Images and Shadows Read online

  IMAGES

  and

  SHADOWS

  Part of a Life

  Iris Origo

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  To Antonio

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  1: Westbrook

  2: Desart Court

  3: My Father

  4: My Mother

  PART TWO

  5: Childhood at Fiesole

  6: Reading and Learning

  7: Growing up and Coming out

  8: Writing

  PART THREE

  9: La Foce

  Epilogue

  Index

  About the Publisher

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Behold! human beings living in an underground den which has a mouth open towards the light … here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

  I see.

  And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? …

  You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

  Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.

  True, he said …

  To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images …

  And now look again, and see what will naturally follow, if the prisoners are released …

  At first when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up … When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled … he will require to grow accustomed to the sight of the upper world. At first he will see shadows best, next the reflections of men and other objects in the water, and then the objects themselves; then he will gaze upon the light of the moon and the stars and the spangled heaven …

  Last of all he will be able to see the sun.

  PLATO: The Republic, VII, 3rd edn. (1888)

  trs. Benjamin Jowett

  Introduction

  De temps à autre, on est soi, un instant.

  PÈRE BOULOGNE

  It has sometimes been pointed out to me that I have had a very varied and interesting life, have lived in some extremely beautiful places and have met some remarkable people. I suppose it is true, but now that I have reached ‘the end game’, I do not find myself dwelling upon these pieces on the board. The figures that still stand out there now are the people to whom, in different ways and in different degrees, I have been bound by affection. Not only are they the people whom I most vividly remember, but I realise that it is only through them that I have learned anything about life at all. The brilliant talk I heard at I Tatti in my youth, in Bloomsbury in the thirties, in New York and Rome in later years, has lost some of its glitter. I was tipped, as Desmond MacCarthy once remarked about Santayana’s writings, ‘with fairy gold’. All that is left to me of my past life that has not faded into mist has passed through the filter, not of my mind, but of my affections. What was not warmed by them is now for me as if it had never been.

  One consequence of this is that—since the people who have touched my heart have belonged to different countries, as well as to very different backgrounds—I have been able to participate vicariously in some aspects of life beyond the field of my own personal experience: to catch a glimpse, as it were, of worlds seen through the peep-hole of someone else’s stage. But equally many other worlds have remained closed to me. Because, for instance, I never happened to have in my youth an intimate friend in France or Germany—not even a French or German governess to whom I was particularly attached—I know no more about those countries than what has been told me by books or by my eyes. On the other hand my affection for the gentle, courageous woman who was my first Italian teacher, Signora Signorini, and later on, for the fiery genial professore with whom I first read Homer and Virgil, acquainted me once for all and from within with the life of the educated Tuscan borghesia—a world whose values, at the time of my childhood, were still those of De Amicis’ Cuore. And equally it was my love for my grandfather, Lord Desart, which bestowed on me the flavour of life as it used to be in the Irish country house in which I spent my summer holidays—a world of blue distances and infinite leisure and ease, flavoured with the scent of sweet peas and the crisp clear taste of red currants, in which the doors were always open to children, dogs, and neighbours, and I would jog on my pony with my grandfather from cottage to farm, or down the green rides in the beech woods, where one might see, in the early morning, a vixen and her cubs slinking away through the tall grass.

  Why then am I writing this book at all, and what sort of book would I like it to be? Desmond MacCarthy once remarked, at Mr. Asquith’s breakfast table, that there are only three motives for writing an autobiography: St. Augustine’s, Casanova’s or Rousseau’s—“either because a man thinks he has found ‘The Way’, or to tell what a splendid time he has had, and enjoy it again by describing it, or to show—well, that he was a much better fellow than the world supposed.” “I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Mr. Asquith, who was cutting himself a slice of ham. “That is just what I am trying to do.”

  Few books, in point of fact, could less resemble Rousseau’s Confessions than Asquith’s Memories and Reflections, and this leads one to wonder whether anyone who sets down his reminiscences ends up by producing quite the book he had in mind. In my case, I must humbly disclaim all three motives. I have no wish (even if I had the matter) to convert, to reveal or to confess. I am only trying to set down a fragmentary account of what it has been like to live in three totally distinct periods of civilisation: first briefly, and partly through hearsay, in the pre-war world of 1914; then in the world between two wars; and finally in the present time, which is so rapidly taking on new shapes both intellectually and materially, that I have found myself unwillingly becoming, in some aspects at least, a spectator rather than a participator. This record will not try to be complete or even chronological; it is merely an attempt to describe certain past ways of living, and a few phases of my own life, taking as my starting point the various houses I have lived in: the country houses of my grandparents both in the United States and Ireland, and the life which they led there long before I was born, and which later on I shared with them; then my mother’s house in Fiesole, where I spent my childhood; and finally the Tuscan villa and farm, La Foce, which—after so many years in other people’s houses and atmospheres—has been, for the forty-six years since my marriage, my own home.

  During those years, there were also many aspects of my life not centred upon La Foce, which I have not dwelled on here. There were long periods spent by me in England or America, and a few vital personal relationships irrelevant to the course of this story; and there were also many long journeys with my husband—to Mexico and Yucatan, to Guatemala and the Caribbean, to Egypt and Greece, to Southern India, Thailand and Angkor—all delightful and exciting to us, but, by the standards of present-day travel, which has left no South Sea island unexplored, no primitive tribe unphotographed, very small beer.

  One advantage of all these changes of scene, or perhaps merely of my own temperament, is that I have never in my life found a day too long. “I am blessed,
” the much-loved Bostonian writer and editor, Mark Howe, was heard to mutter in his old age, “blessed and bored”—but this, as yet at least, I have never known. On the other hand, I have also never known the unquestioning security of background of my grandparents’ generation, and this perhaps has also contributed, as for many others of my generation, to the difficulty of holding to a stable faith. Too much has been put before us, too much! Too much destruction and change, too many trends in spiritual leadership, too many new fields of discovery and awareness.

  Most of these experiences I share, of course, with many others, and I certainly do not think that the things that have happened to me are important, except to myself. But also I believe that every life, irrespective of its events and setting, holds something of unique value, which it should be possible to communicate, if only one can first see one’s experiences honestly and then set them down without too much dressing-up. This is, I suppose, what is meant by the conventional remark about first novels, that all men have at least one book in them. I myself was never tempted to write that book in my youth, chiefly owing to a lack of self-confidence, and it may have been for a similar reason that, when I first began to write for publication, the field I chose was that of biography. It is safer to write about other people than about oneself, and easier (or so I then thought) to shape their lives into a harmonious, consistent pattern. It was only when I began to examine my subjects more closely that I realised that the process was somewhat more complex than I had thought, that it was nearly as difficult to set down the truth about other people as about oneself, and very tempting to rely upon the biographers and critics who had preceded one. It was only after a good many years that I began to wish, and dare, to speak for myself. I then became aware of how much in my earlier books—except for War in Val d’Orcia which was not originally written for publication—had been, not insincere, but second-hand. This book is an attempt, very late in the day, to do something different: to record a few of the things that have happened to myself and to speak, at the risk of speaking flatly, in my own voice: to speak, at last, my mind.

  But not my whole mind—not even if I could. There are, of course, dangers familiar to every biographer, that arise as soon as one begins to select, difficulties of which I once spoke in a lecture entitled Biography—True and False. I called them ‘the seductive tricks of the trade … the smoothing-out and the touching-up. In the end a portrait is built up: slick, vivid, convincing—and false.’ And even greater temptations confront the painter of a self-portrait. Not only is it difficult not to distort by framing a perspective or gilding a picture, but also to prevent self-awareness from turning into self-consciousness. Sir Herbert Read once rightly said in a review of Rilke’s Letters that one is never sure that one is listening to ‘the true voice’, whereas no such doubt ever crosses one’s mind, for instance, in reading those of Keats.

  Nevertheless, selection is necessary. ‘Le secret d’ennuyer est celui de tout dire.’ There are also considerations of reticence and taste, and most of all, a realisation that every human life is at once so complex and so simple, so perplexing and so clear, so superficial and so profound, that any attempt to present it as a unified, consistent whole, to enclose it within a rigid frame, inevitably tempts one to cheat or to falsify. ‘I am always astounded to see’, wrote Pasternak in an unpublished letter, ‘that what is laid down, ordered, factual, is never enough to embrace the whole truth, that life always brims over the rim of every vessel.’ It is partly for this reason and also because no part of one’s life is more complex, as well as more private, than one’s family life and the emotions it arouses that I have written so little in this book about either my marriage or my children. Tolstoy’s famous sentence is far too great a simplification: not only unhappy but happy families are serene or troubled not in one, but in innumerable different ways. I am always amazed when I hear people talking about other people’s marriages: “This was his fault, that was her fault.” How can they think they know? Have they never considered their own marriages and how much, in even the happiest unions, remains unknown to each of us about the other? We are all not islands but icebergs, more than half under water. What husbands and wives do know, after many years of living together, is surely not acquired through any process of the mind, but rather through a kind of symbiosis, a slow assimilation of one nature into another, so that, as in the tale of Philemon and Baucis, the branches of two plants, however different their original roots, become slowly, inextricably intertwined to form a single tree.

  As to one’s children and grandchildren, someone once remarked to me that over every nursery door should be written: ‘This too will pass.’ These words do not apply only to measles and mumps, to tantrums and growing-pains, but also, unfortunately, to that idyllic stage of early childhood in which wonder and trust are the first windows opening upon the world, in which the kindness and wisdom of one’s parents are as boundless as the universe, in which one knows absolute joy and absolute security. When the reaction comes and (swiftly or gradually, according to individual character and circumstances) the umbilical cord is cut, the suffering of the child—since it is accompanied by the adventure of discovery and the acquisition of freedom—is inevitably less than that of the parent. This has been true in all periods; not, as each generation of parents likes to think, only in its own. ‘Love is presently out of Breath’, wrote Lord Halifax, ‘when it has to go up Hill, from the Children to the Parents.’ The Japanese, according to C. P. Snow, have an especial name for describing this stage of a parent’s love: they call it ‘a darkness of the heart’.

  Then, as the children grow up to find partners and have children of their own, new complexities creep in; not only the impact of another family, another nucleus, of different traditions and divided loyalties, but also, inevitably, new standards and values and the rejection of the old. Yet there may also sometimes be, for the fortunate, a new drawing together, in an understanding that does not need to be expressed: the mutual enjoyment of a child’s remark, the eye caught across the table in the presence of strangers, the tacit understanding and trust (in spite of waves of worry, irritation or claustrophobia). And another change, too, sometimes takes place: whereas in childhood (how long ago!) it was the parents’ judgement that mattered to the child, later on the situation becomes reversed: it is then that the opinions of one’s grown-up children become what matters, as well as their kindness.

  At the time of the marriage of one of my daughters I drew up for myself a ‘Decalogue for Mothers-in-law’:

  Don’t ask all the questions.

  Don’t know all the answers.

  Don’t hurry.

  Don’t worry.

  Don’t probe.

  Don’t pry.

  Don’t linger.

  Don’t interfere.

  Don’t compare—or at least don’t complain.

  Don’t try too hard.

  These precepts, of which the last is the most important, were not, I need hardly say, all kept.

  Yet what a strange thing it is, this family bond, with its tugs and withdrawals, its irritations and comprehensions, its ebbs and flows, an affection constantly changing, sometimes fading, never wholly destroyed. With grandchildren, it is all easier. Here the bond, however dear, is at one remove and so can be an almost unmixed, if cooler, joy. In this I have been singularly fortunate, both in the closeness of my own friendship as a child with my English grandfather, in particular, and now with some of my grandchildren, who have bestowed upon me the happiest hours of my old age. With them I have sometimes had a sense of turning back the leaves and living over again my relationship with my own grandfather: a similar frictionless ease, due to the absence of final responsibility, a similar leap over a gulf of sixty years and, for myself at least, a similar enrichment.

  I am aware that this book appears to show a considerable detachment from public affairs, but this is partly due to my disinclination to write about the long years of Fascism, during which I learned to hold my tongue and preser
ve my own convictions, especially during the last few years before the entry of Italy into what Churchill himself, in retrospect, called ‘The Unnecessary War’. Just as I do not think that one is likely to write a good biography unless one feels some sympathy with its subject, so I doubt whether much is to be gained by dwelling on those periods of one’s life of which the dominant flavour, in recollection, is distaste. Times of grief, hardship or danger may all be fruitful, but not a reluctant acceptance of events in which one could play no part.

  By this I do not mean to suggest that from the first I realised to the full the implications of the rise of Fascism. During the growth of the new regime which followed upon the years of isolation in my mother’s ivory tower at the top of the Fiesole hill, and coincided with the time of my own engagement and marriage, my adaptation to an entirely new way of life upon our Tuscan farm, and the birth and death of my first child—I was as self-absorbed as many another ill-informed young woman, taken up wholly by my own personal life and insulated to a degree which now seems to me very odd from what was happening outside it. I felt an instinctive dislike for a few external aspects of the new order which I could hardly fail to observe: the truculent manners and boastful speech inculcated into a naturally courteous and moderate people, and the cult of rhetoric and violence. But—having as yet no political opinions of my own and being still very conscious of my foreign origins—I did not feel justified in criticising events of which I did not fully understand the cause, and I therefore took refuge in the blank vagueness of a young woman uninterested in public affairs—an attitude which was considered quite natural.

  Even when the evidence of both my eyes and ears gradually made me begin to realise what was happening, I was still isolated, by the circumstances of my daily life, from much direct contact with the political life of our time, and I do not think that there is much value in second-hand accounts of events in which one was not either a direct participant or a very acute observer. Both my husband’s life and my own were centred upon our Tuscan farm, La Foce, where our work—as I shall describe—brought us into contact with one of the most constructive aspects of Fascism and with some of its most sincere adherents, but otherwise we remained cut off from the main course of Italian political life. (In this independence, of course, we were singularly fortunate.)