Nowhere did we see the squalor I had witnessed in Morocco or Egypt. Rome’s streets were swept and the buildings clean. Marble and granite gleamed. Silken banners billowed in the breeze. Terraces were brilliant with flowers and shrubs. I was strongly reminded of the beautiful sets which had made Griffith’s Intolerance such a magnificent spectacle. Griffith had commissioned Italian masons to create those sets. Their same style was everywhere in Rome. The columns and arcades might have been made for De Mille’s Ben-Hur. As we rode along one of the magnificent avenues I felt almost like a triumphant charioteer responding to the greetings of cheering crowds.
We turned a corner. A troop of cavalry, all scarlet, gold and green, advanced towards us. The taxi stopped to watch them pass. Here were Mussolini’s fine young soldiers, stern beneath their heavy helmets, prepared to defend their emperor and empire to the last. I found it impossible not to compare them to praetorians. Another few hundred yards and we encountered a column of smart marching infantry followed by two armoured cars. Their gay awnings and polished brass giving texture to the scene, the cafes bustled with customers, windows reflected brilliant light flooding the whole city, creating a glowing aura. Every child, every animal, every plant took on an added reality.
Of course, Maddy Butter was familiar with all this. For me the change was a revelation. Maddy told me she, too, saw Rome in a wholly new dimension. Her senses had been brought fully to life by me. She spoke of me as her ‘mentor’. I, of course, was familiar only with Rome’s bohemian quarter in 1920, before Mussolini had saved his country from the tawdriness and failure of hope which had characterised it before. This Rome was scarcely the same city. Now the public monuments and modern buildings were as fine as anything raised in the great years of Rome’s ancient glory. She had been transformed. Again she was a city fit for gods.
Amused by my astonishment at this transformation, Maddy pointed out piazzas, avenues and statues erected since the coming of Fascism. ‘Signor Mussolini has a theatrical sense,’ she said. ‘A love of the dramatic. All this was designed personally by him.’
‘He clearly understands the purpose of architecture,’ I agreed, ‘which is to enshrine and encourage the aspirations of the nation. Such monuments give hope and a sense of security, but they also make people proud of themselves. They must appeal to our sense of myth.’
She nodded intelligently. She was a wonderful pupil. She repeated how lucky she was to have a lover so wise in the ways of the world. ‘The intelligence of a scientist. The sensitivity of an artist.’
I accepted her praise. ‘If, like Mussolini, one has a moral purpose, a duty to one’s fellow man, an understanding of the public will, then one informs one’s work with these qualities and makes them appeal to the mass of people. This is what one learns in Hollywood. With the talkies, I suspect, the habit of showing the public what one means — as opposed to merely discussing it — is disappearing.’
I have always had the ability to predict the future. It is a heavy burden. One I sometimes wish I never had to carry. Now Rome and Hollywood are lost, gone the way of Athens and Constantinople, merely names for things which were once great.
In those days Rome was again the repository of all we most admired and desired, the exemplar of all we most valued. She was a beacon of sanity and decency in a world beginning to fall into acrimonious civil unrest and cruel vendetta. She had become everything so many of us desired. Lesser men would destroy this dream, just as they destroyed Griffith.
Now the wind drifts through empty cloisters and abandoned rooms. Ruined statues, tattered backdrops, rotting costumes are testament to the power and the purpose of our ruined dream. Ash falls on hollow masonry, on spoiled brick and crumbling stone, on the machinery of all our hopes. At least I knew Rome and Hollywood in the blazing years of their power; at least I played my part in their triumph. I resisted for as long as I could resist. The mean-spirited little men dragged greatness into dirty anonymity. I raised my sword against Big Business and International Zionism. I was defeated. They stole our holiest names and made them wretched and worthless.
The taxi drove on through wider streets, between taller trees, through ordered sanity, through that indefinable radiance.
Suddenly La Butter seized my hand and drew it to her lips. I was not surprised by this expression of passion.
Everywhere was purity. Everywhere the white walls and red roofs of the narrow streets into which we now turned radiated warmth and comfort. Not only the great public buildings reflected national dignity and self-respect; that quality was evident in the most ordinary domestic scenes. I could not help but absorb it all with my cinema-trained instincts. Griffith himself might have taken the whole of Rome for his sets, positioned his crowds, his cameos, his long-shots, his pans, his close-ups. I half expected to hear a voice shout ‘Camera ready’ and another call ‘Action!’Thrilled, I looked around me knowing I would soon have the privilege of meeting the producer of this great miracle, the master architect of the New Europe.
Maddy Butter shared my joy. She pressed her soft lips to my cheek.
‘Welcome to the Future,’ she said.
TEN
Between wakefulness and sleeping we have most of us had the illusion of hearing voices, scraps of conversation, phrases spoken in unfamiliar tones. Sometimes we attempt to attune our minds to hear more, but we are rarely successful. We call these ‘hypnagogic hallucinations’ — the beginning of the dreams we shall later experience as we sleep.
At first they were no more than nightmares dispersing when I opened my eyes. By the time of my second visit to Rome, I was receiving the most intense and terrible visions. I took them to be a warning.
At first there was just the one dream every night: against the black morning poplars a small woman walks her poodle up the avenue. We seem to be in France. Mist rises from the river, rippling silver, reflected in her eyes and skin. She turns to me. Her hair is white, touched with the dawn’s gold. A halo. My mother? Or Esmé? I am not sure. Sometimes they are the same. With agonised sadness in her eyes she murmurs the news. ‘Beware,’ she says. ‘Your good works betray you, for Satan is already triumphant.’
That dream was merely the disturbing prologue.
Later I came to witness all she meant.
They say that I deceive myself. I would suggest we all deceive ourselves. But some fundamental truths cannot be denied. Is a vision any less authentic because it is commonplace?
Those of you who recall D. W. Griffith’s magnificent epic Intolerance, with its profoundly subtle message, will remember how the gigantic ivory elephants come to life, threatening to crush the tiny figures of the people gathered before them. My second sight of Rome awed me just as those elephants awed the Babylonians. I half expected to be crushed by all that magnificence. As in a Griffith film, one wonderful reality overlaid another, ancient and modern, giving profound meaning to everything I saw. The arrogance and cruelty of the past were contrasted with the positive aspects of the present, assuring us that progress was possible and that the noblest human aspirations would ultimately prevail.
The film tells us that we have come far but have far to go and that, it seemed to me, was the message of the new Roman architecture rising among the magnificence of the old. A contradictory message, perhaps. A complex one, certainly, which required the highest type of mind to read it. Mussolini, in those years of his greatness, had that mind. He could see the broad picture. His genius inspired others to complete the details. Of course, his compromise with the Roman Catholic Church, his passion for women and his fascination with Jews brought him to a humiliating end as Hitlers puppet. He, who had inspired the movement of world fascism, was caught cowering in a borrowed German greatcoat, slaughtered and hung upside down like meat in the Milan marketplace. Yet when I knew Il Duce, he was worshipped with an intensity most Italians reserved only for the Pope.