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FORTY-FIVE

As I now pack up the books and pictures that Howard and I acquired at La Rondinaia since we moved in thirty-three years ago I keep thinking of my one conversation with John Steinbeck at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. We were both talking about houses and the urge to put down roots “for good.” I’d just got Edgewater on the Hudson. I could not imagine wanting to live anyplace else. Yes, summers were too hot and winters too cold but it was a perfect house in so many ways. I suspect that it really was what I’d always wanted and that is why I still dream that I have somehow got it back and am moving back in again and, of course, Howard is still alive. Steinbeck was of the same mind. He said, “How many times I’ve settled somewhere
for good
and never wanted to leave until the inevitable day comes when I move on and the place is emptying out and we are suddenly all gone and living in a new place.” As I write this, I am getting ready to move on and a third of my life is being packed up and I am again transient—neither here nor there. These rehearsals for death take more and more out of one until at the end there is, I suspect, nothing at all left except Howard’s old dressing gown hanging on the back of his bathroom door, a refuge for moths, which Rita maintains are fireflies on the ground that I could not know the difference.

Here I am packing up some pictures and 8,000 books, the end of an era for me on the Amalfi coast, ready to face the future in the Hollywood Hills with a new knee made of titanium.

FORTY-SIX

A television crew has come and gone. There is to be a program on Italo Calvino, the first in Italy. So we go into the
salone
and eerily the camera is set up on the exact spot where he and his wife, Chichita, sat at dinner on the day that I was made an honorary citizen of Ravello. There had been music in the piazza. From Rome had come the Calvinos, Luigi Barzini, the critic Alberto Arbasino. Speeches were made. Barzini nicely compared me to Marion Crawford, an American novelist who had lived up the coast at Sorrento and whose house by the sea had been envied by Henry James who did not in the least envy Crawford’s worldly novels. A year or so later I was to preside over the transformation of the Crawford villa into a museum by zealous admirers from the University of Naples. Each Italian village seems to have a tutelary foreign writer in place. Capri is celebrated for Norman Douglas whose family, though from Scotland, had lived in the mountains above Feldkirch while he himself was associated with the Amalfi coast or Siren Land as he called it and, finally, Capri. I had a number of occasions to meet the old man who was supported by an admirer, Kenneth Macpherson; then one day they were all gone. Graham Greene lived at Annacapri on the top of the hill. Occasionally he would ring me and I’d ask him to stay in Ravello on his way to his Capri house but he would always become oddly coy: “You see I am traveling with an old friend to whom I am not married and there are those who object to this sort of irregular relationship.” I told him that I was not an objector but we never saw him in Ravello nor he us on Capri. But he and I saw a great deal of each other in Moscow when Gorbachev held an antinuclear meeting in the Kremlin for well-wishers of his glasnost and perestroika. Graham spoke for culture, a perfect fifteen-minute speech without a note. When, admiringly, I remarked on this to Norman Mailer, he said, “Every Englishman can talk for fifteen minutes on any subject without a note.” It was on this trip that Greene got to see the spy Philby again and came to the conclusion that not only was Gorbachev going to rid us of the cold war but that only the KGB, from which he came, was sufficiently educated and competent to govern the post-Soviet nation. All in all, Graham proved a fairly competent prophet. In those days he lived in the south of France where he was quietly feuding with an old friend of mine, Anthony Burgess, who had made the mistake of describing Graham’s conversation while drinking. Graham had many tall tales to tell but he disliked seeing them later in print. I defended Anthony, warily. Graham was suddenly accusing: “But
you
like to go on television and I don’t.” I said I liked to talk publicly about politics, and street corners were no longer desirable venues. “Burgess,” he said, “is on television all the time in France.” “What,” I asked, “does he talk about?” Graham scowled and whispered, “His
books
.” I agreed that
this
was insufferable. “I never do television,” said Graham, “and, as you see, if I can help it, I never let them photograph me.” Since our arrival at the Kremlin Graham had been constantly televised and photographed which I reminded him of. “Ah,” he said cryptically, “this is the east and those things don’t matter here.” Whether or not they did, he was hugely popular with the east Europeans at the conference where he was a Burgess-like presence. He was particularly exciting on the subject of Castro with whom he had fought side by side in Oriente Province during the revolution. I could not tell if he was making it up as he went along or whether or not he was actually calling upon memory. His eyes were curiously glazed, like mica.

FORTY-SEVEN

Opposite my desk as I write, two pieces of parchment testify that I am an honorary citizen of Ravello as well as of Los Angeles, and my favorite award: a hammered silver plaque from the cities of Magna Graecia for
Creation
and my contribution to the classical world. I think the award was presented in Crotone where Pythagoras died. Certainly his cult still haunts the coast which I shall soon be leaving for a more satisfactory world. Yet again.

As I look about my study I see a row of books bound in dark blue leather. Something annoys me. I open Montaigne’s essays in the Screech translation. The source of annoyance is there. But where? Why? The book falls open, automatically, at his essay on Lying which I often reread when faced with the excess of lies in our public life.

Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up…If a lie, like truth, had only one face we could be on better terms, for certainty would be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits. The Pythagoreans make good to be definite and finite; evil they make indefinite and infinite.

A clumsy journalist at
Time
magazine some years ago did a cover story on me which was odd. It was at the time of Nixon’s fall and since the piece was about my novel
1876
and some of the not always sterling truths that our founders were capable of, the essay on me was entitled “The Sins of the Fathers,” a standard propagandist erasure of news the publisher does not want taken too seriously: sometimes known as “they all do it,” so what’s the fuss? Currently, to counteract all the talk of stolen elections in 2000 and 2004 a dozen journalists now assure us that our elections have always been corrupt; which is hardly true. Recently the same
Time
magazine journalist felt it was time that I be discredited as vain and self-absorbed. So he wrote as if he had actually been inside my study which he hasn’t and saw hundreds of blue leather-bound books all by me. But they are mostly worn leather-bound reference books of the sort I doubt that this kind of journalist consults. But then more than ever in my lifetime the great whopping lie is seriously in vogue.

FORTY-EIGHT

In a fit of absentmindedness I said that I would serve as president of the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 1990. I usually avoid festivals, prize-givings, and every sort of bureaucratic event involving the arts. I can’t think why I said yes. There would be, I was told—warned (?)—a feminist jury. Why not? I thought. I had broken a lance or two in the gender wars on the side of the ladies. Finally, it is unwise to forgo a trip to Venice at almost any time. So Howard and I were booked into a hotel on the Lido. By and large, I have never had much to do with the media that concerns itself with cinema. The journalists involved are often off-duty screenwriters and their world in Italy is somewhat Byzantine and inbred. I thought I’d have nothing more to do than see a dozen or two films and vote with the other jurors for best director, et cetera. But I soon realized it was not going to be that easy. I’d been reading a book by or about Cocteau describing his miserable time as president of that Cannes Film Festival where I’d won the Critics’ Prize for
The Best Man
in 1964. I recalled Jacob, the president of the Cannes Festival, as an intelligent charming figure and was delighted that he was going to serve on my jury. Also on the jury were Omar Sharif and three or four ladies from Scandinavia and Russia. I’d known Omar from my time as screenwriter on
The Night of the Generals
, the second film I did with Sam Spiegel. Everyone asked why I did a
second
film since with Spiegel there was always trouble about payment or credit or both. My cheerful response was, “I couldn’t believe it the first time.” Also, I had grown morbidly fond of Sam with his vast appetite for food and hookers. Gadge Kazan’s wife complained that she found Sam very conventional when it came to scripts and I said he was so conventional that he was classic. He also belonged to the old school of the Producer is god and only He can contribute meaningfully to the script. But Sam had changed; since a series of great successes, all publicity must now be about him: he was being presented to the public as the new Sam Goldwyn. He was also more than ever abrasive with his directors. He liked to pick first-rate directors whose careers were not doing well. He had also cannily signed up Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif for a second film each after
Lawrence of Arabia
. I do not believe that I am revealing confidences when I say that each resented being paid minimal salaries.

Claire Luce and I at a ball in Venice in 1961, years before my jury duty. We are in what was Robert Browning’s study. Each has just misquoted him.

On the Venice jury Omar charmed the ladies and I felt that we would have a comfortable gondola ride to the various Lion prizes. Unfortunately, Omar overdid the charm. The ladies, plus Omar, were a majority of the jury: this meant that practically every prize would go to a different lady: few men were to be winners. Since the best director at Venice that season was Martin Scorsese with his latest film
Goodfellas
it never occurred to me that anyone else would be chosen, with the possible exception of Tom Stoppard who had directed his own
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
. But Omar’s dread charm had swept all the ladies before it. As a sign of solidarity he voted along with his Scandinavian harem. On the first ballot a truly awful film by a Danish woman called
Sirup
(the movie not the lady) won for best screenplay. The managerial head of the jury for the festival looked ill. The brilliant Jacob, if nothing else, must have seen the primacy of his festival at Cannes assured for at least another decade. But not for nothing had I been Tammany Hall’s choice as delegate for the 1960 Democratic convention, instructed to vote for Kennedy. I made a Bushesque speech in favor of total democracy which meant that best picture and director be voted for
jointly
to prevent overlapping prizes. The lady from Moscow gave me a weary look: she had met my sort before in the Soviet paradise. Meanwhile I had a word with Omar who was now as one with the party line. A Swedish lady spluttered but by then I was busy awarding best actress to
her
choice while the auteur of
Sirup
got best screenplay award. The ladies were reasonably pleased. I waited until the end for best film award. In a voice of sweet reason I said, “We are supposed to award these prizes to the best in each category. Since a number of ladies are angry that we have celebrated yet again gratuitous masculine violence, which we all deplore, by giving Scorsese the best director award which he deserves for at least half a dozen other films I think that we should break with tradition and give the Gold Lion to what, after all, is the best film in competition:
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard.” A pair of journalists on the jury had been leaking our proceedings to the world press and they promptly sent up black-and-white smoke signals. But we now had a Pope—Stoppard—teeth all around me were grinding. I was told that Olivier’s
Hamlet
had been booed by the Italian press. They also disliked Shakespeare. Later, when I went out onstage to announce the winners, I was loudly booed but not before I murmured, “At least, for once, the best film got the best prize.” Later I read that the producers who had released the film had once released one of mine and that I’d been paid off. Italy! Thus, on a high note, I ended my jury duty. For good.