BOOKS
487
whether it is possible to interest someone who does not already like
poetry,
in
Auden. But for readers who are interested in modern poetry,
the book is useful; and its modest, descriptive method is appropriate for
a study of Auden, who is not to be placed or judged at this moment:
he is in mid-career, and more acutely conscious of the problems of his
art than his critics can be.
Francis Fergusson
001 ET AMO
ROME AND A VILLA. By Eleenor Clork. Doubledoy.
$4.00.
Vidi aquam egredientem
A travel book; but surely one of the strangest, and most
beautiful, since George Borrow. And also, it must be confessed, one of
the most pugnacious.
Odi et amo,
says Catullus of his Lesbia, and Miss
Clark's feeling for Rome is precisely the same; but whereas Catullus
is mystified by this commixture of love and hatred, and
is
torn by it,
Miss Clark knows exactly the reasons for the disgust and scorn that
thread her admiration, and her sometimes nagging frankness shows no
signs of bewilderment or of pain.
Ecco Roma,
indeed: the splendor,
the depravity, the ancient awe, the gay wretchedness-and, always, the
water. The water of countless fountains, of lakes, of aqueducts, of pools;
of Tiber itself, that cloacal mystery; water pours through the book
like an obsessive symbol, rarely refreshing, as seldom cleansing. Poor
Respighi with his ingratiating
FtOntane di Roma
seems, by comparison,
as parched as Desert Valley. Yet this firm lucid writing is not watery
in the least: it is perfectly aqueous.
Rome and a Villa
is divided into seven parts. (The Seven Hills?)
Four of these, in a highly special sense, are touristic: streets, fountains,
ruins, palaces, churches, museums, people, and cats. The others are a
sociological inquiry into the background and history of that vivid
Sicilian Robin Hood, Salvatore Giuliano; a sharp but by no means
disillusioned account of the goings-on during the recent Holy Year; and
a critical essay on the nineteenth-century satirical poet Giuseppe Gioac–
chino Belli. 'Aside from these seven parts there is another, the superb
"Hadrian's Villa," which is to all intents and purposes a separate small
book in its own right. The richness of the material, presented in a
prose no less rich, is somewhat disconcerting. One is hunted from
piazza
to pillar, from
art
to obscenity of
art,
from the reek of contem–
porary humanity to the suspicious perfumes of the Emperors-a bad
