Free Florence by David Leavitt

Podge is ‘Lord Richard Vermont’, whom ‘some nebulous but familiar scandal / Had lightly blown … over the Channel, / Which he never crossed again.’
Thus at the age of twenty-seven
A promising career was over,
And the thirty or forty years that had elapsed
Had been spent in killing time – or so Lord
Richard thought,
Though in reality, killing time
Is only the name for another of the
multifarious ways
By which time kills us.
    Lord Richard’s house – ‘a miniature castle of plaster / Coloured and divided by lines to represent red brick’ – is protected by a door that ‘was bolted in ten places, / And only unbarred after a footman / Had scanned your face and the horizon / Through a slot in the door’:
Once you were allowed to enter, you were
lost in a dark, gleaming forest
Of golden pillars: a herald’s paradise;
There were many little rooms, studded with
coats-of-arms:
But though it was an ingenious, confusing
forest, with reflections everywhere in mirrors,
It was yet a work of artifice, not of art;
There was one room, copper-sheeted,
Which blushed to rose when the lights
turned on,
And another in which the walls
Were sheets of transparent glass –
I thought it might be to remind him not
to throw stones,
But he explained,
‘I wanted to see what it would be like,
dear boy,
To live in a room with no walls.’
    Sitwell’s sketch – with the exception of a small cache of letters, the most substantial portrait of Lord Somerset to survive – concludes with Lord Richard as an old man receiving guests in a bathroom at the top of his castle, dispensing coffee instead of tea ‘ “Because tea,” he would say, as he poured out the coffee, / “Is responsible for all the dreadful scandal / Talked in English drawing-rooms.”’ The poem’s last lines emphasize the somewhat wistful unreality of these final days, describing the little that remains of Lord Richard’s ‘solitary splendor’ as ‘wings of dust / Enclosing an untenanted miniature castle / With stained walls / In a wisteria-strangled suburb.’
    Lord Richard’s attempt, in Florence, to create ‘a room with no walls’ finally meets with failure because he has confused artifice with art, fancy with invention. This was a common mistake among the Anglo-Florentines, and one of the chief reasons that so many of them ended up mired in mediocrity. As Edward Prime-Stevenson observed in his underground study The Intersexes, the sexual liberty enjoyed by homosexual émigrés in Italy ‘seems remarkably often to have had the effect of destroying their intellectualor artistic activity and ambition. They become professional drifters and “dawdlers”, degenerate in will, in purpose, and even intersexual virility. They do nothing, accomplish nothing, while constantly talking about doing and accomplishing; and anon having lapsed gently to idleness complete, the capital of talent seems to evaporate away. Their liberty really gained, its relief undoes them.’
    Another of Sitwell’s portraits, ‘Mr Algernon Petre’, is about Reggie Temple, a member of the colony often confused with the novelist Reggie Turner, as Algy Petre, in the poem, is often confused with the novelist Algy Braithwaite. ‘Boxes’, the third section of the poem, addresses Temple/Petre’s vocation as the maker of small decorative objets:
Completely
Undeterred
By the various gigantic figures
That threw shadows across his path here –
So that, every morning, before beginning
work,
He had, as it were, to sweep out of his
enormous Studio
The spectres of Leonardo and
Michelangelo –
Algy Petre settled down for over fifty years,
Through summer and short winter,
To paint the identical, highly polished
portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette
On the lids
Of diminutive circular boxes,
Subsequently lacquered.
    Ignoring Leonardo, Algy Petre looks back to the age of Verrocchio, ‘the perfection’, in Pater’s words (which echo here), ‘of the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient