Hearing giggles in the Vatican
Jonathan Keates
WITH GIS SING IN ITALY: THE MEMOIRS OF BRIAN BORU DUNNE edited by Paul F. Mattheisen, Arthur C. Young and Pierre Coustillas Ohio University Press, £40.30, pp. 207 Running away is something writers do from time to time. The famous note saying `Gone to Patagonia' that Bruce Chatwin is said to have left on his desk has a distin- guished ancestry. Everybody from Auden and Isherwood to Byron and Shelley has felt the need at some stage to decamp in search of longer perspectives or a more indulgent moral climate. A few of us, indeed, believe that Shakespeare felt the need for a manoeuvre of this sort. Far from spending all those famous lost years hang- ing out with recusants in Lancashire (the currently fashionable theory) he may have passed some of them in northern Italy absorbing the appropriate backgrounds for Romeo and Juliet and The Taming of the Shrew.
George Gissing too ran away to Italy, though his reasons for doing so were prob- ably more complicated than Shakespeare's. By the mid-1890s his life had begun to bor- row features from his novels. Writing offered the only relief in an existence soured by poverty, the onset of consump- tion and the demands of a wife unsympa- thetic, in the classic manner of a certain kind of consort, to his artistic ambitions. He needed a holiday, he needed dry, smokeless air, but above all he required a world which conspicuously wasn't any of these realms of suffering, shabbiness and neglect staked out by his imagination. The Italian sojourn begun in 1897 was intended to put miles between him and the business of literary drudging to support crabby, self- ish Edith Gissing and their two sons. More important still, it was designed to separate Gissing from a career as a novelist which he seems to have felt had run its natural course.
The impact of the trip is partially reflect- ed in the travel book By the Ionian Sea, not the best of its author's achievements but more promising than the historical novel Veranilda, left unfinished at his death, which sprang from research into the Italian Dark Ages. Neither work, however, is as effective in revealing Gissing's moral and spiritual recovery as the notes taken by a young American who happened to be stay- ing at the same Sienese pensione, jottings which later formed the basis of several pro- jected though unpublished essays and arti- cles. All of this material now appears as With Gissing in Italy, annotated and intro- duced by the indefatigable trio of Ameri- can and French scholars whose recently completed nine-volume edition of Gissing's letters is the ideal monument any halfway decent writer might dream of.
Brian Borfi Dunne, Gissing's fellow boarder in 'quiet, classic, lazy Siena', was the kind of versatile, omnivorous enthusiast unimaginable a century later, when any- body straying beyond a limited field of expertise becomes suspect as a lightweight. Son of the Republican Chief Justice of Ari- zona, he was brought up in that peculiarly intense atmosphere of Irish-American Catholicism where the faithful often seem more devout than the Holy Father himself. After his tour of Europe, during which he learned to play the zither and studied Gregorian chant with the monks of Solesmes, Dunne became a feature writer on the Baltimore Sun, taught the aviator Wright brothers to speak French 'by means of the phonograph', acquired enough archi- tectural skill to build a dozen houses, inves- tigated the causes of eye-strain, designed a tetrahedral kite and wrote a best-selling book on constipation entitled Cured: The Seventy Adventures of a Dyspeptic, with a foreword by H. G. Wells.
Such multifaceted interests made Dunne one of Gissing's shrewdest observers. The mist of New Grub Street drudgery clears to reveal a figure of surprising contradictions, naive, opinionated, fastidious, humane and oddly buoyant despite the scars of earlier experience. In the midst of 'shredding words like oakum for the eager publisher', Gissing, pausing for 'a temperate glass of that thin Chianti', extols the virtues of trav- elling with a dress suit, a dictionary and a rubber bathtub, etymologises the word `bosh' and censures the middlebrow novel- ist Hall Caine for appearing on the Roman Corso in a golfing jacket, military trousers and, 'worse than all, long waving hair. And a beard.'
His primness is matched by a surprising insularity. Though Italy can be clearly per- ceived as working her subtle enchantments on him, Gissing, convinced of England as top dog, continues to ridicule everything Italian, from the absence of bathrooms and the habit of walking round the house in bare feet to the abundance of prostitutes and the catching of small birds with limed twigs. Dunne is amused by his comment that King Umberto's bloodshot eyes are caused by too many late-night parties, but understandably offended when Gissing sug- gests that the Vatican's staid corridors may occasionally echo to the giggles of balleri- nas and the popping of champagne corks.
Over everything in Dunne's reminis- cences hangs a dismal sense of 'too late'. The Italian trip may have been perfect medicine for Gissing's troubled psyche, but it could do nothing against the onset of the tuberculosis which killed him six years later. We watch the fevers and night sweats begin, against which Gissing's resort to Beecham's Pills and a local doctor's pre- scription of daily beefsteaks seems quite comically useless. Down an alley in old Rome, he notes the sign 'Via degli Incur- abili'. 'Street of the incurables, what a name!' Gissing shudders, and so do we.
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