Alan Riach takes us back to Italy in the 1920s with Karel Capek and asks, what was there then to be optimistic about? And what could we learn from this?

OVER the last few weeks, we’ve looked at Capek’s Letters from Spain (1930, in English 1931) and Travels in the North (1936, in English 1939). The very first of his travel books in sequence of publication was Letters from Italy (1923, in English, 1929, translated by Francis P Marchant).

This is clearly where Capek was finding his feet, as it were, to travel with. The tone shifts unaccountably, the humour is sometimes less certain, and the travel route is dazzlingly incomprehensible, but there are some gems.

Capek begins by noting that before he set out, friends sent him various books on what to expect from Italy but he neglected to read any of them and instead wrote this one himself. It’s certainly one recipe for paying close attention and recording as you go.

READ MORE: The virtues of travel writing and the work of Karel Capek

In 2020, contemporary life seems sometimes almost designed to encourage folk to feel we’ve seen it all before, and to try to make us get used to anything – not least the abuses of media language, political chicanery and false assumptions. This is life obscured by mediation.

Instead, Capek keeps us keen to the fact that language used well insists that there are some things we must never, ever “get used to” or “get over” and that resistance is always required, in various forms.

That’s not to say pleasure doesn’t have a place. In Venice, “the canals purl along, the band plays at St Mark’s, twenty languages blend in ceaseless hum” so the city’s “principal charm” is “olfactory and acoustic”. And perhaps in our own time the failure of commercial exploitation brought about by the threat of the coronavirus has in fact helped the water in the Venetian canals to purify itself.

The olfactory faculty is apparently one of the things the virus attacks, but it is itself sometimes a liability. Even if the smells are bad, though, Capek reminds us it’s worthwhile savouring them – through words. At the harbour of Palermo in Sicily, he says: “Mix jasmine, rotten fish, goatsmilk cheese, rancid oil, human exhalations, sea air, orange extract and odours of cats, and you have a tenth diminished degree of description of the atmosphere in a harbour street. And do not forget infantile dribbling, decayed vegetation, tobacco, dust, wood coal, and pomade. And mould, slops, damp washing, and burnt oil, and even that is not enough. It is inexpressible.”

He tells us that “human language is incapable of expressing nice and nasty odours” since God may have charged Adam to name “all beasts and aquatic creatures” but he failed “to designate all kinds of odours.” Well, Capek manages to make some correction of that failing. The words convey the repulsion of the experience. Some experiences are indeed better when they are looked back upon.

READ MORE: Velazquez, El Greco, and Goya: The splendours of Spain laid out by masters

But even the cats have a redeeming aspect. When he gets to Rome, he notes: “there is a grass plot below the street level surrounded by railings; in the middle stands the Trajan column, one of the most senseless monuments in the world, with broken columns standing round. On these columns the other day I counted no less than sixty cats of all colours.

“This was a magnificent spectacle. I went again to gaze on them on a most lovely moonlight night; they sat back to back and mewed, evidently this was some kind of religious ceremony. I leaned against the railings, folded my hands, and thought of home.”

Is not all travel suggested in that last sentence? Not only travelling across nations but journeying into the past, and returning from it to our own time?

When we see in actuality or recollect in memory and imagination the differences between nations and locations, the characteristics of places, their architecture, colours, smells, the tastes of their food, the languages of their people and the visions of their artists, and their cats and dogs, and their histories, do we not also think of home, and what it might be?

For these are the immediacies of experience, and all of them occur in the political world. Remember, Capek was writing in the 1920s and 30s, with fascism rising and his own homeland only recently liberated from Habsburg imperial rule. In that context, it’s especially valuable to see how all the human pathos, the complications, subtleties and strengths that arise can be turned to lasting benefit in the hands of the artist.

IN Letters from Holland, Capek indicates this clearly: “You get a quite different idea of Van Gogh’s pigments, when you see the pigments of the Dutch earth, the colours almost as clear as enamel, the brick-reds, the lush green pastures, the yellow sand, the brightly coloured facias and sign-boards, the fondness for clear colours sparkling in the clarity of the air: all this was devised by Van Gogh from his native Holland, for the colours of France are quite different, poplar-silvery and bluish and opal-grey; no sooner had this Dutchman felt a little of the heat from a more southern sun, than he was in his best form.”

READ MORE: Alan Riach on how travel serves as the antidote to insularity

Now that’s art criticism that gives you vital information!

In his autobiography Lucky Poet, Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of Capek: “The first notable poet of Czech nationalism, the nature of his genius was conspicuously Slavic. And his work was peculiarly congenial to me in the extent to which what Van Wyck Brooks wrote of Wells is exactly applicable to Capek – ‘He is an intellectual, rather than an artist: that is to say, he naturally describes and interprets life in the light of ideas, rather than in the light of experience’ – which, of course, is true of myself as well!”

He continues: “I admired Capek and the Czech people and that indomitable patriotism by which their native language was kept alive through so many proscribed years, to leap up like a released spring in a new literature as soon as the Czechs were freed of the Habsburg yoke and of the dead weight of its compulsion.

“Filled with the rebellious grandeur of Lucifer and the stubborn courage of the Maccabees.”

Oh, Scotland! How much we have to learn.