Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  “Live in it,” said Mayhew.

  As so often, Maugham is writing a fable on his favorite theme of personal freedom. He states his message plainly in the opening paragraph of the story: “I am fascinated by the men, few enough in all conscience, who take life in their own hands and seem to mold it to their own liking. It may be that we have no such thing as free will, but at all events we have the illusion of it.”

  Maugham had met John Brooks, ten years his elder, when he was a sixteen-year-old student at Heidelberg University. Brooks was his first lover and intellectual mentor. The sexual affair had ended by 1895, when the two men came to Capri for the first time. Maugham was struggling to reckon with his homosexual inclination, as he would do all his life. Brooks and Benson were not struggling, and there was a steady traffic of local boys coming to Villa Cercola. It is unclear whether Maugham availed himself of their services, but he was impressed by the openness of his housemates. In his story, Capri represents a zone of individual liberty, outside the strictures of social conformity.

  When Freer returned to Capri for his rendezvous with Jerome, a shock awaited him: Jerome had brought with him a woman from Detroit. Henrietta Sophia Rupp, known as Yetta, was ostensibly Jerome’s housekeeper, but it soon became obvious that she was his mistress. At first Freer accepted this alteration in his friendship with Jerome, whatever its precise nature, but Rupp was a difficult, domineering woman who was ferociously hostile to Jerome’s friends. For a vivid portrait of Yetta Rupp, we return to Vestal Fire, Compton Mackenzie’s roman à clef. The literature of expatriate life in Capri consists of such encrypted fictional representations to a remarkable degree. Indeed, they outnumber the nonfiction accounts and are sometimes more candid than the memoirs by the same authors.

  When [Scudamore, the character based on Jerome] came to Sirene, he brought with him a gypsy-faced young woman as his housekeeper, and it was as much her jealousy as his own books that kept him at home, as much her appalling Midwestern American cooking as his own late hours that made him look so wan and thin. She loved him as women like her love, with as much exasperation as passion. She could not bear to have Scudamore’s “lady” friends treat her as a servant; and she made his life such a misery with her tantrums that for the sake of peace in which to work he gave way to her by inviting no woman, whatever her station, inside his house. Then she tried to keep away his men friends; and she made herself so objectionable with her insolence that fewer and fewer even of them used to visit the scholar.

  The description of Rupp as “gypsy-faced” reflects frequent characterizations of her as a mulatto. That would explain one minor mystery of Jerome’s life, why he would bother to carry on the masquerade that she was his servant, for by Capriote standards, relationships of any sort between unmarried men and women constituted a meager scandal. The theory that Yetta was of mixed race has been disputed on the grounds that she had previously resided in an all-white neighborhood in Detroit, which does not seem conclusive. Freer’s role became that of an absent partner in the property until 1905, when he was on a visit there and had a row with Yetta Rupp, which led to Jerome’s buying him out. Freer returned to America and built a grand marble museum in Washington to house his collections, which he made a gift to the nation. Many years after Jerome’s death, Freer told a mutual friend of theirs from Michigan that he had “said to Jerome that he would not set foot in Villa Castello when Yetta was there. Jerome had his choice and he kept Yetta.”

  When he moved to Capri, Jerome’s defense of Tiberius was the focus of his work, but as his researches became more intensive, he widened the scope to encompass a study of the morals of the empire from its founding. In his memoirs, Compton Mackenzie described the madness of Jerome’s method: “He set to work on this magnum opus, accumulating more and more books, collecting more and more notes, finding it every year more and more presumptuous to make a beginning until he had acquired more knowledge and still more.” By the time of Jerome’s death, in 1914, his library was one of the most comprehensive collections of Roman history, law, and literature in the world, amounting to more than three thousand volumes, which he divided in his will between the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome.

  Jerome never completed his treatise on Roman morals. In “Mayhew,” Maugham cast Jerome’s life in a tragic light: “That vast accumulation of knowledge is lost forever. Vain was that ambition, surely not an ignoble one, to set his name beside those of Gibbon and Mommsen.” Maugham concludes his story on a note of patronizing optimism: “And yet to me his life was a success. The pattern is good and complete. He did what he wanted, and he died when his goal was in sight and never knew the bitterness of an end achieved.”

  The pattern of Thomas Jerome’s life was, of course, more complex than that of Maugham’s Mayhew. It is true that he never completed his big book about Roman morals, but his research was not lost. Nine years after his death, the cream of it was compiled by a professor at the University of Michigan and published under the dreary title Aspects of the Study of Roman History. The principal divergence of the life of the historical Thomas Jerome from Maugham’s tragic fictional synopsis of it is embodied by a book that he published a few months before he finally succumbed to an acute dyspepsia, which had made his life miserable. Roman Memories in the Landscape Seen from Capri is an imaginative study of the panorama the solitary scholar had contemplated for fourteen years from the terraces of Villa Castello.

  Recognizing that the natural beauty of the Campania is “difficult to express without vaporous incoherence,” a just damnation of the extensive literature of travelogues written by other foreign visitors to the region, Jerome proposed to view the coastline as the setting of myth and witness to history. “To make the landscape live,” he wrote, “to give it an added suggestiveness, we need but to consider what has been said and done on these waters and islands, plains, and mountains, what part of the great drama of human history has had this setting for its scene, what these mountains have looked down upon, and what these waters have swallowed up.”

  Roman Memories was a modern book when it was published, in 1914, illustrated with well-printed photographs of the landscape by Morgan Heiskell. Jerome brings a lively, informal style to his recitals of familiar myths, which he sets on a par with the imperial histories. He credits Homer’s tale of Odysseus and the Sirens with a truth more durable than that of Tacitus’s account of Tiberius’s Orgy in Capri. In this, his unintended magnum opus, Jerome’s furious denunciation of Tacitus was refined into a worldly, polished skepticism that anticipates the conceptual approach and methods of contemporary historians.

  CAPRI SURELY PROVIDES the setting for more works of fiction than any other island of its size. The finest of Capri novels, both in literary quality and for the depth and subtlety of its understanding of the island, is South Wind. Norman Douglas’s ambitious first novel enjoyed a resounding success when it was published, in 1917, and had a flourishing afterlife, at least until mid-century. Although it sits firmly outside the innovative movements of its day, South Wind exerted a wide and powerful influence. Virginia Woolf, a critic not easily impressed, wrote that the book “has a distinguished ancestry, but it was born only the day before yesterday.” Graham Greene, who first came to Capri to write the script for a film of the novel, which was never produced, said, “My generation was brought up on South Wind.”

  An antic romance in the style of Max Beerbohm and Ronald Firbank, the book serves Douglas as a platform for philosophical digressions and chronicles of invented history, compounded with elements of the satirical novel of manners and the murder mystery. He has more themes than he can keep track of, but paramount among them is an unyielding hostility to institutional religion; in its place, he advocates an idealistic hedonism nourished by the pagan atmosphere of the Mediterranean. From the novel’s opening pages, Douglas grounds these disparate conceptual strands firmly in the limestone crags of Capri (called Nepenthe in the book), succumbing to the majestic power of the island’s geograph
y as writers had done since antiquity. When the ferry from Naples approaches Nepenthe, Douglas writes, its “comely outlines were barely suggested through a veil of fog. An air of irreality hung about the place. Could this be an island? A veritable island of rocks and vineyards and houses—this pallid apparition? It looked like some snowy sea-bird resting upon the waves; a sea-bird or a cloud; one of those lonely clouds that stray from their fellows and drift about in wayward fashion at the bidding of every breeze.”

  Despite this explicit claim of irreality, South Wind is usually called a roman à clef, perhaps from force of habit, so much does the genre dominate the fiction of Capri, and because of Douglas’s close identification with the island. Nepenthe occupies Capri’s geographic position in the Gulf of Naples, but it is closer in essence to the marvelous unnamed South American country in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, published two years before, a place that English visitors find “very beautiful but also alarming and sultry.” The book’s characters do not correspond satisfactorily with the famous personalities resident in Capri in Douglas’s era, nor are they composites, quite. The queer folk of Nepenthe exhibit traits common to expatriates throughout the Mediterranean in the early twentieth century: misfits and idlers, heiresses and remittance men in search of love and pleasure in the name of personal fulfillment.

  The point of view wanders like a comet but has its center of gravity in Thomas Heard, an Anglican bishop who visits Nepenthe on his homeward voyage after a long ministry in equatorial Africa. He is stopping there to collect his cousin Mrs. Meadows and her infant child, to escort them to England to rejoin Mr. Meadows. On the ferry, Bishop Heard meets a mysterious stranger named Muhlen, “a flashy over-dressed personage” who is later revealed to be Mrs. Meadows’s first husband, still her legal husband, who has come to Nepenthe to blackmail her for bigamy. In the denouement, Heard, watching through field glasses from afar, sees her murder the wretch by pushing him off a cliff, but he decides not to denounce her, the proof that he has been successfully Mediterraneanized.

  Contemporary critics complained that South Wind lacked a plot, but Douglas responded that if his book had a narrative flaw, it was an excess of story. Denis Phipps, a dreamy undergraduate on a search for life’s meaning, is besotted with love for a flirtatious maidservant in the employ of an American-born duchess, who is pursued successfully by a Jewish geologist. Meanwhile, Vesuvius erupts, blanketing Nepenthe in ash until a statue of the island’s patron saint, Dodekanus, is paraded through the streets and puts a miraculous stop to the disaster. A local antiquarian sells a fake Greek bronze to an American millionaire who made his fortune in the condom trade. Another American, the dipsomaniac Mrs. Wilberforce, turns up from time to time to undress in public. A group of lusty, red-shirted Russian vegetarians called the Little White Cows run amok when a tobacconist in the piazza sells one of them a box of matches made with animal fat. The carabinieri arrive in force to quell the melee, wielding their weapons “with such precision that four schoolchildren, seven women, eleven islanders, and twenty-six Apostles were wounded—about half of them, it was believed, mortally. Order reigned in Nepenthe.”

  As Denis Phipps remarks, “The canvas of Nepenthe is rather overcharged.” Douglas’s protestations notwithstanding, the story of South Wind is not the reason readers return to the book. It is a conversation novel, a minor genre that encompasses works by writers as diverse as Denis Diderot, Thomas Love Peacock, and Dave Eggers. Time and again, Douglas establishes a pastoral scene on a terrace or hillside, where his characters repose amid gorgeous descriptive prose and thrash out issues of interest to the author. The book’s distinguished ancestry originates in Plato. Many passages in the book read like one of the philosopher’s odder dialogues, but lacking the rational presence of Socrates.

  South Wind is one of the last works of English literature that assumes a classical education. The island’s name is taken from a mythical drug, mentioned in The Odyssey, which quiets all pain and strife, producing forgetfulness of every ill; those who have drunk nepenthe mixed with their wine will not shed a tear at the death of mother or father. A knowledge of Greek and Latin is not required to get the jokes: Douglas always explains himself, but he assumes that his readers share his interest in the esoteric margins of antiquity, and if they do not, he works hard to arouse it.

  After he has introduced his principal characters and narrative threads, Douglas blithely sails into a biography of Dodekanus. In childhood, he demonstrated a precocious talent for curing lepers and raising the dead and by adolescence had made it his life’s mission to convert the heathens of Africa. There, he “entered the land of the Crotalophoboi, cannibals and necromancers who dwelt in a region so hot, and with light so dazzling, that their eyes grew on the soles of their feet.” After eighty years of preaching, Dodekanus converted them; to celebrate their salvation, the Crotalophoboi murdered him and cut him up into twelve pieces, provisioning a year of monthly feasts. After one of the banquets, the martyr’s femur was swept up by the south wind and cast on the shore of Nepenthe, creating his cult there. The legend of Dodekanus, with its slightly mad annotations, was an inspiration to Nabokov in Pale Fire, another pseudo-learned excursion into manufactured history.

  The story floats along with featherlight irony without ever losing sight of its message. Douglas’s mouthpiece, the antiquarian Count Caloveglia, in the same conversation in which he proclaims that all the wonder of The Odyssey may be found in the panorama surrounding Nepenthe, declares, “We of the South, Mr. Heard, are drenched in volatile beauty. And yet one never wearies of these things! It is what you call a glamour, an interlude of witchcraft. Nature is a-tremble with the miraculous.” Yet South Wind, for all its pagan high spirits, has a melancholy at its heart. In its painfully artificial innocence, its thundering silence about the cataclysm of blood that was engulfing Europe when it was published, the novel was in its way as much a passionate reaction to the First World War as the serious antiwar books that followed it in the 1920s. When Douglas was writing, the outcome of “the war that will end war,” in H. G. Wells’s phrase, was in perilous doubt. The only certainty was that the civilization that had created The Odyssey—and Douglas himself, for that matter—was passing away. South Wind was a banner floating above the citadel, a jaunty pledge of no surrender.

  Like many expatriates, Douglas lacked a clearly defined nationality. Born in Thüringen, Austria, he was raised amid great wealth in Scotland, where his ancestors were barons, and educated at English boarding schools and the Karlsruhe Gymnasium, in Germany. A promising career in the British diplomatic corps was cut short after he got a woman pregnant in St. Petersburg and abandoned his post. When he returned to Britain, he married a first cousin and fathered two sons. Douglas was impoverished overnight after his brother lost the family’s cotton mills in a bad business deal, so he turned to writing to make a living.

  Besides South Wind, he found success with his travel books: Old Calabria, which some readers consider his best work; Fountains in the Sand, subtitled Rambles Among the Oases of Tunisia; and notably Siren Land, a magical-historical-mythological tour of Capri and the Sorrentine peninsula. Otherwise, his freelance career was hampered by a penchant for obscure subjects that were sure to find few readers. His bibliography includes Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology, On the Herpetology of the Grand Duchy of Baden, an essay on forestry, a collection of raunchy limericks, an aphrodisiac cookbook, and a study of children’s games in London, an early classic of sociology that Joyce plundered for wordplay in Finnegans Wake.

  Once a fixture on lists of modern classics, said to have been the most popular title in the early catalogues of the Modern Library, South Wind has slipped beyond the canonical pale and arouses scant interest among scholars today. One reason for this decline, undoubtedly, is Douglas’s scandalous private life. By the time he wrote South Wind, his sexual inclination had shifted to a mania for young boys. He divorced his wife and moved to Italy, where homosexual relations were legal and age-of-conse
nt laws sketchy. Harold Acton wrote that by the time Douglas reached his sixties, he “could endure the society of fewer and fewer people over the age of fourteen.” The exact nature of this “Nietzschean brand of naughtiness,” in Paul Fussell’s phrase, is irrecoverable. The charge of indecent assault that made him persona non grata in England was brought after he propositioned a sixteen-year-old schoolboy at the South Kensington tube station. Douglas was attended in his travels in Calabria by a twelve-year-old Cockney boy named Eric Wolton, with his parents’ approval. In his forties, Wolton and his wife visited the elderly Douglas in Capri. A photograph of Wolton as an adult survives, inscribed “To N.D., the best pal I ever had.”

  Fussell theorizes that Douglas’s sexuality was a relic of the decadent 1890s, before there was such a thing as the “gay lifestyle,” when homosexuality (itself a freshly minted term) was routinely identified with youth worship and endowed with a specious classical pedigree based upon a vague understanding of institutionalized pederasty in ancient Greece. This tolerant attitude, which Fussell calls “an index of the pre-modern” view of homosexuality, was inextricably bound up with the Victorian class system that continued to dominate private attitudes even after it had brought down Oscar Wilde in a public disgrace. As repellent as Douglas’s behavior appears in the light of contemporary morality, for his social peers in Bloomsbury a gentleman’s right to do as he pleased carried more weight than any presumption of legal protection for Douglas’s young working-class companions. There must have been those in Capri who disapproved of Douglas’s behavior, but there is no hint of any social opprobrium in the published testimony, which always portrays him as one of the island’s most popular personalities. The Capriotes, at any rate, adored him, and made him an honorary citizen of the island.