I shall be going to Germany on the 1st of October. An important Japanese publisher has established a prize for the translation of modern Japanese literature into foreign languages, and it will be officially announced in Frankfurt at the book fair. This is the Japan Year. I shall go to Finland for a lecture there and then on to New York for three days. It is idiotic, but I made an engagement to give a lecture in Tokyo a year ago, not knowing I would be going to Europe and America, and the people here say that it is absolutely impossible to change the date, so I must rush back.

  [. . .]

  All my best to you and Francis.

  Yours as ever, Donald

  Naples, October 16, 1990

  Dear Donald—

  How many letters you’ve had from me beginning with apologies for delay in putting pen to paper—and here’s another, in the eternal context of being overwhelmed by events and interruptions, and always trying to establish a working pattern that will hold firm against all intervention . . . No chance, I feel, of that. But work does get done, even so, and many pleasant things occur that make us feel lucky in this manicomio of a world. The present “crisis” seems to me the most foreseeable and avoidable of all of them, since the onset of the Viet Nam war. No one seems to have appetite for fighting and dying over the price of petrol—and the American public isn’t yet able to discuss such matters in a context detached from hypocrisy and moral righteousness—thus, a sort of mental impasse.

  More pleasing, and more enduring, is the great achievement of your nearly completed History—an event that recreates faith in the singular capacity to bring a mighty enterprise to its conclusion. We both do congratulate you from the heart. It is wonderful to think of, and gives a sort of elevated happiness to your friends. When we’re all together again in NYC, we must have a celebration of private kind—I’m sure there will be numerous celebrations of more public sort. I wd like to read the whole now, right through—to understand it as a continuity. You must be—what?—well, excited, I should imagine?

  [. . .]

  The Neapolitan autumn, always beautiful, is surpassing itself this year, and for some time we’ve been dining outdoors. Still in summer clothes. Here, as you know, each day is an adventure, and those of October 1990 have so far been benign and spectacular—speaking personally. “Publicly”, the deaths of Moravia and Patrick White were somehow shocking, although not at all unexpected. We knew both of them—both difficult men, and both, I’d say, writers who had lost impetus in later years. But, in part because of formidability, they were the kind who don’t die, don’t appear subject to death. The newspaper La Repubblica had, for its main headline “Senza Moravia” and it’s true that he’s been a presence for most Italians as long as they can remember & that the nation feels somewhat different without him. Graham Greene is also extremely ill—we called him in Antibes on his birthday (a day we’d often spent together on Capri) and he sounded very weak (although livening up as he worked up some antagonism . . .). He wrote us that he is living from transfusions. I don’t know how long that can go on.

  Italy is really rather alarming—order, never a great feature of this region, in some places seems to be breaking down into utter corruption and banditry. Today’s news is that Gava, an arch Camorrista who has for some time been minister for the interior in the national govt, is resigning from “ill health”. I dare say he won’t resign his sinister activities, but at least they’ll be without portfolio.

  [. . .]

  So—Francis’ “Galiani” is done; your history is nearly done. I must get back to my pages and have something to show. With much affection, dear Donald, from us both, and with warmest congratulations and auguri—Shirley

  Capri, September 2, 1991

  Dear Donald—

  [. . .] Please forgive such a silence. We have been engulfed—but then all our friends are engulfed, and engulfment thus holds no water (if that’s a permissible figure of speech . . .). When we returned to NYC and found yr letter, I had much in my mind to exchange with you. Now we are about to leave again, in a couple of days, for Italy, and so many events and moments have poured over us all that I hardly know how to be coherent. One morning a couple of weeks ago we woke up to torrential rain—the side of a hurricane—and the news that Gorbachev had been detained, the populace had risen, and other unbelievable truths. I’ve been thinking of Alexander Herzen, in Rome in 1848, writing: “It’s either the Second Coming or the Last Judgement”. Something fine was the spectacle of the Russian people, who have remained cowed through three generations of persecutions, and, in the last quarter-century, through the expulsion and intimidation of the most gifted and courageous of their fellow citizens, now taking to the streets, climbing on the tanks, haranguing their oppressors—and standing in crowds outside the KGB palace and laughing. Well—we need not say that much trouble lies ahead, and so on. Because there is always trouble; but we are unused to the luxury of positive and unequivocal actions on the part of the public. Truth is great and shall prevail; but how long before it does, and how many uncounted lives are consumed in the great unravelling.

  When we’re reunited, and when the triumph of your final volume of the history is consummated, we must have a pow-wow about Dickens. What an extraordinary genius, even among genii; what a weird but profoundly sane man (Shakespeare is saner—and greater—still; but he too had a mighty grasp of weirdness); what boldness, what terrible lapses, what astonishing effect, what wisdom . . . And then, the gripping and almost visual passages—like the opening of Our Mutual Friend, or like Steerforth waving his cap. There are long stretches of filling-in, and the girls are—with few exceptions—hopelessly unreal; but one is never sorry to have read everything, every word. That central failing that the main characters are sometimes less believable than the peripheral ones, as you say, seems true for various of the Victorian novelists; perhaps because of their feeling that “virtue” (which, embodied, becomes implausible and a bore) shd be represented almost unflawed. (Daniel Deronda seems a particular example of that: Deronda himself is a mere wooden figure, while the villain, Grandcourt, is marvellously drawn. But George Eliot could be good in representing virtue in women, at least at times.) On the other hand, Pip in Great Ex, and David Copperfield are well done, even if David C has his unbelievable moments.

  [. . .]

  Part of our own lack of time has been, of course, work—but, in F’s case, the double task of correcting 18th century book’s proofs for late October publication, while at the same time completing a 1,000 page typescript of the Flaubert-George Sand correspondence. This last has now, apart from introduction, gone to the publisher. All that has made a long division in my own work and state of mind for work; and all I want, now, is to get to my own pages. Against the odds, I finished a long chapter of my novel about three weeks ago, and feel that it will now truly move on to completion if I can fight off distractions and stick to it ruthlessly. How ruthless one does have to be to get anything done—ruthless also with oneself, as Leonard Woolf pointed out. I’ve just read a huge life of Patrick White, by an Australian writer. Knopf will publish it next year. It’s assiduous and in many ways commendable; but the life is dismaying, the compulsive cruelty and offensiveness, always combined with larger qualities. It is much worse than I imagined, although one had some sense of the long dichotomy. The later work shows disintegration, to my mind. Curious story, and utterly un-American.

  This brings auguri from us both. [. . .] We must seize the day; which includes our next get-together. I hope that Italy has reverted to beautiful stamps, after those horrors of last spring. If I find good examples, I’ll make them an excuse for a next bulletin. With all our best greetings ever, dear Donald, and with warm affection and congratulations from us both—Shirley

  Tokyo, December 6, 1991

  Dear Shirley,

  When I received your letter in September I decided to give you breathing space before I answered. I know how it feels when, having at last written a letter to a friend, one has hardly sent it off than another letter arrives. But waiting three months has been rather too discreet!

  My time in Japan has been going by quickly. After completing my history of Japanese literature I felt a considerable let-down, but before long I set to work putting into English the second volume of Japanese diaries. That accomplished, I turned to translating some plays by a friend. The book, when completed, will consist of three plays and I have now translated two and a half.5 The last play is written largely in a dialect that I don’t really know, though it is not hard to find someone to help me. The problem is whether or not to try to reproduce in English something of the contrast between dialect and standard speech. Even if I could write some dialect of English (I can’t) the associations would be wrong. At first the “you-all” would be transported to the Deep South, and not of Japan! There is another problem in the form of the stiff, rather unnatural language of police depositions. I really should be able to translate the play into three varieties of English, but I am afraid that is beyond my capability.

  I spent three weeks in China during September. I gave a series of lectures in Japanese at the University of Hangzhou. It delighted me to think of teaching Japanese literature to Chinese, who traditionally have denied that such a thing existed. Everyone was most agreeable, and after my last lecture I was presented with a document bound in crimson velvet that proclaimed that I had been named Professor Emeritus of Hangzhou University! The city of Hangzhou is the most attractive I have seen in China, made so by a large lake on which boats silently pass. There is no shortage of ugly buildings too, some of them intruding on the view of the lake, but one can position oneself in such a way that they are blocked from sight.

  I had not quite realized the extent of the destruction—brought about by the Cultural Revolution—until I visited the temples in the region. In most cases, every single object inside the buildings was destroyed, even innocuous stone tablets on which poems had been inscribed. Some of the Buddhist statues have been replaced in recent years, in part for Chinese who wish to worship them, but mainly for the tourist industry, I suppose. These new works of art are, without exception, hideous. For a very long time the reputation of the Japanese was that of imitators of China or the West, and they were often scorned for that reason; but on looking at the statues in Chinese temples and remembering the ones I have seen in Japan, how I wish that the Chinese had been able to imitate the Japanese!

  Economic conditions in Hangzhou seem vastly better than those that prevailed ten years ago when I visited China. The shops are full of (extremely ugly) merchandise, and the big Friendship shops, where formerly only people furnished with foreign currency could shop, are now open to everyone. The catch is that there are two systems of prices, one for the Chinese, the other for foreigners. The Chinese government is obviously trying to keep the prices paid by Chinese down by squeezing what it can from visitors. My hotel room in Hangzhou cost more for one night (without meals) than professors receive in salary for a whole month. The salaries paid professors are in any case inadequate to live on, but they are able to augment their salaries by serving as tourist guides, etc. But, all in all, I think things have greatly improved and (at least in the big cities) the standard of living is tolerable.

  I expect to return to New York on the 13th of January. Early in March there is to be a joyful celebration at Columbia of my forthcoming retirement. [. . .] I hope you will be in New York in January and that I shall have the pleasure of seeing you then.

  All my warmest good wishes.

  Yours, Donald

  New York, September 6, 1992

  Dear Donald—I must first thank you from the heart for your lovely letter—which arrived, as you’ll see, as more than ever an inspiriting intervention—and for the marvellous photograph enclosed, one of the best photographs I ever saw of three people having justified “transports” (not in the 18th century Australian penitential sense). We enjoyed and enjoy it, for itself and because it brings before us that unforgettable evening. Such mighty moments, where civilization becomes manifest and even in its own strange sense triumphant, are more than ever rare and precious in this weird time with its ever intensifying disintegrations around the globe. I don’t write this to be apocalyptic, but because one cannot be unaware, except while working and with close friends (and of course while reading), of the palpable unease of all forms of order . . . [. . .]

  I shd tell you that shortly after your letter arrived, Francis had an awful fall, which took the wind out of our collective and respective sails. Things are pretty much right again, and he escaped miraculously from worse injuries; but it took a toll, and was a bad shock to both of us. We had invited Erse Breunig’s granddaughter, a lovely and intelligent girl just out of Barnard, to dinner at a little restaurant on top of Bloomingdales. (This, Le Train bleu, is—I suppose—a shopper’s lunchtime pandemonium; but almost no one knows that it is open on Thursday evenings, when the store is open late. Quiet, one eats well, there is a fine view over the East River, etc.) We walked down Third Ave, entered the fateful portals, and got on the escalator. As it went up Francis seemed to lose balance on left leg, and tumbled down, couldn’t get up on the moving stairs, which were cutting horribly into his legs . . . “They” stopped the escalator before he was carried back to the top, a squad arrived (in terror of being sued), lifted him up, got him to a chair, when I saw that he could walk, some—at least—of the horror subsided. But it was one of those events where the abyss yawns—that abyss described in the Iliad, shortly before the encounter between Achilles and Hector that ends with Hector’s death, where the fearful underworld threatens to break open, that underneath of things feared alike “by mortal and the immortal gods”. I think of that passage in connection with the interior of the crater of Vesuvius . . . An ambulance was called, we found ourselves at the emergency at NY hosp, much waiting, etc. [. . .] When the gashes in F’s legs were attended to, nothing seemed very wrong except contusions and shock; and we had already found a few absurdities to smile over in the institutional ongoings around us (although I shd add that everyone was helpful and a few were splendidly humane). Since then, a round of bone scans, X-rays, orthopedist, neurologist, dermatologist, therapist, endless visits to hospital and doctors’ offices—that has been a large part of our lives. F only now starts to feel himself and has started a brief new work, of which more when we meet. We are hoping to go to Naples in a few days’ time.

  To you I will say that it has been a bit gruelling. However, we’ve both worked a great deal throughout, though with me that has been a struggle against a thousand daily claims on my time. One night I stayed up all through the night to get a piece of work finished, as I knew that when morning came I wd not be able to go to my desk. Francis has mercifully slept a great deal. Yesterday he seemed absolutely back to his old self, and—as I say—we have found much to laugh about even in this. Exactly ten years ago, we were recovering from his mugging at Naples—he claims that he can’t be called accident-prone at ten-year intervals. A small booklet has been published of his account of the “Incident at Naples”, and he says he is impatient to press a copy on you.

  [. . .]

  Of course we want extremely to know when your final volume of the history will come out. [. . .] Thrilling to me is the news of your “kind of autobiography”. You know that we prize your brief memoirs, unique and so moving. The second book of diaries will be another revelation. And then, good lord, the biography of the Emperor Meiji. That is wonderful. I smiled over the present of a fresh fish—so practical and welcome. When I was at kindergarten, the (wonderful) Scots teacher, Miss Birrell, would round us up at Christmas, when the custom was for the little pupils to bring a giftie to the teacher, sent by one’s Mamma), and tell us with gaelic frugality: “Remember, children, that you shd tell yr mothers that Miss Birrell has plenty of handkerchiefs, plenty of handkerchief sachets, plenty of quilted coat-hangers, plenty of bedsocks, plenty of slippers and lavender bags. What Miss Birrell needs is: leather gloves size seven, in dark colours; a new electric kettle; a woollen material, preferably serge, in navy blue” etc.

  [. . .]

  How good it is to read of your serious life, serious in the rightful true sense, with so much fine work and with pleasures of elevated kind—ozio elevato. I wish I could have one half of that disciplined time to write and to finish my book, which I do hope to conclude in the new year. Our lives have been—as Keats said of his own existence—like a pack of scattered cards these past few weeks. And it’s done me good to re-read your letter and send at last my reply, which I needed quiet moments to write. Yes, I remember the path leading from the Migliera to the Caprile piazza, and the Contadina “reaping and singing by herself”. It comes before me as if it were this instant, and that autumnal light. Soon, the wild cyclamens will be blooming again in Capri—and also in Tuscany, and near Rome . . . By the way, if you can manage it while in Rome, I much recommend a brief excursion to the Lake of Nemi, an hour or less drive from Rome, and indescribably moving and beautiful. There is, in the fine little town above the lake, a pleasant restaurant with view over the lake, called Lo Specchio di Diana . . . We hope to go there this time, too.

  With most affectionate greetings from us both—Shirley

  Postcard, Naples, June 29, 1993

  Dear Donald—Thank you so much for yr extraordinary card (even a cruelly placed postmark cd not obscure the beauty of the stamp of a sagacious portrait—a man wearing a cap that must denote importance: a poet? philosopher?). Here poets are having a rough time—the tombs of Virgil and Leopardi have been brutally attacked. As Henry James said of the death of Rupert Brooke: “Of course.” What times, what a weirdo century. There have also been robberies here at the Oriental Institute . . .