Positano, 1954

Americans abroad: my father, John Steinbeck, Paul Strand, and Tom Ripley

Jul 03, 2024

Le Sirenuse Hotel Positano Exterior Seaside 9505 — photograph of Positano from La Sirenuse Hotel website

As soon as he graduated from art school in 1951, my father Earle hightailed it from Chicago to New York City to make it as an artist. He got a job at the New York Public Library’s picture collection and then as Assistant Manager in the art department at Brentano’s, a fancy bookstore on Fifth Avenue. Occupying a corner building covered with awnings, it sought a high-end clientele, with an emphasis on European titles in translation and foreign magazines. Earle moved into an apartment on the Upper East Side with a friend.

But his generation of male artists, most of them veterans of World War II, were drawn to Europe and many returned on Fulbrights or other grants during the cheap post-war years. In 1954 my father left for something of a Grand Tour. My grandfather saved postcards from that trip in a folder labeled Olsen, Earle, which is how I have them. Earle was twenty-eight years old, a veteran and an art school alumnus, but he seems immature. The postcards are gushy with exclamation points and signed “Love and Kisses, xxxxxxxxxx Earle.” In April he’s in Positano, Italy: on the front of the postcard he draws an arrow through the terraced town to his apartment. He taught briefly at the Positano Art School run by artist Randall Morgan. Once, at the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, I suddenly came across a lovely little work by Morgan called Amalfi: Moonlight Pattern (1950).1

Positano made a life-changing impression on Earle. John Steinbeck, who wrote about the town on the Amalfi coast for Harper’s Bazaar a year before my father arrived, called it “a dream place that isn’t quite real when you are there and becomes beckoningly real after you have gone.” He vividly described the hair-raising road down a cliff into town:

“Flaming like a meteor we hit the coast, a road, high, high above the blue sea, that hooked and corkscrewed on the edge of nothing, a road carefully designed to be a little narrower than two cars side by side….below us, and it seemed sometimes under us, a thousand feet below lay the blue Tyrrhenian licking its lips for us.”

My father seems to have been deliriously happy there, though we got few details except that that’s where he learned to love, and cook, pasta carbonara. It boasts a luxury hotel La Sirenuse that has been run by the same family since 1951. The writer Patricia Highsmith visited in the early 1950s and said that she based her character Tom Ripley, of The Talented Mr. Ripley book (1955), film (1999), and Ripley Netflix series (2024), on a young man she saw there, walking on the beach. Steinbeck wrote that Positano was full of characters and that was truer than he knew.

My father stopped in England on the way home and stayed several months with a friend in Godinton House in Kent. I found the ship’s manifest for his return, leaving Southampton on January 11, 1955, and it was a vivid snapshot of life on board a transatlantic steamer, filled with married couples, students, and artists like my father. Once in New York he promptly held a successful exhibit at the Bodley Gallery, which was a step up for him. It seems he had been productive in Europe— he exhibited 14 new works with titles like “Positano Seascape” and “Bay of Salerno.”

Earle Olsen, untitled abstract from early 1950s.

Earle never went back to Positano and it’s changed so much that I’m sure he preferred to hold onto his dream version, the version Steinbeck says is made more real in memory. I’ve never been there. Steinbeck was sure it could never become touristy because there simply wasn’t room for more people. (He was wrong.)

Artists and writers like my father and Steinbeck created a certain mythology about post-war Italy that paved the way for an influx of tourists. The mythology encompassed both dolce vita ease and cinema verité grit. I recently heard for the first time of Paul Strand’s book project documenting the five months he spent in Luzzara in 1953. In a classic portrait, Strand posed five surviving members of the Lusetti family around a doorway2, an image whose formal geometry even includes the round wheel of a bicycle, as if referencing Strand’s co-author Cesare Zavattini, the Luzzara-born screenwriter for The Bicycle Thief. The town would later draw other American art photographers, like Stephen Shore in 1993.

Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley in Netflix’s series (2024)

I knew I’d write about the Netflix series Ripley when I posted this piece, but I have mixed feelings about it. It’s a story of an American adventurer, Tom Ripley, who circles the glamorous expat life of another young American in Italy and then claims it for himself— the life, the friends, the money, the clothes. I watched an episode or two when it first aired, then lost interest. Directed by Steven Zaillian, the show looks beautiful— that steep Italian town, modeled on Positano, all edges and shadow in black-and-white cinematography— but the characters are bland and repellent. This Ripley, played by Andrew Scott, is closer to the cold-hearted original in Highsmith’s novel than Matt Damon’s boyish charmer in Anthony Minghella’s high-gloss version, but that made it hard to engage with his character. That aloofness is matched by the setting, which Zaillian moved forward to the early 1960s but still evokes the pared down style of Italian neorealist films.

Later, when I returned to finish the series, I was drawn in more by the suspense of Ripley’s cat and mouse game. The acting and production are impressive, but there’s just something necessarily missing in a soulless character like Ripley; he doesn’t care about anyone so why should we care about him? He’s an enigma driven solely by a sort of animal self-interest. Damon’s Ripley was beguiled by Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf, who moved so easily through the world, but Scott’s Ripley just wants Dickie’s things (from his shoes and his pen to his Picasso) and he grabs them with more calculation than yearning. It’s off-putting, on purpose.

I can see my father in the yearning Ripley— the young American eager to please and not sure how, who thinks that everything will be better in Europe and discovers it actually is. I can see him also in the easygoing Dickie, a self-proclaimed artist coasting through life on his parents’ dimes. I can see him in Steinbeck, Strand, and Shore, wanting to document both the reality and romance of Italy through an outsider’s eyes. I can even see him in Highsmith, who created a queer world for herself and encoded it into her fiction. They all shared the restless quality, perhaps, of traveling somewhere else for something more.

From Life with Victoria Olsen

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