Anatomy of Restlessness

by Bruce Chatwin

  In 1942 he never named the Jews. He could, arguably, have been referring to the Euthanasia Programme which did away with about 70,000 Gentile degenerates before the Nazis set to work elsewhere. But then Lorenz usually appeals to general principle, not to the sordid detail of a particular problem.

  Going through Daniel Gasman’s brilliant and disturbing book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, one is struck, also, by how few of Lorenz’s ideas on human behaviour rest on ‘inductive natural science’ but how many of them repeat the tenets of Monism,48 the movement created by the biologist Ernst Haeckel to interpret Darwinism for social purposes and to combat socialist ideologies as contrary to nature’s plan. The Monists were the first to attempt a fusion of biology and social science, and it was under the umbrella of Monist ideas that German academic circles were united with the most strident demands of German nationalism. The point made by Gasman, which cannot be emphasised too strongly, is that the Nazis believed in the final solution as ‘scientific’ and thus sanctioned by Natural Law.49

  Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: ‘Nature is patient of interpretation in terms of laws that happen to interest us.’ And Lorenz’s career is surely a warning to anyone who presumes to write an objective ‘biogrammer’ or ‘ethological paradigm’ for the human species. For it shows just how far the ‘facts’ of our evolutionary past can be stretched or patterned to conform with the wilder flights of prejudice.

  In a historical context, Lorenzian ethology falls into the category of what Lovejoy and Boas called ‘Animalitarianism’—‘the tendency to represent the beasts – on one ground or another—as creatures more admirable, more normal, or more fortunate than the human species.’50 That man himself is a flawed, aberrant being, that his Fall occurred even before he became human, is a constant theme in Western thought from the fourth century BC onward, especially among societies which have lost their nerve. For if the concept of the Good Savage encouraged reformers of a levelling temper to hope for a simpler and more equable life, the Myth of the Happier Beast damned hopes for a better world, engendered in man a disgust for himself and his works, absolved him from responsibility for his actions, and led him, in his desperate search for remedies, to fall into a collective moral anaesthesia and bow his neck to tyranny.

  1979

  V

  ART AND THE IMAGE-BREAKER

  AMONG THE RUINS

  On the island of Capri there lived three narcissists who each built a house on the edge of a cliff. They were Axel Munthe, Baron Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen and Curzio Malaparte. All three were writers of the self-dramatising variety. All had a strong dose of Nordic sensibility. And all sought to expand their personalities in architecture. Their houses were thus acts of self-love – ‘dream houses’ where they hoped to live, love, and work wonders of creation, but which, despite idyllic settings, were infected by a morbid atmosphere akin to that of Böcklin’s Island of the Dead.

  Capri is, of course, the ‘Isle of Goats’. At the time of the Emperor Tiberius it was still a Greek enclave, and the illusion persisted into modem times that the Great (goat-footed) God Pan was not entirely dead, that Capri was still a pagan paradise in a Catholic sea, where the wine was excellent, the sun always shone, and the boys and girls were pretty and available. From the midnineteenth century on, a rush of romantically minded northerners descended on Capri – to buy, build or rent a villa.

  There were German artists, English middle-class eccentrics, American lesbians and Russian ‘god builders’. Kaiser Wilhelm II came; so, at one time or another, did D. H. Lawrence, Rilke, Field Marshal Rommel, Edda Ciano, Gracie Fields and Lord Alfred Douglas (who sat it out in a villa while Oscar Wilde was in Reading Gaol).

  Or there was Norman Douglas – scholar, hedonist, and absolutely no relation of Alfred’s—who, having lost his own villa in a financial tumble, preferred the convenience of rented rooms. Or Fritz Krupp, the ‘Cannon King’, who built himself a cliffside garçonnière—only to commit suicide when his homosexuality was noised about by a Naples newspaper. Or Maxim Gorky, who wrote Mother on Capri. Or Gorky’s good friend Lenin, a popular fisherman known locally as Signor Drindrin.

  But the key to Capri’s history is the Emperor Tiberius. He owned twelve villas on the island, some in the hills, others by the sea. At his cliff-top palace, Villa Jovis, he built a lighthouse from which he could flash commands relayed to all quarters of the empire.

  Tiberius’ character is an academic battleground. Was he – as Norman Douglas believed – the shy, frugal, scholarly, mobhating and art-loving ascetic who startled his Greek philosopher friends by asking what songs the Sirens usually sang, and who found he could cope with government only by retiring to his airy pavilions, to be alone with his thoughts and his books? Or was he – as described by Suetonius – the hideous old pederast, whose left hand was so strong he ‘could poke a finger through a sound, freshly plucked apple, or into the skull of a boy or young man’?

  Did he collect sexual athletes from all over the empire? Did he swim in grottoes with corrupted children? Did he play games with his victims before having them chucked from the Salto di Tiberio, a thousand feet into the sea?

  Given the tenuous borderline between extremes of asceticism and of sensuality, the ‘good’ Tiberius is probably the same as the ‘bad’. But it was the second, Suetonian Tiberius who inspired the Marquis de Sade, an early tourist on the island, to write a couple of sizzling debauches for the characters Justine and Juliette, and who also provoked Baron Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen, a young aesthete awash with dreams of future orgies, to build his Villa Lysis (or La Gloriette) on a tongue of land below the emperor’s Villa Jovis.

  ‘It is one of my many crimes,’ wrote Norman Douglas in Looking Back, ‘that I induced this apple of discord to establish himself on Capri. No: that is putting it too strongly. The fact is he turned up on the island one day and met me almost immediately. He was about twenty-three years old.’

  Fersen’s life has been dealt with in two novels, Compton Mackenzie’s Vestal Fire and Roger Peyrefitte’s L’Exilé de Capri— the result of which has been that the ‘real’ Fersen has vanished into a lilac mist. Vestal Fire is a straightforward roman à clef (it must have seemed quite risky when it came out) which charts the incestuous comings and goings of an expatriate island colony treated to the irruption of an absurd French count, Robert Marsac, and his Italian boyfriend, Carlo. Peyrefitte’s book, on the other hand, confuses famous historical figures with imaginary situations and is maddening to read.

  Fersen apparently belonged to the same family as ‘le beau Fersen’, the Swedish aristocrat and presumed lover of Marie-Antoinette whose attempt to rescue the royal family ended in the fiasco at Varennes. A cadet branch of the Fersens settled in the France of Napoleon III and founded a steel mill near Luxembourg. Jacques’s father died at sea. Jacques was the only son, and was thus a very rich young man.

  He grew up in Paris of the 1890s and seems to have modelled himself on Robert de Montesquiou (who also was the model for Des Esseintes and Baron de Charlus). He had, according to Norman Douglas, a ‘childish freshness’ and blue eyes, and was always overtailored. His first volume of verse was circulated in respectable homes, despite its morbid tone and the poet’s penchant for pink roses, or pink in general (‘Et nous serons des morts sous des vêtements roses’), an affectation derived, at a guess, from Montesquiou’s Les Hortensias Bleus.

  His troubles began with the publication of Hymnaire d’Adonis—Paganismes—à la Façon de M. le Marquis de Sade. He was, however, about to forswear these frivolities and marry a Mlle de Maupeou when, without warning, the police arrested him for the corruption of schoolboys in his apartment on the Avenue de Friedland.

  This episode is the subject of Fersen’s own semi-autobiographical farrago of 1905, Lord Lyllian, ou Messes Noires, which Norman Douglas describes as having a ‘musty, Dorian-Grayish flavour’ and which is not without unconscious humour.

  Tried, sentenced, and then released, Fersen fled to Ita
ly, where he met two American ladies, the Wolcott-Perry ‘sisters’, who invited him to their villa on Capri. He then decided, as an act of defiance, to build his own dream house; and when Norman Douglas showed him the site under Monte Tiberio, Fersen said, ‘One could write poetry here.’ He refused to be deterred even when warned that the house would get no more than two hours of sunshine a day in winter. While the building went up he travelled to Ceylon, where he picked up an opium habit. Then he picked up a newspaper boy in Rome, whom he installed on Capri as his secretary.

  The boy’s name was Nino Cesarini, and he had to put up with a lot. Fersen had ‘some loveable streaks’, according to Douglas: he was not ‘disingenuous or false, but theatrical’. He was also vain, empty-headed and stingy. He mounted exotic festivities and quarrelled with all his guests. He forbade Nino to flirt with girls yet persisted in parading him round the island as if he were an ancient bronze Apollo. He took him to China, where they bought a collection of some three hundred opium pipes. He took him to Sicily to be photographed by Baron von Gloeden. Finally—if the story is true – he staged a mock human sacrifice in the Mithraic grotto of Matromania, with Nino as victim, and both of them were booted off the island.

  When war broke out in 1914, Nino had to be detoxified from opium and went off to fight in the Apennines, while Fersen stayed in the south of France. Eventually he was allowed back to the Villa Lysis; but he had quarrelled with the Wolcott-Perrys, who shut their doors on him, and in addition to opium, he took to cocaine.

  After the war Nino came back to care for his master, who, despite an illusion of perennial youth, was by this time very ill. ‘This house of mine’, Fersen said, ‘has the flavour of death.’ One stormy night in November 1923, ‘Count Jack’ (as Fersen was known on the island), dressed in robes of rose-coloured silk, lolled back on the cushions of his subterranean opium den. Nino, who had gone to the kitchen, returned to find him semi-conscious. ‘How many grams?’ he shouted. ‘How many grams?’ ‘Five,’ murmured Fersen, unclenching his fist as he slipped away—at least that was the version printed in the Naples daily Il Mattino.

  Fersen’s family stripped the villa, used it for the odd picnic, and then sold it to a Levantine businessman. ‘There it stands,’ wrote Norman Douglas in 1933, ‘like a castle in a tale, all empty and forlorn, and embowered or rather smothered in a tangle of trees ... because he grew so fond of his pines and ilexes and mimosas that he would not allow the smallest twig of them to be touched.’

  And there it stands, or half-stands, in its dark, ‘holy’ wood, again for sale – this alien ‘French’ folly, which a Capriote wit once called the ‘visiting card of a courtesan’, with its cracked stucco and splintering jalousies, silent but for the miaowing of cats, the crowing of cockerels, and the drone of powerboats in the sea below.

  I found altars in the overgrown garden, and a temple de l’amour. (A relic of impossible yearnings? Of Versailles and the queen?) The concrete urns had come adrift of their rusty armatures and lay in little pieces in the grass. And in the colonnade under the salon, the villa’s guardian had laid out carob pods to dry, and had tied up her sad beige dog.

  She was a lithe young woman, jealous of her estate. She had a green thumb. In olive-oil cans she grew geraniums, pelargoniums, and canna lilies, which flowered with an almost supernatural brilliance on the steps below the portico. The house was in shadow. A black cat kept crossing my path, as if to warn me not to trespass. There were cats everywhere, puffy-faced cats, and the smell of cat piss. And there were banks of blue hydrangeas—les hortensias bleus of Montesquiou.

  I found the salon’s colour scheme had been white and blue and gold. But the roof had caved in and heaps of rubble now covered the chambre chinoise, with its yellow tiles and phony Chinese inscriptions, where Fersen once arranged his pipes in lacquered racks.

  Yet outside, the gold mosaic still clung to the fluted columns, and, over the peristyle, I could still read, in black marble letters, AMORI ET DOLORI SACRUM—‘Sacred to Love and Sorrow’. And the white marble stair, balustraded with vine leaves and purple grapes, still led to Nino’s nusery-like bedroom – although Jacques’s had tumbled down.

  He was said to be the ‘most fascinating man in Europe’, but it is hard, in retrospect, to like Axel Munthe or his pretentious museum-sanctuary, the Villa San Michele.

  Born in 1857 in the Swedish province of Småland, Munthe came from a family of bishops and burgomasters which had moved to Scandinavia from Flanders. He studied medicine at Uppsala University and, at the age of eighteen, travelled to Italy to recover from a haemorrhaging lung. Happening to spend a day in the town of Anacapri, he saw an abandoned chapel and beside it a garden whose owner, Mastro Vincenzo, had unearthed the mosaic floors of a Roman villa and a lot of ancient marble fragments – the roba di Timberio, or ‘things of Tiberius’, as they were called by local peasants. Munthe recognised the site as one of Tiberius’ twelve and conceived, there and then if one believes him, a mission to own it.

  ‘Why should I not buy Mastro Vincenzo’s house,’ he wrote in The Story of San Michele, ‘and join the chapel and the house with garlands of vines and avenues of cypresses and columns supporting white loggias, peopled with marble statues of gods and bronzes of emperors.’

  Munthe did not go back to Sweden but continued his studies in Montpellier and then in Paris. At twenty-two he was the youngest doctor of medicine in France. He had charm, intelligence and a most plausible bedside manner, and he was soon the partner in a fashionable practice. He believed in making the rich pay for the poor. He took a special interest in nervous diseases and their possible cure by hypnosis.

  He was the close friend of Prince Eugen Bernardotte, the Swedish king’s youngest son, who was then leading the life of artistic bohemia in Paris. He knew Strindberg. He knew Maupassant (and even cruised on his yacht): in fact, much of The Story of San Michele—with its high life, low life, and whiffs of the supernatural – reminds one of Maupassant’s late style. In 1884 Munthe interrupted a journey through Lapland to work in the poor districts of Naples during a cholera epidemic. In 1889 he left Paris, bought the land at San Michele, and, to pay for the villa, set up another practice, in Keats’ house, off the Piazza di Spagna in Rome.

  There he prospered. Dr Weir Mitchell sent him ailing millionairesses from the United States. From Vienna, Professor Krafft-Ebing sent him neuropaths ‘of both sexes and of no sex’. His fees were colossal, his celebrated ‘cures’ perhaps due less to conventional medicine than to changes of climate and scenery. He collected royalty as he collected antiquities. His principal patient was Queen Victoria of Sweden, whom he cajoled into living far longer than she apparently intended. The Czarina craved his attentions, for herself and the haemophiliac Czarevitch (to the extent of almost kidnapping Munthe aboard the imperial yacht), and when he refused her, she fell into the arms of Rasputin.

  There were times when the villa on Capri must have seemed like a sanatorium for ailing queens and empresses; the Empress Elisabeth of Austria was dying to buy it. Later, when the supply of royalty began to dry up, their successors continued to call.

  ‘As for San Michele itself,’ Munthe wrote, ironically and in English, to Hermann Goering in August 1937, ‘I should be glad to lend it to you if ever you can get away from your tremendous cares. The place is small. It was built by me on the principle that the soul needs more room than the body, and it may not be comfortable enough for you.’

  He was his own architect: the style he chose was Saracen-Romanesque. The house was white and light – a ‘sanctuary to the sun’ – and done up in the ‘Renaissance’ manner most popular around the turn of the century. (Roberto Pane, the architectural historian of Capri, has described it as 'un falso presuntuoso quanto insultante’.) There was indeed a loggia peopled with statues – genuine and fake – of gods and emperors, and fragments of ancient marble, some salvaged from the imperial villa, were stuck into the walls like nuts in nougat.

  He laid out gardens with pergolas, terraces and cyp
ress walks. And as to the Chapel of San Michele itself, which used to stand like a lonely, cliff-top hermitage, he had it transformed into a kind of pasha’s pavilion from which he could gaze up to the Castle of Barbarossa, down over the cliffs to Marina Grande, or across the bay to Tiberius’ Villa Jovis—and that execrated blot on the landscape, Fersen’s Villa Lysis.

  At San Michele the view is everything: in Pasadena or Beverly Hills Munthe’s creation wouldn’t get more than a passing glance. Yet it is still one of the best-loved houses in the world, and after fifty-five years The Story of San Michele is still a best-seller and has been translated into some fifty languages (its Korean translator had turned up shortly before my visit).

  Munthe was a natural storyteller who, before hypnotising others, had taken great pains to hypnotise himself He spun tales of buried treasure; of madness; of mixed-up coffins; of wordly clerics, cold countesses and good-hearted whores; of the nun he nearly seduced during the cholera epidemic. What, however, made the book irresistible, particularly to its English readers, was Munthe’s passionate identification with birds and animals. He rescued a baboon from its half-crazed American owner. He almost killed in a duel a sadistic French viscount who had kicked Munthe’s dog so severely the animal had to be shot. He declared war on the butcher of Anacapri, who would net migrant birds and blind them with red-hot needles to make them sing. And finally, he succeeded in persuading Mussolini to turn the whole of Capri into a bird sanctuary.

  From a literary point of view, the book’s best stories deal with his years in Paris and Rome and are told with a clinical, worldweary detachment; they are reminiscent of (besides Maupassant) another doctor turned writer, W. Somerset Maugham. Like Maugham, too, his reminiscences always seem to wind up on a self-congratulatory (or, later, self-pitying) note; and the book in general bears out Oscar Wilde’s warning of the pitfalls of the first-person narrative, particularly when the narrator is a compulsive mythomaniac.