Black Beech and Honeydew (37 page)

She had arrived at the Tabularium on the Capitol and was looking down into the Forum on a fine evening – perhaps the most astonishing view in all Italy.

They leant on the wall and her guide, who was a dashing young man with a pleasing manner, pointed out the near-at-hand three columns of the Temple of Vespasian, and in the middle distance those of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and far away, darkly, the ominous bulk of the Colosseum. It was as if everything she had ever read or been told of Roman history had been unrolled, suddenly, in the evening light. Pammy was deeply impressed but a trifle uneasy. Her escort, perceiving this, removed his hat.

‘I am a Roman gentleman,’ he informed her.

‘And I am very glad to hear it,’ she warmly replied.

So he opened the door of her car for her, returned to his own and guided her back through chaotic traffic to the Piazza Navona and thence to the New Zealand Ambassadorial Residence where he took his leave, as a Roman gentleman should.

We left Rome the next morning and Marcello drove ahead and with careful signals set us upon the road to Perugia. And there I said goodbye to dear Marcello. For some years we exchanged Christmas cards. I expect he still does his splendid indefinable thing at the New Zealand Embassy and if ever he comes across this book I hope he will accept my greetings.

Before absolutely quitting Rome I would like to repeat a little legend which was much invoked at the time I was there.

The Pope was giving audience to a group of visitors and to each of them he put the same question: ‘How long are you staying in Rome?’

The first visitor replied: ‘Your Holiness, alas, no time at all. I am desolate but tomorrow I am obliged to leave. I shall have seen nothing.’

‘Oh,’ said the Pope, ‘I wouldn’t say that. It is possible, if you use your time wisely, to see quite a lot of Rome in twenty-four hours.’

And he moved on to the next tourist and asked him the same question.

‘Your Holiness, unfortunately only three weeks. What can one see of Rome in three weeks!’

‘Oh,’ said the Pope, ‘it is a very short time, certainly, but use it advisedly and you will be the richer for your visit.’

And he moved on to the third tourist and asked him the same question.

‘Your Holiness, I am very fortunate. My company has transferred me to Rome. I shall be here for five years.’

‘Five years!’ exclaimed His Holiness. ‘I’m afraid you won’t see very much of Rome in five years.’

What a lovely drive we had that morning across the Umbrian plains. It was like seeing one quattrocento background after another, with little towns against rounded hills and surrounded by well-disciplined pastures and formal trees, all very fresh and cleanly defined. One middle-distance view I particularly admired was of Todi. There was nothing spectacular about Todi, no enormous church, no ‘must’ for the tourist. Simply a small mediaeval town that would have been none the worse for an angel or two flying decorously above the rooftops and in the streets a bullock wagon and perhaps a man driving it wearing scarlet stockings, a smock and a rustic hat.

We stopped and photographed it and of all the photographs I took in Italy that is the one I like best.

That afternoon we reached Perugia and the Rossetta Hotel. It was like any university town in any other country that had been uplifted and translated into an Italian setting. We sat in an outdoor
caffè
on a high terrace and almost all the other customers were students and looked like students and behaved like well-conducted students. Quite a lot of them spoke either English-English or American-English, since the University of Perugia has summer courses for foreigners and is very popular. It had been a long day and we went early to bed.

The next morning, after breakfast, we drove to Assisi.

What do I remember of Assisi?

Great height. Up and up and then under a windy sky a long view from outside the church. The mist that had been drifting over Umbria cleared slowly and one by one, here and there, vignettes appeared of houses and farms and Noah’s Ark animals. Foolishly I was reminded of the looking-glass view Alice had from the top of a hill above the chessboard country.

We stayed here for some time while a fresh breeze blew in the little village of Assisi.

At last we turned away and went into the church and of course it was the Basilica of St Francis and of course there was the Chapel of San Martino with frescoes by Martino Sierre of the Saint being nice to birds and an apotheosis with scarlet horses and a superb green and blue ceiling. As almost always in Italian churches, in spite of all these wonders, there was an air of everyday usage about the Basilica.

Instead of returning to Perugia we now drove deep into the mountains because Pammy knew of a remote grotto at Remo della Carcere where an order of monks lived in simplicity and hardly anybody else ever went there. So we went and were moved by it.

The next day we left for Florence.

Our entry into Florence was little short of hellish. To us it seemed as if the various approaches led into it like the radii of a spider’s web but that, having passed through the perimeter, they broke up into a maze of lanes and passages into which we edged and out of which, with much ado, we gingerly backed. Our attempts to penetrate them closely resembled a certain slow-motion nightmare to which I am very prone: the one about not being able to get there. You move in a certain direction or seem to do so but The Others, persons who are always there in dreams and are always elusive and unhelpful, either misdirect you or don’t seem to hear what you say but merely nod or smile or don’t give you an answer because of something vague that you don’t understand. They say they will tell you the answer (to what?) when they come back but they don’t come back. On this occasion they seemed to be the sole inhabitants of the streets going into Florence. They came and went while Pammy left me in the car and ran after one of them showing him our address ‘Pensione
Hermitage, Vicolo Marzio 1, Ponte Vecchio’. He pointed and gesticulated and seemed to make sense.

Pammy returned and started us off and suddenly we were there at The Hermitage hard by the Ponte Vecchio. Only, when we stopped and began to take our suitcases out of the car, there were policemen saying we must move on. Somebody – a porter – came out of The Hermitage and there followed one of the Italian street scenes with which I had become so familiar. We were made to understand we might park the car in some cloisters nearby, but only on sufferance and not for long. We now decided the moment had arrived when the car was more of a burden than a blessing and Pammy rang up the local offices of the firm that had rented it to us and they collected it; we paid their very moderate bill and settled into our rooms in The Hermitage.

It was one of the nicest places I have ever stayed in, small but wonderfully situated and beautifully ordered. There were two waiters, a porter and perhaps three chambermaids. The proprietors were two middle-aged ladies who spoke fluent English. We did not have a choice of dishes at meals but were served
en famille,
though at separate tables; the cooking was exquisite.

After dinner we walked about Florence in the cool of the evening and were happy to be there.

We stayed for a week and every morning there was a new wonder. The year was 1968 and the wreckage left by the flooding of the Arno was still evident: unbelievable high-water marks on the walls of churches and the bases of monuments and everywhere, on both gross and infinitely delicate surfaces, restorers were still at work. Miracles of restoration were achieved – paintings were actually separated from damaged surfaces and laid on new ones.

Once again, this is not a guidebook which, in any case, I am not capable of writing and all I can hope to do in the way of ‘sights’ is give fugitive whiffs of my travels. To attempt this is rather like crushing a verbena leaf and finding oneself for a second or two in St Clair and hearing the squawk of Gulliver the lame seagull and the sound of the sea itself, when one was a child in Dunedin.

Other travellers are better remembrancers than I. My memory has always been most eccentric, a thing of slipshod patchwork. Who was a girl in my very remote childhood who looked out of a stand
of raupo in a riverbed and why did my mother say of her: ‘Puck in the bulrushes’? Why ‘Puck’? And how unbelievably young must I have been when I lay on my bed in a room with blue wallpaper and white flowers and, knowing my mother was resting on her own bed across the passage, wondered if I could stagger so far and did slide down and did stagger precariously across the passage and in at her door. I see her, really and truly I do, as if it were days and not two-thirds of a century ago, turn and smile her astonishment and hold out her hands. Why did my brain choose to retain this moment and no other of my remote infancy?

It is the same with travels and sights. Say ‘Florence’ and I see chubby rumps of Utrillo horses, comically improper. Then Donatello’s little David, very smooth in hat and boots, then
the
David – Michelangelo’s – and realize how huge are his head and hands and how lovely the line of his left thigh seen from the rear. Above all, Michelangelo’s feeling for trembling flesh contrasting with firm flesh, expressed particularly in the veiled intensity of a mouth. For the hundredth time I see how little of the inner reality of art is conveyed by photographs and reproductions. Which makes me feel a bit smug, having experienced the reality. And after I’ve seen those things there is a kind of kaleidoscopic effect of quattrocento colour, clear pinks and blues and cardinal scarlet all as fresh as the day they were laid on, by Fra Angelico, of course: touching and truly devout but if I’m to be honest, no longer specific in my recollection. Not so the Botticelli. Aphrodite and her puffing zephyrs and dancing, well-conducted girls so often admired in coffee-table books, unlike the general surfeit of confused impressions, spring up in absolute clarity and perfection.

Well, for a week we walked and looked. There were other pleasures: a violent display of fireworks one night because there was some festival toward. We watched from the roof. And an evening up at Fiesole where high above Florence there is an open-air Roman theatre. Here a retrospective season of Antonioni’s films opened with his early
Chronicle of a Love Affair.
We dined at Mario’s and Signor Antonioni was at the next table. We went on to the theatre and there he was again, across the aisle, and signed Pammy’s programme. It was a warm still night with the stars very emphatic overhead.
Chronicle of a Love Affair
is a remarkable and also an extremely
long film. When midnight came and there seemed to be no end in sight we heard the bus for Florence start its engine and we bolted. We were only just in time.

When we arrived in Florence it was dark and silent and we were not at all sure where we had been put down. A lone taxi appeared. We took it and were back at The Hermitage by one o’clock in the morning and crept up to our bedrooms in the sleeping house.

The week (what would the Pope have said?) in Florence had been dazzling and one left it again saying, as one always does, that some day we would return. When it came to an end Vera, our friend at Lucca, collected us and we were driven across the top of Tuscany to San Concordio where she and her husband Ake lived in a sort of princely farmhouse with a gentle garden tucked into wooded hills. Vera is a distinguished painter. She and Ake had spent most of their lives in China where he was a top man in British espionage; in his own words, I’m afraid, ‘A ball-bearing Mata Hari’. He was of Finnish descent but spoke English like an Englishman and Heaven knows how many Chinese dialects. He was also an authoritative sinologist. My great friends in New Zealand who had spent most of their lives in the Orient brought us together and in Lucca we had long gossips with, as Macbeth remarks in rather different circumstances, ‘no more sights’.

And so after three good days with them, by train one Sunday to Genoa, where everything seemed to be called Christopher or Columbus or both, and then to Paris, where we spent a day with one of my student-players, Douglas MacDiamed, who lives there and is a painter of repute.

The English Channel was rough and for some reason that I’ve forgotten, a strike no doubt, the Dover train was extremely late. Instead of arriving at Victoria in the early evening we fetched up at London Bridge at midnight. There were not anything like enough taxis to go round. The porters were West Indians, some zealous and nimble in securing a cab, others lethargic and bored, ours the slowest of all. The last taxi had long gone, and so had he. There sat Pammy and I
on our suitcases until two o’clock of a sweltering morning. Most of the lights were out when the last two black porters came off duty and said they had a car and would take us, if we liked, wherever we wanted to go as long as it was not too far. I wanted to go to the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge and Pammy to a friend’s flat nearby. So we thanked our rescuers and climbed in. They were kind and helped with the luggage and when we asked how much we owed them they said whatever we liked. I had five pounds and gave it to them and I wish it had been more because they brought a dismal night to a happy and gentle conclusion and we parted pleasantly.

I had been eight pampered weeks on my Italian travels and I now set about writing
When in Rome.

Until one has achieved publication the odds against appearing, however modestly, between hard covers seem astronomical. ‘It couldn’t happen to me’ is the general feeling, or at least it was so in my case. I have related the circumstances under which it
did
happen and how by simply dumping my first Alleyn story with an agent and going out to New Zealand I escaped the awful humiliation of publishers’ rejection slips, those definitive badges of being unwanted.

Nowadays, I suppose, like all professional authors, I am rung up or written to by people asking for short cuts to publication. It is not possible to reply in the way many of them obviously want you to. In my experience there are no short cuts. The only honest answer can be that all publishers are on the lookout for new authors but that few are prepared to risk the enormous cost of presenting a first book unless they are persuaded of its chances and those of a follow-up. It was this circumstance that prevented the publication of Allan Wilkie’s autobiography, a remarkable account of his classic journeyings throughout the southern hemisphere with the plays of Shakespeare. Some old Wilkonians, including Hector Bolitho and myself, tried very hard but did not succeed. The publisher’s reader’s comments were favourable but regretful. One, the most august, from T. S. Eliot, had been left, by some oversight, in the typescript. It began ‘This is a
nice
book’, went on to praise it and ended, ‘Unfortunately I am unable to recommend it for publication.’

The reason? It was what publishers call a ‘oncer’. Needing copious illustrations, it would have been extremely costly to produce. By the
nature of its subject matter the readership would have been limited to people who were of, or attracted to, the theatre. And there was no likelihood of a follow-up. But it
was
indeed a nice book. I recall one strange anecdote Mr Wilkie tells of a novice in his company. During a train journey, there came a sudden drop in the racket of their railroad progress in which this young actor’s voice rang out.

‘Ah, you may think I’m common,’ he cried triumphantly, ‘but you should just meet my people!’

I still lament the non-appearance of Allan Wilkie’s autobiography. Many publishers seem to act in accordance with a yearly balanced programme or something closely resembling it: so many books by popular writers whose work is widely known and bound to appeal, so many with a limited appeal but of such literary, artistic, social or scientific interest that they will bring prestige to the firm that introduces them. Sometimes – very rarely – there comes their way a hitherto unknown author who has the mark of genius and for whom they are prepared to go overboard.

There is an anecdote told about my own publisher, Sir William Collins. He was an extremely tall, elegant man with something Puckish in his looks and great charm of manner. He had attended an International Congress of importance and when the luncheon break came and all the delegates were streaming down a corridor he was seen, head and shoulders above the rest, brandishing a bulky manuscript over his head and shouting, ‘I’ve got the book of the century! I’ve got the book of the century!’

The book was
Doctor Zhivago.

Many ringers-up or writers-in make their requests before they have set pen to paper or finger to keys. Often their friends have told them they ought to write a book and they intimate that they ‘haven’t got the patience’ to do so unless they can be assured of seeing it in print. Many more suggest that I read their book and give them an opinion. Some send a piece without notice. One correspondent simply wrote on the back of a postal order for two shillings that he was prepared to collaborate and I was to insert the word ‘Yes’ in a morning newspaper of such and such a date. I lost the postal order and I suppose to this day he thinks I pinched it.

I wish very heartily that I could say some manuscript of outstanding merit has come my way over the last half-century but no such
luck. If it had I would have offered to send it with a letter of introduction to my agents. As it is I can only suggest to all enquirers that they have mercy on me and provide themselves with a copy of the current
Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook.
It gives a list of reputable agents, well-established publishers (with additional notes on how they like to be approached) and offers sensible advice about finding out which magazines or papers publish the kind of short story or article you believe you can write.

It is foolish to send a piece on home-dressmaking to the
Poulterers’ Journal.

Many years ago now, when I was beginning to get good notices and increasing standing as a writer of detective fiction, my agents and my American publishers asked me if I had ever thought of ‘going straight’. They were kind enough to say they would be interested in such a departure and pointed out that many of the reviewers emphasized the characterization and style of the books rather than their sheer ‘teckery and plot – contrivances which, I must confess, I never have been able to regard as anything but an exacting chore. I have already suggested that in an age of much shapeless fiction the detective story presents a salutary exercise in the techniques of writing. It is shapely. It must have a beginning, a middle and an end. The middle must be a logical development of the beginning and the end must be implicit in both. Economy as well as expressiveness in words must be practised. One may not stray too far from the matter-in-hand. I sometimes catch myself envying the writers of fiction who can allow themselves long digressions into whatever side issue takes their fancy and don’t stop until they have nothing more to say.

If my publishers’ suggestion had come earlier I think perhaps I might have entertained it. But I have never had much confidence in myself as a writer and always think what I am doing at the moment is awful and that I’m going to fall flat on my face and rise up with egg all over it. This is odd because as a director of Shakespeare productions, beset by the terrors of first nights and all the rest of the hazards of the game, I was persuaded, always, that what I wanted to achieve was on the right lines and I think I always know, and pretty exactly, too, just how far I have succeeded or failed in, as actors say, ‘getting a play to work’.

Because the books have done well I have been able to release my passion for these plays and my enduring love for the young actors with whom I have prepared them. It has been possible to forgo fees which a student society could not afford and so enable it to depart occasionally from the best known and therefore safest box-office attractions of Shakespeare’s plays and tackle one that is not on the examination list and therefore will not draw block-bookings from the schools. So, in a way, the books have helped with the productions.

As time goes on, being interviewed about one’s writing becomes more and more of an occupational hazard and demands more and more of a professional attitude. On being asked which of the books is one’s favourite it is not easy to go dewy-eyed and behave as if one is stimulated by the question and is struck by its originality, particularly when, as in this case, the answer is that I haven’t got one. Or else that the one I’ve just finished writing is my favourite because it’s such a relief to have done with it. It would be much easier if the interviewer asked whether, apart from the Alleyns, I had any favourite characters. The Claires in
Colour Scheme,
The Boomer in
Black As He’s Painted,
Inspector Fox and P.P. in
Hand in Glove
come to mind. I enjoyed writing about all of them. On consideration, I think perhaps I worried less about writing
Colour Scheme
and
Black as He’s Painted
than I did with most of the others.

Inevitably, of course, I’m asked how many Alleyn stories I’ve written and inevitably, being me, I forget. I see, in the batch of reviews that has just come to hand, that they put it at thirty-two which surprises me.

Another evergreen enquiry is whether I’ve grown bored with Mr Alleyn. I haven’t. Conan Doyle became so bored with Sherlock Holmes that he pushed him over the Reichenbach Falls and got for his pains an infuriated fan mail so huge that he was in the end forced to heave him up again. One of the letters, from a lady, merely said ‘You beast.’ So Holmes returned but it has been said that he was never the same man again. I incline to think that perhaps the trouble is that he was.

Since Sir Arthur’s time, of course, a new kind of interviewer has arisen and what a job is his! The television probe! How grateful we must be to Mr Michael Parkinson who never shows off, never asks a silly question, never utters a bromide, always seems to be on-side
with his subjects and neither flatters nor cajoles but crinkles into amusement and listens as a listener should, with quiet relish and enjoyment. Jolly nonagenarians, heart-transplanters, tenors, explorers, actors galore, authors, unrepentant homosexuals and ancient bewigged beauty specialists all walk into his parlour and succumb happily to his unostentatious charm. Has he worked very hard, one asks oneself, to attain such consummate ease?

The press interviewers of whom one becomes increasingly wary are young journalists attached to daily papers and, particularly, women journalists attached to women’s journals, and, most especially, the young ladies who scorn to take notes. I have just read a quotation from an American
News of Books and Authors.
In it I am said to have ‘reported’ that I ‘always smoke while writing’. I gave up smoking twenty years ago. The more inexperienced the reporter the less she enjoys being asked to let one see her story before publication and the more reckless her misstatements when it does appear in print. It doesn’t happen on television, of course, because at least you’re there and can contradict the soft impeachments.

The really terrifying televisual things, for me at least, are quiz shows. In character as an author of detective fiction, I was on a very tricky one for Independent Television in London. Outrageous and seemingly inexplicable events, said to have actually taken place, were put to the victims who were asked to give the true explanation. At the outset of this series I was smitten for the first and last time in my life with a devastating attack of lumbago. It struck me down when I was in the cellar of a London flat and it was so severe that I was forced to crawl on hands and knees across the kitchen and up two flights of stairs into a room where there was a telephone which I dragged down to floor level and rang a doctor.

He arrived in time to give me an injection in the lumbar region. This at least enabled me to become more mobile but wore off about halfway through the transmission, which was a live one. He repeated this treatment for the next appearances but was delayed on the final one. I waited till the last minute and then the friend who was staying with me got a taxi. She and the driver eased me into it. A press photograph was taken of the team that night. You can’t see the beads of sweat that had gathered on my brow above the desperate smirk which I managed to flash at the cameras.

While I’m on about the author’s complaints department I feel I must raise a piteous cry that publishers are probably very tired of hearing. It is a plea to the artist or photographer who does the bookjacket that he read the book or at least the passage the jacket is supposed to illustrate. The American jacket for the hardback of
Last Ditch
is a charming, rather old-fashioned pencil and wash affair that can only be made to conform with the text by assuming that the girl on the horse is galloping backwards at great speed into the ditch where her body will be found. I’ve had complaints about paperbacks. One from an English reader on the score of vulgarity so gross that she couldn’t bring herself to buy the book as a present for a friend. It looked, said this reader, like a penny-dreadful in a sleazy book stall.

In
When in Rome
the clothes of a man who is murdered and thrown into a well are described in detail: Italian, black, alpaca-like suit, black tie and beret. On the paperback cover he is spread out, dry as a chip, on a marquetry floor wearing a natty blue business suit and felt hat.

The worst offence under this heading was the binder’s transposition of two jackets and their titles. Infuriated purchasers, thinking they had found a new Alleyn story, discovered they had bought one with which they were already familiar.

I suppose, for non-authors, the best known pitfall in publishing is risk of prosecution for libel or defamation of character or plagiarism. There are famous cases: the one about a City personage who became so fed-up with the badinage of his friends and their quoting advertising jingles about a comical little man of the same very unusual name as himself, that he sued and obtained substantial damages from the firm that published them. There was a successful case against an author who created a disagreeable character and unfortunately gave him the same name as a person he had never met, of whose existence he had no knowledge but who sued and obtained enormous damages.

In one of my early books I introduced a rather unsavoury character called Luke Watchman. I received a charming letter from a real Luke Watchman but the coincidence was startling and might have turned out very differently.

There is, of course, a lighter side to occupational hazards. During the war when I was comparatively young and quite unused to any
public appearances outside a theatre, I was asked to take part in a Brains Trust at a military camp. The other three performers were seasoned academics, politically pink and perfectly assured. Our audience consisted of active soldiers on leave from Guadalcanal, extremely tough and liable to cut up roughish if unamused by the proffered entertainment.

The hall where we were to perform was large and crammed to the doors with troops. We sat in a row on the stage. An officer had been detailed to act as chairman. He opened up by introducing us in turn by name and occupation and saying unconvincingly that he knew we would be given a fair hearing. He then declared the meeting open for questions from the audience. I noticed with terror that a soldier near the front was being nudged and muttered to by his neighbours and that they all looked at me.