The Ancient Shore, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller
Variety of impression, diversity of atmosphere and mood, incongruities of many kinds, these are only to be expected in books on travel, and perhaps particularly in one concerning Naples. But The Ancient Shore is by two hands, and there is a radical difference in style and method that makes it virtually impossible to discuss the book as if it were of a piece. There are the sections written by Shirley Hazzard, which form much the larger part, meditative, nostalgic, static, full of literary and historical reference; and there is the single episode narrated by her husband, Francis Steegmuller, in which he tells of a day in 1938 when he was mugged on a Naples street and badly hurt, and of the aftermath of medical care he received in the two Neapolitan hospitals he was taken to.
Despite the difference, there is a sense in which the two are complementary, each supplying a certain lack in the other. The descriptive essays express an enthralment which seems not to have faltered since the writer’s first visit to Naples, when she went there in her twenties as a representative of the United Nations. The first is entitled ‘Pilgrimage’ and talks of the capacity for impression we take with us when we travel, what she calls in a vivid phrase an ‘aroused imagination’. Like all the other pieces it is beautifully written and like them it gives exquisite expression to the enduring beauty of the city in its setting, the poignancy of change and loss, the myriad changes of time and chance. But pilgrims travel with more than an aroused imagination; they travel with the certainty of salvation if only they can reach the goal.
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