Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  After his visit to the grotto, in 1869, Mark Twain wrote an equally vivid yet more scientific account of the place in The Innocents Abroad:

  The entrance to the cave is four feet high and four feet wide, and is in the face of a lofty perpendicular cliff—the sea-wall. You enter in small boats—and a tight squeeze it is, too. You cannot go in at all when the tide is up. Once within, you find yourself in an arched cavern about one hundred and sixty feet long, one hundred and twenty wide, and about seventy high. How deep it is no man knows. It goes down to the bottom of the ocean. The waters of this placid subterranean lake are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined. They are as transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest sky that ever bent over Italy. No tint could be more ravishing, no luster more superb. Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical fires. Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver, tinted with blue. Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore.

  The Blue Grotto was well-known to the Romans. Kopisch found the remains of a nymphaeum, a seaside pleasure pavilion, or small temple, which might indeed have been built by Tiberius, adorned with life-size sculptures of Tritons, male sea deities, in dynamic poses suggestive of blowing on conchs. Fifty years later, John Clay MacKowen, a veteran of the American Civil War from Louisiana, conducted one of the first systematic surveys of the cavern, which he described in his guide to Capri, published in 1884. After the war, MacKowen, a doctor with a practice in Rome, suffered from chronic insomnia so severe that he contemplated suicide until he visited Capri, in 1877, and found he could sleep soundly there. He met a fisherman’s daughter and married her, and within two years he had fathered a child, bought a yacht, and built a house, a Gothic castle overlooking the Marina Grande, which was later converted into the first grand hotel on the harbor.

  A native of East Feliciana Parish, MacKowen was studying medicine at Dartmouth College when the Civil War broke out. He returned to Louisiana immediately after the Battle of Fort Sumter and enlisted in the Confederate army. He served with distinction and was wounded at Shiloh, and by the war’s end he held the rank of lieutenant colonel. He returned to New Hampshire to complete his degree in 1866, less than a year after Lee’s surrender—a remarkable case of forgetting bygones on both sides. By the end of the year, he was in Paris, where he enrolled in an advanced course of medicine, but he repatriated after a debilitating nervous breakdown. He bought a ranch in Southern California, and by 1870 he had moved to San Francisco, where he served for three years as the superintendent of public schools. Yet his brief residence in Paris had captured his imagination. He wrote to his sister that “in so cosmopolitan a city as San Francisco” there was “no danger of growing narrow-minded,” yet he nonetheless felt “a want of culture which makes life in Europe so agreeable … Ah, Europe, would that some lucky star might shine over my head in life and light the way soon to that home of all my wishes and hopes!”

  A star shone, and after postgraduate training in Vienna and Munich, MacKowen was living in Rome, the choice of Italy perhaps partly the result of his enthusiasm for opera, which he had discovered in Paris. His house was in the Piazza di Spagna, where he missed being Charles Coleman’s neighbor by only a few years; Coleman had occupied the house overlooking the Spanish Steps where John Keats had lived and died. In Capri, the two Civil War veterans, who had been on opposing sides of the cause, lived scarcely more than a mile from each other for some twenty years. It would have been impossible for their paths not to have crossed, but I have found no record of their meeting. Coleman was a genuine eccentric, living in an imagined chivalric past in Villa Narcissus, and MacKowen was a bluff, irritable man who lodged lawsuits as a hobby. He carried on a bitter feud with Axel Munthe (who, in a remarkable coincidence, had also rented Keats’s house, where he opened a medical practice after Coleman had relocated to Capri). Munthe and MacKowen were competitors in the business of digging up antiquities. According to Capri legend, the two men fell out over a marble fragment and challenged each other to a duel, which never took place because of an irreconcilable disagreement over the choice of weapons.

  In 1883, MacKowen moved out of his Gothic castle on the Marina Grande and relocated to Anacapri, near the Blue Grotto. His house, now called Casa Rossa, is a little fairy-tale palace painted Pompeii red, incorporating Greek and Roman architectural fragments and stained-glass windows, crowned by a crenellated Aragonese tower. He crammed the house with a hodgepodge of medieval arms and armor, tapestries, Turkish rugs and carved furniture, ancient pottery, and porcelain figurines he collected on his travels throughout the Mediterranean. The top floor housed his library of rare books and manuscripts. Now a museum, Casa Rossa exhibits four sculptures of Tritons from the Blue Grotto, corroded by centuries of brine into menacing grotesques, which offer a plausible rationale for the Capriotes’ belief that the cavern was haunted.

  Parcel by parcel, MacKowen acquired the land above the Blue Grotto, and thereby made himself its owner, based on the legal principle of usque ad inferos, which endows the titleholder with the control of the mineral deposits as deep as one can dig or drill. He cherished a scheme of excavating an entrance to the cavern by land, a reasonable enough proposition; the Romans had built a stairway that led down to the grotto, which was subsequently buried by subsidence. Many Capriotes agreed with MacKowen’s scheme, seeing in it a way of promoting Anacapri as a tourist destination to rival the Marinas Grande and Piccola. Others, led by his nemesis Munthe, feared it would disturb the nesting grounds of quail, a major export, and the boatmen who earned their livelihood by ferrying tourists to the cavern by sea were vehemently opposed. Embroiled in lawsuits, MacKowen returned to Louisiana in 1897, disgusted by the frustration of his scheme to open a terrestrial access to the grotto.

  MacKowen died in 1901, in a shoot-out near his home in Clinton, Louisiana. His killer was a state senator with whom he was involved in a bitter boundary dispute, who claimed that MacKowen had fired the first shot. There were no other witnesses, but everyone who knew John MacKowen believed his testimony, and the shooting was adjudged to be self-defense.

  * * *

  ON FERSEN’S FIRST voyage in the Far East, during his sojourn in Ceylon, he discovered the pleasures of smoking opium, which was on the room service menu in his hotel. He was soon addicted to its use, a habit that became an integral part of his life and eventually a major aspect of his damnation. From Ceylon he sailed to Singapore, then Penau, a tiny island in the Riau archipelago between Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, then onward to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Peking, and finally to Japan. He returned to Europe via the Pacific, with a stop in Hawaii, populated by “negresses and cannibals,” where, in a bantering letter to a friend, he claimed that he had to beg the local youths to be content with giving him blow jobs and nothing more. In San Francisco, he boarded the transcontinental train to embark on the sea voyage home. He arrived in Capri with “suitcases full of opium” and the manuscript of Lord Lyllian ready for the publisher.

  The construction of Villa Lysis was progressing well. The architect of record was Édouard Chimot, a friend of Fersen’s in his early twenties, who would later have success as an illustrator of frothy erotica, specializing in the “petites filles perdues” (lost little girls) of Montmartre. However, it is clear from his letters to Chimot that Fersen himself was the house’s principal designer. Villa Lysis was intended to dazzle the eye, a condensed château in the neoclassical style of Louis XVI with Art Nouveau accents, such as gold mosaic insets in the grooves of the Ionic columns. The most unusual feature of the interior is a semi-subterranean opium den with short, squat pillars, overwrought with a bas-relief of chrysanthemums, and a mosaic floor with a Greek key border. In her biographical sketch of her ancestor, Viveka Adelswärd, the present baroness, describes Villa Lysis in a vivid metaphor as “a house in the sun with fantastic views, but also darkened by
shadows and dangerously close to the abyss. Take one false step and the fall is fatal. A house filled with beauty—but on the edge.”

  Like many foreign visitors before and after him, Fersen was enchanted by the stunning topography of Capri. In his memoir Looking Back, Norman Douglas wrote that a few days after Fersen’s arrival there, Douglas led him to a crag near the summit of Monte Tiberio, which commanded a panoramic view of the Gulf of Naples, “a favorite spot of mine, high up, where you could dream through the summer evenings.” The young lord instantly decided to build his house there. Douglas scrupulously pointed out the disadvantages: in winter, winds would lash the exposed cliffside location with rain, and the only source of water would be cisterns, which would have to be excavated from the rock, to catch rainwater. Douglas wrote that Fersen chose the location because it was spectacular: “It was remote yet conspicuous. People would be sure to enquire who could live, and build himself a palace, in such a situation; they would then learn that it was the retreat of a young and handsome French poet, who had turned his back on the world … He would be talked about.”

  Villa Lysis got its name from a dialogue by Plato. The theme of Lysis is the nature of friendship, but this early dialogue has an elaborate narrative context. As Socrates strolls through Athens, a group of young men hail him and strike up a conversation. One of them, Hippothales, is maddened by an infatuation with Lysis, a boy whose age is not specified but who seems to be at the threshold of puberty. Hippothales’s friends chaff him for his inept attempts to woo the boy, and Socrates offers to give him some tips about how best to gain his love. The young men take the philosopher to the gymnasium, where he engages Lysis and a classmate in a philosophical discussion, while Hippothales lurks out of sight taking notes. A dispassionate discourse about friendship is the work’s main subject, which is often cited in analyses of Plato’s philosophy, but it is framed as a wise elder’s advice to a younger man about how to seduce boys.

  While Villa Lysis was under construction, a worker died (or was seriously injured; the record is conflicted) when he was struck by a falling stone. Under Italian law, Fersen as the proprietor was responsible, so he took the first of several exiles within exile and fled for the mainland under the cover of night. When he was in Rome, he met a fourteen-year-old laborer named Nino Cesarini, who was working at a construction site on the Quirinal, and took a fancy to him. Fersen picked him up and went home with him to meet his parents. He obtained their permission to hire him as his secretary, undoubtedly making them a handsome gift of cash, and carried him off to Capri.

  Villa Lysis now had a muse. Fersen’s attachment to Cesarini was not motivated primarily by sexual lust per se but rather by a passionate, almost idolatrous worship of youthful beauty. Their relationship was sexual, of course, as his fleeting encounters with Sinhalese and Hawaiian youths had been on his voyage and as his subsequent trysts with other Italian boys would be. But in Nino Cesarini he pursued a platonic love, in a more exact sense than the common meaning of the phrase, corresponding to Hippothales’s passion for Lysis, in which possession of the body of the beloved plays an important part but is not the sole or even the principal object of the passion. Defying all expectations (including, perhaps, Fersen’s own), the relationship endured to the end of Fersen’s life, with no more stormy quarrels and interruptions than many long-term romantic relationships experience. Even more surprising, Cesarini, when he was old enough, took his responsibilities as secretary seriously and made himself indispensable to his scatterbrained patron. Fersen’s attachment to him grew as much because of his precocious good sense as his good looks.

  We have an exact impression of Cesarini’s physical charms, for Villa Lysis was soon filled with paintings and sculptures of him, always in the nude and usually in classical poses. A bronze sculpture by Francesco Ierace of Cesarini riding the back of a leaping dolphin was erected on a plinth at the spot where Norman Douglas had first brought the villa’s creator. Like most of the portraits of Cesarini, the sculpture was lost after Fersen’s death. (However, on my visit to Capri in 2016, I heard gossip that the sculpture is now kept in a secret garden there.) The notable aspect of Cesarini’s beauty is that even in early adolescence he did not look boyish but already possessed a mature body and the angular face of an adult, with prominent chin and cheekbones, and a modern Roman’s canny gaze.

  If anything, Fersen was the head-turning beauty, his good looks marred only by his vanity. In his memoir, Norman Douglas wrote this sketch of him: “With his childlike freshness, his blue eyes, clear complexion, and flawless figure, he could have made the impression he yearned to make, if he had not always been over-tailored.” A few months after they met, in the spring of 1905, Fersen and Cesarini made their first voyage together, to Sicily, where they made a pilgrimage to the grave of August von Platen, in Syracuse, and to Taormina, to call on Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, whose photographs of working-class boys posing in scanty togas were standard decor in the drawing rooms of pederasts. Fersen and his young consort were becoming a celebrity couple in the Uranian underground. In 1907, they set off on a long voyage to the Orient. In China, Fersen bought a collection of three hundred antique opium pipes, which were represented as having belonged to emperors.

  The Capriotes were suspicious of Nino Cesarini—not on the moral grounds raised by the island’s upright Christian foreign residents (by no means the majority of the expatriate community), but rather because he was a Roman interloper, elevated to a lucrative position of privilege that ought to have been given to a local. Again, however disgraceful the relationship might have been in the eyes of conventional morality, there was nothing criminal about it, even if Cesarini had barely attained the age of consent. Fersen, handsome as a matinee idol, rich beyond computation, with a rising if not quite an impressive reputation as a writer, possessed a degree of immunity to open reproach. In his early years there, he was the cynosure of the strange little world of expatriate Capri.

  The cast of characters was changing. The older generation of self-romancing foreign residents, dominated by men such as Charles Coleman, John Clay MacKowen, and Axel Munthe, castle builders with a penchant for duels, was supplanted by Jazz Age socialites who gave lavish entertainments at which they could flirt and quarrel. Norman Douglas’s first bestseller, Siren Land, helped to stimulate the new wave of visitors by burnishing and widely disseminating Capri’s reputation as a realm of magic and myth, which had begun with August Kopisch’s tale of his “discovery” of the Blue Grotto. Acknowledged as the island’s most learned foreign resident, Douglas was supremely sociable but a rolling stone, always running off to the mainland on expeditions in search of rare fungi and birds’ nests, and too poor to entertain.

  The unlikely social queens of Capri were a pair of elderly American women: Kate Perry, an only child who had been raised by her father, a colonel in the U.S. Army who commanded a fort in the American West, and her distant cousin Saidee Wolcott, whom Perry’s father had adopted when she was orphaned at the age of nine. The women were devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, to the point of uniting their surnames, which gave rise to the common assumption that they were sisters (and the alternative, scandalous rumor that they were lovers). The Wolcott-Perrys’ attachment to Capri followed the classic paradigm: they visited the island in the course of an Italian tour and decided on the day they arrived never to leave it. Kate sold a farm or two in Iowa and bought a house midway down the slope from the Piazzetta to the Marina Grande, which the women rebuilt in the reigning Moorish style and called Villa Torricella.

  They were indefatigable hosts: their lavish dinner-dances, serving wine made from grapes produced by the vineyards surrounding the house, became the anchors of the island’s social calendar. Faith Mackenzie, Compton Mackenzie’s wife, sketched the parties at Villa Torricella in her memoir:

  Their villa above the Grande Marina was built for gaiety: salons and loggias blazing with fairy lamps; long pergolas were lit by colored bunches of glass grapes among the vines. Till
dawn they would speed the dancers, plying their band with wine, Kate fanning herself vigorously, her tall figure held upright in her lace dress till the last guest went.

  “Oh, my! How I hate to have folks go!”

  Soon after his move to Capri, Fersen met the Wolcott-Perrys in Rome, at the Temple of Vesta, where he conquered them with his noble good looks, polished Continental manners, and fine talk salted with classical allusions. They called him Count Jack and firmly latched onto him after they all returned to Capri. At his instigation, they built a small replica of the Temple of Vesta in their garden, which figured prominently in their entertainments and thus also in Vestal Fire, Compton Mackenzie’s comic roman à clef.

  Published in 1927, the novel takes as its main story the rustic American ladies’ passionate devotion to the aristocratic dandy and their eventual disillusionment. It is at once a poignant fable of confidence betrayed and a savage satire, which paints a poisonous portrait of Fersen. His character is condemned soon after the reader meets him: “Carlyle once said that Herbert Spencer was the most unending ass in Christendom. He had not met the Count.” Vestal Fire is crafted with precision and often brutally funny, but it falls short of its intended tragic impact because of Mackenzie’s supercilious attitude toward the innocent ladies and his acidulous hostility toward the count. The principal cause of the characters’ falling-out and the author’s own disdain for Fersen was the Frenchman’s lack of patriotism during the war. Fersen avoided military service because of a spurious medical complaint, an excuse that soon wore thin. In his memoirs, Mackenzie tells a devastating anecdote, which he repeated in his novel: “My only memory of Fersen in that year of 1918 is of meeting him one evening in the spring as he was turning into the Via Tragara and of his plucking something hastily from his buttonhole, not quickly enough, however, for me not to see that it was the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, which he had awarded to himself in some opium dream.”