Quentin's European Boyhood

December 24, 2000

Dear Persis,

Some months ago you asked me if I had written up our six years in Europe. That is what I will do now. I had much rather do it in the form of a letter - that is to say, speaking to someone and indeed to anyone who might care to read it, like my account of the AFS years in the form of a letter to Boyd.

Most of the time there were five of us - Mom, Henry and Dottie, Florence and me - and I am the only one still alive. Florence, who after all was two years older than I, would usually remember things differently, or remember different things So here, with no chance of correction or contradiction, is my account of how those years live in my mind. We went to Europe because Henry, who had TB, had sensibly opted for a sanitarium in Switzerland, rather than Asheville, N. C.. It was decided that Mom should go with him. Henry was 25 years old, but had earned a reputation for irresponsibility and misbehavior, and they must have feared that he would not follow doctor’s orders if left on his own. I was eight, Florence was ten. What to do with the children? Take them along.

We sailed from New York on the Cunard liner SS Samaria in October of 1931, after the autumn weddings of Helen and Charley and Harvey Cecil and Flo. Florence and I already knew the pleasures of travel on an ocean liner For the winter months of 1930-31 we had been on a long Mediterranean cruise with Mom. That was on the SS Hamburg. And the previous Xmas-New Year’s Pop had taken all of us, the whole family, including Aunt Florence, Uncle Harvey, and Johnny Bathrick on a first-class Caribbean cruise on the SS Kungsholm.

On the Samaria were Mom and Henry, Florence and me. Dottie, who had a job as a buyer at Macy’s did not join us until later. The idea was, reportedly, that her salary would contribute to the expenses. Dottie used to say that Pop had never reconciled himself to the fact that Henry had married a Jewish girl, and had hoped that this separation might end the marriage. Mom never had such bigotry or prejudice. Dottie and Mom liked one another. At any event, when Dottie had to go back to the States in June, 1952, (partly because her sister Janet was a member of the Communist Party, and this was an embarrassment to Dottie’s employer, the CIA, formerly the OSS) Mom invited her to stay with her in Darien and she did.

Getting back to 1931, we landed in Le Havre, and rented a car with a chauffeur. Of that car-trip, I remember the Mont Saint-Michel (we ate at the Mère Poulard’s but stayed in Pontorson) and the boucheries chevalines. They told me that the chauffeur, who did not eat with us, actually ate horse meat and I was horrified. Our trip took us by the châteaux de la Loire (Later when I learned a little French history, I regretted having visited them in a state of ignorance, not knowing that I was going to get back there.)

We got to Paris, and stayed in the Hotel Port Royal, which many years later became the hotel where Henry and Sally always stayed. Sight-seeing? Restaurants? No. Florence and I ate in the hotel room. I can remember peeling an orange. Then a tourist bus ride down to Nice. There was no one else on the bus. Perhaps because of the Depression the tourist business was lagging, but it always thrives on the Côte d’Azur, and maybe they needed to get the bus down there. I believe we spent the night at Lyon, and went to one of those famous restaurants, la mère something. Henry was already becoming deeply interested in French cooking. (Or is this an illusory memory? An old letter I found says our overnight stops were at Dijon and Avignon. Yet we still could have lunched at Lyon.)

We liked Nice from the start. Except for fresh-picked corn and clams and bluefish from Long Island Sound, I had little acquaintance with good food, and I feel as if it was in a restaurant in Nice that I first got to know it. I had said I did not want any cauliflower. Henry said "Try it. You have never had it cooked right." And he was right. It was from Henry that I learned to love good food. Looking ahead a moment: I was supposedly anemic and was supposed to take a lot of cod liver oil, which I usually managed to avoid doing, and to eat a lot of liver, which I only enjoyed after tasting the way Henry prepared liver and onions. Henry took me to Cannes from Nice to look at the yacht harbor. We were both fond of boats.

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Then we went to Genoa. Only time I have ever spent the night there. Then the train to Luzern. Pretty place. We liked Switzerland from the start. Train, change at Zurich, change at Chur, and so on up to Arosa. Why Arosa? Dottie told me once they had both read The Magic Mountain and so decided against Davos. And there were not many spots where you could go to recover from tuberculosis. We stayed in the Chalet Paradies, a chalet belonging to and adjacent to the Hotel Eden. The hotel owner was Herr Wettengl, and we all liked him. Afternoon tea in the lounge at the Eden. Chamber music playing. I never learned to like background music. In a hotel lounge it sounds prim and stuffy. But skiing! That was the great pleasure of Arosa. And there Dottie joined us. And came skiing with us. There was a sun-porch at the Chalet Paradies There Henry would stretch out. The mountain air is supposed to be good for you. I would lie there too and look out at those beautiful mountains. Arosa is ringed by them. Beautiful and terrifying too. For me they stood for the most terrifying creature I knew of: God the Father. I think it was then I began to realize He wasn’t real. Just a bogeyman. I had enjoyed going to the Congregational Sunday School in Stamford. Jesus was a good guy. But from the Anglican Church in Arosa which we went to every Sunday and from its Padre, who was also our tutor, I concluded that the less I heard about God the better. That padre told us some people believed one of the joys of salvation was leaning over the sky’s balcony and peering down at the tortures of the damned. That did not sound like fun to me. Yet going to church was not all bad. Singing hymns had its pleasures, and even back then I think I enjoyed the resonance and firmness of the English of the collects and the prayers. (From the Book of Common Prayer, I presume.) Not to mention the Old Testament and New Testament readings. It is always the same story: there is much beauty associated with religion. It is just religious belief itself that I cannot accept. Yet it was central to Mom’s life. Every night we said our prayers.

That spring of 1932 Mom and Florence and I traveled down to Florence, leaving Henry and Dottie in Arosa. Somebody must have told Mom about Miss Barry’s School. We stayed at the Pensione Simi on the Piazza Donatello.. Near the school. We were there in the spring of 1933 too. Memories of the Simi melt together. It had a fine garden. I used to play with the gardener’s son, Mario. He called his father Babbo, which means Daddy. I called him Babbo too. Their cat was called Cici, pronounced cheechee. If you got Cici to stand between your legs and made a hurdle by joining your two hands in front of you he would jump over it. I think we went down to Rome that spring. By bus. I remember driving through Umbria. It was probably in Rome that we saw Bellini’s Norma, the first opera I ever saw. But it was in Florence that I saw and heard the first opera I really liked: Götterdämmerung or rather Il Crepuscolo degli Dei. Mom had found a lady who gave us piano lessons on the piano in the Simi drawing room. I remember asking her to help me pick out on the piano some of the motifs. ,

At the end of the school-year we traveled by train - third-class, wooden benches - to St Jean de Luz. There may have been an overnight in Marseille. Henry and Dottie were there and we lived in an apartment. We liked St.Jean. It is a small city on the Basque coast about halfway between Hendaye on the Spanish border to the south, and Biarritz to the north, an elegant beach resort, made fashionable, I believe, by the Prince of Wales, one of the trendsetters of the day. Florence and Henry and I got as far as both of those places on our bicycle trips along the shore, and we always did a lot of surfing along the way. Plenty of nice little pocket beaches, and plenty of surf rolling in. I remember fondly Henry’s good cooking, the first time I tasted potatoes with gros sel adhering to the skin, the cry of Sardines fraîches rising from the streets. Fish vendors hawking their product. I did not enjoy the day trip we took in a rented car to San Sebastiani. My failure to appreciate the glories of Spain probably dates back to then. We would watch pelote basque, the priests had a team of their own and played in their hiked-up cassocks. When you live in that region you are constantly reminded that you are in Basque country.

The fall of 1932 we spent in Grenoble, Why there? I wonder. It is a dreary, overlarge Alpine city on the banks of the Isère. Our pension was located over a wineshop, and was penetrated by an unpleasant wine-smell. They must have spilled a lot of it. For the first time, I went to a French school. I had no trouble making friends (or enemies) among my classmates (kids do not know what a language barrier is) and from the start I enjoyed the academic competitiveness that French schools encouraged in those days, but I was glad when Mom marched in and told them not to make me write with my right hand. "Laissez-le tranquille. Il écrit de la main gauche. Depuis toujours. Il doit apprendre le français. C’est déjà assez. Pourquoi lui demander de réapprendre à écrire?" But I imagine her French was not nearly that fluent. All the time we lived in Europe Florence and I were embarrassed by Mom’s American accent and her failure to master the native language, whatever it was. As for me, I was generally embarrassed by Mom. So short, so fat, so inelegant. My ideal of feminine elegance was embodied by Dottie, tall, slim, dark-haired, graceful, well-dressed. That, I feel sure, was just one of the reasons why I was thrilled when she and Henry (my hero, the only grown man I knew, whatever we were doing it was always more fun if Henry was part of it) decided to take me along with them to Mégève, the village in the Alps where Henry could continue his health cure.

Mégève, like Arosa, was in the midst of a slow transformation from health resort into ski resort. A local boy had done very well in international ski competition, the whole village was proud of him, and someone, in emulation of Hannes Schneider in St. Anton-am-Arlberg, had started a ski-school. We stayed in a pension and H&D quickly made friends with a merry group of pensionnaires who also became friends of mine. I remember at some celebratory occasion one of them built a pyramid of champagne glasses and poured champagne into the glass on top of the pyramid. It trickled down like a fountain, filling each glass. Did I drink a glass of it? Probably. Champagne was regularly served at French kids’ birthday parties. But I did not develop a taste for wine. Henry told he once that I got drunk as a kid on a couple of glasses of Cahors. But that was years later. The first wine I ever tasted was a glass of Asti in Arosa the previous winter Not nearly as good as ginger ale.

Henry and Dottie were very good to me. They called me the Rabbit. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was timid, easily scared, and evasive. They took me with them to eat reblochon in a nearby farm where the farmers made reblochon, and to a bar called Le Casbah, where we met the aging soprano (an American lady?) who created the role of Mélisande. I would go out and buy High Life cigarettes for Dottie. Pronounced Igliff. English was the language of sophisticated folk in those almost Proustian days. I remember Dottie’s annoyance at the name of a villa we walked past often. She thought it was My O So Tis. Neither of us knew that myosotis is the French word for the flower we call forget-me-not. Good as they were to me, they must have tired of having a little boy with them wherever they went. They enrolled me in a boarding school, Le Hameau. I liked the other boys there. We sang a song that went "C’est un vieux château du moyen age/ Avec un vieux what? blank blank/ A chaque étage." This old castle was inhabited by a "vieux chameau" and chameau was our favorite term of abuse. Any teacher we did not like was a chameau. Yet I hated it there. I was lonely and homesick there. Henry and Dottie came to see me and asked how I was doing in my classes. Fine. Premier in this, premier in that. In some other subject I was troisième. "How many kids in that class?" "Three." They laughed. I could not understand why. Troisième was an honorable rating. But they did listen to my pleas. And took me home with them. I continued in that school as a day student.

Mom and Florence came to Mégève for Christmas. As part of the seasonal celebration, the cook carved a rabbit out of a mound of butter and presented him on a large plate with a few capers lined up behind him to represent his droppings. Florence and I were spellbound. But she and Mom went back to Grenoble.

When Florence and I were finally reunited we sat up all night talking and realized we had missed one another and decided to give up childish squabbling and get along. We were off for Florence again How? I think we took a bus down the Route Napoléon. The road he had taken in the other direction after landing from Elba and on his way to Paris. Again the Simi. Many of its regular customers had on their tables those soda water bottles where you pull a trigger of sorts and the fizzy water comes gushing out. Florence and I got down to the dining-room early one day and started running around the room, squirting soda water at one another. I imagine the waiter put a stop to that before Mom became aware of our misbehavior. And there was the American church where the pastor would let me go on weekdays and pick out tunes on the organ ( my favorite part of the church service was "May the lord bless you and keep you, may the lord make his light to shine upon you, and give you peace" not because of its sentiment, which I do find comforting, but because it meant the service was over.) Mom clearly liked Florence, partly because of the many British and American expatriates who lived there. She would take us to the British Tearoom now and then. I liked that because you could get cinnamon toast, part of the conventional American kid's diet that we missed and never got anywhere else. We also missed fresh corn, uncreamed spinach, and American ice cream, but the gelato limone we got at a place on the Borgo de' Pinti was awfully good. But we were never tempted to try the chocolate crosses and chocolate sacred hearts that candy stores displayed around Easter.

Other pleasures of Florence were concerts with Vittorio Gui conducting (Dottie made fun of him because of the way he pranced and practically danced on the podium. But Dottie was always adept at finding something to complain about or make fun of.) And opera at the Politeama. Florence and I would run up to the second balcony (seats were cheap, but unreserved) and save seats for the others. Once we went to Bellini’s I Puritani. The curtain went up The characters on stage were wearing strange costumes with legs of different colors. (I believe they were designed by Giorgio de Chirico.) I was frightened by the whistling and shouts of disapproval that rose from the audience. In an opera performance in Italy they behave like a crowd at a sports event, and it kept on and on. Someone took me home. Speaking of sports events, soccer was immensely popular, as it still is. I went to a game with the door-boy, Renzo, a friend of mine. It was exciting all through, beginning with the crowded tramride to the stadium. The tram was aswarm with excited fans. There was an animation and emphasis to events in Italy that we all took for granted and that I become aware of only in retrospect.

A fellow called Tealdo Tealdi took us on guided tours of the museums. I also took book-binding lessons from Tealdi’s son. I never learned to bind a book, but I loved the look of the leather and the gold leaf. Which reminds me of another aspect of Italian life: the sheer delight in beauty, and the revulsion people feel for the unbeautiful. Fare bella figura, fare brutta figura were phrases you heard all the time. And the Fascist hymn began: Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza. (A national anthem beginning "Youth, youth, springtime of beauty" certainly sounds silly, but it is less offensive than those that exalt flag, king or homeland or hope that "un sang impur" will irrigate its furrows.) The basic axiom in Italy seems to have been: if it looks good it is morally right. So far from the puritanism I was brought up on which always seemed to look upon joy and beauty with suspicion! Of course, none of us articulated that thought. We just liked Italy. Henry did especially, I think. That was probably the year when Henry decided to become an art historian. He was an art educator practically from the start. He used to take Florence and me around to look at paintings. Identifying painters became a kind of game for us. "That’s a Carlo Crivelli." "That’s a Dosso Dossi." From the start I liked the Venetian painters best, particularly Titian. The Mostra Tiziano in Venice may have been the next year. Anyhow there were trips to Venice. The pensione Seguso became what it has remained, the only place we ever stayed in Venice.

There was Miss Corinna Barry, that severe and demanding teacher with the pince-nez that really pinched her nose and left great red dents either side of it. She would take off the pince-nez and rub her nose. She admired Mussolini, and, as a good Boston Irish woman, she hated the British, and deplored the sanzione they tried to impose on Italy for invading Abyssinia. But she ran a good school, even though there was no science - no labs, you know - and no Italian was taught. She knew we would learn it in the street, which we did.. Later a friend of mine at Harvard who had also gone there but before we did, John Faust, a classics major, took over as headmaster. Another friend who went there, but after we did, was Creighton Gilbert. There were wonderful trips to Siena, San Gimignano, Lucca, Pistoia, etc. I just happened to remember a letter that Mom wrote to Pop at the end of our sojourn there in 1933. It gives some of the flavor of those years. I copied it some years ago, and probably sent a copy to anyone likely to be reading these pages. Yet I will transcribe it (or part of it) here:Blanche's letter

That summer of 1933, another long train trip took us to Paramé, which Mom chose because there was a university summer program there. We stayed at the pension Le Manoir, H & D in an apartment nearby. The pension was a block from the beach and the swimming was fine.

That fall of 1933 all five of us were in Meudon. The pension had been Vincent d’Indy’s house, piano lessons on his piano, a dog from Brittany called Morlaix. But the lady who gave us German lessons had a dog of her own, a German police dog, of course. He had an open sore on his back. Der Hund hat ein Wund, she would say. We went to RC parochial school. The nuns were very nice - one of them gave me a lump of sugar soaked in brandy, after I fell down during récréation - may the God she worshipped bless her - but we thought of the whole thing as a joke. In Florence’s class they would kneel by their pupitres, beat their chests and say "mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." In my class, two grades lower, it was the same ritual, but we would say "C’est ma faute, c’est ma faute, c’est ma faute." There were walks in the forêt de Meudon, but the best part of our stay there was going by train to Paris frequently, and to the concerts Lamoureux and Pleyel. I got pretty well-acquainted with compositions you don't hear often any more by Lalo, Chabrier, Chausson and other composers of that ilk and I liked them. But I especially liked seeing the ladies at those concerts. They were wonderfully dressed, and wore good-smelling perfume. And, in that same vein, the salle Pleyel, as I remember it, was all upholstered in grey, and looked like a jewel box.

That winter all five of us went by train to Arosa again, but this time to a cheaper chalet. The Villa Midi was on the horseshit-bestrewn main street (the favorite means of transportation was horse and vehicle, Mom loved to travel that way, and Florence and I did too - in Arosa it was by horsedrawn sleigh, in Firenze by carrozza - The Villa Midi was more than halfway up to Inner Arosa. It was good to be back to Henry’s cooking. (I imagine Dottie did some of the cooking too.) It was Christmas so he experimented with plum pudding. For my 11th birthday I was hoping for a camera, and got a stuffed dog, green in color. No problem. I called it Contax and kept it for years. Contax read many a book seated by my side. The skiing, as always, was good. The skiing instructors who gave their classes on the slopes in front of the Hotel Kulm in Inner Arosa would return downhill to their quarters in the late afternoon, standing upright on their skis, with their poles tucked under an arm, and their skis clattering on the icy surface of the road, casually smoking cigarettes and chatting with one another. They were objects of admiration, or at least they hoped to be. Florence and I had lessons of all kinds, including skating lessons, from the Fornaros, man and wife.

In the spring of 1934 we headed back to the Pensione Simi in Florence, Miss Barry’s, the usual trips. The Maggio Musicale was a big attraction. In the summer of 1934, we were again in Paramé. After a brief look at La Rochelle, we decided we would rather go back to Paramé. Lots of tutors It seemed as if every time Mom met an impoverished soul, and there were plenty of them around, she would try to help out by hiring him or her to tutor us in something. I would ride my bike into Saint-Malo for piano lessons (I always wanted to learn to play the piano and never did learn) And when a wandering Dutch artist showed up she hired him to give drawing lessons to us, which I hated, but Florence liked.) Mom also hired a couple of American graduate students who were taking the Paramé summer program. One of them, Charley Magnam, stayed with us throughout the following year, and taught us English composition ("don’t use the word very in your writing, cross it out and write in damn then cross that out too"). And American history. That is where I first heard anyone make critical remarks about a textbook. "Muzzey is wrong about that." Did he criticize him for not putting enough emphasis on the role the extermination of the Indians played in the growth of our country? I can’t remember, but it sounds like him. I learned a lot from Charley. I decided to follow his career path, and take a Ph.D. and go into college teaching, as he planned to and eventually did after completing his wanderjahren.and his thesis (on Crashaw?) Any job with summers off for sailing seemed attractive to me. (During all those years in Europe I never forgot the joys of sailing.) Anyhow I liked learning, and correctly surmised that anyone who likes learning will like teaching.

That summer ended splendidly with a Brittany trip in a rented car with H and D. Florence and I got scolded for going swimming in the surf after the car was all packed. We loved that beach. And we loved Paramé. I had lots of friends there, mostly French boys, but I remember meeting a British girl called Una. We both found it striking to have numbers for names,

After the Brittany car trip (I remember Concarneau as one of its high points.) Florence and Mom and I traveled to Tours and found a pension in Saint-Symphorien across the Loire. We spent the month of September there. Charley Mangam joined us and stayed with us all year and we took bicycle daytrips to each of the châteaux that were within a day's ride aller-retour. Then on to Paris where we stayed in the pension Les Marronniers, 78 rue d’Assas. We went to the Ecole Alsacienne, a school founded by Frenchmen who refused to live in Alsace after it became German territory in 1871. It was coeducational (or rather there were classes for boys and other classes for girls) and attended by many Protestants, but it was not a church school. I later learned that André Gide had gone there. A good Protestant, but not a good boy. I am sure they were not especially proud of their distinguished former student In fact, I think they kicked him out.

I worked hard and was terrified by the teachers. That did not prevent me from getting into trouble. Everyone carried a carnet. I kept mine and found it years ago. A teacher had written in it in an angry hand: "Cet élève monte pardessus les bancs pour regagner sa place." I think it was in drawing class. I felt innocent enough. I could not see what was wrong with climbing over benches to get to my seat. But the German teacher was a nice guy, even though learning to write in that Gothic script was awfully hard. His principle was "une classe est comme une partie de bicyclette." No one of us should get too far ahead of the slowest of us. Give the laggard a helping hand. Florence and I would walk home from school together. The boulangerie where we would get a pain au chocolat on the way was still there last time I looked.

We were ranked every few weeks. I was proud when I was named premier en français. But it was embarrassing when she scolded the rest of the class. "N’avez-vous pas tous honte? Le premier en français est votre petit camarade américain." The other fellow who did well in French class was Mignon, a good friend of mine. (We all called on another by our last names). And we were all fond of Aulagnier who was consistently last in everything. He seemed to thumb his nose at the rigors of the system which oppressed us all. (I was so scared when I lost a livre de classe that when I came home for lunch, as we always did, I persuaded my thrifty mother to give me the money to go out and buy another. Easy to do in that quartier full of second-hand bookstores.) When we got to Italy, I wrote to my friend Aulagnier. I did not have his home address, so I used the school address. Bad idea. The letter went to that French teacher whom we would call a home room teacher in this country and in his reply Aulagnier explained what happened. She told the class that Aulagnier had got a letter from votre petit camarade américain and asked him to read it to the class. Would any American schoolteacher do such a tactless, intrusive, and thoughtless thing? Naturally the letter was full of abusive language about the school and its teachers, each of whom had an appropriate nickname. Aulagnier said he was able to cover up and fake it.

That Christmas we went to Arosa with H&D. I think they had been living on Raspail and going to the Ecole du Louvre. (Their study at Art et Archéologie came later.) We only stayed a short while and then came back to Paris. But as usual in the spring we headed off to Florence. On the way, we stopped at Santa Margherita (near Rapallo, less famous, but just as attractive), and in Florence we stayed at a pensione on the via Nazionale, opposite the railway station, a much more modest place than the Simi. Charley Mangam joined us there. He said he knew the Fascists were militarists, yet he was surprised, when he looked out the train window on his way, to see graffiti reading "Viva Guerra" all over. I was happy to tell him that Guerra was the name of a popular bicycle rider and that, although the young Italian men I knew liked wearing a uniform, they were no more fond of war than we were.

We went to Miss Barry’s again. One good thing about Mom was that she gave us a lot of independence. I would ride my bike to school and would often take in a matinee showing of a movie on the way back. Mom would take us to any musical performance we wanted to go to, but she was doubtful about the movies. I suggested that the three of us go see Captain Blood with Erroll Flynn, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I imagine the title put her off. One day I came home from school and Charley told me he had seen Mussolini. The railroad station right across the street from us was quite new. (The Fascists loved putting up new buildings and displaying their technical skills. "Mussolini made the trains run on time" was a phrase you often heard from oldtimer expatriates.) Mussolini had come to town for the railroad station dedication ceremonies. As self-important great men like to do, he had moved away from his entourage, and was wandering around the roof of the station all alone. Or so said Charley. Charley looked out the window of the room we shared and there stood the famous man, all alone. When Charley saw him, he made the Fascist salute, and Mussolini returned it Or so said Charley.

We were planning to spend the summer in Austria. One of the responsibilities Mom gave me was selecting what programs and operas we would hear at the Salzburg Festspiel and, of course, I was happy to do that, through the Austrian Tourist Agency. I imagine a number of the Maggio Musicale fans extended their musical diet by moving on up to Salzburg. But first we went to Gmunden. The University of Vienna ran a summer school in the Schloss Traunsee. It was a residential program, and the five of us lived in that fine 19th-century castle on the banks of the Traunsee. It was full of other foreigners, all studying German. There were Czechs (our best pingpong player was a Czech whose nickname was Pepichek) French (there was a stunning French woman who astounded me on one of our many day trips from the Schloss by saying, as we stood on the shore of some lake other than the Traunsee, she was going to change into her bathing suit right then and there. "Pas possible," I said. "Regardez-moi," she said, and put on a long bathrobe and nimbly slipped out of her street clothes under it) and there was an Italian girl that one of the instructors was smitten with. (I remember Henry was in a skit the students all made up making fun of everyone and he imitated the instructor saying to the girl whose Italian accent was presumably incorrigible "Keine kleine -a- bitte") and a Scotchman who became a friend of mine (One of my many friends who was years older than I. We visited him later in Glasglow, while touring Great Britain.) For some reason Mom did not make Florence and me take the German classes - maybe we were too young to be admissible - so we spent our days swimming in the lake in front of the Schloss and drinking himberwasser, a mixture of raspberry syrup and water, in the bar. One of our daytrips was climbing the Traunstein, another was the easier ascent, by cable car or something, of what I remember as Patscherkopfel, a smaller mountain on our side of the lake. On another occasion, Henry rented a sailboat and for the first time in many years we went sailing, on another we visited a salt mine, and on another the bus took us to Linz for a concert of music by their native son, Anton Bruckner.

But our crowning musical experience was the Salzburg Festspiel, after the Gmunden program was over. There were the Mozart operas. Ezio Pinza was a wonderful Don Giovanni. And Lotte Lehmann as the Marschallin. It was good to get away from that fat tenor, Benjamino Gigli (he was a great favorite in Florence). I think that is where my preference for the lighter and more refined German tenor voices began, even though the exemplary one was Richard Tauber, a specialist in sentimental songs. Also at Salzburg I first learned that opera singers did not of necessity have to be offensive to the eyes. The first Cosi FanTutte I ever saw was visually very attractive and so were the sopranos. The names I remember (perhaps mistakenly) are Jarmila Novotna and Luise Helletsgruber. Then there was Bruno Walter’s lecture to a conducting class on Brahms’s Second Symphony where his message was restraint. "Don’t let all the emotion come to the surface in the first movement. Save some of the warmth and expressiveness for the second movement." And a lieder recital in the Mozarteum in which he accompanied Lotte Lehmann at the piano, and Jedermann in the Domplatz, and the small town feeling of Salzburg. We would see Arturo Toscanini (he conducted Fidelio admirably) having a coffee with some other famous musician on the terrace of a café. Speaking of cafés, the waiters were notoriously slow-footed. Henry had worked out a gradation between ‘"gleich" "komm sofort"’ and "bin schon da" which we would use to try to guess how long it would be before Henry and Dottie would get their beer and Florence and I would get our himberwasser, or Mom would get the Rechnung. Speaking of beer, that is what the carters and other morning workmen would have when they came in for breakfast to the eating area of the humble hotel where we stayed. And the Festspielhaus itself was a favorite spot of mine. Quite apart from the riches of the music, Salzburg was a delightful place. I would like to see the baroque statuary of the Mirabell Gardens again.

After Salzburg we went with H and D to Vienna and stayed in the pension Pfohl, 20 Rathausstrasse. The ladies who ran the place were pleased to learn that Florence and I had never been to or heard Siegfried before and spent half the afternoon telling us about it. I loved the opera and we all loved Vienna. For one thing, Henry persuaded Mom to buy me a long pair of trousers. Up until then I wore plus-fours, and I had grown pretty tall. There is a snapshot of me striding down the Ringstrasse in my proud, new, long pants accompanied by a few family members Then we traveled to Budapest, a fine city, particularly for its swimming pool which has simulated waves and its goulash, even though it was accompanied by a violinist who went from table to table playing rhapsodic Hungarian melodies Then on to Venice.

And Mom and Florence and I moved into that pensione on the Via Nazionale, and, for the only time during our years in Europe we spent the whole academic year in one place, going to Miss Barry's. I remember going to hear Chesterton give a talk in the Signoria. He was fat. I can't remember much else about what we did in Florence, It was mostly a reprise upon previous years. The American church. Carrozza trips up to the Viale Michelangelo. San Miniato. And now and then by public conveyance up to Fiesole. And Settignano. There was a very nice albergo in Fiesole that we liked to stay at now and then Beautiful views of Florence from up there. And there was a beautiful pair of white oxen up there Not all Tuscan farmers had tractors in the thirties Not even all Maine farmers did two years later. When Pop took us up to Maine and his car got stuck in the infamous mud, it was a pair of oxen who hauled us out.

Lots of time bicycling around the Cascine which is Florence's Jardin de Boulogne. The son of the lady who owned the pensione belonged to a Fascist youth organization. He was too old to be a balilla. I believe the boys in their group were in their low twenties. They all loved wearing uniforms. He would make fun of one of them who had the imprudence to boast that his uniform was made of stoffa inglese. They forced him to take a dose of castor oil, which was one of the Fascist's favorite ways of punishing people. A nasty thing to do, yet scarcely as bad as some of the ways the Nazis behaved. And this same young man used to put his mother's soup tureen on his head which made him look as if he were wearing Mussolini's favorite kind of helmet and strut around saluting and yelling "saluto fascisto," and it certainly seemed to me as if he were making fun of the whole farcical regime. All around town were displayed maps with tiny Italian and Abyssinian flags stuck in them, showing the advance of Badoglio's troops (very slow) I had many a conversation with the other pensionnaires. One of them claimed he was a direct descendant of Julius Caesar. What then, I wondered, was he doing in a mediocre, grade B pensione. (The Simi had been Grade A, which meant chicken twice a week.) The food was good though, and I ate a lot of it. My sobriquet was "stomacho di ferro." I liked zabaglione and any dessert with panna on it, and that is whipped cream. Nationalism was rife. A naval officer who lived there and I were looking at a map together. He pointed to the Alps and said "questa è la chioma d'Italia." This is Italy's mane. i.e. head of hair. As if all the Alps belonged, geographically speaking, to Italy. I was not buying any of that nonsense. Anyhow, I knew perfectly well that the finest country in the world was the United States. And we kept asking Mom when she was going to take us back This crazy guy decided he would like to marry Florence and asked Mom for her hand. Mom explained politely that in our country fourteen-year-old girls don't get married. Or so I was told later. I knew nothing about this at the time.

As usual we went up to Arosa for Christmas, we had an apartment near the RR station, Henry and Dot joined us, and then while Florence and I were watching the vacationers get off the train (what else are you going to do if you live opposite the RR station?) Florence let out a cry of astonishment. "There's Pop!" Big, tall man. Hard to miss. Yet I didn't recognize him. He arrived unannounced. Had stopped briefly in Paris with Henry and Dottie. But his arrival was a total surprise to the other three of us. He got a sled and came along with us when we went skiing . One of those one-person sleds that some older people, like Madame Fornaro, would get around town on. It came with little short poles that you used to propel yourself with. Via horsedrawn sleigh, we would go up to the Tschuggen from which there was a short ski descent on steep slopes. If you stayed on that sleigh it would take you all the way up to the Weisshornhütte. From there, there was a great 17-kilometer descent to the village of Litzirüti. Florence and Henry and I would ski all the way down to Litzirüti, and go into a nice, warm stube and then take the train back up to Arosa. Florence and Mom and I went back to Italy by a route new for us. We had a look at St. Moritz, that famous ski resort for rich people. Then at Pontresina, less toney, more appealing.

Trips from Florence: Venice once again. Mussolini was giving one of his rants in Piazza San Marco and the low-rate RR fares were irresistible. Anyhow you did not have to go listen to him. In fact, we scarcely knew he was there. Part of our group was a schoolmate of mine from Miss Barry's. He remembered Venice for its smells. Together we took an expedition up and down the canals seeing how many different and distinct smells we could collect. On another trip, Florence and I took a bus up to the hills north of Bologna to go skiing. On the way back I struck up a conversation with a merry group of young men. We stopped in Bologna and the bus driver said we would be there for an hour before leaving. My new acquaintances decided to go somewhere and asked me to come along with them. That was how, all unawares, I paid my first visit to what I later figured out must have been a brothel. When we got there and the lady in charge saw that the group included a youngster she scolded the big boys and sent us all away.

Later that year we took the train down to Rome, a city I never liked. Loud, trafficky, and reeking of Fascist imperialism. Florence and I went off sightseeing on our own and at lunch time decided to dine at the famous Alfredo's. Coincidence! Across the room there was Mom dining with a friend. The ladies invited us to join them. Our trip took us to Naples, another beautiful but hateful city. There, a rogue taxidriver took us to the wrong hotel, but Mom marched right out onto the street with the two of us and soon we got an honest taxi and got to the right hotel. Boat to Palermo, our first and only visit to Sicily. We liked Palermo and its cloisters. Then we took a tourist bus that was driving all around Sicily, Syracuse, Catania with Aetna looming over us, Taormina, Messina and back. One of the few other passengers was a German who kept saying that the island properly belonged to Germany because Frederick II had been King of Sicily in the early 14th century and that in due course it would become German again. Back to the mainland, a drive that Mom had been looking forward to along the Amalfi drive, and a brief sojourn in a famous and wonderful hotel in Amalfi. I forget the name of the place, but we all loved it.

Back to Austria for the summer. There was a summer school at Millstadt on a lake in Southern Austria and we stopped there to have a look, but we all decided we liked Gmunden, Schloss Traunsee better. We had a fine car trip over the newly built Grossglockner, then all five of us gathered again in Gmunden, followed again by a visit to the Salzburg Festspiel Then the three of us took a long train trip through Germany. I arranged that one myself. There was a tremendous fare reduction on any train trip through Germany that began at one point of entry and ended at another. This was part of a scheme devised to attract tourists and I was gullible enough to rise to the challenge. With a guidebook handy I mapped out a trip that took us to Nürnberg, the wonderfully well-preserved Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber (see nearby picture of Rothenburg gatehouse), Dinkelsbühl, also well-preserved and very medieval, Ulm, Freiburg-in-Breisgau, Frankfurt-am-Main (visit to Goethe's birth house), a Rheinfahrt, Köln and its many churches, Düsseldorf, which is a fine little city on the Rhine, Hildesheim and nearby Hannover. a dull place, why did I arrange a stop there? maybe so that we would not have too long a train ride into Berlin, a few interesting days in Berlin, Dresden (I am glad we saw that jewel of an 18th century city before it was destroyed in WW II) I don't think it was on this the trip that we went to Prague. I can't remember. But I do remember that Prague is a great city. And that we saw a performance of Shaw's Saint Joan there in German (everyone there seemed to speak German, it felt less estranging than Budapest had) and an opera, Don Quixote, I forget who wrote it but it struck me as unusually weak musically. This Rundfahrt of Germany ended as we went through Breslau and crossed over into Czechoslovakia.

Here follows a bizarre incident. A Czech girl I had known at Gmunden, Olga Zaludova, and I had formed what might be called a romantic attachment. We had agreed that I would visit her in her native town of Bystrice-op-Zom which is on the rail line between Breslau and Vienna and I had told her when we would be coming through. Later that summer I lost interest in this arrangement and called it off. I never mentioned any of this to Mom or to Florence. None of their business. But when the train pulled in to Bystrice there were Olga and her parents, coming through, looking for us. So we got off and we spent the night with them. This was quite a surprise to Mom and Florence. I suppose Olga and I must have communicated in German. It was the only language we had in common. I remember that we corresponded later. Unfortunately I have forgotten what little German I knew.

Our next stop was Vienna, a city we loved. We wanted to go to school there, in the same school that an Austrian girl who was a friend of Florence's went to, but Mom insisted on our going to the Munich Preparatory School. We told her she would not like Nazi Germany, but she was anxious about our fitting into the American school system when we got back and wanted us to go to an American school. There was not one in Vienna, so we failed to persuade her. Our only satisfaction, later, was saying "We told you so." We gave Mom a hard time. It cannot have been easy bringing up children all alone in such circumstances. Of course, she enjoyed traveling, and sightseeing. And she believed in enjoyment. As I do. "Might as well have a good time." That is not what she said, of course. Such principles as she did enunciate I disagreed with. But it isn't what people say that counts. It is what they do. And she did the right things. Right for her, and right for us too. But not when she insisted on Munich.

Before Florence died she told me she regretted fighting with Mom so much. I reminded her that any real fight requires two contestants. Mom and Florence were temperamentally alike. Someone had to carry on the fight and defend our joint interests as defenseless children and Florence took care of that. If there was blame to be handed out Florence got it. She reminded me in adult years, that back in those days I got away with everything, and did what I liked. My technique was simply to keep my head down. And enjoy whatever there was to enjoy. Even Munich under the nasty Nazis had its pleasures.

Our pension, in Schwabing, very close to the Englischer Garten, was not one of those pleasures. The food did not interest me and the woman who ran the place had a tyrannical streak. The rule was that we did not sit down to the table until she entered the dining area. But the girl who lived in the room next to mine was an American voice student, Georgina Schenk. I would hear her singing "Mi chiamano Mimi, ma il mio nome è Lucia" next door, and I developed a liking for Puccini. When we were about to leave Munich she pointed out that there was a door between our rooms and she opened it and came in and gave me a kiss. How thrilling! Like everyone I knew, she was years older than I. I was thirteen. Big for my age, though. And I wore long pants!

The school was run by the Bissell brothers. They were Nazi sympathizers, but conscientious and devoted teachers. I took harmony from one of them, and found it hard to put hymn tunes into four-part harmony and to avoid open fifths. "if you think that is hard, wait til you get to counterpoint" he would say. In English class he told us that he knew German before he learned English, and he thought a daffodil was a kind of bird and that made "a host of shining daffodils, dancing in the breeze" a confusing line to him. We put on a school play in German in which I played one of two Communist criminals, Peter, and the name of my fellow-criminal was Paul. The innocent little peasant girl played by Florence mistook us for Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

Downtown there was a sort of shrine, maybe to early Nazis who lost their lives in a failed putsch. A couple of sentries stood by it and you were supposed to salute and say Heil Hitler when you walked past it. Florence and I liked to walk past in silence and hands in pocket, hoping a sentry would stop us for it and we were prepared to say "Wir sind Amerikaner." No one ever did, On the other hand, all around town were posted copies of Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer full of dreadful caricatures of villainous Jews, and when Mom would stand in front of them and exclaim about how awful they were, Florence and I would drag her away, lest someone hear her. I had read John Gunther's Inside Europe and Sinclair Lewis's fantasy about fascism coming to America, It Can't Happen Here, and Gunther especially helped me shape my view of what was happening. I had heard of Dachau and rode my bike out to have a look. Of course all I saw was the walls. And every couple of weeks there would be Eintopfstag when you were supposed to eat a meal entirely cooked in one pot. Why? As a symbolic sacrifice? After all, copious and heavy eating was supposedly a distinctive national trait. Or were you supposed to give the savings to the Party? Or to support the war effort? There was a war going on in Spain, and no effort was made to deny the role the Germans were playing in it, On the contrary.They were proud if it.

Mom hated it as much as we did. Every time Hitler gave a speech there were loudspeakers set up around town and we would leave. Once to Garmisch, for skiing, another time to Innsbruck, a good choice because it gave Mom a beautiful city to visit. And the skiing was good there too. Florence and I would take a bus out to the downhill side of the cable car and usually fit in several descents a day, just as we did in Garmisch. The speed and efficiency of cable cars delighted us. We had not been brought up on them.

Back to Munich, where I actually saw Hitler. It was at a performance of Der Rosenkavalier I had come down on my own on the tram from our pension and got a seat behind the fauteuils in the royal circle - they were sold cheap just before curtain time - and at the first act curtain the lights shone on the royal box and the orchestra struck up "Deutschland über alles" or maybe it was the Horst Wessel song. And there he was standing amidst his entourage accepting the applause of those adoring Bavarians. Right on the same level as where I was, so I could have had a good shot at him. The thought crossed my mind.

That Christmas we were again in Arosa and Pop again joined us, and we were again in the same apartment. We got Henry and Dottie to persuade Mom to get us out of Munich. And it worked. Sort of. We went back to Munich, but that spring we were on our way to our favorite city in Europe, Paris. Via Köln and Amsterdam. (Our first visit to that wonderful city. We all loved Holland. As who doesn't?)

We had an apartment on Vaugirard. Every morning Florence and I would walk down to the place Saint-Sulpice and take the bus past Trocadéro where they were building the buildings of the Paris World Exhibition of 1937 and tearing down the ugly old Palais du Trocadéro, to the rue Chardon Lagache in Auteuil where was located the American High School. But it seemed as if we would never get away from Fascism of one kind or another. The school director was a Franco sympathizer, and invited an official from the Franco regime to give us a talk.. But Peter de Francia, one of our fellow-students, was an honest-to-God young communist. He thought us boys should join the Lincoln Brigade. When I told him I wanted to learn more about Communism he offered to lend me his copy of Das Kapital. Ugh. Maybe my distaste for Communism dates from that spring.

But that was a really American school, full of American kids, with sports, including basketball which I disliked then as I do now - yet we were all proud of playing the Lycée Voltaire which had an enrollment of 2000 boys - and I liked and participated in the track meets, and the parties were fun, and we wandered around town just as teenagers do. We went to American movies on the Champs-Elysées, and haunted the fruit-juice bars called Pam Pam, and the American Club on Raspail, where we put on a school play, and its pool, and we "dated." My date was Patsy Kelleher, who two years later accepted my invitation to a prom at Wesleyan. Other good friends were the Espersons, David and Jean, and Ralph de Castro. All of those people got back to the States before the war broke out, and we would get together with them now and then. Ralph de Castro went to high school in Norwalk nearby. He told me once that the other kids in that high school called him Frenchie. An opprobrium that I escaped.

That summer: Aunt Evelyn joined us for first part of an extensive tour de France in a Delage we bought. Henry and Dottie wanted to revisit many of the Romanesque churches they had seen on a field trip under the direction of their maître, the great Henri Focillon (it was Focillon who advised Henry to complete his studies at the Fogg. Henry owed a great deal to him and to Sachs at the Fogg. But of course he earned their support.) And we went on to see practically every Romanesque church in France. The other focus of the trip was the famous mountain passes, like the col de Tourmalet, which the Tour de France traditionally confronted. That was my idea. This was our original automobile tour of France, to be followed by many more, after the war. Evelyn quit. Mom would often ask to be dropped off at a restaurant when we went in search of a good picnic spot on some river bank.. I imagine sitting down on the ground was hard for her, and swimming, which the rest of us all did, was out of the question. I think we visited every French region. It was the only time I was ever in Bordeaux or saw the Landes. Florence and I would sit on the jump seats.

Then we took the Delage over to Great Britain. First time we had ever traveled in a country where they spoke English. In the great capital city of London - he who is tired of it is tired of life - we stayed at the Strand and had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at Simpson's. Our trip took us to Scotland which we especially liked, and for the only time ever we went to Cornwall and Devon, scenic and picturesque counties.

H&D were critical of British class-consciousness. But I say there is class-consciousness in every culture I ever met and I prefer the old-fashioned, alleged English sense of superiority to all lesser beings, continentals, Ameddicans, and wogs to the sense of intellectual superiority that is supposedly typically French. Social snobbery seems preferable to intellectual snobbery to me.

.We sailed from Southhampton on a German liner, and got back to the familiar shipboard pleasures of shuffleboard and quoits. Florence and I little suspected that our greatest adventure lay ahead: the discovery or rediscovery of the native land that we (so justly) longed for. And of the sister and brother we had not seen for six years, and of their spouses (whom we had barely met) and dwelling places and cats (in Greenwich Village) and dogs (in Maine.) The schools I went to - St. Luke's, Wesleyan, and Harvard - permitted me to continue the slow-paced pursuit of learning that had begun over there and was to become the central activity of my life. Insufficiently broad learning, of course. Learning only about those subjects that interested me: language, literature, history, music, the adventures and misadventures of the human mind. And what about art? I must have realized that, much as I liked looking at them, I did not have a vivid and precise visual memory of paintings, sculptures, buildings, and objets d'art, as Henry did. Perhaps that is why I never took a course in art history. Unlike Florence, who majored in it, and worked for the Chicago Art Institute for a while during the war.

Breathing the air of liberty was fine. And quite a change. The political leaders we knew of were the posturing clown, Mussolini, or the frightening firebrand fanatic, Hitler. Léon Blum whom I admired had been driven from power by French rightwing enemies of the Front populaire by the time we got to the States. But we had FDR. Pop's disapproval of his policies did nothing to decrease my admiration for them.

It was also a pleasant surprise to discover the mild-mannered do-goodism of the Congregationalist church in Darien. Another discovery that delighted me was a form of the musical theatre I had known nothing about: the musical comedy. I saw DuBarry Was A Lady, I Married an Angel, The Boys from Syracuse. And there was theatre in English: Our Town, No Time for Comedy, There Shall Be No Night, Philadelphia Story. Most of those plays were all adrip with sentiment. Not nearly as harsh, or as populated by unlikeable people, as drama has become since. But then I always prefer the past to the present. And that seems like the right note on which to end this long reminiscence.

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