TABLE TALK

The Wilder shores of Rome

DENIS BROGAN

Passing a bookshop the other day, I saw the new Penguin edition of Thornton Wilder's first book, The Cabala. He wrote it after a year in Rome at the American Academy and it has the faults (and virtues) of a young man's book, of a young man who escaped from Wisconsin and Yale to Rome—a Rome that had just emerged from the Great War and was about to enter the tunnel of fascism.

Thornton Wilder, when he wrote his book, didn't give much weight to the coming of fascism. For his cast, fa.sciArno was merely noises off, and the real theme was Rome: the translation of the imper- him, not to such transitory short term tenants as Byzantium, Paris, or London, but to New York, the real New Rome (not, of course to the alleged third Rome of Moscovy which was just stretching her imperial limbs). It was the Rome that I knew a year or two after Thornton Wilder, when the SPQR on the manhole covers was agreeable antiquarianism, not a boast of the Duce's impero. Indeed, al- though I don't think I realised this, I should have borne in mind, as an omen, the only piece of classical Latin still in use (as a very learned teacher had told me): locanda est. This was a city to let, abandoned by its old tenants.

In a sense, that is the theme of The Cabala. Just as the sailors in the Mediter- ranean heard the cry 'Great Pan is dead' at the moment of crucifixion, the Cabalists realise that their world is dead (or, at any rate, the sacred city is dead) and that the Gods are moving to the new Rome, New York. Troia Mil. The theme of the return of the Gods or of the death of the Gods has been done before and will, in various forms, be done again. We have plenty of half-Gods today and the modern version of 'Great Pan is dead' sounds from the pseudo-capitol of the Kremlin. Perhaps it is the cardinal, who dies on his way back to China, that is the unconscious symbol; for we can't think that Thornton Wilder foresaw Chairman Mao!

But the charm of The Cabala (a charm that, for me, it has kept) is not in the Pateresque fable, but in the picture of the international set in Rome in the remote days when Roman women were (we are told) impossibly dowdy and the routine of the Apostolic palaces went on as if Cavour, not to speak of Lenin. had never existed. There is one slip I think, in Wilder's account of the black aristocracy (those who refused to recognise the House of Savoy as rulers of Rome) for we are told of young mem- bers of the great Roman houses who were great successes at the Vatican and at 'the court'. But was this the court of the Piedmontese king? Could one be Bien vu in both worlds? Would not this double role have been very difficult? Oriane de Guer- mantes knew that it was all right for her to invite the Duc d'Aumale to meet the Princess Mathilde, but there is no Oriane described here who could have reconciled, say, the friends of Queen Margherita and those of the great pontifical houses. I was told, by an older English friend who knew Rome well, that before the war of 1915 (as the Italians reckon dates) the sons of the great 'black' houses preferred to serve in the Austrian army but could, as a grave exception, serve in the Italian cavalry; and that for them the coming of aeroplanes was a godsend, for there were no taboos on service in that new and, it was thought, chivalrous arm: a plane was simply Pegasus.

Thornton Wilder's Roman world was black. His Mademoiselle de Morfontaine would have fervently uttered the prayer put into Chesterton's paper GK's Weekly:

That I may see before I die The lilies float above Versailles, The crosskeys over Rome.

His young American hero (on whom the cap of Mercury is finally fitted) moved in higher circles than I did. I am not sure that I ever kissed the hand of any Roman

princess, not even of that notable Glasgow woman, the Principessa Doria Pamphili,

still less of the Principessa Caetani who was

to emerge, with such glory, from the Botteghe Oscure. My Rome was the Rome

of poor students or transient, badly heeled tourists. There was that physically vigorous Texas high school teacher who was 'doing Europe'. In fourteen days. She knew no word of any tongue but Texan and followed some tourist agency itinerary

faithfully. She was getting behindhand. We met in a cheap pensione in the Via Rocca di Leone where I had been put by Mrs Strong and I was glad to help. I took her

over all Rome in one day. I best remember suggesting to her that if she wanted to fill her diary with truthful records of where she had been, what she had done, I could help. I remember offering to go round the

outside of either the Pantheon or Santa Minerva copra Minerva, while she went through it inside. She duly clocked up the visit.

But there was a better Rome than that. I remember sitting in a latticeria on the

edge of the Pincio when a young Roman

woman came in to buy milk. She was a Roman blonde (not like a Ligurian blonde

or the slightly bogus Venetian blondes I

was later to admire). But it was not her blondness that mattered. I can take blondes

or leave them so to speak. It was her

features and her majestic carriage. Vera incessu paluit den. The effect on the small

audience is still living in my mind and I remembered it when a magnanimous friend of mine, herself a blonde, told me of the

same impact on a much greater scale when the young Lady Diana Manners entered a box at Covent Garden just before the first war.

Of course. The Cabala is a piece of pastiche. It is not Firbank; it is not Proust. This kind of thing is only worth doing if it is done well, and it is done well. The unknown poet had asked the American stranger that there should only be written on his grave 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water'. And when I came back

from the country he had died and his fame had begun to spread over the whole world.

(The same magnificent pastiche is to be

found in the use of Madame de Sevigne in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.) So Mercury- Wilder takes off for the 'last and greatest of all cities'. From all that I hear of Man- hattan at the moment, the last is more the nun Piste than the greatest.