The vilified author.

[MANICHAEAN]

THE VILIFIED AUTHOR.

Part 1:

On that sublime early July morning, the Eternal City was between shifts. High in his apartment in the Vatican City, the current aged incumbent of the Holy See was in prayer for Mankind, whilst in the streets behind St Peters, the fallen angels of the more expensive variety had returned home after having cut free a few stragglers from those devotional pilgrims, unable or too weak to keep up with the aspirations and progress of the main herd. The smell of freshly cooked pizza and softened moist anchovies wafted across the nostrils of the street cleaners and the ghost’s of fallen gladiators and centurions glided past Titus’s Arch and across the Ponte Verdi to Trajan’s Forum in order to indulge in reminiscences of the good old days when Nero made sure the streets were safe & when orgies were of the highest order.

Italians in general and indigenous Romans in particular have three priorities in life that make it difficult for them to leave this city on the Tiber: mama, pasta & the women in their lives, (excluding mama). An exception to this norm was a relatively young man named, rather exotically; Oreste De Fazio Forte, who was at the current juncture in his life, a journalist. He had on that morning submitted an idea to the editor-in-chief of L' Osservatore Romano, the definitive newspaper of Vatican affairs and for whom he now worked. The proposition, (unusual considering the religious nature of the journal), was to address an inquiry into at what age mankind falls in love. The editor, Umberto Ortelli seemed astonished that an idea so journalistic, (that was his word), should have been an initiative by his most recently acquired member of staff. Ortelli was at base, as hard nosed as they come & despite the unique persona of the newspaper under his control and the deep religious convictions he professed to hold, his business morals would have gained him honorary access to joint cold showers with the best of the British Fleet Street Praetorian Guard.

Oreste’s proposal was to go and interview certain men and women, first upon the age at which one loves the most and next upon the age when one is most loved. He had jotted down the names of a number of individuals whom he proposed to interview on this all-important question, and began to read over the list to his boss. It contained two ex-government officials, one of Berlusconi’s current mistresses, a senior officer in the Carabinari, four jaded actors, two dubious financiers, seven questionable lawyers, a surgeon with a known drink problem and a lot of literary celebrities to finally infuse it with a modicum of what is termed “human interest”. At some of the names being called the chief would nod his approval, at others he would say curtly, with an affectation of American manners, "Bad; strike it off," until Oreste came to the name he had kept for the last, that of Graham Greene, the famous novelist.

"Strike that off," he said abruptly. "He is not on good terms with us. In fact the Holy Father has his reservations too, though more charitable than mine. He has read Greene’s latest novel “The Power & the Glory” & apparently said to one of the Cardinals, that perhaps that man needs help! Help. He needs more than help! He writes of a whiskey priest who is a hero figure & other priests forced to marry by the state. It’s obscene! Anyway, it is one of Greene’s principles not to see any reporters. I have sent him ten if I have sent him one, and he has shown them all the door. The L’Osservatore Romano does not relish such treatment, so we have given him some pretty hard hits. He is like that French writer, Houellebecq and will similarly pay the price. In that case, we gave him such bad reviews that to the general public he is now associated with many unpleasant things like racism, cynicism & nihilism. He is forced to live in exile in Ireland & we will ensure that after initial interest his novels will not be read.”

"Nevertheless, I will have an interview with Greene for the L' Osservatore Romano," was Oreste’s reply, drawing the editor back from his diversions into his perceived perversions of other writers. "I am sure of it."

"If you succeed, De Fazio Forti" the editor replied, "I'll raise your salary. That man makes me tired with his scorn of newspaper notoriety. He must take his share of it, like the rest. But you will not succeed. What makes you think you can?"

It was hard to permit Ortelli to speak in that way of the man Oreste most admired among living writers, for he had found, as he had feared, that entering the workforce was like entering the grave. That from then on, nothing happened and you had to pretend to be interested in your work. That was the worst part of the trap for him. Professional life meant that nothing else was going to happen to you. Since that not far-distant time when, tired of being poor in Italy, he had made up his mind to cast his lot with a provincial newspaper in France where the great man now lived. He had tried to lay aside his old self, as lizards do their skins, and had almost succeeded.

In a former time, a former time that was but yesterday, he knew, for in a drawer full of poems, dramas and half-finished tales he had proof of it that there had once existed a certain Oreste de Fazio Forte who had come to France with the hope of becoming a great man just as he had conversely given up hope in his native Italy. That person believed in Literature with a capital “L.”He was now dead and buried. Would he some day, his position assured, begin to write once more from pure love of his art? Possibly, but for the moment he knew only the energetic, practical Oresti, who had entered the jungle with the idea of getting into the front rank, and of obtaining as soon as possible, an obscene income by which he would regain his freedom.

He had long ago in his poverty & dejection questioned whether love still existed. He had been happy in childhood but uneasy in adolescence, so what had caused it to disappear? He put it down to the curse of materialism whose club he had now joined, albeit reluctantly, for in materialism we are alone, we live alone and we die alone. That’s not very compatible with love.

[Hawkman]

Well apart from some horrifically long sentences in the opening paragraphs which are starved of punctuation, this narrative grips. It holds and refuses to let go. We are left asking, Quo Vadis? I'm looking forward to finding out. :D

Live and be well, H

[sweety]

I take my hat off to you sir. Well written

[YesNo]

I agree with Hawkman that some of the sentences seemed long, but they contained amusing phrases that kept my interest and made me want to read more. All of these details focused my attention rather than distracted it. So I think it was well done.

I liked the three priorities that men have in their lives: "mama, pasta & the women in their lives, (excluding mama)". I'm glad they excluded mama. And the more serious comment at the end: "for in materialism we are alone, we live alone and we die alone" makes me think there is more than humor waiting for the reader.

[MANICHAEAN]

Hawkman, sweety & YesNo. (Not quite an appropriate title for a possible team of soliciters!), thank you for your comments. Please find below, presented with bated breath Part 2.

I've tried to subdue the black humour this time & improve the punctuation. Just take deep breaths before you start the sentences!
Best regards.
M.

Part 2:
Oreste had, as a matter of fact, a sure means of obtaining the interview. It was this: When he was young and relatively naïve, he had sent some verses and stories to Graham Greene, the same verses and stories the refusal of which by four editors had finally made him decide to enter the field of journalism. The great writer had been traveling at this time, but he had replied. Oreste had responded by a letter to which he again replied, this time with an invitation to call upon him at his villa in Nice. He went but did not find him. He went again and did not find him that time either. Then a sort of timidity prevented him returning to the charge. But to Oreste although he had never met him, at least he knew him through the two epistles. This is what he counted upon to extort from him the favor of an interview which he certainly would refuse to a mere newspaper hack. His plan was simple; to present himself , to be received, to conceal his real occupation, and to sketch vaguely a subject for a proposed novel in which there should occur a discussion upon the age for love, to make him talk.

Everything went unexpectedly smoothly, considering the depth of the deception. Contact was made, an invitation from Graham Greene was extended, and Oreste, full of excitement mixed with feeling of guilt made the journey to Nice in his small Fiat, booking into a small local pension overlooking Nice’s anchored yacht’s & opulent façades.

He presented himself at the villa the next day and was warmly received. The books and papers that littered the table bore witness that the present occupant of this retreat remained a substantial man of letters. His habit of constant work was still further attested by his face, surmised in some quarters as one that had been lived in! If Oreste had found him the snobbish pretender whom the weekly newspapers were in the habit of ridiculing, it would have been a delight to outwit his diplomacy. But no! he saw, as he rose to receive him, a man about sixty seven years old, with a face that bore the marks of reflection, eyes tired from sleeplessness, a brow heavy with a lifetime of thought.

“What have you been doing since the story and the verses you were kind enough to send me?" he said.

It is vain to try to sacrifice once and for all, one's youthful ideals. When a man has loved literature as Oreste had loved it at twenty, he could not be satisfied at twenty-six into giving up his early passion, even at the bidding of implacable necessity.

“So Graham Greene remembered his poor verses!” he grasped. “He had actually read his story! His allusion proved it.”

Could he tell him at such a moment that since the creation of those first works, he had despaired of himself and was about to repeat the most infamous kiss known to mankind, that of Judas Iscariot. “Is it I Lord?”

He replied, "I have retired back to Rome since last I wrote to you, in order to work upon a novel called “The Age for Love”, and it is on this subject that I wished to consult you, sir."

It seemed to Oreste, it may possibly have been an illusion that at the announcement of the so-called title of his so-called novel, a smile and a shadow flitted over Greene’s eyes and mouth. The vision of a young woman he had met in the hall came back to him. Was the author of so many great masterpieces of analysis about to live a new book before writing it? He had no time to answer this question, for, with a glance at an onyx case containing some Turkish cigarettes, he offered Oreste one, lighted one himself and began first to question, then to reply to him. Oreste listened while he thought aloud and had almost forgotten his Machiavellian intentions, so keen was his relish of the intimacy of this communion with a mind he had passionately loved in his works. He was the first of the great writers of his day whom he had thus approached on something like terms of intimacy. As they talked, Oreste observed the strange similarity between his spoken and his written words. He admired the charming simplicity with which he abandoned himself to the pleasures of imagination, his intelligence, the liveliness of his impressions and his total absence of arrogance and of pose.

"There is no such thing as an age for love," Greene said in substance, "because the man capable of loving in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation never ceases to love. I will go further; he never ceases to love the same person. How can I explain it? It’s like a series of photographs one upon another, the pictures of the different women whom the same man has loved or thought he had loved in the course of his life. Upon reflection, we should discover that all these women resembled one another. The most inconsistent have cherished one and the same being through five or six or even twenty different embodiments. The main point is to find out at what age they have met the woman who approaches nearest to the one whose image they have constantly borne within themselves. For them that would be the age for love.”

“As for the age for being loved" he continued. "The deepest of all the passions I have ever known a man to inspire was in the case of one of my close friends in my youth, a poet, and he was sixty years old at the time. It is true that he still held himself as erect as a young man, he came and went with a step as light as yours, he conversed freely; he composed verses as beautiful as any I have ever known. He was besides very poor, very lonely and very unhappy, having lost one after another, his wife and his children. You remember the words of Shakespeare's Moor: 'She loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I loved her that she did pity them.”

"So it was that this writer inspired in a beautiful, and wealthy young woman, devotion so passionate that because of him she never married. She found a way to take care of him, day and night, during his last illness. That was years ago. In her case she found in a man three times her own age the person who corresponded to a certain ideal which she carried in her heart. The crux of a story which you propose to embark on is to have the courage to analyze great emotions and to create characters that shall be inspiring and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there."

The effects of Green’s words on the young Italian were immense. The contrast between the world of ideas in which he now moved and the atmosphere of the newspaper in which for the last few months he had been stifling was too strong. The dreams of his youth were realized in this man whose gifts remained unimpaired after the production of thirty novels and whose face, growing old, was a living illustration of the saying: "Since we must wear out, let us wear out nobly." His slight frame bespoke the austerity of a lifetime of application to his trade, his firm mouth showed his decision of character; and yet, the refinement of his hands, so well cared for, the sober elegance of his dress and an aristocratic air that was natural to him showed that the finer professional virtues had been cultivated in the midst of a life of frivolous and sometimes dangerous temptations.

After having talked at great length with Oreste, he ended by saying, "Since you are staying in Nice I hope to see you again, and to-day I cannot let you go without presenting you to my guest and friend."

She was a young girl of possibly twenty, rather tall, with a long face lighted up by two very gentle black eyes, therin a little smile upon a black void. About her mouth and bearing was subdued nervousness and restrained feverishness. He had not been there a quarter of an hour before he had guessed from the way she watched and listened to Greene, what a passionate interest the old master inspired in her. When he spoke she paid rapt attention. When she spoke to him, he felt her voice shiver, and he, surfeited with triumphs, exhausted by his labors, seemed, as soon as he felt the radiance of her glance of animated idolatry, to recover that vivacity, that elasticity of impression, which is the sovereign grace of youthful lovers.

Oreste perceived "He is in love with that child, and she is in love with him. She is too living to be neglected. He means to marry her. There's the prospect of a wedding that will make good copy, and when Ortelli hears that I witnessed the courtship that will be an added bonus, but just now I must think of my recent interview.”

He remembered, the reasoning of a man determined to arrive and he tried to lull to sleep the inward voice that cried, "You have no right to put on paper, to give to the public what this writer said to you, supposing that he was receiving a writer, not a reporter." But he heard also the voice of his editor saying, "You will never succeed." And this second voice, he was ashamed to confess, triumphed over the other.

At an early age he had discerned that he had been more sensuously developed, more refined in instinct than other boys. Academically he had been weak, but loved anyone who could convey enlightment to him through feeling.

His eyes filled with a strained, almost suffering light and he was moved by this experience beyond all calculations, it was so deep.

That evening back in the hotel, Oreste wrote, under the vivid impressions of the afternoon, his powers as well as his nerves spurred by a touch of remorse whilst he baulked at the mean enclosure of reality. Eventually he went to bed with a feeling of duty performed; such is the nature of a writer. Under the form of the interview he had done, he knew it, to be the best work of his life.

Yet they had set fire to the homestead of his nature, and he felt implicitly that he would be burned out of cover. He knew he did not belong to himself. He admitted within, that he was only fragmentary, something incomplete and subject. There were the stars in the bright heavens traveling, the whole host passing by on some eternal journey. So he sat in his small room, small and submissive to the greater ordering.

[MANICHAEAN]

Part 3:

What happens while we sleep? Is there a ferment of ideas while our senses are closed to the impressions of the outside world? For when Oreste awoke, already in his mind was the image of Graham Greene and he knew the reality of having taken advantage of the man’s kindness and trust. But there was no need of the humiliation of a confession he thought. It would be enough to destroy the pages he had written the night before. He rose from his bed resolved on this course of action, but before proceeding decided to read them that one last time. But he could not destroy that, which he was so proud of in himself.

The phone rang. It was Graham Green & he sounded distraught.

"I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. Would you like to come round so that I can explain?”
Oreste, quickly washed, dressed & proceeded to the villa. Greene was again in his study to receive him. He thanked Oreste for coming and then proceeded to talk, almost in a self conscious way.

“When I said that one may love and be loved at any age, I ought to have added that sometimes this love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice.”

He proceeded in what Oreste still perceived to be an obscure manner.

“I had a friend, who, when he was twenty, had loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them. The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterwards she died. My friend lived. There is as you know, nothing which does not leave its scar. I had known of this, my friend’s love & I was close enough to him to be informed over the years of the succession of other affairs and dalliances that had followed his initial passion. He felt and inspired other loves. He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his words. Many times he said to me, 'In others I have always looked for her and as I have never found her, I have never truly loved any one but her.'"

"And had she loved him?" Oreste interrupted gently.

"He did not think so," replied Greene. "At least she had never told him so. Well, you must now imagine my friend at my age or almost there. You must picture him growing gray, tired of life and convinced that he had at last discovered the secret of peace. At this time he met, a mere girl of twenty, who was the image, of her whom he had hoped to marry thirty years before. It was one of those strange resemblances which extend from the color of the eyes to the lilt of the voice, from the smile to the gestures. Its unnerving for she comes and goes, she laughs and sings, and as you go about, at her side walks one long dead.”

“One day this friend of mine is in his house and he glances at a photograph, framed & placed on the sideboard. It is of himself as a young man. There had been some moisture in the air, such that when he looked closer he observed the trace of two lips on the glass front. The only other person who had been in the house that day had been the young girl.”

"What then?" Oreste asked, as Greene paused.

"My friend related that there had been a mirror nearby and that by some strange instinct he had compared his face in the photo with how he now appeared. It was then that he realized he was culpable of having inspired a passion in a young girl whom he would have been a fool, almost a criminal, to marry? Did he comprehend that through his age which was so apparent, it was his youth which this child loved? Did he remember, with a keenness that was all too sad, that other, who had never given him a kiss like that, at a time when he might have returned it? He only knew that he gave up the same day, determined never again to see one whom he could no longer love as he had loved the other, with the hope, and intensity of a man of twenty."

[zoolane]

Very thought provoking is part 3, I under impression 'Greene' love young women has husband would wife to point but obvious under current climate of world inappreciable. Women love him because his mind and she gain from him. I could be total wrong. I will have to re-read the parts again.

[MANICHAEAN]

Hi Z

I was basically trying to explore the reality and two of the perceptions of men that go with younger women.

It seems, especially in Western society to be either:

1. Look at that dirty old man with a girl young enough to be his daughter or,
2. There's a big age gap between them and it seems to put a spring in his step!

I'm trying not to judge, but to look into those themes, especially as you note, the difference between the mental & the physical maturity.

Best regards
M.

[MANICHAEAN]

Part 4:

A few days after this conversation, Oreste Di Fazio Forte found himself once more in the office of the L'Osservatore Romana seated before Ortelli, and he was saying, "Already? Have you accomplished your interview with Graham Greene?"

"He would not even receive me," Oreste replied, flatly.

"What did I tell you?" he sneered, shrugging his big shoulders. "We'll get even with him on his next novel. But you know, De Forti, as long as you continue to have that innocent look about you, you can't expect to succeed in newspaper work."

He bore with the ill-humor of the editor, for what else could he do once the decision had been made? What would he have said if he had known that Oreste had locked up in a drawer in his flat, the transcript of the interview, and in his head an anecdote which was precious material for a most successful story?

Was there a happy ending? I think so.

Oreste knuckled down to the journalistic profession. He served his time, he made his way, he lost his look of innocence and he made his money. But his financial gain did not comprise thirty pieces of silver and was never derived by usage of, or the printing of the most profitable and the most brilliant writing he had ever produced.

He reflected sadly sometimes that he had not served the cause of letters as he originally had wanted, since, with all his laborious endeavours he had never written a book. And yet, when he recalled the impulse of respect which prevented him from committing toward a master a most profitable but infamous indiscretion, he still says to himself;

"If you have not served the cause of letters, you have not betrayed it. There is in that, nothing of which I am more proud.”

[zoolane]

Ok Last part was interest because put himself in trouble and with no money to propect her or himself from dee her or MrGreene.

[MANICHAEAN]

Hi Zoo
Glad you liked it. You must be digging back through the archives! Seems ages since this one was written.
Best wishes.
M.

[everyadventure]

I started reading this a day or two ago, but couldn't give it the proper attention with little ones underfoot. So at long last I'm curling up with it and a mug of cocoa, as the best of tales deserve...

M, I feel like I need a passport when I read your pieces. You take the reader so completely to another place... a much-needed vacation. I try to read others' postings with a keen eye in hopes of offering a bit of insight... but I confess I just let myself get lost in the pure enjoyment of reading this one. I don't suppose you've written any novels I could while away a few evenings with?

[MANICHAEAN]

everyadventure
Thanks for your kind comments. Try "A Murder in Accra" under Short Story Sharing. Can never really kill the beast and conclude it! Better buy more cocoa, as its a long one.
Best regards
M.

[everyadventure]

Can't wait!