The Naples Of Beauty And Filth
The Age
Saturday December 27, 2008
JOURNEYS Shirley Hazzard's views about Naples show us that what we bring to our travels has a profound relationship to what we take from the experience, says Michelle de Kretser.
The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples By Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller The University of Chicago Press, $34.95 NAPLES is not a city that sets out to enchant. The approach by road involves the negotiation of Italy's unloveliest suburbs, while the traveller who arrives at station or port is plunged instantly into a havoc of traffic and tricksters.Even the historic centre is deficient in the charm that Florence or Venice lavishes at once on the most casual eye. It lacks vistas; hence the all-embracing perspective that reveals splendour in a single sweep. Its ruler-straight Roman roads form canyons walled with stupendous, dilapidated churches and palazzi that a visitor must discover - not always easily - one by one. Beauty, dispensed in a series of discrete astonishments, is not delivered here but earned.Shirley Hazzard, who spends part of every year in Naples, notes that those who love the city are "continually challenged" to defend it. The brief, graceful essays that make up her contribution to this book constitute her response to newcomers repelled by the city's shortcomings and baffled by its fame.In characteristically luminous prose, Hazzard describes the itineraries and attractions that have kept her in thrall to Naples for half a century. She writes of the "unquenchable life" of the teeming historic district and the allure of the city's famous bay. Faced with the tower blocks and industrial chaos that disgrace its outskirts, she finds "violated and ghostly elegance" in stretches of vineyard, secluded sea gardens and decrepit 18th-century villas of ravishing design. A chapter devoted to Vesuvius examines responses - historic, painterly, above all architectural - to the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.It would be wrong, however, to imply that The Ancient Shore is only superior travel writing of the kind that disdains a city's scruffy, incommodious present while hymning the glories of a never-to-be-recovered past. If Hazzard writes only in passing of poverty and crime, she nevertheless insists on the entanglement of squalor and sumptuousness that is everywhere apparent in Naples.In the Neapolitan acceptance, shocking to a visitor, of so much that is distressing, Hazzard sees the fatalism of a people who, living within view of Vesuvius, are resigned to unhappy conclusions.She is admiring, too, of their "genius for human relations". A long essay by Francis Steegmuller, Hazzard's late husband, wonderfully illustrates her point. It tells how, on a summer afternoon, he was mugged by two thieves riding a motorbike; a commonplace crime in Naples.Steegmuller goes on to detail the kindness and solidarity it called forth: from the onlookers who drove him to hospital, from the expert doctors who attended to him, from the patients who, in the grim surrounds of a Neapolitan hospital ward, offered sympathy and small comforts to a stranger.These things are contrasted with the alienating medical "care" Steegmuller subsequently received in New York. The essay ends with his return to Naples - for he returns promptly - where he goes in search of the people who helped him in order to thank them.Many wouldn't have bothered. Many more would never have gone near the place again. The essay is intended as a tribute to Naples and its people, but its enduring lesson is that what we bring to our travels - an abiding sense of human commonality in Steegmuller's case - has a profound relationship to what we take from the experience.The point is borne out obliquely by Hazzard, who adduces a childhood spent in Australia, "a remote, philistine country in those years ... dominated by a defiant masculinity that repudiated the arts", to explain her hunger for cultural riches and the places that could provide them. When she finally arrived in Europe she was ready to be enraptured, for its destinations had long been invested with her dreams.That sense of the sacred - of yearning and bliss - still informs Hazzard's view of travel. She writes, with greater charity than most of us can summon, that "even the tourist who only glimpses, from a sealed bus, the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum, seeks his particle of the holy relic of the world's experience".Thousands of visitors pass through Naples every year, heading for Pompeii or the Amalfi Coast. But the city itself has slipped from the tourist beat. It is deemed too dangerous to visit or too dirty; it has become a byword for civic disorder, its collapse perennially rumoured.None of this will deter the traveller to whom the city has spoken intimately; who has found in Naples what Hazzard calls a "reciprocity of place and person". Nor will the intelligence and charm of The Ancient Shore change the outlook of the visitor who has proved resistant to the city's spell. Our responses to place, winding forth from the dim and storied labyrinth of the self, cannot be commanded and are never wholly explicable.Michelle de Kretser's most recent novel, The Lost Dog, is published by Allen&Unwin. It won the NSW Premier's award for fiction and was longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
© 2008 The Age