Milking the Moon (26 page)

She said, “Oh, Mr. Walter, you are so young.” And I said, “But you are American.” And she said, “Well, yes. Didn’t you know?” And she said, “Come in,” so we sat down and she served orange juice. I later convinced her that for poets, bourbon or Scotch was more effective. At five in the afternoon, after a difficult day at the Alliance Française, one doesn’t want orange juice. Not that she was antialcohol, she just thought that was a nice thing to serve because she was brought up in an age when fresh oranges weren’t always around.

Anyway, we got along from the first moment. She asked me what I studied and who my favorite writer was and where I stayed. We talked about my poems, and she told me why she liked them. “I should like to see more manuscripts from you,” she said. Then we walked about three blocks—that’s why there were Keds—to an Italian restaurant where she was known. And where they rearranged the flowers, the tables, the window curtains, the silver, on every table when she came in the door. “Ah,
buon giorno, principessa.
Today we have fresh wild asparagus. Not on the menu, but we have two servings in the kitchen.”

*

That was a busy girl, that Princess Caetani. She was originally Marguerite Chapin from New London, Connecticut. Her family owned all the copper mines out west and had built railroads going to the mines in the last century. She was an only child of her mother, who died when I think she was young, and then her father married again. Since she had a very beautiful singing voice, she got Papa to send her to Paris, where she studied with the famous singer Jean de Reszke. And she stayed on.

As a young man, Roffredo Caetani also went to Paris. He was a composer and a very good one. He was born in wedlock of the duke and duchess of Sermoneta, but everybody knew that his papa was really Franz Liszt, the composer. The duchess of Sermoneta, in the 1870s or something, had a love affair with Franz Liszt. All of Rome knew it, but it was never mentioned publicly. And if the lady is married, the child is—let’s not say “legitimate.” Let’s say “highly within the official bedroom.” And nobody dared ask questions. But Roffredo Caetani was the godson of Franz Liszt, studied with Liszt until he was fourteen years old, and when Liszt was dying in Vienna, he sent for Roffredo Caetani. Everybody in all the biographies speaks of how Liszt, when he died, said, “Tristan”—that his true love was really Wagner. That ain’t it. In the next room, Roffredo Caetani was playing the piano and was playing Liszt’s transcription of themes from the Tristan and Isolde solo. Liszt was only recognizing a piece he’d written. Anyway, Roffredo Caetani was every inch a gentleman. And he was about seven feet tall, with snow white hair. He had gaga days and ungaga days.

Roffredo was the youngest son, and he was prince of Bassiano. One of his brothers was prince of Teano. The eldest brother was the duke of Sermoneta. That was the family title. The princess was Princess Bassiano when she was in Paris doing her first magazine,
Commerce.
She didn’t use Princess Bassiano in Rome; she used that only in Paris. Then the only son of the duke of Sermoneta died, and Roffredo got the title duke of Sermoneta, and so she was officially duchess of Sermoneta for the last six years, perhaps, of her life. She’s three personalities in Roman history, and you have to be sure which one. It’s very confusing.

Anyway, Roffredo and the princess lived all the time in Paris in the twenties and early thirties. Their home was the Villa Romaine in Versailles. They gave glittering Sunday breakfasts frequented by many personalities of the day. Out of these grew a little group of friends who met every two weeks in a different Paris restaurant, and out of their conversations came the French-language review
Commerce,
published by the princess. She published new works of French writers like Paul Valery, Jean-Paul Fargue, Valery Larbaud, Andre Gide, and Rene Char. She more or less created the name and fame of Rene Char, who did not run in French literary circles. He was snotty and difficult and stayed outside Paris. Even though he published some delightful poems, nobody wanted anything to do with him. I think the princess was in love with him, because his name was God. You know. I don’t think they were lovers, but I think she did have a real passionate crush. Because he was God. If he said something, that was it. I never met him, but there was something so unpleasant about his letters and the way I felt he used the princess. Of course, everybody should read his prose poems about the war. They are extraordinary. I think Rene Char is a great poet, a rare voice.

But he never left the war, never left the provinces. Never came to Paris, never joined any kind of literary thing. My thought was, along about 1957: He’s a big boy now, and the war is over. But he just went on being underground.

She also published some very important famous texts in translation, and she published the first Pasternak outside of Russia and outside of Russian, the first Lorca outside of Spain and outside of Spanish, and the first Faulkner in Europe, “A Rose for Emily” in French in
Commerce.
Since she read and read and read and was so interested in what other people were reading and their reaction to new work, she just somehow hit it right every time. Every time. Bless her heart.

She was intelligent, so naturally she had an interest in literature. And the money for the magazines came from her own pocket. She had lots. Her husband owned a hunk of Italy about as big as Mobile County, but of course, keeping that up was expensive. It was not as if he couldn’t have gone to the Vatican Bank if he needed cash and said, “I need a million dollars by tomorrow morning.” But he never did because they don’t do that over there.

Commerce
had a ten-year life. The Germans were coming, were rumbling in the distance. Also, when the duke of Sermoneta died, they had to go back and do the administration of the estate. They owned all the land from Naples to Sermoneta: the middle hunk, the belly band of Italy, from sea to sea. The legend is that Aeneas landed there and said to his nurse, Gaeta: “For your faithfulness and the good care you’ve taken of me, I am giving you all the middle of this peninsula.” The family name at one moment was Gaetanus; another was Caetanus. It was all considered myth until about 1957, when they were doing some repairs at the Vatican and dug up right under the chancelry tombs of the Gaetanus and Caetanus family, taking the Caetanis, who were historically known since A.D.3, back to long before Christ. It makes our American history so short.

There was everything of the confusion of the war starting. The princess was very much against the war because Italy was joining with Hitler. She was very upset about all that. And she was coping with the administration of this huge estate. What she did was, she retired to the castle of Sermoneta, which is a medieval stronghold on a mountaintop in south central Italy, about two hours from Rome. She put in some plumbing and some electricity and got a kitchen going. Then, when the Germans occupied Italy, she got all the peasants on Caetani land, with their animals, into the courtyard and all the thousand wings of the castle and ran it. She got word through her half sister in Washington, Mrs. Francis Biddle, whose husband was attorney general under Roosevelt, that nobody should bomb Sermoneta because she had all the peasants there. She said, you know, Bomb the Germans, but leave Sermoneta alone.

And then she went into three years of coma when she got the news of her son’s death. Her only son, being the heir to the title of Sermoneta, the oldest son of the oldest living son of a papal aristocratic family, had the privilege of not being drafted. But he was half American. He wasn’t going to sit there while his contemporaries, whether peasant or prince, were off fighting. So he got himself into the army that was fighting in Greece. Not fighting any Americans. He died of gangrene on the battlefield. Apparently he was wounded and no one dragged him to safety. An unnecessary death. An unnecessary bit of American valor.

When Rome was freed she went back there, and she and some other grand ladies who were antifascist made something called Il Retrovo, meaning “the refindery,” the refinding. It was like a reception center, partly sponsored by American intelligence, where all the people who’d had dealings or had relatives in the war could regroup and find out what they needed to know. It was for people who wanted to find out what had happened to all their friends during the war and to make contact. That went on for about a year.

Then she began to realize that the outer world knew little about all the young writers who had developed in Italy during the war. She’d had the idea of a polylingual magazine ever since leaving Paris, because she thought this ought to be translated into that, and that ought to be translated into this, and then there are some new writers there who should be alongside some new writers here. But she never got to it until after Il Retrovo. Then she started up.

She called it
Botteghe Oscure
because the Palazzo Caetani is in the Via della Botteghe Oscure. It literally means “the street of the dark shops.” Once upon a time that street, in the Middle Ages, sort of passed by this semiruined small early Roman amphitheater. As I remember, it was older and much smaller than the Colosseum. In the Middle Ages there were shops in the promenade. The ground floor had these big arches and then this walk where there were doors going into little shops inside. Now there are bits and pieces of those walls built into some of the structures on the street, although there is nothing major left of that ruin. But the street is still the street of the shadowy shops. All her friends were scandalized when she called the magazine
Botteghe Oscure.
Everybody said to the princess, “You can’t call it that because everybody will think it’s the Communists or the Jesuits.” The headquarters of both were on that street. People all over Europe would say “Botteghe Oscure” when they meant the Communist Party headquarters in Rome. But the Caetani palace predated both, so she said, “The Caetanis were here earlier. We’ve been here at least three centuries longer.”

The magazine came out about twice a year. The first edition that I saw was number six. So it would have been the end of the third year that I first saw it in New York.

Then she began to ask me to help her. We just got along and had things to talk about. About the difference between Europe and America. She was interested in my first impressions coming from remote Alabama to New York. She was interested in my impressions of Paris, where she had lived since 1912. Little by little we talked about writers. So little by little I began to work with her. Suddenly I was working for her. I was not doing it for pay. She simply included me in all kinds of luncheons. In the middle of the day she liked to have young writers and newcomers and unknown quantities. And for a long time she served only orange juice, until I began to tell her about how writers really do absorb stronger beverages. Afterwards we’d look at manuscripts and she would say, “What do you think of this?” She loathed literary conversation, but she loved to see people’s reactions to new work. She always had these things on her tea table. She would say, “I’m just reading this. Do you know who this is? What do you think of this one? I just love it.” And so on. Everybody was always flattered to be asked advice by her. It was part of her act. But she published what she damn well pleased and didn’t listen to anybody. And she would say, “Oh, Lord, I’ve got this pile of stuff. I’ve got it all mixed up. Will you just have a look at it and sort it out? Anything that’s the least bit good, put it in one pile. If it’s impossible, put it in another pile.” She asked if I could come several afternoons a week and help her.

The princess liked my work as a writer, but she also realized that I was not a moonstruck writer, that I did have a certain knowledge of printing, paper, mailing, and all the dirty work of publishing. And I did some errands for her. I think that’s what made her want me more and more. I almost worked full-time for her in Paris.

George Was the Hitching Post

The first year I was in Paris, just after I went to work for
Princess Caetani, these young men came to her asking if she could give some financial assistance. They were thinking of starting a literary magazine in English, in Paris, and they were having problems getting it going. She said, “No, I can’t give you any money.” It took every penny she could spare to do her five- to six-hundred-page-long
Botteghe Oscure
twice a year. Then they said, “Well, do you know anybody who writes funny stories? Because we’ve set up this first number and realized that everything in it’s about death.” “Oh,” she said, “I can give you somebody who writes funny stories. Money I cannot give you; but I can give you Eugene.” So she sent me to meet them all.

It was George Plimpton, John Train, Peter Matthiessen, Donald Hall, and Billy Pène duBois. They had all just finished Harvard and were doing their
Wanderjahre
in Europe: a Harvard-to-Paris graduation ceremony. And they’d all had something to do with the Harvard
Advocate
in some way or another, and they just wanted to do a publication. They had the same attitude as Princess Caetani. No reviews. No critiques. Text, text, text. And they really started the interview in dialogue form. That’s what I thought was so interesting: insistence on text and the interview with some living, breathing writer.

I had seen George Plimpton about in the neighborhood café. We may even have had a conversation without knowing who each other was. But then the princess told him about me, told me about him. So I just dropped in on the office unannounced. George was rather unsmiling at first, and then he said something like “Well, Eugene Walter, the princess speaks very highly of you.” And I said, “I speak very highly of the princess.” Ask me something, you know. I think the Harvard boys were nervous with me because I was an unknown quantity. I had never been to college but had published in snobby reviews, and the princess had praised me. But they couldn’t figure out what wavelength I came from. What was I? Was I a sharecropper’s child or the great-grandson of Robert E. Lee? you know. (I’m both, and more besides.) I think they thought they were fishing salmon and had suddenly caught something native to the Gulf of Mexico, you know, maybe a big catfish or something like that. I have a feeling that I was a rare bird. They didn’t know how to place me. But they reserved judgment, with real Yankee politeness. They didn’t go into my geographical origins or which university I had attended. Which most Harvard or Princeton or Yale boys would want to find out. I would say that each of those boys, in his own way, was liberated. These were all lively spirits. Instinctively, I think, they went to Paris to shunt off some of the tight bonds of New England and Harvard or Yale or whatever. And most of them were young. I’d had my thirtieth birthday and was older than most of them. They were five to eight years younger than I. In that age group then automatically there is going to be a certain exuberance. It’s just nature. As Tchelitchew said, “Mrs. Nature is wonderful. Oh, Mrs. Nature, she is wonderful.” He meant Mother Nature, but he said “Mrs. Nature.”