Nothing to Be Frightened Of

  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 Bro
nzino, “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!”

  So all reliable evidence for Stendhal’s Syndrome effectively dissolves before our eyes. But the point is not that Stendhal was an exaggerator, a fabulator, a false-memory artist (and Beyle a truth-teller). The story becomes more, not less, interesting. It is a story instead about narrative and memory. Narrative: the truth of a novelist’s story is the truth of its final form, not that of its initial version. Memory: we should believe that Beyle was equally sincere, whether writing at a few hours’ distance from events, or fifteen years later. Note also that whereas Beyle was “almost moved to tears” in front of the Bronzino, they “started to his eyes” when he wrote about the sibyls a couple of hours later. Time brings not just narrative variation but emotional increase. And if forensic examination appears to diminish the story of Santa Croce, it remains, even in its original, unimproved version, about aesthetic joy being greater than religious rapture. Fatigue and tight boots would have distracted Beyle from God’s glory, had he gone into the church to pray; but the power of art overcame pinched toes and rubbed heels.

  Chapter 66

  My grandfather, Bert Scoltock, had only two jokes in his repertoire. The first referred to his and Grandma’s wedding day, 4 August 1914, and so came with half a century of repetition (rather than honing): “We were married the day war broke out,” (heavy pause) “and it’s been war ever since!!!” The second was a story drawn out as long as possible, about a chap who went into a café and asked for a sausage roll. He took a bite, then complained that there wasn’t any sausage in it. “You haven’t reached it yet,” said the café’s proprietor. The fellow took another mouthful and repeated his complaint. “You’ve bitten right past it,” came the reply—a punchline my grandfather would then reprise.

  My brother agrees that Grandpa was humourless; though when I add “boring and a little frightening,” he dissents. But then Grandpa did favour his firstborn grandchild, and taught him how to sharpen a chisel. It’s true, he never beat me for pulling up his onions, but his was a headmasterly presence in the family, and I can easily summon up his disapproval. For instance: every year, he and Grandma would come over for Christmas. Once, in the early sixties, Grandpa, looking for something to read, went to the bookshelves in my bedroom and, without asking, removed my copy of Lolita. I can see the Corgi paperback now, see how my grandfather’s woodworking and gardening hands methodically broke the spine as he read. This was something Alex Brilliant also used to do—though Alex behaved as if breaking a book’s spine showed you were engaging intellectually with its contents; whereas Grandpa’s (exactly similar) behaviour seemed to indicate disrespect for both the novel and its author. At every page—from “fire of my loins” to “the age when lads / Play with erector sets”—I expected him to throw it down in disgust. Amazingly, he didn’t. He had started, so he would finish: English puritanism kept him doggedly ploughing through this Russian tale of American depravity. As I nervously watched him, I began to feel almost as if I had written the novel, and now stood revealed as a secret nymphet-groper. What could he be making of it? Eventually, he handed the book back to me, its spine a vertical mess of whitened cicatrices, with the comment, “It may be good literature, but I thought it was SMUTTY.”

  At the time, I smirked to myself, as any aesthete going up to Oxford would. But I did my grandfather a disservice. For he had accurately recognized Lolita’s appeal to me then: as a vital combination of literature and smut. (There was such a dearth of sexual information—let alone experience—around that a reworking of Renard obtained: “It is when faced with sex that we turn most bookish.”) I also did Grandpa a disservice earlier by suggesting that he left me nothing in his will. Wrong again. My brother corrects me: “When Grandpa died, he left me his repro Chippendale desk (which I never liked) and he left you his gold half-hunter watch (which I had always coveted).”

  An old press cutting in my archive drawer confirms that the desk was a retirement present in 1949, when Bert Scoltock, then sixty, left Madeley Modern Secondary School after thirty-six years as a head teacher in various parts of Shropshire. He also received an armchair—quite probably that very Parker Knoll; also, a fountain pen, a cigarette lighter, and a set of gold cufflinks. Girls from the Domestic Science Centre baked him a two-tier cake; while Eric Frost, “representing a group of boys from the Woodwork Centre” gave him “a nut bowl and mallet.” I remember this last item well since it was always on display at my grand-parents’ bungalow, yet never used. When it finally came into my possession, I understood why: it was comically impractical, the mallet firing shell-shrapnel all over the room while reducing the nuts to powder. I always assumed that Grandpa must have made it himself, since almost every wooden object in house and garden, from trug to book trough to grandmother clock case, had been sawn and sanded and chamfered and dowelled by his own hands. He had a great respect for wood, which he took to its final conclusion. Shocked by the notion that coffins crafted from fine oak and elm were reduced to ashes a day or two later, he specified that his own be made from deal.

  As for the gold half-hunter, it has been in my top desk drawer for decades. It comes with a gold fob-chain for waistcoat-wear and a leather strap if you prefer to dangle it from lapel buttonhole into top pocket. I open its back: “Presented to Mr. B. Scoltock, by Managers, Teachers, Scholars and Friends, after his leaving after 18 years as head teacher at Bayston Hill C of E School. June 30th 1931.” I had no idea my brother had ever coveted it, so I tell him that now, after forty-odd years of suffering this sinful emotion, the watch is his. “As for the half-hunter,” he replies, “I think he would have wanted you to keep it.” He would have wanted? My brother is winding me up with this hypothetical want of the dead. He goes on: “More to the point, I now want you to keep it.” Yes, indeed, we can only do what we want.

  I apply to my brother on the subject of Grandpa and Remorse. He has two explanations, “the first perhaps too trivial”: a running shame at having beaten his grandson for pulling up his onions. The second, more weighty, suggestion is this: “When he used to tell me stories [about the First World War] they would run up to the time the boat left for France, and then start back again in hospital in England. He never said a word to me about the war. I suppose he was in the trenches. He didn’t win any medals, I’m sure, nor was he wounded (not even a blighty). So he must have been invalided out for trench feet? Shell shock? Something less than heroic, in any case. Did he let his chums down? I once thought I’d try to find out what he actually did in the war—no doubt there are regimental records, etc. etc.; but of course I never got round to doing anything.”

  In my archive drawer are Grandpa’s birth certificate, his marriage certificate, and his photo album—that red cloth-bound book titled “Scenes from Highways & Byways.” Here is Grandpa astride a motorbike in 1912, with Grandma perched on the back; roguishly laying his head on her bosom the following year, while grasping her knee with his hand. Here he is on his wedding day, hand a
round his bride’s shoulder and pipe cocked in front of his white waistcoat, as Europe prepares to blow itself apart; on his honeymoon (a studio shot which has faded less); and with “Babs”—as my mother was known before becoming Kathleen Mabel—born ten months after the wedding. There are pictures of him on home leave, first with two stripes up—Prestatyn, August 1916—and finally three. By this time Sergeant Scoltock is in the Grata Quies hospital outside Bournemouth, where he and the other inmates look remarkably perky as they pose in fancy dress for a concert party. Here is my grandfather in blackface, first with a certain Decker (cross-dressing as a nurse), and then with Fullwood (a Pierrot). And here again is that photo, the head-shot of a woman, still dated in pencil Sept 1915, but with the name (or perhaps the place) erased, and the face so scarred and gouged that only the lips and the Weetabixy hair remain. An obliteration that makes her more intriguing than “Nurse Glynn,” or even “Sgt P. Hyde Killed in Action, Dec 1915.” An obliteration which seems to me a much better symbol of death than the ubiquitous skull. You only get down to bone after rotting through time; and when you do, one skull is much like another. Fine as a long-term symbol, but for the action of death itself, try just such a torn, gouged photograph: it looks both personal and instantly, utterly destructive, a ripping away of the light from the eye and the life from the cheek.