Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  His work may be derivative and uneven, but it is not the wretched pastiche and insipid doggerel denounced by writers who take as their main subject Fersen’s melodramatic life and might not have read his works with care. In his verse, nuance is easily lost amid the dense classical allusions, perfumed tropes, and extravagant homages to adolescent flesh. Fersen’s sin in the eyes of posterity was the same one that damned him in the eyes of the establishment of his own era: isolated in Capri, he took as his model the Decadents, a literary movement in its final decline, at a time when many of his contemporaries were inventing revolutionary modes. (Not all of them: Fersen’s visions of graceful lads in bucolic settings are no more sentimental than those of A. E. Housman, among others.) Cocteau was just in his invocation of the Pre-Raphaelites but obtuse in describing Fersen’s style as modernistic, for it was precisely the absence of modernist influence, conjoined with scandal, that condemned him not to a minor reputation but to no reputation at all.

  In 1905, after Fersen had made his move to Capri and while his villa on Monte Tiberio was under construction, he went on a long voyage to the Orient. At his first stop, in Ceylon, he wrote an autobiographical novel that is the most original in his oeuvre. It is a problematic description of a book that is swamped by the influence of Huysmans and Wilde, but while À rebours and The Picture of Dorian Gray anticipated the gay sensibility by suggestion, Black Masses: Lord Lyllian is one of the first novels that openly portrayed a way of life based upon homosexual desire, and the novel is more complex than that. It narrates the life of a Scottish nobleman orphaned at seventeen who falls under the influence of a flamboyant homosexual writer named Harold Skilde, transparently based on Oscar Wilde, who plays Pygmalion and remakes him as a monstrous mixture of Narcissus and Heliogabalus. Blessed with ethereal beauty and possessed by sexual lust, Lord Lyllian engages in a series of affairs with boys and men, as well as women (one of whom commits suicide at a party when he refuses her kiss), and comes to ruin when he stages “black masses” with Parisian schoolboys.

  Harold Skilde is almost the only male character who is not in some way an emanation of the author. Will Ogrinc, a Dutch medieval historian who privately published a comprehensive, thoroughly researched biography of Fersen, describes the novel as “a virtually unique manifestation of narcissism.” Mirrors occur in almost every scene. At fifteen, Lyllian awakes in the middle of the night, pulls off his nightshirt, and stands before the mirror. “He found himself beautiful, very desirable indeed, so that, now fully awake, exhilarated by his youth and nudity and caressing the slender body, he kissed the mirror as he would have kissed himself.”

  Harold Skilde seduces the young lord by writing a masque on the theme of Narcissus for him. The association of the novel’s autobiographical protagonist with the myth is made literal as he carries on affairs with other characters who embody different aspects of the author’s life and personality. Lyllian’s first name is Renold, that of Fersen’s younger brother, who died in infancy. One of his admirers is the cynical middle-aged diplomat Herserange, named after the d’Adelswärds’ family seat. His most sympathetic lover is a tubercular Swedish poet named Axel Ansen, who is identified as a descendant of le beau Fersen, the author’s own distant relation (or so he believed); Axel was his own father’s name. A key difference is that Lord Lyllian is twenty, just three years older than the older boys in his entourage, whereas Fersen was twenty-three and thus unambiguously an adult at the time of his arrest.

  The description of the “black masses” in the novel, told from the point of view of Lord Lyllian’s servants, who are spying on him for the police, is the closest thing to a confession of his activities that Fersen ever published. The fictional description matches the court records in essential details. A naked youth lies on an altar, surrounded by white roses and black lilies, holding a skull; in the servants’ naive, confused telling, Lord Lyllian brandishes a sword as he chases another boy around the room. Fersen piles on contemptuous satire of the hypocritical, philistine witnesses who testified against him: the policeman who is noting down the servants’ testimony exults that he has “an excellent case of corruption of minors,” with evidence of “reciting poetry and other obscenities.” Fersen defends his activities in the words of Lord Lyllian, who here addresses another pederast:

  I teach these youngsters about the greatness of the love they vaguely perceive, and sometimes, after I have been entrusted with their youthful confidences, and after I have thoroughly examined their sentimental souls, as dusk falls I read to them the painful lamentations of Byron or the litanies of poor old Verlaine … Since they have no one to whom they can open their hearts and since school is limited to grammar and football, I encourage them to choose among themselves a kind-hearted friend with whom they will discover life, its beauty and tenderness, in the way it ought to be discovered.

  Fersen is disingenuous. The court records reveal that in a few cases, particularly that of Loulou Locré, these pep talks went beyond recitations of Byron and Verlaine to include the fondling of genitals and masturbation, though there was never an accusation of intercourse, a distinction of critical importance to everyone involved.

  The complexity of the novel lies in the fact that the protagonist, like the book’s author at this point in his life, is bisexual, motivated by a “pure” (that is, socially sanctioned) love of women that balances his desire for men. The more outrageous Lyllian’s public homosexual personality, the more punishing the guilt he feels. In the novel’s denouement, he vows to renounce his dangerous dalliances with schoolboys and marry an innocent aristocratic girl. They plight their troth in a ruined Gothic chapel, kneeling before a statue of the Virgin Mary, which the beloved has strewn with roses. “Nestling against Lyllian’s breast, the young fiancée, so petite and dainty, shuddered like a timid bird.” Soon afterward, as he is dressing for a dinner to announce his betrothal to “his English cousin” (like many Continental Europeans, Fersen fails to observe the distinction between Scotland and England), one of his cast-off schoolboys arrives in an agitated state.

  André Lazeski, whom Lyllian had previously described to one of his pederast friends as “the little seventeen-year-old Pole with pretty eyes the color of clear water,” has heard the news of the engagement and angrily accuses Lyllian of breaking faith with him and his classmates. For the others, it might have been a lark, but his love, André declares, is a fathomless, undying passion. “You elevated my heart and my soul,” he cries, “you changed my life.” Their love, the boy tells Lyllian, “was all the more enduring because it was ethereal. How was it born, how did it grow? Do we ask such questions of the birds, of the mountains? Ah, you used to call me your ‘little adored one,’ do you remember?” Lyllian is moved by the boy’s recollection of their former intimacy and attempts to soothe his proud, wounded heart by assuring him that his previous avowals were sincere, but now he sees that it was a delusion. He urges Lazeski to follow his new, healthy vision of love: “Abandon this way of life. Young people who, like us, believe they can replace woman’s love by their own are emotionally sick … Today I repent and I am saved. I have suffered much, André, and I am not rejecting you. I will help you towards a speedy recovery.”

  Yet Lazeski’s frenzy cannot be appeased. The novel’s finale is a catastrophe in the style of verismo opera, which was then at the height of its popularity. The boy has a gun, there is a struggle, shots are fired, the two of them are mortally wounded. As the police clamor outside, pounding on the locked door, the forbidden love is redeemed, even as it claims the lives of its victims. They die locked in an embrace, as André’s tears fall on Lyllian’s face.

  “My child, my brother, my beloved,” murmured Lyllian as if far off. “It is here … nearby, the peaceful tomb, the door that is opening onto the most beautiful countries … Oh, I am suffering! Yes, my ‘little adored one,’” he continued, drunk with pain, “you were right … It was too easy to abandon you … Together we will embark on a long journey…”

  André obviou
sly symbolizes the Black Masses scandal. He descends on Lyllian while he is dressing for a festive announcement of his betrothal, just as the scandal had on Fersen. Lyllian’s death at the hands of his little adored one is high camp to a modern sensibility, which obscures the bold originality, the imaginative freshness, in 1905, of a fictional scene in which two male lovers die in each other’s arms. At the time Fersen wrote Lord Lyllian, the possibility of an openly declared love between men as equals had not yet been even distantly glimpsed.

  Peyrefitte and others have cast doubts on the sincerity of Fersen’s courtship of Blanche de Maupeou, suggesting that it was a pose adopted in pursuit of a respectable situation, as a cover to his homosexuality, but these cynical suspicions reveal more about the doubters’ own psychology than that of their subject, which was more complex than that. The dossier of Fersen’s trial at the Archives de France reveals that he sometimes dressed his boys in girls’ clothing, even against their will. Until his move to Capri, at the age of twenty-four, Fersen was torn between a physical attraction to adolescent boys and an idealized love of adult women. Oscar Wilde was similarly conflicted and never disavowed his love for his wife. Wilde’s feelings of guilt for her suffering as the result of his disgrace, and that of his sons, whom he never saw again after his arrest, were the crux of his martyrdom. In Fersen’s case, the pederastic impulse was expressed by lust for individuals, while the love of women remained an abstraction. Lord Lyllian’s fiancée is nameless, always referred to as the Young Girl, her beauty characterized in spiritual terms of purity and innocence, never as an inspiration of sexual desire.

  It would be simplistic to psychoanalyze Fersen in contemporary terms as a homosexual tormented by socially implanted concepts of morality and guilt—and what use would such a distinction have been to him, anyway? Like Lyllian, he was presented with a choice between an outlaw existence as a sodomite and the hope of reform in a marriage with a sympathetic woman. No other course was open to him. His adventures with the lycée boys possessed an air of corrupt, artificial innocence; it was more about playacting and titillating dreams of antiquity than about sex. In exile, again like Wilde after his debacle, Fersen became exclusively homosexual, and it was not playacting, for a respectable heterosexual life was no longer possible for him. However earnestly he might have wished it, he could never have found a suitable match. And if a man of means wanted to chase boys, Capri was just the place for it.

  * * *

  MANY WRITERS WHO have considered Fersen’s life express wonderment at his choice of Capri as the rock of his exile. Roger Peyrefitte fabricated a youthful meeting with Oscar Wilde to make it plausible. Yet it was a logical choice, almost the obvious one. In America or Australia, Fersen would have faced legal sanctions against Uranian love just as punitive as those in England, but Italy had repealed the laws against homosexual relations in 1889. In any case, Capri was under mainland control in theory only. The literary phenomenon of the Orgy of Tiberius had established Capri in the European imagination as an exotic place of escape for men (as they mostly were, until the twentieth century) who deviated from the norm in their sexual preferences. Tacitus and Suetonius were not specific about the sex of the emperor’s orgy mates, but when Achille Essebac elegized the ephebes of Tiberius descending from the heights of Capri, he was following a venerable tradition that they were male.

  Another attraction for Fersen was that Capri in the early twentieth century remained almost as much a sanctuary of Greek tradition as it was when Augustus visited there. Germans, most classical of Europeans, had come to the island in Greek-thirsty hordes throughout the nineteenth century. In Recollections of an Alienist, Allan McLane Hamilton, the early owner of Villa Castello, posted a stereotypical complaint that the Germans “overran the island: there was hardly a path that was not strewn by them with empty sardine cans and greasy papers, scraps of ham and bread, marking their daily walks; their noisy voices also penetrated everywhere.”

  In 1827, August von Platen-Hallermünde, like many young German men of his generation, followed in the footsteps of Goethe on a classical pilgrimage to Italy. Platen’s reputation as a lyric poet of the first rank has remained secure in his homeland, but he has been only sparsely translated into English. Among his earliest works in Italy is an ode to the fishermen of Capri, which was obviously based on personal observation. Platen begins with a topographical sketch of the island, as Tacitus and the Marquis de Sade had done before him: “If you have come to Capri, this rock-girdled island, as a pilgrim, then you know how difficult it is to find a harbor for approaching ships: Only two locations are suitable.” The Marina Grande is a spacious harbor open to Naples’s lovely bay, while the lesser haven, the Marina Piccola, looks out upon the sea, the “waving wilderness.” From there, “you see no shore other than the one you are standing on.” Above the poem’s imagined pilgrim looms the Castiglione,

  a crumbling structure

  with loopholes, where there was always a watchtower

  to guard the open beach from Algeria’s flags,

  come to snatch the island’s virgins and young men.

  Descending to the sandy gravel, “you will behold a rock low and flat, braving the surf of the waves,” bare but for a fisherman’s hut, the most isolated habitation on the island.

  Here, early in life, the boy tests himself dashing against the waves.

  Soon he learns to take the helm and steer the rudder.

  The headstrong child caresses the curling dolphin,

  which, lured by sounds, comes rolling toward the boat.

  May a god bless you and your daily work,

  peaceful people, so close to nature and the mirror of the universe!…

  Live! The ancient fathers of your race lived just as you do,

  ever since this island was first torn from Siren’s seat,

  and Augustus’s daughter here bewept sweet crimes.4

  Platen’s ode, among the earliest works by a foreign poet in Capri, sounded themes that would dominate the literature associated with the island until the modern era: the island’s solitude in the “waving wilderness,” the desolate majesty of its landscape subjugating the human inhabitants.

  Scion of an impoverished noble family, Platen was enrolled first in the Royal Cadet School, in Munich, and then at an academy for court pages, where he discovered his attraction to his own sex. Throughout his life, he was shadowed by a sense of guilt that verged on doom as a result of his sexual inclination. Platen was a master of the sonnet and cultivated archaic classical forms. German Romantic poetry often has an unhealthy dose of Weltschmerz: if things are going rapturously well with the beloved, the reader knows that tragedy will soon follow. In Platen’s works, the sense of impending calamity and self-pitying grief is sometimes oppressive. It was ridiculed by his contemporaries, but his sense of martyrdom was not baseless. Heinrich Heine, for one, picked a feud with him, denouncing him as a homosexual.

  Thomas Mann undertook a major rehabilitation of Platen, whose poetry was a crucial influence on Death in Venice. In an essay, Mann proposed that Platen’s preoccupation with form was directly linked with his eros, the subject overt or covert of most of his poetical works. “The Persian ghazal, the Renaissance sonnet, the Pindaric ode,” wrote Mann, “all knew the cult of youths and lent it literary legitimacy. Because [Platen] took them over from the past—and with what unheard-of artistic brilliance he recast them!—their emotional content could also appear borrowed, as an archaicizing convenience, impersonal and therefore possible in this world.” Pederastic love was the principal theme of the ghazal, indeed almost its only subject. Platen did not have the Persian poet’s option of addressing love poems to the living youths he admired, but by adopting the form of the ghazal, he invested his verses, outwardly lofty in tone, with the emotional muscle of the erotic poetry he imitated.

  Platen’s journey to Capri had been inspired by his close friend August Kopisch’s visit there the year before. Kopisch became an instant celebrity in Germany after he claimed to h
ave discovered the Blue Grotto, a sea cavern on the island’s northwestern coast, which is illuminated by sunlight that shines through an underwater cavity and irradiates the waters with a sparkling azure glow. Kopisch swam into the cave in 1826 after his innkeeper tipped him off, and he described its weird beauty in The Discovery of the Blue Grotto of Capri, which was reprinted in many editions. Kopisch’s claim to fame was spurious, of course; the Capriotes had always known of the grotto’s existence but avoided it as an unlucky place. Yet the success of Kopisch’s book soon made the Blue Grotto the island’s most celebrated natural attraction, a must for every visitor.

  Just fifteen years later, the choreographer August Bournonville, a principal creator of the Danish school of ballet, visited the cavern on an Italian tour, which inspired him to set an act of one of his most famous ballets there. Napoli, a staple of the repertory of the Royal Danish Ballet since its premiere in 1842, is the story of Gennaro and Teresina, young lovers who are shipwrecked during a moonlight cruise in the Gulf of Naples, at the end of act 1. In the second act, naiads transport Teresina’s lifeless body to the Blue Grotto, where the presiding deity of the gulf holds court. He miraculously revives her and makes her a naiad in his service. Gennaro finds her there, and by the ballet’s end she is restored to human form, and to him. The Blue Grotto act has long been regarded as the ballet’s weakest, known as “Brønnum’s akten,” because after the first intermission many members of the audience would go to Brønnum’s restaurant, near the theater, to have a drink and a snack and then return for the finale, an exuberant expression of the sunny southern streak in the Danish golden age, capped by a famous tarantella.

  In his memoir, Bournonville is moved to a Romantic rapture by the Blue Grotto. Observing the magical transformation of his handkerchief when it is dipped in the water, he leaps overboard: “One’s body glows in the water like a sulfurous flame, and each spray is a spark.” He accepts Kopisch’s fanciful theory that a subterranean path once led from Tiberius’s palace to the cavern, which collapsed in an earthquake, “and now the imagination can have free play through the centuries during which the grotto stood forgotten and unknown,” a process that, for him, resulted in act 2 of Napoli. “What crystalline mirrors in the sharp edges of the stone!” he effuses. “What echoes! And how mysterious is the atmosphere, which suddenly takes away the thought of everything that has delighted or offended one in the outside world.”