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See Naples: A Memoir : A Peter Davison Book
The memoir of a great and misunderstood city, this book is a contribution both to literature and history. A sensuous paean to Italian pleasures, it is also the story of the American military advance northward up the boot of Italy during World War II. See Naples begins four years after the war had ended. Allanbrook, living in a house above the gorgeous ruin of Naples, is passionately involved with an Italian woman who is a ringer for Bette Davis. He is in love with Italy, with the scugnizzi (wiseguys) of the back alleys, with the opera at San Carlo, with this most dramatic of cities. Allanbrook had earlier been among the first Americans to land in North Africa, at Christmas in 1943, and had lived for years uncomfortably close to the fighting, in a division that took heavy casualties. Watching as his friends died, he was among those few who won through to watch the tide of war ebb. See Naples has great sweep, rich humor, and broad learning. It is a remarkable creative act, a stunning tri
- GenresItaly
Hardcover
First published October 1, 1995
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December 11, 2019[Written for the Boston Globe September 1995]
Contemporary literary theorists sometimes assail memoirists with the charge that they are forcing the messiness and complexity of life into too simple and neat a package, making linear narrative out of what is really only the spattering of a billion random moments. Writers of memoirs have also been subject to a variety of other charges: that their choosing to include this and leave out that tilts the work in favor of their own ego or politics; that they do not sufficiently account for the distortion of time; that, in writing so blatantly about themselves, they begin with the presumption that their lives or stories hold some special interest so we are justified in suspecting them, from the very start, of a combination of narcissism and exhibitionism.
Still, the form lives on and, in hands as capable as Douglas Allanbrook's, can make for wonderful reading. Perhaps the advantage of the memoir rises out of the very shortcomings mentioned above: it erases some of the messiness of life so that we can see it for the remarkable thing it is; it enables a writer to say, this happened to me, or around me, or through me, and it is work remembering -- even in modified or imperfect shape.
Allanbrook's superb memoir, SEE NAPLES, is about the Allied campaign in Italy in 1943 and 1944, about Allanbrook's part in the war, and, to a lesser extent, about his affection for and involvement in things Neapolitan. It is written by a musician with no previous books to his credit, from a distance of 50 years, and yet it strikes such an honest and appreciative string of notes that it will likely resonate in the minds of readers who have not the slightest interest in things military or Neapolitan.
The book beings in 1951, and moves backward and then forward in time. When we first meet Allanbrook, he is living on a Fulbright fellowship in the hills above Naples, composing a symphony and courting an Italian woman. With a deftness that would fill experienced writers with envy, he then plunges back into his combat experiences with a US Army infantry division, sketching characters from both worlds -- eccentric landladies, proud Italian families brought low by the war, informers, fascists, comrades in arms and fellow musicians. He has a great gift -- slightly overused in certain passages -- for moving effortlessly back and forth between different subjects and different periods. Discussing a friend he knows in the 1950s, he will slip back to a similar personality from his wartime days, forward to an associated event from later in his life, and back again in the space of a single paragraph.
Many of these scenes and much of the book as a whole center around his loves -- consummated and otherwise. The strain of melancholy that plays through all this has the sound of lonely old age to it, but Allanbrook steers clear of self-pity. One of the book's many strengths is its author's tone -- almost jaunty in places, honest and raw, touched with real sadness and the real horror of combat, but viewing everything from an appreciative distance. He speaks of his musical talent ("genius" might be a better word, though he does not use it: A composer and pianist, Allanbrook is also considered to be one of the finest harpsichordists in America) without false modesty, of petty and stupid officers without apology, of his friends and lovers without sentimentality.
This tone holds as he takes us from the happy postwar years back to his Army training, his unit's arrival in Morocco and its slow, bloody, sometimes absurd progress up the Italian peninsula.
He deals frankly with wartime sex -- both hetero- and homosexual, the latter a rarity in military memoirs -- and gives the nonveteran an excellent feel for the pettiness and courage of officers, for the cold, smells and cruelty of wartime Italy, the alternating boredom and horror that is the infantryman's lot. German land mines, impromptu nightclubs, torturers, partisans, prostitutes, pimps, one freezing Apennine winter and a large and well-drawn cast of infantry soldiers -- all of this is mixed almost perfectly into a stew of history, philosophy, music and romance.
Surprisingly perhaps, the story reaches its dramatic climax not during combat but immediately following the German surrender, when Sergeant Allanbrook and his cohorts are charged with the duty of returning truckloads of Russians to the Soviet authorities to face judgment and certain death.
In the last two chapters, the book fades just a bit. I would have liked a more detailed return to the postwar years so well-depicted in the opening chapters, more about his Italian wife of 18 years -- who remains only a silhouette. Allanbrook's story is so engaging, and so engagingly told, that I wanted it to go on another 100 pages. The prose is strikingly smooth and natural, as in this description of a not-so-attractive section of southern Italy: "To enter one of these towns is desolation: a fly-bitten piazza with a dusty bar, the caribinieri headquarters, a few palazzi of a certain age, a disheveled church, and, all around, a honeycomb of squalid stone houses with, perhaps, on the outskirts (if their mayor has been able to finesse some funds from the cassa per il Mezzogiorno) rows of cement apartments facing out onto the desperate countryside."
His love of music pervades the story without ever taking center stage. We see him entertaining his hosts or fellow warriors on both magnificent and broken-down pianos, studying a score in the desert, or next to a barracks craps game.
SEE NAPLES is a memoir in classical form. It takes a purely personal view of an important piece of history, giving intimate glimpses of a life without ever allowing the shadows and flashes of private emotion to occlude the larger, more universally accessible vista. Finishing it, I found my understanding of my own life had been enhanced by Allanbrook's perspective, my regrets and small triumphs somehow conjoined with his. It seems likely to me that most readers of this finely- tuned work will have a similar experience -- which may, after all, be the purpose and value of setting one's remembrances into print.
Contemporary literary theorists sometimes assail memoirists with the charge that they are forcing the messiness and complexity of life into too simple and neat a package, making linear narrative out of what is really only the spattering of a billion random moments. Writers of memoirs have also been subject to a variety of other charges: that their choosing to include this and leave out that tilts the work in favor of their own ego or politics; that they do not sufficiently account for the distortion of time; that, in writing so blatantly about themselves, they begin with the presumption that their lives or stories hold some special interest so we are justified in suspecting them, from the very start, of a combination of narcissism and exhibitionism.
Still, the form lives on and, in hands as capable as Douglas Allanbrook's, can make for wonderful reading. Perhaps the advantage of the memoir rises out of the very shortcomings mentioned above: it erases some of the messiness of life so that we can see it for the remarkable thing it is; it enables a writer to say, this happened to me, or around me, or through me, and it is work remembering -- even in modified or imperfect shape.
Allanbrook's superb memoir, SEE NAPLES, is about the Allied campaign in Italy in 1943 and 1944, about Allanbrook's part in the war, and, to a lesser extent, about his affection for and involvement in things Neapolitan. It is written by a musician with no previous books to his credit, from a distance of 50 years, and yet it strikes such an honest and appreciative string of notes that it will likely resonate in the minds of readers who have not the slightest interest in things military or Neapolitan.
The book beings in 1951, and moves backward and then forward in time. When we first meet Allanbrook, he is living on a Fulbright fellowship in the hills above Naples, composing a symphony and courting an Italian woman. With a deftness that would fill experienced writers with envy, he then plunges back into his combat experiences with a US Army infantry division, sketching characters from both worlds -- eccentric landladies, proud Italian families brought low by the war, informers, fascists, comrades in arms and fellow musicians. He has a great gift -- slightly overused in certain passages -- for moving effortlessly back and forth between different subjects and different periods. Discussing a friend he knows in the 1950s, he will slip back to a similar personality from his wartime days, forward to an associated event from later in his life, and back again in the space of a single paragraph.
Many of these scenes and much of the book as a whole center around his loves -- consummated and otherwise. The strain of melancholy that plays through all this has the sound of lonely old age to it, but Allanbrook steers clear of self-pity. One of the book's many strengths is its author's tone -- almost jaunty in places, honest and raw, touched with real sadness and the real horror of combat, but viewing everything from an appreciative distance. He speaks of his musical talent ("genius" might be a better word, though he does not use it: A composer and pianist, Allanbrook is also considered to be one of the finest harpsichordists in America) without false modesty, of petty and stupid officers without apology, of his friends and lovers without sentimentality.
This tone holds as he takes us from the happy postwar years back to his Army training, his unit's arrival in Morocco and its slow, bloody, sometimes absurd progress up the Italian peninsula.
He deals frankly with wartime sex -- both hetero- and homosexual, the latter a rarity in military memoirs -- and gives the nonveteran an excellent feel for the pettiness and courage of officers, for the cold, smells and cruelty of wartime Italy, the alternating boredom and horror that is the infantryman's lot. German land mines, impromptu nightclubs, torturers, partisans, prostitutes, pimps, one freezing Apennine winter and a large and well-drawn cast of infantry soldiers -- all of this is mixed almost perfectly into a stew of history, philosophy, music and romance.
Surprisingly perhaps, the story reaches its dramatic climax not during combat but immediately following the German surrender, when Sergeant Allanbrook and his cohorts are charged with the duty of returning truckloads of Russians to the Soviet authorities to face judgment and certain death.
In the last two chapters, the book fades just a bit. I would have liked a more detailed return to the postwar years so well-depicted in the opening chapters, more about his Italian wife of 18 years -- who remains only a silhouette. Allanbrook's story is so engaging, and so engagingly told, that I wanted it to go on another 100 pages. The prose is strikingly smooth and natural, as in this description of a not-so-attractive section of southern Italy: "To enter one of these towns is desolation: a fly-bitten piazza with a dusty bar, the caribinieri headquarters, a few palazzi of a certain age, a disheveled church, and, all around, a honeycomb of squalid stone houses with, perhaps, on the outskirts (if their mayor has been able to finesse some funds from the cassa per il Mezzogiorno) rows of cement apartments facing out onto the desperate countryside."
His love of music pervades the story without ever taking center stage. We see him entertaining his hosts or fellow warriors on both magnificent and broken-down pianos, studying a score in the desert, or next to a barracks craps game.
SEE NAPLES is a memoir in classical form. It takes a purely personal view of an important piece of history, giving intimate glimpses of a life without ever allowing the shadows and flashes of private emotion to occlude the larger, more universally accessible vista. Finishing it, I found my understanding of my own life had been enhanced by Allanbrook's perspective, my regrets and small triumphs somehow conjoined with his. It seems likely to me that most readers of this finely- tuned work will have a similar experience -- which may, after all, be the purpose and value of setting one's remembrances into print.
May 23, 2024
Definitely a memoir with deep, vivid details. Part war story, part love story, part family journal. A little bit of everything, but tied together with images in prose.
August 26, 2007
An unusual travelogue/war memoir/romance by a soldier who was an important harpsichord player. Both the war narrative and the romance parts are interestingly different from the predictable.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews