A Room in Rome

There are some books that you know are awful the moment you begin reading, but others whose awfulness creeps up on you, opening gradually in other words like some vaguely threatening tropical orchid. Many years ago I bought A Room in Rome, by the late Vera Cacciatore, sometime curator of the Keats–Shelley Memorial House in the Piazza di Spagna in Rome. This slim volume was evidently translated from the original Italian, C’era una stanza a Roma (1970), very probably by the author herself. It was not until I reached about page 9, on the train to Naples, that I realized I had chanced upon something special. The book begins innocuously enough:

The room in Rome is the room of John Keats. Though he lived in it for only three and a half months, from November 1820 to February 1821—it is still his room, the room of John Keats.

One can forgive, even celebrate, an opening flourish of this kind, involving a novel fusion of anaphora, epistrophe, and anadiplosis, even when it is immediately followed by:

This continuity evinces the magic and strength of Poetry, a proof that the past is always present and ready for a future and that the peculiarity of poetry is to transmute suffering into rest, fear into charm, the vagueness and shapelessness of desire into the ripeness of fulfillment.

However, when eventually I reached page 32, I had to conclude that Signora Cacciatore was laboring under the influence of mind-altering drugs—either in the composition phase, or whilst producing the translation, perhaps both. There is simply no other explanation:

He could not hear Fanny’s name uttered; he could not see Fanny Brawne’s name written. For a poet, the name is a spell. The name frees. The name is a handle to grasp. It is an object without weight; it is a form without an object. To see her name written would be more than I can bear. For a poet, the name is a noose too, the name ensnares, the name imprisons.

Likewise:

Shelley was very fond of Allegra, and, a fortnight after her death, as he was walking with his friend Edward Williams on the terrace of Casa Magni, he saw a naked child, a child very like Allegra, rise up from the sea, clapping her hands at him as if in joy. He often saw Allegra rising out of the sea in the moonlight and: “There it is again, there…” he would cry. Not only that: once he met the figure of himself walking on the terrace and the phantasm asked: “How long do you mean to be content?” Mary, his wife, thought them dreams, but Shelley would have none of it; he could not be persuaded that they were not walking visions. As a child, he was called mad Shelley…

The second half of the book is a selection of little snippets from the letters of Keats, entitled “When I am in a Room,” but here one misses Signora Cacciatore’s critical commentary, her gift for phrases that roll off the tongue like a brick, and a knack for conjuring images that linger in the mind long afterwards like marsh gas. That said, I have over the years become rather fond of Signora Cacciatore, and wish I could have had the opportunity to meet her in person. It was never to be. To me she will have to remain a name, a spell, a noose, a handle to grasp, or a form without an object.

SS. Quattro Coronati

The year I lived in Rome was one of the happiest and most adventurous of my life. I was not yet twenty-two when I arrived in the fall of 1986, armed with a trio of scholarships and a letter of introduction to the ancient Professor Richard Krautheimer who graciously allowed me to get a reader’s ticket at the Bibliotheca Hertziana over which he still presided in the Palazzo Zuccari at the top of the Spanish Steps. There I spent many sunny mornings reading my way into an impenetrable thicket, trying with minimal resources but much ambition to make sense of the Tavolette di San Bernardino at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia. That group of panels I first knew in the somewhat unpromising form of several dusty old Arundel Society prints that hung in the corridor outside the office of the Warden of Trinity, the late and much lamented Evan Laurie Burge. The problem I set for myself was to come up with a hypothesis about the sequence in which the panels were originally installed in the Augustinian oratory for which they were intended; figure out what they meant; and who painted them. Essentially I failed in all three endeavors, but it was heaven. I had a job answering the telephone for the Ladies of Bethany, an order of Dutch nuns of whom only two elderly members remained en poste, living in considerable splendor in a very large apartment on the top floor of the Collegio Innocenziano in the Via di Sta. Maria dell’Anima, overlooking the Piazza Navona. And I enrolled as a part-time student of Latin at the Pontifica Universitas Gregoriana. It sounds busier than it actually was, because as far as I can remember I spent most of my time exploring the churches of Rome, of which there is a limitless supply, and in every one of which there is an abundance of treasure.

One of my favourite places, because of its scarcely conceivable antiquity, was the fortified monastery of SS. Quattro Coronati, which is tucked along an almost bucolic uphill lane just behind the Colosseum. In that complex, then and still now occupied by an enclosed order of especially ferocious nuns, the small chapel of S. Silvestro contains a cycle of early thirteenth-century frescoes depicting scenes from the lives of Pope Sylvester and the Emperor Constantine the Great. What is so fascinating about this monument is that, not surprisingly because of earthquakes, the frescoes were at intervals heavily restored (most recently towards the end of the nineteenth century), but evidently restored in the certain belief that the original paintings were far, far cruder in execution than was actually the case, and in conformity to the view that before Pietro Cavallino Roman painting of the dugento amounted to nothing. If there is one monument that should teach caution to those of us who concern ourselves with the repair and restoration of damaged works of art, it is the fresco cycle of S. Silvestro at SS. Quattro Coronati. However, we did not know this when I first knew S. Silvestro, because the art historian Andreina Draghi had not yet re-discovered an astounding further fresco program elsewhere in the same complex, in the aula gotica upstairs, that also dates from the early thirteenth century. This happened in 2002. That lost cycle was entirely covered with plaster probably at around the time of the Black Death around 1348 or 1349, presumably in a desperately prophylactic but useless gesture of penitence—which nevertheless and, at length, fortunately insured that many of the frescos have been preserved in almost pristine condition. The monument is a revelation, and shines entirely new light upon the artistic milieux of medieval Rome, far, far less like something out of the Flintstones than we previously assumed. These airy frescoes let us see as never before what early thirteenth-century Roman painters were capable of. They are amazing: subtle, intensely colored, brimming with life, energy, even choreography. And, equally remarkable, they are secular, a scheme of Twelve Months (May is illustrated here), representations of the Liberal Arts, the Four Seasons, and of the Zodiac—a kind of temporal pendant or counterpoint to the ecclesiological cycle that lurks underneath the crude reconstructions in the chapel of S. Silvestro downstairs. Thank goodness Professor Draghi was allowed to reveal and conserve these lost paintings in the Gothic hall, and to photograph and publish them in sumptuous detail, because those wretched sisters will not allow them to be seen by any visitors at all because of the strictly enclosed state of their order. Nevertheless the work that Professor Draghi has done now lets us see beyond the gluggy restorations, and hazard a guess at what S. Silvestro might once have looked like.

Letter from Montréal

Some weeks ago I visited my friend Leideke Galema, a Dutch nun (left) who lives in comfortable retirement on the outskirts of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands. I first knew Miss Galema years ago when, living in the belfry of the church of S. Agnese in Agone on the Piazza Navona in Rome, she and her co-religious Miss Josefa Koet (right) hired me as a general dog’s body, telephone answerer, plant-waterer, and errand-runner. It was heaven.

Miss Koet died not long ago, but Miss Galema is thriving. She met me at the little railway halt, in the middle of open fields, and we walked in the drizzle through the village to her charming villa. It was once used as a boarding school for the children of Rhine barge captains; the river is less than a kilometer away.

Right across the road is the convent where Leideke boarded during the war. She was sent there after the English teacher at her previous school in The Hague made off with the best friend of his own daughter, a classmate of Leideke’s. ‘We were only fifteen,’ she says, with a look.

Following the terrible Battle of Arnhem in September 1944, her present home was co-opted by the British army as a temporary palais de justice. The local Nazis were rounded up, and thrown in the cellar. Leideke tells me this with relish, as if there are a few of them still down there.

I went to Amsterdam as a courier, escorting to the Van Gogh Museum our very large painting of the celebrated Dutch-Cherokee lion tamer of Boston and Hartlepool Mr. Isaac van Amburgh, by Sir Edwin Landseer.

In the freight warehouse at Schiphol, the crate and I were temporarily stored in a secure spot near the diplomatic pouches. India’s are dark green, rather smart; the United Arab Emirates and France had mountains of them, but I looked in vain for ours.

While we were waiting for the forklift man, an otherwise innocuous-looking stack of twenty or so little wooden boxes was loaded into the back of a heavily guarded van, rather more strenuously than seemed necessary. What is shaped like a box of tissues, weighs a ton, and clinks dully? When the vehicle visibly sank down on its haunches, I realized we were looking at a shipment of gold bullion.

There is only one thing more spine-chilling than the air temperature after a Canadian blizzard, and that is standing outside the Hôtel de Ville in Montréal, looking at the St. Lawrence River: mighty, choppy, slate grey, and lethally fast-flowing. Thank goodness I am standing beside Florent the farmer, a human windbreak.

It seems incredible that the original settlers decided to stay on after the first winter (1642/43). Driven by necessity, and by an amusing mental picture of burly French-speaking Hudson’s Bay fur trappers paddling past moose, Iroquois and redcoats, I head straight to the firm of Henri & Henri, fourrières, in the rue Sainte-Cathérine est, and buy myself a slinky beaver hat. In this weather, fake fur does not cut the mustard.

Florent tells me my beaver looks ridiculous, and no doubt people in warmer climes will want to throw paint at it, but these are not moments for hesitation: I must have furry ear-flaps, and I must have them now.

Which reminds me, not long ago I examined a new acquisition in our rare books department, the 1914 illustrated trade catalogue of Winsor & Newton Ltd., Manufacturing Artists’ Colourmen. I was immediately intrigued by the off-printed testimonials glued opposite the relevant product, one of which is a pungent relic of empire.

On October 29, 1911, only a month before setting off for the South Pole by sledge, Dr. Edward A. Wilson, the universally liked “Uncle Bill” of Scott’s doomed five-man polar party on the British Antarctic Expedition, wrote from the Terra Nova at Cape Evans in McMurdo Sound, reporting that Winsor & Newton watercolours and papers had demonstrated remarkable stability in the extreme cold. Although the letter is here reproduced in facsimile, I wonder if it has ever found its way into the Scott literature.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the Melbourne artist E. J. Shearsby of 66 Tivoli Road, South Yarra, wrote:

You will no doubt be interested to know that whilst on a sketching tour in Gippsland (Victoria) two years ago, I had a large surplus of your Flake White on my palette at the completion of a day’s work, and, with the aid of my palette knife, applied it to the surface of a fallen tree, which was minus its bark. Last month I paid another visit to the locality and have had an opportunity of comparing the paint with some fresh from the tube, and find it has not discoloured in the slightest. This proof of permanency is of importance in itself, but when I add that the paint has been fully exposed to Australia’s summer sun for two years, and the tree lies on marshy land, and had for several days of each winter been submerged by the overflow of the River Latrobe [sic], these facts are worthy of record and speak well for the purity and permanency of your Flake White.

Québecois say some very strange things in their version of French. A senior colleague of mine remembers a man behind the counter in a Montréal bookshop apologizing for keeping her waiting because, he explained, he was ‘sur le téléphone’ – a phrase impossible to formulate unless you had thought of it first in English. Sure enough, I hear it too in a café called Schwartz’s, where I exchange occasional monosyllables with Florent the farmer, and then again shopping for CD oddities in the enormous music store called Archimbault.

Carriages on the Montréal Métro have rubber tyres as in Paris, while the names of stations are fantastically mixed: Champ-de-Mars, Peel, Verdun, Namur, Pie IX, Square Victoria, Côtes-des-Neiges.

The portrait of the Queen on the new money is surprisingly good.

The memorial to Lord Nelson is a statue on a column. It went up in 1808, carries a long inscription in English, and was paid for by public subscription. Everywhere there are similarly post-imperial vibrations.

A melancholy moment in the biting tundra of the car park at Pierre Trudeau International Airport; a long embrace—rocking gently back and forth, crunching the snow—and then goodbye to Florent the farmer, with his beautiful arms, arctic ear-muffs, and the Toyota pick-up he’s driving home to Trois Pistoles, Québec.