From China to Peru: A Memoir of Travel

3. Little Red Schoolhouse in Italy

3 Little Red Schoolhouse in Italy When I was a graduate student at Harvard, you couldn’t buy a condom in the state of Massachusetts. Standing up for my rights, I went from door to door calling for repeal of the law. I targeted Charleston, a section of Boston largely blue-collar, Irish, and Catholic.Though I gathered few signatures on my petition, I came close to getting punched in the nose. What made me bother the man of the house, interrupting his Sunday dinner? I must have been into self-flagellation, like many lefties I’ve known. But partly, I think, the end I aimed at did me credit. I wanted to make the world better. Nothing wrong with that, and young people who don’t share this impulse are soul-dead.The trouble, as I see it now, was that the end and my means were remote. As I saw it then,America needed a complete overhaul.The rich were lining their pockets, the poor pined away, and the ship of state drove on the rocks. Lecturing the scribes and pharisees, I told them what had to be done. Change the laws and you change the man, I said, with all youth’s assurance.What I really wanted was to get rid of history. Literary history was my business and pleasure. Less bloody than the battles-and-leaders kind, it had its casualties too. If you were a target of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s, a great shooter down of pretension in the age before our own, you seldom or never recovered.A night owl, Johnson sat up late with friends in London taverns like the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. Enthroned in his own corner, he vanquished all comers with the power of his wit.These combats delighted us both. But the prodigy of intellect thought that intellect alone could do little, and that shocked me. He wasn’t a frivolous man for whom the intellect is little red schoolhouse in italy 43 only an instrument on which one plays.To the contrary, he was serious, he was moral, and exercising his wit, he hoped to arrive at the truth.The imperious man was deeply skeptical, however, and believed that God’s grace made the difference for success or failure. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Unlike me in my youthful time,Dr.Johnson didn’t believe in progress. The kind of change you could legislate put money in our pockets or took it away but didn’t affect our salvation. Like me but with a difference, he wanted to escape from history, a record of “all the ills that human hearts endure.” But the ills were native to us, he said, and laws and kings alike had no power to cause or cure them. That might have bred despair, and a man I know, seeing to the bottom of politics, squatted in the fireplace and heaped ashes on his head.This is a figure of speech, but you get the idea. Dr. Johnson, seeing farther than most men, didn’t despair, though irrational terrors beset him and he was melancholy to the point where suicide became an option. But he so loved the world and its sweetness that he wouldn’t willingly leave it. In London for the first time, I did my best to be like him. “Come, sir,” I said to my then-wife, a stand-in for Boswell, “let us dine at the Cheese.” Its pudding was famous, a savory mess of kidneys, oysters, larks, mushrooms, and beefsteak, and you could smell it as far away as St. Paul’s.
They turn up for lunch at the Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, real-life functionaries of the Italian Communist Party.Not in my wildest had I dreamed of breaking bread with the likes of them.They ought to be rabble-rousing in the village below us, but they are sipping aperitivos on the graveled walk beneath the monkey tree. I reflect that these are grossi pezzi, however,“big shots” from Rome, not blue collar.The Left has its hierarchies too. Giuseppe Boffa, foreign affairs editor of the Communist daily l’Unità, lives remote from the noise and stink of the city, high on the Gianicolo almost next door to theAmericanAcademy.A powerfully muscled man in his forties or fifties and bald except for a neatly trimmed fringe above the ears, he looks like a Renaissance cardinal. Mantegna might have painted him. His...