FROM AN ITALIAN JOURNAL
and gathering itself into the collected works of Henry Miller. And of
course I shared in the general illusion that Kafka was a great writer?
"There is a very small light of reason burning in the world," he said
reflectively. "Mr. Kafka tries to put it out." He had exact, firm judg–
ments on everything that crossed his path; his years, his fortune, his
snobbery, and his taste have given him a freedom in getting past con–
ventions that is highly stimulating
if
not very satisfying-it is as
if
he
were surveying the present from a point removed in sympathy; I miss
that quality which alone makes a thinker interesting, his commitment
to the living. We were talking about the cultural inertia and provin–
cialism which become deeply felt after one settles into Italy, and he
thought the decline had set in with the Risorgimento--which is curious
not because there is any lack of skepticism today in Italy about the
vaunted traditions of the Risorgimento, but because of the example
that immediately came to his mind. One was left to infer that the cul–
tural elite had surrendered its prerogatives. Why, in his first years in
Italy one could still pick up from Roman pushcarts first editions of
English eighteenth-century novels which had come straight from the
shelves of the old nobility. He finds Italians now lacking in individuality.
Curious to see how he touches on all these things quite outside the realm
of historical development; he goes straight to fundamental themes of
style.
The long romance with Italy is probably over-obviously "Italy"
the aesthetic concept, Italy as he first knew it and as he has retained it
at his villa with such devotion and finesse, has had to bear the burden
of a certain jarring or contradiction under the pressure of recent events.
There must be odd infringements on so exquisite a connoisseur's existence
that make one reflect on how hard it is to possess fully everything we
buy in this world.
We talked about his old friend Santayana, who is living not far
away as a guest of the Nuns of the Blue Sisters-they no longer see
each other. Curious to think of these two old intellectual grandees
finishing out their lives in Italy, the one a Spaniard and the other a
Lithuanian Jew, but both formed by their early life in Boston and at
Harvard. They were together at the Boston Latin School, at Harvard,
and in Germany thereafter- Santayana always one year ahead, as he
is one year older. He greatly admires Santayana, and it was only when
talking about him that he seemed younger and less
distingue
than anyone
else you ever heard of-but they are estranged, and to judge from the
oily and characteristically malicious tone Santayana takes to him in his
memoirs, the friendship ended on his side rather than on Berenson's.
In Santayana's eyes, Berenson was simply a pushing Jew; he has never
559
