Continuing Clayhanger

Saturday, May 7th., Pension White, Florence.

This morning news of the death of the King. The moved silence in which it was received in the coffee-room was most remarkable. One middle-aged man had apparently some difficulty in not crying. This afternoon I wrote a pretty fair article on the 'human nature' of the reception of the news here. I used mostly real incidents, but they had to be arranged.

Last evening I received the proof of my English Review article, "Night and Morning in Florence". I found it even more brutal than I had expected. But it is good.

Yesterday I wrote 2,700 words of "Clayhanger". Then I walked all over the town to find a subject to sketch, and found none until in despair I sat down in the Loggia Lanzi.

This morning I had written about 1,500 or 1,600 words of "Clayhanger" at 8.30, though I only went to bed last night at 11.30. Then Mr. Mock and Marguerite and I went up to San Miniato & he and I sketched. An ideal morning. This afternoon, after my article, I sketched again; and on the way home bought for 14 sous the first edition of R. H. Dana's "To Cuba and Back".

No museums for a long time now.


Additionally for May 7th., see 'Leaving Greece'

The Teodora would be quite a small steamer - on the Atlantic. here she is large; indeed 8,000 tons. The traditional phrase "dirty little Italian steamer" has ceased to be apposite. Italian shipping is about as good as any. That which has happened to Italian railways has also happened to Italian shipping. After the hurly-burly of departing is over, and the sellers of collections of foreign stamps, and the cheating money-changers, and the cigarette sellers who ask for a tip, have left the ship, you soon perceive that the Teodora is well run, and exceedingly orderly; and decorated in a touching, demode, simple style which appeals successfully to your sympathetic imagination. You perceive further, at the first meal, that she has the incomparable advantage of carrying no orchestra: she does, nevertheless, carry a barber and a cinema. No food could be more charmingly presented, and no service could be better or more urbane or delightful, no bathrooms hotter, and no pillows harder, than the Teodora's.

Class war

Thursday, May 6th., Cadogan Square, London.

Today is the third day of the general strike. At lunch yesterday (Gardiner, Tudor Waters, Hedges, Jim Currie, Sassoon, and Lord Devonport) most people were gloomy, but all uncompromising. General opinion that the fight would be short  but violent. Bloodshed anticipated next week. Plenty of wireless messages, futile. Typescript printed Times and Financial Times.

Another N.N.E. wind today. Not a taxi on the streets that I saw. It is now over a week since I did anything on the novel - the last day being Thursday, 29th April. 

I went for a walk to Brompton Road to spy out the land. Eleven buses passed the top of Sloane Street in five minutes at 4.30. Only two of them were Generals, and both of them had a window smashed. I saw more in the evening. A policeman and a special constable on every General. 

I drove up to see Griffin about "Lord Raingo", which he had medically vetted for me. He was very pleased with the book.

Dined at the Yacht Club, after some trouble about me not being in evening dress (a new rule that I had never heard of). However, I insisted on dining there, and did. Imagine enforced evening dress in the middle of a General Strike!
Additionally see 'The General Strike'


Also for May 6th., see 'Survivor's story'

Returned here on Friday and met Bertie Sullivan in the train. Carrying F.O. mails over to Holland in the Copenhagen, he had been torpedoed by a submarine. He said 6 subms. waited for the boat, in 3 pairs. He was shaving. He seems to have kept pretty calm, but said he couldn't get his boots on. "I was flurried," he said. Of 17 bags he saved 16, and sank one. Result, after several days, a sort of lack of feeling in fingers. (It was March and he was not in row-boat for long.)

Impressions

Wednesday, May 5th., George Street, London.

I went for weekend to Beaverbrook's on Saturday and returned on Monday. Max has now two crazes - playing tennis all day - and sleeping at night in the garden. He gave me the full history of his relations with his father, as material for my next 'big' novel. (But I am afraid that I shall have to write a little one first) he also promise to tell me stories of 'deals' as material for short stories. Especially Strathcona's life in England.
For more on Beaverbrook see 'A visit to Berlin' and 'Leading the high life'

He had a series of Mutt and Jeff cartoons in which Ll. George and Bonar Law were Mutt and Jeff, and Ll. George was always playing tricks on B. Law. Ll. George expressed curiosity earnestly to see these things, and so Max asked him and Mrs. Ll. George to come to Cherkley to see them on his private screen. It was an ordeal. practically the whole Bonar Law family came down in batches while I was there. All perfectly delightful - papa, two girls and two boys.

Monday night: "Mary Rose", Barrie's new play at the Haymarket. Tedious. The papers for the most part hailed this work as a great masterpiece.

Mary Rose is a play by J.M. Barrie, who is best known for Peter Pan. It first played in London in April 1920. It tells the fictional story of a girl who vanishes twice. As a child, Mary Rose's father takes her to a remote Scottish island. While she is briefly out of her father's sight, Mary Rose vanishes. The entire island is searched exhaustively. Twenty-one days later, Mary Rose reappears as mysteriously as she disappeared ... but she shows no effects of having been gone for three weeks, and she has no knowledge of any gap or missing time. Years later, as a young wife and mother, the adult Mary Rose persuades her husband to take her to the same island. Again she vanishes: this time for a period of decades. When she is found again, she is not a single day older and has no awareness of the passage of time. In the interim, her son has grown to adulthood and is now physically older than his mother. Barrie, who normally wrote with his right hand, wrote Mary Rose with his left hand due to a "writer's cramp".

Last night "The Skin Game", Galsworthy's new play at the St. Martin's. This play may be a melodrama, but it is a very good one indeed and it holds you absolutely. It is very well acted. It is a tale, an incident, whose effect depends on coincidence, and it has no general significance. The writing and the observation are excellent.

The Skin Game is a play by John Galsworthy. It was first performed at the St Martins Theatre, London in 1920. It was included in Burns Mantle's The Best Plays of 1920-1921. The plot tells the story of the interaction between two very different families in rural England just after the end of the First World War. One, the Hillcrists is “old money”, although their finances are at a bit of low ebb. The other family is the “nouveau riche” Hornblowers, headed by the single-minded and rich industrialist Hornblower who plans to surround the Hillcrist’s rural estate with factories.

Lillah McCarthy

After this show we went to Lillah and Fred Keeble's reception after their marriage. Lillah most beautiful. Lady Wyndham was there; aged. I thought: "Lillah will be like that one day." But perhaps she never will be like that. And how do I appear to others? Do I look my age, or older, or younger? The mirror fails to enlighten me on this important subject. 
For more on Lillah McCarthy see 'Indecent exposure?'

The usual crowd.

Additionally for May 5th., see 'The noble savage'

I have been reading some Rider Haggard. Though a popular and sensational writer there are good thing in his work. He can certainly tell a tale. "King Solomon's Mines", for example, carries the reader inexorably forward and is hard to put down. He is at his best when writing of the Zulus. Though he retains some of the prejudice towards 'natives' which characterise the white man, he is clearly an admirer of the Zulus. There is real poetry in some of his descriptive passages and my sense is that this derives from his knowledge of Zulu language and culture. Women are incidental to the story. Even "Nada the Lily" for example is about the hero Umslopogaas, not about Nada, and he is prone to idealise white women. Overall not to be sniffed at;  a useful relief from 'literature'!

Florentine palaces

Wednesday, May 4th., Pension White, Florence.

I sat an hour in the sun sketching on Monday morning. Yesterday morning: the Gothic Palazzo (? Davanzato) which Professor Volpi the owner has fitted up as a museum. The most complete 'show' house I ever saw. The professor even has the generosity to leave incunables lying about. What amused us - I met Mr. Mock therein by accident - was the holes in the floor of the drawing-room through which enormous stone balls could be dropped on the heads of hostile visitors in the hall below. There is something exquisitely cheerful about this device.

Palazzo Davanzati was erected in the second half of the 14th century by the Davizzi family, who were wealthy members of the wool guild. In 1516 it was sold to the Bartolini and, later that century, to the Davanzati family, also rich merchants (1578), who held it until 1838. After the suicide of Carlo Davanzati, it was split into different quarters and modified. After escaping the numerous demolitions of 19th century Florence, it was bought by Elia Volpi, an antiquarian, who restored It in (his impression of) the original style. 

In 1910, Volpi opened the building as a private museum (Museo Privato della Casa Fiorentina Antica). The contents of this museum kept changing as Volpi sold the furniture at auctions, including a major one in 1916 in New York. In the 1920s, Egyptian antique dealers Vitale and Leopoldo Bengujat acquired the building and its contents. In 1951 it was purchased by the Italian state and kept open as a museum. By 1995 the museum needed to be closed for major restoration to keep the building from falling down. The museum was partially reopened in 2005 with the ground and first floors; by 2012 all the floors were open to visitors.

Por called in the afternoon, and stayed an hour though I was ill. He said that all progressive periodicals in the U.S.A. had suffered a set-back, & were either paying their authors half-rates, or had been bought up by reactionaries, or something else had happened to them.

This morning, fired by a letter from Martin: Palazzo Riccardi. Yes, the Gozzoli frescoes quite came up to my expectations; but it would be quite impossible to enjoy them under the actual conditions: a man flicking a portable electric light around all the time, and the Wild West accent in the back of my neck. The other show-parts of the Palazzo are not worth more than the half lire charged. But of course I was unwell.

The Palazzo Medici, also called the Palazzo Medici Riccardi after the later family that acquired and expanded it, is a Renaissance palace located in Florence, Italy. The palace was designed by Michelozzo di Bartolomeo for Cosimo de' Medici, head of the Medici banking family, and was built between 1444 and 1484.

Additionally for May 4th., see 'The General Strike'

Today was the first day of the general strike.
Many more motors about. I walked round to Victoria, which was shut up (both stations) one small entrance guarded by policemen. I heard someone say that a train had gone somewhere during the morning.
Yet in the vast empty stations Smith's book stalls were open. So were (outside) the cafes.
The populace excited and cheery, on this first day of the strike.
No evening paper. News from the Wireless at very short intervals, half hour intervals at night up to midnight.
I should think that all theatres would soon be closed.
Already today there has been a noticeable increase in gravity in the general demeanour.

Remains of a catastrophe

Tuesday, May 3rd., "Flying Cloud", Athens.

Sleep. Great discussions in the air throughout the day about a change of plans which would make Constantinople possible. The thing to be settled tonight i hope.

We saw a Byzantine small church after sleep. Intense heat. Then we went shopping in the 'Shoe Street' (second-hand quarter). I bought a heavy gold, silver and lace scarf-shawl for Dorothy from Salamis; old. Then tea, to which came Mr. Hill formerly head of the American archaeological school here. He took us to the Acropolis, and was intensely interesting and brilliantly clear the whole time.

Bert Hodge Hill at Corinth

Bert Hodge Hill (1874 - 1958), served as the director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for twenty years (1906-1926). His academic interests were broad and diverse. As the director of the ASCSA he was in charge of the Corinth excavations where he concentrated on the study of the springs of Peirene, Glauke and the Sacred Spring. He was also closely involved with the study of the monuments of the Athenian Akropolis, especially the Erechtheum and the Parthenon, as well as with the study of various issues related to the topography of Athens. In addition to architecture, sculpture, and topography, he was engaged in studies of epigraphy and worked on the publication of many inscriptions. His knowledge of Greek archaeology, in particular that of Athens, was widely recognized and, consequently, he was consulted by everyone publishing on these topics. His contribution to the publication of the Erechtheum, for example, is well known.

In front of you, and as much to the right as the Erechtheion is to the left, but somewhat nearer, stands the shell of the Parthenon. You see the north and the west sides at an angle. I should estimate that of the original masonry not one tenth now stands where the architects put it, or stands at all. The upstanding one tenth constitutes the greatest religious architectural monument of the western world, perhaps the greatest on earth. But it is not more sublime than the structure which forms the entrance to the Acropolis. I count them equal in mastery. 

The battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18th June 1815. Historic date! Another historic date is Friday 28th September, 1687, when a German lieutenant (these Germans have no luck), fighting for the Venetians, fired a shell into the middle of the Parthenon. The Turks were then using the Parthenon as a powder magazine, and the exploding ammunition blew the building all to bits. The episode was magnificent, and it was also war, and a century and a half passed before mankind fully realised the enormity of the catastrophe.

Additionally for May 3rd., see 'Bothersome interference'

I have had a wireless receiver installed by the B.B.C. at a cost of £60. It is not working satisfactorily and I am unhappy.
For example, last evening we wanted to listen to a performance of the Second Act ofDie Walkure, but found it impossible to get an uninterrupted transmission of the opera. Another programme, and perhaps two other programmes, kept breaking in with more or less comic music of a violently anti-Wagnerian character, and no amount of adjustment would prevent this. Also a long speech. The Wagner would go on excellently for a few minutes , and then, for no apparent reason, it would be drowned by something else. All attempts at re-adjustment only resulted in whistling and various other strange noises.
This receiving set is admirable within certain limits, but I consider that the limits are far too narrow. An instrument which will neither get Continental stations, nor a Daventry station without mingling it with London or some other place, must surely be classed as extremely unsatisfactory.
I have written to the B.B.C. to complain.

For charity

Tuesday, May 2nd., Comarques, Thorpe-le-Soken.

The MS. of "Helen with the High Hand" sold for £27 at the Red Cross sale at Christie's on Friday. This was the last day of the sale. Bookseller Beaumont bought it.

I have written to inform Doran that in the the issue for December 23rd., of the New York Nation there is an extremely fine article on me by Stuart P. Sherman. On the whole I regard it as the best article I have ever seen on the subject. I should very much like to have seen this article reprinted, either with other by the same hand or alone, but I suppose there is no chance of this. I should judge it to be about 5,000 words in length.

Additionally for May 2nd., see 'Almost idyllic'

We both enjoy ourselves tremendously here. I take pleasure that may positively be called 'keen' in walking across the park, getting a shave in a picturesque talkative barber's shop, and then strolling about the town. Our surroundings are certainly almost ideal; and the weather now is ditto. The fruit trees are in blossom. Lilac and peonies are coming. I startled a lizard yesterday in the forest. And there is a general cloak of thin green on the branches. We have tea in the kiosk, and eat our other meals with the door open. Today I had to close the persiennes of my study against sun and heat. And this month I shall be 41!

Examples of fatuity

Sunday, May 1st., Pension White, Florence.

Yesterday morning Rickards and I went to La Badia, where he showed me in some detail the tomb sculptures of Mina da Fiesole. He was not much struck with the cloisters of San Marco. In the afternoon we went to the royal villas of Castello & Petraia. Sensations of heat, quiet and cypress-effects that really were worth having. From the terraces you have a fine view of the perfectly flat plain. Curious furnitures at Petraia; a mixture but some rooms very original & beautiful. You can't forget the reflection of pale chairs in a dark marble floor. The fatuity of the life there must have been excessive. The Games Room, etc. The horrible little private chapel. Two of the 'finest fountains in Italy' it seems, by John of Bologna and Trbola. But after all it was the cypresses and the roofs and the distant hills, and the cloud and sky effects against the cypresses that were the chief things. For fatuity, the glass case with singing fluttering birds, and the play of floor-jets of water in a silly ugly grotto must be remembered. We had guides of some individuality, decent, quiet, and open to suggestion: otherwise the guide business would have been very trying. We came and went in a dusty tram, and while waiting for it to go back sucked oranges in the narrow & tedious, but watered, main street of Castello. In this street I saw a notice of an Italian opera called 'Sullivan', of which the scene & characters were London, to be done today at the Castello theatre. (Box Office open first on such a day at such an hour) It must therefore be a stock piece.

In the evening the Mocks and Marguerite and I went to 'Monna Vanna', at the Verdi. Georgette le Blanc, Jean Froment, Severin Mars. This was the worst dramatic performance, without any exception, that I have ever seen anywhere. The whole conception of the interpretation of the play was fatuous and vulgar. Poorish, fashionable audience. Reception cold.

Additionally for May 1st., see 'A Paris Night'

On Saturday I dined with Martin at the Restaurant Italien and then we went to Buffalo Bill. Most lugubrious, for besides bad weather there was bad lighting and little to see. We left almost at once and went to the Bal Tabarin in "the ball of the models of the two salons."