A Chill in the Air E-Book

Iris Origo

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 182

Beschreibung

A gripping unpublished diary from the bestselling diarist and biographer, covering Italy's descent into warIris Origo, one of the twentieth century's great diarists, was born in England in 1902. As a child, she moved between England, Ireland, Italy and America, never quite belonging anywhere. It was only when she married an Italian man that she came to rest in one country. Fifteen years later, that country would be at war with her own.With piercing insight, Origo documents the grim absurdities that her adopted Italy underwent as war became more and more unavoidable. Connected to everyone, from the peasants on her estate to the US ambassador, she writes of the turmoil, the danger, and the dreadful bleakness of Italy in 1939-1940.Published for the first time, A Chill in the Air is the account of the awful inevitability of Italy's stumble into a conflict for which its people were ill prepared. With an introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the award-winning author of The Pike, and an afterword by Katia Lysy, granddaughter of Iris Origo, this is the gripping precursor to Origo's bestselling classic diary War in Val d'Orcia.Iris Origo (1902–1988) was a British- born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy at her Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy's fascist regime. Pushkin Press also publishes her bestselling diary, War in Val d'Orcia, which covers the years 1943-1944, as well as her memoir, Images and Shadows, and two of her biographies, A Study in Solitude and The Last Attachment.

Leseprobe

PUSHKIN PRESS

Praise for Iris Origo

WAR IN VAL D’ORCIA

‘A remarkable war diary’ Daily Telegraph

‘A remarkably moving document that, like the best of the elemental war stories, eventually becomes a statement about the unplanned nature and folly of war’ New York Times

‘Iris is unsparing in offering her readers her own keen and compassionate observations of the world around her, investing it at times with a startling immediacy’ Virginia Nicholson

‘It is jolting to recall, through Origo’s sober and self-effacing prose, the atrocious conditions of the summer of 1944’ FT

‘Relates in vivid detail the experiences of civilians who had the terrible misfortune to find themselves pinned between battling armies … beyond doubt a minor masterpiece’ Washington Post

IMAGES AND SHADOWS

‘An elegiac biography … illuminating’ Daily Telegraph

‘Elegant and intelligent’ Spectator

‘A wonderful writer … Images and Shadows is as delicious and tear-inducing as Downton Abbey’ New York Times

A STUDY IN SOLITUDE

‘Sympathetic and discerning … the ideal biographer’ Spectator

‘Origo evokes the bittersweet, unlived life with … sympathy and clarity’ Publisher’s Weekly

THE LAST ATTACHMENT

‘A sublime wordsmith and an astute and passionate observer of human behavior’ New York Times

‘A fascinating and sincere biography … a treasure trove … gives off a rich aroma of those fargone and unbelievably romantic days’ Kirkus

‘A fascinating book … an exciting and complex story admirably told’ Clive Bell, Spectator

A CHILL IN THE AIR

An Italian War Diary 1939–1940

Iris Origo

Introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

With an afterword by Katia Lysy

PUSHKIN PRESS LONDON

Contents

Title PageIntroduction 19391940AfterwordAbout the PublisherCopyright

Introduction

In her late sixties Iris Origo wrote a memoir. In looking back on her life as a writer she devoted several pages to each of her biographies (Leopardi, Byron’s daughter Allegra and his mistress Teresa Guiccioli, St Bernardino) but only one subordinate clause to “my little war diary”. That “little” diary, first published in 1947 as War in Val d’Orcia, is the most admired of her books. Now here is another of her diaries – published for the first time – one that shows a rather different Origo, and describes with vivid clarity the strange period  – the months leading up to Italy’s entry into the Second World War  – when Italians lived in suspense, waiting to know whether they were going to be called upon to kill and be killed alongside the Germans, whom the majority of them detested, in what Churchill was to call the “unnecessary war”.

When it came out in 1947, War in Val d’Orcia was an immediate success. Origo was praised for her spare, elegant prose and the trenchancy of her thinking. Reviewers like Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley welcomed her into the ranks of first-rate writers. More  – the book had a significant effect on Anglo-Italian relations. While the Allies were bombing German-held Italian cities, Origo and her Italian husband Antonio, and the people on their estate, hid and fed partisans and fugitive British soldiers, and helped the latter on their way southwards to join the advancing Allied armies. They risked summary execution by the German occupiers. As Origo’s biographer Caroline Moorehead writes, “Sometimes, as Iris was talking to partisans or escaped prisoners of war in the garden, giving them maps and food, Antonio would be tying up a German patrol in conversation at the front of the house.” Repeatedly the couple, out of decency, kindness, and a sense of the responsibilities attendant on their privileged position, imperilled themselves. The Italian peasants who worked on their estate did too, sharing their meagre supplies and risking their lives. The world took note. As La Stampa’s reviewer wrote, “War in Val d’Orcia has done us more good than a battle won by our side.”

It had shown the English-speaking world how selfless and how brave Italians could be. It also made Iris Origo into a celebrated author, and a heroine as well. When German troops turned her, her family, and their many helpless protégés off their estate, she led a troop of children, women with babies, and infirm old people in a hair-raising march across countryside that was being shelled from the air by the Allies. After several hours they reached the foot of the hill on which Montepulciano sits, and halted briefly to gather strength before the steep climb up to the town where they hoped to find a refuge.

As we sat there, a little group of citizens appeared, then yet another: they had seen us from the ramparts, and were coming down to meet us with open arms. Many of them were partisans; others were refugees whom we had helped. They shouldered the children and our packages, and in a triumphant procession, cheered by so much kindness, we climbed up the village street, Antonio at the head, with Donata [their baby] on his shoulder.

Afterwards she wrote, “Never was there a more touching welcome.”

The story of Iris Origo, the foreign Marchesa who was so brave and so generous to the people of her adopted country, was given a commensurately warm welcome by readers all over the English-speaking world.

*

That story is true, but it shows only one aspect of the colourful life and complex personality of Iris Origo. In wartime she was a kind of Mother Courage, but she was also a sophisticated and cosmopolitan woman with a fierce intellect. The diarist Frances Partridge met her when she was a twenty-one-year-old bride, “so slight, like a flame, very delicate, almost like a Botticelli, with a very quick voice and a mind as quick, running from one thing to another, and alarming because so clever”. A few years later, in 1935, Origo was in London again with her beau of the moment, the novelist Leo Myers, and there she met Virginia Woolf. Woolf describes her. “She is tremulous, nervous – very – stammers a little… but honest eyed; very blue eyed. She’s clean and picks her feet up.” First impressions were good enough for the Woolfs to invite Origo to dinner and Virginia again noted that Iris was “honest”, “genuine”, as well as being “intelligent”. She had these sterling qualities, and she glittered as well. She was very well connected and very well dressed. “I like her Bird of Paradise flight through the gay world,” wrote Woolf. “A long green feather in her hat.” Another friend wrote, “It was impossible not to be excited by Iris… She was technically on fire.”

*

This vivid bird of passage had led a cosmopolitan and privileged life. Her mother, Sybil, was the daughter of the Anglo-Irish peer the Earl of Desart. Her father’s family were rich Americans. Their fortune came from railroads, shipping and sugar-beet. They spent it on philanthropy, on being among the founders of the New York Public Library, on their houses on Madison Avenue and Long Island and a box at the Metropolitan opera. Moving from one grand family home to another, Iris grew up knowing she was, in many ways, exceptionally fortunate.

No amount of money or social position, though, could protect her from loss. Within weeks of her birth her father, Bayard Cutting, had his first haemorrhage. Throughout her early childhood Iris and her parents traversed the globe in search of treatment for his tuberculosis or, failing that, at least a climate that might alleviate it. They tried California; they tried Switzerland; they tried various Italian resorts by the sea or in the mountains. They were in Egypt when, just short of his thirtieth birthday, he died. Iris, whom he dotingly called “Bullet-head” or “Fatty”, was seven. Sixty years later she wrote that her father’s death was one of the two most significant events of her life, and that “there is no greater grief than that of parting”.

Before he died, Bayard had made plans for her. His last letter to Sibyl alludes to the objections his family had made to his marrying an Englishwoman, and goes on to say he wants Iris to grow up “free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, then she can’t have it”. Italy, he suggested, would be best. There she could become “cosmopolitan, deep down” and, when the time came, “be free to love and marry anyone she likes, of any country, without its being difficult”. Sibyl complied. Bayard had left her rich. She rented (and subsequently bought) the Villa Medici, in the hills above Florence, and there, in a house built by Michelozzo for Cosimo di Medici, and described by Vasari as “a magnificent and noble palace”, Iris grew up.

As the only child of an eccentric and hypochondriac mother she didn’t have the easiest adolescence, but it was a mind-broadening one. Her mother, reclining on a sofa in a Fortuny tea-gown, would read poetry aloud to her or, when feeling more energetic, would drag her along on excursions around Italy, barging uninvited into private houses while teenaged Iris cringed with embarrassment. In Fiesole, the social life of the then numerous English colony was busy: Bernard and Mary Berenson were among the neighbours with whom Sybil played at “conoshing”, an art-historical guessing game in which participants vied in displaying their connoisseurship. For these people, wrote Iris later, the First World War “was only a distant rumble, an inconvenient and unpleasant noise offstage”. Ignoring it, Sybil improved the garden and shopped indefatigably at the antiquari of Florence. At Iris’s coming-out ball, “the terrace, where supper was laid on little tables, was lit with Japanese lanterns; the fireflies darted among the wheat in the podere below; the air was heavy with jasmine and roses, and at midnight fireworks from the west terrace soared like jewelled fountains between us and the valley”.

The young woman who emerged from this rarefied atmosphere, in which high-mindedness and frivolity were so curiously blended – couldn’t wait to leave it. She wanted to go to Oxford (she had, unusually for a girl, been given a classical education) but she was persuaded instead to be a debutante three times over. After Florence came England, where she enjoyed the “wild gallop” at the end of a hunt ball, but where she felt as out of place as “a Pekinese in a pack of hounds”. In New York she was dismayed by the “stag line” of college boys, swigging poisonous hooch from hip-flasks (these were the Prohibition years) and becomingly predictably boorish as a result. No wonder, back in Florence, she fell for Antonio Origo. Her mother thought he was too grown-up (he was ten years older than Iris) and too good-looking. Sibyl repeatedly postponed the wedding by taking to her bed with mysterious complaints until the family doctor “bluntly” told Iris to go ahead regardless: “if we didn’t get married at once we never would”. And so they did, in the Villa Medici’s chapel, in 1924.

Antonio’s father was a sculptor and a close friend of the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, but until the war interrupted his career, Antonio was being groomed to become a businessman. Together with Iris, though, he determined on a different course. Each of the young people had money; Iris’s father had left her enough to make her independent. Rebelling against their families’ plans for them, the couple sought out and bought the estate of La Foce in southern Tuscany, choosing it, against all advice, precisely because the land was so eroded and harsh, the buildings so dilapidated, water so scarce and the navigable roads non-existent. They were looking for “a place with enough work to fill our lifetimes”. Iris had hoped as well for “some beauty” but La Foce, when they found it, was a “a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman” with the “bleakness of a desert”. The main house was dark, with no electric light, no heating, no garden (because there was only just enough well-water for necessities) and no bathroom. Undaunted, they bought it, determined to “turn this bare clay into wheat fields, to rebuild these farms and see prosperity return to their inhabitants, to restore the greenness of these mutilated woods”. Quite an undertaking. The estate included twenty-five farms. Iris was still only twenty-two.

*

When she fell in love with Antonio Origo, Iris chose not only a man but a nation. She continued to visit her relations in England and America. She loved travelling, and every year, even after her adored son Gianni was born, she was often away on jaunts abroad. But she was tied to an expanse of Italian land. In the early 1930s she wavered  – spending longish periods in England and indulging in a couple of love-affairs. But by the time the Second World War was imminent, she was back at La Foce, committed with all her heart to her home, to her marriage and to her life in Italy. Her distress when she found her adopted country at war with both her native ones was great, but she met it with characteristic poise. “I decided that, for the time being, all that was required of me was to try to keep as steady as possible.” As an aid to that steadiness she thought, “Perhaps it might be useful to try to clear my mind by setting down, as truthfully and simply as I can, the tiny facet of the world’s events which I myself, in the months ahead, shall encounter at first hand.” A Chill in the Air is the diary she wrote as the outcome of that decision.

*

Nowadays the word “Fascist” is used as a catch-all pejorative term. It is disconcerting to read someone like Origo – a liberal internationalist – remarking, for instance, that it was her “good fortune” to be a landowner under the Fascist regime, when Mussolini’s “Battle of the Wheat” meant that landowners were encouraged, and generously subsidised, to improve their land. In her opinion, Fascist consorzi  – landowners’ associations – like the one of which Antonio became the president, “represented what was best in the Fascist regime”. Iris praises some of their leading lights, like the “man of outstanding ability and charm” who combined an “uncritical acceptance of Fascist slogans” with admirable enthusiasm for their work. To read her memoirs and diaries is to be obliged to lay aside simplistic judgements and to remember that, for a full generation, Italians of all temperaments and shades of opinion got by – reluctantly, contentedly or, in most cases, just pragmatically – under Fascist rule.

Origo (like many British observers, including Churchill) was impressed by the Duce. “My dear,” she wrote to a friend in 1930, “Mussolini is a very great man.” She saw in him “firmness… and a sense of complete remoteness and loneliness. Here was someone on a larger scale than most people”. Later her views shifted. In the late thirties she became close to the Bracci family and the group of courageous anti-Fascists around them. For many years, though, she  – ostensibly anyway – closed her eyes to the oppressiveness of the totalitarian regime. In her memoirs she was to acknowledge a “disinclination to write about the long years of Fascism, during which I learned to hold my tongue and preserve my convictions”. She was an outsider  – a foreigner  – trying to fit in. Besides, she wrote, “I doubt whether there is much to be gained by dwelling on those periods of one’s life of which the dominant flavour, in recollection, is distaste.” That reticence, though, came with hindsight, and was for public consumption. A Chill in the Air – written with the urgency of immediate observation and not intended for publication – shows an energetic, mature woman (she was thirty-seven), full of forthright opinions and lively interest in the tremendous events going on around her.

*

She was exceptionally well connected. Her godfather William Phillips, who appears often in these pages, was the American Ambassador in Rome. The friends and acquaintances who pass on Mussolini’s remarks to her are high-placed officials. She learns of Russia’s responses to the Italian government’s moves from the Russian chargé d’affaires. She is shown a letter from the American President. She discusses the projected exhibition celebrating the Fascists’ twenty years in power with the woman who is designing it. A conversation between two of Mussolini’s most trusted advisers, Volpi and Balbo, is passed on to her by Volpi’s daughter. The rumours Origo retails are not just the tittle-tattle of the drawing room or the piazza, they represent what was being said in innermost political and diplomatic circles.

Her private life plays no part in the diary. She has set out here to describe not her own domestic affairs but a nation’s, albeit from a highly personal point of view. The closest thing to a private family event here is the arrival (or non-arrival) of La Foce’s new tractor. Iris’s first child, Gianni, died of meningitis in 1933 when he was seven years old. She mourned him in tight-lipped silence: it was only in her old age that she began to talk about him, and then, one friend recalls, she couldn’t stop, recounting the story of his pathetically short life to anyone who would listen. After his death followed seven childless years and then, in the period covered by this diary, she became pregnant again. Readers may be startled to find her casually alluding to the birth of her daughter Benedetta in 1940 after no previous hint that all the hectic activity over the previous months has been undertaken while she was pregnant.

She is as reticent about her situation as a foreign national as she is about her motherhood. In the run-up to war, all over Europe, people who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time were being interned. Iris arranged for her mother and stepfather – both British and still living in Italy – to be given special passports and hurried out to Switzerland. But she says nothing of her own predicament. She writes of having made a short visit to Switzerland with Antonio in August 1939. Though she doesn’t say so, they had been to Lucerne to hear a concert. The conductor should have been Bruno Walter (who was Jewish), but he had pulled out. His daughter had been shot dead the day before by her Nazi husband, who then also shot himself. Toscanini took Walter’s place on the podium. Iris doesn’t mention the two deaths. She writes about the “houses trimmed with wooden lace and the Sunday picnic-parties by the streams”. She records that, returning over the Simplon pass, they saw an Italian driver attempting to cross the border and being turned back by a carabiniere who said, “No more Italians jaunting abroad now!” The sight must have chilled her, but she doesn’t mention that in crossing back into Italy she is committing herself to sitting out the war in a country where she is a resident alien. There will be no further chance to get out.

*

The diary is a curious mixture of news – both fake and genuine – rumour, comment and observation. Origo was to write later that she had joined “the wide captive audience, all the world over, listening to confused, discordant voices coming out of a little box”. The radio is at the centre of this diary. Iris and Antonio Origo and their friends gather round it, fiddle with the controls in an attempt to get the foreign stations, and anxiously discuss afterwards what they have heard. Mussolini knows how to exploit the medium. Propaganda pours over the airwaves. Discerning listeners like Iris sift the bombastic output for truth. “Far more than the whistle and crash of falling shells later on, or the dull roar of bomber formations over head,” she wrote afterwards, “this cacophony represents my personal nightmare of the years before and during the war.” Speeches from Hitler and Dolfuss, Eden and Chamberlain, the voices of schoolchildren or soldiers belting out Fascist anthems. “It is difficult to convey the cumulative impact of these voices, as we sat alone in the library of our isolated country house day after day, and the increasing sense they brought of inevitable, imminent catastrophe, of the Juggernaut approach of war.” Difficult it may be, but in this remarkable diary, she conveys it  – all the anxiety and uncertainty, all the bafflement and frustration of a clever, well-informed person striving to make sense of a crazy situation.

At La Foce the workers simply cannot believe war will come – even after it has actually been declared and their boys are being dragged off to fight. Iris almost shares their incredulity. How can Italy be sacrificing its young men on behalf of an ally who is so generally detested? (Italy fought against Austria and Germany in the First World War. The German-speaking peoples who had so long – as representatives of the Hapsburg Empire  – dominated and oppressed Italians were described by d’Annunzio in the run-up to that first war as Italy’s ‘hereditary enemy’.) How can the supple shifts and rich ambiguities of intellectual discourse be replaced by crude propaganda? These questions are unanswerable. What Iris Origo captures here, poignantly and with great clarity, is the silence that falls when peace-time debate is replaced by the brute simplicity of armed combat.

*

One of this diary’s most memorable entries is that describing June 10, 1940. A message comes from the local fascio ordering that all the estate’s working men should gather to hear a broadcast at 5 p.m. The radio is carried out to the loggia and some hundred people are assembled. At five it is announced that the important speech is postponed for an hour. Bathos. The men sit on the ground, bring out bread and wine, play cards. “Antonio and the keepers discuss the young partridges and the twin calves born that morning: one of them will not live. I go indoors again; a great bowl of delphinium and lupins take me back for a moment to an English garden. A whiff of jasmine blows in at the window. It is all curiously unreal and also boring.” The broadcast resumes. Mussolini announces, with much bombast, that Italy is declaring war on France and Britain. Afterwards, “The men shuffle away in silence. We go back into the house and stand looking at each other. ‘Well, ci siamo!’* says Antonio. ‘I’m going out to look at the wheat.’ Flatly, gloomily, we go to fetch our hats and coats.”