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A Need to Testify Date: 12 January 2018 Page: 30,31 DIARIES & LITERATURE A need to testify Rediscovering the work of a remarkable Italian writer CAROLINE MOOREHEAD brash and posturing, from the twentieth anni- versary celebrations of the birth of Fascism. It Iris Origo ends when Italy, after many months of vacilla- tion, joins the war on the side of the Axis pow- A CHILL IN THE AIR ers. In between, in the lucid, unsentimental, An Italian war diary 1939–1940 192pp. £14.99. sometimes almost clipped sentences that were 978 1 78227 355 4 the hallmark of her style, is a shrewd portrait of a nation which had spent fifteen years being IMAGES AND SHADOWS “taught not to think”. It now found itself pro- Part of a life pelled towards a war for which it was totally 384pp. Paperback, £12.99. unprepared and which the great majority of its 978 1 78227 266 3 citizens, devastated by their losses in Abys- WAR IN VAL D’ORCIA sinia and the Spanish Civil War, did not want. An Italian war diary 1943–1945 “A good Italian’s duty”, a young fascist 320pp. Paperback, £9.99. woman tells her, “is to have no opinion.” 978 1 78227 265 6 These two years were spent largely on the estate that Origo and her husband Antonio had A STUDY IN SOLITUDE created on a waterless hillside in Tuscany fac- The life of Leopardi: poet, romantic and radical 416pp. Paperback, £12.99. ing Monte Amiata, and in Rome, where her 978 1 78227 268 7 godfather, William Phillips, was the American ambassador. Much of their war news came THE LAST ATTACHMENT from the hours she and Antonio spent listening The story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli to foreign broadcasts on the radio, but 576pp. Paperback, £12.99. wherever she went, on her journeys up and 978 1 78227 267 0 Pushkin Press down Italy, in the American embassy and among her well-connected friends, she lis- ris Origo died in 1988, aged eighty-five. tened and took note. “The juggernaut approach Almost thirty years later, Pushkin Press to war” appalled everyone except the fascist Iare printing a hitherto unpublished diary, gerarchi, but by the spring of 1940, Italians felt together with a selection of her other Italian they had nothing to hope for from the Allies; books, some no longer in print. They are a indeed, they felt a deep resentment towards the reminder of what an intelligent, scholarly and weak and treacherous English. When Musso- perceptive writer she was, and of the deep lini declared war, they were “passive and fatal- affection she felt for her adopted country. She ist”, filled with “a strange melancholy had no illusions about its shortcomings, but acquiescence”. Looking out across the peace- she understood them in a way few foreigners ful landscape, with the grapes ripening and the ever have done. oxen ploughing, she wrote: “only man is mad”. A Chill in the Air covers just two years, 1939 Among the Origos’ friends were both Fas- and 1940. It opens on a train, with Origo cists and anti-Fascists, and she offers no observing a group of squadristi, Mussolini’s apology for having in the early days of his dic- ardent early supporters, as they travel home, tatorship felt considerable admiration for Copyright material – reproduced under license. No further copying (including printing, digital reproduction / forwarding) is permitted except under license Date: 12 January 2018 Page: 30,31 Mussolini. What makes A Chill in the Air so was tipped”, she observed, “with fairy gold”, though she would say later that it had also cut interesting – and pertinent today – is the pic- ture it gives of a country swayed and made her off from making the kinds of friends she biddable by years of lies and corrupting prop- might otherwise have enjoyed. aganda. (But it would have benefited from By the time she was eighteen, Origo was footnotes, necessary to all but historians of formidably well educated, an excellent tutor modern Italy.) There is little that is personal having schooled her in Greek and Latin, and in this diary. The reader learns almost nothing she was fluent and widely read in Italian, Ger- about Origo’s own feelings, or the events of man and French. Tall, slightly plump and shy, her own life. The fact that she was pregnant she found the coming-out parties to which her with her daughter Benedetta is mentioned mother subjected her excruciating. When she only in passing. But then, what obligation is was at last able to flee the demanding and there on a writer to bare her soul? What you hypochondriacal Lady Sybil, she married learn is a very great deal about the sounds, Antonio, the illegitimate son of an aristocratic smells, inhabitants, landscape and political cavalry officer. Together, helped by some of upheavals of Italy, which is exactly what you her American money, they set about turning get from Origo’s two other autobiographical La Foce, an estate of 3500 arid hectares and books, Images and Shadows (1970) and War twenty-three crumbling farms, into a flourish- in Val d’Orcia (1947). The new subtitle of the ing agricultural community with a school, first is telling: part of a life. It is a part in every health centre, grain silo, olive press and above sense, effectively stopping not long after all with water, made further possible by grants the war when she was in her late forties, and from the fascist state. They also restored the derelict sixteenth- touching only fleetingly on inner concerns. But it is certainly one of the great memoirs of century manor house and, with the help of the the twentieth century, a precise, vivid portrait landscape architect Cecil Pinsent, planted a of a group of people for whom the art and cul- garden of box hedges, lawns, wisteria, cypress ture of Europe was a source of endless fasci- walks and spring flowers, with views across to nation and infinite pleasure. In writing it, Monte Amiata. Their son Gianni was born in Origo had no wish, she said, “to convert, to 1925, and his death at the age of seven is reveal or to confess”, but only to describe a described with a spareness made all the more world in which she was a spectator. As Vir- poignant by its brevity. This death, Origo ginia Woolf memorably wrote, Origo was wrote, like that of her father, was the defining moment of her life, and son and father “clean and picks her feet up”. Origo’s father, Bayard Cutting, was a diplo- remained as real to her as the people she saw mat from a rich New England family; her every day; it conditioned for ever more her atti- tude “both to death and to human affections”. mother, Lady Sybil Cuffe, was Anglo-Irish. Cutting, to whom she was especially close, In a postscript to A Chill in the Air, her grand- died when she was seven, and Lady Sybil, daughter Katia Lysy writes that one of the rites mindful of her husband’s wish that Iris should of passage of her childhood was when Origo grow up “somewhere she does not belong” in pulled out her “Gianni book”, complete with order to keep her free from any taint of nation- photographs, including one of his deathbed, alism, drifted to Florence, where she bought a surrounded by lilies. In Images and Shadows, perhaps more than villa in Fiesole designed by Michelozzo for Cosimo de’ Medici. It was the heyday of in any other of her books, there comes across Anglo-Florentine literary and artistic life. Origo’s particular voice, moral, sensitive to others, alert to the times she lived through and Among their friends were Bernard Berenson, Harold Acton and Jane Ross, and the “ava- to the frailties of people. Like Samuel Johnson, lanche” of foreign writers and painters who she maintained that the unadorned truth “keeps descended on Tuscany in the springtime. “I mankind from despair”. That she sounds so Copyright material – reproduced under license. No further copying (including printing, digital reproduction / forwarding) is permitted except under license Date: 12 January 2018 Page: 30,31 candid sometimes obscures the fact that she and grief was in itself a “merciless and tragic left so much out. (In his review in the Irish self portrait”. The apparent simplicity of his verse, she wrote, was deceptive, for it was Times, Terence de Vere White complained that “founded upon riches”, and she explored them she had refused “to lift even her veil”.) to the full. Leopardi was the perfect subject for Her only other foray into autobiography, her. It involved an immense amount of schol- and perhaps her best-loved book, is the diary arly research: his notebooks, the Zibaldone, she kept for the last eighteen months of the war alone run to 4,526 pages, and his letters and in her valley in Tuscany. Again, she avoids any papers were scattered in archives all over Italy. attempt at facile condemnation of Fascism, It also enabled her to describe, in all its colours saying that during the Mussolini years she and textures, life in nineteenth-century Italy, “learned to hold my tongue and preserve my with its pageants, smells, uniforms, clothes, own convictions”. But when, in January 1943, food, poverty, political chicaneries and literary she and Antonio decided to offer a refuge to rivalries. And as she worked, so she fashioned a children made homeless by the Allied bomb- set of rules about the nature of biography itself, ing of Genoa, she set herself the task of record- which later became a memorable essay and was ing daily life at La Foce, first in their struggles printed in a collection called A Need To Testify to feed the refugees and later to prevent (1984).
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