by Jamie James
Douglas remained true to his vision of pagan hedonism to the end of his life, in 1952, at the age of eighty-three. It was a horrible death. He was tormented by erysipelas, a bright scarlet inflammation of the skin commonly known as Saint Anthony’s fire, which worsened to a mysterious illness diagnosed as “a sort of consumption of the skin.” Deprived of the prospect of any further pleasure from life, he hastened its end by taking an overdose of pills. As he lay dying, some German sisters of mercy came to revive him, but he waved them away. His well-attested last words were “Get those fucking nuns away from me.” Douglas’s funeral was an unofficial state ceremony: the shops closed and tout Capri, from the civic elite to fishermen and farmers he had courted when they were boys, turned out to follow the cortege to the cemetery.
THE HISTORY OF the foreign colony in Capri is a chronicle of scandals, most of them teapot tempests by the standards of contemporary morality, yet for that reason instructive about the habits and thinking of our grandparents and great-grandparents. The Isle of Capri, as it came to be known, was the resort of last resort for men with ready money to pay for the rental of a villa, who typically went there for the same reasons that Tacitus constructed to explain Tiberius’s removal to the island: to avoid censure for shocking behavior and continue it beyond the strictures of home. In the pre-electronic era, scandal control was a simpler proposition than it is now, particularly for the highborn, who could depend upon the courts, including the court of public opinion, to take their word over that of the lower orders. Most indiscretions could be swept away by a modest sum of cash, so long as the miscreant had the good sense to go on a long holiday abroad, where such sins were tolerated or more readily forgiven.
At least until the trials of Oscar Wilde. His downfall, like that of a Greek tragic hero, was put into motion not by his deviations from conventional morality but rather by hubris, his serene belief that he was too powerful to suffer public opprobrium for his private affairs and could punish those who had the temerity to denounce him. Wilde sealed his own doom when he lodged a libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. After all, Queensberry, bully that he was, had only spoken the truth when he accused Wilde (albeit illiterately) of being a sodomite. If Wilde had been content to disregard the accusation, his posthumous reputation as a wit for the ages would have been untarnished, and it would have been left to modern scholars to excavate the details of his romps with rent boys. Yet the indelible image of Wilde is that of a ruined man in shackles on the platform at Clapham Junction, where he was reviled and spat on by passengers as he waited for the train that would take him to Reading Gaol. After his release from prison, Wilde left Britain and never returned. He spent the wretched remainder of his life traveling throughout Europe, with occasional forays to North Africa, often incognito.
One of the stations of his martyrdom took place in Capri: for once, the island’s celebrated tolerance was absent, though it was not the Capriotes’ doing. Five months after his release from prison, Wilde took up residence in Naples, accompanied by Douglas. After Wilde received a windfall of ten pounds from his publisher, the pair went to Capri for a brief holiday, where they stayed at the Quisisana, the island’s best hotel, which would provide the setting of many later scandals. The pathos of Wilde’s ruin derives in part from his jaunty good spirits in exile. He wrote to his loyal friend Reginald Turner, “I want to lay a few simple flowers on the Tomb of Tiberius. As the Tomb is of someone else really, I shall do so with the deeper emotion.” Wilde and Douglas had lunch with Axel Munthe, the island’s legendary self-legendizer, at his famous villa, San Michele, in the upland village of Anacapri. In another letter, Wilde described Munthe as “a great connoisseur of Greek things” and “a wonderful personality.”
Roger Peyrefitte described Wilde’s public humiliation on the night of his arrival in The Exile of Capri, a biographical novel told from the point of view of the aristocratic French writer Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, whose reckless pursuit of love and sexual adventure with adolescent boys would make him the island’s most scandalous foreign resident after Tiberius. Jacques, seventeen, is traveling with Robert de Tournel, a poet his elder by some fifteen years, who is initiating him into the Uranian underworld, the earliest manifestation of what would come to be known as the gay lifestyle, though not as his lover. As the two Frenchmen peruse the dinner menu at the Quisisana,
a man, accompanied by a younger man, appeared in the doorway. The man had a powerful head, long gray hair, heavy, flaccid cheeks, and his fingers were loaded with rings; his companion was pale, carried himself insolently, and had a cane in his hand.
“Oscar Wilde,” Robert muttered, “and Lord Alfred Douglas.”
Jacques, overwhelmed, stared at these two personages, whom fate had thus thrown in his way on this his first visit to Capri. They were making their way towards an unoccupied table, when an Englishman summoned the maître d’hôtel and told him, in a loud voice, “If these gentlemen are dining here, I shall leave your restaurant at once.”
Other English diners indicate that they will follow him, and the maître d’ suavely refuses service to Wilde and Douglas. Jacques, his eyes “bright with tears, as Wilde’s had been,” in a voice “hot with indignation” demands that Robert invite the outcasts to join them at their table. His worldly friend demurs and proceeds to explain the reality of scandal to the naive young man. Wilde, he explains,
could have continued to flaunt his tastes before the whole of society if he had been content to satisfy them among his social and intellectual equals. Whereas what his trial revealed were his relations with a pack of stable-boys, waiters, and male prostitutes. England recoiled from a man who had been so stupid as to stir up mud enough to obscure his genius, and mud, moreover, which left its mark on all England, since every Englishman had, at his public school, done what Wilde was reproached with.
In the morning, when Jacques and Robert make a pilgrimage to the ruins of Villa Jovis, Jacques stops at Villa Federico, the house where Wilde and Douglas are staying, to leave a bouquet of gladioli and tuberoses, with a note identifying himself as “a young Frenchman at the Quisisana.” Wilde responds with a warm note of thanks: “You have poured the balm of your youth on the wound I received from the Pharisees … I shall remember Capri only for your flowers.” It is a lovely fable, connecting the two martyrs in a floral symmetry, yet that’s what it is, a fable. Peyrefitte’s narrative of Wilde’s humiliation at the Quisisana follows contemporaneous accounts of the event that survive in the record, but the only source for the presence of Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen at the scene is Peyrefitte’s novel.
Fersen2 published some twenty books of verse and fiction, most of them about the beauty of young men and the love it inspires. Some of them are charmingly written and offer points of interest, but none of them is fully satisfying as literature. Fersen’s most enduring creation was Villa Lysis, the opulent mansion he built just an arrow’s shot down the hill from Villa Jovis, unless one counts his life, which fulfilled the motto inscribed over the entrance to Villa Lysis: Amori et dolori sacrum, consecrated to love and sorrow. In his preface to The Exile of Capri, Jean Cocteau described Fersen as among “those beings who, incapable of creating masterpieces, try to become one in their own persons,” and cruelly likened him to mad Ludwig II of Bavaria and Elisabeth of Austria, last of the Habsburg empresses, who slept one night of the week under a blanket of beefsteaks to keep her skin in good form. If Cocteau’s assertion was just, and Fersen’s aim was to make a masterpiece of his life, he succeeded. It was an anarchic tour de force, a histrionic chronicle of love fulfilled and betrayed, of ecstatic exaltation and bitter sorrow worthy of a Byronic hero.
The intense romance of Fersen’s story is attributable at least in part to the fact that, like the life of Tiberius, it is shrouded in mythic shadows and mists that will never be illuminated or dispelled. Any consideration of Fersen’s life presents the problem, which may be unique in modern biography
, that the principal source of factual information is a work of fiction. The Exile of Capri, published in 1959, was based upon extensive research that cannot be verified: interviews with Fersen’s friends and intimate associates, by then near the end of their lives, and documents that are lost or no longer available. The novel is a maddening literary sphinx that seamlessly mingles fact and fiction in what might be called a roman à demi-clef, a semi-nonfiction novel, or a biography enlivened with fabricated scenes of high drama. Peyrefitte identifies the major personalities by their real names, yet he gives pseudonyms to many minor actors, and some, such as Robert de Tournel, are pure invention.
Seventeen-year-old Fersen might have been at the Quisisana the night that Oscar Wilde was refused service; Fersen was traveling in Italy with his mother around that time, and their visit to Capri might have coincided with Wilde’s. No record of the hotel’s dining-room reservations exists to prove that he was not there, but if he was, his dining companion would have been his mother, and the floral tribute, and therefore Wilde’s note, lie far beyond the bounds of credibility. In this instance, we may take the lack of corroborative evidence as strong grounds for doubt. Fersen, throughout his life keenly alert to the interesting pathos that it presented to the world, would surely have told the story of meeting his idol if it had occurred—and he would have kept that note.
Ostensibly a sympathetic portrait of a difficult man, The Exile of Capri is in fact fatally biased. Peyrefitte was an outspoken apologist for pederasty. His first novel, Special Friendships (Les amitiés particulières), about a tragic love affair between schoolboys, was a succès de scandale that came near to winning the Prix Goncourt when it was published, in 1945. Yet in his subsequent career, Peyrefitte discovered that literary scandals can be as difficult to manufacture as they are to escape. His attempts to repeat the sensation of his first book fell short. He was a notable example of the sort of gay cheerleader who finds icons and martyrs everywhere he looks: not content with the usual lineup of Alexander, Hadrian, and Richard the Lionheart, Peyrefitte, guided by the principle that if no one can disprove an interesting theory, then it must be true, was ready to believe that almost any male person who made a name for himself in history was homosexual, popes in particular.
Beguiled by the witty entertainment value and confident tone of Peyrefitte’s novel, many writers have overlooked its manifest untrustworthiness and turned to it as a source of historical information. Why would anyone put any credence at all in a book that begins with a forged letter by Oscar Wilde? Nonetheless, the Quisisana incident has often been repeated as fact. The cause of Fersen’s death is unknown and unknowable, but many writers of nonfiction also follow Peyrefitte in making his death by an overdose of cocaine a suicide, yet contemporary testimony and circumstantial evidence would just as well support a theory of accidental death. The main reason Peyrefitte’s novel has maintained its position of prestige is that it has long extracts from court records and other official dossiers that have every appearance of being genuine.
Subsequent investigators have pored over the book in search of reliable information, but the author did not provide even a rough guide to his research. In his memoirs, Peyrefitte dispensed tantalizing hints as to who’s who in the book, what’s real and what’s not, but he took spiteful pleasure in claiming sole possession of Fersen’s life. As a record of historical events, his book is a fatally alluring mirage. The novel is further complicated by its equivocal, at times malicious attitude toward its subject. Just as Tacitus had his own, republican reasons for inventing or embellishing or at least laying a heavy emphasis on Tiberius’s immoral behavior in Capri, so the author of The Exile of Capri portrays Fersen as a feckless, pathetic victim of his own grandiosity and meager talent, in order to make him fit the pattern of the pederastic hero of a Roger Peyrefitte novel, which must trace a tragic arc.
As is often the case with expatriates, Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s ancestry was cosmopolitan. The noble line of the Adelswärds is Swedish, dating to the seventeenth century; the French branch of the family began in 1806, when Baron Göran Adelswärd, fighting with the Prussians against Napoleon’s army in Lübeck, was captured and imprisoned at Longwy, in northern France. There, in the comfortable circumstances of an officer in confinement during the Napoleonic Wars, he married the daughter of a local civic dignitary. According to Peyrefitte, the baron’s wife was the cousin of Count Hans Axel von Fersen, a hero of the American Revolution decorated by George Washington and later the dashing lover of Marie Antoinette. This uncertain connection holds our attention only because Jacques later claimed to be a descendant of le beau Fersen, as he was commonly known.
The baron’s son Renauld d’Adelswärd became a naturalized French citizen and got his family accepted as French aristocracy (hence the adoption of the nobiliary de). He created the steel industry in Longwy and with it fabulous wealth for himself and his descendants. He built a stately family seat, Château Herserange, and secured an appointment to the National Assembly. There, he became friends with Victor Hugo, a deputy representing Paris; after the coup d’état of 1851, the two men went into exile together on the Channel island of Jersey. Renauld’s son Axel, Jacques’s father, was a yachtsman who died on a steamship voyage en route from Marseilles to South America, under mysterious circumstances. Thus, at the age of seven, Jacques inherited a romantic family history, a barony, Protestant religion, and the promise of sole possession of a vast fortune in steel.
After his father’s death, Jacques was the only male in the family; his mother, grandmother, and two younger sisters petted and spoiled him. His grandfather took an interest in him, taking the family scion on sporting holidays, though Fersen later said that he spent most of his time during these manly outdoor vacations picking flowers and chasing butterflies. On one such trip to Jersey, when he was thirteen, he formed a romantic friendship of some sort with a blond Etonian he met there. Fersen’s education was remarkable for its elaborate itinerary: he attended six different lycées and collèges in Paris over the course of ten years. The cause for the frequent removals would not seem to have been poor marks, for he won several prizes. More likely he was bored by his studies and resisted school discipline. His classmates called him fille, a girl, and he confirmed their contempt of him when they took him to a brothel, a rite of passage he fled in horror.
When Fersen was twenty-two, he published a poem about a schoolboy much like himself neglecting his work in a study hall, which gives a vivid impression of how his twig was bent:
Thirteen, blond, with precocious eyes
That speak of excitement and desire,
Lips that have a smack of mischief,
Even something of vice about them.
The other boys are scribbling away at their essays, but he is alone in a corner, reading naughty poems by Alfred de Musset. When the prefect supervising the study hall approaches him, the boy puts away his book and presents an appearance of sedulous application to his studies. After the prefect passes, he returns to his reading. His face flushing pink, he shifts in his seat, slipping farther into the shadows.
He runs his hands into his pockets,
Pierced with a hole, none’s the wiser,
And languorously plays with his toy,
A dreamer of kittenish pleasures.
In 1898, Jacques’s grandfather died, making him, at eighteen, one of the richest men in Europe. Although his education was not the pressing concern it was for most of his contemporaries, he enrolled at university in Geneva, idly contemplating a career in diplomacy, in emulation of his ancestral hero Axel von Fersen. Instead, he followed Musset, his first literary hero, and became a dandy and a poet. He did not complete his studies in Geneva, but he did publish his first book there, Love Story (Conte d’amour). By 1902, the year he turned twenty-two, Fersen had published five books, which found enough readers to be reprinted several times. He followed Conte d’amour with two collections of verse; his first novel, Our Lady of Dead Seas; and a miscellany of poetry and short
fiction, Ébauches et débauches (Sketches and debauches), which included “Arcadian Kisses,” a short story that celebrated an ideal love between two fifteen-year-old shepherds in Arcady, and another story extolling the charms of “Cycladian girls, pretty Greeks who dreamed of fountains and disdained the love of men.” In 1902, Fersen renewed his Swedish connection by attending the wedding of the titular head of the Adelswärd clan, in Stockholm, where King Oskar II received him in a private audience. An item in Le Figaro reported that he presented the minister of foreign affairs with a copy of one of his books.
One of the most marriageable bachelors in Paris, the good-looking young baron became a frequent guest at the capital’s best salons. The Exile of Capri is packed with counts, duchesses, and princesses who welcomed him to their at-homes. At one of these soirees, he met Blanche de Maupeou, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a vicomte and, crucially, a Protestant. She was a passionate admirer of Ébauches et débauches. The book’s veil of respectability was thin enough; débauche has the same meaning in French that it does in English, and the Arcadian kisses are plainly shared by boys (though it is possible that some of the high-flown classical references, such as “Cycladian girls,” that is, girls from Lesbos, might have flown over her sheltered head). There was nothing outrageous or bold about the collection; most of the poems are conventional, addressed to feminine love objects, and Blanche might have fancied that she had inspired them. Anyway, a soupçon of homosexuality was fashionable in the salons of turn-of-the-century Paris, rather as it was for rock stars in the 1970s, endowing the male with an exciting dash of danger. It was to France, after all, that Wilde fled after his release.
Fersen advanced his career the way writers have always done, by ingratiating himself with the successful authors of his time in the hope of gaining their support. He successfully pursued two members of the Academy, José-Maria de Heredia, the Cuban-born sonneteer, and Edmond Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, who wrote a brief preface for his second poetry collection, Light Songs (Chansons légères). His most notable conquest was the superbly snobbish Robert, comte de Montesquiou, the model for Jean des Esseintes, the protagonist of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s prototypical Decadent novel À rebours (translated as Against Nature and Against the Grain). Des Esseintes embodied the fin de siècle ideal of the dandy and provided a direct link with the Uranian underworld in his fascination with liquid-eyed, cherry-lipped schoolboys. Fersen dedicated Ébauches et débauches to Montesquiou. On a visit to his estate in Neuilly, in suburban Paris, Fersen met Marcel Proust, at the time an aspiring litterateur whose artistic reputation had scarcely begun, who encouraged him in friendship.
