No doubt everything will be more enjoyable in practice than in prospect. The maddening slowness of mail between Japan and Italy makes negotiation impossible, but I can count on the Italians to see to it that my stay is enjoyable.

  On the plane returning home from New York (and later) I read Shirley. At times I was carried away to the extent of thinking that this is one of the best English novels, but I kept hoping (in vain, alas) for some grand development that would make the characters come alive. The themes are absorbing, & hopelessness of women in a society where they have only one chance of happiness—a good marriage—is movingly expressed. The unrest caused by the introduction of spinning machines was so well presented as to make most novels of the period seem unconcerned with the real world. But it is hard for us to sympathize with the mill owner who mercilessly tracks down disgruntled employees, & the humor is so ponderous that one yearns for some disaster to cut short the farce! But, no doubt thanks to Japanese literature, I find myself more and more interested in women novelists of the past. I really would rather read the Brontë sisters than Dickens or Trollope etc.

  All my best to you and Francis. Yours, Donald

  Postcard, Capri, May 27, 1988

  Dear Donald—

  Thank you so much for your greeting—how good that you saw San Clemente & the SS Quattro Coronati; and so much else all over Italy. We only regretted seeing so little of you here. Our Bologna stay was splendid—what a magnificent city—the only big town I know that has actually got better (in civic responsibility, state of conservation, elimination of traffic, etc) in the last twenty years. Here, great beauty of weather & place. Also, two unforgettable Pollini recitals (one of chamber music, all Brahms) at the San Carlo. We’re all lucky. We trust your news, of health particularly, is all good? Best affection to you from us both—Shirley

  Capri, June 16, 1988

  Dear Donald,

  Thank you so much for the kind letter and photographs, received today. We sat in the bar next to the funicolare (a caffè with beautiful view, of course, & particularly pleasant in these mornings when the piazza itself is abuzz and troppo affollata, read it, and sent you many messages by mental telex.

  [. . .]

  When you speak of spending half the year in Venice, does it mean that such a possibility is open to you? Well, it is a miracle of beauty and survival. I do think one might exhaust its “novelty”, but only after years; and the great works would only grow more precious. It is perhaps a sense of confinement, and the lack of natural things (other than the sea) that would make me hesitate to spend long stretches of time there. But two or three months would be beautiful. Do you know, out on the Fondamenta Nuove, the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto, wonderful and filled with great pictures? It was restored by English friends-of-Venice, the money being raised and the work being directed by John Pope-Hennessy. A few paces from it, a lovely old palazzo has been made into a charming and authentic hotel, the hotel Madonna dell’Orto. At the rear of the hotel there is a true garden, large for Venice and with splendid trees. It is far from the heart of the city, and that wd perhaps be troublesome for a short stay. But we’re always thinking we might go for, say, three weeks, spending the first week in nearer San Marco and the balance of the stay out in that extremely interesting part of Venice—a short walk, after all, by Capri standards, from the more familiar sites, and a walk that passes through delightful scenes such as Campo dei Mori. [. . .]

  Here, much to say—but it can be summed up in the word beautiful, too. The month of June has been divine in weather and in the peacefulness of Capri. Only on Saturdays and Sundays does hell break loose, and even then all go to the sea and leave us alone until evening.

  You don’t speak of your health, and we hope we can assume from that that all is well? We do hope so, and that work and life itself are full and pleasurable. With all affection from us both—Shirley

  Tokyo, July 6, 1988

  Dear Shirley,

  It is always a delight to find a letter from you in my mailbox, but when opening it is preceded by a flourish of trumpets—in this case the magnificent stamps showing the Teatro S. Carlo and the Piazza Giuseppe Verdi in Salerno—it really becomes a special occasion. I haven’t collected stamps since I was 17, but I still feel the allure.

  [. . .]

  I have not heard anything from the University of Venice about the suggestion that was made in April by one of the professors that I spend a protracted period there. At that moment, walking in the quiet of the streets that were lit not by neon but by discreetly placed lanterns here and there, I was ready to spend the rest of my life in Venice. I may still (if invited) wish to spend some months there, but at the moment the one thing I want to do most is to complete my history of Japanese literature. It goes so slowly. Reading an eleventh-century text with annotations of the unhelpful kind—not revealing the meaning of a passage but, say, the source of a borrowed quotation—I often have the feeling of working at my very limit. But it also gives me great pleasure, as you can imagine.

  I have almost a drawer full of picture postcards of Italy. I owe so many marvelous places to you. I must have written you of my walk from the Excelsior to Santa Maria del Carmine. The walk itself, along the coast, was more frightening (cars parked in such a way that one could not walk on the pavement but had to take one’s chances in the road) than enjoyable, but it made the arrival even more exciting. What a wonderful church! Later, I bought some picture postcards dealing with Masaniello’s revolt that show the church in the background. I am trying sporadically to learn some Italian vocabulary from opera libretti. Of course, I knew already all the words for revenge, daggers, ardent love, contemptible monsters and other typical elements in opera, but I now can say “to grumble” (brontolare) and “to make fun of” (corbellare), both from the first scene of that enchanting opera of Rossini, Il Viaggio a Reims, which was only recently discovered. There is no telling when I will either want to grumble or make fun of some one, so I shall treasure these new acquisitions.

  I hope that all goes well with your work. My best to you and Francis, as always.

  Yours, Donald

  Did I write that I read Edel’s biography of Henry James? I was most impressed. It is really a biography, though many biographies of late have tended to be novels.

  Postcard, New York, August 21, 1988

  Dear Donald,

  A word in haste, having got your card yesterday—thank you for your message and your concern; and I’m a bit aghast that you obviously haven’t received a letter I sent from Italy at least six weeks ago, before we left Naples to visit friends at Fano on the Adriatic (from Fano, then, to Rome and NY). Perhaps it will arrive—the Neapolitan post takes the summer off, we find. But I’m mortified that you had no word. Yes we are both sunk in work at present which is a good way of sinking no doubt. The heat in the city was infernal from the time of our return—really remarkable, and (almost) interesting in its cruel portentousness. Only the last two or three days has the incubus lifted which had never altered, day or night and unprecedented.

  I’m glad to think you, too, have a volcano—a smoking one, at that. [. . .]

  We return to Italy soon after Labour Day. All our affectionate greetings, and our “auguri” for your work—Shirley

  Tokyo, August 30, 1988

  Dear Shirley,

  I was much relieved to receive your letter with the interesting enclosures. No, I had not received your previous letter. It is strange how one tends to trust the postal systems of the different countries, despite all evidence. One assumes that after one has dutifully placed a stamp on the envelope and then pushed the letter into the designated receptacle, it will then without fail reach its destination. Perhaps that was even true at some time in the golden age of the Postal Service. But again and again I have had the experience of knowing that a letter had been sent to me yet never receiving it. Nevertheless, my faith is abiding, and so each time I have evidence that still another letter has found its way into the yawning maw of the Dead Letter Office, I feel the transience of the world anew. And, as the Japanese used to say, my sleeve is wet with tears.

  You mentioned in your letter, the one I received I mean, that you would be in New York until after Labor Day. I blush to admit it, but I don’t know when that is. The reason why I am interested in this fact of American history is that the book which I have dedicated to you and Francis will be ready about the middle of September. There is obviously no hurry about delivering a book that deals mainly with events of nine hundred years ago, but I would like to be able to tell the Columbia University Press where to send the book. If you will be in New York until a certain date, they might send a copy by special messenger in order to foil the evil designs of the local post offices. [. . .]

  There is a possibility I may teach at the University of Rome in November of next year. There is some sort of exchange agreement between that university and Columbia, and they asked if I could lecture there for about three weeks. I believe I told you that I gave two lectures there, each of an hour and a half in the space of three and a half hours!

  At the moment I’m going over the copyedited manuscript of my book on Japanese diaries.1 It is to be published in New York by Holt, who published the volumes of my history. I have been most discouraged and upset by the remarks of the copyeditor. She knows nothing about Japan, as she cheerfully admits, and her queries (as one of the ignorant public) are sometimes to the point. But I have the impression that she does not understand what I have been trying to do. I have used the diaries to find Japanese people of the past who can still speak to us. For my purposes it does not matter much if a particular diary is well or badly written, as long as there is something in it which inspires me to comment on it, to find something of lasting significance in it. But the copyeditor seizes upon every indication that I honestly make that a diary is not a literary masterpiece to urge that I delete it. And anything that seems less than a true diary by her standards is also fated for the block. I shall resist, and no doubt in the end there will be some kind of compromise, but it is an unpleasant beginning to the process of producing a book.

  Another problem arises from her fears that if ever I mentioned that a work is notably masculine or feminine in style I am sternly warned that this will open me to charges of sexism. It doesn’t matter that I may be praising women’s writings, or saying that the diaries by men are not as well written; if I dare to mention the words masculine or feminine I am likely to be viciously attacked. At the moment I think I would prefer to be attacked, rather than change what seems to me to be a legitimate way of treating the materials, but no doubt the publisher fears bombs.

  After reading your last letter (some months ago) I decided I really must read Dickens again, and I have at last implemented this decision by reading Hard Times. I think I like it better than any previous Dickens novel I have read. I always have trouble with his drollery and the names of the characters, but in this instance the work is so solidly made that my objections are swept away.

  As ever, Donald

  Capri, October 17, 1988

  Dear Donald—

  Please forgive this unexpected stationary—from the beautiful hotel near Positano where we’ve just spent a few days, in the course of attending the wedding of the Knights’2 daughter—a most delightful affair, so Italian in the best and ultimate sense, a synthesis of perfect simplicity, easy amplitude, much beauty, laughter, high spirits, and just the right tinge of solemnity. The peak of the celebration was an Epithalamium, unexpected even by Ella, delivered by Carlo3 without notes—he had composed this charming poem in the preceding days and since it was by no means short, put me in mind of Metastasio by reciting it in high spirit over several minutes. The beautiful hot day, the coast in splendour, a riot of flowers around us as we all sat at lunch at the San Pietro . . . Well, by now you may even feel you know too much about the event.

  The occasion was almost too much for us, coming immediately on the receipt of your wonderful book with its dedication which moves us both and makes us proud and happy. The book was brought to us from the gatehouse at our Posillipo place by the driver who had come to take us to Positano for the wedding. We debated whether to bring it with us but decided it would get tossed about in the luggage and be boxed about the ears. Now we think we must have been mad, as we both long to have it in our hands and to read it—not to mention reading over the dedication a good few times. Well, Francis says that on this occasion he feels the justice of his father’s perpetual question (whenever Francis had any notice in the press), “What have you done to deserve this honour?” And honour, we feel, in the true sense—friendship is the best honour one can have; and the linking of one’s best feelings to a fine work touches heart and mind. Thank you, dear Donald, from both of us and from the heart. When we’re all together again in NYC we’ll hope to “festeggiare” this volume and all its associations for us. The book came with a kind letter from Jennifer Crewe (surely an English name?) at Columbia UP, and we’re writing to thank her. It took over three weeks by air. As to your letters, and ours, I won’t bore you with their adventures in the post—although I wonder if my July letter has any chance of ever turning up. I do find a complete disappearance of a letter very unusual, although it’s happened to me once or twice before. However, the summer mails in Italy are extremely strange, and one hears of disgruntled postini who tip their complement of letters into a rubbish dump, etc. (At the UN, a filing clerk—not myself—for years threw out all the correspondence he was supposed to file; no one noticed it, and he was only caught by indiscreetly confiding his “method” to a colleague.)

  [. . .]

  Italian institutions are the devil, in making proposals and then falling silent. However, the “convegno” which we were invited to in Bologna last April—which was the stimulus for a splendid Emilian stay—has crazily given rise to invitations to “Professoressa” Hazzard to “speak” throughout this sometimes deluded nation—not only deluded in the English sense, but to be “delusa” in the Italian sense if I took up these rash suggestions. I did give a short talk at a rather marvellous gathering at Villa Pignatelli here last week (where you and I saw an exhibition of 17th century painters once): it was a memorial “convegno” for Roberto Pane, and extremely moving—first of all for the almost incredible diversity of themes, all of which he had mastered; and then because some of his “enemies” (nearly every Neapolitan in a prominent scholarly or cultural position today was, if he or she is of any stature, a university pupil of Pane’s; he then admonished them for having, as he considered it, joined the hated establishment by becoming museum directors, etc) made moving speeches about him. There were of course also many who had managed to stay on good terms with this formidable man; and those who loved him included ourselves. A Florentine professor made a wonderful talk that brought Pane vividly alive, with his outrageous and inspired decrees and his fearless pronouncements. (Of a modern architect whose work—familiar to New Yorkers, of expensive honeycombed apartment buildings and high rises—was hailed as genius, Pane said “Yes, it takes genius to reconstruct the ‘bassi’ on the top floor”. The “bassi” being those cubicles in which thousands of Neapolitans live right on the street, for instance in Spaccanápoli. Pane was also quoted against specialisation—e.g., the exhaustive concentration on a single painter’s work, and so on—as having remarked that such specialisation was more evocative of a trained dog than of a fulfilled human being.) When asked to speak, I had said that I would like to be among the series of brief speakers (no more than quarter-hour each). I kept my bargain, but most of the others ran on, disregarding even the little alarm bell that rang when they had exaggerated unconscionably. Italians do love these speaking marathons, nightmarish to us. But the Pane congress was quite exceptional, and often brilliant. He clearly made it animate with his presence and his “risata sogghignante”; and at times one felt his thunderbolt might fall—as when the mayor (of Naples) exploited the opportunity to speak of the wonderful “developments” now hideously proposed for the ancient centre. However, the next speakers pulverised this theme. (Which nevertheless remains a ghastly threat here. The ancient centre is the last nucleus in mid-Naples for the speculators to make their billions, and we have learned now that every wildest fantasy of “urban development” can be realised if there is enough money in it and no official morality whatever. If there is any posterity, I should think the Koch-Trump era in New York City may be looked back upon as a threshold to the new stage of ruthless real estate exploitation we now seem burdened with forever.)

  Forgive this rambling. Other events, Napoli, 99 “convegno” on the Emperor Frederick III, culminating in the “unveiling” of the restored arch of renaissance sculptures at the Castel Nuovo. This was really marvellous, done with great taste in an evening ceremony, to which Cossiga (pres. of Italy) came, but—as is often the case with the Italian president—said nothing, not even a word. This obviously has its advantages in a president, but the tradition does make him seem more of an icon than ever, although not a particularly attractive one. We spent a few days in Rome, clambering about an excavation under a beloved church and discovering extraordinary things in a peripheral connection to Galiani. [. . .] Now, much work to do, and new experiences no doubt. Among the deluded invitations to me to “speak”, God help us, is a tempting offer to bring me from New York to Florence in January, for another “convegno” at the Univ. of Florence. But when would I ever work if I did not stay put in NYC for the winter, especially as I now must finish my novel? Besides, I really have no more “speeches” left in me, and hope never to “speak” again. The speaking of “our” presidential candidates is dismaying, isn’t it?—We will register our absentee votes for Dukakis, and be “pleased” if by a miracle the Democrats shd win. But the level is shameful, the populace in general appallingly intent on having leaders of this low calibre, and meantime the initiative in world change passes “suddenly” to the Soviets, whose efforts to break out of their monolithic bondage provide the modern adult political interest (despite the anguish of the NY Times at the prospect that anything might conceivably improve in Russia).