August’s Heat: Part II

Even though the weather report says otherwise, the heat doesn’t show signs of abating. An early morning walk is still quite tolerable, perhaps to pick up a few groceries, go to the pharmacy or the bank. Otherwise, I stay home, where I realize it is time to get my next post in.

In a sense posts are conversations with my human friends, to be opened anew when I have an idea and want to see how it is received and what they have to say. Conversations with my books are never-ending but it is up to me to let them tell me something new, something I had never thought of before.  In writing a post, do I have someone specific in mind? Or am I writing to clarify some idea of mine. I suppose the same holds for whatever we write. Do we have someone specific in mind? An author gets an idea. Decides to develop it. But for whom? I once asked a friend of mine, a deeply intellectual scholar, who he writes for when he explains his theories. He thought a moment and said “my mother I think, although she wouldn’t understand at all what I was doing.” When I write it might be for a child, perhaps even for someone I had never met. My new friend Giulio, who lived mostly alone  in a small stone house in Tuscany,  once said to me: “Please come. Otherwise to whom will I tell my story.”

So the best thing to do, once I’ve had my supper, is to go to bed and read. There are generally a couple of books waiting for me, lying open, face down near my pillow. I can read. I can think I don’t have TV, except for a few channels I can tune in on my computer. The last thing I saw on the culture program was on the survey of poverty and misery in Italy in the 1960s (come to think of it I had been here several years by then, but in the 50s I had also seen some of the towns where poverty was still acute at the time).  Later I had also been made aware of the problem, when I discovered books like Levy’s Christ Stopped at Eboli or Elio Vittorini, who looked at this peasant world and at the Mafia. If I had been more enterprising then, in 1956, I could have wandered into some of these forsaken villages, as did Danilo Dolci, and tried to make a difference. But then my character was what it was, and I was never really aware of what was happening in the US at the time. Would I have participated in protests in favour of the rights of women? 

Thinking back to my year it Europe, I realize how superficial my approach was then, but perhaps that was because the key to the new world I found myself in was art history and it was the visual impact of my surroundings that triumphed. I was a watcher and not yet capable of delving deeper into what the world I was observing had to tell me.

Perhaps if I had read someone like Richard Holmes at the time (not sure how I discovered him), I might have looked at the world differently. To begin with what had fascinated me was how Holmes was trying to follow in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom I was acquainted with of course but more from a child’s point of view. Then in reading Holmes, I was intrigued by the man as a person as I accompanied him on the written page in his hikes over the hills of France, slept under the stars or ended up in some small inn.  I can’t help but ask myself what would have happened if I had been bold enough to leave the beaten track in 1956 and see what life in Italy was really like.

Holmes however was a biographer by trade, and his book tells us what that means, not just archive studies and interpreting letters and documents found (I wonder what future biographers will do), and trying to understand what it meant to live in another century, or another country. He took off on his own in France, something which as a woman alone I might not have been able to do, in his search for R.L. Stevenson.  Then when he turned his attention to Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft and Claire, he found himself living through the French Revolution and the ideals of Romanticism, in France and in Italy, and his aim was to find every single house Shelley had stayed in, to feel why that house had so attracted the poet. Holmes furnishes us with an insight into what it means to be a biographer. 

After Stevenson and Shelley and Mary and Claire, Nerval seems to have had an almost fatal attraction for him. His attempts to understand this French writer and poet were frightening, for here Holmes risked being consumed by his subject’s mental convolutions, leading into insanity. As I continue reading, my thoughts begin to wander and I become unsure as to how far I can follow Nerval, or is it Holmes, and remain the person I am.   To what extent does one become what one reads about?

A few more pages and my conversation with Holmes, or is it Nerval, must be put to rest. I come back to reality and wonder if I have locked the door, and the dog is on her mattress below the window before pulling up the sheet and saying good night to no one in particular.