A Sweet and Glorious Land (3 page)

Like Gissing, I met friends in Rome before and after my 1998 southern ramble. He had returned there on December 15, 1897, following a leisurely five-day journey from Reggio, on the far southern edge of Calabria; through Naples for one last look; and then a brief two-day stopover at the monastery at Monte Cassino, occupied four decades later by Germans and destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.

He stayed on in Rome for four months of socializing, sightseeing, and correcting proofs of his critical study of the works of Charles Dickens. Gissing had finished the manuscript in Siena, a Tuscan city northeast of Rome, just a few weeks before he headed south. The proofs of the Dickens book had caught up with him in the midst of his Ionian Sea adventure.

In Rome, he helped arrange lodgings to house his good friends H. G. Wells and Wells's wife, Catherine. Gissing also renewed an acquaintance with a budding, nineteen-year-old American journalist, Brian Ború Dunne, with whom Gissing had shared lodgings in Siena a few months earlier. Decades after Gissing's death, Dunne wrote a remarkable memoir, edited later by three Gissing scholars and published in 1999, about his friendship with Gissing and their Italian days together (
With Gissing in Italy: The Memoirs of Brian Ború Dunne
).

It must have been a heady time for the young American Dunne, who suddenly found himself in the presence of Gissing, Wells, and, later, Arthur Conan Doyle—three giants of late Victorian literature. In 1959, when Dunne was a frail old man living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he was visited by English newspaperman Anthony Curtis. Dunne recalled having lunch in Rome with Wells, who had just published
War of the Worlds,
and Gissing, fresh from his return from the Ionian Sea. Later, Dunne took the famous pair to his room. Curtis records Dunne's recollections of the moment: “As they climbed the five flights of stairs … Wells paused to say, ‘Now here's a young man [Dunne] who wants to write. Here I am who have written a little,' then, pointing to Gissing: ‘And there is someone who has mastered the art.'”

In addition to the frenetic period in Rome of socializing and proofreading the Dickens work, Gissing scoured the city, laying the groundwork for what would be his final work,
Veranilda,
a romance set in Rome shortly after the Western Empire's downfall. He never finished the book's last five chapters, dying in France in 1903. His death came two years after
By the Ionian Sea
was published, and a year or so before
Veranilda
was published in unfinished form.

*   *   *

I worked on this book during most of 1998, realizing after plowing through a mass of additional reading that I had to return to southern Italy for two more weeks of seeking out places I missed earlier. During that first journey I had traveled almost exclusively by train, and did not, for example, go over the mountain road Gissing traveled between Paola and Cosenza, or up into Squillace, several miles away from its train station on the Ionian coast. These places required visits if Gissing's journey was to be retraced properly.

In January 1999, friend and fellow Italophile and author Paul Paolicelli and I headed by car into the Calabrian hills. He read aloud from Gissing's account in between glances at a detailed Touring Club Italiano road map, while I drove. He also took many of the photographs that grace these pages.

In writing this book, the only literary license I have taken is occasionally to combine the two journeys as one. The automobile journeys to Paestum, through the mountains between Paola and Cosenza, to Squillace, to the archaeological dig at Sybaris/Thurii/Copia, and my time at Capo Colonna came during the January 1999 trip. Everything else took place in March–April 1998.

This book, like Gissing's account, is a personal narrative and a work of journalism, not a footnoted history or a scholarly work. All of the knowledge I pass on comes from my own experiences of observing Italians and from traveling through Italy for the past thirteen years, or from other writers, ranging from the ancient historians Herodotus and Livy to modern historians, archaeologists, Gissing scholars, and journalists. They all wrote in a way that allows us to appreciate and understand either George Gissing or this ancient land and the contribution to Western culture made by the original native peoples of Italy, and later Greek and Roman settlers.

Chapter 1

Naples

Naples is chilly—unusual for late March. A cold wind blows constantly from the gulf toward land. It mocks the belief that early spring in the southern Mediterranean should be warm. I have a shirt on, covered by a flimsy windbreaker that I pulled out of the pouch I found tucked in a remote pocket in my luggage. No sweater, no overcoat. It must be in the high thirties or very low forties, barely warm enough to keep the frost off the gurgling fountain across the way. White exhaust pours out from behind cars. Steam rises out of grates in the sidewalk. My glasses fog up when I walk into a warm, crowded coffee bar.

I am foolish not to have dressed more warmly. In Italy in February and March, one can wear light shirts and still break a sweat as far north as Genoa. I remain too trusting of my beliefs about delightful Italian weather, honed over more than a decade of walking in the warm Italian sun.

My first morning here I awake to look over a foreground of tall umbrella pines and see a patch of new snow on Vesuvius, which the afternoon before stood brown over the Gulf of Naples. The giant volcano's bulk dominates everything to the east, a sword hanging over the heads of Neapolitans. Scientists warn that at any moment Vesuvius could erupt, or spawn major earthquakes, potentially killing millions. Wind whips a plume of smoke—or is it a safe cloud?—hanging above its crater. The bluster could be a
maestrale
blowing southeastward from northern France, or a dust-laden
sirocco
from the deserts of Libya.

Weather terms defeat me, just as do most new Italian words that I want to add to my inconsiderable vocabulary. Perhaps it is a function of age, of corroded synapses. I am learning Italian in my fifties. For younger people, languages appear to hold no mystery. Years ago, my then teenage daughter seemed to become fluent in French overnight. Later, she picked up basic conversational Japanese in weeks. Now, in her mid-twenties, she is just as eagerly learning Latvian. I am amazed and envious.

I must constantly refer to my well-worn, and perpetually bent, pocket dictionary, speak agonizingly slowly in restaurants, hotels, and train stations. The words do not come automatically, even after I use them many, many times.

One of the great things about Italians is that, unlike Parisians, they appreciate a foreigner's attempts at their language no matter how poor the pronunciation or syntax. The only time an Italian ever corrected my pronunciation was when I misspoke the name of his city. I used the word “Naples,” a perfectly acceptable English pronunciation. A man on a train, proud to be a Neapolitan, instantly corrected me:
“è Napoli!”
he said emphatically, all the while ignoring my other mispronunciations and scattered syntax during a pleasing hour-long conversation.

Words describing weather are just as hard. I still do not understand how El Niño differs from La Niña. Italians seem to have a name for every type of breeze, every kind of storm. I only know “cold,” “hot,” “warm,” “chilly,” “breezy,” and “stormy.” In Italy, I vow to change, to become knowledgeable about the nuances of
il tempo
(the weather), and words that describe its subtle shifts.

Italians, even city-bred ones, appear on intimate terms with their land, and with the subtlety of how weather affects growing things and the people who cultivate them. In cities, even in the poorest quarters, potted gardens tumble their vines from window ledges packed with pots, and from balconies too narrow—or too crowded with plants—for a person to stand. Small patches along railroad tracks that in the United States would be full of wrecked cars, battered refrigerators, and rubble are cultivated, season after season, by city dwellers who spend their spring, summer, and fall weekends tilling soil and growing things.

I am sure that Italians have a name for this wind that whips through me as I huddle in the grand, open space of the Piazza del Plebiscito, cleared of automobiles in recent years by Naples' progressive mayor; and I am sure that I am cold—and regret not packing a warmer coat.

Englishman George Gissing, a Victorian writer well known among his peers, was here one hundred years ago, perhaps standing on this very corner at the southwest edge of the Plebiscito where it connects to Via C. Console and where I am looking toward the bay and at the hazy outline of the island of Capri far across the water. If the wind was whipping through him as it is me, I am sure he did not mind. There is a passage from a chapter entitled “Winter” in one of his last books—
The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft
—that seems to capture what I perceive Gissing's attitude to be about the natural forces of weather: “For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.” Somehow this knowledge did not make me feel better as I stood there shivering. I walked quickly up to the Via Toledo, found a store with inexpensive sweaters, and bought one.

*   *   *

Gissing arrived in Italy on September 23, 1897, his third journey to the southern Mediterranean in nine years, and spent time in Siena working on his critical study of Charles Dickens. He completed it on November 5 and sent it to his publisher. A short time later, after a few days in Rome, he launched his famous foray into the South of Italy to rediscover the cities that originally had been founded by the Greeks.

The result of that journey, a travel narrative published in 1901,
By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy,
is what drew me a century later.

His trip, so well documented in the nearly one-hundred-year-old classic, was taken after two earlier journeys to the Mediterranean, one to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Naples in 1888, and another a year later to Greece and Naples, where, according to biographer Korg, he experienced congestion of the right lung, “the first serious touch of the illness that was eventually to kill him” in 1903. Today, scholars generally believe he died of emphysema, although his death certificate is unclear about the cause.

*   *   *

Born in 1857 into a family of limited means, George Gissing grew into a dour man who seemed depressed much of the time and who often retreated into the recesses of his mind. He showed little outward emotion in life, took long, solitary walks in the English countryside, and acknowledged in his diary that he daydreamed about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.

His twenty-two novels and collections of short stories dealt with English life in the Victorian Age of the late nineteenth century, and focused on the disparity among the social classes, and on life along the mean streets of the newly industrialized, smoke-belching cities.

Gissing's personal life was not a happy one. As a young man, he had been a brilliant student, particularly in the mandatory study of the classics that English schoolchildren were subjected to in that era. But he was expelled from college and briefly imprisoned after he was caught stealing from classmates to support a prostitute, with whom he had become infatuated.

In disgrace, he left England in September 1876 and eventually landed in Chicago. During this American exile, he tried his hand at teaching and later barely supported himself writing short stories of fiction for daily newspapers, including the
Chicago Tribune.
Later, he was an assistant to a traveling photographer, journeying throughout New England.

Just before his twentieth birthday in the fall of 1877, Gissing returned home, eventually marrying the prostitute he had stolen for. This was the first of two failed and, by his accounts, miserable marriages. The marriage to Marianne Helen Harrison, whom he called “Nell,” caused him continual despair over her unrepentant lifestyle of alcohol and drug abuse. Through it all he continued to write. He and Nell eventually separated, but he continued to care for her through numerous health crises. In a study of Gissing's image of women,
Portraits in Charcoal,
James Haydock writes that once, when Gissing took Nell to the doctor for one of her ailments, the physician detected the presence of venereal disease. When the doctor asked her about it, she blamed her husband. Later, Gissing, who did not have the disease, told a friend that he had felt trapped during Nell's telling of her phony story to the doctor and “so endured the doctor's angry rebuke in silence.”

Nell died in February 1888, just a few days after her thirtieth birthday, from the effects of untreated alcoholism and, probably, syphilis. Gissing took care of her funeral arrangements, hiring mourners, paying the mortician, clearing out her squalid room. His diary entry describing the scene in that room when he was called by Nell's landlady to identify her body is particularly compelling:

“On the door hung a poor miserable dress and a worn out ulster [a long, loose overcoat of Irish origins, made of heavy material]; under the bed was a pair of boots. Linen she had none.… All the money she received went in drink.… Her associates were women of so low a kind that even Mrs. Sherlock [the landlady] did not consider them respectable enough to visit her house.… I drew out the drawers. In one I found a little bit of butter and a crust of bread—most pitiful sight my eyes ever looked upon.

“She lay on the bed covered with a sheet. I looked long, long at her face, but could not recognize it … she had changed horribly. Her teeth all remained, white and perfect as formerly.… Henceforth I never cease to bear testimony against the accursed social order that brings about things of this kind. I feel that she will help me more in her death than she balked me during her life. Poor, poor thing!”