Florence

by David Leavitt

  Florence’s reputation as a sodomitical hotbed goes way back. As early as the first years of the eighteenth century, (Henry James’s cousin) H. Montgomery Hyde notes, an anonymous work titled Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England was blaming ‘women for the increase in homosexuality, besides foppish clothes, continental manners, tea-drinking and Italian opera’; the work also observed ‘that sodomy is considered a trivial matter in Italy, since no sooner does a stranger set foot in Rome than the procurers rush to ask if he wants a woman or a young man’. A 1749 pamphlet titled Satan’s Harvest Home: or the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping and Sodomy … And Other Satanic Works, daily propagated in this good Protestant Kingdom stated the case more baldly, calling Italy the ‘mother and nurse of sodomy’.

  No doubt such diatribes had the opposite effect of what their authors intended; by vilifying Italy, they actually added to the country’s appeal as a place of settlement for homosexual Englishmen obliged to flee their homeland. Among others, George Nassau Clavering-Cowper, third Earl Cowper – a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and noted art collector, whom The World newspaper accused posthumously of having addicted himself ‘to the practice and use of the most criminal and unmanly vices and debaucheries’ – spent most of his life in Florence, where he died in 1789. In 1797 the Revd John Fenwick, Vicar of Byall, flew to France and then to Naples after a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of assaulting a man named Harper, who had had to jump out of a library window in order to escape his attentions. In 1809, George Ferrers, Earl of Leicester, having been disinherited by his father after the exposure of an affair with a waiter called Neri (a Florentine name), settled in the Villa Rostan at Pegli, near Genoa. In 1841 William John Bankes, a parliamentarian, who had some years before been accused, Hyde writes, of ‘committing an act of indecency with a soldier in a public lavatory outside Westminster Abbey’, fled to Venice after he was brought to court a second time, for ‘indecently exposing himself in a London park’.

  Even before the adoption of the Code Napoléon – which, in contrast to English law, made a point of not criminalizing sodomy – Florence displayed an exceptionally permissive attitude toward homosexuality. Sodomy, if not homosexuality in the modern sense, had been a prominent feature of life in the city since at least the 1300s, when erotic relationships between men and boys were so prevalent that a special tribunal, the so-called ‘Office of the Night’, had had to be established to deal with the matter. In Forbidden Friendships: Sodomy and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, the historian Michael Rocke describes a society in which sex between men and boys was tolerated so long as the passive partner was under eighteen. On the other hand, older men who took the passive role were looked upon as monstrous, and were often executed or maimed in public, their ears or noses cut off. The Ponte Vecchio, then the exclusive domain of butchers (it is now the exclusive domain of gold sellers), was something of a carnal war zone, a corridor down which no boy dared venture lest he should ‘have his cap stolen’. By the early sixteenth century, a German dictionary was defining ‘Florenzer’ as ‘buggerer’ and the verb ‘Florenzen’ as ‘to bugger’.

  The city’s twin status as a capital of great art and a haven of permissive sexual attitudes made it a particularly appealing destination for homosexual artists and scholars. Among the earliest of these to travel there was Winckelmann, the subject of a long chapter in Studies on the History of The Renaissance. ‘In German imaginations,’ Pater observed here, ‘even now traces are to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried the northern peoples away into those countries of the South.’ (Many years later the young Sybille Bedford, crossing over the Brenner Pass, would likewise respond to ‘the first sight on a September morning of a southern sky and light … with the alert joy of a creature born and emerging from the north’.) And what were these Germans – Winckelmann prominent among them – looking for? Art and love, ‘the exercise of sight and touch’, passionate friendships from which the erotic, bravely, was not excluded. ‘There had been known before him,’ Madame de Staël wrote of Winckelmann, ‘learned men who might be consulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity.’ Pater adds, ‘That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido’s archangel.’

  Alas, the last of these friendships proved fatal; in 1768 Winckelmann decided to go back to Germany, traveled as far as Regensberg, then – homesick for Italy – cut his visit short and turned south again. Waiting in Trieste to sail, he fell in with a handsome café waiter, who murdered and robbed him in his hotel room. The waiter was Florentine, and his name, ironically, was Arcangeli.

  The first edition of The Renaissance appeared in 1873, when Ouida was enjoying her greatest successes and trying, somewhat ineptly, to shock people at the Langham Hotel. This was a fraught moment in English social history, marked on the one hand by an increasing sexual boldness on the part of citizens, and on the other by a government-led effort to enforce sodomy laws as a defense against perceived Continental decadence. Among the earliest victims of the tension that resulted was Lord Henry Somerset, second son of the Duke of Beaufort (the Duke invented the game of Badminton, which was named after his estate) and the first of the so-called Uranian poets. A former MP for Monmouthshire and Comptroller of Her Majesty’s Household, Lord Henry escaped England for Florence in the late 1870s after his wife, Isabel, caught him in flagrante delicto with a teenage boy named Harry Smith. Because she had gone public with the reasons for their separation, and thus flouted the Victorian code of ‘reticence for women’, Lady Isabel soon found herself persona non grata in English society. At home she became a pariah, while abroad, Lord Henry enjoyed (if that is the right word) an exile’s odd notoriety; he is probably the ‘suave Lord X’ to whom Acton refers as having ‘had to flee from the London police because he was a “Greek born out of due time” …’ Then about ten years later Lord Henry’s youngest brother, Arthur, was also obliged to flee for the Continent after being implicated in the famous ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’, which erupted in July 1889 when police stumbled upon a male brothel near Piccadilly staffed by telegraph boys, and catering to a generally aristocratic clientele. (Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, or ‘Prince Eddy’, the heir presumptive, was also reputed to have been a client at the brothel; certainly he was a frequent guest at the Hundred Guineas Club, a homosexual gathering place where he was known as ‘Victoria’.)

  The atmosphere in England had become especially oppressive since the 1885 passage of the Labouchére Amendment – named for Henry Labouchére, the parliamentarian who wrote it, and who would soon become a member of the Anglo-Florentine colony in his own right, settling upon retirement at the Villa Cristina. (That he and Lord Henry should have ended up living cheek by jowl is further evidence of Florence’s oddity, its status as a place outside the ordinary rules.) In essence, this amendment criminalized acts of ‘gross indecency’ between adult men in public or private, making them punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, with or without hard labor. (The maximum penalty was life imprisonment if minors were procured.) Previously, only anal intercourse – ‘buggery’ in England and ‘sodomy’ in Scotland – had been a crime.

  Surprisingly, Labouchére was neither a religious zealot nor a conservative; on the contrary, he was a famous radical, the editor of a muckraking journal called Truth that was constantly being sued for libel. His amendment arrived in Parliament attached to a bill intended to curb the rise of syphilis among prostitutes, and was seen as contributory to an effort to contain this crisis. Previously, ‘fallen women’ themselves had been blamed for the ills associated with prostitution. Now lawmakers, at the urging of so-called ‘social purity’ feminists, were pushing the id
ea that the men at whose hands these women had ‘fallen’, rather than the women themselves, ought to be held accountable. According to this thinking, homosexual sex was simply the most extreme form that masculine depravity could take; men who engaged in acts of ‘gross indecency’ with each other, rather than categorisable ‘inverts’, were monsters of carnality, as likely to go hunting girl virgins to corrupt as to soil together the beds of decent hotels. Desire itself, in other words, was the crime that had to be punished.

  The problem, of course, was that outside the imagination of Victorian physiologists, such polysexual demons as those at whom the law was aimed did not, by and large, exist. ‘Inverts’, on the other hand, were legion, and in the end it was they who suffered the most from the Labouchére amendment, in great part thanks to the words ‘in public or private’, which were seen as giving the green light to blackmailers, and soon led to its being dubbed the ‘blackmailer’s charter’. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 arrest under the amendment’s provisions sent homosexuals into a panic, and provoked the rather fantastic exodus that Frank Harris describes in his inventive biography of Wilde:

  Every train to Dover was crowded; every steamer to Calais thronged with members of the aristocratic and leisured classes, who seemed to prefer Paris, or even Nice out of the season, to a city like London, where the police might act with such unexpected vigour … It came as a shock to their preconceived ideas that the police in London knew a great many things which they were not supposed to concern themselves with, and this unwelcome glare of light drove the vicious forth in wild haste.

  Florence was where most of them landed, since it offered, as Barbara Strachey primly put it in her memoir Remarkable Relations, ‘an ideal place for the unconventional Anglo-Saxon at this time. Lord Henry Somerset … had taken refuge there … and the large expatriate community abounded in “Sapphists”, eccentrics and those whose marital arrangements were irregular.’

  She was neither generalizing nor indulging in overstatement. The lesbians in residence included, most notably, Radclyffe Hall, author of the banned novel The Well of Loneliness, who lived in Florence with her lover, Una, Lady Troubridge. Then there was the travel writer Maud Cruttwell, who dressed in men’s clothes and told Mary Berenson ‘how pleased she was to ride behind my donkey when she thought it was a female ass, and how disgusted she was when she found out it was a “maschio” ’. The Florence-born Violet Paget, known as Vernon Lee, kept her hair cropped short and, like Maud Cruttwell, wore a man’s necktie. James described her as ‘exceedingly ugly, disputatious, contradictious and perverse ... a really superior talker with a mind – almost the only one in Florence’. Likewise the German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand recalled in a letter a dull evening enlivened by her intellectual vigor:

  During the dinner there was desultory chat; then we sat out till half past eleven near the little gate and I had a long discussion with Vernon Lee on the nature of truth. She was very aggressive and brilliantly intelligent, and after two hours succeeded in proving triumphantly the very statement she had undertaken to combat …

  John Singer Sargent painted her portrait; her writing impressed Pater, and she enjoyed a long if rivalrous friendship with Berenson, who held court, with his wife Mary, at I Tatti. Visitors streamed in and out of the villa, among the oddest of them the poet Michael Field, not one man but two women, an aunt and niece named Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived together from the time that Edith was a small child until her death in 1913. (Katharine died a year later.) Of ‘the Mikes’, as they were not so affectionately known, Mary Berenson wrote:

  They think they are a Great Poet, unappreciated at present but certain to be famous and adored in the next generation – and they think their souls are united and that it is good for them to be together. As a matter of fact the utter mistake of both these theories is ‘obvious to the meanest intelligence’ …

  (A stanza from their interminable ‘Variations on Sappho’ proves the point:

  Maids, not to you my mind doth change;

  Men I defy, allure, estrange,

  Prostrate, make bond or free:

  Soft as the stream beneath the plane

  To you I sing my love’s refrain;

  Between us is no thought of pain,

  Peril, satiety.)

  Berenson’s own marriage to Mary, as it happened, was among the more ‘irregular’ in Florence, encompassing a relatively open ménage à trois of which the third member was his female secretary, Nicky Mariano. Heterosexual members of the colony, it seemed, had reasons no less pressing for living in Italy. Thus the Hon. Mrs George Keppel, former mistress to King Edward VII and mother of yet another lesbian, the novelist Violet Trefusis, settled with her patient husband at the Villa dell’Ombrellino in Bellosguardo. (What choice did she have besides Florence?) Lord Arthur Acton was a zealous amateur photographer in the tradition of Baron von Gloeden, except that his nude subjects were young girls instead of, as in von Gloeden’s case, (mostly) young boys; as the novelist Francis King recalled in Yesterday came Suddenly, he ‘had been involved in a scandal before the First World War, when the police were tipped off by a mother dissatisfied with her pay-off that, along with a local politician, he was photographing pubescent girls in a studio rented for that purpose’. He also fathered numerous illegitimate children by Florentine women, one of whom would later sue for half his estate. Yet for all his indiscretions, Arthur showed little tolerance toward his son, who even in his late forties was allowed neither use of the family car (he took the bus instead) or his own key to the villa; instead, James Lord writes in ‘The Cost of the Villa’, whenever Harold returned late at night, he would have to clamber up the wall and enter by a window.

  Although today he is better remembered for his memoirs and his history of the Bourbons of Naples, Acton also wrote three novels – Humdrum, Peonies and Ponies, and New Lamps for Old – as well as numerous forgotten short stories, including one called ‘The Soul’s Gymnasium’. Here a mad old man in orange robes tries to persuade young male visitors to his Florentine garden to ‘doff their worldly garments’ and dive into a ‘pool of purification’. The second of these young men, an American named Al Randy, has earlier ‘doffed’ his garments to pose naked alongside a copy of the David, to whose physique his own compares favorably.

  Acton’s homosexuality was an open secret in Florence – which did not stop him from threatening a lawsuit when he heard that he was to be ‘outed’ in a biography of Nancy Mitford. (His putative motive was to protect the delicate sensibilities of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who had recently stayed at La Pietra.) In two long volumes of memoirs, he never once acknowledged his own homosexuality, though he spoke often of homosexuality in the abstract – in the first volume, for instance, writing, ‘One was continually hearing that certain men in Florence were queer, not that it made much difference to their popularity: on the contrary! The queerer, the dearer.’ Significantly, the subject of this observation, rather than himself or one of his lovers, is a stranger glimpsed at a distance, and identified by a female companion as queer. ‘But wherein did this queerness reside?’ Acton asks disingenuously.

  I must find out. In trying to solve this problem I stared at the young man until he flushed with embarrassment. ‘But I can’t see anything queer about him,’ I exclaimed, and was told to mind my own business, which led to further cogitation. Thinking him over, I came to the conclusion that he was prettier than a man was supposed to be; and that might have something to do with it. But how could he help having curly hair and a pink and white complexion? If he shaved his head and wore a beard he might look more manly, of course, but wouldn’t that be rather affected?

  Were it not for the fact that he was in no way pretty, Acton might have been talking about himself here; far from a minor ‘problem to be solved’, queerness was for him a dilemma requiring the use of an ever-more complex algebra of evasion – thus the displacement of homosexuality, in the memoirs, on to a remote (and ‘safe’) third party, or the observation, wh
en assessing the failed marriages of some of his friends, ‘I could congratulate myself on being a bachelor.’ (‘As if the option had been exercised after dispassionate contemplation!’ James Lord notes wryly.) During the Second World War, Acton had been refused a post in Peking, where he had lived in his youth, due to a report claiming that his behavior there had been less than that befitting an officer and a gentleman. Resentment of this ‘slander’ still burned in 1968, and in the introduction to More Memoirs of an Aesthete, Acton characterizes the author of the denunciation as ‘some epicene dunderhead from the Foreign Office. His rage against my independent way of life was that of the perennial snake in the grass, the envious Philistine.’ In analyzing this passage, Lord points out that in general usage the definition of ‘epicene’ is effeminate. ‘How can Harold have been so rash as to attribute to his accuser a characteristic which must have been central to the accusation against himself?’ Lord asks. ‘Did he actually fancy that no one knew?’

  It’s hard to imagine, just as it’s hard to imagine that Pino Orioli really believed he was fooling anyone when he described in Adventures of a Bookseller a dispute that arose between him and his partner Davis after they fell in love with the same ‘creature’ – a ‘creature’ whose gender, in the course of a long passage, is never specified. (Italian, with its evasive articles, is even more pliant than English in this game of gender obfuscation.) Yet Orioli shows no similar reticence when lamenting the superfluity of ‘Geoffreys’ passing through Florence ‘singly or in couples’, since the observation does not implicate him:

  Not all of them are called Geoffrey, but most of them bear that name which, somehow or other, suits them perfectly. The name conjures up for me the vision of a young fellow, generally from an English University, generally arriving in his own or a friend’s car, generally effeminate; always well dressed, always rich, and always close with his money… . Decorative boys but quite empty-headed, and rather a nuisance into the bargain.