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PARTISAN REVIEW
repressed when we confront the fact
en masse)
and so we are guilty
about something it would be unnatural not to feel. Woe unto him
from whom the scandal cometh! But in this case who really brings,
and who really suffers, the scandal? I leave Bellow with the very
sombre feeling that this is a real
scandal
into which I have wandered,
not as a mere journalistic sensation, but in the universal human
sense that it implicates all alike in a single guilt.
II
In Italy everything became a little clearer.
It
is charac–
tensllC of that beautiful peninsula, with its clear light and warm
colors, that the very outlines of human life seem to become simpler
in its atmosphere. To go overnight from Paris to Florence was for
me to confirm again all of Stendhal's perceptions about the differ–
ence between France and Italy: the world of Italian "energy" is no
abstraction, you seem to breathe a biologic vitality in the air around
you, and the stir of men and women walking in the street of the
southern city surrounds you with a different rhythm and life of the
senses that immediately takes you into itself. The rapidity of modern
travel makes it easier to catch this first shock of recognition: later,
for example, returning just as abruptly from Italy to France, I was
overwhelmed by the homeliness of the French after the handsome
race south of the Alps. In Italy too the relation between the sexes
has a simpler outline. Italian women do not have the glaze or chic,
the sexual
esprit
or wit, that you see in the prettier Parisiennes.
Of
a much more stoic and enduring race, they are slow, solid, and
gentle in their movements; and with their rich warm color they sug–
gest inevitably that hackneyed image-which however does not seem
at all hackneyed while you watch them-of some ripe sunwarmed
fruit of the earth. I used to tease the francophile Abel by telling
him, "To prefer the Frenchwoman to the Italian woman is al–
ready the first step toward homosexuality." But I was serious too, for
the separation of the woman from the earth, the bearing of fruit
and the bearing of children, may be the first step toward transform–
ing sex into sensation, a matter of
cuisine
and elegance, from which
point on the invert appears only as another sauce, another variety,
for taste. After the homosexual bohemia of Paris, Italy was like a
bracing air, reviving one's faith in the beautiful possibilities of
heterosexuality.
