Esmond stops and sighs again. It is seven in the morning. He stands, stretches and looks out for a moment onto the piazza below. He turns out his desk light and shuts the door of the studio.
Suico Atlantico Hotel, Lisbon
15/4/38
Dearest Es –
I wonder if you’d given up on me? There is, I understand, a small mountain of unopened mail waiting for me in Praterstraße; whether some are yours or not I don’t know. The house is being looked after by our neighbours, although the downstairs windows have been broken and the statues in the garden smashed. The last letter I read was from early in your Florentine days. You sounded miserable. I do hope things have improved. I’m sorry I didn’t write back — I’ve always been a dreadful correspondent.
Mutti and papa left for Lisbon two weeks ago. They’d been in Switzerland waiting to see which way the wind would blow. It’s one thing you can say for papa — he’s careful. Moving out of Leopoldstadt was my own concession to caution. I bunked up with Charlie Campbell — do you remember him from Emmanuel? He’s over on some sort of exchange programme teaching papyrology at the university. Put me up in his drawing room. Jolly decent of him. I earned my keep by bowling leg-breaks at him in the corridors of the Faculty of Ancient History. At least I took something from my time in England. I think I loved cricket almost as much as I loved you. Helps keep off the Kummerspeck too!
We told everyone that I was a cousin of Charlie’s over from the UK. I wore his clothes, spoke bad German with an English accent, ordered my tea with milk. But when the worm von Schuschnigg rolled over, and the true extent of the whole Heim ins Reich thing came out, it began to get hot. I left Vienna at night, wrapped in Charlie’s ulster, three days after the Anschluß. I took the train to Innsbruck where I fell in with a gang of Jewish students with pretty much the same idea — escape, get away from that vile little man, his swarm of vile little men. I followed my parents to Lisbon. There were people on the border — not good people, no one I could see doing it for anything but money — and they ferried us across. A week in St Gallen, then Geneva, then a night train to Genoa.
Can’t tell you how much it bucked me up just to be in the same country as you. I even dreamed, for a moment, of hopping off in Milan, taking a train for Florence and turning up on your doorstep. If only to see your face. But that hereditary caution …
It feels like things are rushing towards a ghastly end, as if everything is coming apart like something from Yeats. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’ That was it, wasn’t it? I watched those violent men on the streets of Vienna, ugly snarls on their faces, and I knew that no good would come of Europe, that we are entering the new Dark Age, and those who would live must flee.
Another quote kept coming to me on the train, and then on the boat from Genoa to Lisbon. It’s Shelley — I think from his Defence of Poetry, but I don’t have my books with me — ‘A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.’ This is what we’ve lost, our empathy. The Germans used to have it — Hölderlin had it, and Goethe and Rilke. But they don’t any more. Poets still have it — Auden does, and Spender, I think. Whatever you lose out there in Florence, Es, keep that. And for God’s sake put it into your writing.
Now the last, rather embarrassing thing. My parents are nowhere to be seen here. Presume they’ve hot-footed it to New York already. But I was rather relying on them for funds. While I was waiting for the clipper to New York, I met a Portuguese sailor in the Barrio Alto. I know, I know, but Lisbon is a rather thrilling place. You’d adore it here. I woke to find my watch and wallet missing. He left me a handful of escudos on the chair but they won’t get me far. I wonder if you could wire me a few quid, just to see me through until the boat leaves. In my name to the Central Lisbon Post Office, if you don’t mind.
You’re a good man, Es. I’ll always think awfully well of the time we spent together.
Philip.
L’Ombrellino
Piazza di Bellosguardo
Firenze
28/4/38
Would you like to come for dinner on the 3rd? Just a few of the old-timers. You might come and bathe beforehand. Bring Bailey.
Alice Keppel.
Telegram: 2/5/38
Money received with thanks STOP Far too generous STOP Actually now not going to States at all STOP Will join Charlie in Valencia STOP Always fancied fighting the good fight STOP Come and join us STOP Viva las Brigadas Internacionales STOP Philip
[Selection of twenty-first birthday cards, postal orders, a copy of Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, a fountain pen.]
He hasn’t told Goad, or Bailey or Ada that it’s his birthday. It’s past eleven and he’s sitting in the bar of the Excelsior, drunk. He orders a gin fizz and goes to the lavatory where he urinates down the front of his trousers, singing ‘Domum’ to himself tunelessly. At the bar, he orders another drink and slumps on the stool. Despite the broadcasts, the money, the novel finally finished and typed up and sent off to Faber, he doesn’t feel he’s made a success of anything in Florence. And yet, he thinks, if he’d been offered this a year and a half ago in Shropshire — to be running the radio station, hosting vibrant cultural discussions with Ezra Pound and Bernard Berenson, invited to parties at Renaissance palaces in the hills of Fiesole — he’d have fainted. It’s partly that his expectations move several steps ahead of the events of his life — Goad smiles expectantly at him at the end of every broadcast and the face he returns grows ever more heedful and resigned, as if to say they could do so much better if only they had better equipment, more staff, more luminous interviewees — and partly that he’s different now: he walks a little slower, talks more carefully, drifts away during most of the Fascist broadcasts and looks towards the window.
Welsh Frankton,
Shropshire.
1st June.
Dear Esmond,
I was delighted with your letter, as was your mother. It seems extraordinary to us, marooned as we are out here in the wastes, that our son should be at the very centre of things, hobnobbing with world leaders. We listened to your programme on Manzoni’s The Betrothed with great interest in the library this evening. Difficult stuff! Pavolini sounds a good sort — well done for getting him on. I understand that he has Il Duce’s ear, quite the coming man of Italian politics.
Great sense of relief that the problems in Czechoslovakia appear to have been resolved. Hitler perhaps not as bellicose as we had feared. Glad also that Chamberlain was so swift to bat down any talk of cosying up to the Russians. They’re the real enemy: remember that.
Good work on the latest instalment of advertising money. Be assured that it’s being wisely invested in the future of this great country.
Your mother sends her love,
Your Father.
P.S. I saw Pound in London — he’s barking but seems to have enjoyed your meeting. When do we hear the recording you made with him?
[Selection of letters and telegrams from: Birra Moretti, Wilier Triestina, Snia-Viscosa, Beretta, Danieli, De Agostini, La Stampa, Martini & Rossi, Romeo Motron. All confirm advertising subscription to Radio Firenze at the new rate of 1,000 lire per three-minute window.]