Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  During the war years, Fersen’s steel shares were in abeyance, forcing him to live on a reduced budget, and his avoidance of his military obligations was another blot on his reputation on the island. Nino Cesarini loyally stood by his lover and patron, and after his discharge from the army the two men were joyfully reunited and set out on a series of voyages while they awaited permission to return to Capri. They cruised first to the Cyclades and Tunisia and then embarked on another long voyage in the Orient, which concluded in Japan. In April 1913, the Italian government granted Fersen permission to return, which he celebrated with a book-length Ode to the Promised Land, dedicated to Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti.

  Fersen and Cesarini had arrived at a modus vivendi that followed the pattern of many gay partnerships in which the element of sexual desire, and therefore of jealousy, is unequal: Cesarini accepted his patron’s incorrigible philandering, so long as his own position as consort and male chatelaine of Villa Lysis remained unchallenged. Fersen’s love for Cesarini never abated, though it found expression in toxic jealousy on a few occasions, when the younger man dabbled in affairs with women his own age. Fersen’s judgment was debilitated even as his libido was goaded by his narcotic habit, and he diverted more of his emotional life into casual sex with poor Italian youths, the descendants of Achille Essebac’s “flower-boys of the Spanish Steps” and “cheeky street urchins of Naples” and the forebears of the hustlers championed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. Cesarini seems to have been truly bisexual by nature. His attachment to Fersen plainly arose from love, strengthened by the habit of companionship and not primarily by financial dependency.

  Fersen’s final years trace a pathetic trajectory of decline that followed the usual course of addiction. By the age of forty, his prodigious daily dosage of opium, thirty to forty pipes a day, had shattered his health and spoiled his good looks. He committed himself to a hospital in Naples to undergo a cure, but the horrors of detoxification were too much for him. He took to the use of cocaine, which was legally available without a prescription, to palliate the withdrawal symptoms, which had the usual result of simply transferring his addiction to the new drug. The doctors pronounced Fersen incurable, and he returned to Villa Lysis for what amounted to his own death vigil. He became increasingly isolated, though from time to time he still threw a famous party, as when Sergei Diaghilev brought the dancers of the Ballets Russes to Capri for a holiday after performances in Naples, and they emptied Fersen’s wine cellar and danced on the terrace.

  The rift with the Wolcott-Perrys had healed, but after Saidee’s death, in 1917, Kate was inconsolable and lived in a shadowy state of widowhood. Norman Douglas had repatriated to England during the war years and came back to Capri only after his arrest for making sexual advances to a youth on the London Underground, when he jumped bail and made his exile permanent. The golden age of expatriate society in Capri, if it merits the metaphor, at any rate the era in which Fersen had distinguished himself, had come to an end. More and more often the parties at Villa Lysis had two guests now, the lord of the manor and his companion to prepare the pipe.

  Even as his life force was diminishing, Fersen made one final conquest, or it might be more appropriate to say he was conquered for the last time, when he met fifteen-year-old Corrado Annicelli, the son of a notary from Sorrento, who was in Capri on a holiday with his parents. Although there could not have been much doubt about Fersen’s intentions, Corrado’s parents consented to their son’s association with him on the grounds that he could perfect his French. For his part, Annicelli, in Will Ogrinc’s analysis, “was torn between feelings of sincere love for Jacques and compassion and an intense disgust for his drug addiction.” Fersen took the boy on a trip to Sicily, where they repeated the itinerary of his visit there with Cesarini, calling on Baron von Gloeden and making a pilgrimage to Platen’s grave. On their return to Sorrento, Fersen was so ill that the Annicellis advised him to check into a hospital, but he was bent on going to Naples to purchase a fresh supply of opium on the black market. There, he was too weak for Corrado to care of him alone, so Nino Cesarini came and collected them at their hotel and brought them back to Capri.

  Fersen died on the night of his return, of an overdose of cocaine dissolved in a glass of champagne. Peyrefitte composed an elaborate, melodramatic suicide scene, with bathetic echoes of the death of Socrates, interlocutor of Lysis. Suicide is obviously a plausible scenario; in the course of his research, Peyrefitte interviewed Corrado Annicelli, by then happily married, so he was well informed. Yet Norman Douglas wrote a different version, which was also based on contemporary testimony: “He dined, and as he was lighting his after-dinner cigarette fell forward—dead. Heart failure. Ten years’ opium smoking had prepared the way: two years’ cocaine sniffing finished him off.” The difference in the two scenarios may not amount to much (and in any case, Fersen had smoked opium habitually for some eighteen years). One romantic detail that all accounts agree on is that on the night of Fersen’s death a thunderstorm with spectacular displays of lightning struck Capri, which lasted twelve hours. He was buried in the non-Catholic cemetery in Capri, with a headstone engraved only with his name and the dates of his birth and death. His name is misspelled “Baron Jaques Adelsward Fersen,” lacking the c in his first name, the nobiliary particle, and the umlaut in his surname.

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF the twentieth century, critics and scholars, and therefore most readers, ranked writers by their claim to “greatness,” a vague quality based in part upon the artistic value of their work, assessed by various systems that attempted to objectify aesthetic standards, but to a greater extent by their influence on literary history, defined in general terms by an author’s stylistic originality and influence on younger writers. By the end of the century, these arbiters of taste had been supplanted by moral tribunes, who evaluate artists as phenomena of social history, judging them by their private behavior and political convictions more than by the quality of their work per se. Such ideological factors always played a significant role, notably in the aftermath of the Second World War, when many artists and writers who had supported Fascist regimes were ostracized. Yet among the academic critics who now tend the canon, there is scant leeway for artists of the past who failed to adhere to the prevalent moral standards of the present day (Norman Douglas being an egregious example).

  Fersen fails by every measure. His private behavior was controversial in his lifetime and repellent by contemporary mores. Here is not the place for a discourse on evolving attitudes toward pederasty, sometimes euphemistically called intergenerational sex, in contradistinction to pedophilia, a psychiatric disorder in which adults are fixated on prepubescent children. Suffice it to say that the broad acceptance of homosexuality in Western societies in the present era has brought with it a strictly enforced prohibition against sex between adults and adolescent minors and an upward creep in the age of consent, by social convention if not in law. Anita de Pascale and Tonino Gargiulo’s tolerant views about an opium addict with a passion for adolescents occupy the liberal end of the contemporary spectrum in Western democracies.

  The particular interest of Fersen’s works for the modern reader is the spectacle of the final decadence of Decadence, a bizarre efflorescence of hyperaesthetic attitudes of mind that shade provocatively into spiritual sickness. I have given little attention to Fersen’s mature verse, but it is mostly devoted to celebrations of the beauty of youth, male youth, which found its most fervent expression in sexual jealousy. When Fersen and Nino Cesarini visited Venice on a holiday in 1907, Cesarini carried on a flirtation with a Russian woman, the daughter of Mark Antokolski, a well-known sculptor specializing in Jewish subjects. Sacha Antokolski was smitten by Cesarini’s swarthy good looks and followed him to Capri, where she seduced him. Hysterical, Fersen dashed off a collection of poems called Thus Sang Marsyas. The title refers to a mortal piper who challenged Apollo to a musical contest. After the inevitable outcome, proud Marsyas was flayed alive, which provided
Fersen with the metaphor for his suffering over Cesarini’s betrayal, as he saw it. The poems address Nino’s godlike beauty, the tragic prospect of life without him, and the treachery of Woman, a staple of Decadent literature that originated in Baudelaire’s angry poems denouncing his mistress Jeanne Duval as a vampire. Fersen’s poem “She Who Crushes the Marrow” (“La fripeuse de moelle”), which is dedicated to his rival by name, addresses Cesarini with appalling acrimony:

  Yet perhaps one evening, embittered by remorse,

  You will remember my anguished tenderness:

  Your embrace of her will feel as icy to you

  as a swoon on the ankles of a corpse!

  And when the nauseating odor of menstruation

  Squirts its sticky vomit from the matrix,

  You will think you are seeing the overflow of an obscene chalice,

  Of blood coagulated deep within the sex organ of a gravedigger,

  Of gases evacuated by the Vampire-Eve!

  Even an enthusiastic misogynist, who may derive a certain guilty pleasure from Baudelaire’s sick fancies, mellowed by the patina of time and protected by the poet’s imperishable reputation, shrinks in horror from Fersen’s disgusting vision.

  His imaginative works about opium addiction, another Baudelairean theme, embody other Decadent elements, such as a fascination with exoticism, which had its origin in Wilde’s Salomé and, more ambiguously, The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Ecstasy,” a short story published in Akademos, is set in the opiarium at Villa Lysis, which he describes in precise detail as “a smoking room half underground” with a “thick architrave supported by squat columns with large chrysanthemums,” transposed to an island in the Indian Ocean during a storm. Two lovers, Rama and Kali, experience a vision of supreme euphoria. A human skull suspended above them as decor begins to weep, inviting them to make their perfect, ecstatic union eternal. Kali knows why the skull weeps: it is a prediction of the day when death will part the two lovers. He tenderly murders Rama by pressing a golden needle into his heart, then leans down and sips the blood dripping from the breast of his beloved.

  “Ecstasy” was published in 1909, soon after Fersen had discovered opium. Yet even when his addiction to the drug was advanced and he was experiencing its hellish effects, he was unable to abandon his mystical belief in the drug’s mysterious power to produce visions of an alternate reality. Fersen’s last book, published in 1921, was a slim collection of verse devoted almost entirely to the subject of opium. Soaked in exotic atmosphere, Hei Hsiang: The Black Perfume opens with a worshipful paean to the drug:

  Tonight I sing of opium,

  Opium the unlimited, opium the vast,

  Opium, hieratic son of Asia,

  Who provides

  The sweetness for nectar, ambrosia for peace,

  Which the ten thousand tutelary genies

  Have resurrected like an act of forgiveness,

  The words of light since Confucius and Meng Tseu [Mencius].

  One of the poems is addressed to Baudelaire, identified as “He who never came,” a reference to Baudelaire’s abortive voyage to Asia, which terminated at Mauritius, en route to Calcutta. Fersen’s poem envisions an imaginary journey with Baudelaire to Angkor, the prelude to a suite of poems set in the ruins of the classical Cambodian kingdom. Angkor, presided over by the majestic temple of Angkor Wat, exerted a fascination on the French imagination at the end of the colonial era that rivaled that of ancient Egypt and Babylon, its mystery enhanced by its remoteness at a time when steamship travel was an expensive proposition that required months or years. Apart from Peyrefitte’s imaginative reconstructions of meetings with Paul Claudel and other European residents in Asia, which appear to be little more than plausible conjectures, the record of Fersen’s voyages to the Orient is sparse. However, the vividness of the Angkor poems suggests that Fersen spent some time there, indulging in opium dreams. The first two stanzas of the poem to Baudelaire may be translated thus:

  I would wish to live in the mystical jungle,

  Guided by the fervor of your eyes of the believer,

  And to fall humble, on my knees, far from this tawdry world,

  Before the flowering of the lotus in the smiles of Buddhas,

  O disillusioned Sovereign, O Grand Asiatic!

  The Wat would reflect its unique nirvana

  In your darkened soul as in these ponds.

  We would climb with trembling steps

  These stairways raised as an assault on the white sky

  And seek the Ineffable in solemn music.

  The most urgent issue in a consideration of Fersen’s work is the basic one of literary quality. In his preface to The Exile of Capri, Cocteau dismissed Fersen with a smug phrase: “To be granted dreams but not genius must be the worst of tortures.” Supercilious, very, but not altogether unjust, and Cocteau’s palliative, that Fersen’s life might be a masterpiece to counterbalance the light weight of his writings, also makes a strong claim. Yet some readers in Fersen’s era placed a higher value on his work than Cocteau, Mackenzie, and Peyrefitte did. His most ardent advocate was Rachilde, the pen name of Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, a prominent critic and novelist of the Decadent movement. She made her name at twenty-four with a controversial novel, Monsieur Venus, on the theme of inverted sex roles, with the story of a woman who dresses as a man and transforms her male lover, a florist, into a submissive, dependent personality. Rachilde and her husband, Alfred Vallette, founded Mercure de France, one of the country’s most influential literary journals. She wrote admiring reviews of many of Fersen’s books in its pages, reserving her highest praise for his short novel The Kiss of Narcissus, which she judged worthy of the Prix Goncourt in 1907, the year it was published.

  Set in ancient Babylon, it narrates the life of a youth of extraordinary beauty (needless to say) who is chosen to be a priest at the temple of Adonis-of-the-Ivory-Hands. Miles permits older men to worship him; one of them, a famous architect, in despair that he will never win the youth’s love, kills himself by plunging a golden stiletto in his heart. Miles forms fleeting relationships with women his age, but they lack passion: he feels incapable of love. One of them, in a fury because Miles does not return her passion, finds a boy who is Miles’s double, even younger than him and his equal in beauty, and dances with him in public to arouse Miles’s jealousy. The ploy backfires when Miles falls in love with his mirror image and absconds with him. The story ends on an ambiguous, modernist note: Miles and his alter ego awaken at dawn on a dreary, deserted beach, wearing animal skins, with nothing to eat but berries. The double, disillusioned, wanders away and will not return, leaving Miles staring at his own image in a tidal pool.

  The scene of Miles’s initiation into the priesthood of Adonis-of-the-Ivory-Hands is a sequence of tableaux from a mural by Puvis de Chavannes, elegant and pallid, which invokes the myth of Narcissus as explicitly as Lord Lyllian did: “Miles asked for a mirror, and, as there was no mirror, he leaned, lovely and curious, over the basin where he had bathed. And the trembling water conveyed to him an image, or rather a shadow, but so fine and so youthful that he smiled.” His attendants rub his body with precious oils and perfumes, then fasten a golden tunic at his shoulder and bedeck him with jewels. Before the assembled priests of the temple, who are all adolescent boys except the elderly head priest, Miles sings, accompanying himself on the lyre, of the life and death of Adonis, and then he dances, “slowly at first, then enlivened by the driving, lascivious rhythm, bending and twisting his chest, sliding with winged feet.” Every time he spins around, “a mysterious power flung up his white arms, and the filmy golden tunic fluttered around them, framing the marvelous head, which shuddered giddily. Sometimes the little flowers scattered on the pavement rose in the vortex as the dance became more Dionysiac, as if they wished to float up to Miles’s lips.” At the conclusion of his performance,

  with a charming, childlike gesture, he took a violet that had fallen on his shoulder with the tips of his rosy fingers, lifted his
eyes to heaven as if to ask its protection and to clothe him with light. Then he unhooked his tunic and the silky cloth fell to the ground, fluttering around him like a moth. And he remained in a pose like that of a god, while the golden rays powdered his firm, pearly flesh with warm light. The tapering arc of his narrow ankles, muscular legs, slender at the knees, like two alabaster columns, supported his supple torso, the abdomen flat and slightly hollow, where Miles’s precocious manhood asserted itself. His head seemed a beautiful flower blooming on the neck of this human amphora, whose handles were formed by the two adolescent arms, already robust.

  This glorious apparition humbles the other ephebes to silence. The high priest, in an unprecedented gesture of abasement, kneels to kiss Miles’s knees.

  For most modern readers, the scene reads simply as camp. It is sincerely felt, a definitive requirement of camp; the question is whether the performance falls so far short of its mark that it is ludicrous rather than moving, as the author intended. Fersen was capable of pure camp, as here, in the first stanza of “Distantly,” a poem published in 1911:

  It is in a bungalow that I would have you,

  To sleep for a very long time beneath the punkah’s lullaby.

  It would be in a tropical land, a happy place:

  The banana trees, for us, would ripen in the night.

  The Kiss of Narcissus presents a borderline case: the description of Miles’s Dionysiac dance, with the painterly image of the blossoms drawn up in the vortex toward his lips, charges the scene with mystical power, yet the metaphor of the amphora teeters on the verge of the ridiculous, with the boy’s robust arms representing the tiny handles of a Greek jar, and his face a flower stuck in its neck. The description of Miles’s nude body imitates Achille Essebac’s ecstatic vision of the ephebe Luc, he of the satiny mother-of-pearl hips, published five years before. The principal difference is that in The Kiss of Narcissus Fersen attempts to evoke a dream of antiquity rather than a slice of contemporary Decadent life.