Some passing waves

Byron in Italy

 

I wrote this article in 1983, and it was published (in English and Italian) in the second number of the first volume of the Sheraton Italia Magazine, with the following (slightly fanciful) by-line:

English-born Richard Gibbs has been living and working for the past seven years in Rome. He is a professor of English Literature, a free-lance journalist and one of the owners of a new English pub, located on Via della Madonna dei Monti (near Via Cavour) in the historical centre of Rome.

 

I had a particular interest in Noel, George Gordon, 6^th Baron Byron of Rochdale, as in 1980 I had named one of four new Houses at St George’s English School (where I taught) after him.  The then Headmaster, Hendrik Deelman, decreed that, among other criteria, the names (of the houses) should preferably be of people, probably historical figures, with whom pupils will be proud to be associated and about whom much of interest can be said......

 

When I proposed Byron for mine (the others were Drake, Livingstone and Newton) the Headmaster objected and attempted to block my choice.  I insisted, however, on the grounds that despite a physical handicap (he was born with a short Achilles’ tendon which made running difficult) Byron achieved great physical feats in swimming and riding in particular, and not only supported Italian liberty but died assisting the Greeks in their struggle for freedom.  You want a hero?  Find me a better example.....  Hendrik, to his grumpy credit, acquiesced.

 

Here is the article:

Byron in Italy

Portrait of Lord Byron by G Sanders (1807)
Courtesy of Sir Joseph Cheyne
The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, Rome

The literary links between Britain and Italy are many and various and deep-rooted.  Perhaps the earliest connection was Julius Caesar’s account of his invasion, which depicted the Britons in their true-blue glory.  However, it was not until the Middle Ages that the traffic of impressions and influence really began. Whether or not Chaucer met Boccaccio in Florence will never be known.  But the Italian influence on Chaucer was marked.  As ‘Pilgrimage’ became more popular – and safer – and as printing made literature more exchangeable the dissemination of ideas grew.

 

Italy has always been an attractive place of northerners.  The stabilisation of Europe under the Caesars and the popularisation of Greek drama in Latin form must have played many a part as did the immensely important role of Rome in the Christian Church, but not all pilgrims are saints, and many with pious hopes also had pedestrian appetites, and so the dissolution of cultures continued.

 

Civilisation, climate, Christianity and curiosity all played major parts in bringing artists and writers, ladies and gentlemen, to Italy.  From the seventeenth century on, with a snowballing increase in more recent years, the tourist trade has developed, and everyone with his sketch-pad or her note-book, or nowadays with the video-camera [smart-phone? Ed] tries to capture a little of the country for the folks back home.

 

Among the millions of visitors Italy has had have been some of the greatest figures of literature, as well as myriads of their acolytes. Certain of their books are still well-known and a few are still quite readable.  Dickens’ Pictures from Italy ranks high as a subjective piece of journalism, determinedly anti-Catholic and yet refreshingly enthusiastic (his appreciation of the effect of the Trevi Fountain contrasts markedly with his denigration of St Peter’s), while Henry James’ Italian Hours is pompously unapproachable, a weak moment in self-appreciation.

 

Direct responses to the country are less available than the influences to be found in novels and poetry, and drama, however.  Many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in  Italy for example, and the Petrarchan sonnet is a major form in English verse.  The Duchess of Malfi, Keats’s Isabella, Forster’s A Room with a View are three examples of works with obvious connections with Italy, but there are many more.

 

One of the most striking relationships between a British literary figure and the people and literature of Italy is that of Lord Byron.  It is now [November 1983, Ed]. Nearly two hundred years since his birth and short, stormy life, and countless books have been written about him, but there is still a great deal of prejudice in circulation against him and at least as much myth.

 

His great strength was activity: he was not content to stay at home and mop his brow in aesthetic ecstasy.  Byron did things like swim the Hellespont, the Tagus at Lisbon and the Lagoon at Venice.  He travelled extensively in Greece and Albania as a young man, helped the cause of Italian liberation in his maturity, and died at Missolonghi from a fever (doctors reported) contracted during the Greek campaign against the Turks [which he partly financed from his own purse, Ed].

 

A few years ago, in Genova, I was trying to locate the villa in which the Dickens family had lodged for almost a year in the mid-19^th century. I knew roughly where it was and thought I might have found it, though I also knew that it might have disappeared long ago.  Dickens had composed The Chimes, one of his popular Christmas Books, whilst living there, and years later, when he died, the bells of Genova had tolled for him, and the local newspapers had announced that Nostro Caro Carlo Dickens è Morto! I asked in an old, Dickensian haberdasher’s shoop whether the two old ladies (undoubtedly residents of the area since the mid-19^th century!) knew anything about this famous scrittore inglese?  They turned the name over a few times, shaking their wise old heads.  Eventually I got an answer: Charles Dickens – no....  But Byron, yes!  He lived over there.... And indeed, he had lived in that street briefly in 1823, prior to his fatal departure for Greece.

 

Byron holds people’s imaginations because he was generous and vigorous, outspoken and brave.  His life was distressing to himself and to some others but it was presided over by an energetic and essentially truth-loving spirit.  As Peter Quennell (a literary historian famous for his work on Bryon) has said, Three-quarters of Byron’s verse is, at any rate from the modern point of view, quite remarkably bad, yet, as a significant literary figure and as an exceptionally interesting and unusually ill-fated human being, Byron can never cease to command our attention, exhorting our sympathy even at moments when we are inclined to like him least.

 

Although he did not write much about Italy, apart from the famous lines in Childe Harold’s Pilgimage that describe Venice, Florence and:

 

Oh, Rome! My Country!  City of the Soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

 

much of what he wrote was inspired by what he saw or read here.  Don Juan has precious little to do with Italy (and nothing to do with Mozart’s Don Giovanni) but it is written in a romping ottava rima that he had learnt from reading Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and it was nearly all written while living in Italy.

 

The prejudice that marks Byron as a licentious libertine, and which brands all romantic poetry as unreadable gush, is one of the main objects of Byron’s satire, and it is most often found in the mouths of those who have never read a line of his.  In fact his work is often witty, readable, and (even) moral, and often contains entertaining thoughts as well as amusing stories, though he never tried to overdo it, as he wrote at the end of the first Canto of Don Juan:

 

But for the present, gentle reader! And

Still gentler purchaser!  The Bard – that’s I –

Must, with permission, shake you by the hand,

And so – ‘your humble servant, and Good-bye!

We meet again, if we should understand

Each other; and if not, I shall not try

Your patience further than this short sample –

‘T’were well if others followed my example.’

 

*****

 

In case you are not persuaded, may I call on Kenneth Clark’s support?  On page 307 of Civilisation, he wrote: appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along, so that he became, after Napoleon, the most famous name in Europe.  From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin, or great men of action like Bismarck, down to the most brainless schoolgirl [careful, Ken!  ED] his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm.....  Byron, who was very much a man of his time, wrote a poem about the opening of a prison – the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon. He begins with a sonnet in the old revolutionary vein – Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeon’s, Liberty!  But when, after many horrors, the prisoner of Chillon is released, a new note is heard:

 

At last men come to set me free;

I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where;

It was at length the same to me,

Fetter’d or fetterless to be,

I learn’d to love despair.

 

Since that line was written how many intellectuals down to Beckett and Sartre have echoed its sentiment.....  [However] this negative conclusion was not the whole of Byron.  The prisoner of Chillon had looked from his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake, and felt himself to be a part of them.  This was the positive side of Byron’s genius, a self-identification with the great forces of nature: not Wordsworth’s daisies and daffodils, but crags, cataracts and colossal storms: in short, with the sublime.....

*****

 

I rest my case.  A final quote from Don Juan, Canto XV, stanza 99 [which, for the record, I read whilst wild camping on Corsica some 45 years ago]:

 

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

‘Twixt night and morn upon the horizon’s verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

 

 

Byron House, 1994

 

Lord Byron

My days are in the yellow leaf.....

Newstead Abbey, the Home of Lord Byron from 1808 - 1814

It was Byron's birthday, last Wednesday, January 22nd, and we visited Newstead Abbey to pay tribute. It was a quiet day, and there were no signs of celebration, no traces of the flamboyant, broody, romantic in person, though the mellow stones, the sombre wintry park and the cool, tree-stitched lakes breathed romanticism.

The Stable Block and the lake where his father, the eccentric Fifth Lord Byron, staged sea battles

Byron may not be in current vogue, but his work still flashes with brilliance, and his life story still intrigues and excites. His days were erratic and his affairs chaotic. His marriage, to Anna Isabella Milbanke was a disaster, for both of them; his fatherhood, of a daughter (Ada) by his wife, another (Allegra) by Shelley's step-sister-in-law and (possibly) another (Elizabeth) by his half sister Augusta Leigh, was troubled, to say the less. A wayward student at Harrow and Trinity Cambridge, he shot to superstardom at the age of 24 with his narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which describes his travels from Portugal to Greece and Albania. For six years he lived a moody life in the crumbling ruins of Newstead Abbey, which he had inherited from 'Mad Jack' Byron, his father, on his death in 1791, practising pistol shot in the great hall, playing with his beloved Newfoundland dog (Boatswain) in the grounds and riding furiously across the parkland. 

Occasional flurries in society brought him difficulties in love, with problems with Lady Oxford and the crazy Lady Caroline Lamb spitting scandal when rejection addled her brain. Following an attempt by his wife to declare him insane, in 1816, at the age of 28, he left his native shores for good. 

Adieu, adieu! my native shore

Fades o'ver the waters blue;

The night-winds sigh, the breakers roar,

And shrieks the wild sea-mew.

Yon sun that sets upon the sea

We follow in his flight;

Farewell awhile to him and thee,

My native Land-Good Night! 

A few short hours, and he will rise

To give the morrow birth;

And I shall hail the main and skies,

But not my mother earth.

Deserted is my own good hall,

Its hearth is desolate;

Wild weeds are gathering on the wall; 

My dog howls at the gate.

Adieu, Adieu! My Native Shore

The publication of the first Cantos of Don Juan brought more fame, but infamy as well, and for the rest of his life he wandered restlessly in Europe, for several years the cavaliere servente of Teresa Guiccioli in Italy, a country he loved and which loved him.

He met his death, on April 19th 1824, when fever combined with the medical science of the day to close his eyes for ever at Missolonghi, where he had taken responsibility for supporting the cause of Greek independence from Turkish oppression. 

         

In the late 1970s, when teaching in Rome, I was party to a naming of houses, when the school's pastoral system went vertical. Charged with finding suitable names for four houses, where the titles would be shoutable on touch lines (hence planets such as Uranus were discounted) and should promote strong values (?) my option was for George Gordon Noel, the sixth Lord Byron. The then Headmaster, one Hendrik Deelman, wished to veto my proposal, claiming that my hero may have had homosexual tendencies, had an embarrassingly uninhibited libido, and spoke his mind..... Also held against him was his reported club-foot, a handicap which apparently made him less attractive as a hero.

These accusations raised my hackles, and on behalf of the long dead lord I fought back.  Here was a highly successful writer who lived in, and loved, Italy; who may have had a physical disability but who notwithstanding could swim the Bosporus, the Tagus at Lisbon and from the Lido of Venice across the lagoon and up the Grand Canal in a race; and who effectively gave his wealth and his life to the cause of an oppressed nation.  Come on Byron!  What more could you ask for?

He may have been described as Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know (by the possibly deranged Caroline Lamb) but it would be risky to suggest that anyone is perfect, and Byron's imperfections seem to me to have been outweighed by his genius.  He was an inspiration.  And when we launched the house in his name (and indeed celebrated his 200th birthday soon after) we found much to admire, and much to draw on both for succour and for solace.

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know......

On his birthday, in 1824, Byron penned the following poignant lines at Missolonghi, clearly aware that his time was limited:

On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year

'TIS time the heart should be unmoved, 

Since others it hath ceased to move: 

Yet, though I cannot be beloved, 

Still let me love! 

My days are in the yellow leaf; 

The flowers and fruits of love are gone; 

The worm, the canker, and the grief 

Are mine alone! 

The fire that on my bosom preys 

Is lone as some volcanic isle; 

No torch is kindled at its blaze-- 

A funeral pile. 

The hope, the fear, the jealous care, 

The exalted portion of the pain 

And power of love, I cannot share,

But wear the chain......

This poem, one of his shorter pieces, and the last he wrote, is justly famous, reading today as easily as if it were freshly composed, with a gently loping rhythm that holds up with every fourth line as if riding a horse in wind and rain, not galloping, but surging forward then reining back.  Whatever weaknesses Byron may have had, his lyrical qualities were unsurpassed, and for me his plain philosophy rings bells, even if cracked like the west front of his desecrated Newstead.

As champion of the maligned lord, I took time to travel with a copy of Don Juan, reading it in bars and on beaches through one heated July.  I read it with a pencil in hand and scored lines against passages that I found particularly resonant, the rolling ottava rima keeping me enthralled. Now, as I complete my sixty-third year (on this day of writing, also his half sister Augusta's birthday) I feel a renewed affection for his life and work, though would not pursue any likeness or pretend any connection beyond admiration.

Well - well, the world must turn upon its axis,

And all mankind turns with it, heads or tails,

And live and die, make love and pay our taxes, 

And as the veering wind shifts, shift our sails.

The king commands us, and the doctor quacks us, 

The priest instructs, and so our life exhales,

A little breath, love, wine, ambition, fame,

Fighting, devotion, dust - perhaps a name.....

(Don Juan, Canto II, stanza 4)

Outside the rain and wind spatter the garden and the street. It's not a pleasant day, and if I own to a slight despondency it is probably due to the time of year, rather than to my advancing years.  I take heart from Byron's lightness of touch when it comes to melancholy, and his shrouded optimism:

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

'Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge.

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be!  The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar 

Our bubbles.  As the old burst, new emerge......

(Don Juan, Canto XV, stanza 99)

These days the trademark Byron is much sought after, and the adjective Byronic needs little explanation. Though, despite his image as romantic hero, dressed in colourful robes, it is the courage of his convictions which still inspires, and, difficult though he may have been, I applaud his outspokenness, even when he adopts the guise of Juan:

                                           Ne'er doubt

This:  when I speak, I don't hint, but speak out.....

          I may stand alone,

But would not change my free thoughts for a throne.

(Don Juan, Canto XI, stanzas 88 and 90)

Happy Birthday, George!  And thank you!  We leave the Abbey grounds in quiet weather, enriched by the complex of nature and architecture, grateful to Nottingham City Council for preserving this for the public. From the medieval cloisters, and the remains of the 13th century Priory Church, the Great Hall with its minstrels' gallery, and the 300 acres of parkland and lakes, we take our leave, but carry with us an impression of a life much greater than our own.

So we'll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

(So we'll go no more a-roving)

http://www.newsteadabbey.org.uk/

ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR
by: George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)

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'IS time the heart should be unmoved,

Since others it hath ceased to move:

Yet, though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love!

 

My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers and fruits of love are gone;

The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone!

 

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze--

A funeral pile.

 

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,

The exalted portion of the pain

And power of love, I cannot share,

But wear the chain.

 

But 'tis not thus--and 'tis not here--

Such thoughts should shake my soul nor now,

Where glory decks the hero's bier,

Or binds his brow.

 

The sword, the banner, and the field,

Glory and Greece, around me see!

The Spartan, borne upon his shield,

Was not more free.

 

Awake! (not Greece--she is awake!)

Awake, my spirit! Think through whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,

And then strike home!

 

Tread those reviving passions down,

Unworthy manhood!--unto thee

Indifferent should the smile or frown

Of beauty be.

 

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?

The land of honourable death

Is here:--up to the field, and give

Away thy breath!

 

Seek out--less often sought than found--

A soldier's grave, for thee the best;

Then look around, and choose thy ground,

And take thy rest.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/on_this_day_i_complete_my_thirty-sixth_year.html#GmyjIoxx8jsG2MuI.99

ON THIS DAY I COMPLETE MY THIRTY-SIXTH YEAR
by: George Gordon (Lord) Byron (1788-1824)

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'IS time the heart should be unmoved,

Since others it hath ceased to move:

Yet, though I cannot be beloved,

Still let me love!

 

My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers and fruits of love are gone;

The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone!

 

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle;

No torch is kindled at its blaze--

A funeral pile.

 

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,

The exalted portion of the pain

And power of love, I cannot share,

But wear the chain.

 

But 'tis not thus--and 'tis not here--

Such thoughts should shake my soul nor now,

Where glory decks the hero's bier,

Or binds his brow.

 

The sword, the banner, and the field,

Glory and Greece, around me see!

The Spartan, borne upon his shield,

Was not more free.

 

Awake! (not Greece--she is awake!)

Awake, my spirit! Think through whom

Thy life-blood tracks its parent lake,

And then strike home!

 

Tread those reviving passions down,

Unworthy manhood!--unto thee

Indifferent should the smile or frown

Of beauty be.

 

If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?

The land of honourable death

Is here:--up to the field, and give

Away thy breath!

 

Seek out--less often sought than found--

A soldier's grave, for thee the best;

Then look around, and choose thy ground,

And take thy rest.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/on_this_day_i_complete_my_thirty-sixth_year.html#GmyjIoxx8jsG2MuI.99

Corsica

The Rings of Corsica - In memory of W G Sebald

"....my wishful thinking about a few last years with no duties of any kind soon gave way to a need to fill the present afternoon somehow, and so I found myself, hardly knowing how I came there, in the entrance hall of the Musee Fesch, with notebook and pencil and a ticket in my hand."  So wrote W G Sebald in an essay entitled "A Little Excursion to Ajaccio," written in the mid-90s, but now published in "Campo Santo."  Sebald died in December 2001, when the car he was driving (with his daughter - who survived - as passenger) swerved into a lorry coming the other way. He may have suffered an aneurysm.   Sadly he did not have many years with no duties of any kind. [Perhaps I should add that W G Sebald was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and was the author of five of the most influential psycho-fictional-travel books created in recent times, which include, "The Rings of Saturn," a book to take to heaven.]

Napoleon Bonaparte, in a toga, in Ajaccio

He wrote at the time that, "It was a beautiful, sunlit day, the branches of the palms in the Place Marechal-Foch moved gently in a breeze coming off the sea.... and I wandered through the streets feeling care-free and at ease....."  I remember that day, too, and I too have wandered carefree and easily in the Ajaccio streets.  It is an energetic city, slightly out of place on the wild island of Corsica, as it seems more continental than its companion urban centres.

However, both Sebald and I were under the spell of Napoleon, who was born here on August 15th 1769 (that's his mother above). This was the second house the Bonaparte family had occupied in Ajaccio, where Napoleon's father, Charles-Marie Bonaparte, was Lawyer to the Superior Council of Corsica. The house is cool and uncluttered. It is difficult to imagine the young emperor and his seven siblings careering round the chambers, but it is not hard to envisage his father sipping a glass of Muscat with some prisuttu ham and figatellu sausage, gazing out of the first floor window, wondering how his children would turn out.....

 http://www2.demis.nl/mapserver/mapper.asp

Corsica has a wonderful roller-coaster metre-gauge railway that connects Bastia with Calvi and Ajaccio.  At the meeting point of the two lines, Ponte Leccia, there is a station, with a waiting room.  In the middle of absolutely no where - no nothing, not even a view to recommend, though of course it is wild bandit country all around - there is a station, a platform, and a waiting room.  And in the waiting room was (perhaps still is?) a portrait of a plump Napoleon Bonaparte, as if he was the current ruling dignitary of the island. Dusty, eerily quiet, and desolate;  I waited there for the train to take me to Calvi, and for an hour or two thought I was back in the early nineteenth century.

I have always arrived in Corsica by sea - so far, never by air - and the port of entry has been Bastia, a typically Mediterranean fishing-come-ferry port, with restaurants overlooking the harbour, and narrow streets unwinding away to the boulevardes of the modern city.

It is very Mediterranean, and could well be Italian, though there is an underlying Frenchness on this side of the island.  Once ruled by Genoa, but for generations uncomfortably under the supervision of the Gendarmerie, it is a francophone version of La Spezia, or a smaller cross between Livorno and Marseilles.

The south of the island, once ruled by the Pisans, is more Italian, and also is geologically dissimilar in that it is limestone rather than granite.  Bonifacio perches perilously over the cliffs veering towards Sardinia, and has a character, and a dialect, much more Italian than French.  The restaurant in this picture is called 'A Marichella' with a Neapolitan resonance.

And only a stone's throw (quite literally) away the sea erodes while the beautiful people fry their skin cells.

While on the west of the island, the aforementioned Ajaccio, flies the common flag of the whole Mediterranean, the string of washing (characteristically displaying the French colours) run out from apartments with no other space.

The island is tortuous to explore. In 1765 James Boswell journeyed from Bastia to Corte, and back; "For some time I had very curious travelling, mostly on foot, and attended by a couple of stout women who carried my baggage upon their heads." A little later he was more fortunate, and, "From Murato to Corte I travelled through a wild, mountainous, rocky country, diversified with some large valleys. I got little beasts for me and my servant, sometimes horses but oftener mules or asses....."

Vescovato

Ultimately everyone arrives at Corte, once capital of the island, though a curiously small town, dominated by a sinister citadel perched precariously atop a crag. Boswell records visiting this castle and being shown round. There were three prisoners on death row and a miserable hangman, who was a Sicilian. Being, "held in utmost detestation," this poor chap, "was obliged to take refuge in the Castle and there he was kept in a little corner turret, where he had just room for a miserable bed and a little bit of fire to dress such victuals for himself as were sufficient to keep him alive....." 

In Corsica time could be measured against the menhirs which appear at various sites on the island. These curious stones, with minimalist but absolutely recognisable human faces, are found here and there, with little apparent reason, and date back some 3,500 years. The settlement at Filitosa, one of the most impressive of these sites, may have been occupied by menkind for some 7,000 years, but there are only megaliths, not megabytes, to record this.

"The head was clearly shaped: a large round head with protruding ears, sinister close-set eyes and a faint indication of moth and nose. Neck and shoulders were carved from the block; but the body was simply a flattened shaft of stone, with a ridge, just discernible, crossing it diagonally: not an arm, it seemed, but a sword....."

"Few works of art have ever made so strong an impression on me as these enigmatic, rudimentary human figures. They were uncouth, they were barbaric; yet their impact was sharpened by what I recognised as familiar in their strangeness...... They moved me in the acute and disturbing way of things long lost and suddenly rediscovered, which is more poignant, far, than the shock of what is altogether unknown." This is Dorothy Carrington in "Granite Island," ("A Portrait of Corsica") a book first published in 1971, but which was based on a trip to the island in 1948 and subsequent visits over twenty years. The book is a dense but mesmerising account of Corsican history and culture.

Dorothy Carrington tells of the customs of old Corsica, but also evokes the scenery, the jagged edge of a Mediterranean culture that is not so remote as one would expect. In some ways hers is a book that would have pleased W G Sebald, though it is more detailed, more precise and focussed than his work appears.

"Sebald's work is driven by associative thinking – coincidences, connections – but his chief aim was to evoke and capture, and his images, rich in mystery, or resonant with pathos, are what linger. A corpse released by a glacier. An office spilling with paper....."   Leo Robson, The Guardian, 21st June 2013.  

Corsica lends itself to fanciful images and combinations of ideas.  In the picture above, the human viewer will note the road and simple houses, the ruined wall, the clouds and the rugged mountain ridge, and then will come back to the browsing cow with the flickery tail. Carrington would most probably link the picture to pasturage and husbandry and account for the development of the high bergeries.  Sebald would find a way to pursue his theme of desolation even in the brightest of light, identifying the cold heights as sources of hope, of a kind.  "This story of the burning of the frozen substance of life has, of late, meant much to me, and I wonder now whether  inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow."  (The Rings of Saturn, Part IV).

My own love for Corsica derives from the juxtaposition of life and hardness: the way that trees sprout from barren rock; wild boar forage amongst the brittle stones, and remote dwellings are shaped from the natural environment.

On my first visit I was alone with Lord Byron, walking and reading, and sleeping rough to the rhythm of Don Juan.  The first night, in a wild patch on the outskirts of Bastia, I found I had slept on a scorpion's nest.  Another night I shared with some of the most aggressive mosquitoes I have ever met, in a low lying wood near the coast at Porto.  On another, more romantic occasion, I tried to sleep in "An English Park" near Ajaccio but was pestered by some deluded and amorous tortoises. Up on the Grande randonnée 20 (now said to be the toughest long distance path in Europe), which then was overgrown and almost impassable, despite being one of the main mule tracks across the island at one time, I slept in a stone hut whose floor was entirely dried goat and donkey droppings.....

Returning some years later, the spot was virtually unchanged, except that it had passed from black and white to colour, and I was in the company of my wife.  The Restonica was as fresh and clean as ever and our bathing was a thing of paradise before the fall.  

A touch of paradise

Later still we returned with our children, who in their turn appreciated the isolation and remoteness, the splashing of clear waters and the rustling of breeze driven leaves.

Rock dominates Corsica.  The terrain is severe, the geology unforgiving.  High in the hills you can find erratic features and along the deep valleys you will struggle to bypass boulders and cliffs.

Sebald did not have enough time in Corsica to weave the same allusive magic that he found for The Rings of Saturn, but he made a start. "My first walk on the day after my arrival in Piana took me out on a road that soon begins falling away steeply in terrifying curves, sharp bends and zigzags, leading past almost vertical rocky precipices densely overgrown by green scrub, and so down to the bottom of a ravine opening out into the Bay of Ficajola several hundred metres below....." (Campo Santo.)

What he perhaps did not experience is another natural (?) phenomenon that continually plagues the island, which is fire. In summer, the intense sunshine dries everything to tinder, and then winds can whip up to one hundred and fifty km/h stir ring the dust and awaiting a spark, which may come from a piece of broken glass, an electrical fault, a discarded cigarette or a deliberate match or lighter.

While the burning of undergrowth and even trees is a natural part of regeneration, it is very scary to wildlife and humans alike, and the experience of trying to sleep when there is a blustering wind shaking the shutters, the sound of sparks showering and spitting across the sky, and the acrid odour of charcoaled broom, is not something that tour operators will promote.

Those that fight the fires are brave and tireless.  Canadairs, some from Italy, will bank and bomb for an hour or more, providing they have a lake nearby to refill from.  In more difficult terrain, helicopters will suction up water from wells or ponds, and then pour it down on the undying flames.

But firemen on the land, with their vulnerable appliances, battle against the scourge, valiantly attempting to divert conflagration from property or livestock, vineyard or orchard. It is devilishly difficult and many of the fires are set deliberately by unscrupulous developers perhaps.

At the end of the day, however, to cite a cliche, the sun will go down, the wind will drop, the air will cool and the rain will fall (Corsica has a higher average rainfall than Ireland).  

"Only as the sun sank beneath the horizon was the surface of the sea extinguished; the fire in the rocks faded, turned lilac and blue, and shadows moved out from the coast. It took my eyes some time to become accustomed to the soft twilight, and then I could see the ship that had emerged form the middle of the fire was now making for Porto harbour so slowly that you felt it was not moving at all....." (The Alps in the Sea.)

Time to Kill

Sundown is time to take stock of the day, to unwind with a book and to take refreshment, which in French style is with a long glass of Pastis with lots of ice and water.  In the first part of The Rings of Saturn Sebald writes that, "All I could hear was the wind sweeping in from the country and buffeting the window; and in between, when the sound subsided, there was the never entirely ceasing murmur in my own ears."

Corsica resonates.  I Muvrini, once a most popular group on the island, sing in harmony and intone their tales of bandits and shepherds.  I remember meeting a shepherd in the hills above Corte once, and discussing, in Italo-French, the difficulty of the terrain and the variable weather.  He smiled in a relaxed and patient way.  

W G Sebald

The heart of Corsica is stone, but it beats with calm defiance.  Never laid waste, never tamed, still a place of virgin territory despite the charter planes that invade the northern shores, Corsica resonates with tradition and flavour.  On the feast of Sampiero (a sixteenth century Corsican hero) I stepped off a bus in Sartene, at breakfast time, and soon found myself seated with a group of young men drinking brandy for breakfast.  

On a return from the island, I took a slow train from Piombino and unpacked a ripe Corsican ewe's milk cheese to revive me as a snack.  In little time the carriage was empty but for one other person, the film director Francesco Rosi, who sat unconcerned at the rustic savour, lost in a Sebaldian reverie, circling, circling.

"Between two worlds life hovers like a star

'Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge.

How little do we know that which we are!"

Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XV, 99

Musée Nationale de la maison Bonaparte, rue Saint-Charles - 20000 Ajaccio

Campo Santo: W G Sebald, ISBN 978-0-141-01786-0

The Rings of Saturn: W G Sebald. ISBN 1-86046-399-1

Granite Island: Dorothy Carrington, ISBN0-14-009524-1

Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France, 1765

http://www.le-gr20.com/gb/