When Virginia Faulkner published her first novel, Friends and Romans, she was 21 and managed to sound like 41. Or 37, to be more precise. Faulkner narrates this wise-cracking romance through the voice of Marie Manfred, just past 37 and taking a hiatus from her busy career as the world’s greatest concert pianist. To get away from the world, her manager finds a villa in the Alban Hills outside of Rome. She is also trying to get away from the publicity generated by a tell-all biography, Gaudy Calliope, written by a former lover. The Romans she encounters are all confused by the book’s title: they all associate it with the muse of poetry, when it’s actually a jab at her piano-playing style, suggesting it’s akin to a bunch of steam-powered locomotive whistles.
Virginia Faulkner, 1935Of course, in declaring, like Garbo, that she wants to “be alone,” Marie is inviting half the civilized world to descend upon her. First to arrive is her next-door neighbor, Mrs. Hamilton Cotter Frewitt, wife — or shall we say, soon-to-be ex-wife — of the British military attaché. She brings in tow her current lover, Count Gustaf (Tavo) von Keinlohe, a garden variety fortune-hunting gigolo and, as it turns out, also a former lover of Marie’s. The international set of 1934 ( whose crack-up Faulkner would later recount, through the memoirs of her comic creation, Princess Tulip Murphy, in a little comic masterpiece from 1940 titled My Hey-Day), it turns out, is a close, and often tight, little community.
Lunch with another acquaintance, the Principessa Colosini, leads to an introduction to the Principessa’s younger brother, the dashing and devastatingly handsome Don Ricardo dei Retti. Sparks fly. Animal magnetism takes its effect. He whisks Marie off to a quiet dinner in his discreet seaside villa. Unfortunately, on her way back, Marie discovers that Don Ricardo is more than vaguely connected with Mussolini: he is, in fact, on the hit list of the still-active Fascist resistance movement. They would, so to speak, like to put him at #1 with a bullet.
Danger, however, only adds to Don Ricardo’s allure. A week or two of entanglements, interrupted by periodic calls to vague affairs of government (eventually explained when it’s revealed that Don Ricardo is, in fact, Mussolini’s chief of intelligence), ensues. Marie is convinced that this is the man worth abandoning her career for. Only to run into the very chauvinistic side of Italian raffinatezza: as … come se dice? … a woman with una storia, Marie would be perfect as a mistress. As a wife … eh, non così tanto. As Marie tells herself early in the book, “Most men regard women as the hunter regards the game — precious and exciting during the chase, but after the kill one begins to look for blemishes in the pelt.”
Less than a year after publishing Friends and Romans, Faulkner followed with a second novel, The Barbarians (1935) — but a comparison of the two books suggests that Barbarians was probably the first to be written. There are numerous references to “the Barbarians” — a loose-knit collection of artists and musicians in Paris — throughout Friends and Romans and Marie and Tavo are prominent characters in the book. I shall have to read and report back soon.
At the time she wrote the two books, the sum total of Faulkner’s international experience was a year at Miss Moxley’s finishing school in Rome and a bit of time in London, Paris, and the Riviera after that. Yet she managed to come off as sophisticated and worldly wise as one of the queens of the international set, Daisy Fellowes (and a far better writer). No wonder she was soon writing for America’s poshest magazine, Town and Country, and trading quips at the Algonquin Round Table not long after. A rival to Dorothy Parker, she left her mark on Broadway and in Hollywood as well, but unlike Parker, she pulled herself out of a downward spiral somewhere in the early 1950s and returned home to Lincoln, Nebraska, where she became a key member of the staff of Prairie Schooner and the University of Nebraska Press. She died in September 1980 while watching Monday Night Football. Definitely a life overdue for recognition.
Friends and Romans, by Virginia Faulkner New York: Simon and Schuster, 1934
A Distant Summer collects three long stories: “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” and “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany.” Saturday Review’s reviewer tried to sum them up cleverly as “a scene erotic, a scene exotic, a scene psychotic,” but like most pat descriptions of a book, left a largely inaccurate summation of its true qualities.
Each story offers a snapshot of Italian life during and just after the Second World War. In “A Distant Summer,” set in the late summer of 1943, a seventeen year-old boy awakens to the complexity of adult life. Staying with his mother in a fine resort hotel at the foot of the Alps, he, like the other residents, is trapped in a sort of limbo. Mussolini has been removed from power by King Victor Emmanuel III and Marshal Badoglio named Prime Minister, but there are rumors that German divisions are preparing to come through the passes and take over control. Uncertain and fearful, they cling to the hotel as a refuge, sitting
… from morn to dusk on benches in the same square or around a clump of pines in the park or at tables in the bar. And these places might have been borders of the world or confines of a leper settlement, for no one crossed them, preferring extenuating boredom at the hotel to excursions and even simple walks in the lovely surroundings, lest these interrupted the reassuring sense of closeness to other besieged ones.
In his idleness, the boy becomes fixated on the only lone woman staying at the hotel, Signora Borghi, waiting with a young son while her husband, an Air Force pilot, is stuck with his unit. His adolescent reverie is broken when a tall, dark, well-dressed man, Signor Rangoni, arrives. He is an unashamed slacker: “I suffer from a rare and costly disease,” he says, “It costs me a fortune to have this disease till the end of the war.” But he and Signora Borghi are quickly attracted. In the course of an evening or two, the boy spies them walking off together into the evening shadows after dinner, and when he follows, see Rangoni pressing her up against a wall, her legs wrapped around him.
The boy’s anger, jealousy, and confusion are further compounded when the husband arrives. The boy is infatuated with the image of the dashing and heroic pilot, and emotionally sides with him until he overhears him say to his wife, “I hope one day someone will write me an anonymous letter and tell me. I’ll kill you and you know why now, I’ll beat you black and blue.” Exposed to aspects of the relations between men and women he had never encountered, the boy is left feeling something of a stranger in his own world.
Although it doesn’t quite match the quality of “A Distant Summer,” “The Bait,” which tells about how a charismatic young figure in the local Communist movement manipulates an admiring boy into becoming his accomplice, is certainly the better of the two remaining stories. “A Brief Trip Into the Heart of Germany,” about an encounter between a war crimes investigator and a former concentration camp guard, comes off less convincing.
“A Distant Summer” seems a perfect candidate for filming, rather an Italian counterpart to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Beween: a story in which a boy is given a glimpse into the existence of sex as a force quite separate from any notions he might have of love or romance. The scenes are well-shaped, focused, precisely and efficiently sequenced, the prose — translated by Archibald Colquhoun — clean, exact, and specific. As the TLS reviewer wrote, “Signor Rosso can draw the pith of a man or a situation in a few words; he seems to have no tricks and an apparently transparent style, and all he says, with such brevity and such lack of elaboration, strikes one as piercingly accurate.”
The Chamber of Deputies in the Piazza Montecitorio, around 1870. If I were looking for an Amazon review headline for The Conquest of Rome, Matilde Serao’s 1885 novel, I’d probably opt for “Zola Does the Italian Parliament.” For, like a number of Zola’s novels, such as The Belly of Paris, Money, or The Ladies’ Paradise, the story is really just the author’s excuse for a long, leisurely, meticulously detailed, and often fascinating description of the workings of the behind-the-scenes world of some enterprise most people would have taken for granted.
In this case, it’s the world of the Montecitorio, the Italian Parliament, as seen through the eyes of Francesco Sangiorgio, the newly-elected deputy from a remote rural area of Basilicata, one of the poorest parts of southern Italy. Intensely driven, with great ambition despite deep insecurity for his poverty and humble status, Sangiorgio has fought his way from school teacher to country lawyer to district advocate, and now heads to Rome to launch his political career.
A man with little in the way of personality, Sangiorgio soon learns how low is the position of an unknown deputy from a backward district in a parliament as large as the U. S. House of Representatives. Taking a cheap room in a dank and dirty boarding house, he makes almost no acquaintances until he is befriended by Tullio Giustini, a hunchbacked deputy from Tuscany. Shunned for his physical defects, Giustini uses his position as an outsider to act as an acerbic critic of the Montecitorio and its social strata.
“Why should it be concerned with you,” he asks Sangiorgio, “an infinitesimal atom, passing across the scene so quickly? It is indifferent; it is the great cosmopolitan city which has this universal character, which knows everything because it has seen everything.” To conquer Rome, he advises, one must have “a heart of brass, an inflexible, rigid will; he must be young, healthy, robust, and bold, without ties and without weaknesses; he must apply himself profoundly, intensely to that one idea of victory.” It’s obvious that Giustini considers this a fool’s goal, but instead, Sangiorgio is inspired and vows to become the next conqueror.
With no money and no social connections, Sangiorgio has little chance of being noticed, but Giustini takes him along to a reception hosted by Countess Fiammanti, whose salon is one of the true centers of power. Sangiorgio’s looks are nothing to speak of, but the Countess is attracted by his passion for political success, and spins an idle web to see if she can instigate an affair between him and Donna Angelica Vargas, the wife of a Cabinet member.
Although Donna Angelica never puts her position at risk, she encourages Sangiorgio just enough to fill him with a dangerous blend of romantic and political passion, supercharged by his utter naivety. He rushes headlong into a session of Parliament, at which Donna Angelica’s husband is giving a long and dull speech introducing the new budget. It is a predictable matter, and after droning on for an hour, the Minister concludes and begins accepting the congratulations of his colleagues when another speaker is announced: “Honourable colleagues, I beg for silence. The Honourable Sangiorgio has the floor.”
“‘Who ? Who ?’ was the universal inquiry.”
Taking advantage of the suprised silence, Sangiorgio plays the moment for its full dramatic value.
Hereupon the curious eyes of the members sought out that colleague of theirs, whom scarcely anyone knew. … No one thought him insignificant. And then divers speculations grew rife in the Chamber. Would this new deputy speak for or against the Minister? Was he one of those flatterers who, scarcely arrived, hastened to make a show of loyalty to the Government? Or was he some little impudent nobody who would stammer through a feeble attack before the House, and be suppressed by the ironical murmurs of the assembly? He was a Southerner and a lawyer — only that was known about him. Therefore he would deliver an oration, the usual rhetoric which the Piedmontese detested, the Milanese derided, and the Tuscans despised.
Instead, the Honourable Sangiorgio began to talk deliberately, but with such a resonant, commanding voice that it filled the hall and made the audience give a sigh of relief. The ladies, whom the warmth had half lulled to sleep, revived, and the press gallery, empty since the conclusion of the Minister’s discourse, began to refill with reporters, returning to their places.
Sangiorgio delivers a riveting speech that condemns the Government for its neglect of the very peasantry that elected him, and gains the attention of the press, opposition, and a few members of the Government.
It is, however, just a flash in the pan. Sangiorgio’s only real agenda is to be accepted, and when Donna Angelica begins to take him a little more seriously, he quickly loses all interest in anything aside from having her accept him as a lover. He neglects the affairs of his electorate. He spends money he doesn’t have to create an elegant love nest to entice her. He succeeds only in annoying a better-placed would-be suitor, and the two end up fighting a duel. Sangiorgio wins, but in a manner that merely further alienates him from the people he would engratiate himself with. And so he climbs aboard the train back to the Basilicata, Rome having never really noticed his existence.
It’s a fairly predictable story pattern, one that could be found in dozens of other novels about an ambitious young man from the sticks trying to make it in the big city, and on its own would provide little incentive to read The Conquest of Rome.
What the book really is, though, is a rich and carefully observed journey through Rome as it existed in the 1880s. Serao started as a journalist, and The Conquest of Rome is probably more successful as descriptive rather than artistic work. Here, for example, is Serao’s sketch of the room in which constituents wait for hours on end in hope of an audience with their deputy:
It might have been the anteroom of a celebrated physician, where invalids came, one after another, waiting their turn, looking about with the indifferent gaze of people who have lost all interest in everything else, their thoughts for ever occupied with their malady. And as in such a lugubrious anteroom, which he who has once been there on his own behalf or for one dear to him can never forget, as in such a room are assembled people with all the infirmities that torment our poor, mortal body — the consumptive, with narrow, stooping shoulders, with lean neck, his eyes swimming with a noxious fluid; the victim of heart disease, with pallid face, large veins, yellowish, swollen hands; the anaemic, with violet lips and white gums; the neurotically affected, with protuberant jaws, bulging cheekbones, emaciated frame; and the sufferers from all other diseases, hideous or pitiful, which draw the lines of the face tight, which make the mouth twitch, and impart an unwelcome glow to the hand, that glow that terrifies the healthy — thus, in such a room, did the possessors of all the moral ills unite, oblivious of all complaints but their own. … Every one of those people has a grievance in his soul, an unfulfilled desire, an active, torturing delusion, a secret sorrow, a fierce ambition, a discontent. And in their faces may be seen a corresponding spasmodic twitching, a contraction of angry lips, a dilation of nostrils trembling with nervousness, a knitting of the brows which clouds the whole countenance, hands convulsively doubled in overcoat pockets, a melancholy furrow in the women’s smile, which deepens with every new disillusion. But all of them are completely self-centred, entirely oblivious of foreign interests, indulging in a single thought, a fixed idea, because of which they watch, meet, and conflict with one another, although seeming neither to hear nor to see each other.
There are several dozen such set-pieces in the book–the galleries in the Montecitorio, the grimy quarters of the poorer deputies, the teeming life in the slums along the banks of the Tiber. Like Zola, Serao sometimes forgets to come up for air when she dives into the details, but you just have to slip a page or so further to avoid suffocation. But if you appreciate the chance to step back into a world from 100-plus years ago and soak up the sights and sounds and smells, I can recommend taking a trip through Matilde Serao’s The Conquest of Rome.
One never knows just how good or bad a book is when it’s wrapped in a lurid 1950s paperback cover. This was a time when publishers and cover artists were a bit like Weekly World News editors–fighting to catch the eyes of buyers by constantly striving to reach new highs in glare and new lows in discretion. I’d sure that somewhere out there is a 1950s paperback edition of the Confessions of Saint Augustine featuring a Roman babe about to lose her toga to the hands of a lecherous young Augustine.
In the case of Richard Lebherz’s 1957 short novel, The Altars of the Heart, what you get is both better and worse than the cover promises. The writing is far more subdued and sensitive, and the story and characters bear only slight connection to the nymphet and bed games suggested by the cover. “A Story of Love and Deceit in Summertime Rome”–well, that much is true, but woman is a good fifteen years older and the love is brief, confused, and one-way.
But there are also elements much creepier than would even be appropriate within the loose guidelines of these covers. The Altars of the Heart is one of a long string of tales of innocent Americans lured off their wholesome standards by the ease and sophistication of decadent Romans. In this case, it’s a spinster schoolteacher who sprains her ankle and goes to the wrong doctor for treatment.
The wrong doctor meaning one who seems to have spent a little too much time in Berlin working for the S.S. during the war and who seems to be in the midst of some kind of obsessive S&M relationship with his mistress. I say “seems” because Lebherz merely suggest these details. The doctor decides to romance the teacher as the means to getting a quick loan of $500 to help the mistress out of a jam–or rather, as he puts it to teacher, to “pay off medical equipment.”
Well, not to be a spoiler, but let’s just say that if you ever find yourself in the doctor’s situation, make sure to put your souvenir S. S. dagger out of reach. The schoolteacher flies home in panic, and the moral of the story seems to be … well, keep the S. S. daggers out of reach, I guess. What started out as a restrained minor work takes a Grand Guignol turn and never manages to find its way home save by means of a Pan Am ticket. Odd and forgettable.
Altars of the Heart, by Richard Lebherz New York City: Grove Press, 1957 New York City: Berkeley Books, 1959 also published as Affair in Rome, Ace Books, 1960
, 
, 
, or 
, the story is really just the author’s excuse for a long, leisurely, meticulously detailed, and often fascinating description of the workings of the behind-the-scenes world of some enterprise most people would have taken for granted.
of Saint Augustine featuring a Roman babe about to lose her toga to the hands of a lecherous young Augustine.
, what you get is both better and worse than the cover promises. The writing is far more subdued and sensitive, and the story and characters bear only slight connection to the nymphet and bed games suggested by the cover. “A Story of Love and Deceit in Summertime Rome”–well, that much is true, but woman is a good fifteen years older and the love is brief, confused, and one-way.
, Ace Books, 1960