Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Casati dyed her hair a flaming red to match her vermilioned lips, rimmed her large green eyes with kohl and dilated the pupils with belladonna, and framed them with extraordinarily long false eyelashes. She wore extravagant gowns, some of them created for her by couturiers such as Mariano Fortuny and Paul Poiret, others of her own design, sometimes accessorized with a living snake coiled around her arms. Casati’s sensational appearances at balls in Venice and Paris, accompanied by a pair of leashed cheetahs wearing diamond-studded collars, were frequently appropriated by illustrators and filmmakers. The femme fatale in the first Futurist film, Thaïs, directed by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, is plainly based on her.7 Marinetti called her “one of our most original national products,” who succeeded “in sensationally beating in eccentric elegance and astounding creation of bizarre oddity and dandyism all that Paris has to offer in terms of originality, elegance, eccentricity, and dandyism.” Casati collected palaces, including the Palazzo dei Leoni, on the Grand Canal in Venice, which Peggy Guggenheim later bought to exhibit her art collection.

  Brooks’s portrait of Casati came about by a process that reversed the usual dynamic: it was the sitter’s idea. Ordinarily, when friends asked Brooks to paint their portrait, she resisted. She turned the marchesa down when she first suggested the idea, perhaps fearful of unflattering comparisons with the artists who had preceded her. “I should like to paint a chef d’oeuvre,” she wrote in her memoir, “but also hesitate before the ordeal.” Yet Casati was not to be denied. Brooks extemporized: she said that she had no canvas, then Uncle Charley loaned her some. She made the conditions ever more demanding: she announced that she would not come to Anacapri, and Casati agreed to come to Villa Cercola. Finally, Brooks insisted that she pose in the nude, something Casati had never done before. When she agreed to that, Brooks felt compelled to paint the picture.

  The result is exceptionally dramatic, one of the few paintings from Brooks’s maturity that employs vivid color, a loud orange for the subject’s hair, which writhes and coils like serpents. Daniela Ferretti, director of the Palazzo Fortuny, in Venice, wrote this imaginative description of the painting in an essay for the catalogue of La Divina Marchesa, a landmark exhibition that reconstructed Casati’s career, at the Fortuny in 2014: “Her Mephistophelean gaze, Medusa-like hair, feet transformed into claws, and androgynous body standing out against a rocky background, make her a proud creature of the night, a haughty fallen angel.” The portrait is visually striking but has little of the psychological penetration characteristic of “the Thief of Souls.” The artist is receiving and transmitting the Casati legend in its lurid glory and misses the sitter’s complexity, her vulnerability and emotional neediness. Brooks hated the picture and refused all offers to buy it, including Casati’s. “It isn’t me,” Brooks wrote.

  By the time of her first visit to Capri, three years before, Marchesa Casati was well established as the Futurists’ muse, the embodiment of their concept of Eternal Woman, the temptress and avenging sorceress. When Marinetti gave her a portrait that Carlo Carrà had painted of him, he inscribed it “To the great Futurist Marchesa Casati, with the slow eyes of a jaguar digesting the steel cage it has devoured in the sun.” On her visit to Capri in 1917, after Casati had checked in at the Quisisana, Fortunato Depero, the painter in residence at Gilbert Clavel’s villa in Anacapri, left a card at the desk inviting her to visit him at his studio there. By day’s end, Depero wrote, she arrived “accompanied by a Neapolitan prince and a white greyhound as elastic as a feather. She wore shoes with mother-of-pearl heels and proved friendly and very intelligent.” She bought a painting from Depero (now lost), “a vision of Capri with Clavel’s villa in the center. Stretched out on top of it, as red as a little devil, and surrounded by figures, flora, and views of the island, the poet was like a little king asleep amongst his fabulous belongings.” Casati created one of the best collections of Futurist art in the world. In 1930, her entire collection, including the portraits of herself and her jewels, was sold at auction, in partial satisfaction of a personal debt of some twenty-five million dollars.

  On her visit to Capri in 1920, when Romaine Brooks painted her portrait, Casati stayed as the guest of Axel Munthe. She had asked to rent San Michele, the villa he built in Anacapri adjoining the restored ruins of a medieval chapel, but he refused her. Casati, never deterred, disembarked at the Marina Grande amid mountains of luggage and sent a message to San Michele announcing her imminent arrival. Even the Capriotes, accustomed to eccentric visitors, were astounded by the apparition she presented. In Compton Mackenzie’s account, “She wore an astrologer’s hat, from which depended long veils enveloping her person. Her face was plastered like a mountebank’s, her eyes surrounded by large black circles, and her hair was red. She wore bells in her ears.”

  Once installed in San Michele, she turned the place upside down. Mackenzie’s memoir continued, “The walls were hung with black draperies and the stone floors covered with black carpets. She herself wore black, with black pearls and jet rings. Her hair, which had been red at first and later green, was now likewise black.” Mackenzie writes that when he arrived for tea one afternoon, she received him completely naked, lying on a black bearskin in front of the fireplace. In Capri, Casati was attended by a servant Mackenzie describes as a “buck negro,” whom she had stripped naked and gilded from head to toe. The man collapsed and would have died had not a local doctor come in time and scraped the gold leaf from his skin. An avid opium smoker, she often visited Fersen at Villa Lysis.

  Casati became a popular fixture in Capri, for despite her bizarre affectations she was a kind, generous friend and hostess. Munthe’s hope that his hellish houseguest would leave at summer’s end was dashed, as it turned into an indefinite stay. A pugnacious advocate of animal rights, Munthe complained about Casati’s use of snakes, big cats, and greyhounds (dyed to match her outfits) as props and personal adornments. He had a point: she once created a thrill at the Paris Opéra when she arrived with one bare arm dripping the blood of a chicken she had had beheaded for the occasion.

  Any consideration of the expatriate community in Capri must reckon with Axel Munthe, the Swedish doctor who made himself the island’s most famous resident. The Story of San Michele, his memoir, is the bestselling book about Capri ever published, translated into more than thirty languages. Indeed, it is reputed to be one of the bestselling books of the twentieth century, though like much of the book’s contents, that may be an exaggeration. In its pages, Munthe portrays himself as a healer of miraculous powers, the most admired and sought-after physician first in Paris and then in Rome, where he set up his practice in Keats’s house on the Spanish Steps; a brave humanitarian who brought an end to a cholera epidemic in Naples; a lover of celebrated beauties to rival Gabriele D’Annunzio; and the esteemed friend of the powerful and famous, particularly royals. The Swedish queen, Victoria, was devoted to him. The author’s egotism is only made the plainer by his fulsome self-deprecations.

  The Story of San Michele perfects the cliché of the Capriotes as carefree, childlike peasants, whom Munthe watches over like a loving patriarch. He was more passionate in his devotion to the island’s quail and campaigned indefatigably for laws to protect their breeding grounds, regardless of the havoc wrought on the livelihood of many of the Capriotes he claimed to care for so tenderly. Curzio Malaparte, the political gadfly who built a villa in Capri that became as famous as San Michele, wrote a brutal description of Munthe in Kaputt, his semi-fictional memoir of the Second World War. In old age, nearly mad from loneliness, Munthe was “a prey to his black whims shut up day after day in his tower, stripped bare and like an old bone gnawed by the sharp teeth of the southwest wind.” When Malaparte called on him, Munthe “stood there stiff, wooden, sulky; an old green cloak over his shoulders, a little hat perched crossways on his ruffled hair, his lively mischievous eyes hidden behind dark glasses, which gave him something of that mysterious and menacing air that belongs to the blind.” Querulously, Munthe said, “I
hope that you have not come to talk about the war.” Nonetheless, he asked whether the Germans were killing birds. Malaparte replied, “They have no time to bother with birds. They have just time enough to bother with human beings. They butcher Jews, workers, peasants. They set fire to towns and villages with savage fury, but they do not kill birds.” Munthe removed his dark glasses and smiled. “At least the Germans do not kill birds,” he said. “I am really happy that they do not kill birds.”

  Munthe possessed a potent personal charm, enhanced by a ruthless disregard for speaking truth. Compton Mackenzie, who delighted in the role of tattletale, recorded a classic example of Munthe’s habitual mendacity. When the Mackenzies visited Munthe, San Michele was still under construction, and he was living in a Saracen tower at Materita, about a mile away. When the carillon at Materita rang Angelus, Faith noted the particular beauty of the third bell. Munthe responded, “You are quite right, Mrs. Mackenzie. I had never noticed what a beautiful note that bell has. You have a wonderful ear.” Two weeks later, Faith came again to Materita for tea, with a baroness whose name and nationality Mackenzie suppresses in his memoir. When the carillon played the Ave Maria, Munthe pointed out to the baroness the sonorous beauty of the third bell. She responded on cue and exclaimed at its exquisite timbre. “I will tell you an interesting story about that bell,” he said, and proceeded to spin an inspirational fairy story, with himself as the dauntless hero.

  When he was visiting Florence, he told her, he heard the golden peal of that bell and conceived an irresistible desire to possess it. He awoke in the dark for matins, listened for the bell at midday and at every canonical hour, and finally found where it was, a nunnery in the Lung’Arno. He pounded on the convent’s door and said, “I am the physician of her majesty the Queen of Sweden, and I must speak urgently to the Reverend Mother Superior.” He persuaded the mother superior to sell him the bell, “and that is why you have heard that beautiful bell, Baroness, when Ave Maria rang at six o’clock.” Munthe’s brass to tell this story in the presence of Faith Mackenzie, who had pointed out the sonorous beauty of the bell’s voice to him for the first time just two weeks before, was a proof that he had mastered the art of lying, which requires the liar to believe implicitly in the veracity of any yarn that pops into his head.

  * * *

  AFTER ROMAINE BROOKS’S residency in Capri came to an end, as she visited France more often and for longer stays, her artistic activity declined sharply. She continued to paint almost to the end of her life, but infrequently, as the desire to paint a masterpiece was thwarted more and more by self-doubt. By the mid-1920s, Brooks had painted most of the pictures that her posthumous reputation depends upon. Her grisaille palette became a habit, a trademark, lacking in the rigor of her self-schooling at St. Ives, where she trained her eyes to detect “an endless gamut of grays.”

  After quitting Capri, she lived first in Paris, in an apartment in Passy, but she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney’s house on the rue Jacob when Barney’s salon was at its height of influence. Brooks was a forbidding fixture at her partner’s Fridays, more than a co-host, averse to meeting newcomers and cantankerous with people she knew. In Paris, she painted portraits of her friends, who were mostly lesbians, and a few male friends, including a fine likeness of Paul Morand, Loulou Locré’s classmate, looking characteristically smug. The portrait of Una, Lady Troubridge, dates to this period. A process of masculinization similar to that painting is evident in a self-portrait from 1923 in which the artist wears a riding coat, gloves, and a top hat that shadows her eyes. The only spots of color are traces of scarlet lipstick (also the only unambiguous indicator of the subject’s sex) and the tiny red ribbon of her Legion of Honor, pinned to the lapel.

  In the 1930s, Brooks lived in New York, first in the penthouse of the Waldorf Astoria and then in the Hotel des Artistes, on West Sixty-Seventh Street, and rented a studio above Carnegie Hall. When Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas came to town, Brooks took them for dinner at the Tavern on the Green. She adored Central Park by night, which she said reminded her of a Japanese garden, but by day it looked like “an abandoned farmyard.”

  The only constant in her emotional life was her profound, affectionate attachment to Natalie Barney. The women managed to stay together by not living together, in obedience to Brooks’s growing need for solitude. They quarreled, of course; the relationship nearly foundered over Barney’s infatuation with Dolly Wilde, the dissolute daughter of Oscar’s dissolute older brother, Willie. Brooks had tolerated most of Barney’s affairs, but this one went on for far too long. Finally, she wrote Barney a letter of farewell, a definitive dismissal. As usual, Barney responded with abject surrender. She proclaimed that her friendship with Brooks was “the most important thing in my life” and swore, “I shall always serve under your near or distant banner all the days or years of my life that remain, Romaine!”

  In the postwar years, Brooks devoted more and more time to her memoir, obsessively revising and polishing it. Excerpts pertaining to her childhood with St. Mar were published in 1938, in a British journal called Life and Letters To-day, and twenty years later Brooks was still laboring over the manuscript. The version in the Beinecke collection, quoted here, is witty and filled with keen psychological insights about her friends and enemies, but as a memoir it is deeply flawed. She devotes many pages to trivial spats with people she barely knew yet fails to mention that she married John Brooks. Barney makes only a fleeting appearance, as a nice and interesting friend. A more serious problem is that there is good reason to believe that some passages are invented or heavily embellished. The author’s martyrdom is presented in language that at times approaches hysteria; her suffering, particularly in childhood, attains a degree of wretchedness that defies belief. Throughout her life, she meets an incredible number of hunchbacks.

  The remaining twenty-five years of Brooks’s life were a pathetic decline into misanthropic isolation. One after another, she picked feuds with her old friends. By the end, Willy Maugham and Paul Morand were almost the only friends who remained loyal to her. She made one final friendship, with Marchese Uberto Strozzi, who lived the life of a Renaissance prince in a palace on the Piazza del Duomo. In 1961, at the age of eighty-seven, Brooks painted his portrait. She converted a room of the house in Fiesole where she was living into a studio, installing a glass panel in the roof with a complicated system of black curtains on pulleys to maintain precisely the lighting she required. She made the marchese, nearly as old as herself, pose for long hours in a hot, airless room, sitting in a black velvet armchair. The result is a fine portrait of the nobleman in repose, looking as though he might leap to his feet at any moment, a painting on a par with her best work from forty years before.

  In the last decade of Brooks’s life, her mental decay accelerated. She retreated to one of the houses in Nice she had inherited from Ella Goddard, where she lived among ghosts and nurtured imaginary ailments, particularly that of losing her eyesight. She was possessed by an irrational fear of being poisoned. Another quarrel with Natalie Barney, over another young rival, led to the final break, which Barney refused to accept but could not repair. At the age of ninety-two, she undertook the journey from Paris to Nice, uninvited. When she turned up on Brooks’s doorstep, she was refused admittance. Marchese Uberto was the last friend to be dismissed. They had continued to chat by telephone after she moved to Nice, but eventually she stopped taking his calls. Finally, when he asked the servant if he had given Madame his message, the man replied that yes, he had, and her reply was “What’s the use?”

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1904, after Joseph Conrad had published Nostromo to disappointing reviews, and with his always precarious financial situation vitiated by an operation for his wife, Jessie, he abandoned England to spend the winter in Capri, motivated by thrift and the hope that the climate would conduce to her recuperation. He met Norman Douglas soon after his arrival, and they became fast friends. Conrad wrote to H. G. Wells that he had met “a Scot (born in Austria) o
nce in diplomatic service, [which] he threw up I fancy in sheer intellectual disgust. A man who can not only think but write.” The purpose of the letter was to enlist Wells’s aid in getting Douglas published. To soften him up, Conrad added that he, Douglas, and Thomas Jerome had discussed Wells’s visionary novel A Modern Utopia, which was then being serialized in The Fortnightly Review, and they agreed that Wells was “the one honest thinker of the day.”

  Capri disappointed Conrad, for reasons cited by many visitors before and after him. In a letter to his friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford, he reported,

  I’ve done nothing. And if it were not that Jessie profited so remarkably I would call the whole expedition a disaster. This climate what between tramontana and sirocco has half killed me in a not unpleasant languorous melting way. I am sunk in a vaguely uneasy dream of visions—of innumerable tales that float in an atmosphere of voluptuously aching bones … The scandals of Capri—atrocious, unspeakable, amusing scandals, international, cosmopolitan, and biblical flavored with Yankee twang and the French phrases of the gens du monde mingle with the tinkering of guitars in the barber’s shops … All this is a sort of blue nightmare traversed by stinks and perfumes, full of flat roofs, vineyards, vaulted passages, enormous sheer rocks, pergolas, with a mad gallop of German tourists lâché à travers tout cela [loosed amid all this] in white Capri shoes over the slippery Capri stones, kodaks, floating veils, strangely waving whiskers, grotesque hats, streaming, tumbling, rushing, ebbing from the top of Monte Solaro (where the clouds hang) to the amazing rocky chasms of the Arco Naturale—where the lager beer bottles go pop.