Enough of my rambling. You have great things to do. Mosley is staying with us. He and Diana are always after news of you. We are both struck by how well you and Goad work together — a thoroughly engaging duo. Funny the way in which things work out, isn’t it? That all of this now feels fated — that you should leave Cambridge, go out to Florence, make a man of yourself. Then — who knows? — come back and do great things for the Party at home, or fight like a lion in the war when and if it comes.
Your mother sends her love,
Your Father.
Faber & Faber
24 Russell Square,
London, WC1
23rd September, 1938
Dear Mr Lowndes –
I greatly enjoyed the draft of In Love and War that you sent me. A rather good idea to take a well-known figure like Hulme and re-tell his life as fiction. I thought you got the essential clash between his bawdiness, his brutality and his brilliance absolutely spot-on. I also very much enjoyed the way you worked his poetry, his letters, his life, into your fiction.
I would like to ask you to take another run at the passages describing his life in battle. It seems to me that these are where the novel stumbles. Ask your father — he was there with him. Read Sassoon (if you haven’t already, and your prose rather suggests you haven’t). It is a fact that whilst so many of those who know what it was like to fight in the trenches are still with us, there is something of a moral duty for the writer to convey the truth of war as clearly and cleverly as possible. It doesn’t seem to me that your novel does this.
If you are able to fix this, I should think there’s a good chance that we’d be interested in publishing. It won’t hinder things that your father’s name, and your own work on the wireless confer upon you a certain celebrity. We won’t make you rich, but Faber & Faber is a fine publishing house and we’d be very glad to have you on board.
Sincerely,
Richard de la Mare.
Via dei Forbici, 35c
Firenze
1.10.38
Dear Esmond –
It was most kind of you and Father Bailey to treat us to such an exceptionally good dinner last week. I am only sorry it has taken me such a long time to write and thank you. As you can imagine, things are rather difficult for our family at the moment. I don’t like to go into things too deeply in front of Ada (or indeed her mother, who is, as you saw, suffering from a deep sadness at the turn events have taken), but you can imagine the sense of betrayal we are feeling just now. I — who have given everything for this government, for this country — my country — and for the Fascist cause — that I should no longer be thought of as an Italian, that my passport should be confiscated and returned defiled, that La Nostra Bandiera, which has supported Il Duce for more than a decade, should be closed down — All of this seems incredible to me.
I enclose a petition signed by several of my prominent friends — you will note the first name is that of Giovanni Gentile himself — supporting my exclusion from the punitive racial laws which have so hampered my ability to continue in the service of a cause in whose integrity I continue to believe with all my heart. I acknowledge the need for the Charter of Race, given that so many of those who insist on swimming against the tide of history — the members of Giustizia e Libertà, the leaders of the Communist unions — are Jewish. It seems sensible also to deny the great blessing of Italian citizenship to the recent miscegenated product of our African adventures. But to someone like me? It is a great travesty.
As a figure in the public eye, I’d be very grateful if you would sign this petition. I have been let down by many of those I counted amongst my dearest companions, but we are lucky to live at times such as these when the bonds of friendship are put to the test and we may winnow out the lickspittles and toadies. Perhaps you’d pass it on to Father Bailey once you sign it, and ask him to send it the way of anyone else he thinks might help my cause.
I’m aware that you have been put under some pressure over Ada’s continued employment at Radio Firenze. I wanted to offer you my sincere thanks, and that of my wife. We love our daughter and know she loves working with you. See you for dinner on Wednesday as usual, I hope.
With my most cordial salutations,
Guido Liuzzi.
[Collection of invitations; visiting cards; concert, cinema and opera tickets; train tickets to Rome, Milan, Genoa and Venice; receipts for meals, hotels, taxi journeys.]
He has been on so many train journeys these past months he feels the rhythm of the shuddering carriages in the patterns of his thoughts. He suffers a kind of seasickness for the first half-hour in a new city, until he finds his land legs again. He does not see enough of Italy on these trips. Often he is taken straight from the station to some out-of-town office to meet the scions of wealthy manufacturing families, ambitious executives keen to toady to Il Duce, place a flag in the ground on Radio Firenze. Advertising money is pouring into the station, eclipsing the contributions made by the operations in Heligoland and Sark, and he and Ada open the discs each afternoon and listen to stoic men in clipped voices talk about the smooth action of their Beretta, the speed of their Romeo, the refined taste of their Martini. The next day, he is a travelling businessman — he feels modern, useful, as if he has stepped from a dream into real life.
He spends a night in a hotel in Venice overlooking the Piazza San Marco. The city is more ornate, more oriental than Florence, the squares wider and suffused with grey light. It seems to him a more naturally Fascist environment. His taxi driver points out the balcony from which Mussolini and Hitler addressed the crowds when they met there in ’34. He is appalled by the stench of the canals. He meets a girl at the foot of the Torre dell’Orologio and takes her back to his hotel. He is surprised when, in the morning, she wants paying.
He finds an England in the landscape. Looking out of the window of the train as he crosses the Po Valley, he sees a coppice of oak and elder that might have been a hillside in Ellesmere. He is reading War and Peace, falling in love with Andrei and Natasha in equal measure, but he thinks of England. And the streets of Milan and Turin are as dull as those of London, the people of those busy northern cities as lost in their own affairs, in their own hurried footsteps and urban anxieties.
Whenever he returns to Florence, making his way by foot down the via Tornabuoni and over the Ponte Santa Trinità to the gate of St Mark’s, it feels like home.
Roma Reial Hotel, Barcelona
4/11/38
Dearest Es –
Everything’s buggered. I’m in Barcelona, looking down over the Plaça Reial. Bloody rain gushing onto the cobblestones, turning lanes into mud, splashing up and soaking the few miserable creatures out there pushing half-empty carts up to the Ramblas markets. Above the noise of the rain on the roof I can hear the shells to the south of the city, guns in the hills. Place I’m in used to be a hotel, but there’s no bed, nothing in the room but dust, my few books, my revolver, a blanket. I’m hungry and we’re all bloody buggered.
That sod Chamberlain’s to blame. We all had so much hope. We were cheering Hitler on during the Sudeten Crisis, applauding every act of violence, every ultimatum ignored. We thought, you see, that it’d lead to an alliance against Fascism: the Russians, the Brits and the French. Even the Americans, perhaps. That as Hitler pushed things further and further, the democratic powers (well, and Stalin) would see Fascism for the evil it is (sorry, Es, but there you have it). They’d turn not only on Hitler, but on Franco, Mussolini, Horthy — the whole dark stain wiped from the map. And before you brace yourself for a wiping, take a good look in the mirror. You’re no more a Fascist than I am. Anyone who’s had his cock in my mouth automatically unsubscribes himself from the Fascist Cause. It’s one of life’s little rules.