Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  Marinetti claimed to find an affinity between the patrician establishmentarian of the Roman Republic and Futurism, asserting that the Futurists’ “passion for synthesis allows us to enjoy even Tacitus without being suffocated by the repellent dust of the past.” Making a fanciful leap of logic, he proclaims that “Italian writers admire the manly conciseness of Tacitus, sister of that plastic synthesis of the Italian language we have propagated and brought about in the Futurist revolution of free speech, with the parolibero style.” Paroliberismo, “liberated words,” was a fundamental principle of Marinetti’s writing, articulated in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in 1912, which ordained that the words of the text must be freed from all syntactical and grammatical principles. The narrative of the fight between the Pink Congress and the prostitutes is an exemplary passage of paroliberismo. Marinetti’s explanation is flimsy if not absurd: Tacitus was the master of syntax, held up as a model for students of Latin prose from medieval times until Marinetti’s era.

  When it was published, Marinetti’s translation of the Germania was excoriated by critics and Latin scholars. Since then, it has received scant attention in the Italian-speaking world and (for obvious reasons) none at all outside it. Another strange intersection between Marinetti and Latin literature occurred in 1924, when rumors flew in Naples that some lost volumes of Livy’s History of Rome had been found. The discovery was attributed to Marinetti, who was in Capri at the time on another summer sojourn. The “lost decades of Livy” were soon revealed to be a hoax.

  For all of Marinetti’s ingenious rationalizations, the Futurists’ fascination with Capri posed a glaring contradiction to every principle the movement professed. The island was as far removed from the modern, mechanized Western world as any place in Europe during the early decades of the twentieth century. Their main motive for relaxing their principles might have been economic: they were poor, and Capri was cheap. The Neapolitan critic Ugo Piscopo also discerns a geographic rationale for the Futurists’ loyalty to the island. In 2001, Piscopo wrote that for the Futurists and their supporters and sympathizers Capri presented an

  epiphany of the irrepressible germination of the forces of life, plastically and dynamically renewed. The island, which looks east on a famous volcanic landscape, finds in active Vesuvius one of its fundamental reference points (volcanism being a key icon of Futurism); on the west it overlooks the open sea (and the ocean-sea is one of the central, most frequently recurring metaphors in Marinetti and his colleagues), where the Futurists discover the individual, which, as [Enrico] Prampolini says, is “a continuous variation on the theme of ‘becoming matter.’” … Capri is also the explosive magma of poetic vitality in its magic circle of land and water, in the unbroken flux of metamorphosis, in the excess it presents of events of light, color, smell, and sound, in the provocativeness of its allegories of simultaneity, of synthesis and synesthesia, in the states of the soul. It functions like a parolibero laboratory that sends circular proposals of fecundity and creative links of word-voice-color, of memory and intuition, of calculation and imagination.

  The Futurists maintained a nearly continuous presence in Capri after the movement’s vital force declined and petered out in the Fascist era. After the Second World War, Prampolini, one of the most prolific Futurist painters, returned to Capri, where he continued to pursue the movement’s dynamic aesthetic in watercolors, palely tinted landscapes and marine paintings observed in vertiginous perspective.

  BEATRICE ROMAINE GODDARD arrived in Capri in 1899 with no money, no introductions, and no plan apart from an intention to paint. The island was as hospitable to obscure and impoverished visitors as to the wealthy and famous; she was all of that. A few years later, after she had inherited a fortune, she returned to Capri and married John Ellingham Brooks, the feckless housemate of W. Somerset Maugham and E. F. Benson, in what might be called a marriage of inconvenience. Romaine Brooks, the name by which she was known after she found international renown as a portrait painter, would always remember her first visit to Capri as the only interlude of true happiness in her life.

  In her unpublished memoir, which in some versions bears the title “No Pleasant Memories,” she begins her account of her years in Capri,

  At the end of the last century, Capri was still unique in character. Though only two hours by boat from Naples, it might well have been an island in the archipelago of faraway Greece, so undisturbed it was. Artists who loved color sought its beauty; intellectuals who were weary, an ideal retreat. To those who felt strange currents beneath the soil stirring them into fever, Capri was a Pagan island, and Vesuvius its burning God.

  It is a concise and complete description of Capri’s allure, timeless except in its characterization of the Greek archipelago, which would not remain “faraway” much longer. The sentence that follows this passage dates the author in an unflattering light, fixing her class in the late Victorian era: “The peasants were beautiful and simple children who liked the foreigner because his fever brought them gold.”

  Romaine’s childhood, as she described it in her memoir, was a hellish vortex of suffering that surpassed the travails of Dickens’s most pathetic orphans. She was born in Rome, which gave her her name, in 1874. In her memoir, Romaine portrays her mother, Ella Waterman Goddard, as a woman remarkable for her “arrogance, unusual culture, and personal elegance,” who had been raised amid great wealth as the daughter of the mining magnate Isaac Waterman, in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. From her earliest childhood until she died, Romaine was convinced that her mother hated her. She portrayed Ella Goddard as a Satanist who conversed with invisible spirits and never exhibited “the slightest sympathy for anyone.” Romaine’s only solace was in drawing, which her mother forbade her to do, so she made her sketches in secrecy, on boxes and windowsills, “even with a pin on the polished wood of the piano.” The memoir does not mention her father, Major Henry Goddard, a preacher’s son from Philadelphia who was an alcoholic. Ella divorced him when Romaine was little. In childhood, Romaine was the caretaker of her mad elder brother, St. Mar, their mother’s darling, who was given to fits of violence against everyone except her.

  When Romaine was seven, while the family was living in a posh hotel in Manhattan, Ella sent her to live with a laundress, where she starved on a diet of bread and black coffee. Isaac Waterman’s secretary rescued her a year later and sent her to study at St. Mary’s Hall, an Episcopalian boarding school in New Jersey, where she was bullied and ostracized. When Romaine was fourteen, Ella confined her in a cruelly strict convent in Italy, where she was the only Protestant and forbidden to bathe. After five years of stiff-necked rebellion, she bolted. She eked out a bohemian life in Paris on a meager allowance from her mother by singing at a workingman’s cabaret called Café Chantant, until she got pregnant. Abandoned by her wealthy lover, alone in a shabby hotel room, she gave birth to a daughter. She gave up the baby for foster care in a convent, where it died at the age of two months. Romaine fled to Rome to study art. She was the only female student in her life-drawing class, which was taken by her classmates as an indication that she was available for sex. She was harassed persistently until she took flight again, to Capri.

  In her recollection, the island was a place filled with music, “rhythmic calls and responses in the vineyards, sounds of flutes from the hillsides,” where shepherds clad in sheepskins played bagpipes at the Virgin’s shrines, which “drew me back to the Pagan world whose music had not as yet died.” Her choice of lodging was governed by price: she chose a boardinghouse that charged five lire a day, which looked out on a garden shaded by palm trees. In the first of many mysterious ailments that would torment her throughout her life, she was overcome by “a bad state of nerves. At night I would be awakened by the cries of strange birds flying over the island.” She would rush to the window, where she found “all things silent in the transparent darkness of a southern sky.” No one else heard the strange birds, so she did not talk about them.

  Romain
e did not make friends at her pension. She found the boisterous atmosphere at mealtimes intolerable, so she sat alone, in glowering silence. Loneliness turned into depression; she once stood on the edge of the cliff below Villa Castello and contemplated jumping. Her work did not go well. “All efforts to paint the peasants, who posed willingly for a few centesimi, proved a failure. I would wander about, plant my easel in some isolated pathway, and then sit before it for hours, doing nothing.” Slowly she abandoned herself to the island’s influence and let it mold her to its ancient form, giving her the “freedom to find the latent Pagan within oneself, or simply to live without ambition, breathing the soothing air.” She made a friend, an American named Mrs. Snow, “big and blond,” who had “left behind a husband in some damp and gloomy house in London.” Mrs. Snow shouted at her little daughter in a loud Yankee voice, but her breezy, optimistic personality lifted Romaine from her gloom.

  She decided to leave the pension, and Mrs. Snow helped her search for a suitable studio-residence. They found just the place, a deserted chapel with a redbrick floor and a high Gothic window beside a courtyard with fig trees, enclosed by orange groves and vineyards. “The rent was only twenty lire a month, because the place was in the slums—if such a name could possibly be given to any part of Capri.” The chapel was sparsely furnished, and it swarmed with lizards and “all the queer insects of the island: fat worms with padded feet that tried to crawl up the walls but whose weight pulled them down with a soft thud to the floor, and spiders the size of saucers that I had to kill and then wash away their mangled bodies.” Her neighbor was an old beggar whom she always gave a few coppers. When she returned to Capri after receiving her inheritance, he was the first person she sought out. “Waving his bundle of bank-notes he danced about the courtyard with cramped-up legs, shouting ‘Viva la Signorina Romana!’”

  Mrs. Snow introduced Romaine to the island’s other expatriate residents, starting with her compatriots, Charles Caryl Coleman, whom Romaine called Uncle Charley, and her near neighbors at Villa Castello, the bachelor couple of Thomas Spencer Jerome and Charles Lang Freer. She was also a regular visitor at Villa Cercola, shared by Maugham, who would remain a loyal friend until his death in 1965, Benson, and Brooks. Set on a knoll commanding a fine view of the sea, amid pleasant gardens with a little vineyard and an olive orchard, Villa Cercola would become her own residence when she was rich.

  She discovered her artistic métier as a portraitist when the indefatigable Mrs. Snow introduced her to Thomas Burr, an American author sojourning in Capri, who paid her fifty lire to paint his likeness. “Mr. Burr’s face was all beard and hair,” she wrote in her memoir, “and during the sittings he became sentimental, which added to the difficulties of painting the portrait.” By “sentimental,” she meant that he made sexual advances toward her. “Though disappointed in me,” because she did not respond to his propositions, “he was, in the end, pleased with his hairy image, which he paid for and took away.” Romaine celebrated her first commission by buying a table. She arranged her library of ten books on it and would sit contentedly hours at a time, “leaning over the desk holding a pen in my hand as though about to write.”

  Either because he liked the painting or more likely in a desire to pursue his unrequited passion, Burr ordered a second, larger portrait. Wearing old-fashioned knee breeches, he “wanted to sit writing by the open window with the Castello seen in the distance and a pot of flowers on the window-sill.” As the picture progressed, he became increasingly amorous and “more and more displeased with my resistance. Finally, disillusioned, he left the island without taking leave, and what was worse, without purchasing the almost finished portrait.” He departed in a heavy sea, and the first portrait was washed overboard.

  Her portraits of Mr. Burr must have been well received by the expatriate community, for they led to a second commission, from an Englishman named James Whipple, who is always called an explorer, though what or where he explored is never mentioned. Romaine wrote that Whipple was “always planning diversions somewhat too Anglo-Saxon for Capri—roller-skating on his spacious terrace, for instance.” Another of Whipple’s brain waves had a pagan provenance: anticipating Fersen’s disastrous enactment of a Mithraic ritual to celebrate Nino Cesarini’s twentieth birthday, he mounted a similar spectacle in the same place, the Grotto of Matermania. Led by Whipple and Coleman, with Charles Freer and Thomas Jerome assisting, the participants wore ivy wreaths and white kimonos that Freer had brought back from a recent collecting trip to Japan. “Walking in procession we chanted verses from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which had been set to music by John Brooks, the poet and musician of the island.” Romaine, the former cabaret artiste, stood on a rock altar and sang quatrain 100, “Yon rising moon that looks for us again.” Then, “in propitiation, doubtless, for singing of the moon when we were worshipping the sun, Mr. Jerome pronounced a ponderous discourse on Mithras which nearly sent us all to sleep.” Whipple concluded the ceremony by performing magic tricks.

  Whipple agreed to pay Romaine two thousand lire for a large portrait, enough money to support her in Capri for a year. He wanted to be painted “in a smart khaki outfit with topee and leather boots, seated on a camp stool, jauntily holding a cane across his knee.” She lugged easel, canvas, and paints up to Whipple’s villa in Anacapri. “Finally, all was arranged and I seated [myself] before my easel, when what was to be expected happened. My sitter jumped up from his camp stool and threw himself before me in all his khaki splendor, pouring out what had been on his mind for months.” She rebuffed him angrily, and after Whipple made the rounds of the island’s villas lamenting her scornful rejection of his noble declaration of love, Romaine was ostracized for a brief period. One night, Uncle Charley gave a party and “invited my admirer but not me. Resting quietly in bed, listening to the music that came faintly over from his garden, I felt very relieved indeed that events had made it impossible for me to paint the khaki portrait.”

  The most mystifying friendship she made in Capri was the one with “the poet and musician of the island,” John Brooks, her future husband. Brooks was the sort of expatriate who gives expatriates a bad name, a dilettante who lived off his friends with an unlimited sense of entitlement and not a glimmer of responsibility or gratitude. His life’s work was a translation of the sonnets of Heredia, Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen’s friend, which was never published; later in life he devoted himself to a translation of Greek epigrams. Benson, his devoted yet unsparingly frank friend, described his translations of Heredia as “frigid and labored, and had not the primary call of beauty, nor any echo of it,” and declared his Greek epigrams to be “devoid of any rendered magic.” Brooks diddled at the piano for hours every day, playing so badly that no one except Romaine could bear to stay in the room.

  A public school boy who earned a B.A. at Peterhouse, Cambridge, Brooks was admitted at Lincoln’s Inn to study law and passed the Roman law examination, but he never had any serious intention to practice. He had turned up in Capri with Maugham four years before Romaine, and when Maugham left at holiday’s end, Brooks stayed on: as he would often say, “Came for lunch and stayed for life.” He was among the first wave of homosexual emigrants to settle in Capri after the trials of Oscar Wilde. At that time, a taste for sex with men and boys was closer to a dangerous, exciting pastime than a way of life. Compton Mackenzie recalled meeting Brooks “coming along one day in a great flutter to say that Maugham had got himself involved with a married woman and that he was going to have to marry her.” Brooks exclaimed, “I don’t know what I shall do if Maugham brings a wife to the Cercola. I don’t think Benson will like it at all either.” Benson, who had great affection for Brooks, described him as “inexcusably indolent, he never took himself in hand, he dawdled and loitered year in year out. He never did a day’s hard work, but translated his sonnets and his epigrams just as he fumbled at Beethoven’s sonatas, appreciating his performance, enjoying the hideous result through a mist of self-hypnosis.” Yet Brooks was not
a vicious man. Soon after he met Romaine Goddard, he conquered his horror of a woman living in his house and proposed marriage to her, though she may have been the only foreigner in Capri who was poorer than himself.

  A professional breakthrough of a sort came to Romaine when Charles Freer took an interest in her work. He bought a painting, a landscape of a pergola draped in vines abundant with purple grapes. The picture was pretty and competent, nothing more, but he saw something in it. The support of a major collector validated her vocation and emboldened her to take herself seriously as an artist. She grew dissatisfied with her work, which adhered to the pattern for foreign painters in Capri, emphasizing brilliant color observed in intense sunlight. Freer’s encouragement brought with it an enhanced awareness of the somber-hued portraits and cityscapes of Whistler, with which her mature work is often associated. There is no evidence that Freer hung any of his Whistlers at Villa Castello, but Romaine’s friendship with him enlarged her artistic imagination to encompass a conception of painting that did not rely on color for visual interest, such as Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1, Whistler’s familiar portrait of his mother.

  Freer urged Romaine to escape the stale influence of the mediocre artists in Capri and to study in Paris, where she could immerse herself in the old masters. In the fall of 1901 she followed his advice and enrolled in intensive painting courses at the Académie Colarossi, the fees for which nearly depleted her scanty allowance from her mother. She would have starved were it not for the kindness of a wealthy young Russian student who befriended her and brought her to her family’s house for dinner. Charles Freer looked her up when he was passing through Paris. He invited her to dinner and took her to a girlie show. In Romaine’s narrative, the encounter ended with a romantic proposition, which would tend to undermine the theory that he and Thomas Jerome were lovers, but the reader is permitted to take a skeptical view. In her memoir, virtually every male she met before she became involved in serious romantic relationships with women fell in love with her.