Nothing to Be Frightened Of (35 page)

The Goncourts have a new neighbour, as of 2004. An old grave, its concession expired, has been replaced by one with a gleaming black marble headstone, topped by a portrait bust of its occupant. The newcomer is Margaret Kelly-Leibovic, professionally known as Miss Bluebell, the Englishwoman who trained generations of athletic and beplumed six-footers to twirl and kick, twirl and kick for the lubriciously monocled. Just in case you doubt her importance, the four medals she was awarded—including the
légion d’honneur
—have been painted, life-size, though with an amateurish hand, onto the black marble. The fastidious, deeply conservative, Bohemia-hating aesthetes beside the parvenue troupe-trainer from the Lido (who didn’t think her name was “enough”)? That must lower the tone of the neighbourhood:
Hé! hé!
Perhaps; but we shouldn’t let death become an ironist (or let Renard’s cackle succeed) too easily. The Goncourts discuss sex in their
Journal
with a candour which can still shock today. So what more appropriate—even if delayed by a century—than a posthumous
à trois
with Miss Bluebell?

When Edmond de Goncourt was buried here, and the family line died out, Zola gave the graveside address. Six years later, he was back in his own right, borne to a tomb as showy as the Goncourts’ was simple. The poor boy from Aix who made the name of his immigrant Italian family resound across Europe was buried beneath a rich art nouveau swirl of reddish-brown marble. On top is a portrait bust of the writer so fierce that it seems to be defending not just his coffin and his oeuvre but the entire cemetery. Yet Zola’s fame was too great for him to be granted posthumous peace. After only six years, the French state body-snatched him for the Panthéon. And here we must allow death some irony. For consider the case of Alexandrine, who had survived that night of smoke inhalation from the blocked chimney. Her widowhood was to last twenty-three years. For six of these, she would have visited her husband in green and pleasant Montmartre; for the next seventeen, it was a trudge to the chilly, echoing Panthéon. Then Alexandrine herself died. But pantheons are only for the famous, not their relicts, so she was buried—as she must have known she would be—in that vacated tomb. And then in their turn, Mme. Alexandrine’s children joined her; and then her grandchildren, all stuffed into a vault that was missing its patriarch and the very reason for its splendour.

We live, we die, we are remembered—“misremember me correctly,” we should instruct—we are forgotten. For writers, the process of being forgotten isn’t clear-cut. “Is it better for a writer to die before he is forgotten, or to be forgotten before he dies?” But “forgotten” here is only a comparative term, meaning: fall out of fashion, be used up, seen through, superseded, judged too superficial—or, for that matter, too ponderous, too
serious
—for a later age. But
truly
forgotten, now that’s much more interesting. First, you fall out of print, consigned to the recesses of the secondhand bookshop and dealer’s website. Then a brief revival, if you’re lucky, with a title or two reprinted; then another fall, and a period when a few graduate students, pushed for a thesis topic, will wearily turn your pages and wonder why you wrote so much. Eventually, the publishing houses forget, academic interest recedes, society changes, and humanity evolves a little further, as evolution carries out its purposeless purpose of rendering us all the equivalent of bacteria and amoebae. This is inevitable. And at some point—it must logically happen—a writer will have a last reader. I am not asking for sympathy; this aspect of a writer’s living and dying is a given. At some point between now and the six-billion-years-away death of the planet, every writer will have his or her last reader. Stendhal, who in his lifetime wrote for “the happy few” who understood him, will find his readership dwindling back to a different, mutated, perhaps less happy few, and then to a final happy—or bored—one. And for each of us there will come the breaking of the single remaining thread of this strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader. At some point, there will be a last reader for me too. And then that reader will die. And while, in the great democracy of readership, all are theoretically equal, some are more equal than others.

My last reader: there is a temptation to be sentimental over him or her (if “he” and “she” still apply in that world where evolution is taking our species). Indeed, I was about to make some authorial gesture of thanks and praise to the ultimate pair of eyes—if eyes have not also evolved differently—to examine this book, this page, this line. But then logic kicked in: your last reader is, by definition, someone who doesn’t recommend your books to anyone else. You bastard! Not good enough, eh? You prefer that trivial stuff which is all the rage in your superficial century (and/or that leaden stuff which makes you judge me trivial)? I was about to mourn your passing, but I’m getting over it fast. You’re really not going to press my book on anyone else? You really are so mean-spirited, so idle-minded, so lacking in critical judgement? Then you don’t deserve me. Go on, fuck off and die. Yes,
you.

I shall myself long since have fucked off and died, though of what cause I cannot yet tell or, like Stendhal, predict. I had assumed that my parents, in a last controlling act, would determine my end; but you can’t always rely on your parents, especially after they’re dead. Mary Wesley, to the disapproval of my GP, was counting on her family’s famed talent for conking out—dropping like a fly listening to Shostakovich’s fifteenth quartet. But when the time came, she found that they had neglected to pass on this hereditary skill, or repeated luck. She died instead, more slowly than she would have wanted, from cancer—though still with admirable stoicism. One witness reported how “She never complained about her uncomfortable bed, hard food and painful, bony body except for one occasional comment—‘Bugger.’” So, by the sound of it, she died in character, and at least was able to swear, unlike my stroke-struck, tongue-tied English master, who never got to utter the promised “Damn!” as his famous last word.

Chapter 65

Nowadays, it costs five euros to visit the church—or as the ticket prefers, the “monumental complex”—of Santa Croce in Florence. You enter not by the west front, as Stendhal did, but on the north side, and are immediately presented with a choice of route and purpose: the left gate for those who wish to pray, the right for tourists, atheists, aesthetes, idlers. The vast and airy nave of this preaching church still contains those tombs of famous men whose presence softened up Stendhal. Among them now is a relative newcomer: Rossini, who in 1863 asked God to grant him paradise. The composer died in Paris five years later and was buried in Père-Lachaise; but as with Zola, a proud state came and body-snatched him for its pantheon. Whether God chose to grant Rossini paradise depends perhaps on whether or not God has read the Goncourt
Journal.
“The sins of my old age”? Here is the
Journal
’s entry for 20 January 1876: “Last night, in the smoking-room at Princesse Mathilde’s, the conversation turned to Rossini. We talked of his priapism, and his taste, in the matter of love, for unwholesome practices; and then of the strange and innocent pleasures the old composer took in his final years. He would get young girls to undress to the waist and let his hands wander lasciviously over their torsos, while giving them the end of his little finger to suck.”

Stendhal wrote the first biography of Rossini in 1824. Two years later, he published
Rome, Naples and Florence,
in which he described how Henri, or Arrigo, Beyle had come to Florence in 1811. He descended from the Apennines one January morning, he saw “from a far distance” Brunelleschi’s great dome rising above the city, he got down from the coach to enter on foot like a pilgrim, he stood before paintings which thrilled him till he swooned. And we might still believe every word of his account if he had remembered to do one thing: destroy the diary he had kept of that original trip.

Stravinsky in old age wrote: “I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nonetheless and not by truth.” Stendhal lived by the memory of 1826 whereas Beyle had written the truth of 1811. From the diary, we learn that he did indeed cross the Apennines by coach and descend into the city, but memory took one road and truth another. In 1811 he couldn’t have seen Brunelleschi’s dome from afar for the simple reason that it was dark. He arrived in Florence at five in the morning, “overcome with fatigue, wet, jolted, obliged to maintain a hold on the front of the mail wagon and sleeping while seated in a cramped position.” Unsurprisingly, he went straight to an inn, the Auberge d’Angleterre, and to bed. He left orders to be woken two hours later, but not for touristic purposes: he headed for the post-house and tried to book himself a seat on the next coach to Rome. But that day’s coach was full, and so was the next day’s—and this was the only reason he stayed in Florence for the three days in which he added to the history of aesthetic response. Another incompatibility: the book sets the visit in January; the diary dates it to September.

Still, he went to Santa Croce: memory and truth agree on that. But what did he see? The Giottos, presumably. That’s what everyone goes for: the Giottos which, as
Firenze Spettacolo
reminds us, are in the Niccolini Chapel. But in neither account does Beyle/Stendhal actually mention Giotto, or, for that matter, any of the other starred masterpieces our modern guidebooks urge us towards: the Donatello crucifix, the Donatello Annunciation, the Taddeo Gaddi frescoes, the Pazzi Chapel. Tastes change over a couple of centuries, we conclude. And Beyle does mention the Niccolini Chapel. The only problem is, it doesn’t contain the Giottos. Standing in front of the altar, he would—should—have turned right for the Bardi Chapel and the Peruzzi Chapel. Instead, he turned left, to the Niccolini Chapel in the far north-east corner of the transept. Here, the four paintings of sibyls which moved him to “rapture” were by Volterrano. You may well ask; as I did. (And found the answers: born Volterra 1611, died Florence 1690, follower of Pietro da Cortona, patronee of the Medici, decorator of the Pitti Palace.)

In the memory of 1826, the chapel was unlocked by a friar, and Stendhal sat on the step of a faldstool, his head thrown back against a desk, to gaze at the frescoed ceiling. In the truth of 1811, there is no friar and no faldstool; further, in both 1811 and 1826, and at any date previous or since, the sibyls have been located high on the walls of the chapel, but not on the ceiling. Indeed, the diary of 1811, after praising the Volterranos, continues: “The ceiling of the same chapel is very effective, but my eyesight is not good enough to judge ceilings. It merely appeared to me to be very effective.”

Today the Niccolini Chapel isn’t locked, but this famous location where art began to replace religion lies ironically in the roped-off section intended for the prayerful. Instead of a friar you need a uniformed official; instead of a folding stool, a pair of binoculars. I explained my secular purpose to a man in a suit; and perhaps in Italy the words “I am a writer” carry a little more weight than in Britain. Sympathetically, he advised me to stuff my guidebook into my pocket and not to take it out while “praying”; then he unhooked the rope.

In holiday clothes, I tried to look convincingly grave as I crossed this reserved corner of the church. Yet at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon there was not a single believer—let alone a priest or a friar—in any of these sacred spaces. The Niccolini Chapel was also quite deserted. The four Volterranos, still neck-strainingly high on the walls, have been recently cleaned, and show themselves even more plainly as competent yet routine expressions of the baroque. But then I would have wanted them to be: the more ordinary the paintings, the better the story. Also, of course, the stronger the implicit warning to our own contemporary taste. Just give it time, these sibyls seem to warn. Time may not reinstate Volterra no for Giotto, but it’s bound to make you look foolish, fashionable, amateur. That is time’s business, now that God has given up the job of judgement.

Apart from the Volterranos, there was one other painting in Santa Croce which excited Stendhal beyond measure. It showed Christ’s descent into limbo—that place so recently abolished by the Vatican—and left him “aflutter for two hours.” Beyle, then working on his history of Italian painting, had been told it was by Guercino, whom he “worshipped from the bottom of my heart”; two hours later, a different authority ascribed it (correctly) to Bronzino, “a name unknown to me. This discovery annoyed me a great deal.” But there was nothing equivocal about the picture’s effect. “I was almost moved to tears,” he wrote in his diary. “They start to my eyes as I write this. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful . . . Painting has never given me so much pleasure.”

So much pleasure that he faints? And if not at the Giottos (which he never claimed, but which later wishful thinking foisted upon him), then at least at Volterrano and Bronzino combined? Well, here’s a final problem. Stendhal’s Syndrome, paraded and patented—if not named—in 1826, does not appear to have taken place in 1811. That famous episode in the porch of Santa Croce—the fierce palpitation of the heart, the wellspring of life drying up—was not deemed worthy of a diary entry at the time. The nearest approximation to it comes after the line “Painting has never given me so much pleasure.” Beyle goes on: “I was dead tired, my feet swollen and pinched in new boots—a little sensation which would prevent God from being admired in all His glory, but I overlooked it in front of the picture of limbo.
Mon Dieu,
how beautiful it is!”