the pilgrim traveler
by
Douglas Messerli
Shirley
Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)
In
her beautifully written apologia for Naples and the Campania region, author
Shirley Hazzard begins her “dispatches” with a differentiation between
traveling to a country, merely living in another country, and a stay of
pilgrimage. The first, no matter how rich the experience may be for the
traveler, is usually defined by a brief stay in a place, with little deep
knowledge of, or appreciation for, its history or culture; tourists generally
travel through a country without having the time or ability to take in its rich
heritage. Certainly Hazzard and her husband Francis Steegmuller (a well-known
editor, translator, critic, and literary biographer) could be described as a
couple living in another country—Hazzard’s father’s career as a diplomat forced
the family to move several times in her early life, from Australia to Japan,
Hong Kong, England, and New Zealand, before she ended up in New York City and,
some time later, worked for the United Nations in Italy—but their experience is
quite different from those individuals living in another place who continue to
define their lives by their ultimate return to their homeland. For Hazzard, her
journeys, particularly her move to Naples and Campania, are of another kind,
what she calls “pilgrimage,” resulting in experiences that appear as “an
elixir, a talisman: a spell cast by what has long and greatly been, over what
briefly and simply is.” The difference, she argues, is that the pilgrim
traveler becomes temporarily one with the place, “learning to match its moods
with one’s own,” combining “human expectation” with “an exquisite blend of
receptivity and detachment.”
Hazzard, accordingly, takes the reader
through her Italy—the headland of Posillipo, Vesuvius and Pompeii, Capri, the
Sorrentine peninsula, and through the streets of Naples itself. She shows us
its museums and treasures—the ancient villas of the Romans, the churches, the
fisherman returning with their catches, and the Spaccanapoli, the sequence of
streets (Via Benedetto Croce, Via San Biagio dei Librai and Via Vicaria
Vecchia) that cut through the heart of the Naples’ historical center.
In a particularly riveting chapter, “In
the Shadow of Vesuvius,” Hazzard describes not only the great volcano that
buried Pompei and Herculaneum, but other eruptions and earthquakes
since—detecting, in the continual destruction and rebuilding right up to the
lip of the volcano, the Neapolitan sense of time and the inevitable. As the
author repeats, “Naples requires time,” like the city itself with its ancient
layers of reality; the experience of the city must be something encountered
over long stretches if it is to reveal itself. In dazzlingly beautiful
sentences, Hazzard indeed allows the reader to intellectually wander the city
along with her, characterizing it as a “city of secrets and surprises”:
“Persisting,
you will soon discover the opera house, the spacious galleria, and the huge
Castel Nuovo that dominates the port. Even so, the city eludes the search for
its center. The truth is that there are many centers at Naples, each vital to
its own city quarter. And Naples is rifest perhaps at its oldest point, the
district of Spaccanapoli, where the city splits along its Greco-Roman
decumanus.”
Hazzard’s writing, accordingly, is an
often brilliant travelogue in which the reader is made to recognize what he or
she may have missed in the elusive city. But there is occasionally a sense in
her homage to Neapolitan wonders that seems almost forced, as if she were
somehow in league with the city’s tourist industry. Indeed, so in love with
Naples is Hazzard that she only once mentions the notorious Camorra mob—an
obvious danger for those living in the entire region—and she appears never to
have experienced the heaps of garbage I encountered there in 2007, a perfect
invitation to a blight of rats and disease. Although she and her husband
describe riding through the city in taxis, neither seem to have witnessed the
complete abandonment by the Neapolitan drivers of the rules of the road. While
admitting that “Unlike Florence or Venice, Naples long allowed her great
monuments to languish in disorder, “she argues that they remain in their
authentic context, and that “Private acts of faith and rescue have not been
lacking in recent years.” Although she advises several times that visitors
should never carry a purse or bag, she hardly hints at the violence that might
occur if one were to ignore her suggestions.
The longest chapter in this book,
however—a piece titled “The Incident at Naples,” penned by
Steegmuller—describes just such an event. Carrying an empty bag, and forgetting
for an instant to roll it up or put it in his pocket, Steegmuller, dangling it
by the handles, is suddenly attacked by two young men on a motorcycle, and, in
the usual pattern, is dragged along the street until it becomes loosened from
his arm. In this case, the victim is quite seriously hurt, with severe
lacerations to his nose, hands, and legs. But even in this one instance of
described violence, Steegmuller finds the decaying hospitals to be filled with
kindly doctors who, because of the nationalized health system, do not even bill
him. Returning to the U.S., he misses the kindnesses of the Neapolitan doctors
and the immediate actions of close Italian friends. The clean white clinics of
New York seem less interested in him as a human being than did the decaying
facilities of Naples, and he returns to Italy, after healing, to thank the
several individuals who helped him get through the affair—one of whom tells the
author that the robbers might have killed his son had he not removed the baby
from its stroller at the moment of attack.
I have no doubt, given my own personal
experiences with Neapolitans, that he received such a genuinely personal
response, and one applauds both Hazzard’s and Steegmuller’s praise of these
interpersonal relationships that continue to exist throughout the region.
Nonetheless, it often appears that the Naples and Campania of The Ancient Shore
is a world more of the past and shadow than of the piercing glare of
contemporary Southern Italian daylight.
Los
Angeles, November 2009
Reprinted
from Rain Taxi (Spring 2010)
