Portraits and Observations (42 page)

A line from Edith Sitwell:
Jane, Jane, the morning light creaks down again
—This from a poem I’ve always liked without, as so often with the particular author, altogether understanding it. Unless “morning light” is an image signifying memory(?). My own most satisfying memories of Jane Bowles revolve around a month spent in side-by-side rooms in a pleasantly shabby hotel on the rue du Bac during an icy Paris winter—January, 1951. Many a cold evening was spent in Jane’s snug room (fat with books and papers and foodstuffs, and a snappy white Pekingese puppy bought from a Spanish sailor); long evenings spent listening to a phonograph and drinking warm applejack while Jane built sloppy, marvelous stews atop an electric burner: she is a good cook, yessir, and kind of a glutton, as one might suspect from her stories, which abound in accounts of eating and its artifacts. Cooking is but one of her extracurricular gifts; she is also a spooky accurate mimic, and can re-create with nostalgic admiration the voices of certain singers—Helen Morgan, for example, and her close friend Libby Holman. Years afterward I wrote a story called
Among the Paths to Eden
, in which, without realizing it, I attributed to the heroine several of Jane Bowles’s characteristics:
the stiff-legged limp, her spectacles, her brilliant and poignant abilities as a mimic. (“She waited, as though listening for music to cue her; then,
‘Don’t ever leave me, now that you’re here! Here is where you belong. Everything seems so right when you’re near. When you’re away it’s all wrong.’
And Mr. Belli was shocked, for what he was hearing was exactly Helen Morgan’s voice, and the voice, with its vulnerable sweetness, refinement, its tender quaver toppling high notes, seemed not to be borrowed, but Mary O’Meaghan’s own, a natural expression of some secluded identity.”) I did not have Mrs. Bowles in mind when I invented Mary O’Meaghan—a character she in no essential way resembles; but it is a measure of the potent impression Jane has always made on me that some fragment of her should emerge in this manner.

That winter Jane was working on
In the Summer House
, the play that was later so sensitively produced in New York.

I’m not all that keen on the theater: cannot sit through most plays once; nevertheless, I saw
In the Summer House
three times, and not out of loyalty to the author, but because it had a thorny wit, the flavor of a newly tasted, refreshingly bitter beverage—the same qualities that had initially attracted me to Mrs. Bowles’s novel
Two Serious Ladies
.

My only complaint against Mrs. Bowles is not that her work lacks quality, merely quantity. The volume in hand constitutes her entire shelf, so to say. And grateful as we are to have it, one could wish that there was more. Once, while discussing a colleague, someone more facile than either of us, Jane said, “But it’s so easy for him. He has only to turn his hand. Just
turn
his hand.” Actually, writing is never easy: in case anyone doesn’t know, it’s the hardest work around, and for Jane, I think it is difficult to the point of true pain. And why not?—when both her language and her themes are sought after along tortured paths and in stony quarries: the never-realized
relationships between her people, the mental and physical discomforts with which she surrounds and saturates them—every room an atrocity, every urban landscape a creation of neon-dourness. And yet, though the tragic view is central to her vision, Jane Bowles is a very funny writer, a humorist of sorts—but
not
, by the way, of the Black School. Black Comedy, as its perpetrators label it, is, when successful, all lovely artifice and lacking any hint of compassion. Her subtle comprehension of eccentricity and human apartness as revealed in her work requires us to accord Jane Bowles high esteem as an artist.

August, 1966! Aboard the
Tritona
. Others aboard: Gianni and Marella Agnelli (hosts), Stash and Lee Radziwill, Luciana Pignatelli, Eric Nielsen, Sandro Durso, Adolfo Caracciolo, his daughter Allegra and his nephew Carlo. Seven Italians, one Dane, one Pole, and two of
us
(Lee
et moi
). Hmm.

Point of departure: Brindisi, a rather sexy seaport on the Italian Adriatic. Destination: the islands and coast of Yugoslavia, a twenty-day cruise ending in Venice.

It is now eleven
P.M.
, and we had hoped to sail at midnight, but the captain, a no-nonsense gentleman from Germany, complains of a rising wind and thinks it unsafe to risk the sea before sunrise. Never mind!—the quay alongside the yacht is awash with café lights and piano sounds and Negro and Norwegian sailors browsing among brigades of pretty little purse-swinging tarts (one a really speedy baby with pimiento-colored hair).

Groan. Moan. Oh oh oh hold on to the wall. And crawl, Jesus, please. Please, Jesus. Slowly, slowly, one at a time: Yes, I am crawling up the stairs from my cabin (where green waves are smashing against the portholes),
crawling
toward the presumed safety of the salon.

The
Tritona
is a luxurious craft constructed on a wide-bottomed principle of a Grecian caïque. The property of Conte Theo Rossi, who lent it to the Agnellis for their cruise, it is furnished throughout like the apartment of an elegantly humorous art collector: The salon is a greenhouse of flowering plants—a huge Rubens dominates the wall above an arrangement of brown velvet couches.

But on this particular morning, the first day of the voyage, as we crossed the swelling seas between Italy and Yugoslavia, the salon, when at last I’ve crawled my way to it, is a rocking wreck. A television set is overturned. Bottles from the bar are rolling on the floor. Bodies are strewn all over like the aftermath of an Indian massacre. One of the choicest belongs to Lee (Radziwill). As I crawl past her, she opens a seasick eye and, in a hospital whisper, says: “Oh, it’s
you
. What time is it?”

“Nine. Thereabouts.”

Moan. “Only
nine
? And this is going to last the
whole
day. Oh I wish I’d listened to Stash. He said we shouldn’t have come. How do you feel?”

“Maybe I’ll live.”

“You look incredible. Yellow. Have you taken a pill? They help. A
little
.”

Eric Nielsen, lying face-down and somewhat askew, as though he’d been felled from behind by an ax murderer, says: “Shut up. I’m worse off than either of you.”

“The trouble,” says Lee, “the trouble with the pills is they make
you so thirsty. And then you’re dying for water. But if you drink water, that only makes you sicker.”

How true—as I learned after swallowing two pills. Thirst is not the word; it was as if one had been a prisoner in the Sahara half a year or more.

A steward had arranged a buffet breakfast, but no one has gone near it—until presently Luciana (Pignatelli) appears. Luciana, looking impossibly serene and lovely—her slacks immaculate, every strand of golden hair just so, and her face, the eyes particularly, a triumph of precise maquillage.

“Oh,
Luciana
,” says Lee in a grieving, drowning tone, “how ever did you do it?”

And Luciana, buttering a slice of toast and spreading it with apricot jam, says: “Do what, darling?”

“Put on your face. I’m trembling so—I can’t hold a lipstick. If I’d tried to do what you’ve done to your eyes—all those
Egyptian
lines—I would have blinded myself.”

“Trembling?” says Luciana, crunching her toast. “Oh I
see
. You are troubled by the motion of the boat. But really it is not so bad, no?”

Eric says: “Shut up, girl. I’ve been on hundreds of boats, and I’ve never been seasick before.”

Luciana shrugs. “As you like.” Then she calls for the steward, who arrives careening to and fro. “May I have an egg, please?”

Lee says: “Oh, Luciana. How
can
you?”

At dusk this day the sea calmed as the
Tritona
approached the stony Montenegro coast. Everyone, feeling vastly better, is on deck staring down at the green-crystal depths skidding below. Suddenly a trio of sailors, standing in the ship’s prow, start to shout and gesture: An immense porpoise is racing along beside us.

The porpoise leaps, arcs, gleefully descends out of sight, leaps like laughter materialized, plunges again, and this time disappears. Then the sailors, leaning over the rail, begin to whistle a curious intense whistle-chant, and the whistling is some Ondine melody the seamen know will lure the creature back. Back it comes!—soaring heavenward wreathed in water-spark.

The porpoise guides us along the coast as far as a cave, then turns and seeks the deeper, now darkening outer sea.

Village lamps light the distance; but only Gianni (Agnelli), ever the questing spirit, wants to go ashore. The rest of us have more sense. And anyway, it’s my policy to leave heavy sightseeing to others—I’ve never cared to burden myself with churches and such relics. I like people, cafés and the stuff in shop windows. Unfortunately Yugoslavia, much as it happily differs from most socialist states, nonetheless is afflicted by that same
tristesse
, that same atmosphere of empty vistas, of nowhere to go and nothing to do when you get there, that starts just the other side of the Berlin Wall.

As usual in these countries, the store shelves are crammed with merchandise, but none of it is anything you would care to buy, not even as a gift for a cruel stepmother. Occasionally one encounters a street peddler selling pretty-enough native rugs; and if you like liqueurs, the best Maraschino in the world, a masterpiece of the distilling art, is a Yugoslavian creation. Otherwise zero, a shopper’s hell.

Nor can we praise the restaurants; as in Russia, the service is very Stepin Fetchit, every meal an endurance test. Dinner at the best restaurant in Dubrovnik is an only so-so affair. And the queer thing is, the quality of produce available in the marketplace is excellent. In the larger coastal cities, say Split, the markets sprawl like immense crazy quilts, a pattern composed of tomatoes and peaches
and roses and soap and pickles and pigs’ feet and severed carcasses strung upside down. And over it all, over everything, hovers a buzzy, prickly cloud of wasps. These wasps are like a political emblem, a subtly evoked threat—they seldom sting, but one cannot escape them, for they are a constant factor in the Yugoslavian landscape: a part of the air, unavoidable even aboard the
Tritona
, where, when we lunch on deck, the wasps dance in a yellow haze above the wines and melon.

Some quite unusual melons were served at lunch yesterday—cantaloupe-colored, yet spongy and sweet as honeydews. Marella said: “Absolutely
divino
! I wonder where the melons come from.” And pretty Princess Pignatelli, who has spent much of the voyage raptly reading a book called
The Big Spenders
(by Lucius Beebe), snaps to attention: “The Mellons?” says she. “The Mellons? They come from Pittsburgh.”

“A week is enough. Ten days is the absolute maximum,” so remarked Stash (Radziwill), referring to the amount of time he considered it possible to spend within the confines of a yacht cruise; and apparently most people in a position to judge second his opinion—that ten days is the limit, regardless of the charm of the company or the fascination of the scenery. But I do not agree with this. To my mind, the longer a cruise lasts the more intoxicating it becomes—a strange drifting awake-dream, a drug compounded of sun and motion and floating-by views that both lifts and lowers the spirit into a condition of alert slumber.

Also, I like boat routine.
Tritona
mornings are spent ashore in city-ports or island villages; around noon the cast, separated in twos and threes, wanders back aboard, then departs again by various speedboats to isolated coves and beaches for an hour’s swim.
When everyone has once more reassembled, we gather on the sun-exposed upper deck for drinks and, for the athletes, a session of exercises conducted by Luciana (“my figure has improved seventy percent since I started weight-lifting”).

Then lunch (Italian chef, lots of great pasta concoctions, am gaining about a half-pound a day, oh what the hell). And as we start lunch, the yacht sets sail; we cruise all afternoon to our next destination, usually arriving at sunset.

Yesterday, abandoning the languors of a Norwegian-like fjord, we went all together in two speedboats to explore the beautiful waters surrounding a rocky little island. That was where we encountered the unpleasant fisherman.

He was a husky, handsome man, brown and naked except for denim trousers rolled up to his knees; not young—but a youthful fifty. His sturdy little boat was anchored in the cove where we had stopped to swim. He and his crew, three men much smaller than their captain, were ashore building a fire under a big iron kettle. The captain, a cleaver in his hand, was chopping up great hunks of fish and tossing them into the pot.

It was Eric who said why not buy fish from them, so we all swam to the beach, and Eric and I went over to discuss the matter with the fishermen. None of them acknowledged our approach. They just, in a rather eerie way, pretended we weren’t there. Finally Eric, speaking Italian, which most Yugoslavian seamen speak or understand, complimented them on their fine haul and, pointing out a particular
loup
, asked its price. The sullen captain, with a mirthless grunt, replied: “Three hundred dollars.” And he said it in English!