FORTY-FOUR
A few years ago the BBC wondered if I would do a program on the American South and its families. Incidentally it is only British television that wants to do interesting projects on our native land: with few exceptions, the home team deals only in entertainers if, of course, they can be guaranteed not to entertain. Someone had noticed that although the WASPs are in themselves a small minority in the South they compensate for their fewness in numbers by their webs of cousinage in families which go back to the 1600s like my grandmother Gore, a Kay from South Carolina whose family had emigrated from Bury in Lancashire in the eighteenth century. Since there were so few British settlers in the Southern states there was not much of anyone for these immigrants to marry so they kept marrying into the same families. I have never been able to remember what relation I am to Albert Gore Junior even though his father, a Tennessee senator, once explained it to me on television in San Francisco (no, I don’t recall what he said but he did say that had I been elected to Congress in 1960 “our relationship would have been much closer,” which perhaps says it all).
Once a year the Gores hold a family reunion in northern Mississippi which I eventually attended in the interest of a documentary on me rather than on that white Anglo-Saxon enclave in the Southern states, a project abandoned because the BBC did not want to get involved in the business of race or, as my grandmother Gore liked to say, if any descendant of mine should marry someone colored I’ll come back and haunt ’em. When I was grown I liked to tease her with the knowledge that our blood had been commingled with that of the other race ever since the country began; she would then simply change the subject and complain about how the Civil War was the vengeance of God on a generation of Southern boys who preferred shooting and hunting to going to school. The producers had also been put off by Jimmy Carter himself who had thought the program was to be about me when the subject was about kin and all of us. I had of course sent him a telegram after his disastrous intervention with helicopters in Iran during the hostage crisis, reminding him that honor required his resignation for having disgraced the country. Had he perhaps taken my censure amiss?
Finally, he and I do share a most distinguished ancestor, John Kay of Bury (1733–1764). According to the Dictionary of National Biography, “Kay’s improvements in machinery for weaving continue in use to the present day” (the Flying Shuttle). He was the founder of the first great improvements in the manufacture of cloth by which employment is now given to hundreds of thousands of people while in 1760 his son Robert invented the shuttle drop box. I fear that neither Jimmy nor I have ever lived up to our brilliant heritage.
FORTY-FIVE
As I now pack up the books and pictures that Howard and I acquired at La Rondinaia since we moved in thirty-three years ago I keep thinking of my one conversation with John Steinbeck at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. We were both talking about houses and the urge to put down roots “for good.” I’d just got Edgewater on the Hudson. I could not imagine wanting to live anyplace else. Yes, summers were too hot and winters too cold but it was a perfect house in so many ways. I suspect that it really was what I’d always wanted and that is why I still dream that I have somehow got it back and am moving back in again and, of course, Howard is still alive. Steinbeck was of the same mind. He said, “How many times I’ve settled somewhere for good and never wanted to leave until the inevitable day comes when I move on and the place is emptying out and we are suddenly all gone and living in a new place.” As I write this, I am getting ready to move on and a third of my life is being packed up and I am again transient—neither here nor there. These rehearsals for death take more and more out of one until at the end there is, I suspect, nothing at all left except Howard’s old dressing gown hanging on the back of his bathroom door, a refuge for moths, which Rita maintains are fireflies on the ground that I could not know the difference.
Here I am packing up some pictures and 8,000 books, the end of an era for me on the Amalfi coast, ready to face the future in the Hollywood Hills with a new knee made of titanium.
FORTY-SIX
A television crew has come and gone. There is to be a program on Italo Calvino, the first in Italy. So we go into the salone and eerily the camera is set up on the exact spot where he and his wife, Chichita, sat at dinner on the day that I was made an honorary citizen of Ravello. There had been music in the piazza. From Rome had come the Calvinos, Luigi Barzini, the critic Alberto Arbasino. Speeches were made. Barzini nicely compared me to Marion Crawford, an American novelist who had lived up the coast at Sorrento and whose house by the sea had been envied by Henry James who did not in the least envy Crawford’s worldly novels. A year or so later I was to preside over the transformation of the Crawford villa into a museum by zealous admirers from the University of Naples. Each Italian village seems to have a tutelary foreign writer in place. Capri is celebrated for Norman Douglas whose family, though from Scotland, had lived in the mountains above Feldkirch while he himself was associated with the Amalfi coast or Siren Land as he called it and, finally, Capri. I had a number of occasions to meet the old man who was supported by an admirer, Kenneth Macpherson; then one day they were all gone. Graham Greene lived at Annacapri on the top of the hill. Occasionally he would ring me and I’d ask him to stay in Ravello on his way to his Capri house but he would always become oddly coy: “You see I am traveling with an old friend to whom I am not married and there are those who object to this sort of irregular relationship.” I told him that I was not an objector but we never saw him in Ravello nor he us on Capri. But he and I saw a great deal of each other in Moscow when Gorbachev held an antinuclear meeting in the Kremlin for well-wishers of his glasnost and perestroika. Graham spoke for culture, a perfect fifteen-minute speech without a note. When, admiringly, I remarked on this to Norman Mailer, he said, “Every Englishman can talk for fifteen minutes on any subject without a note.” It was on this trip that Greene got to see the spy Philby again and came to the conclusion that not only was Gorbachev going to rid us of the cold war but that only the KGB, from which he came, was sufficiently educated and competent to govern the post-Soviet nation. All in all, Graham proved a fairly competent prophet. In those days he lived in the south of France where he was quietly feuding with an old friend of mine, Anthony Burgess, who had made the mistake of describing Graham’s conversation while drinking. Graham had many tall tales to tell but he disliked seeing them later in print. I defended Anthony, warily. Graham was suddenly accusing: “But you like to go on television and I don’t.” I said I liked to talk publicly about politics, and street corners were no longer desirable venues. “Burgess,” he said, “is on television all the time in France.” “What,” I asked, “does he talk about?” Graham scowled and whispered, “His books.” I agreed that this was insufferable. “I never do television,” said Graham, “and, as you see, if I can help it, I never let them photograph me.” Since our arrival at the Kremlin Graham had been constantly televised and photographed which I reminded him of. “Ah,” he said cryptically, “this is the east and those things don’t matter here.” Whether or not they did, he was hugely popular with the east Europeans at the conference where he was a Burgess-like presence. He was particularly exciting on the subject of Castro with whom he had fought side by side in Oriente Province during the revolution. I could not tell if he was making it up as he went along or whether or not he was actually calling upon memory. His eyes were curiously glazed, like mica.