What she was saying was, The here and now is so important. We are having a good French lunch, and what is all this blah? Bless her commaless heart.
Alice told me some other stories, but that was the one that threw everything else out of my head. Of course, I should have been Boswelling all these years. I’m sure I’ve forgotten as many stories as I remember. I should have had endless Redbird notebooks and number 2 pencils. I should have been Boswelling. But I wasn’t. I was Eugene-ing, which is different.
Low Bubbling Mark
Suddenly I had no more GI Bill of Rights. And I’d spent every
penny from Lippincott. I was so broke. I finally moved out of the Helvétia and into a sort of slum area. A little hotel over close to the Sorbonne. I was at low ebb. Low watermark. Low bubbling mark. Because I was on beer by then, so it was low bubbling mark. I was as depressed as monkeys ever get, or cats. And the princess was always asking me to come to Rome. Little by little she would give me piles of manuscripts to read. Once she gave me a set of proofs. I said, “Well, you know, these haven’t been proofread yet.” “Oh,” she said, “well, yes, there’s this young lady who proofread them.” I said, “Well, I don’t think so. Look at this and look at this,” and then
said, “The printer should not have broken this word in this fashion.” Then she kept saying, “I wish you could be in Rome.” She said, “I don’t have an office. And I don’t have any sort of subscription service. I can never find somebody who really can help me with all this. I do hope you’ll come to Rome and help me set up an office.” Finally I said, “Well, I’d love to.” So I borrowed some money from friends and moved to Rome. Of course, the princess forgot to pay me for a year. And I was too shy to ask for a salary.
Part Five
Rome
An Orchestra Seat at a Comic Opera
Rome was a totally unknown quantity. I had already lived in
Paris in my mind before I lived in Paris. But I had no preconceived idea of modern Rome. And I was surprised by the poverty of it just after the war. Which was what? ’56. Just ten years after the war. It was a city of bicycles because not everybody could afford an automobile. And early in the morning, flocks of sheep crossed the town, driven by their shepherds to the Doria Parks on the Janiculum Hill, because they gave free grazing instead of hiring people to mow the lawn. The lawn was two or three square miles, so early in the morning, there would be these flocks of sheep filling the streets of Rome. When I left Rome years later, there were traffic jams tail to bumper of those Fiat 500s. You know. Honk, honk, honk, honk. But when I first arrived, there weren’t that many cars. Everybody was broke. So every morning, streets were full of bicycles and flocks of sheep. Thousands of bicycles in the street; it was really a sight.
In so many ways, Rome was not so different from Mobile. It was a warmish climate, with street life—things spilling out into the street. People who didn’t have porches just sat in front of their slum dwellings on little stools in the evening. Rome is flamboyantly Catholic, and I was raised Catholic. There were some processions that I enjoyed thoroughly, like the day of the Virgin, Ascension Day. It’s an all-day parade through the middle of Rome with everybody in resplendent robes and choruses singing—it was another form of Mardi Gras, really. I just loved it. And on every block there were two or three cafés. You sat and watched the world go by, just like in Mobile in Bienville Square.
Now, the cafés in Rome were a little more democratic than the cafés in Paris. There was a café at the corner from me on Corso Vittorio where you’d get the street sweeper and the man who had the little newsstand and a high-ranking Jesuit from the Jesuit order and some politicians. You would never see a street sweeper sitting at the Café de Tournon. You would see only tourists, all the publishing world, all the government world, and all the intellectual world. You’d never see small-business men or street sweepers. Or firemen. In Rome it was much more mixed up; I had friends in every strata. And everybody knew everybody. Everybody spoke to everybody. I knew my neighbors on both sides even though there were thick Renaissance walls between us on Corso Vittorio. Unlike the French, who are so strange and withdrawing and snotty, the Italians have always welcomed intellectuals, painters, writers. In Paris nobody would ever invite you to their home. They’d invite you to a café, even after you’d known them for years. But in Rome, the second day you knew them, they’d invite you to their house for a drink. I knew a couple of very grand French people but never saw the inside of their house, ever. Whereas the Italians would invite you immediately. The more educated they are, the more pro-American they are. They were genuinely interested in young American painters, writers, and all that because they had had none for so long. And most of the noble Italian families have survived only because they have had a shot of either American blood or American money. If you were American and doing something interesting, they wanted to know you and all about the new. So right away there was this sense of being welcomed.
And I could walk everywhere. Since it’s a medieval town built on Roman ruins, it’s following the donkey trails and the sheep trails and the cow paths that went through the Roman ruins. It’s not like Paris, where they tore down all the medieval sections and did avenues, avenues, avenues. Quite often at night, if I had to go a certain distance, I’d take a taxi. But usually I’d walk. Everybody else did.
One of my favorite places to go at night was the Tre Scalini, the famous ice-cream bar in the Piazza Navona, with the famous Bernini fountain. Just to sit there and watch the children roller-skating and the painters selling their paintings on the sidewalk and people hawking various things and tourists gaping—it was rather wonderful. It was like having an orchestra seat at a comic opera.
When I first arrived, I knew Rome only in theory. I knew the classical sculptures and all the classical architecture of Rome. The big surprise was the modern world superimposed. I mean, here was the Colosseum, and then about a block away, tucked away in some trees, was a dear little pizzeria. I never had thought of Fiat 500s and people on bicycles and street peddlers being between me and the monument. So I think the daily surprise of modernity amidst antiquity triggered something in me. And I loved it.
*
I didn’t have a place to live when I first got to Rome. The princess had invited me to live in the Palazzo Caetani; there was a guest room. It was like a luxury hotel, the Palazzo Caetani. The Caetanis owned this entire palazzo; it was built for them in the 1550s. But they rented out various suites and apartments. It was never anything openly advertised. But there was Eulalia, her daughter, and Lord Howard, her husband, who lived on the roof garden of the main palace. Then there was the American ambassador to Italy and his wife and granddaughter in a very grand apartment. There was Ginny Becker and John Becker and their two children. Some sort of institute had a suite of rooms. The
amministrazióne
Caetani was in the
pianterréno,
on the ground floor. And all those palaces have an army—guards and a family police force—and they occupied the administrative offices on the first floor. And there was a room she would have given me, a very gorgeous, huge room about as big as a house. A salon. And then a little bedroom and bath off of that.
But I knew better than to be domiciled with the princess. I wanted to keep distance and have independence. I didn’t want to be under auspices. I have never been under auspices since the age of sixteen. Even when I travel, I don’t want to stay in a private house; I’ll take the cheapest motel. I might want to skip around the house naked and get drunk at midnight, you know. I didn’t want any private house. I didn’t want to impinge on her or have her impinge on me. The princess was the type that if she thought I was living there alone, she would probably ask me to dinner, even though I lunched with her almost every day. Because we worked every day, and sometimes, if she had literary people or something like that for lunch, then I was always invited. I think she liked my entertainment value with certain professor types. But I knew I had to have another life.
So William Fense Weaver, the Rome editor of
Folder,
invited me to stay with him in his place about eight blocks from Palazzo Caetani while I looked for my own place. What I found was this huge room, rather like the ballroom of the Rubira House in Mobile, in an old palace in Via Giulia near the back door of the French embassy. I thought, Oh, what a wonderful place, Rome. This sunlight in the winter. The first night I spent there was the first time it had snowed in Rome in twenty years. The snow came in the window, and I woke up with a snowbank on the foot of my bed. And then I was saying, “Did I do the right thing, moving to Rome?”
I told everybody, “I have got to find a place to live. It has to cost nothing and it has to be in Centro, where I can walk to Palazzo Caetani.” So one day this Venetian I’d met who was eight feet tall called me and he said, “Well, Eugene, I don’t know if this would interest you. It’s really very modest, and it’s in Trastevere.” I said, “What’s Trastevere?” He said, “It’s what it says: across the river.” The Tiber is “Tevere.” “Tras”: other side. Other side of the Tiber. It’s where the shepherd people lived when all those Sardinians and Etruscans and all that came and took Rome in pre-pre-pre-pre-pre. So I said, “Well, let’s go see it.” I just loved it right away. It was a different atmosphere in that part of Rome, even though you were right there a few blocks from Piazza Argentina and a few blocks from Palazzo Caetani. The open-air market was somehow more giddy, closer to Naples in style. And there were lots of little restaurants and bars which were just sprawling out onto the streets.
So he took me to this back alley where we climbed the same number of stairs as the Spanish Steps. At the top of this hillside was this little gardener’s cottage. It consisted of a bedroom, a dining room, a nice modern bath, and a kitchen with no stove, no anything. In front of it was the terrace, which was covered with gravel, and there were six wooden posts and a grapevine. You looked out over all of Trastevere and all of Rome. It was eighteen thousand lire a month; that was about, I guess, twenty-something dollars. So I said, “I’ll take it.” There was this cranky, cranky old landowner; this was his gardener’s cottage. He lived on the Janiculum and entered from the Janiculum. He made the slaves climb 365 steps to the common folks’ quarters. He was nasty and mean and absolutely miserly. But I did like sitting on that terrace and looking out over Trastevere.
On this hillside, there was nothing but weeds along the 365 steps. So I dug and planted fig trees that are still there, bearing by now, and lots of iris, iris, iris. In digging, I found the most extraordinary things, like pink slabs of red porphyry. Of course, my sculptor friends would faint dead away. This hillside had been the site of one of Cleopatra’s kitchens. She had three separate kitchens. They all prepared the same thing, but starting an hour subsequent to each other, because she never knew when Caesar would get there from the Senate. So no matter when he arrived, it was freshly prepared, with three kitchens making the same menu. Those hunks of red porphyry I’m sure were left over from Cleopatra’s kitchens. So I gave all that to the sculptors. I went out of my way to meet many of them, because I was fascinated by the fact of all the American sculptors living in Rome. There are the old foundries that have been casting statues since prehistory; we don’t have that tradition in America.
The princess gave me a stove. She insisted that all my laundry be done by her washwoman at the palace. That the dry cleaning be done with the palace dry cleaning. They had a whole corps of servants, and there was a wardrobe mistress who literally looked after the dry cleaning and the laundry. The princess was very upset about the snow story, and she said she still wanted me to come and stay at Palazzo Caetani. But you know, I couldn’t have. If I were a snob and wanted someday to be something fancy at Harvard, I might have lived with the Princess Caetani. But such as that never crossed my mind in all my life. I was out to explore the cat and monkey world. And you see, I could never have given dinner parties in the Palazzo Caetani. There was a hot plate or something in the corner of that huge thing she offered me. But some of the people I invited would have been looked upon askance by the
portiere
of Palazzo Caetani. Student types or artist types would have been considered inappropriate for the palazzo. I could just imagine that uniformed
portiere
looking down his nose.
There were a lot of people who would turn up. Like Allen Ginsberg turned up one day. If you could have smelled him. He had been hitchhiking in Italy, and I don’t think he had changed his clothes in a week. He had these filthy shorts and this filthy shirt and this backpack. Of course, he wasn’t famous then. He was somebody who’d heard about
Paris Review
and
Botteghe Oscure
and just dropped in on me at my office in Palazzo Caetani. I had seen his work in I’ve forgotten what little review. It had kind of an “up yours” attitude. This was long before the full flair of hippies. I liked his impudence. He had some poems that he wanted us to publish in
Botteghe,
and the princess just didn’t go for them. Some of the words and phrases did not, to her, seem to occur naturally; sometimes you thought he made it raunchy or vulgar to make a point. I liked it, but of course she was from another generation and New England. After we talked, I decided I liked him a lot. He really is a very gentle, basically lonely soul, trying to be a tough Brooklyn Jew. He is just a gentle soul. But you see, I could never have invited him to dinner if I had been living in some
appartamento
in Palazzo Caetani. He, obviously, was just something from the streets.