Point to Point Navigation

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.