Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Compton Mackenzie came to Capri to live in 1913, prompted in part by an enthusiastic reading of Siren Land. At thirty, he was already a major writer, anyway a famous author. His powerful advocate was Henry James. In an essay published in 1914, James named him among the “best of the younger men,” on a par with Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells, with D. H. Lawrence lagging behind “in the dusty rear.” Mackenzie’s second novel, Carnival, was one of the bestselling books of 1912, filmed in 1916 and remade twice in the talkie era. In James’s summary, the book is “all roses and sweet champagne and young love,” which might explain why it has not fared as well with posterity as novels by other “younger men” on James’s list. Mackenzie’s next book, Sinister Street, a very long bildungsroman set at Oxford, had an enormous impact on the post–First World War generation. It was a succès de scandale, which dealt openly with forbidden issues such as Scottish nationalism and homosexuality. Orwell adored the book when he was the schoolboy Eric Blair, and was caned after he was caught reading it. While he was living in Capri, Mackenzie wrote The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett, a prequel to Sinister Street, which bolstered the author’s notorious reputation by adding prostitution, cross-dressing, and atheism to his repertoire of controversial themes.

  Mackenzie followed Vestal Fire with another comic novel set in Capri, Extraordinary Women, about the island’s lesbian residents. In his memoir, Mackenzie claimed that his Capri books were romans à clef in the exact sense, closely based on real people and faithfully narrating events from life. One popular book about Capri has an appendix that provides a key to the true-life models for the two novels’ seventy-seven characters. It is a pointed commentary on the state of Fersen studies, such as they are, that the novels of Compton Mackenzie are the most trustworthy source of information about his life, surpassing The Exile of Capri, for no full-length biography of him has been published.

  Fersen himself wrote a roman à clef about the expatriate community in Capri, but the key is approximate. Et le feu s’éteignit sur la mer … (And the fire is doused in the sea…), “respectfully dedicated to the mademoiselles Wolcott-Perry,” tells the story of Gérard Maleine, a sensitive, idealistic sculptor in Paris who falls in love with an American heiress, a Modern Woman who plays golf and goes joyriding in aeroplanes and fast motorcars. He takes her to Capri, where she models for his masterpiece, a sculpture of Psyche. He marries her there, in a pastoral wedding scene reminiscent of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and immediately experiences a disastrous disillusionment. The novel is a harmless, amusing entertainment, marred by a tragic ending that falls flat.

  Fersen’s evocation of Capri in the novel is affectionate if patronizing, and as accurate today as it was when the book was published. The Piazzetta, he writes, is like a little theater, thronged with people who “make extravagant gestures yet appear to be in no hurry at all, like the extras in an operetta.” Debonair, mustachioed carabinieri, looking a cross between Pulcinella and Napoleon, stroll across the stage, which is wafted with the scent of frying garlic. The afternoon sun makes bright splashes on the stone staircase, its steps lined with flowerpots, that leads up to the pompous cathedral. On the right, a terrace edged with white columns overlooks the sea, with a sign indicating the entrance to the funicular. The old town clocktower looms over the scene, its powder-blue faience dial peering down at the players as if through a monocle.

  The book provoked outrage in Capri when it was published, in 1909. It was condemned as a vicious roman à clef that insulted everyone in the foreign community of Capri, yet the reader searches in vain for characters that clearly target individual residents. One malicious passage, often quoted to justify the opprobrium heaped on the book, seems mild enough. If the intent was to satirize real people, it is too vague to identify them: “The people in Capri annoyed [Maleine]. It was a social cocktail with the most heterogeneous mixture: bankrupt bankers, crooked lawyers, former croupiers from the Riviera, gentlemen working at trades, newly enriched dishwashers fraternizing with virtuous old tarts, girls who were unmarriageable or too-fervent admirers of Lesbos.”

  The only character evidently modeled on an actual person is identified with Fersen himself: Eric Hultmann, “the little painter who lives on Monte Tiberio,” who has “an unassailable bad reputation.” At a dinner party, one of the guests breathlessly reports that “he lives there with a Chinaman,” perhaps a conflation of Nino Cesarini and Fersen’s Sinhalese servants, and “has a twenty-three-year-old male cook and statues of completely nude men.” Maleine mockingly asks whether Hultmann ought to put boxer shorts on his statue of Antinous and proffers the standard Decadent defense of heterodox private affairs, echoing Proust’s plea on Fersen’s behalf after the Black Masses scandal: “Everyone has the right to hold his own views about life. When it comes to intimate morality, only a laundress has the right, the pleasure or the annoyance, of sticking her nose into Hultmann’s dirty linen.” After Maleine’s bride abandons him and runs away with a former lover, Hultmann takes his brokenhearted friend on a tour of pagan Campania, endeavoring to persuade him to sample the consolations of boy love. The attempted conversion fails, and the novel ends abruptly. In Mackenzie’s wicked synopsis, “following upon a tornado of invective against the falsity and lust of Woman,” Maleine mutilates the sculpture of Psyche “and in pushing it over the cliff into the sea pushed himself over on top of it.”

  After the publication of Et le feu, Fersen’s sterling reputation began to tarnish. His conviction in Paris had become common knowledge on the island, though the Wolcott-Perrys stopped their ears to the revelation and persevered in their belief in Fersen’s hollow denials. In 1909, Nino Cesarini turned twenty, making him too old to continue to embody Fersen’s erotic ideal, so Fersen imported younger talent from the mainland for sex. A hedonistic life centered on opium and sex with adolescents might raise eyebrows, but it could be overlooked if the hedonist was an aristocrat with steel shares. However, popular opinion shifted against Fersen after another scandal brought on by his passion for amateur theatrics.

  Cesarini had been called up for military service, and to celebrate his twentieth birthday, Fersen planned an elaborate spectacle in which Cesarini would be initiated into the cult of Mithras. It was performed by torchlight in the Grotto of Matermania, on the island’s western coast, where the Romans had built a luxurious nymphaeum similar to the one at the Blue Grotto. Later (or perhaps simultaneously), the sea cavern was devoted to the rites of Mithras. Fersen composed a verse script for the occasion and cast himself in the part of Hypatos, the priest officiating at the rite, attended by his Sinhalese servants in skimpy togas and his maids, dressed as slave girls. The Wolcott-Perrys’ obese cook took the role of Tiberius. In the middle of the night, cheered by wine and opium, the motley group packed up their ritual paraphernalia, donned coats over their costumes, and processed overland from Villa Lysis to the grotto.

  Peyrefitte wrote a detailed description of the event, which might have been based on secondhand gossip that had a kernel of truth in it, or it might be a purely imaginative pastiche of scenes from Fersen’s novels and desultory research into neo-Mithraic rites. It might even be true:

  The two maidservants came and went, ringing small hand bells and waving lanterns, according to Mithraic ritual. They sprinkled the congregation with leafy branches dipped in milk, a symbol of fecundation, although all the loves present were sterile. They stooped over them to administer the sacred communion—a spoonful of honey … Nino hummed one of Jacques’s songs, set to music by Nouguès:5

  Chantez-moi doucement

  La langue des amants

  Solitaires …

  Chantez-moi, voulez-vous?

  Le Malheur d’être fou

  Sur la terre.

  [Sing to me sweetly

  The language of lonely lovers …

  Sing to me, will you?

  The misfortune of being mad

  Upon this earth.]

  When the [Sinhalese] “boys” had called out that sunr
ise was near, the initiates straightened their leafy coronets and grouped themselves about the altar. Each recited invocations, and then Nino stripped off his robe. By the mingled rays of dawn and torches, he appeared in his nakedness, wearing only a belt of some creeping plant about his loins.

  The Sinhalese flogged the initiate twenty lashes with a leather strap, and when sunlight struck the threshold of the cavern, Fersen as Hypatos ritually killed his lover’s human incarnation, or perhaps it was the ceremonial death of his boyhood, by plunging a dagger (fruit knife) into his manly breast.

  The young daughter of a farmer, cutting grass on the field above, heard voices and peeped into the grotto. She ran home, horrified, to report the murder of a naked Italian youth by a foreign lunatic wielding a sword. The truth must have seemed hardly less appalling to the magistrate, who issued a decree proclaiming Fersen’s expulsion from Capri. Once again he was persona non grata.

  * * *

  THE NATURAL SETTING of Villa Lysis, perched on the island’s highest cliff in the midst of a primordial forest, plays as powerful a part in its impact as the architecture does. The villa’s gardens were supervised by Domenico Ruggiero, the island’s leading landscape architect at the turn of the twentieth century, who had created the gardens at many of the island’s grand private estates, including Villa Torricelli. In 1900, he designed the Krupp Gardens, one of the most gorgeous botanic gardens in the Mediterranean, sited on the southern edge of the village overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Now known as the Gardens of Augustus, it remains a popular tourist attraction. The Mackenzies were devoted to Mimí, as he was called. In his memoir, Compton Mackenzie wrote, “Intelligence beamed from his eyes; sympathy flowed from the tips of his expressive fingers. With the manners of a diplomat, the appearance of a genial brigand in an opera,” he was a genius with carnations and could cook pasta as well as anyone in Capri. Ruggiero carried on a never-ending row with Fersen, who decreed that not a twig was to be pruned from the trees on his estate, with the result that it was an impenetrable thicket.

  I found it just the same on my first visit to Capri, in 2001. At that time, the villa was closed to the public, its ownership embroiled in legal controversy. On a walk through the woods up to Villa Jovis, I stopped to peer between the iron bars of the estate’s high fence, longing to have a look at the lair of the infamous Count Fersen. A gap in the bars, apparently well traveled, presented itself, so I slipped inside and fought my way through the brambles and branches of the pine trees and beeches to the house, which was in a sad state of dilapidation. The golden mosaics were tarnished, and mold disfigured walls with peeling plaster. Through a broken window on the inland side I saw the ruined opium den, stacked with spindly gold chairs of the sort used for weddings. The terrace that faced the entrance, on the site where Norman Douglas brought Fersen soon after his arrival on the island, was broken and littered with evidence of illicit partying. Vines had grown over the plinth that had once supported Ierace’s bronze sculpture of Nino Cesarini astride a leaping dolphin. The spectacular view of the Marina Grande far below and the Gulf of Naples stretching into the distance made me dizzy.

  When I returned to Capri in the spring of 2016, the commune had established its ownership of the estate, restored the house, and opened it to the public. I arrived a few weeks before the season began. Not trusting to luck this time, I asked the commune to arrange for someone to meet me and unlock the gate.

  Anita de Pascale, a slim, lively woman, looking glamorous in a clingy blue pullover and dark oversize sunglasses, greets me with a sunny smile. She is not an employee of the commune, she explains, but rather belongs to a volunteer group that has taken a curatorial interest in Villa Lysis. Anita is a founding member of Capri È Anche Mia (Capri Is Mine Too), an informal group of native Capriotes that was formed in 2014 to clean up and maintain public gardens, beaches, and plazas. The group has about fifty active members who meet on Sundays to sweep, prune, and plant flowers. Their main job, Anita says, is clearing the litter left by tourists.

  The interior of the villa is clean but empty apart from some posters left over from an exhibition the year before, photographs of Fersen and Cesarini, the Wolcott-Perrys and Norman Douglas, interiors of Villa Lysis and Villa Torricelli, even a portrait of Roger Peyrefitte. The only place to sit is a sagging smelly sofa in a bay window that overlooks the gulf. Anita offers the information that the room will be refurnished before the house opens for the summer season. The bright morning sunshine and the clean, bracing smell of a fresh paint job give the opium den a strangely wholesome atmosphere. There and elsewhere, the architecture incorporates stone formations underlying the site that were left unexcavated, bringing a feeling of the outdoors inside.

  The terrace at the entrance has been repaved, and the plinth now has a cute bronze of a boy wearing a leafy loincloth in the style of Peter Pan, whose torso is twisted as he looks over his shoulder to inspect his foot, which is being pinched by a crab on the base. I ask to tour the garden, but Anita doesn’t have the key to unlock the padlock on the wicker gate. I propose hopping over it, which could easily be done. She counters by inviting me to return on Sunday, when Capri È Anche Mia will be working there, so I can see them in action.

  Sunday is a bleak, blowy day, threatening a rain that never comes. When I arrive, at 8:00 a.m., perhaps two dozen men and women, in equal numbers, most of them in their thirties and forties, are already at work. The men are building a rustic wooden fence on the edge of the cliff, while the women are raking up mounds of dead leaves and mold. I find Anita in a crouch, cleaning a flat stone with a brush. She greets me happily and says, “Today I am an archaeologist! My great-grandfather worked here as a gardener. He laid these stepping-stones, and now I am cleaning them so they can be used again.”

  Anita de Pascale’s great-grandfather was Mimí Ruggiero. She introduces me to her cousin Tonino Gargiulo, another descendant of Ruggiero’s, who is potting geraniums to line the driveway that leads from the main gate down to the house. Tonino owns a fish market on Via le Botteghe, just off the Piazzetta. He has installed a snack bar there, in the front of the shop. Later in the week I will go there to eat crisp, tender fried calamari.

  I ask the cousins what they think about devoting their Sundays to restoring the house and garden of an opium addict who took a fourteen-year-old boy as his lover. I pose the provocative question blandly, and it doesn’t stop them for an instant. They shrug in unison and glance at each other.

  “The past is the past,” said Tonino. “I am not influenced by his way of life. I am grateful that he chose Capri as his home and built this beautiful villa.” Anita picked up the thread: “In those days, he had to come here to live in freedom. Capri is the same now as it was then. Everyone has liberty to live as they want, and they are respected.” They invite me to join them for lemon cake and coffee from a flask.

  In a sense, Anita and Tonino are having Mimí Ruggiero’s revenge on Fersen, by imposing a degree of domesticated order on the bosky wilderness that the house’s master decreed must be left in its pristine, impassable state. Compton Mackenzie predicted it. When his first residency on the island came to a close and he boarded a ship in Naples, bound for Alexandria, Ruggiero woke up in the middle of the night to wave addio from the terrace of Mackenzie’s villa when the ship cruised past. Mackenzie prophesied, “No doubt one of his family will sustain the great Ruggiero tradition.”

  * * *

  PARADOXICALLY, FERSEN SPENT much of his final exile from Capri in Paris, where he continued to pursue his literary ambitions with unflagging energy. There, he created one of the most beautiful literary journals of the early twentieth century, Akademos, a “monthly review of free art and criticism.” It was inspired by German periodicals devoted to the cause of homosexual equality, newly founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, but there was nothing doctrinaire about Fersen’s magazine except a commitment to uphold the pagan virtues, Greek simplicity and Latin purity of expression, and a stern opposition to vulgarity, hypocrisy, and ugliness. It wa
s launched under a cloud of tragedy: in the first issue, Fersen published his obituary of the journal’s secretary, Raymond Laurent, who shot himself on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute, in Venice, in despair after he had been dumped by a lover. Just hours before he killed himself, he had made an unsuccessful pass at Jean Cocteau, then twenty years old. Laurent’s body, Fersen wrote, was discovered, apparently by coincidence, by Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s son.

  The roster of contributors to Akademos suggests that Fersen was not quite the despised litterateur manqué that Cocteau and Peyrefitte made him out to be, and commanded a measure of respect in the European literary establishment. In addition to friends with secure reputations, such as Achille Essebac, Robert de Montesquiou, and Norman Douglas, the list included such prominent writers as Colette, Anatole France, Maxim Gorky, Pierre Loti, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. After Marinetti proclaimed the principles of Futurism, Fersen improbably signed on to the movement, which renounced any sentimental reverence of antiquity. He wrote in Marinetti’s journal Poesia, “If it is true that an artist has to live in nostalgia, it would be better for him to cling to the divine essence of the future than to the human materialism of the past.” This fashionably modern view is difficult to reconcile with the devotion to pagan virtues extolled by Akademos, either a tribute to the flexibility of his convictions or an indication of their shallowness. Akademos was expensive to produce and found few subscribers, yet it still managed to get out twelve issues, comprising more than two thousand pages.