Writer’s Notebook

Just back from a few days in Rome — the perfect small metropolis for ‘street-haunting’, as Cyril Connolly described his love of strolling through cities. I first went to Rome in 1976, aiming to interview — for my university magazine — three of the writers who lived there or thereabouts at the time. I duly wrote to Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. All of them politely turned me down but I went anyway and have revisited the city many times. In fact, in the way life sometimes arranges these things, I later met all three writers and even came to know Burgess and Vidal a bit. As reading matter for this short trip I took a new edition of Burgess’s great but little-known novel about the city, Beard’s Roman Women, one of the small sub-genre of novels that have photographs in them. It seems that nothing much has changed in Rome since Burgess wrote the novel in 1975 — except I didn’t see a single Roman street cat.