Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Villa Cercola today remains just as it was in Benson’s description. The present owner is Nicolino Morgano, the proprietor of the Quisisana and other hotels in Capri. He invited me to have a look at the house on a morning in early spring, just a week after the hotel had reopened from its winter hibernation. We enter by the lowest of the three gates, which presents a view of the house at the top of the knoll, with beds of flowering shrubs descending in lazy terraces. Gardeners kneel by the paths, replanting the floral borders. As we ascend to the house, Morgano explains, “I bought Villa Cercola because I felt a responsibility. My family is one of the oldest in Capri, and I was afraid what someone from the outside might do if they bought it.”

  He is being tactful: the remark is an indirect jab at the previous owner of the house, the fashion designer Valentino Garavani, who entertained the jet set here in extravagant style in the 1960s and 1970s, including famous clients such as Audrey Hepburn, who made Capri pants a worldwide staple of women’s leisure attire, and Jacqueline Onassis. As we wander through the garden, Morgano confides, “The house was in terrible condition when I bought it from Valentino. The electrical wiring was no good—there was no electricity in the house at all.” When I ask how Valentino lit the house for his famous parties, Morgano responds with an eloquent shrug and says, “The house had been empty for a long time. It was full of candles.”

  When Morgano took over the place, he made no changes apart from the repairs needed to make it habitable. “No changes at all,” he says. “We just painted it.” The exterior of the house is now a foggy shade of gray, very Romaine Brooks. He points out the old-fashioned rectangular swimming pool, a novelty in Capri when it was built, and the pergola, where, he says, Norman Douglas used to sit and write. I think he means Somerset Maugham, but I don’t say anything. Douglas was a frequent visitor and must have sat there often, and he undoubtedly wrote there sometimes as well.

  Morgano leads me inside. His wife, Carmen, makes a striking entrance, wearing a smartly tailored tweed suit with black leather trim. Looking elegant and tall in stiletto heels, she greets me warmly. One relic of Valentino’s tenancy that the Morganos have retained is a decorative mural in the smaller dining room, which is painted with a trompe l’oeil mural of vines in lush foliage, giving the room the feeling of a rustic bower. The weather is too warm to take coffee outdoors, so Signora Morgano serves it in the living room. She explains that Villa Cercola is not the family’s main residence, yet it is nonetheless decorated in a homely style. Where Andy Warhol’s portrait of Valentino used to hang, there are now family snapshots. She has kept a few mementos of the villa’s past; she hands me a framed photograph of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor lounging by the pool with a panting sheepdog.

  Affable and mild mannered, Morgano speaks softly yet exudes the self-confidence of a man born to leadership. “Tourism and hospitality were born a hundred and fifty years ago in Capri with the Morgano family,” he says proudly. “My great-grandmother Donna Lucia Morgano was the patron of the cultural world. I represent the fourth generation.”

  In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Giuseppe and Lucia Morgano took over an existing café that catered to German tourists called Zum Kater Hiddigeigei (“The Tomcat Hiddigeigei,” a cynical feline in popular satirical poems by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel, a literary antecedent of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat). Caffè Morgano became the hub of expatriate life in Capri, purveying, in addition to coffee and cocktails, goods that were otherwise hard to find, such as bathing suits and foreign newspapers, and providing invaluable services, which included tipping off their regulars when the carabinieri were after them, as Donna Lucia did for Christian Wilhelm Allers. When foreign friends ended up in jail, she helped them find a lawyer and sent over hot meals. Compton Mackenzie wrote, “Receiving a glass of vermouth from the hands of the Lady Lucia Morgano is like drinking from the miraculous breast of Mother Earth.” In 1934, Giuseppe and Lucia’s grandson Mario opened the Morgano Tiberio Palace, the family’s first hotel, which aimed to rival the Quisisana in luxury. Fifty years later, Mario bought the Quisisana, just around the corner from Caffè Morgano, which maintains its reputation as la grande dame, the island’s most prestigious hotel.

  Although he is in the prime of life, Nicolino Morgano as a native Capriote has seen enormous changes in the island. When I take my leave, as he escorts me to the upper gate, he recalls, “The big change in Capri came in the late nineties, when they started to have regular ferry service at night. Before that, there were only three or four boats a day, so not so many people could come, like now.” As a hotelier, of course, he does not complain about the volume of tourism; every visitor is a potential guest, and hospitality is in his blood. He swings the door open for me and says, with a genial smile, “Watch your step!” He points with his toe to the inscription carved on the doorstep: Cave hominem.

  * * *

  ROMAINE BROOKS’S RETURN to Capri at the end of the war was motivated in part by nostalgia, a desire to return to the place she had been happiest, where she had escaped the demands of her crazy mother before she inherited the responsibilities of wealth. John Brooks stayed on in Villa Cercola long after Maugham and Benson had left Capri, and spent the war years there. When he learned that his wife was arriving to take possession of the house, he vacated the premises, in accordance with his undertaking to stay clear of her, a requirement for his meat-but-no-pickles pension, and moved into a one-bedroom cottage at a discreet distance. Romaine adored the house and took an unwonted interest in the garden, digging and replanting it with her own hands.

  She gloried in her solitary situation at Villa Cercola and immersed herself in her work. She confided in a letter to D’Annunzio, “I shut myself up for months without seeing a soul, and give shape in my paintings to my visions of sad and gray shadows.” Yet as with her self-description as a misanthropic recluse in Paris, it is hard to reconcile this claim of months of solitude with the tally of her social calendar in Capri, which appears to have been a busy one. The island was more thickly populated by foreign visitors now than it had been on her previous visits, and it is possible that her social life seemed to her a lonely one by comparison with the never-ending round of dinner parties and picnics and thés dansants that the other foreign residents pursued; more likely, it is an attempt to make herself appear interesting to her former lover. Soon after her arrival, Faith Mackenzie paid her a welcoming call and wrote this romantic picture of the hermit of Villa Cercola: “A heat wave, hot even for Capri in August, sent temperatures up. Feverish bouquets of exhausted blooms lay about the big studio, letters and invites strewed her desk, ignored for the most part, while she, wrapped in her cloak, would wander down to the town as the evening cooled and sit in the darkest corner of Morgano’s Café terrace, maddeningly remote and provocative.”

  Now a woman of substance, wealthy and established as an artist with an international reputation, Brooks no longer needed to fend off gropers like the sentimental Mr. Burr. If there were any lingering doubts about her identity as a lesbian, in Capri she devoted herself almost entirely to the company of women. Nonetheless, Norman Douglas took a great liking to her, and she called on Fersen from time to time to have a look at a portrait of herself that hung at Villa Lysis. The artist and the present whereabouts of the painting are unknown. According to Faith Mackenzie, the portrait presented Brooks seated, wearing black knee breeches, with one white-cuffed hand dangling, and full, challenging eyes.

  Reconstructing Romaine Brooks’s life in Capri in 1918 presents the same difficulty that faces Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s biographers: the manuscript of her memoir dwindles to an inconclusive end before reaching this period of her life, and the principal account of events is a work of fiction. Extraordinary Women, Compton Mackenzie’s novel about Capri’s lesbian community, is in many ways a better book than Vestal Fire, his roman à clef about Fersen and the Wolcott-Perrys. He gathered much of the intimate background from Faith, who was Romaine Brooks’s confidante.

&nbs
p; Mackenzie wrote that “every one of the characters in Extraordinary Women is an exact portrait” (with one insignificant exception), but it is a misleading claim. Olimpia Leigh, the character that is supposed to be based on Romaine Brooks, diverges from its model in significant ways. In appearance, Olimpia Leigh is “small and dark”; Brooks was neither. The author puts her up not at Villa Cercola but rather at Charles Coleman’s Villa Narcissus, thinly disguised, with the disadvantageous site of Elihu Vedder’s Villa Quattro Venti added for comic interest. Olimpia Leigh’s mother was “a Swedish mathematician who had also been a musician and a scholar of Greek,” very different from Ella Goddard. Leigh composes lyrical music, which might be a workable substitute for painting, but her work is devoted to Sappho, and she frequently drops ancient Greek into her conversation. The Sapphic theme, perhaps borrowed from Natalie Barney and grafted onto Brooks, is an egregious misrepresentation, for Brooks took no interest in her partner’s efforts to find a classical pedigree for lesbianism in ancient Lesbos.

  In Extraordinary Women, Mackenzie’s habitual irony takes on a sarcastic edge that may be attributable to the fact that his wife had a lesbian affair while they were living in Capri. He treats the loves of these women as inherently ridiculous: neither more nor less so than love between men and women, and that between men, but the distinction is easily lost. Most readers of The Well of Loneliness are impressed (not often favorably) by Hall’s earnestness, but if Extraordinary Women was Mackenzie’s attempt to correct the discourse, he overcompensated. Nonetheless, his book, which came out immediately after The Well of Loneliness was published and banned by the censor, earned the distinction of being the first novel about lesbian lives that was permitted to be sold in British bookshops.

  Taken on its own terms, his novel is a learned, amusing fictional frolic, which resembles E. F. Benson’s ironical satires of quarrelsome provincial ladies, with an even stronger dose of venom and enlivened by a bracing dash of classical erudition. Mackenzie’s narrative skill as he unwinds a tangled skein of plots and subplots is deft and sure. One of the principal threads is a triangle, or rather a trapezoid, that involves Rory Freemantle, a female fight promoter who favors men’s suits, in furious pursuit of Rosalba Donsante, a capricious, conceited beauty, slim and graceful, who resembles Benson’s “Lucia,” Emmeline Lucas, more than a little. Rosalba in turn vies with Olimpia Leigh for the conquest of an American heiress. Rosalba gives a dinner party, narrated in a passage that exposes the misogynistic edge to Mackenzie’s view of lesbian love:

  These dinner-parties of Rosalba’s had little in common with that form of entertainment as it is usually practiced in civilized communities. They partook more of the nature of séances at which everybody is wrought up to a pitch of nervous tension and expectation. The mere passing of the salt or pepper involved as much expense of emotion as an elegy of Propertius. All life’s fever was in the salad bowl. A heart bled when a glass filled with wine. We know what an atmosphere can be created at a dinner by one jealous woman. At Rosalba’s parties there were often eight women, the palpitations of whose hidden jealousies, baffled desires, and wounded vanities was in its influence upon the ambient air as the dreadful muttering of subterranean fires before an eruption.

  Mackenzie balances his contempt with occasional flashes of sympathy for the emotional pain his characters inflict upon each other. When Rosalba appears to have shifted her affections to Olimpia Leigh, Rory Freemantle ponders whether the dignified response would be to offer her successful rival the villa she had built for her true love: “When the dusty road was behind her and she was in that cool and white seclusion, when she saw once again the azure sea through the colonnades and heard the bamboos whispering and walked past the cypresses to lean over the marble parapet and gaze upon the enameled floor of the bay, she hesitated to forsake all this for another woman. Why should Olimpia have it? Why should she withdraw in favor of a woman who had already enjoyed all that life could give?”

  In its ingenious plot construction, Extraordinary Women resembles Clare Boothe’s comedy The Women, a hit on Broadway in 1936 subsequently filmed by George Cukor, in which all the characters are female (including the children) and much of the action takes place in a couturier’s dressing room, a beauty salon, and an exercise class. Men are only talked about. In Extraordinary Women, the male characters are sketchy and usually nameless. One of the few male characters in the novel, in the comic bit part of the misguided suitor who fails to comprehend that the girl he fancies prefers her own sex, is described only as “a young Neapolitan neither more nor less good-looking than innumerable other young Neapolitans who were screaming at one another all over the island night and day, to the perpetual astonishment of elderly Englishmen who could not understand why they were not in the trenches.”

  Natalie Barney came to visit Brooks in Capri on several occasions, but never for long; Barney preferred city life and disliked travel generally. Their partnership thrived upon separation, though Brooks thrived on it more than Barney did. While Brooks was living at Villa Cercola, Barney wrote to her from Paris, “I know that you have not bathed without everyone on that hot island desiring you—that they could follow the glimmer of your perfect form to the end of the earth.” In the same letter, Barney predicts the potential result of Brooks’s love of solitude: “I fear, I suppose, that relentless quality I’ve seen at times in you, that getting-rid-of-everything quality,” and declares that if it is ever directed against her, “I must change into some dumb devoted pitiable animal.”

  This effusion of jealousy was provoked by an affair Brooks was carrying on with the concert pianist Renata Borgatti. “I am alone and you are with her,” wrote Barney. The portrait Brooks painted of Borgatti in Capri is among her finest works. In it, the theme of the androgynous female martyr to art ventures beyond the lissome, boyish figure epitomized by Ida Rubinstein and takes on a powerful female “warrior,” an artist with a male-like physique and habits. Borgatti was the daughter of the renowned tenor Giuseppe Borgatti, the leading Wagnerian Heldentenor of his time, under the patronage of Arturo Toscanini. Renata began her musical career by accompanying her father on concert tours and later found success as a solo recitalist, specializing in programs of Debussy (which presumably would have included his sparkling Prelude No. 5, Book 1, “The Hills of Anacapri,” which he composed on a visit to the island). She resembled her father not only in her blunt facial features but also in her husky build. Contemporary memoirists describe Borgatti as a woman inhabiting a man’s body, the embodiment of theories about the “third sex” espoused by Havelock Ellis and Magnus Hirschfeld. When John Singer Sargent saw her perform in London, he was so struck by her extraordinary appearance that he asked her to sit for him.

  Borgatti made many other conquests in Capri besides Brooks—including Faith Mackenzie. Compton, perhaps expressing a hope about his wife’s temperament more than an objective appraisal of Borgatti’s personality, wrote of the pianist in his memoir, “The masculine side of her nature was so dominant that she sought women as she found them, without waiting for those who were temperamentally akin to herself.” Borgatti appears to have blundered from one fleeting affair to the next, at the mercy of her libido, like a female Don Juan. Later, she had a romantic relationship with Princesse Edmonde de Polignac, the former Winnaretta Singer, one of Brooks’s first lovers.

  It is difficult to form a reliable conjecture as to whether Brooks was sleeping with Renata Borgatti when she painted her, nor does it matter: when Brooks painted a portrait, she approached the subject with the scientific precision of a surgeon, allied with a timeless grace. The composition of her portrait resembles an early painting by Whistler, At the Piano (1858–59), in which the figure of the pianist, rapt in her playing, is balanced by a graceful young girl in petticoats, leaning against the instrument. Brooks’s portrayal of Borgatti’s face in profile catches a resemblance to Franz Liszt that was noted by contemporary observers. The painting takes as its principal subject the absolute dedication of the pl
ayer, her life absorbed by music. The face is somber, with a waxy pallor lit from within by a spiritual or intellectual glow, like a melancholy prelude by Debussy in a minor key.

  Borgatti never attained great prominence as a pianist. For all their passion, her performances had too many wrong notes, for she did not practice enough. But her private recitals at her studio on the Punta Tragara, the majestic massif that overlooks the Faraglioni, and at the Mackenzies’ villa were a legend in Capri. Faith Mackenzie, who had given up a promising career as a pianist when she married, wrote, “I want to cry: Ah, but you should have heard her at the Punta Tragara, playing music because she loved it, with divine irresponsibility.” Mackenzie’s admiration of Borgatti’s musicianship must have been warmed by her emotional attachment to the musician: “You should have seen that silhouette swaying to the music in the candlelight which flickered because outside the wind was booming from the southwest. You can’t tell unless you hear her like that, what an artist Borgatti is!”

  The portrait Brooks painted of Marchesa Luisa Casati in Capri, in 1920, was unknown, or completely forgotten, until it was found after the artist’s death, wrapped up and stored beneath her bed. Casati was a unique figure in the history of modernist art and performance in Europe. She is often called a muse, to (among many others) the Futurists and Gabriele D’Annunzio, with whom she carried on a long-term love affair, but the label falls short of the mark. She might more aptly be described by the concept of the artist who makes his life the work, as Cocteau remarked of Fersen. Casati did not make durable art objects or perform on theatrical stages; reality was her medium. She presented an inhuman appearance, often assuming personae demonic or divine. For D’Annunzio, she was Coré (a feminine form of “kouros,” the idealized figure of a youth in archaic Greek sculpture), “the destroyer of mediocrity.” Casati commissioned more than 130 portraits of herself, including major works by Léon Bakst, Giacomo Balla, Giovanni Boldini, Kees van Dongen, Jacob Epstein, Augustus John, and Man Ray.