Cathedral Rock: Allen Curnow's Italy

Not long after arriving in Italy, Lord Byron wrote: pleases me as much as I expected - and I expected much - it is one of those places which I know before I see them - and has always haunted me'.1 Proust recorded a similar impression: When I went to Venice, I found that my dream had become incredibly but quite simply - my address'.2 No doubt Italy often strikes the first-time visitor that way. Already known and already dreamt about, Rome, Florence, Venice - as a thousand writers testify - is likely to do strange things to the visitor's accustomed sense of novelty and familiarity, anticipation and realisation. The New Zealander may find it is a place where the Maori sense of time holds true doubly: its past and our past are always before us.Allen Curnow came particularly late to Italy. He was 63, two years away from retirement and on his last university leave, when he and Jeny arrived, by ship, in February 1974. An unusual amount of 'Italian luggage' would have arrived with them: a canon of prior literary responses from Goethe and Byron through Ruskin and Henry James to Proust and Pound, not to mention all the art books, operas and concertos, the travel guides, the anecdotes and tips of friends, even the kind of memories one has from watching Kenneth Clark's Civilisation on colour TV. And with the luggage a question: can a place as old as Italy be 'something different, something nobody counted on'?After a first week in Florence, his wife Jeny was called home to attend a family emergency; Allen stayed with his brother in Geneva until she returned, three weeks later. They then spent three weeks in Venice, staying at Ruskin's old house, had a week in Ravenna, and returned to Florence in mid-April, for a further two weeks. They were in Sicily for most of May and concluded the Italian leg of their trip with two weeks in Rome. After briefer visits to Geneva and France, they based themselves in London for three months and returned home in December after a six week stay in the United States. Almost half of a full year's leave had been devoted to Italy; Florence, the first and then the midpoint of their visit, would have been special for all the usual reasons, but as they were there at Easter time, they made a point of observing the celebration of High Mass in the Duomo.3The poem 'In the Duomo' is part of a sequence entitled An Incorrigible Music, published in book form in 1 979 but appearing in Islands a year earlier as one of three poems excerpted from a sequence of the same name. Those three poems - 'Cans't Thou Draw out Leviathan with an Hook?', 'In the Duomo', and 'Bring Your Own Victim' - formed a series of interconnecting poems in the manner of Curnow's most recently published work, the sequence Trees, Effigies, and Moving Objects (1972). The three poems appeared in Islands without punctuation - a practice that places stress on syntax and the management of line endings but Curnow subsequently thought better of that experiment and introduced the usual commas and full stops in the final version. I have counted over two dozen tinkering changes between the versions of these poems, but none of the revisions are especially significant. Each of the poems that appeared in Islands is only a whisker away from its final published form, and is already part of a fully conceived and titled longer work. Indeed, all the poems in An Incorrigible Music except one had been written before the Curnows left for a second trip to Italy, early in April 1978.The three poems published in Islands - one set at Karekare, one set in fifteenth-century Florence, and a third commenting on the themes of the other two - are the ridgepole of the ursequence. Others radiate like rafters from that central line of thematic continuity. But the centrepiece of the published book is undoubtedly 'Moro Assassinato' - a poem in nine sections, and by some pages the longest of the individual poems or minisequences that make up the volume. Although it reads as if it might have been the single key poem which prompted the writing of others, 'Moro Assassinato' was in fact the uncanny postscript to an already completed work. …