.
[5]
Gradually, over very many generations, the family secured one part and then another, thinking first of summer houses or country residences. The mad dream of the palace of Isola Bella was slow in forming. But it came, and when it did its conception was breathtaking in its grandeur, for it was to be the real family seat of the illustrious house of Borromeo. This was a family that had given so many brilliant sons to the science and the arts, to the church and to the law. Under Charles Borromeo III the central idea found root, and the grand design of Isola Bella took shape. It was named after his wife Isabella D'Adda, though neither he nor she lived to see it completed. But the divided motif was there, for it was to be their family seat, yes, but it was also to be a palace of pleasure shaped into the design of a huge green ship, lying at anchor on the azure waters of the great lake. Ideas were taken from everywhere. There is even a hanging garden of Babylonian provenance. But, as the family was forever running out of money, the work proceeded by fits and starts and remains incomplete in some details to this very day. This is romantic sugar-icing architecture of an outrageous kind, offset by the luxuriance of lake greenery that is almost tropical in its profusion.

But first I lay at Novara, the fine little town that gives its name to the whole province. Moreover I was travelling rather late in the season, which is always wise when one has to deal with a very popular tourist place. Italy cannot be all that different, I thought to myself.
[6]
To my delight I was not wrong; the last days of September were placid and autumnal-sweet, and everybody who didn't live there was starting to pack up. Hotels were slacking off, and the lake campgrounds were already deserted. Winter and mist lay ahead. But meanwhile the cafés basked in sunshine, their coloured awnings spread out like sails. The graceful gardens of the little town were drifted up with the first fallen leaves.
[7]
Plump horse chestnuts crashed through the trees, falling from their spiky green purses and bumping on the roof of my little camping car. Old pensioners swept away at them so that children or old ladies would not turn an ankle walking on them. In the public garden there is a ghastly statue of nymphs in attitudes of supplication, invoking the sky for rain, perhaps, or the gods for husbands. I have forgotten the inscription.

Novara, too, I had almost forgotten, but not quite. I remember the queer red tessellated streets with their strips of gray concrete stretching down the middle for rubber wheels to grip. And the lovely duomo rearing up in the same shredded red brickwork, so fragile.

I am a literary tourist, which is the worst kind of globetrotter. For example, I spent ten minutes in Novara station. Why? When Nietzsche went mad, his two closest friends went to his aid and took him back to the lunatic asylum at Jena from Turin.
[8]
There was a three-hour wait in bitter weather here, the silent madman standing between his two sad friends. Indeed the whole of Novara smells of Nietzsche, of that marvelous girl Lou Andreas-Salomé.
[9]

These literary memories were only strengthened when next morning very early I took the road to Orta, that little kidney-shaped lake of quite special beauty where they spent a summer, and where Nietzsche outlined to the eager and sympathetic Lou (he was thirty-eight and she twenty-four) the plot of
Zarathustra
.
[10]
In the dense warm mist I did a little pilgrimage to the Sacro Monte with its twenty little chapels, each with a group of statuary illustrating the vicissitudes of St. Francis's life.
[11]

Then on I went to Stresa nearby at a single bound. By now the morning mists had cleared, and the whole clear-scooped foreshore of the great lake opened in front of me like a seashell. Stresa with its tiny railway station emphasizes the Victorian storybook atmosphere. A sign said TO THE ENGLISH CHURCH, which gave one an instant feeling of security. There would be sure to be a branch of Barclays Bank at Stresa.

And then the islands—they came sailing unselfconsciously out of the mist and into the warm orbit of the sun, sure of the visitor's approbation, like great film stars. Could one not echo Napoleon and Josephine's admiration? And who would want to cross swords with Flaubert and Stendhal?
[12]
Not me.

And these great rambling hotels left over from a forgotten age of opulence, inhabited now by the ghosts of long dead millionaires and frail English nannies. Each hotel had its vast library of tall glass-fronted bookcases full of yellowing Tauchnitz editions of Conrad and Dickens and Kipling. How beautiful it was.

And the food, too, was fine lake food, without the intricacy and tetchiness of the French cuisine. Good stable wines, red and white, many smoked mountain delicacies like sausage and
viande de Grison
[13]
but, on the whole, matter of fact.

The fine red wine of Stresa is just right for what we English call “elevenses,” namely, a midmorning snort to keep the soul sharply attuned to nature's beauties, to keep the fantasy booted and spurred. Such was the charm of that sunlight I found myself gracefully polishing off a whole bottle while I scouted the little harbor for a boatman to carry me over the water to Isola Bella.

I supposed that a good deal of hard bargaining would be in order, and I thought of Mark Twain in the Holy Land: the passage where he says that when he heard the prices the boatmen charged on Galilee he was not surprised that Jesus walked on the water rather than pay them.
[14]
But I was wrong about it all. My boatman turned out to be a mild ex-schoolmaster who was kindly as well as knowledgeable, and the price was fixed by law. So over the still pearly water we went puttering in his launch, to make a leisurely circuit of the two smaller islands before turning our prow in the direction of the finest. The last groups of tourists were arriving from several points on the mainland: peasants from the Italian Tyrol. Milanese families and even some Swabian Germans with folklore wives in bonnets and aprons and starched kerchiefs. The men wore dark brown medieval dress such as one sees in the paintings of Brueghel.
[15]

I climbed the staircase to the palace entrance where the group of uniformed guides lounged in the sunlight like gun dogs. Business was slack. I fell upon a pleasant young guide who set me quite a pace around the corkscrew palace with its armories and crypts and chancels, its secret gardens and sweetly curving balustrades and loggias. Considering the relatively small size of the island it is amazing how it gives the feeling of space and grandeur. It conveys harmony and grace, and also operatic fantasy so dear to the Italian heart. There are white peacocks that walk the extraordinary construction known as the Amphitheatre, scolding you with their horrible voices. And the grottoes whose walls are covered in coloured seashells. And a marionette theatre…

Perhaps the most astonishing collection on the island is the plant collection that is unique and deserves a catalog all to itself. It took quite a time to complete a leisurely circuit, but when it was over I bade my boatman come and lunch with me at the little café called the Dolphin, the headquarters of the native fishing colony. We ate excellent lake trout and drank red wine while the sunlight steepened and the afternoon drew slowly on. We spoke of Isola Bella and my boatman said: “It is unfortunately too beautiful. When you make something so beautiful that the whole world must come and see it—why, what happens to your private life? You are overrun.” He had something there. Imagine standing on the green bridge of this pleasure ship and suddenly seeing a boat approach with Napoleon sitting in it, or Queen Victoria (for she was also an approving visitor). You could hardly send the butler down to say you were out when it came to guests of such calibre. I suppose this explains why the descendants of the family no longer inhabit this precious place. No doubt they have settled for privacy in Rome or Milan. And so Isola Bella with its cargo of fantasies belongs to the whole world, to us.

Alexandria Revisited

1978

IN 1975 THE BBC TOOK ME BACK TO GREECE
to make a film called
Spirit of Place
, based on my island books and the memories of the years when I lived there.
[1]
In between these happy Greek years lay darker ones, marked by war, which I had spent in Cairo and Alexandria. Last year, the film director, Peter Adam, suggested we travel again together, this time to Egypt, to the scenes of
The Alexandria Quartet
, and try to touch all the points which, either from a literary or personal point of view, meant something to me, or marked me or moved me.

Filming is a sort of composite art—one is always manufacturing the work of two or three people and trying to assemble it into a coherent image. The writer is a solitary animal sitting in a garret, and when the stuff comes off his typewriter nobody else interferes with it. So to try and make a film about a subject which was precious and probably, from a general point of view, out of date was a trepidation added to traditional neuroses.

To return to Egypt, to revisit Alexandria in order to see what traces, if any, remained of that extravagantly coloured world I had painted in
The Alexandria Quartet
? The idea filled me with unease. After thirty years or so, the country must have changed. There had been the long post-war reaction to the West and then an eight-year flirtation with Russia—until the abrupt discovery that Marxism spelt materialism. Then, apart from these factors, even the Egypt I had painted—or rather the Alexandria—had itself ceased to exist by the time I got there in the war years. Cavafy was eight years dead; the brothel quarter had moved to Cairo, whence I had brought it back to help me set the stage once more. And I myself? Had I changed also, as Egypt must have? These ideas, together with ancient memories of the place, splashed about in my mind as the plane hovered and sank upon Heliopolis through a sunset more marvellous than any I remember. At least nature was a constant, one could count on her. Or so I hoped.

But we were very late and in the huge pandemonium of the airport, which vibrates still with the old noise and dust and smells, it was easy to think that not so very much had changed. This aspect of daily life, anyway; here we were, limp with fatigue at nine o'clock at night, but the beggars and borrowers, the scroungers and the footpads were still bursting with life. We got out to our bus, yes, but almost left our clothes behind in the process—so many were the imploring hands which plucked at our sleeves, or dived upon our shoes to clean them by main force.