I recently went deep down south, down Italy's long and stupendous peninsula
away from the windy, unpredictable spring of the north. A break from family,
the screen, the current short story collection. As the trip involved a long
train travel from the north I left equipped with what I thought was an
appropriate novel for the journey. I’ve had Shirley Hazzard's *The Bay of Noon
on my bookshelf for a good while now, having enjoyed The Transit of Venus
(which I must reread) and People in Glass Houses (dealing with the raw truths
of diplomatic life - right up my old alley).
But The Bay of Noon was almost too beautiful to savour while I was
rocking on a night train and trying to dodge an unwanted hand (yes dammit!), or my blistery-eyed shunting out of Rome and further south. Then the scenery
itself was absorbing with its great social drama, the volcano (!) and the hustle of history.
Today's Naples is a world away from the post-war city Hazzard experienced, but
so many images remain resolutely the same.
Let me find a few:
On to the flanks
of those palaces, smaller buildings had been grafted in every age except our
own – in any unlikely opening, on any precarious ledge, apparently with the
sole provision that they bear no resemblance to one another. Forgotten or
overlaid, antiquity had been buried in the walls, making its laconic signal –
sunken column, Greek, dark, smooth as silk, with acanthus capital; a Roman
inscription, traces of a fortification, or crenellations that, centuries since,
had been surmounted by a rooftop. In one vast courtyard was planted a colossal
sculpture, Roman or Renaissance, of a horse’s head; another ended in galleries
of disintegrating frescoes..
Hazzard’s
narrator Jenny lands in post-war Naples traumatised by her past, particularly
her too-close rapport with her brother. Her emotions are ‘cauterized’. As
Hazzard did, Jenny works with NATO, installed in the ‘volcanic’
city liberated by the Americans.
The city itself
was marked by a volcanic extravagance. Its characteristics had not insinuated
themselves but had arrived in inundations – in eruptions of taste and period,
of churches and palaces, in a positive explosion of the baroque; in an outbreak
of grotesque capitals, or double geometrical staircases; in a torrent of hanging
gardens poured down over terraces and rooftops, spilt along ledges and
doorsteps.
Jenny
befriends local Gioconda and her Roman lover Gianni and we are invited to savour scenes of Italy's Fellini-esque film world. She also goes out with Justin, a Scotsman working in Naples, who reveals Jenny's stiff character from another angle. Through her friendship with Gioconda
she is absorbed into the rich and tragic arc of local history, which by
comparison makes her own life feel pale.
Whereas
excavations of Gioconda’s past brought to light temples, palaces and tombs,
with ornate interiors worthy of grand gestures and heroic renunciations, my own
archaeology seemed by comparison like a mere scouring of some minor site – a hilltop
encampment of the Hittites, say, or some beehive village of the Picts –
yielding nothing more than a heap of domestic utensils and handful of weapons,
few intact and none beautiful..
Hazzard’s
language is mesmerising as she probes our absorption by place and the instincts that foster love. There are moments where love is hidden, where love collapses, where love bursts to unexpected and thwarted life. Through Jenny’s eyes she dissects Gioconda and Gianni’s
rapport which she sees falter and twist and revive. Jenny's own growth and
recovery accompany this close connection, as does the lush presence of
Naples, a city that Hazzard, too, also began to call home. Through every page the voice of Naples is loud and melodious:
Let me dream that you love me again
And let me die in my dream.
 |
| Capri! Capri! Not for me! |
It
wasn’t until I was home and back in the doldrums that I reread Hazzard’s Paris
Review interview after finishing The Bay of Noon. I am addicted to these
interviews and wanted to read more about Hazzard’s attachment to the grand city
of the south. To my dismay I read that Shirley Hazzard has a house in Capri and
is an honorary citizen there. Capri lay just off the coast from where I was
staying! To think that perhaps the great writer – who lives between New York
and Capri – might have been sipping a coffee at the local bar there! I might have wandered over and sat in her glow,
foolishly asked the now eighty-year-old lady for an autograph.
But alas, Capri
remained on her platter of endless sea and I did not leave the mainland. This lazy author feared being crammed on a ferry with tourists and preferred a day
on a secret pebbly beach.
Hazzard
herself speaks of the delightful break that initiated her career as a writer
In 1960, I wrote
a story--a simple story of a young poet, derived from an evening in that
Italian garden. I sent it to The New Yorker, without keeping a copy. It was
accepted by William Maxwell, and I received his letter standing in the big old
kitchen of my friends' villa. Moments like that don't come twice..
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