CONNECTICUT IN ROME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 725, 5 June 1953, Page 12

CONNECTICUT IN ROME

ROME AND A VILLA, by Eleanor Clark; Michael Joseph. English price, 21/-. MY wonder grows that one small Connecticut head: should carry all the knowledge of archaeology, history (all periods), architecture, painting, sculpture, belles lettres and human behaviour (Kinsey style) which must be inferred from the judgments so freely

given by Miss Clark. This is Rome treated in a modern Irwin Shaw man-ner-condensed, impressionistic, bawdy, epigrammatic, sprightly. The verdicts (mostly adverse) fall in pitiless and unceasing hail on the dome and square of St. Peter’s, on the city and its ancient monuments, its sculptures, and its fountains. It reminds me at times of Vulliamy’s attempt om Dr. Johnson some years ago. Like it the Olympian manner is dropped quite often for an undisguised sneer. "The stairs have a good holy look of an impossible proposition." Like Vulliamy also is the high literary quality of the debunking, and it is often quite as comic. The city fares rather worse than the Vatican at Miss Clark’s tapering fingers. Which reminds me that anything tapering has a positively distressing effect on Miss Clark’s mind, and what she makes of the obelisks would cause Havelock Ellis, Freud and Frazer to wish they had thought of it first. : Right in the middle of the book is a sudden 35 pages on Salvatore Giuliano, a Sicilian bandit recently deceased, for whom the author has evidently an admiration. This interlude has nothing to do with Rome or anything in the book before or after it, but is quite interesting. There is also a long dissertation on Hadrian’s Villa and a Roman poet. On the whole, it’s a luxuriant tangle of lightly baked erudition and artistic

appreciation. Some of it is quite shocking even when she’s not kidding, and most of it is pretty well expressed. To use her own expression, "The choreography is exceflent." It must have made

Connecticut sit up.

F. J.

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