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6 Sea-Drinking Cities In January 1925 Camilla and Josephine left Charleston in a great flurry of steamer trunks and suitcases bound for Italy aboard the Conte Russo. The unbounded vista on the high seas, salt spray, and new faces pulled Pinckney out of her depression. A shipboard romance restored her confidence a bit after her recent disappointing “affaires du coeur.” She could now joke with Hervey Allen about the “charming creature” who foolishly left the ship “and me—at Gibraltar in spite of my trying on him all the wiles I’ve learned in a long life. This was ashes in my mouth, of course.” “While it is a traveler’s banality to say to one at home ‘I’ve wished for you,’” she wrote Allen, “I shall say so since you already know how commonplace I really am.”1 The Pinckneys enjoyed a brief excursion into Spain, stopping for a day at Madeira where the sight of lavender houses wreathed with red bougainvilleas made a lasting impression upon her. At Algiers, Josephine bought a “swell costume” of blue and gold Turkish trousers at the market. Her excursion with her mother into the “smelly” Arab and Jewish quarters was less successful. At a mosque, Camilla, the steadfast pillar of the Episcopal establishment, unwittingly “stepped on an old Arab’s prayer mat with her shoes on and got cursed out for an irreligious woman by the irate owner,” giving Josephine “great joy.” Next, Josephine convinced their party that they must see another custom of the country, the belly dancers. After a long wait and “much red tape and large sums of money,” they entered the tent and saw the show. “The dancers weren’t naked,” she complained. “Very disappointing.”2 In Sicily she began her study of Italian, which, she complained, “I was misled into thinking was an easy language to learn.”3 In the afternoons she read the classics (Theocritus’s Idylls was a favorite) in English and worked fitfully on her own poetry. Later, in Maiori, on the Amalfi coast, Pinckney took up painting, “the most fun of anything I ever did.” There, they met up with Isabella Wigglesworth, a “rebel Bostonese” painter and sister-in-law of Dick. Isabella, whose childhood nickname “Baby” had to be changed to “Bay” after the birth of a younger sister, shared Pinckney’s enthusiasm for life and her sense of humor. Pinckney thought her “quite a peach” and “the member of the clan whose charm has lasted best 92 | A Talent for Living for me.” On their scenic side trips to Ravello, Pompeii, and Sorrento, Pinckney no doubt made discreet but probing inquiries about a certain young lawyer now posted in Berlin. But mostly they focused their attentions on the landscape as they struggled to capture the evanescent loveliness of the seaside in watercolors. The whole experience “went right to our heads,” she wrote Allen.4 In early April 1925, the Pinckney party successfully negotiated the rock of the Cyclops, Scylla, and Charybdis, and settled into Rome. Pinckney awaited word from Amy Lowell who planned a celebratory trip to Europe upon completion of her Keats biography. Keats, most of Lowell’s closest friends believed, was “retrospectively” the real love of her life. When Pinckney learned that John Keats had been released, she promised Lowell she would head right for his grave in the Protestant cemetery where “I shall lay Orestes-like upon his tomb, a curl of severed hair—in your especial honor.”5 In Rome, Pinckney spent as much time “cogitating” as writing. After all the masterpieces of painting she had seen throughout Italy, she was wrestling with the relationship of art and poetry. Her time in Florence had been a total joy; she even developed a crush on poet and novelist Robert Nathans. Among the other intriguing people she met in Florence was art critic Bernard Berenson. Pinckney was invited to a party at his home, probably with Caroline Sidney Sinkler who was a friend of Berenson’s patron Isabella Gardner Stewart. At the Villa I Tatti, she was dazzled by his “pictures” and intrigued by the stimulating talk.6 When Pinckney caught up with her mail, she learned that after three years the North American Review had finally published her poem “Dark Water.” Rather than enjoying her success, she brooded over the published lines, picked the poem apart, and rewrote it. She also found letters from Hervey Allen. They had kept up a lively transatlantic correspondence wrangling...

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