This blessed plot

Royal Yacht Squadron, Cowes Castle, 1921

If I have a favourite spot it is Cowes, or more precisely five acres overlooking the Solent, the strait which separates the Isle of Wight from the English mainland. I lived there aged thirteen for a year; and again at seventeen, at a different house nearby. Each was a front-row seat at a non-stop theatre of marine activity. You could watch the ceaseless comings and goings, where commerce and leisure ploughed the water known as Cowes Roads as they had done for centuries, whether sail or motor, speed or serenity, racing or aimless wayfaring. But why do I love the place so?

Queen Victoria, happily married to Albert, brought their children to Osborne, at East Cowes, as a holiday home; and in her long years of widowhood, she stayed here whenever her duties permitted.

The same, today

Her son Edward VII and grandson George V raced at Cowes, together with kings and princes too numerous to mention from around the globe. The famed regatta, known as Cowes Week, started when George IV was still Prince Regent. I’ve never taken any interest in royalty, nor have I ever sailed. Even when I lived there, I never stepped on a boat, other than the ferry to Portsmouth. We had no funds for such frivolities.

It’s not that I was unhappy there as a teenager, nor specially happy either I’ve written a series of posts about Norfolk House (where I lived at age 13), eccentrically numbered as follows: post 0, post 1, post 2, post 3, post 4, so I shan't expand further on that topic.

I haven’t yet covered my time at the other place, Nubia House, because the consecutive stream of my memoirs is obstinately stuck at age fifteen. The house is gone, I don’t know when, its only memorial a little nest of modern dwellings called Nubia Close built over the site. Nothing remains of the grand crumbling mansion, covered in Virginia creeper, once home to Sir Godfrey Baring. There’s very little on the Web, but I found this, part of a letter to Winston Churchill from his future wife, on August 8th 1908:

Now as then

Nubia House
Cowes

I was so glad to get your delightful letter this morning—I retired with it into the garden, but for a long time before opening it I amused myself by wondering what would be inside—
. . .
We all went to the ball the next night which I hated—I was extremely odious to several young partners not on purpose, but because they would interrupt my train of thought with irrelevant patter about yachts, racing, the weather, Cowes gossip etc.—So I was obliged to feign deafness—

I was a school boarder there, but I scarcely appreciated the place or its history. I’d been uprooted too many times from places I’d begun to like, and scarce realized that Nubia House was only a short distance from Norfolk House where

Our host’s garden

I’d lived at thirteen. Boarding-school was sequestered and inward-turned, like a monastery, or garrison in a foreign land.

In Cowes, a place of antique renown, attracting men and women of distinction, I once sojourned with the carelessness of youth. What was it all to me? Now I gaze at the same scene more eagerly. Cowes is a place for conspicuous display of wealth. One can only speculate in each case whether it has been gained from inheritance, crime or legitimate business. All I say is, "Fortune favours the fortunate".

Last weekend we stayed two nights in a house on that fortune-favoured slope, built 180 years ago, recently restored to the condition of its heyday. Our balcony looked over the Solent and hung above a garden which our host was weeding as we arrived. He’s from the East End of London, with the direct honesty and down-to-earth manners of that tribe, and an entrepreneurial Midas touch which he happily admitted. He’d acquired the house in an auction, instantly seduced by its situation, its view. Before that, he’d sailed the world. His love of yachting was displayed in many small touches of the well-furnished house. In the dining-room is a large painting, finer than my photograph is able to capture, which he had commissioned from the artist, showing a scene from the days of King George V.

That painting--click for more

Next to it, a battered whaler’s harpoon leaned carelessly, straight out of Moby Dick.

There was something about our host which in my limited experience of the world I couldn’t place. I felt a strange kinship with the man, as if discovering a long-lost brother on a parallel path. What I have only done in realms of fancy, he effortlessly carves out in the world’s gold which men covet, shaping it without owning it. I feel no envy, though it’s he, not I, who dwells in

this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
. . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm . . .
(In his famous deathbed speech, John of Gaunt is describing England in these words, but I like to apply them to the Isle of Wight and especially the corner in which we stayed.)

View from the pub

He has at his disposal an historic 56ft yacht. It belongs to the son of a retired statesman of international renown, who’s happy for him to keep it maintained at Cowes, so long as he can have the use of it now and again. A vessel like this needs a sizeable crew, and the boatyard labour of many hands. Instead of personal wealth, our host takes on volunteers for these tasks. He helps run a small Christian mission and uses the yacht to help men whose lives have hit crises, such as failed marriages or mental breakdowns.

Which may explain a mystery. When I went into the kitchen to settle the bill for our two nights’ stay, there on the table was an old Bible, open at the book of Jeremiah; with a pen and notebook alongside. It was only after we had come back home that my curiosity led me to look up his name, and the yacht’s name, and discover a few facts which I then pieced together; for he had given no hint of the religious basis for his activities in our conversations.

Last look at Cowes

I ponder destiny and free-will, the paths we take through life, why I am me and you are you. I give thanks for that blest plot in Cowes and to my host who lives there. For if you want to see the blessedness of everywhere and everyone, it helps to start with some defined spot and one particular specimen.

Enhancing the sky

I suppose I’m generally a fatalist, accepting what comes. “Che sarà, sarà / Whatever will be, will be”. So I rarely have cause to pray for anything. In small ways, I can impose my creative ideas through focused effort and perseverance: for instance keeping the house and garden shipshape. But my scope is narrow, and when I desire a change which I cannot bring about personally, I don’t join campaigns. I just think to myself “I wish”. To me, that’s the essence of prayer. Addressing a named deity is an unnecessary formality. Usually I don’t even remember wishing: until it comes true.

My prayers always do seem to come true. It’s an awesome power. I have to be careful how I use it. Sometimes it’s a curse.

I was walking into town not so long ago. You’ll see on the bird’s eye view a spot marked with X. That’s where I was when I wished that the town could be less drab. I respect its lack of of pretensions, but I have to face that it’s ugly. Don’t get me wrong. I love the place. I’ve been here twenty years—four times longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. Nothing will change my fierce loyalty to this town once famous for chairs and other furniture, made mostly in small workshops.

So I wished that someone, creative students maybe, could do something to brighten it up; perhaps with some piece of public art, to show that one need not look only to Nature for inspiration. If only, like Renaissance Florence, it could attain the critical mass to attract the most creative spirits, particularly when the drab old college is being reborn into a University.

You can see part of the “campus” in the top right of the bird’s eye view, with a bulldozer in an empty lot. That’s where they knocked down some low buildings to build a new one which fills every available inch, blocking the view for those who work in the one behind. No cloisters, no quadrangle, no lawn and fountains. Just a faceless slab shoehorned into a small plot, for stifled students to suffocate.

But now, just yards from the site of my secret prayer, that same building begins to compete with the sky’s glory. No, it doesn’t compete: each enhances the other; thanks to the addition of a miraculous catalyst, stainless steel cladding. It’s not Florence. But it’s lovely in its way and I give thanks.

David’s fig-leaf

It’s the 6th of August 1962. I’m sitting on the steps outside the Duomo, Florence’s cathedral, trying to work out whether I’m a student, an ex-student or merely a tourist. I’ve recently arrived from Marseille, where I spent some weeks—I've no idea how many; and I have not yet located my fellow-students of Italian language and literature. They are not the reason I’m here, but it would be nice to find them.

On my first night in Florence I stayed in lodgings full of young Americans, college students probably, doing the grand tour of Europe. The next morning they were lounging out in the back gardens, an abundant wilderness overgrowing various slabs and ruins. I was told it’s the site of a yard where Michelangelo learned to sculpt. The students are discussing the next stages of their itinerary: Florence is just another overnight stop. I’ve no plans to go anywhere. My objective is to stay abroad as long as possible, go back home a day or two before term starts in October, to sort out some clothes & books.

I know exactly what date it is, because news vendors have today announced the shock death of Marilyn Monroe at only 36. Don’t come to Florence in August. The heat is intolerable. I’ve moved into cheaper lodgings (with dormitories) overlooking a quiet piazza. Residents take a siesta with the shutters closed against the midday sun, which only mad dogs and Englishmen would go out in. I try it once but am forced to seek the shade to avoid being fried alive.

At least the Duomo casts a cool shade on these steps. My photo, from Google Maps, must have been taken at a different time of day, but it shows to advantage the deliciousness of the cathedral, like an ornate wedding-cake. I sit waiting for Godot, in no mood for contemplating sculpted marble, even if it looks good enough to eat. Food is my main concern now. I could sleep anywhere, as in Paris, but if I run out of food money, I’ll have to surrender my passport at the British Embassy, and get the fare back home. [Which is what I did, at the end.]

Godot arrives, or at any rate a man sidles up and asks, in what I would call a Brooklyn accent, whether I would be interested to work in a movie. Politeness prevents me from laughing out loud at his clichéd pickup line. I flinch at his physical closeness. It doesn’t go unnoticed, and he hastens to introduces himself, with a business card, as Leo Rogelberg, cinematographer, Coronet Films, Chicago. Why me, though? Hunch, he says. I look intelligent, with time on my hands—and needy. I’m no tramp; my ragged clothes are clean, but I’ve had a little problem with footwear, solved for the moment with string carefully applied to my sandals. I’m suspicious, but in no position to turn him down flat, for surely all Americans are rich, by European standards? Aren’t film-makers the richest of all? Cecil B De Mille for example. Leo sets me straight.

Coronet Films have given him a low budget for an educational film on the art works of Michelangelo, painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling; sculptor and architect of other works surviving in Rome and Florence. He’s just come from a difficult few days in Rome. First, the Vatican wouldn’t give him permission to film in the Sistine Chapel. So he had to make do with a series of colour photographs, carefully pasted together, filming those as if they were the real thing. Second, his van was broken into, his cine-cameras stolen. He phoned Coronet but they weren’t sympathetic: he’d damn well better have insured them properly; and surely he knew what Rome was like?

So, he now wants an assistant who’ll work for peanuts, or more precisely, nice fresh salami sandwiches and Coca Cola whilst we’re filming. (And in the event, plenty of beers when we got to know one another.) I am in no position to refuse. I am to be lighting technician, that is, I will set up the lights, switch them on and off; I will help carry the equipment; and I will chalk scene references on the clapperboard, holding it up to the camera at the beginning of each take.

There must be many whose climb to movie stardom started on a lower rung.

*****

Our first assignment was in the Battisteria, or Baptistry, a polygonal building facing us as we sat on the Duomo steps. After much negotiation, we got permission to film at night, when there were no visitors and we could set up lights as we wished. We were supposed to pay for a museum attendant’s overtime, but the budget was too tight. We opted for plan B: to be locked in the building from closing time in the evening till opening time in the morning—fifteen hours.

Incarcerated in this Tomb of the Medici for hour upon uncomprehending hour, in an eerie, bleary sleepless stupor, I remember best gazing dully at the breasts of Night. Yes, you may well ask. The statue in my illustration is called Night, and I still suspect that Michelangelo used an androgynous young man for a model, adding breasts based on the shape of a pomegranate. Its partner, known as Day, is equally disturbing. I consoled myself with the thought that no one since Michelangelo himself might have gazed on those breasts so continually (and so critically).

We took victuals with us of course. I certainly enjoyed the payment. The knights in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur fasted and stood vigil over their arms all night in a chapel, and prayed. But they weren't stuck in one for fifteen hours.

Another day, we entered the Duomo to shoot the Florentine Pietà, or Deposition from the Cross. (The artist carved several others.) This one, a late work, has Jesus with only one leg, a peculiarity about which art critics speculate and disagree. The hooded figure of Joseph of Arimathea is a self-portrait of Michelangelo as an old man. It's in the Cathedral museum today but in 1962 it was the centrepiece of its own chapel. A “typical American family” had been recruited as unpaid extras, to admire it. I had to read out the script at a certain speed, in a loud clear voice, to synchronise shooting and actors. You’d think statues were easy to shoot, compared to children, animals and demanding superstars: but to a beginner they are complicated enough. I put all I had into the reading, as if I would be in the final cut, and not replaced by a voiceover.

I won’t bore you with details of all the subjects we covered, but my proudest moment was to play the artist himself, in a scene when he stands on the bank of the river Arno, tossing in pebbles abstractedly. Only my hand was in the shot, and for all I know, it was cut out in post-production.

Soon after meeting Leo on the cathedral steps, I tracked down my fellow-students, and briefly considered signing up for summer courses with them al’Università degli Studi di Firenze. But I thought better of it, chose to remain, for the time being, an ex-student. But I did start going to the student canteen, and quite coincidentally met a sculptor, for Leo asked me to look out for one, as he wished to commission a fig-leaf. Our film was to be shown to schools across the USA, and in the Southern States, it seems, attitudes were a little Victorian. The problem was the famous statue of David. Queen Victoria had a fig-leaf made for her visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which housed a cast of David. Not that ladies were ever offended when the anatomically correct details on this fine piece were put on open display. The director of the Museum reported:

'The antique casts gallery has been very much used by private lady teachers for the instruction of young girl students and none of them has ever complained even indirectly'. (Source: V&A Museum website: "David's Fig Leaf".)

The museum attendants at the Accademia Gallery seemed to think we were perverts when we asked to climb a stepladder for measurements. At any rate, they refused our request. We had an idea. Under a disapproving glare, we measured David’s right big toe. In the gallery shop we bought a postcard of the statue, and used arithmetic to calculate the required fig-leaf coverage.

As for the movie, it survives in several libraries, summarised as follows:

Michelangelo and his Art, videocassette (16 min.) : sd., col. ; 1/2 in. VHS.

Traces the life and career of Michelangelo--sculptor, painter, architect, and poet--pointing out that his knowledge of the human body and his skill in portraying human emotion through the body made him one of the great artists of all time as well as a leading figure of the Italian Renaissance. Photographs analyze some of his original works, including David, Pietà, Moses, Deposition, and the figures of the Medici Chapel.

Subject: Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1475-1564.

Author/Illus: Coronet/MTI Film and Video.

Before we parted, Leo typed out a “To whom it may concern” testimonial, which I kept proudly for many years. We promised to keep in touch and never did. The Web has nothing to say about him after 1968, when he had a company doing documentaries. But I’ve written to another documentary company, run by two Rogelbergs. I think they must be related to Leo! Will let you know the outcome.

Waiting and dreaming

On a morning like this I feel a strong call to take the valley path, on account of the clear sky, the expectant hush as in a theatre when the curtain is about to go up, the pure tang in the air. I speak as if these are qualities of the valley itself, affecting equally all who live and breathe and toil in its folds, rather than my own state of mind. Outer or inner? Such a question is always unknowable, but as I put on my boots and take my grey shoulder bag with pen, notebook, and other unnecessaries, to navigate the less frequented paths, I commence a parallel trek through memory.

It felt just like this in 1962, when I travelled through France with a grey canvas duffel bag slung on my shoulder, stepping out to this same expectant void each chill morning, tasting this same tang of adventure in the air. I was a newly-bearded virgin, but forty-seven years between now and then haven’t filtered out the impulsive inwardness which ruled me that Spring. Or perhaps my memory has filtered out everything else but this inwardness, which I see now as a probe which connects deeply into the inward pulses of Nature.

I take the valley path. On the map it’s a string of playing-fields, small housing estates and a public park linked by paths through wilderness or behind back gardens. To my inward eye it’s a primeval route, destined to persist through future cataclysms which may wipe most of civilization.

Even as I take in the familiar route, it’s Marseille I’m thinking of, back in a time of Charles de Gaulle as President of France, when the town was uneasy and restless with exiles: ethnic Algerians and Pieds-noirs—white colonists in flight from the newly-independent Algeria. I got to know Marseille well: the Canebière, main street in which I climbed to my little room from an inconspicuous door between two large shops; the Foreign Legion garrison; great slabs of apartments on the skyline, built by le Corbusier; the cathedral, Notre Dame de la Garde, landmark overlooking the Mediterranean; a certain street market where they sold salted anchovies out of barrels and where I subsisted, in the end, on damaged fruit which the traders had thrown to the ground, joining other down-and-outs in this scavenging before the street-cleaners finished the job.

You may ask what I was doing in Marseille. I ask myself the same question. It started in Paris. When April turned to May I was infected with a mood to leave the city. Robert Tristan was amongst others to feel the same way and suggested a trip south, hitchhiking. He was an agency journalist on a mini-sabbatical, taking leave from a high-pressure assignment in Munich. I met him with the raggle-taggle assortment of colourful exiles who gathered on the Square du Vert Galant, that pointed bit of the Île de la Cité near the Cathedral of Notre Dame. So we left for the south.

I was a free agent. I’d intended to sign on to courses at the Sorbonne, but through impatient arrogance I hadn’t filled in enough forms before leaving England and the funds to finance my studies and subsistence never arrived. When I realised that my six months in France and Italy would be dedicated to Lady Poverty and not Academia, I moved to simpler accommodation: out of the Cité Universitaire and into the École Polytechnique, not to study in that prestigious institution but sleep there. We used to climb a wall, squeeze through the bars of a small window and sleep in a dusty space of boilers and chimneys—till an old woman reported us and the window was chained up one day, with my precious duffel bag still inside. I had to strip to my underpants to squeeze through the chains to retrieve it, with the old woman screaming all the while as if I were attacking her virtue. After that I went to stay with George Whitman at Shakespeare & Co, on the Rue de la Bucherie. Actually George hadn’t at this point taken over the name from Sylvia Beach who ran the original bookshop, so it was still called Librairie Mistral. George offered a free bed in the shop to travelling writers. I told him I was writing a book on Zen Buddhism. By way of rent, my allotted task was to mop the floor tiles each morning, after he’d kept his large dog in all night. Conscious of being but one step from living on the street, I found this a small price to pay. It seemed a Zen thing to start the day cleaning up dog excrement.

When Tristan and I were ready to leave, I wanted to tell Karina but didn’t know where she lived, or much about her at all, except that she was Swedish. She wore a tweed trilby low over her green eyes, shading the freckles and upturned nose. We’d recently met, and gone at her suggestion, to see Orfeu Negro, a magical film about the carnival in Rio. Like everyone I knew in Paris, she was in exile: in her case from a mysterious relationship with an older woman—not that she herself was lesbian, she hastened to explain. We became friends and I wondered if I might fall in love with her.

Tristan was a good hitchhiking companion, bold, ready to take on anyone. He’d once tried to interview Ray Charles, who had other things on his mind and told him to get lost. On our trip we found ourselves taking on some bizarre strangers: such as the Communist who picked us up on the basis of my superficial resemblance to Fidel Castro, (Tristan reaffirming our fervent support of this Cuban leader I’d hardly hard of) so that he took us to drink brandy in his hunting-lodge in a Provençal valley full of cypresses like a van Gogh painting, and showed us paintings he’d done himself, in Vincent’s “swirly” style; or such as the old man in a pony-cart who took us back to his mas (traditional homestead) and let us stay the night in a hayloft with chirping yellow chicks, in return for favours which neither of us were prepared to grant him.

When I got back to Paris Karina said she’d been looking for me. I told her about Provence: about running with bulls in the streets of Beaucaire (or was it Tarascon?), the scent of the wild flowers and herbs, the cypress wilderness. We agreed to travel south together; but without giving any reason, she said she had to wait a week before she could go. For my part, I couldn’t wait a day longer, as during my absence from Paris, George Whitman had given my bed to another impoverished writer.

WIth youthful optimism, Karina and I agreed to meet at a certain camping site about 40 km north of Marseille. I took the train down, stayed overnight at a cheap hotel, then hitched up to the camping site. It was well-known to travelling students, had noticeboards full of messages from those passing through, trying to reconnect with their buddies. I decided not to stay there, but left a note.

Back in Marseille, I realised I must change my hotel to an even cheaper one, on the Canebière, where my room was no more than a windowless cupboard under the stairs, the walls thin, with an Algerian couple for neighbours, she coughing with consumptive desperation, and heart-rending rows breaking out regularly between them. I read Apollinaire (his poems were on my course reading list) and Moby Dick. I spent my waiting days a-wandering, meeting sometimes an exiled Englishwoman, also stranded in Marseille, but for unstated reasons. She told me about a man who the previous day had tried to molest her. She summoned aid from a passing policeman, but he tried to molest her too. Who would rescue her this time? It was a tall sentry from the Foreign Legion barracks, who left his post and chased away the policeman. He guaranteed that all his comrades would do the same, and ask nothing in return. So she spent her days on the rocky beach opposite the barracks, reading her novels, taking an occasional swim, feeling safe. We had this one thing in common, that we were waiting.

My money was running out. I couldn’t wait any longer for Karina—I'd been here four weeks—so I decided to go on to Florence, where some fellow-students would be sure to lend me some cash. I’d earned a little in Paris from decorating George Whitman’s girl-friend’s flat; when that ran out I’d sold all my things to Algerians in Marseille. Now I had no means of continuing to pay the daily rent on my room, and my food-money was used-up too. One Friday afternoon, about five, I came in from the dazzling sunshine and heard a radio playing “Apache”, an instrumental hit by the Shadows. It lifted my spirits. The landlady gave me a telegram, which said my parents were sending a bank draft of £25. But the bank wasn’t open till Tuesday. Hope filled my belly for a few days. I paid the landlady, got a train to Florence, found the fellow-students after some days. Again, my money ran out. I got a job as assistant to a cinematographer making an educational movie about Michelangelo. But that’s a tale for another day.

Thirty-five years later, I picked up a hitchhiker in England. Our conversation turned to hitchhiking in France. He told me how he’d once had all his money and belongings stolen when he’d hitched a lift and the driver had asked him to get some cigarettes at a sevice station, and then driven off with all his things. He also told me about a girl who went to a rendezvous in the south of France, but the boy wasn’t there and she waited, and couldn’t manage to contact him … “Oh, that must have been me,” I said. You’d think I would remember the precise details. Never mind, I believe it was Karina yearning for me as I yearned for her, each blaming ourself for having missed the other. Yet the memory is so indistinct, I wonder if I dreamed it.