Word: ischia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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MacNeice is dead now, and Auden, an immeasurably more talented poet, has become a happier, wiser traveler, with a preference for balmier summer spots-the island of Ischia near Naples, for instance, and the civilized hills of Austria. But in Letters from Iceland, the two precocious patriarchs of an Oxford poetic school spoke with the same youthful, irreverent voice. The book is probably the only successful verse partnership since the old English firm of Beaumont & Fletcher closed shop. It is, moreover, an object lesson for all dull dogs who could find nothing more exciting in a place like Iceland than...
...organization and personnel of the British Foreign Service with the methods of a totalitarian state? Smith and Jones do not seem to be staking their lives on a confrontation of opposing faiths; they appear only as a couple of sexual deviates who might just as well have flitted to Ischia or any other hospitable enclave...
...spent half of almost every year on the Mediterranean island of Ischia. His Ischia landscapes are among his best works, but they were more the landscapes of a dream than of nature. No sun bathed them; they seemed to be lit from within. And sometimes a tree or a mountainside would take on the shape of a bird, a face or a giant eye. Gilles painted Ischia's fishermen, but they were as lonely as his gods, as tortured as his Ophelia and Lear. Whatever his subject, it was thick with melancholy...
...life of any party; but his favorite haunts were the seedy back-street beer halls (Berliner Kneipen) frequented by taxi drivers, petty criminals and superannuated prostitutes. Though he talked year after year of going off to Italy to visit his friend Artist Werner Gilles on the island of Ischia, he let year after year go by before he could bring himself to apply for a passport. He loved West Berlin with a passion, had not budged from it since 1945, and his mythical trip to Ischia became a standing joke among his friends...
...last, one day in 1954, Heldt got a passport. The night before his departure for Italy, he made the rounds of his Kneipen to say goodbye, later wrote from Ischia that he wondered whether he would ever see his old haunts again. He never did. At Ischia, after a bibulous evening with his friends, he died in his sleep at the age of 49. The end was so peaceful that Werner Gilles cried out in a mixture of grief and envy: "He stole the death I had planned for myself...