Tête-à-tête
Elizabeth Hardwick and Tim Parks have a conversation.
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Americans who removed themselves to England were usually seeking manners, civilisation, congenial spirits; in Italy the senses were enchanted, brought under the spell of the great sun, the heartbreaking landscape, the sweetness of peasant faces, toiling and enduring, the lemon tree against the wall. It appears that an American cannot become an Italian—property, marriage to the aristocracy, nothing seems to insure assimilation. And the answer must be that Americans want to live in Italy but do not wish to become Italians. Many once wished to become Englishmen and succeeded; foreigners from every land have become Frenchmen of a sort…
The headmistress reads… She reads quickly, giving the kind of details that might be interesting at an academic conference but making no attempt to have them come alive for her present audience… The children by the flag on the balcony are making faces at their mothers and fathers below. Two members of the band have sidled round the corner of the building out of sight of the luminaries to light a cigarette. Brass players, too… The headmistress is just pronouncing the words ‘recent advances in didactic methodology’ when a bus passes, entirely drowning out the inefficient PA. At which it occurs to me that, for better or worse, the most important thing that children bring home from these events is a profound indifference to the content of public discourse. It is important for the headmistress to speak, of course. But who cares what she says.
To become an Italian you must lose yourself to the family. Will the American (or the Brit, for that matter) ever say bye bye to the public persona, the core of their identity, its spine?
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