No lost faith
STORM JAMESON
Images and Shadows Iris Origo (John Murray 60s) A first reading of Iris Origo's autobiography is like looking closely at a fifteenth-century tapestry : the first impression of a simple elegance is overtaken gradually by the discovery of an infinite richness of detail. Behind the figure of the grave thoughtful child emerge the adult figures of near an- cestors, one half of the pattern formed from American grandparents, members of a clearly defined haute bourgeoisie, highly cultivated, hardworking, achieving a seem- ingly effortless grace through two or three generations of intelligent well-bred decisive women, the other half an Anglo-Irish family of the Ascendancy, a rootedly different race, yet possessed of the same fine-grained talent for living a serenely dutiful life in a world whose continued existence could be counted on. Essentially the book is an evocation of two worlds, two ages, the one that ended in 1914—although its particular qualities of solidity and moral simplicity and its sense of a still existing past and a viable future survived, undermined only slowly, in certain families—and the one that began in 1920, only to die in agony after two decades.
Iris Origo's individual life unfolds in the space of this wide canvas: the years of early childhood, of holidays spent in the calmly luxurious world of families living on the Eastern'seaboard of an America which did not know how close it was to destructive change, and in the more easy-going comfort of an eighteenth-century country house, sen- tenced to be burned, with all its family papers, portraits, incarnate memories, in Feb- ruary 1922 by raiders from Tipperary. Early years in Switzerland and Italy, with a father fighting tuberculosis: with his death in Egypt a phase of her childhood ended. Journeys with her young mother in Sicily and Greece, and from 1911 life in a house built for Cosimo de' Medici, on the slope of the Fiesole hill, the Villa Medici. A child grow- ing up here, solitary in brilliant com- pany—the intellectual society of Florence before and after the First War—was beckoned from all sides by the past. For three years, from the age of twelve, she was tutored in Greek and Latin by Professor Solone Monti. To be so taught, and in a country where the earth is saturated by classical myth and poetry, gave her what she most needed.
'As I looked round me, there was nothing in sight that Virgil himself might not have seen; the olive-trees and figs and vines, the single clump of lilies beside the farm door, the pungent thyme beneath our feet, the goat (and Virgil, too, knew that the damage wrought by goats is even worse than that of
drought or early frost), even the wooden flails leaning against one of the walls of the
amphitheatre, the small curved sickle with which a bare-armed, dark-skinned girl was cutting a bundle of grass, and the round bee- hives placed, as the poet advised, beside a lit- tle channel of running water.'
With her marriage to the Marchese Antonio Origo, the several strands in her nature begin to be drawn into a lasting pat- tern; the energy of mind, the capacity for continued hard work, the inborn sense of responsibility to society handed down to her, were fully stretched in the life she and her husband dedicated to the task of turning a neglected estate of three thousand acres in southern Tuscany—twenty-five half-ruined farms, an old castle, and a strong dilapidated country house—into a prosperous region. Passages of Virgilian clarity describe the old farming methods still in use when they began their life-work, the hand-reaping from dawn to sunset, the threshing, the vintage, the oil-pressing by half-naked men working day and night. Through the years more acres were added, farms rebuilt, added to, modernised, roads made, the soil cleared and cared for and planted with clover, Indian corn, wheat, vines, olives and trees, a hospital and clinic built, a nursery school, workshops, a small cemetery and chapel.
The whole formed a small self-supporting nearly self-contained world. It held when the Second War broke over it : the school housed twenty-three refugee children from Genoa and Turin, the farms, the cellars, sheltered fugitives, escaping English soldiers, and partisans: all were fed, all were clothed.
Simply as narrative, it is a magnificent story, calmly and lucidly told. A remarkable diary she kept during the war and published in 1947 tells in more detail the events—they include the birth of her second daughter—from 30 January 1943, the day the first frightened children arrived at Le Foce from Genoa, to the day in the summer of 1944 when the Allied troops reached them : eighteen months of increasing anxiety and increasing danger from German guns and Allied bombing. The shorter account here, equally vivid, adds a poignant detail : when, after the Germans had left, she returned with her own and the other children to the devastated estate and house, to begin all over again the work of rebuilding and planting, there, on the hall table, lay a copy of the private record she had written of her young son's death, with a note that it had been found in the woods by an English soldier who had walked back many miles with it so that she might find it waiting for her. One of the unnumbered small acts dur- ing the war of imaginative kindness and brotherly respect and consideration on which she rests her unshaken belief in the goodness of ordinary people.
Readers of her biographies of Leopardi, Byron, Allegra, will expect to find, and will
find, in Images and Shadows superb
portraits—of grandparents, parents, close friends. It is less metaphor than plain state- ment to say that the portrait gallery of men and women and one child is completed by intimate portraits of the places she has lived in, the most memorable that of Val d'Orcia itself and of La Foce and its garden. There are moments when, for all its solidity and brilliant detail, this last can seem the portrait of a life as remote from the civilisation of 1970 as that recorded by Turgenev. It is remote only in the sense that classic art is remote; there is in it no trace of sen- timentality, no regret for an irrevocably lost past, no withdrawal of faith in the future.
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