It is no small part of the beauty of the so-called Protestant Cemetery in Rome that Keats is buried there. The word felicity comes to mind around this fact, because it is of that order of experience to be brought up against all the tough intellectual rigor, the nearly impossible demands of vision and fitness of thought, that went into his sense of “beauty” and could make it equate with “truth”—the very opposite of wallowing in facile landscape. Yet of course there is another fitness in the place having remained as beautiful as it has in the ordinary meaning, and still another in his having some rather good company there, though mostly of later times and on the whole of something less than the genius often vaguely associated with it. The charm, taking that word too as deeply as we can manage, of this piece of ground next to Rome’s one Pyramid, while enhanced by thoughts of the “truly great,” is both more and less than the titillation of looking at tombstones of famous people. Less because there are not so many there, far fewer than of their and other people’s infant children. More because the charm is of Rome itself, in its hold on the mind of the world outside Italy.
It is a foreign enclave, of non-Catholics—Germans, Scandinavians, English, Americans, Greeks, Russians—administered by diplomatic representatives of the countries chiefly involved; an exception may have been made now and then but the rule is that Italian Protestants, or agnostics or atheists, are not allowed to be buried there unless married or related to a foreigner. So one might expect a feeling of double alienation, from life and from home, unless with Shelley one were inclined to be “half in love with death, at the thought that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” But no, although he was right about the quality of the place and would be still by some strange mercy today, it is not like any of that, or need not be. It would be too callow to call the cemetery festive, but gloomless it certainly is, and homeless its dead are not. One might even speak of it as having, as a community shared also by its lovely vegetation and the large colony of cats at the base of the adjacent Pyramid, a rare sense of humor. At least it serves as sufficient comment on the outbreak of Thanatology courses and other vulgarities on the subject in our country nowadays, of the Facing the Facts and How to Be Bereaved and Like It categories, rather more horrid than the inhibitions they replace; and yes, toward those embarrassments as in other ways, surely we can imagine this little plot in Rome, unique in the world as it is, as wearing something in the nature of a smile.
Not the “infant’s smile” Shelley gave it in Adonais, nor quite “the light of laughing flowers” he saw there over the dead. It would be a gentle and generous one, though so many battles have swirled around the spot and the names can’t all be of people who were generous and peaceable in life. This quiet garden keeps the dignity of human grief. For the non-Catholic and non-Latin mind it does so far more than the enormous Campo Verano, the regular cemetery of Rome since 1837, out by San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, quite beautiful too in its setting and planting but where pathos is crushed by the bella figura: the expense, the show, the need to outdo in pomposity of monuments, along with the sorry custom of trying to immortalize the deceased with portraits and photographs, down to the cheapest snapshots of the poor in their little boxes tier on tier in the walls. No bella figura there and there must be many who cannot afford even that. By the Pyramid, there are relatively few pretentious monuments, and probably not many of very poor people either, aside from some of the artists and students and political refugees. By and large the foreign colonies in Rome over the last two hundred years have been something short of indigent.
At the time of Keats’s death, in the still sorrowful and resonant little room over the Piazza di Spagna, in 1821, there were not many stones or names of any kind in the cemetery. There was no wall around any part of it, then or for another half a century, except the Pyramid and the adjoining section of the Aurelian Wall at the top of the slope. It was part of what was called the Agro, the “fields of the Roman people,” and looks very rural indeed in engravings of the time, with its small sprinkling of tombstones close to the Pyramid as though for protection from its age and bulk, and oxcart tracks between the clusters. The trees around appear to be live oaks; the pines and cypresses were planted much later. Protection was needed, and Caius Cestius, he of the Pyramid, dead in 12 B.C.E., was not always up to the job. Monte Testaccio, down at what is now the other end of the block, the hill formed from debris of ancient potsherds, was a site of all sorts of rowdy goings-on, with drinking places in its caverns. Tombs were sometimes vandalized and funeral groups were apt to be attacked, perhaps less out of Catholic devotion than proprietary feeling about the fields. This is given as the reason for the prohibition of daytime funerals; one burial scene by torchlight, in an etching by Pinelli of 1811, looks more like a witches’ sabbath. Another prohibition may or may not have had to do with a fear of stirring up popular outrage; more likely it reflects the motto of ruling Church circles—Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. Until 1870 crosses were forbidden over the graves, as were the word God, quotations from Scripture, or any hint of eternal salvation.
That would have been a plus to Shelley, and no worry to Keats, who in the atrocious misery of his last months, the only months of his life in Rome, yet knew of what kind his salvation would be if any were in the cards: “I think I shall be among the English poets after my death.” What pleased him was his friend Joseph Severn’s report of the wild flowers, especially violets and daisies, that grew in profusion around the ground. Severn, in his heroic efforts to soothe a mind already close to cracking, from loss and hopelessness and the particular torments of that long dying, would not have mentioned the possible violences at the cemetery, if he knew of them. No other plan was possible in any case. But in that same year an aged English aristocrat, who because of his years and social station had special permission to bury his daughter by daylight, had to do it accompanied by a squadron of mounted police, and eight months later was himself buried by torchlight (from a pamphlet on the cemetery by Johan Beck-Friis, published in Sweden in 1965).
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One likes to think that Keats would have been pleased too to think of the sheep and goats grazing among the graves and the smattering of broken ancient columns, although he had more feeling for plants than for animals, at least large ones—he was all empathy with the cricket, the grasshopper, and the nightingale—and if the herds had been large or regular they would have finished off the daisies. In any case there was nothing to keep them out. After years of requests and efforts by diplomats, of Prussia, Hanover, and Russia, and the more effective pleas of a Danish prince in the year of Keats’s death, the papal Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, was still raising obstacles to any demarcation of the ground, and as the great poet he certainly never heard of lay across town in his youth, yearning for the relief of death, the cardinal was giving orders to have six cypresses around a tomb cut down because they spoiled the view of the Pyramid. Keats had been buried three years since, and Shelley two, when in lieu of a fence or wall, a kind of moat was dug around the old part of the cemetery, which came to be known as “the dogs’ ditch” from the corpses of dogs and cats that were thrown into it. Not that such as Consalvi were the whole story. As has often been pointed out in this connection, religious intolerance the other way around was rife in England at the time, and on the whole the bosses at the Vatican were anxious to please the English in Italy, in view of all the “gold” they began to spend there after the close of the Napoleonic Wars.
According to Beck-Friis, the records of the cemetery before World War II have been lost. There was fighting nearby when the Allies reached Rome, June 4, 1944, ending the nine-month German occupation, and one is free to imagine that some crackpot bit of looting, Neanderthal or pious, may have been responsible. An earlier memoir by H. Nelson Gay, published in 1913, states that the register of burials did exist at that time, but it must have been rather hit or miss. As far as is known now, the first was of a twenty-five-year-old Oxford student of high degree named Langton, in 1738. Before that, foreign non-Catholics in Rome seem to have been buried wherever a hidden or country spot could be found for the purpose, or else with prostitutes along the Muro Torto, then as now a center of that trade; or they could be sent, if feasible, to the Protestant cemetery in Livorno. The burial that Gay lists as the first was of another young aristocrat, also twenty-five, in 1765. He was Baron George Werpup of Hanover, killed in a fall from his carriage, who grew into something of a legend, as being responsible for the Pope’s official acknowledgment of the cemetery, in spite of God’s exclusion from it; the story is that in his great love of Rome the young man, of enough patrician caste to have such introductions, had been determined to end his days there, though no doubt not so soon, and talked the Holy Father into that much tolerance. The age of twenty-five has a broader poignancy, or jinx, in the place. Keats is often spoken of as having died at twenty-six, perhaps because the mind boggles at the scope of his work and achievement at any such age, but actually was only four months past his twenty-fifth birthday, and the unhappy German poet Wilhelm Waiblinger was also twenty-five when he was buried there in 1830.
Back to the 18th century and aristocrats, who either had a monopoly on the ground or were the only ones traveling at the time, there is a Sir James McDonald, Baronet, dead at twenty-four in August 1766; July and August were the lethal months, as Shelley and his wife were to discover with the loss of their child, William, through their lingering in the city into that season. But the widespread illusion of Rome as a health center could be dashed at any time. The Humboldt of the sign near the entrance is not the famous philologist and diplomat, Wilhelm, but his infant son who died in 1803, to be followed shortly after by a brother. Gay gives the figure of under thirty graves in 1818, when Shelley described the place in a letter as the most beautiful and solemn cemetary he had ever seen; from pictures of the time one would guess closer to a hundred.
Among the adults of this company, then and up to the present, Keats is rare, though not alone, in having had next to no firsthand experience of Rome or even acquaintance with it. The voice, the air, the common language of the cemetery—and there is one, beyond all the linguistic divisions commemorated there; the flowers and rambling vines and crooked little paths have their say in it—has for one element a curious reciprocity between people and city, of a kind that occurs nowhere else.
This is to speak of an overall charity and grace that everyone feels in the cemetery, no matter how they express it or fail to. It is true of all graveyards that visitors, sightseers, wander more slowly than they are accustomed to, “repressing haste, as too unholy there,” but from this one it would be hard to find a person so stupefied as to come away without a mellower sense of life. “Lovely,” “moving,” “beautiful,” “nice,” even Shelley’s now bygone “sweet” are the common adjectives—all referring to a charmed relaxation of strain around the fact of death and toward those, psychologists and others, who would beat our brains out groping for ultimate answers in the absence of religion. Not that groping isn’t in order, but the all-day question mark seems a little less useful as a guide to living than the hair shirt, or than Shelley’s hide-and-seek metaphysical personage, Demogorgon (Prometheus Unbound). Keats in his genius of sympathy with all that makes up the flow of life, a reason among others for his being so profoundly at home with Shakespeare, said it very well in the famous letter to his brothers on Negative Capability, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. . . .” A sentence liable to be mistaken as crudely anti-philosophical if taken out of the whole context of his work and letters. All it means is that he had Shakespeare’s generic kind of intelligence, as against the isolated, frameless—therefore uh-Miltonic, un-Dantesque—overreaching after “The Reason For It All,” sure poison to poetry. The key word is “irritable.” In that sense his grave could not be more appropriate.
Yet it will not do to forget something there that he had no part of, and never would have had. A certain seediness tends to attach to foreign colonies anywhere, and more in Rome than in Paris, since the contemporary intellectual demands are less and the tendency for many people is to sink into laziness of one kind or another, via social rounds or wistful learning or dolce far niente. This has been true at least throughout the relatively short age of the cemetery. The English and American artists who settled in Rome in the 19th century had among other good reasons for it the remarkable quality of the Roman light, also relief from the Anglo-Saxon civic conscience; they went with a notion of and even a passion for serious work, but not one who remained to be buried there, as many are, is of interest now except to the most specialized connoisseur. The blessings of the city were obvious; the vital drain from lack of responsibility, except to one’s art or some notion of the pleasant life, has always been more insidious, having to do very deeply with the matter of vocabulary. The poetic voice of the cemetery veils more than a diversity of real languages; the pathetic gutlessness and inaccuracy of most expatriate speech, in any language, are another part of the common bond, for many of the lives in question. Keats would have fled, we know, long before this could happen to his tongue or mind. Of those who stayed for good, who really made Rome their home, the great exceptions on the side of achievement are scholars, predominantly German or Scandinavian, whose field of interest was centered there, giving their choice of domicile an overriding sense they couldn’t have done without.
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On a different level, however, for Keats as for many who were not permanent residents, there would be a sense of belonging, through a claim of heritage. Montaigne wrote, “Je savais le Capitol et son plan avant que je susse le Louvre, et le Tibre avant la Seine.” Chateaubriand some two hundred and fifty years later dreamed of ending his days, or so he professed momentarily, at Sant’ Onofrio on the Janiculum, near “la chambre où Tasse expira.” And so it went over the centuries; nobody with education was really an alien there, in one part of their being and for a while. Young Waiblinger, body and soul at last unable to keep together after a four-year struggle on what he could earn away from Germany, could nevertheless write in a last letter to his family, for their or his own consolation, “I die on Roman soil.”
In his case the attachment seems to have been made up of peculiarly fierce and diverse curiosities, and he might or might not have stayed on into old age; probably not. Italy was all the rage in intellectual Germany at the time, owing in part to new windows opened on classical and Renaissance art by Winckelmann, but Goethe, who fanned the fad into a fever, and extended his own stay in Rome by many months until he could feel himself thoroughly re-educated—at the age of forty—could not have stayed longer than that. A striking fact of his Roman journals is that it is only in the first months that he is really open to the sights of the city; in the second half he has drawn into his own states of mind in regard to them. A few years later we find him uninterested in being in Italy at all, and to have that book reopened by the burial there of his only son in 1830—a son furthermore who was neither a poet nor apparently very educable, though he was making his first visit to Rome at just the age when his father had—must have been a sad twist of irony.
In that case only a crowning one. The son, August, only survivor past infancy of five children, was seventeen before Goethe got around to marrying his mother, in gratitude, as the story goes, for her staunch behavior during the occupation of Weimar by the French troops, after the Battle of Jena. The aging young man seems to have been a fairly good secretary and accountant for his father, although heavy on the bottle, but any slim paternal hope there may have been that his mind would expand in Rome was dashed by his death, within three weeks, of smallpox. The monument in this instance is more admirable than the life, with its bas-relief head by the famous sculptor Thorwaldsen looking quite imperial, although its model had been named for a mere duke and his liver was reported after the autopsy to be five times normal size, from drinking. Another version of the autopsy is that it revealed deformations of the brain, but both stories could be slander.
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Rome was a home of the mind to all these people, probably even to August Goethe, as it was to the world—at least the world of the more or less privileged, and of the West, say from Jerusalem to Boston and Philadelphia and eventually San Francisco. Classical education had given it to them, as an extension of their living quarters, and a very real one; the experience of being there would be fifty-fifty discovery and recognition.
For actual living, insofar as he had any gift for that, Shelley was more comfortable in other parts of Italy. One can’t imagine him settled in Rome, or anywhere else for that matter. Yet one feels his memory far from depaysé up against the old wall where his ashes—not his heart as many have been led to think by the words Cor Cordium on the stone—ended up after the cremation on the beach near Viareggio. He is rightfully there, and Rome had the right to receive him, more specifically than by the somewhat abstract justice of all the earth belonging to all people. Prometheus Unbound, high authorities to the contrary notwithstanding, is very far from his best poetry but was certainly one of his greatest efforts, in collaboration with—that is not stretching much—what were then the very lonely and overgrown ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. The “vastness” that so worked on him, and on Goethe, was of the time; the French Revolution and Napoleon have their part in the underlying craving and image, meat and drink to Shelley and which Keats had the sense to resist. Nowadays we don’t think of using the word “vast” for the ocean, still less, to put it mildly, for the Colosseum; only the universe qualifies now, or a new variety of canned olives. Another Shelley word no longer with us and never much with Keats is “sublime.” But all the vocabulary of his letter to his friend Thomas Love Peacock on those Baths tells the nature of his inspiration there, and something of the nature of his failure in it: steep mountains, immense labyrinth, pinnacles and masses, immensity, immense, chasm, enormous, lofty crags, peaks, vast desolation; ending with: “Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered; which words cannot convey.” They couldn’t and didn’t, for him, but it was at least true that for his time, and his world-weary youth and bent of mind in his time, Rome and only Rome did provide the vastness, in works in stone and excesses of history, that might serve as stimulus and setting for the farthest flaunting of the human spirit, in scorn of every fetter and pettiness.
Not a bad idea; it only made for poor poetry and worse, or no, politics, of a kind needed to implement any such ideal. Nobody has expressed any opinion of Shelley since his death without getting into a hornet’s nest; it can’t be helped. The champions of Prometheus Unbound would have it that failure to admire has got to be a sign of our own inadequacies. That is asking for it; they have got to be secret messiah bugs, or never have breathed outside a library, so to mistake the intention for the deed. The deed as poetry. Those endless pages are one of the great white elephants of English literature, to be read, if they ever are outside the classroom or the addict’s den, only because their author did far better on other occasions, not many, but a few. Keats was terribly right, if courteous, in his censure. But hush; this is a cemetery. He did do far better and that is why Severn’s painting of him hard at work, that is gazing easelward, among the ruins, without a thought for vipers or malaria or any human vulnerability in spite of all the personal disasters already in his wake, can after all affect us, as his grave does. An extra fact about that, far from the key but still an important one for these days of “vast” willful ignorance—yes, here the word is all right—is that he was hard at work and had been all his life, with time out for one other sublimity but not much for food; his classical education was of the best, and his reading and reading habits seem to have been prodigious, perhaps more than Keats’s. This tends to be forgotten by some of his would-be emulators on the Love-and-Liberty fronts.
Those peaks and chasms were not Browning’s Rome or what he made of it at all, and would never have been Keats’s. But they too knew their way around there, from long back. It is hard to take in, given Keats’s age and the grueling years he put in on medical studies, how it was possible for him to have read as much and as deeply as he had. His powers of absorption, which would have been of little use without equally strong habits of work, were clearly abnormal if the word means anything. The autopsy report in his case refers to lungs, not deformations of the brain, but that organ must have had something unusual about it, of a beneficent if not blessed kind. Evidently, in the short time he had had, he had exposed himself much less to history than to literature including classical mythology, but that would do for a start and a very good start in Rome. Among the various ifs of his career that it is futile to speculate on is what he would have made of a healthy experience of the city, long enough for him to readjust the literary connotations and grow under that influence as he had under every other. It would have been nothing like the same exposure for Goethe, or Shelley either, that’s certain, but then Keats was not like anyone else in anything; the charm and goodness of his nature alone would have set him apart, even without poetry, but for him there could be no such without. He had defined his life and it was that, though he would say of Fanny Brawne toward the end, “O that I could be buried near where she lives.”
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There was no time; he had really only the Rome in his head to be buried in. Few artists have been as lucky as he in their eventual biographers, notably for our period, in English, Bate, Gittings, and Ward. After their unusually heartfelt as well as thorough works, nothing remains to be said about the ghastly sea voyage with Severn to Naples, the further wretched days of quarantine there when he tried to divert the company with talk of the “classic Scenes he knew so well,” the slow carriage journey, and the room in Rome. Somehow he lasted there, unwillingly since all hope was gone, just over three months. So was fulfilled his “languishment/ for skies Italian” of three years earlier. The sad travelers passed the Colosseum on their way into the city, but that seems to have been Keats’s only sight of it, and all he could know of St. Peter’s was the view of the dome from the top of the Spanish Steps. In the beginning some walks, in the near vicinity of Piazza di Spagna, and even a few slow horseback rides, were still possible, but although he would not let his engaging humor die and remained good company as long as he could, he was yearning for laudanum, not education. What he did see of the city that was big compared to some periods in the Middle Ages but tiny in the present-day scale—with a population of about 130,000—was a compound of beauty and decay that to many visitors was more depressing than uplifting. Oppression lay heavy on this Rome of Pius VII, though it is strange to find the word “monotonous” used by foreign observers for the life of the Roman people; but the large foreign colonies knew those people only as servants. Their own great poet, G. G. Belli, was to give a very different view of them. He was there, going on thirty, and could have regaled Keats with a most un-English kind of wit and class antagonism if he had ever heard of him, and if they had had any language to converse in.
The Caffé Greco on Via Condotti, scarcely two hundred yards from the door on Piazza di Spagna, is about the same age as the cemetery, and has had many of the same clientele. Indeed it had and still has in one or two respects something of the same atmosphere—of a pleasantly relaxed welcome transcending generations, without strain, and of privacy without loneliness. Accounts of the café’s history have it that “Keats and Shelley” were often there. Disregarding the gross coupling of the names, a world habit too ingrained to be stopped, the statement cannot be accurate with regard to Keats. He was far too ill, though the cafe’ was a favorite place of foreign artists and he may have gone once or twice in the early weeks.
The house where he was more and more confined is of the 18th century and probably of the same date as the adjacent stairs, built by the French though named for Spain. It was bought early in this century by public subscription, through the efforts of Lord Rennell of Rodd and others including a number of English and American writers; the third floor, second by European counting, where Keats died, was officially opened as the Keats-Shelley Memorial in 1909. It is really a little library and museum of the English Romantic movement in general, but not many people stay to read. The bare little corner room, of the rosetted ceiling, is the one, for those who do know; it is a little Gettysburg of the history of poetry, and a conspicuous fact, as on the world’s practical battlefields, is the number of people who have been moved to tears by it, however rarely they may have been anywhere else. Sinclair Lewis confessed to being one of those; one would not have expected it from the author of Babbitt, but he was a disturbed and complicated character, and “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art,” or almost any line from the three great odes, do in that place put a person’s frailties up for sale. The legend on Keats’s gravestone, beginning “Here lies all that was mortal of a young English poet,” seems there more than ever a travesty; intended though it was, in the first disarray of sorrow, as an act of friendship. The key words of that inscription—“in the bitterness of his heart/ at the malicious power of his enemies”—reflect the disease, not the man, still less anything of the poet. There are no such words among those that crowd on the mind in the small room, as they do, from one of the most radiantly simple vocabularies ever put together in English. “. . . Keen, fitful gusts. . . .”; “while thy hook/ spares the next swath. . . .”; “with patient look,/ Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. . . .”; “the small gnats mourn/ Among the river-sallows. . . .” Those hours in the plural—who else would have done it? And the line Robert Frost would borrow from: “And I have many miles on foot to fare.” Another word one remembers is not Keats’s own but from his young-English doctor there, kind if incompetent, who spoke of him repeatedly as “noble.”
In some respects his memory is better off in the cemetery than in the apartment now. The Barcaccia fountain that it pleased him to hear under his window cannot be heard for the traffic or often seen for the crowd of idle or just weary young, spillover from the steps, packed around it eating lunch or cooling their feet. Horses and carriages must have made other pleasant sounds outside the window, though muted by mud; the piazza is such a tourist center now, and the stairs up to Trinità dei Monti had been such an elegance for quite a while then, it is odd to think of its having been left uncobbled, whether to spite the French or just because it was out of the way—not to the English though; it was their central hangout. A more practical question is how the apartment was heated. There seem to have been sunny days, while Keats was still ambulatory, to justify the great English dream of sunny Italy as the cure for all that ailed their bodies or minds, but the thought of a Roman winter as a tuberculosis treatment is bound to appall anyone who has shivered through one in good health. Of course it was too late anyway; he could as well have died in Happy England among many friends instead of in a foreign place with a single one, and only Rome would have been the loser. No, Severn would have been that too, though he was half dead himself from the strain by the end.
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The museum had to take down its plaque and go secretive, like much of the city, during the nine months of German occupation in 1943-44. At night people would run for safety over the rooftops and many were hidden in houses in the neighborhood. Signora Vera Cacciatore, curator for several decades, has written about those vicissitudes in a pamphlet on the house, but not about her own and her husband’s courage in protecting the valuable collection of manuscripts, letters, prints, etc. which could never have been brought together again, nor about one of the more ironic episodes of the period. The main treasures of the place were sent in two or three boxes for safekeeping, along with objects from other museums, to, of all places, the abbey of Monte Cassino, shortly to be one of the most totally pulverized buildings in Italy. A friendly priest, broadminded or who had not read much Shelley, rescued the boxes at the eleventh hour and brought them back, riding on a cart attached to the retreating Hermann Goering division. Immediately after the Allied entry the night of June 4-5, the identity of the building was restored and literary-minded English and Americans in uniform, and perhaps some who had never read much but felt drawn to a reminder of civilization at that juncture, began turning up. One who touched Signora Cacciatore particularly was an American who described himself as a student, who was assigned with another soldier to guard the house the first night. “He asked whether he might be allowed to go alone for one moment into the room where Keats died. He handed his rifle to his companion and, with a candle, went up the dark stairways and made his way around the dark rooms once occupied by Keats and Severn. . . .” Tears showed behind his glasses afterwards, understandably, whether he had come via Naples or Anzio.
Now people sometimes scurry for refuge for a different reason to the downstairs hall of the house. There are police roundups on the steps now and then, aimed at drug business or any selling without a license, so a good many run till it blows over. Some will be Italian, but more are young foreigners, from the self-appointed Lower Depths of our society. The Signora takes a charitable and motherly view of them on the whole; they have caused her no trouble; and it rather pleases her, perhaps because any literary recognition is better than none, that so many of the other young people who actually go up the stairs are above all entranced by mementos of William Godwin (Political Justice, free love; “Godwin-perfectability” as Keats put it), his daughter Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Woman). For sex mores, Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” would be timely too, leaving out the brainy side of bed-hopping, but that would require opening a book—inadvisable: it might reveal what a disagreeable hypocrite and money-grubber Godwin was, for instance. For sweet illusion’s sake it is better for all this stuff, along with Byron’s and Shelley’s revolutionary and libertarian outpourings, to be more heard about than read, though it would be interesting to see what tags and scraps of the political notions of those well-heeled rebels would fit into the lowest-level current bombast of our maniacs of social protest, the kidnappers et al., if they were only larded with scatology and obscenity every few words.
Byron saved himself from insipidity by turning to satire, and being quite good at it. Shelley, as Santayana wrote, was ineducable, “impervious to experience. . . . Being incapable of understanding reality, he reveled in creating world after world in idea” and if met by opposition was outraged and “cried aloud for liberty and justice.” Santa-yana grants him genius, even sees this strange imperviousness as a condition of its particular kind, and so perhaps would have included the rest of the same syndrome, an identical procedure in love, of which Montaigne long before had written differently—it was not an invention of Shelley’s: “Between ourselves I have constantly observed that there are two things which, strange to say, always go together: super-celestial feeling and subterranean morals. Such as dwell on the soul apart from the body design to get beyond themselves and escape from humanity. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels they transform themselves into beasts.”
One comes to feel there are two worlds up there in the Keats-Severn rooms, among the prints and framed letters and leather bindings—Shelley’s “O world! o life! o time!” versus Keats’s “. . . if a sparrow comes before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” But that is a bombastic thought, something less than half true. One unifying element, whatever the term Romantic for that period in poetry really means, is a common and peculiar intimacy with death. Something aside from all biographical facts; not Homeric; not that of people acquainted with plague or Hitler’s camps or other massive assaults on life; not chivalric; not quite like any other period in literature. In Shelley’s case the nearest to it is the kind of remark heard sometimes now from among the more desperate and degraded young, “Death might be a good trip.” But Keats too, though so differently, seems to have been born into a loneliness somehow without antecedents; all sorts of good times and better didn’t keep death from being half a friend, as against “the immortal sickness which kills not.” Precisely in time for them, the mold had cracked, and they were the ones endowed enough to know it. Of course it is always cracking in one way or another, but more often in ways that produce, instead of poets, “mock lyrists, large self-worshipers . . . and careless Hectorers in proud, bad verse.” It must have been some such background upheaval that gave both Keats and Shelley such ecstatic youthfulness in joy, as though they were the first ever to have seen sunlight on the sea, and in melancholy so prematurely old a view of “darkness, death and darkness,” “where black gates were shut against the sunrise evermore.”
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The funeral, on February 26, was held at or some time around dawn; that was sometimes permitted. The little group and the minister were all English. It is rather a long way from the house; the carriages would have started out in the dark, through many dismal streets, and probably nobody was in a mood to care that Saint Paul passed by the Pyramid when it was brand new, on the way to his beheading, as Paul that day can hardly have cared what sort of vulgar new shape of vanity it was. He wouldn’t have seen the Aurelian Wall, with the gate the coffin vehicle and the others went through that morning in 1821; that didn’t appear until the 3rd century, when there began to be a menace from northern people the Romans called barbarians; and the outer façade of the gate that we see now was put on still later, under Honorius in the 5th century. But it was all old and fine enough to provide the best kind of custody, and posterity, whatever its platitudes, would take care of the book reviewers. It has only not cared or dared to have Keats’s inscription changed, the stone replaced if necessary, and there is no conceivable reason for that not to be done. The distortion of his image has been made a sacred cow by nothing but duration, and we have to trust there will be at least as much of that in store to sanctify the correction.
Severn and the poet’s close friend Charles Brown, who collaborated in the extra words, came to have bitter compunction about it and wished to have them removed. Keats wanted to be past the need or confinement of a name and that at least was respected; his name is not on his stone, only on Severn’s put beside it so many years later, as his friend, with the painter’s adored two-year-old boy, dead from an absurd accident in his crib, between them. The lyre Severn designed for Keats’s tomb, with half its strings missing as a sign of the unfinished life—as the Humboldts had set up broken stubs of columns by their small children’s graves—is not intrusive, but for words there should obviously be none but the strangely simple ones he requested, which are only as modest as a person of great gift and soul and knowing his worth, unless nothing has any, should be: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
Shelley is generally said to have been a charmer, in friendship and society as in his aberrant love affairs, and he was indeed gracious toward the poet with whom he shares the chief glory of the cemetery. In a letter referring to his invitation to Keats to be his guest in Pisa, when he knew how ill he was and that everyone thought the only hope was Italy, he had written his well-known comment: “I am aware, indeed, in part that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me; and this is an additional motive and will be an added pleasure.” It was generous. He liked being that, not counting tradesmen in the human picture, mainly doing evil through obtuseness about some obvious facts of life, sexual and other; one such fact was that Keats was never at ease in his company. To that precise mind and rigorous heart, the verbalizings must have seemed as sloppy as the life, the charm finally wearisome. It would have been the perfection of agony in his dying to be beholden to that tormented household.
The discomfort would be far more than intellectual, but strong that way too. Keats was himself, as far as might be compatible with poetry, of those to whom “the miseries of the world/ Are misery, and will not let them rest,” a tribe never to be confused with “fanatics,” who “weave a paradise for a sect.” “Only the dreamer envenoms all his days”—and the days of those closest to him. Yet his new volume Lamia, the pages turned back to the “Eve of St. Agnes,” was one of two books found in Shelley’s pockets when the body washed up on shore the next year—the other was a volume of Sophocles—and Adonais is perhaps Shelley at his best, though interminable and with few single lines as good as those leading up to the “pestilence-stricken multitudes” of the “Ode to the West Wind.” It more than atones for his skylark, but then Keats had poems to live down too and succeeded even less, if less pretentiously, in any long one, though he was coming close to mastery of the form in the second Hyperion: a nearly insuperable business, without the dramatist’s or storyteller’s art and with traditional stuff of the epic gone, to be replaced from scratch or Greek mythology.
As tribute to Keats, Adonais is more skittish, even without Shelley’s letter to Byron apologizing for having perhaps overrated the dead poet’s talents and explaining on what grounds, of sympathy in his mistreatment by the press, he had been so carried away. On that score he had reason to feel a passionate fraternity, but it was with far deeper reference that he had written, as his widow Mary mourned, “his very own elegy.” The chronic obtuseness is there, about Keats’s true nature and strength, and the Doric variant of the spelling of Adonis gives a remove from common associations with that beautiful youth more needed for a self-image than an objective one. The Adonis associations per se are, except for the Death and Resurrection theme, much more in line with his own character, of the two: being fought over by two goddesses, one of them Aphrodite; death-wish versus voluptuous amour; the ritual of the young man’s image being thrown into the sea, and so on. A well-felt and skillful elegy it is nonetheless, and although this is a triviality as against its impact, it speaks well for certain basic decencies, along with the lasting attainments, of the Romantic movement. Even Byron, vile about Keats, was up to some decent fits of loyal rage concerning Shelley—“hooted from his country like a mad dog for questioning a dogma”; which was a fashionable stance and not quite the whole story, but was close enough to do them both credit.
The irony of Shelley’s dying so soon after seems slight; death at sea was suitable for him, and surely the time of it suited him. He too has a stone to one of his children, the little boy William, beside his, and the year-old Clara had died in Italy; so had Byron’s and Claire’s beautiful five-year-old daughter Allegra to whom Shelley had been attached, victim of a father’s self-infatuation as those other children were not. That was not Shelley’s vice; self-indulgence and self-deception were and they figure in his own children’s deaths. However there are many children of conventional parents in the cemetery and if one can speak of murder, especially in regard to Clara and Allegra, it is only in the sense of lethal conflict of interest. Before that for Shelley there had been the suicide of his first wife, “poor Harriet” as we have come to think of her, and the other suicide, of Fanny Imlay, and God knows what and what deaths in Naples, behind the so-called Hoppner scandal. Beyond the general Romantic familiarity with death, at the age of nearly thirty he was terribly familiar with the real thing, as Keats was from a quite different process—of nursing his dying brother Tom—and ready for it in soul, as Keats was only because his. lungs were destroyed. One was beginning, the other burned out. But they are companions in one extraordinary fact, of other companionship. Edward Trelawny, who was to survive his friend Shelley by fifty-nine years, as Severn survived Keats by fifty-eight, has the neighboring stone.
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Already in 1822 what is called the “antique” part of the cemetery, where Keats was interred, was closed for any more graves except by very special permission, so Shelley’s ashes were placed, five months after the burning on the beach, in the new part; a consular official, Mr. Freeborn, had had to keep them quite a while in a cellar at his office, while he waited to come across an English minister kind enough to officiate for an atheist. Trelawny arrived in Rome soon after, disliked the spot as being in a crowd of the nondescript, and had them moved to where they are now, in an embrasure of the old wall at the top of the hill. He first meant to have inscribed on the stone an epitaph in Latin by Leigh Hunt but changed his mind in favor of the not much more appropriate lines from The Tempest, “Nothing of him that doth fade. . . . ,” etc. which are not exactly sub specie aeternitatis since everybody knows Ariel is speaking there of a pretended, not a real death; but perhaps Shelley would have liked that. In larger letters, under the poet’s name, is the baffling Cor Cordium, endlessly referred to but that seems unidentified as to source, unless Hunt made it up. Trelawny paid for the plot, later a cause of dispute between heirs of both, and installed his own blank stone, mystification of tourists until nearly the end of the century. An odd aspect of both these sets of associated graves is that neither Severn nor Trelawny was among the older or closer friends of the poet they chose a long lifetime later to be buried beside. Severn was hardly more than an acquaintance of Keats’s when they set out for Italy, though as a serious artist himself he was worthy of the intensities of the ensuing months—some of the friends back in England didn’t think so—and must have come to feel them as the crux of his own life; whatever Mrs. Severn thought of it, she was buried earlier in Marseilles. Trelawny, the outgoing cheerful buccaneer, adventurer, no artist but sensitive to Shelley’s mental stimulation and perhaps more so as they say now to his life-style, had known him only about six months, but for him too it was a high point of life that no number of amorous and other affairs would ever beat.
A tangle of legend and conflicting stories soon grew up around the events preceding Shelley’s burial, and persists; not that it matters except as a sample of the waywardness of human records and memory, especially under the seduction of big names. It is often heard that Byron burned the body on the beach, and it is true that he was there, and at the same rite for Shelley’s friend and co-mariner Williams the day before, along with Leigh Hunt who had just arrived in Italy and various Italian officials and policemen to keep back curious onlookers, but it was Trelawny who arranged everything; evidently about that he can be believed. The third corpse from the boat, of the hired eighteen-year-old English boy, was not burned but buried in quicklime on the beach, as the others were too for five weeks before the burning; this was according to sanitary regulations, based on extraordinary dread of contamination from ships. So far the stories jibe, except as to the exact places involved. The onlookers are described either as “villagers” or as “well-dressed.” In the legend that stuck, Trelawny burned his hand snatching Shelley’s heart from the flames; in his first account, he and others, using metal poles since they were not allowed to touch anything and it was too hot anyway, carried the metal grill holding the fire into the sea to cool it; he then in curiosity about one part not having been consumed, burned himself pulling out an oily organ that modern speculation suggests may have been the liver but that in the guise of heart was to cause some strange jealousies and acrimonies as it changed hands; whatever it was went to Mary and eventually to Boscombe, England. Byron wanted the skull but Trelawny, knowing he had used another as a drinking cup, did not want it so profaned; besides in the digging up of the body it had been struck by a mattock and later fell into two pieces.
The whole appearance of the body as dug up was described as nauseating, with details; the official Italian records, brought to light by Dr. Biagi at the end of the century, give it as nothing but bones, though it would seem that the heart story must have had something more than that to go on. That Shelley, who couldn’t swim, was a nincompoop as a sailor and in general inept physically seems agreed, more than why his and Williams’s boat got to be named the “Don Juan,” as a bit of enforced loyalty to Byron, instead of the “Ariel” as Shelley had wanted, and the two reports of how it was brought up from the bottom, and how far out, differ totally. As to digging up the child William’s remains in the cemetery so they could be by his father’s, in one version the grave was found to contain bones of someone five-and-a-half-feet tall; in another, no trace of it could be found. In any case, that third stone marks a memory, not a grave, and Mary, who first spoke of wanting to be buried there—Trelawny jauntily wrote her, “You may lie on the other side if you like”—eked out a fairly long, churchgoing widowhood in England and was buried in Bournemouth, having written a good deal without ever recapturing the flash of Frankenstein. Her main occupation seems to have been building up an image of Shelley as the moral and conventional character he would have shuddered even to meet at a party—he couldn’t stand being “bored by idle ladies and gentlemen”; a job taken over for the next generation by their only, and commonplace, surviving child, Sir Percy, and even more by his strenuous and propriety-bugged wife, Lady Shelley.
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In 1910 the director of the cemetery, Signor Trucchi, gave an account of the Shelley plot, beginning with a reference to 1823. “At that time the administration of the affairs of the cemetery was very irregular and the name of the purchaser of the ground remained unregistered, but my father remembered having been told of the purchase. Many years passed and as I had never heard from the owner of the ground I supposed that he had died. To my great surprise, however, in the latter part of 1880 I received from England a letter signed Trelawny, in which the writer stated that, as he was the owner of the plot of ground near the grave of Shelley and that, as he was now an old man and could not expect to live much longer, he thought it was time for him to prepare his grave. He gave me an idea of the measurement of the box that would contain his ashes. . . .” Trelawny was then eighty-eight. In October of the next year, 1881, an English lady turned up unannounced, with the box, “about four o’clock in the afternoon,” but as she had known nothing about needing certain official documents she had to take it home with her, presumably to a hotel room. Everyone was very kind, and within a fortnight Trelawny was “moored at last on the stormless shore,” as Swinburne had already expressed it immediately after the old man’s death in August (“Lines on the Death of Edward John Trelawny”). “Heart of hearts, art thou moved not, hearing/ Surely, if hearts of the dead may hear,/ Whose true heart it is now draws near?/Surely the sense of it thrills thee, cheering/ Darkness and death with the news now nearing—/ Shelley, Trelawny joins thee here.”
The Swinburne pathos is of course only one of several varieties of Shelley-worship that have gone on ever since his death. One form, somewhat in line with the efforts of the widow and her daughter-in-law, shows up in the contortions of an otherwise sober biographer, in the 1940’s, to dispel any thought that having once eloped with Mary, Shelley could possibly have been such a cad as to sleep with anybody else. The disease seems to be most acute among pedants and the near-illiterate, whether on metaphysical or some vague version of political grounds; the poetry as poetry gets rather lost in the swoon. George Bernard Shaw, no swooner in general, in his Fabian youth took part in some Shelleyite gatherings, while knowing that The Cenci was an abominable play. By and large it appears to be neither ideas nor work but the life, with its peculiar brand of non-conformism, that gets people, under Victorian restraints or the contrary, though of course the idea of the work, and the idea of the ideas, have to be there to ennoble it all. For cult purposes, below the Demogorgon orbit, Shelley’s own statement about his “passion to reform the world” is really all that is needed. Such is sainthood, and there is always somebody to make money from it. There has been over some generations a lucrative market in Shelley forgeries, also in such relics as locks of hair, presumably false, not to mention the portrait of the poet as Christ, after a model by Leonardo. Of course the Shelley-haters have had their innings too, though never again as in his lifetime; the Rossettis and Co. put them in left field. But it is far less the witless detractors than the idolaters who drive the best of the poetry, and the best that must have been there in the man, out of sight, and it has to be for the best that one grieves.
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One Shelley biographer, John Addington Symonds, came to be buried beside the Pyramid (1893), not from idolatry but because he was often in Rome and happened to die there. One among later biographers was not so lucky, and may be taken as a small footnote to the story, for which the principal can’t be held responsible; yet his spirit hovers over it, and on the Swinburne theory, would no doubt be shaking its head. The book, two heavy volumes published in 1927, avoids the more blatant sexual exculpations of its successor, partly because it was the “Epipsychidion” side of the matter, with or without Intellectual Beauty, that made the scholar in the case feel more equipped than most to deal with that particular poetic soul. He found sanction there, as others have, for his own worst failings, and it brought him no end of grief. His name was Walter E. Peck. He was a tall gangly man, of rather noble brow and flaccid lips, quick gregarious humor, and impetuous energy. He was a professor at Hunter College, then for women only, and he made the most of the fact, until, after various scandals including a charge of bigamy, he was fired. By 1938 he had run through handouts from friends and was down to begging from acquaintances; he would bring the plea by phone down from a dollar to a quarter and if the person called could no longer bear to see him would wait outside for the coin to be thrown to him in the street. Then he disappeared, to turn up some years later as a hopeless but cheerful and still learned alcoholic on skid row, otherwise known as “one mile of hell.” In that neighborhood he was liked and respected, was known as The Professor, hung out with a coterie of kindred fallen intellectuals at a place called The Pitcher Joint, and when in condition sometimes wrote or lectured for the Bowery News. A sociology class at N.Y.U. went to interview a group of Bowery bums, who returned the visit in the classroom a few weeks later, because they were paid for it, not out of any wish to mend their ways, according to the New York Times account. Walter Peck, Oxford D. Phil., was one of them, and was described as claiming to have written a life of Shelley. But that was cleared up for the obituary, in January 1954, when he had been found unconscious in a Bowery doorway. His Shelley was in all big libraries, and still is. He was buried in whatever we use for a Potter’s Field.
Caius Cestius, for whom the Pyramid was built, wasn’t exactly a nobody. He was a praetor, tribune of the people and member of the college of the Septemviri epulones, the group in charge of providing the sacrificial feasts of the gods, and he must have fancied himself extremely and been very rich. Thomas Hardy in 1887 hit on a way of thinking about him, which might not go down too well with the Germans, Swedes, Scandinavians, and other citizens of the world through love of Rome, in fact to an unkind view it might seem chauvinistic. But it does express a phenomenon very pertinent to that piece of ground and that is going to be with us for at least another few thousand years if we are going to get that much; i.e., being buried on what is called foreign soil can as well be a cheerful thought as not and has many special attractions in this case, but native language is a home hard to do without. Keats knew it well: “Since every man whose soul is not a clod/ Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved,/ And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.” Hardy’s poem on the Pyramid is not one of his best, but then one scarcely thinks of him as comfortable on the continent at all, or in any metropolis. “Who, then, was Cestius,/ And what is he to me?/ I can recall no word/ Of anything he did;/ For me he is a man who died and was interred/ To leave a pyramid// Whose purpose was exprest/ Not with its first design,/ Nor till, far down in Time, beside it found their rest/ Two countrymen of mine.” He calls the two “those matchless singers” and “two immortal shades,” and sees the Pyramid as beckoning pilgrims to their tombs “with marble finger high.” Shelley in Adonais saw it a little differently: “And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime . . . doth stand/ Like flame transformed to marble. . . .” Both descriptions are bizarre, and the monument would not look like much in Egypt. Still, its geometry is beautiful, more so in contrast to all other shapes in Rome, and with acquired beauty far beyond that. We do have reason to be grateful to Cestius, who “in life, maybe,/ Slew, breathed out threatening.”
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Cemeteries are a dying institution. Long before we are all talking Urthspk or whatever our one world language is to be, we will all have to be writ in water, for lack of ground, or strewn in wonder-working ashes on whatever soil is left. Considering the present population of Rome this seems rather imminent at Campo Verano, but not beside the Pyramid, where there is still a good deal of room and no such pressure. You don’t feel pushed for time there, and again as at the Caffé Greco can enjoy the company with some feeling of leisure, especially as it is all more or less contemporary. As against the Pyramid and even the Aurelian Wall of two hundred years later, which can be lumped together as representing about two-fifths of recorded human history—not speaking of artifacts—the others we are concerned with can be thought of as only having a different number on the same short street; they are our very close neighbors in time.
There are about four thousand of them now, and as such things go, the Achievers among them do make up quite an eminent group. Alexandria may never have had such a university; the rude forefathers of the hamlet, or the slums either, were never less represented. The prevailing odor for the imagination along many of these little paths is of tons of bookdust, though the lives and, it may be, the untimely misfortunes of the rich and beautiful are apt to be more dramatized, often in the kind of pseudo-classical sculpture that adorned the gardens of the 19th century, or in long inscriptions, about the virtues of the deceased and the precariousness of human fate. One of those, relating the death of a young society beauty in a riding mishap, is the story there that most affected Henry James “irresistibly, as a case for tears on the spot.” In general, his sympathy among the graves was keenest for the transients caught up by “trouble within trouble,” from “misfortune in a foreign land,” which comes oddly from one of our most renowned expatriates. One wonders what he would have made, two generations later, of Isabel Brown: “The Faithful Lizzie. For forty-two years devoted maid of the Marchesa Malaspina.” It was good of the Marchesa to put in her real name, and for all we know they may have had a beautiful relationship.
Lizzie is in a category by herself in the cemetery. So is one German lady, who ended a very long life in Rome and who forms an odd little link, on the politico-philosophical side, between Shelley, beacon or windbag of dissent as one cares to see it, and the tragic victim of Mussolini buried near him a century and a quarter later, the Marxist leader Antonio Gramsci. Malwida von Meysenbug, a political exile from her native Hesse, was of the company of the Romantic Revolutionaries, a friend of the Russian socialist forerunner Alexander Herzen, and of Mazzini and Wagner. She was born two years after Waterloo, six before Shelley’s death, and when Garibaldi, whom she came to know, was a boy of nine in Nice. The young Romain Rolland, whose correspondence with her has been published, was a friend of her old age in Rome, where he used to play the piano for her, and his was one of the prominent names in the international outcry in the early 1930’s against the atrocious conditions of imprisonment of Gramsci, already many years in prison and then close to death.
The mounting protests from abroad had some effect, but they were too late. Gramsci, a hunchback whose health had never been good, was transferred from the prison near Bari to a prison clinic farther north, and later to one in Rome. There, though still under guard, he had relative freedom, since any one of several diseases tormenting him was enough to finish him off soon and prevent his being dangerous to the Fascist regime meanwhile. He had been so weak for a year and a half that nobody had dared tell him about his mother’s death, at home in their village in Sardinia. He had gone on writing and sending messages to her and was perplexed at her not answering—by dictation, as she herself had never learned to read and write. His term was to expire on April 21, 1937, and those left at home, including his aged father, were wild with joy and plans to receive him because for once in his embattled life he was going there to rest instead of back into the struggle. It was too late for him to go anywhere. He died on the 27th, at the age of forty-six. His father, who had never tried to follow the politics of that one and another of his seven children, tore his hair and beard and struck himself like a madman on hearing the news, shouting, “Assassins! they’ve killed my son! they’ve killed him!” He survived only two weeks. Antonio, as anticlerical as he was critical of the zealots of opposition to the Catholic Church—“anti-clerical pornography” was a phrase he used—could be buried beside the Pyramid because his wife Giulia, then and for years back in Moscow with their two young children, was considered a Russian, though her family was of Swedish origin and had lived for long periods in Rome. Her letters to him had become impersonal and far between a long time before and he had never seen their younger son. In the one carriage that followed the hearse in the rain there were only one of his brothers and his devoted sister-in-law Tatiana, human mainstay, with no reward beyond brotherly affection, of his ten and a half years in prison.
Now that Gramsci is published and read around the world, the look in history of the tyrant and bully who killed him, as he did so many others who couldn’t toe or sideslip the cynical line of the time, is of course no more ironic than that of Gramsci’s own cause. At his death he was still in some vague sense a leader of the Communist party, a party that could scarcely be said to exist under the circumstances; he was appointed to the top leadership by the Comintern in Moscow, which he was visiting as a delegate, in 1923, after the arrest of all the Executive Committee in Italy, less than a year after Mussolini’s March on Rome. A warrant was out for his arrest too, but the next year he was elected a Communist deputy, one of nineteen, and took the risk Of returning to Italy with “parliamentary immunity”—a safeguard blown up within a few weeks by the murder of the socialist deputy Matteotti. The Communist leaders were arrested, or fled into exile, not long after.
That Gramsci would have parted company with those who clung to the Soviet mystique through its nightmare convulsions there seems little reason to doubt, though the Italian Communist party continues to claim him as an exclusive intellectual property and heir to Lenin’s thought, as though his writings had been of ten, twenty, or thirty years later than they were. Ignazio Silone, of very different temperament, who broke with the party in 1928, has lately said that Gramsci was a man who had “improved, intellectually and spiritually, in prison.” That could only mean growth in independence of mind, with the further implication that such growth might, the mind being willing and able, be easier to come by in the stark ultimacies of prison solitude than in the vanity-feeding hurly-burly of everyday politics. Gramsci’s mind was willing; and that it remained able to the end, in a body so nearly destroyed, subject to periodic blankouts along with chronic fever and other more painful symptoms, is a mark of a heroism not often within human capacity.
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By 1933, having refused to bow by requesting a pardon, he began to be haunted by a dread of becoming so worn down by-disease that he would no longer be the same person and would give in. “You hear it said, ‘He’s held out five years, why not six?’ . . . The truth is that a man in the 5th year is not the one he was in the 4th, the 3rd, the 2nd, etc. He is a new personality . . . in whom precisely the years passed have destroyed the moral restraints, the strength of resistance that characterize the man of the 1st year. A typical example is that of cannibalism” (Letter from prison). Stalin’s monstrous purges, that would give such thoughts a reference beyond anything dreamed of in Italy, were just getting into full swing at the time of Gramsci’s death. It seems inconceivable that once exposed again to news, books, conversation, he would not have made the extrapolation from his own sufferings, or would have needed them, for a true judgment, in spite of the most intense paternal feelings about his two sons who were being brought up as Young Pioneers.
Scholars will judge what his writings amount to, as a contribution to Marxist theory, and as critiques of Croce and other philosophical mentors of Gramsci’s various stages of development. His literary comments, as on Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dante, are certainly not free of the gross social-purpose criteria of Soviet-oriented circles in the 20’s and 30’s; and the stock political phrases, “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “withering away of the state,” etc., like the view of trade unions as a revolutionary force, are sadly outdated now. Yet his curiosities had always been wide-ranging, and on subjects not crusted over with Moscow-line orthodoxy both his thinking and his style can be very pungent.
One such subject, a minor one but big bio-graphically, was the upsurge of banditry in his native Sardinia toward the end of the 19th century, when pressure from northern Italian industrialists had brought tariff regulations that cut off the island’s agricultural exports, especially to France. In the suddenly ruined economy, miserable enough before, both crime and Sardinian nationalism were bound to boom. “Elementary terrorism,” the grown man would call the highway holdups, kidnappings, cattle rustling: an anarchic and futile misconception of “the class struggle,” but he would vividly recall the romantic hold of the big bandit names of the time on such schoolboys as himself. Peasant and village families, not his own but like them in their grinding poverty, sheltered and protected those assassin “heroes,” and quite a few intellectuals joined in the adulation (G. Fiori, Vita di Antonio Gramsci, 1966).
Not foreign intellectuals; nor would most of them have condemned the bandits with much understanding either; that was not their Italy. The nearly incredible conditions of life of Sardinian miners and their first efforts to revolt were also basic to Gramsci’s youth, and like the rest of his upbringing, pertain to an aspect of the country to which Byron and Shelley in their time were as oblivious as any other English aristocrat. But then so does the whole life of this man, deformed in body, who spent his early years close to starvation in order to feed his mind, becoming at one stage the white hope of philology at least for the professors in Turin, and the last ten and a half no less determined to keep that mind intact, while his liver was as good as pecked out by a vulture. Shelley’s Prometheus does have that much reference after all; it applies—so does Byron’s properly forgotten “Prisoner of Chillon”—even while giving for our time, somewhat less clearcut than either his or Gramsci’s, an oversimplified idea of who Jupiter is.
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In Keats’s section of the cemetery there are still some of the violets and daisies he loved, though even before Severn’s death the flowers were being stolen in quantity from around the grave. Where Gramsci’s simple stone is, in the new part, there is no room for turf, but iris and azaleas and oleanders bloom in every sort of patch and crevice, in a tumble of ivy, among the stones with names and the ones without, that serve to hold up the narrow terraces. The body of George Santayana, who in his last years was cared for by nuns on the Aventine and who had called Catholicism a “vista” for his imagination, was on the grounds for one night in 1952, in the mortuary chapel; apparently he had wished to be buried in unconsecrated ground, which caused some confusion or resistance by the authorities, and it took a day of finagling by the Spanish consul to arrange for burial in the communal Tomb of Spaniards at Campo Verano. Beside the Pyramid, one of the additions of the last decade is the grave of an American painter of talent who committed suicide, and if there is a loneliness to be felt, a sense of all this being, as Henry James put it, in a foreign land, it is that grave and Gramsci’s that seem to qualify as well as any. Gramsci is one of the very few there buried in his own country, but he is not among his own people, either by nationality or conviction. But then if he had stayed in the land of his convictions he would probably have died sooner and more violently and had no grave at all.
There is no great carousing any more at the foot of Mount Testaccio, only a few Gypsy wagons halted there from time to time as a base for begging operations, and the district around and far beyond the Pyramid is a screeching turmoil of traffic. A mystery, among so many, is the quiet that strikes as soon as you turn the last corner before the cemetery gate; there did come to be a gate, because donors gave a wall and by that time it was permitted. Stones of a different association have come to light in this century, to add to whatever solace may derive from the others, of a lovely shade of gray and rounded by innumerable rubbings of feet and hoofs and wheels; they make up a section of the ancient Via Ostiensis, the street Saint Paul walked over on his last day, to the place where the three fountains would spring up in his memory. Those stones, of the old thoroughfare, are fenced off now way below the level of the cemetery and next to the base of the Pyramid, so the cats that manage to make their way in there from their main habitat on the noisy piazza side can prowl over them without being able to get up among the graves. They do it in slow gingerly steps, because it is not the kind of footing they are used to. They have to explore, and wonder, try not to do anything foolish, and in time return to the food supply on the unquiet side.
They couldn’t care less what part they play in our reconciliation. But some of those whose names are on the ground above knew once, in their time, what it was to be on the receiving end in that charmed precinct: “Free from all pain, if wonder pain thee not,” “Rich in the simple worship of a day.”
