Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Another way of posing the issue is to put the onus on the reader. The ethos and mood of Fersen’s Babylonian legend is overwrought and precious, no doubt, but any work of literature from the past requires the reader not only to suspend disbelief but also to participate willingly in the ethos of its era. We are accustomed to making this voluntary suspension of taste when, for example, we read Shakespeare: anyone who would complain that the events narrated by Romeo and Juliet are unbelievable, depending upon absurdly bad timing and the existence of a narcotic that mimics death, only displays a failure of the imagination. After we have read the play and seen it performed on the stage, and watched the film versions, after we have seen Gounod’s opera and Prokofiev’s ballet, we accept the preposterous elements of the plot with ease. To take an example more remote in the past, the erotic allure of pretty little Lysis in Plato’s dialogue is simply weird, too troubling for modern readers to contemplate, so they read the dialogue for its analysis of the nature of friendship and ignore its erotic framing.

  Yet The Kiss of Narcissus is uncomfortably close to our own era. Modern readers of the novel are aware that when Fersen wrote it, James had already published The Turn of the Screw, Conrad Lord Jim, and Gide The Immoralist, serious, highly original novels set in their own time that deal, in various shades of murk, with the theme of intimate relationships between males. (In the case of The Turn of the Screw, the character of a young boy under the unwholesome influence of an adult servant is named Miles.) The classical background of Fersen’s book was conventional in its own time, its allusions to ancient Greek and Roman literature as familiar to his readers as Romeo and Juliet is to modern ones. Yet classical education would soon go into decline, and by the end of the twentieth century it was itself an antique. Most contemporary readers of The Kiss of Narcissus approach the book with little more than a vague awareness of Ovid’s version of the myth.

  A similar interpretive difficulty presents itself with respect to Fersen’s life: for it to be a masterpiece, as Cocteau proposed, one must accept the erotic idealization of the male adolescent as a guiding aesthetic principle. It was an eccentric notion in the Decadent era, but soon it would pass into the realm of psychopathology, intolerable in even the most progressive circles of societies that place a higher value on the protection of children than any that preceded it. Pederasty was not a universal theme, but it was at least familiar to Fersen’s readers, often in sublimated form. When Lord Henry Wotton, puffing on an “opium-tainted cigarette,” first sees the portrait of Dorian Gray in Basil Hallward’s studio, he calls him a “young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves,” and exclaims, “Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus.” Lord Henry imagines the sitter as a lovely thing, “some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at,” yet there is no clear suggestion of carnal relations. If such an idea should occur to the reader, Lord Henry offers as a defense, in what would soon become a wretched irony, “Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders.” Wilde’s ruin a few years later created a panic among homosexuals, but its effects were felt throughout the society: the moral decadence of the Decadents predicted the decay of the aristocracy. Fersen’s trial was a further, explicit tipping point in the process.

  We may view the life of Oscar Wilde as a tragedy, with Wilde in the sympathetic role of a martyr, because he was a genius, as he himself proclaimed with immortal panache to customs agents on his arrival in New York. Yet as Cocteau gleefully pointed out, Fersen was not a genius. Fersen’s vision was rooted in the Decadent literature of the fin de siècle, and his influence on younger writers was nil, but in Lord Lyllian, The Kiss of Narcissus, and other works he displays a certain boldness, even bravery, by portraying love between men (or rather males) openly, while James, Forster, and Lawrence were writing in code. The erotic fascination with doomed, beautiful youths that flickers through British poetry in the era of the First World War is acceptable because it is a muted leitmotif, merged with the modern myth of noble youths who died like Homeric heroes when their ethereal beauty was at its peak. The fleshly undertones remain safely buried.

  The challenge of reading Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen is to appreciate the value of literature behind the curve of taste, to be moved by the pathos of a jealous, self-pitying drug addict, a cosseted aristocrat who never experienced a day of want in his life. It is a steep hill to climb. Yet those born to wealth suffer as much as poor folks do, and we cannot always be praising Homer: Fersen was both an outlier and an outcast who occupies a niche not the less interesting for its narrowness. It is more difficult to sympathize with those whose suffering is self-inflicted than with people who suffer unjustly. Yet for most of us, the victims of history and poverty remain pathetic abstractions, while we can see ourselves in fellow creatures who create their own troubles.

  AT THE SAME time that Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen was losing himself in amorous reveries of classical antiquity, other sojourners in Capri gloried in the present and saw salvation in the future. “We want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!” proclaimed Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement’s founder, in 1909, in the first of many manifestos. Marinetti’s contribution to Akademos and his reciprocal invitation to Fersen to write for his own journal were a flirtation of convenience on both sides, arising from the perennial pursuit of writers for markets and editors for copy. It could never have resulted in a lasting relationship, for their essential principles were in almost diametrical opposition.

  The Futurists had no interest in slim, gilt ephebes but rather enjoyed a lusty appetite for robust women. They despised the gentle pleasures of Arcadia and exalted the modern city. Yet imitating the flexible principles of the exiled Bolsheviks who had preceded them there, the Futurists happily made an exception for Capri, tolerant and welcoming to visitors of any persuasion. At a conference to promote conservation on Capri, held at the Gardens of Augustus in 1922, Marinetti declared with characteristic extravagance that the island was “the refuge for indispensable disorders” and “a blow against European order and bureaucratic moral duty.” He proclaimed Capri a Futurist island, in part because of its exciting, unruly landscape and in particular for its vernacular architecture, which evolved in isolation from the linear progression of historical styles—in other words, free from the tyranny of the Greek orders.

  The Futurist beachhead in Capri was established in 1917 by Fortunato Depero, a student of Giacomo Balla, the first-generation Futurist painter, with whom he wrote a manifesto modestly entitled “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.” Depero was a guest of the visionary Swiss writer Gilbert Clavel, who had been based in Anacapri since 1910. Sergei Diaghilev had commissioned Depero, at the age of twenty-three, to design the sets and costumes for a new ballet by Stravinsky, which was never realized. It was Diaghilev’s secretary, Mikhail Semenov, who introduced Depero to Clavel. Depero described his host as a “little gentleman, hunchbacked, with a nose cut like a square bracket and gold teeth, with a glassy, nasal laugh, who wore ladies’ slippers. A man of strength and willpower endowed with superior cultivation, a professor of Egyptian history, a researcher and observer with the sensitivity of an artist, a writer, and a lover of people, poetry, and metaphysics.”

  The hunchbacked Egyptologist and the rising Futurist painter had a productive summer in 1917: Depero drew the illustrations for Clavel’s philosophical novel School for Suicide, and they teamed up on a fairy-tale ballet for puppets. Caffè Morgano, the meeting place for expatriate artists and intellectuals in Capri, mounted one of the first exhibitions of Futurist paintings anywhere, with a small show of Depero’s paintings, which included portraits of Gilbert Clavel. In 1928, Depero immigrated to New York, where he had notable success as a commercial artist and designed windows for Macy’s and covers for The New Yorker and Vogue. After his return to Italy, he and Balla attempted to maintain the creative momentum of Futurism, which was now fatally identified with Fascism.

  The
most important Futurist visitor to Capri was Marinetti himself, the movement’s glamorous leader. Among the more outrageous premises of the first manifesto was its glorification of war, “the world’s only hygiene.” The Futurists greeted the First World War joyfully. Marinetti led a volunteer force of bicyclists from Lombardy that fought in the mountains on the border with Austria, above Lake Garda. The horrors of combat soon dispelled the Futurists’ idealistic illusions about the cleansing power of war, particularly after Umberto Boccioni, one of the movement’s most talented and original artists, was killed in action in 1916. Marinetti was wounded in 1917, and at some point during or after his recovery he came to Capri with Bruno Corra, the pen name of Bruno Ginanni Corradini, whose career as a Futurist was short-lived. They collaborated on a short satirical novel, The Island of Kisses, published in 1918, which simultaneously presents the movement’s response to the experience of war and mounts an attack on the pederasts in Capri; it also functions, perhaps more than the authors intended, as a self-satire of the Futurist mania for manifestos.

  Styling itself “an erotic-social novel,” The Island of Kisses takes a chaotic form that might be likened to the hallucinatory, quasi-journalistic fantasies of Hunter Thompson, with the authors as prankster-narrators. Marinetti and Corra recount their experience as covert observers of a meeting of a secret international society of homosexuals, the Pink Congress, which is held in the Blue Grotto. The novel begins, “Our too intense participation in the feverish life of our bellicose, revolutionary era forced us, in early August, to take fifteen days of total vacation.” A Futurist holiday, it begins at a train station in Milan and proceeds to a steamship bound for Capri. After they embark in Naples, the Futurists find themselves in the company of fourteen well-dressed men, a group “linked by an incomprehensible common interest.” The “mysterious tourists” are a cosmopolitan group, which includes a Russian legislator, a Rumanian baron, an Egyptian lawyer, the director of a library in Chicago, a Polish archaeologist, a Brazilian planter, and the Grand Duke Federor Cohn, an anti-Semitic English Jew who has converted to Christianity. The leader of the group is a French writer, Count Paul de Ritten, an approximation of Fersen, a required element of any fiction set in Capri: “A beautiful young man, slender, with pale blue eyes beneath wavy blond hair, which he pats into place from time to time with his thin, aristocratic hands, loaded with antique rings.” De Ritten’s sex-kittenish wife is the only woman in the group.

  As the steamship speeds across the gulf, “the nude profile of the Isle of Capri, pearly, recumbent, useless, and absurd,” looms into view. After the passengers disembark at the Marina Grande, Marinetti and Corra follow the group to the Blue Grotto Hotel. There, they meet an agent of the Italian government posing as a commercial traveler, who fills them in about what he has learned after shadowing members of the Pink Congress throughout the world for five years. Later that night, at the hotel, the de Rittens have a loud argument. After the count storms out, Marinetti sneaks into their room and comforts his wife. He makes a pass at her, which ends in a “kiss that explains nothing.”

  The middle bulk of the book is devoted to the polemical proceedings of the Pink Congress, which also calls itself the Physiological International, a jeering allusion to the Comintern. After the men assemble in the Blue Grotto and admire one another’s bathing costumes, the congress elects Count de Ritten as president. The first order of business is to do something about the dreadful heat and mosquitoes, which are disturbing their sleep. When one member, a Swiss antiquarian and numismatist, proposes installing colossal electric fans throughout the island, de Ritten cuts him down, denouncing the proposal as “disgustingly revolutionary and Futuristic. We want nothing modern!” He calls for a crusade against electric lights and fast trains. He declares, “Down with bicycles, motorcycles, and automobiles, which deform the divine beauty of men!” and makes a counterproposal, to hire orchestras to play every night, hidden in vineyards, to fill the Capriote nights with the music of divine Beethoven and superhuman Bach.

  As the debate descends into trivia, de Ritten calls on the assembly to table these proposals and get to the main business, the adoption of a platform and plan of action. He calls on Count Ricard, who is “French or Irish,” round-faced, with tender blue eyes, an angelic mouth, and plump, shapely hands, to deliver a prepared speech that expounds the group’s official ideology. The Futurists’ ambivalence about the war is apparent in the satire: “Only the rocky cliffs of Capri have managed to resist the infamous conflagration”; only Capri, languidly lying on the sea, a neutral and international land, the tranquil mistress of twilight, opposes the ignoble brutality of war. Ricard outlines a nine-point plan of action, denouncing the wicked Germans, affirming support for the archaeological excavation of Greek ruins, condemning progressives and Futurists to death, vowing to suppress all machines and restore silence to the cities, and to expel women, so vulgar and smelly, from Capri, the capital of a new world order of elegant love, famous ruins, and manicured hands.

  These dignified proceedings are brought to an abrupt halt by Madame de Ritten, who bursts into the Blue Grotto, condemns the men as pigs and pederasts who have corrupted her husband, and shoots herself. The Pink Congress is thrown into an hysterical uproar—“Women are always so stupid and melodramatic!” “What a vulgar gesture!” “Our party is ruined!”—but the Futurist interlopers admire her dead body: “The corpse was surprisingly beautiful. The head was thrown back, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling of the cavern, drenched in a rapid battle of azure reflections, which made the pupils of the eyes seem to be animated continuously by voluptuous glances.” From the ruins of the corsage she was wearing “emerged the miraculous purity of the right breast, a dome with a small scarlet wound that did not drip blood.” The president, unfazed by his wife’s suicide, announces that on the next day her funeral will be held in Anacapri, where the Pink Congress will celebrate the symbolic death of heterosexual love.

  The Futurists plan a prank to upset this solemn ritual: they make a nocturnal run across the gulf to Naples, where they visit their favorite brothel and recruit some whores to come back with them to disrupt the funeral of Madame de Ritten. The ceremony takes place on a high crag overlooking the sea. It begins with a long speech by de Ritten, which repeats the effeminate aestheticism and misogynistic claptrap of the congress, ripe with Wagnerian allusions and inspiring maxims such as “Dress well,” and declares that the supreme pleasure in life is to have your stunning ensemble praised by an intelligent friend. He promises that “our Pink Congress will save humanity” and predicts that after his wife’s body has been sunk in the waters where Tiberius bathed, “the war will magically end and the new religion of distinction, elegance, refined nostalgia, and classical music will pacify the world.”

  Meanwhile, the Futurists and the prostitutes have sneaked up to the precipice. When de Ritten concludes his remarks and they hear the swooshing whisper (“sussurrrrrri frusssssciaaaanti”) of the coffin sliding down the cliff, Marinetti, Corra, and their Amazon warriors leap from their hiding place and attack. The whores beat the men savagely: “Broil. Indistinct gesticulation in the starry twilight. Punches, terrified yelps. Bodies collapsing on one another. The whistling rip of fabric. Body to body. Tumbles. Rolling among the stones.” The women parry the insults of the sodomites and condemn them as bad for business. Echoing the slogan of a labor demonstration, the women’s leader cries, “Down with unfair competition!” Then it all goes very wrong. The Island of Kisses concludes on an odd note of apology. “We wanted to pull off an atrocious Futurist joke and a demonstration against those who live in the past, but the wine of Capri had maddened the women. The play became tragic.”Markoff, the Russian legislator, falls to his death, dragging two of the prostitutes down with him.

  The Island of Kisses is an amusing jeu d’esprit, but its satire is blunted, in part because the Futurists manifestly share the Pink Congress’s sentimental attachment to Capri, starting with its setting of the main action at the Blue Grotto, sym
bol of Capri’s fabulous, unearthly beauty. The descriptions of the landscape are as rapturous as any in the conventional romantic fictions set there. After their ferry arrives at the island, the Futurists stop for lunch on the waterfront: “The warm, soft lilac twilight, suffocating in its sweetness, dampened the island’s rough outlines, its green volumes of vegetation, marked by the white patches of the villas, and muffled the cries of the boatmen of the Marina Grande.” The satire of the Pink Congress lacks a bitter note, the essential satiric element of animosity toward the target. Following the mainstream attitude of their age, Marinetti and Corra treat the homosexuals as spoiled milksops, ridiculous in their obsession with grooming and wardrobe, not as dangerous enemies.

  Another work of Marinetti’s from Capri, almost completely forgotten, which belies his self-made reputation as the nemesis of the classical past, is his translation of the Germania of Tacitus. The translation was commissioned by Umberto Notari, one of Italy’s leading publishers, in 1928, as part of an integral collection of ancient Roman literature in Italian. The decision excited consternation at the time. Why assign the founder of Futurism to render a venerable Latin classic by Tacitus, a compendium of received knowledge about the history and ethnography of the Germanic tribes, into Italian? Notari, a witness at Marinetti’s wedding to Benedetta Cappa, in 1923, might have wanted to help his old friend by offering him paid work. Marinetti explained his decision to undertake the translation in the book’s preface. He wrote that when Notari made the offer, he was on a holiday in Capri, and the job gave him “a youthful way to begin days that were full of long baking in the sun in Capri, plunging headlong into the turquoise liquid sunk in the depths of sea caverns, and carrying on immense conversations with the Futurist Benedetta while she was nursing our baby.”