Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a book published four or more years ago.

“BY THE IONIAN SEA” by George Gissing (first published in 1901)

 

There are two topics that I have tackled a number of times on this blog. One is the nature of travel books and the other is the work of the late nineteenth-century realist novelist George Gissing (1857-1903).

With regard to the nature of travel books, I really said my piece in the posting On the Beaten Track some nine years ago. My basic contention was the obvious one that a worthwhile travel book has to be more than a description of places – a function that has now been usurped by television, photography and guide-books. It must be more in the nature of an extended autobiographical essay, dealing with personal encounters, human interactions and various travel-related topics (social, historical, political etc.) that engage the author. I maintained this view in my postings on older travel books like Henry Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, A.W.Kinglake’s Eothen, and Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps; and more recent ones like Ben Stubbs’ Ticketto Paradise, Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and The Last Train to Zona Verde, and Robert Carver’s The Accursed Mountains.

And how is travel related to George Gissing? On this blog I have often made postings on his novels, usually stories of the grinding poverty of the working classes, or stories of the lower middle-classes desperately trying to maintain their position. Thus The Nether World, New Grub Street (probably his best-known novel, about hack writers), Born in Exile, The Odd Women, Will Warburton and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The last-named, probably Gissing’s second-best-known work, is a fantasia of the type of life George Gissing, always short of money, wished he had been able to lead. He depicts his alter ego as a man of leisure, living in the countryside, reading beloved literary texts, taking long walks and aestheticising over nature. How Gissing wished he could have led that life! And how he wished he could have continued with his classical studies, which had been broken off when his tertiary education was abruptly terminated. At the time of his death he was writing, but had not completed, Veranilda, a novel set in classical antiquity.

Which at last, to your relief, brings me to my reason for placing travel books and George Gissing in this one posting.

 

            Even by the standards of our day, George Gissing’s one-and-only travel book By the Ionian Sea, subtitled “Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy”, is a very brief work – about 140 pages of large print in the copy I read. It is an account of Gissing’s weeks in 1897, when he wandered about in Calabria and nearby areas, the “toe” and “instep” of the boot of Italy. Gissing had already visited more northern parts of Italy, but this was his one and only plunge into the deep south. After sailing from Naples, he landed at Paola on the west coast of Calabria, visited Aspromonte, travelled up to Taranto on the north of the Gulf of Taranto and moved back south to Cortone, where he suffered a horrible malarial fever, after which he went to the salubrious mountain town of Catanzaro, to Squillae on the smaller Gulf of Squillae, and eventually embarked for home from Reggio di Calabria.

            Now why did he choose to visit this part of Italy in one of his very rare trips abroad? Obviously it was because of his interest in classical antiquity, and his knowledge, fired by the books of the French archaeologist and classicist Francois Lenormant, that Southern Italy was as much a part of Greek antiiquity as of Latin antiquity. Greek colonists had settled there when Rome was still just a struggling city-state and before it had acquired an empire. Ancient Romans were sometimes called the south of Italy “Magna Graecia” (“Greater Greece”) because of this connection. As Gissing says in his opening chapter:

“The names of Greece and Italy draw me as no others; they make me young again, and restore the keen impression of that time when every new page of Greek or Latin was a new perception of things beautiful. The world of the Greeks and Romans is my land of romance; a quotation in either language thrills me strangely, and there are passages of Greek and Latin verse which I cannot read without a dimming of the eyes, which I cannot repeat aloud because my voice fails me. In Magna Graecia the waters of the two fountains mingle and flow together; how exquisite will be the draught!” (Chapter 1)

So in his journey, Gissing is the amateur antiquarian, sniffing out the tomb of Alaric the Goth; dreaming, when he has the fever at Cotrone, of the defeated Hannibal’s embarkation for Cathage; and breaking off the account of his own journey to give us a chapter on the Roman scholar and statesman Cassiodorus. His happiest single moment seems to be when he sees an orange orchard by full moonlight (end of Chapter 11) and imagines it to be the legendary Garden of the Hesperides which, geographically, should have been in about the same place that Gissing is visiting.

In the modern life of southern Italy, Gissing sees many things that delight him, and seem to him an affirmation that the ancient customs and ancient ways, which he admires, still persist there. Take this account of a pot market:

“I was glad to come upon the pot market; in the south of Italy it is always a beautiful and interesting sight. Pottery for the commonest use among Calabrian peasants has a grace of line, a charm of colour, far beyond anything native to our most pretentious china-shops. Here still lingers a trace of the old civilization. There must be a great good in a people which has preserved this need of beauty through ages of servitude and suffering. Compare such domestic utensils – these oil-jugs and water-jars – with those in the house of an English labourer. Is it really certain that all virtues of race dwell with those who can rest amid the ugly and know it not for ugliness?” (Chapter 3) [Emphasis added]

But, for the modern reader at least, there is a problem with Gissing’s classicist approach. In looking for the ancient, Gissing often denigrates or belittles the living Italian realities of his own time. “It disappointed me that I saw no interesting costume [at Paolo]; all wore the common, colourless garb of our destroying time,” (Chapter 2) he writes of his first landing in the south, as if he expects modern Calabrians to be dressed as ancient Greeks in some sort of theatrical tableau. Of a sea wall, he writes “… it grieves one to remember that the mighty blocks built into the sea barrier came from that fallen temple.” (Chapter 7) Does he expect people, over many generations and centuries, not to have turned to their own uses the materials at hand? Many a traveller in an antique land expects that land to be a species of museum. Yet it is ironical that while Gissing makes the occasional comment on how “progress” is destroying much of the region’s ancient charms, he is as much a traveller by train as by foot.

Couple this antiquarian bias, this sense that modern Italians are simply living on the ruins of something greater than themselves, with his frequent complaints about stinky hostelries and awful, unhygienic Italian food (except in the delightful town of Cantanzaro), and you almost have the formula for the ghastly Englishman abroad, seeing these natives as merely cluttering up the classical landscape.

This impulse is, naturally, most to the fore when Gissing comes up against the locals’ Catholicism. When he reads an 1896 announcement by Pope Leo XIII of 300 days of indulgence, Gissing bursts out: “Probably he repeated a mere formula learnt by heart. I wished he could have prayed spontaneously for three hundred days of wholesome and sufficient food, and for as any years of honest, capable government in his heavily-burdened country”. (Chapter 8)

His account of his presence in a church in Catanzaro on a feast day, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, is almost a catalogue of Protestant distaste: “At the hour of high mass I entered the sanctuary whither all were turning their steps. It was not easy to make a way beyond the portico, but when I had slowly pressed forward through the dense crowd, I found that the musical part of the service was being performed by a lively string-band, up in a gallery. For seats there was no room; and a standing multitude filled the whole church before the altar, and the sound of gossiping voices at moments all but overcame that of the music. I know not at what point of the worship I chanced to be present; heat and intolerable odours soon drove me forth again, but I retained an impression of jollity rather than of reverence. Those screaming and twanging instruments sounded much like an invitation to the dance, and all the faces about me were radiant with cheerfulness. Just such a throng, of course, attended upon the festival of god or goddess ere the old religion was transformed. Most of the Christian anniversaries have their origin in heathendom; the names have changed, but amid the unlettered worshippers there is little change of spirit; a tradition older than they can conceive rules their piety, and gives it whatever significance it may have in their simple lives.” (Chapter 12) [Emphases added] You see, these “unlettered” and “simple” people are uncouth enough to actually enjoy their religious ceremonies and rejoice at them. They should be singing doleful hymns of lament and listening to overlong hortatory sermons, like the puritans of northern Europe. And besides, their religion is just modified paganism anyway…

But I do not wish to over-emphasise this element of Gissing’s outlook. Though he does have his moments of sneering at local “superstitions”, Gissing is probably much kinder to Italians than most of his English contemporaries would have been. In one section he remarks:

“Legitimately enough one may condemn the rulers of Italy, those who take upon themselves to shape her political life, and recklessly load her with burdens insupportable. But among the simple on Italian soil a wandering stranger has no right to nurse national superiorities, to indulge a contemptuous impatience. It is the touch of tourist vulgarity. Listen to a Calabrian peasant singing as he follows his oxen along the furrow, or as he shakes the branches of his olive tree. That wailing voice amid the ancient silence, that long lament solacing ill-rewarded toil, comes from the heart of Italy herself, and wakes the memory of mankind.” (Chapter 10)

A little “purty”, perhaps, but at least showing some fellow-feeling.

Gissing does describe some of the ancient places he visits, but reading By the Ionian Sea, I was most struck by the fact that he is more concerned with anecdote than with (purple prose) descriptions of the sort that filled many travel books of his time. For example, he tells us of the local urchins who assume, because he is inspecting ruins, that he must be an architect come to fix their church, which has been damaged by an earthquake. The locals are sometimes bullied by “dazio” (excise men), which suggests some of the ongoing tension between Calabrians and the forces of the newly-unified Italian state, which really served the interests of more northern Italians and tended to see the southerners as barbarians to be tamed. Yet it was clearly the promise of scenic sights and interest in antiquities which motivated Gissing to travel to this country in the first place. There is, incidentally, no sense that Gissing has a travelling companion,. He is all alone, and the only people he speaks with are the chance acquaintances of the journey.

            A very brutal conclusion: despite its felicitous moments, this short book is also a very “slight” book, with no great moments or revelations. One almost gains the impression that Gissing wrote a travel book to order – to make sure he got the most out of his brief holiday.