Alex Preston - In Love and War

Your Father.

The mince pies have been crushed in transit from England. Alice Keppel looks down at them apologetically as she serves coffee at the end of Christmas lunch. Reggie Temple has drunk too much and is lolling back in his chair, snoring. Bailey and Goad are wearing paper crowns and discussing the Nanking Massacre. Colonel Keppel alone seems cheerful. — I’m dashed if I’m too old to fight, he says to anyone that will listen. — Just let me at the bounders. Russians, Germans, all the same to me .

Esmond had unwrapped his presents alone, in bed. Two Old Wykehamist ties from his father, the Dugdale abridgement of Mein Kampf from his mother. His sister has sent him a bundle of Everyman editions of the great Russian novels: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev. He lays them on his dresser alongside the box of gaudy handkerchiefs from Gerald via Goad. Missing you, the card read.

He decides to walk back from L’Ombrellino alone. It’s cold and he’s wrapped in an overcoat. The wind brings tears to his eyes as he makes his way down into the city, lustrous under her lamps. Bells chime here and there, children play with spinning tops, yoyos, push-bikes in the street, their scarves tied in stiff knots at their throats. The church is dark and echoing when he lets himself inside. He has a recording to prepare, needs to check supplies of reel-to-reel tape and record needles. He’s in the studio until late and then goes to bed, reading three pages of Mein Kampf before tossing it aside with a snort.

Telegram: 2/1/38

Left yr mad politicians in the lurch STOP Wld rather sleep on street STOP Dad says he’s better is this true STOP Gerald

Via dei Forbici, 35c

Firenze

1.2.38

Dear Esmond –

It strikes me that we started out on the wrong note. Ada has enjoyed working with you enormously — she seems to have found her calling. Her mother and I listen to the programme with great pride, knowing the extent to which our daughter is involved in its production.

Perhaps you’d like to come for dinner one evening. If there’s one thing that the tribulations of my co-religionists north of the Alps have taught me, it’s that leaping to assumptions based upon such broad measures as race or nationality is almost always to err. I loathed your Mr Eden, I resented the sense of entitlement I found in the English who have colonised Florence, much as you have colonised the rest of the world. But these past few months have changed my views on many things. Ada’s aunt, my sister, lives in Hamburg. Life for her has become extraordinarily difficult. Her husband has been beaten, many of their friends have fled, some have disappeared.

It is to the credit of the British that you, like the Italians, are not temperamentally suited to racialist behaviour. The strength of your cultural life gives you access to a finer degree of sympathy — or that, at least, is how I’ve come to see it. Let’s discuss over dinner. I’ll leave it to Ada to agree the date with you.

With very best wishes,

Guido Liuzzi.

[Enclosed with following letter: article from Daily Mail entitled ‘Son of Sir Lionel Lowndes in Italian Broadcast Venture’.]

Welsh Frankton,

Shropshire.

February 2nd, 1938

Dearest E –

Thanks for yours. Can’t tell you how chuffed they all are with you. I’m sure others have sent you the piece from the Mail, but here it is just in case. It makes you sound like quite the hero. Mosley wrote a smashing letter to dad about the difference this has made to the Party’s standing in Italy. Is it true that Musso himself is going to broadcast for you? Now that would be a coup. In any case, he’s told Grandi that he’s thinking of re-starting his contributions to the Party.

I’ve been in the Royal Salop again, can’t seem to shake the cough. It’s a beastly pain but I’ve got through the boredom by thinking about you out there, and how fabulously you’re doing, and what a splendid time you must be having.

Oodles of love,

Anna xxx.

— You know the Treaty of Rapallo? Pound says as they make their way down from the train station. — 1922, it was. Marked the renewal of diplomatic relations between Germany and Russia. Now it looks like they’ll carve the world up between them. And it all started here! He has a halo of fiery hair turning white at the ends, a faun’s beard. Esmond had expected an American accent. — I found Hitler magnificent, when I met him, Pound says. — He’s the real thing, has a vision, a sense of history and destiny . They come to a small café on the seafront overlooking the gently curving bay, bobbing boats, terns and gulls following fishing trawlers out to sea. — In here, Pound says. — I’m upstairs .

He arranges the recording equipment on the balcony of Pound’s apartment. Inside it is too cramped, crowded with books, dark. Pound lounges back in a deckchair, occasionally stroking his beard. It’s cold, a jagged wind pouring down from the hills. He doesn’t seem to notice. — I’ve been introduced to the Boss — Il Duce — several times now, Pound says as Esmond checks levels and adjusts the microphone. — I’ve never met anyone who understood my poems so quickly. He seemed to feel them on an instinctive, primal level. He’s a soldier, of course, but he’s also an intellectual. People forget that here.

That evening they have dinner at the villa of the violinist Olga Rudge. Pound sits between their host and his wife, Dorothy. Esmond is exhausted, downcast, and the dining room is unheated and chilly. He’s not sure he can use any of his conversation with Pound. They’d sat and watched the sun sink over the hills and Pound had spooled out his theories on usury and Social Credit and the Jewish problem and Esmond had felt as if he were back listening to William Joyce address a rally in the East End. There was so little subtlety to his argument, so much anger. They talk about Hulme for a while. — He was a dear, dear friend, Pound says. — Thoroughly brutal. I miss him still . Throughout, Pound’s wife sits in silence, looking over sombrely at Esmond as if he might help her escape along his radio waves to Britain. He retreats to his room as early as he can.

He stands at his window and can see the castle on the bay, patches of darkness on the water where ships are moored, young people walking along the seafront arm-in-arm. He’d brought his novel with him, but he can’t write. Perhaps, he thinks, he’s not supposed to be a novelist. Perhaps novels won’t even be read in the years to come. Maybe his legacy, the thing to make his death less hollow, is the recordings. He imagines a shell whistling down on St Mark’s, he and Goad dragging archives down into the crypt. The best way to speak to the future, Goad is saying, is with brilliant ideas .

The next morning, as the train winds down the coast towards Pisa, he leans from the window of his carriage and sends the discs he’d cut with Pound the previous day spinning out to sparkle for a moment in the winter sunshine and then crash on the rocks below.

Telegram: 10/2/38

Wiring E Lowndes five thousand lire for purchase twelve advertising slots as per agreement at meeting in Milan 6 Feb STOP Viva Il Duce STOP Bianchi Automobiles and Bicycles 7 Via Nirone Milan

MINISTRY FOR POPULAR CULTURE

VIA VITTORIO VENETO, ROMA

10/3/1938

Dear Esmond,

I was delighted and honoured at the introduction Mr Goad gave to my short speech on Radio Firenze last week. I have already written to him directly and apologise that I haven’t been in touch with you earlier. I very much enjoyed meeting you in Rome and was delighted to discover so many points of shared interest. I am sure that Italy (and England) will thank the day that Esmond Lowndes took an interest in the rapprochement of our once-close nations.