Florence

by David Leavitt

  (Along the same lines, a character in Jocelyn Brooke’s ‘Gerald Brockhurst’ makes the observation that in novels as well as life, ‘Geralds’ are almost inevitably athletic and straight: ‘There’s one in E. M. Forster, and another in Lawrence – you know, the man in Women in Love – and I once read a novel by Gilbert Frankau, when I was at school, called Gerald Cranston’s Lady; the hero was just the same type, terrifically hearty and military, with a mustache.’)

  For Orioli as much as for Acton, it was one thing to observe the faintly embarrassing ways of foreigners, and another to talk about oneself. Thus Orioli can recall a group of Germans who ‘used to meet every afternoon at a certain table – it happened to be square and not round – in the Café Gambrinus, which was the most fashionable at the time ... If you passed near them, you could hear one or the other of them saying charming things about Donatello or Dante or Michelangelo or Bruno or Benvenuto. If you took a table near enough to overhear what they were saying, you soon realized that they were not comparing the merits of those famous Italians of bygone days, but those of the best-looking modern youngsters about town who bore the same names.’

  Of course, it is about as easy to believe that Orioli merely ‘took a table near enough to overhear’ this conversation as that Proust, in Time Regained, chose by chance a gay brothel when he decided to check into a hotel to take a rest. Far more probable is that Orioli was sitting with the Germans, taking part in their conversation, as entranced by the boys with the artists’ names as they were.

  Among the most entrenched relics of the homosexual community in Florence during the first part of the twentieth century was Lord Henry Somerset, who – following his flight from England – settled at 1 Via Guido Monaco, not far from the station of Santa Maria Novella. In prelapsarian days, Lord Somerset had not done much of anything; now he became slightly famous as a songwriter (‘All Through the Night’, ‘The First Spring Day’, ‘Where’er You Go’, etc.). He was also the author of a slim volume of verse, Songs of Adieu (1889), inspired by his great love Harry Smith, who would die in New Zealand in 1902. Here is one of these poems, entitled ‘The Exile’:

  O PRAY for me!

  That weeping stand on a distant shore,

  My young days darkened for evermore –

  O pray for me!

  Pray for the homeless, outcast one,

  Pray for the life crushed out and done

  Ere yet its youth had scarce begun –

  O pray for me!

  O think of me!

  I loved you well in the days gone by, Together,

  you said, we’d live and die –

  O think of me!

  Think then of those imperial years,

  Think, think of all my bitter tears,

  My racking doubts, my dismal tears –

  O think of me!

  Yea, dear one, morning, noon, and night,

  I think, and weep, and pray for thee,

  And through my tears my one delight

  Is born of thy dear memory.

  My life with thine is past and o’er,

  We can but weep for evermore.

  Oscar Wilde, reviewing the Songs of Adieu in the Pall Mall Gazette of 30 March 1889, concluded, ‘He has nothing to say and says it’; a quip that did not keep Somerset from entertaining Wilde when he came to Florence to visit Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894. ‘Podge’, as Somerset was known, was as tragicomic an eccentric as the hero of ‘The Soul’s Gymnasium’. Osbert Sitwell, who made something of a career out of memorializing Anglo-Florentine dinosaurs, portrayed him as ‘Milordo Inglese’ in one of the poems that comprise ‘On the Continent’, the third section of his 1958 collection Poems about People, or England Reclaimed. Here Podge is ‘Lord Richard Vermont’, whom ‘some nebulous but familiar scandal / Had lightly blown … over the Channel, / Which he never crossed again.’

  Thus at the age of twenty-seven

  A promising career was over,

  And the thirty or forty years that had elapsed

  Had been spent in killing time – or so Lord

  Richard thought,

  Though in reality, killing time

  Is only the name for another of the

  multifarious ways

  By which time kills us.

  Lord Richard’s house – ‘a miniature castle of plaster / Coloured and divided by lines to represent red brick’ – is protected by a door that ‘was bolted in ten places, / And only unbarred after a footman / Had scanned your face and the horizon / Through a slot in the door’:

  Once you were allowed to enter, you were

  lost in a dark, gleaming forest

  Of golden pillars: a herald’s paradise;

  There were many little rooms, studded with

  coats-of-arms:

  But though it was an ingenious, confusing

  forest, with reflections everywhere in mirrors,

  It was yet a work of artifice, not of art;

  There was one room, copper-sheeted,

  Which blushed to rose when the lights

  turned on,

  And another in which the walls

  Were sheets of transparent glass –

  I thought it might be to remind him not

  to throw stones,

  But he explained,

  ‘I wanted to see what it would be like,

  dear boy,

  To live in a room with no walls.’

  Sitwell’s sketch – with the exception of a small cache of letters, the most substantial portrait of Lord Somerset to survive – concludes with Lord Richard as an old man receiving guests in a bathroom at the top of his castle, dispensing coffee instead of tea ‘ “Because tea,” he would say, as he poured out the coffee, / “Is responsible for all the dreadful scandal / Talked in English drawing-rooms.”’ The poem’s last lines emphasize the somewhat wistful unreality of these final days, describing the little that remains of Lord Richard’s ‘solitary splendor’ as ‘wings of dust / Enclosing an untenanted miniature castle / With stained walls / In a wisteria-strangled suburb.’

  Lord Richard’s attempt, in Florence, to create ‘a room with no walls’ finally meets with failure because he has confused artifice with art, fancy with invention. This was a common mistake among the Anglo-Florentines, and one of the chief reasons that so many of them ended up mired in mediocrity. As Edward Prime-Stevenson observed in his underground study The Intersexes, the sexual liberty enjoyed by homosexual émigrés in Italy ‘seems remarkably often to have had the effect of destroying their intellectual or artistic activity and ambition. They become professional drifters and “dawdlers”, degenerate in will, in purpose, and even intersexual virility. They do nothing, accomplish nothing, while constantly talking about doing and accomplishing; and anon having lapsed gently to idleness complete, the capital of talent seems to evaporate away. Their liberty really gained, its relief undoes them.’

  Another of Sitwell’s portraits, ‘Mr Algernon Petre’, is about Reggie Temple, a member of the colony often confused with the novelist Reggie Turner, as Algy Petre, in the poem, is often confused with the novelist Algy Braithwaite. ‘Boxes’, the third section of the poem, addresses Temple/Petre’s vocation as the maker of small decorative objets:

  Completely

  Undeterred

  By the various gigantic figures

  That threw shadows across his path here –

  So that, every morning, before beginning

  work,

  He had, as it were, to sweep out of his

  enormous Studio

  The spectres of Leonardo and

  Michelangelo –

  Algy Petre settled down for over fifty years,

  Through summer and short winter,

  To paint the identical, highly polished

  portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette

  On the lids

  Of diminutive circular boxes,

  Subsequently lacquered.

  Ignoring Leonardo, Algy Petre looks back to the age of Verrocchio, ‘
the perfection’, in Pater’s words (which echo here), ‘of the older Florentine style of miniature-painting, with patient putting on of each leaf upon the trees and each flower in the grass …’ In Sitwell’s summing up, Temple/Petre is portrayed as having spent his life ‘Contentedly working by a method / That, before he rediscovered it, / Had fortunately been forgotten’:

  Painting the portrait of someone he had never

  seen,

  Until it was time for him, too, to fold up

  Into a box he had not painted,

  Under a cypress tree.

  His boxes – precious and pointless – might be said to emblemize the colony itself, just as Algy Petre might be said to embody its spirit. For him, the ghosts of greatness are suspiciously easy to dispel. He is a dilettante, yet unlike Lord Richard Vermont, who seeks to create a room without walls, he boxes himself in: opposed methods that lead to the same fate.

  Sitwell also included in his collection a poeme-à-clef about Reginald Turner, an unsuccessful novelist but much-loved man, and one of Oscar Wilde’s intimates. (He had been at Wilde’s bedside when the poet died.) Here Turner is portrayed as Braithwaite, ‘a friend of Wilde and Whistler’ who ‘Had lived abroad for many years, / Making a small income go a little way.’ It is not a kind poem:

  When he laughed – which was often –

  His ugly sallow face

  Would collapse into a thousand wrinkles,

  And his eyes, those dejected cornflowers,

  Would wink, blink and water.

  Although he was himself the author of almost as many books as Ouida – among them Castles in Kensington, Count Florio and Phyllis K. and Samson Unshorn – Turner is perhaps best remembered for a quip: when W. Somerset Maugham complained to him that he could find no first editions of his novels, he replied, ‘Really? I can’t find any second editions of mine.’ (Maugham, not incidentally, was a frequent visitor to Florence in those days, usually in the company of his secretary, Gerald Haxton.) Like Acton, Turner suffered a fate typical to many of the Anglo-Florentines, that of being better remembered for the people he had known than for anything he himself had done. In this regard his connection with Wilde was a source of vexation to him. Acton recalls a French novelist, André Germain, embarrassing Turner ‘by seizing his hand and clinging to it while he piped in a shrill octave: “Ai-je bien l’honneur de parler avec le grand ami d’Oscar Wilde? Monsieur, permettez-moi de vous embrasser.”’ On another occasion ‘Ronald Firbank, whose mere voice made Reggie wince, rushed upon him from a flower-shop and covered him from head to foot with lilies.’

  Turner was a close friend of Norman Douglas, whom Sitwell called ‘Donald McDougall’ in yet another poem. In those years, Douglas spent much of his time on Capri, which was then to Florence what Fire Island is now to New York. He wrote a novel set in Capri’s expatriate community – South Wind – as did Compton McKenzie, the founder of The Gramophone. (His was called Vestal Fire.) Under a pseudonym – ‘Pilaf Bey’ – Douglas also published a collection of aphrodisiac recipes, Venus in the Kitchen, for which Graham Greene provided the introduction.

  Much innuendo surrounded Douglas’s murky sexual life. In The Ant Colony, Francis King’s gossipy novel about Florence, an Italian named Franco recalls Douglas gathering around him ‘some pubescent schoolboys, Franco among them’, while holding aloft ‘a note of pitifully small denomination to be awarded to the boy who, in an increasingly frenzied contest, succeeded in coming first’. Acton described to James Lord the walking tours that he would sometimes take through Chianti with Scott Moncrieff and Douglas, ‘who could not be kept from fondling little boys in every village they passed through’. This habit finally caught up with the elderly writer during the Fascist era, when he was run out of Florence as a result of his involvement with a twelve-year-old boy. Although Acton wrote about the episode in his memoirs, in a skewed attempt to protect his friend’s reputation (or perhaps his own) he changed the boy to a girl, thus giving Compton McKenzie the opportunity to quip, ‘They all turn to little girls in the end.’

  Ronald Firbank’s personal eccentricities have subsumed, for many readers, the genuine interest of his work. To the painter Duncan Grant, he was ‘an elegant grasshopper in white kid gloves and boots’; to Carl Van Vechten, his friend and champion, an ‘Aubrey Beardsley in a Rolls-Royce’, a ‘Jean Cocteau at the Savoy’. Even Firbank took part in the cult of his own persona, complaining in a letter to Van Vechten that reviews made him feel ‘quite like a bottle of prohibition whiskey, & not at all like the Veuve Cliquot (1886), special cuvée’ that he knew himself to be.

  In Noble Essences, Osbert Sitwell recalls that ‘during the April and May when [Firbank] was living in a villa that had formerly belonged to the Swiss painter Böcklin, situated outside Florence’, Sitwell and his brother Sachaverell would often encounter him in the Via Torna-buoni, ‘staggering under a load of flowers he had bought, and craning round in a wild and helpless way for a cab to carry him home …’ Flowers figure prominently as well in Acton’s description of the meeting between Firbank and Reggie Turner, who disliked him intensely. ‘Though Firbank led an isolated life,’ Acton continues,

  maintaining no more than a jerky acquaintance with a few choice relics of the ‘nineties who did not know what to make of him, nobody has conveyed the aroma of Florentine gossip better than he. He endeared himself to the waiters at Betti’s by his handsome tips. Having carefully ordered fruit that was out of season, he would sit and contemplate it like an El Greco Saint in ecstasy. Muscat grapes in mid-winter he would dangle against the light, eyeing the clusters caressingly as he sipped glass after glass of wine. At the food he merely picked and jabbed as if it repelled him.

  In short, Firbank was the perfect avatar of fin de siécle decadence, just as the style that he perfected – distinguished by a self-reflexive archness that echoes the barbed intercourse of Florence – represents the most extreme manifestation of the movement that Wilde (and to a lesser extent Beardsley) had initiated several decades earlier. Nor is the association between Firbank and Wilde merely literary. During his youth, Firbank managed to maintain longstanding friendships both with Lord Alfred Douglas and with Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland, whose twenty-first birthday party he attended, as did Henry James. (Later, according to his biographer, Miriam Benkowitz, ‘Firbank snubbed [Holland] for his pleasure at a series of lawsuits which Douglas lost.’) By employing the Wildean voice, which was also the voice of café chat at Doney’s, Firbank was able to subvert not only Anglo-Florentine self-promotion, but English attitudes generally.

  Of all his novels, the one that shows the strongest Florentine influence is The Flower Beneath the Foot, most of which he wrote while renting the Villa I Lecci at 15 Via Benedeto di Maiano in Fiesole. ‘How different my book would have been had I gone to Vienna,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘for of course one’s surroundings tell. Probably it would have been more brilliant & flippant, but not so good as the steady work I hope to do here.’ He saw his own style in the novel as being ‘vulgar, cynical & “horrid”, but of course beautiful here & there for those that can see’. Such writing as his own, he felt, must bring ‘discomfort to fools, since it is aggressive, witty & unrelenting’.

  It will come as no surprise that The Flower Beneath the Foot is a roman-à-clef. To the habitués of the fictitious Pisuerga, where the novel takes place, Firbank prepared a kind of cheat sheet, which he sent to his mother:

  ‘Princess Elsie’ = Princess Mary. ‘Mrs Chilley-water’ = Mrs Harold Nicolson. ‘Eddy’ = Evan Morgan – & of course ‘King Geo’ & ‘Queen Glory’ are the king & queen. The English ambassadress is founded on Mrs Roscoe & Lady Nicolson … The lady journalist must be ‘Eve’ of the Tatler or any other of the prattling busy-bodies that write for the magazine.

  Princess Mary was visiting Fiesole on her honeymoon at the time that Firbank was writing The Flower Beneath the Foot. Other connections ink themselves in as the novel progresses. Madame Wetme, the owner of a Doney’s-like bar, longs above al
l else to get into society; her ‘religion, her cruel God, was the Chic: the God Chic’. Even Madame Wetme’s metaphors reflect Florentine geography: ‘I admit we live in the valley,’ she tells a Duchess. ‘Although I have a great sense of the hills!’

  In-joke nicknames abound. One conversation alone features ‘Grim-lips and Ladybird, Hairy and Fluffy, Hardylegs and Bluewings, Spindleshanks and Our Lady of Furs’. At another moment the King of Pisuerga, upon being informed during a banquet that in the imaginary country of Dateland there is no such thing as china, replies, ‘I could not be more astonished … if you told me there were fleas at the Ritz.’ This chance remark, misunderstood by Lady Something, the British ambassadress, becomes the stuff of wild rumor, and eventually results in the owners of the Ritz suing her for libel.

  Firbank saves his most biting parody for the aesthete ‘Eddy’ Monteith, son of Lord Intriguer, a character based on his former intimate, Evan Morgan. In 1920, the two had had a falling-out over Firbank’s play The Princess Zoubaroff, which he wanted to dedicate to Morgan. At first Morgan accepted his friend’s offer with gratitude; shortly before publication, however, he had a change of heart, and threatened to sue Firbank’s publisher, Grant Richards, if the dedication was not removed. (One is reminded of James’s horrified protests when Forest Reid dedicated The Garden God to him.) Writing The Flower Beneath the Foot, Firbank no doubt still nursed a grudge, for he ridicules Morgan’s ‘aesthetic’ tendencies:

  Lying amid the dissolving bath crystals while his manservant deftly bathed him, he fell into a sort of coma, sweet as a religious trance. Beneath the rhythmic sponge, perfumed with Kiki, he was St Sebastian, and as the water became cloudier, and the crystals evaporated amid the steam, he was Teresa … and he would have been, most likely, the Blessed Virgin herself but that the bath grew gradually cold.

  Eddy is the author of a volume of Juvenilia, the contents of which includes such works as ‘Lines to Doris: written under the influence of wine, sun and fever’, ‘Ode to Swinburne’, ‘Sad Tamarisks’, ‘Rejection’, ‘Doigts Obscènes’, ‘They Call Me Lily!!’ and ‘Land of Titian! Land of Verdi! O Italy!’ Later, and in a footnote, no less, Eddy dies while taking part in an archaeological dig near Sodom: ‘the shock received by meeting a jackal while composing a sonnet had been too much for him … Alas, for the triste obscurity of his end!’