488
P~RTISAN
REVIEW
lot, by the way, if we exclude Hadrian; and even Hadrian ... ; and all
this not so breathlessly as intensely, by a guide at once tireless and
ruthless.
One fights the book at the beginning. I, at any rate, found the
opening two sections hard going-not so much because of the torrent
of sights and sounds and smells as because of the ambivalent attitude of
the author herself.
Odi et
~mo
is an axiom, an unhappy truth straight
from Hell; but Miss Clark's
odium
is difficult to adjust to. Until one has
got used to it, it seems
malin,
as though she felt the necessity of quali–
fying every word of praise-the kind of "Yes, but ..." approach which
one recognizes as just, even inevitable, whether it be to persons or to
works of art, but which can also be exasperating. But the waters of Rome
disperse this, or perhaps one simply gets hardened; at any rate, halfway
through the Fountains the reader has surrendered to the charm.
And there is great charm. First of all, there is the prose itself, which
I take to be something unusual in contemporary writing. It is ornate,
even baroque, yet the effect is one of utter spontaneity. At its best it
is to be found in "Hadrian's Villa" and in the little set pieces scattered
through the book- notably in an extraordinary panegyric on the cats of
the Piazza Vittorio, a tour de force of sheer cat
brio
which goes .on for
page after delighted page. But even the touristic matter-of-fact manner,
as in scores of disjunct little notes, can be tautly ironical:
In 1512 the boy Federico Gonzaga of Mantua, in Rome to perfect
his education, was taken to see the dismemberment of a priest who had
been convicted of several murders; the quartering took place in the
church of Aracoeli.
Secondly, there is the intellectual delight of being entertained and
instructed by a mind that is at once subtle and healthily coarse, creative–
ly critical and caustically destructive.
If
at times the author is shaky
in historical fact and terminology-and I am thinking of more serious
matters than the disguising of our boyhood friend as
Horatio
at the
Bridge (even Horace at the Bridge would look no more queer) -, the
general feeling is nevertheless one of rightness, of instinctive rightness
even in error. I am no archaeologist, and cannot judge; but although I
have heard a thumping professional say fairly sad things about some of
the data of "Hadrian's Villa," I am beguiled and aesthetically con–
vinced by that poem of reconstruction.
There is no space for more than a glance at the remaining sec–
tions: the great Circus which was Holy Year, for example, which Miss
Clark handles with corrosive delicacy, concluding with an account of
the pitiful new little Saint, Maria Goretti. The story of Salvatore
