by Jamie James
Romaine’s one scheme to raise money in Paris went awry. She had brought with her the second portrait of Mr. Burr, which she had finished, and delivered it to him at his residence. He received her warmly until he noticed that she was carrying the rolled-up canvas. “He became very angry and told me frankly that he had no intention of taking it unless I became his mistress,” she wrote in her memoir. The scene turned farcical: “When he tried to kiss me and I resisted, he crushed me against the wall. His manners were so rough that my only thought was to get outside the door.” She escaped without her painting, and her subsequent attempts to get paid were fruitless. The portrait did, however, get the artist her first press clipping. An item in The New York Herald, illustrated with a small image of the painting, read, “Mr. Thomas Burr, the eminent author, now visiting the Island of Capri, has had his portrait painted by Miss R.G.”
Romaine returned to Capri, where she could live on almost nothing in her Gothic chapel, because the rent had been paid in advance, and where her friends would welcome her. She found John Brooks as destitute as ever, contemplating suicide. Romaine was willing to rescue him, but she too was penniless and had no prospects, as far as she knew. When her mother agreed to give her an allowance, she had impressed upon her that by accepting the stipend, she was giving up any claim to the family fortune, a premise that proved to be false, though Ella Goddard herself might not have known it.
Romaine’s return to Capri was cut short by events at home, if the word may be applied to her mother’s household. She noticed this announcement in The New York Herald: “Mr. Henry St. Mar Goddard, the brilliant son of Mrs. Ella Waterman Goddard and Major Henry Goddard, has died at Nice of an illness that cut short a promising career.” The item must have been written by Ella, a steadfast believer in her adored son’s talent, for his principal occupation in the last years of his life was filling up notebooks with statistics about the cholera epidemic that was ravaging Europe at the time, copied out of stories in the newspapers. The Herald was the only reliable means of communication between mother and daughter, it seemed: Ella had read the item about Romaine’s portrait of Mr. Burr and wrote to her, ordering her to present herself at Château Grimaldi, her opulent residence in Menton, on the outskirts of Nice. So Romaine packed up her few belongings, hid two hundred lire in a box in the chapel as an emergency fund for her eventual return, and departed for a reunion with her mother, whom she had not seen for six years.
When she arrived, Ella met her at the door. “I gazed at her spellbound,” Romaine wrote. “She was untidily dressed in black; from under a blond wig that had shifted to one side, gray wisps of hair escaped. Her face which once merely quivered with madness was now a rigid mask of madness and despair.” Neither woman greeted the other. Ella had transformed the gloomy mansion in Menton into a funerary monument worthy of a boy pharaoh. With no word of greeting, her mother escorted her to an unlit drawing room and said, “This room is dedicated to your brother. His spirit haunts these relics of his deathbed.” In a glass case, a plaster cast of St. Mar’s hand was placed upon the sheets from his deathbed. Dozens of death masks were displayed in the room. Ella handed her daughter a bouquet and said, “You are an artist. Place these flowers in an artistic way round your brother’s coffin”—but there was no coffin. St. Mar’s remains were in a vault at a cemetery. Ella Goddard was engaged in a protracted, ultimately unsuccessful effort to persuade the Italian government to grant her permission to inter her son in a mausoleum in the garden of Château Grimaldi. Romaine laid the flowers in the form of a cross on the empty funeral bier.
In her efforts to communicate with her dead son, Ella fell under the influence of the celebrity clairvoyant and palm reader Cheiro, who was always dressed in the formal frock coat he wore onstage. When Romaine met him, she took him for the butler. He told Romaine that as soon as his divorce decree was granted, he was going to marry her mother. Yet Ella Goddard was not only mad but dying. Romaine consulted a doctor, and after she had described her mother’s symptoms, which included an unquenchable thirst, the doctor concluded that she suffered from acute diabetes. A visit from the doctor was out of the question, so Romaine brought him a urine specimen from her mother’s chamber pot, which confirmed the diagnosis and indicated that the disease was too far advanced to be susceptible to treatment. It was a long, painful death, punctuated by brief periods of lucidity, which she devoted to bitter words of hatred for her daughter. “It was not delirium,” Romaine wrote. “She knew she was dying and I, alive, watching. I wondered if such hate could die with death. Might it not, as earth-born ombra [shadow], always hover over me?” The prophecy fulfilled itself: fifty years after Ella’s death, Romaine Brooks wrote in a notebook, “My dead mother gets between me and life.”
Romaine was surprised to learn that she and her elder sister, Maya, would divide a great fortune. Ella’s threats of disinheritance had been hollow, for she had never controlled her father’s wealth. In his will, Isaac Waterman had bequeathed his entire estate to his grandchildren after the death of their mother, his only child. Ella’s extravagant spending had all come from a trust fund. Romaine wrote, “From possessing almost nothing, I now had six flats in Nice alone, another in Monte Carlo, one in Dieppe, an unfurnished one in Paris, and a château near Menton.” She was miserable in Château Grimaldi, where she kept finding more death masks of St. Mar in cupboards. She was firmly convinced that Ella’s ghost haunted her, so she sold the place to a Russian doctor, who turned it into a laboratory to study the rejuvenating effects of monkey glands, and returned to Capri.
She decided to give up the chapel and move into lodgings more suitable to her new station in life. “When for the last time the big rusty key opened the door of the old chapel, I felt very unhappy. I knew somehow that the simple, almost monastic life so congenial to me was now over.” She collected a few paintings, the library of ten books, and the two hundred lire she had hidden for her return, now superfluous, and surveyed the place with melancholy. She made handsome gifts to her old friends, the bundle of banknotes to her neighbor, the crippled beggar, and a gold chatelaine for Mrs. Snow. She made a handsome overpayment to Uncle Charley for an ugly Renaissance tapestry he claimed had once belonged to a doge of Venice; she grew to hate it and finally sent it back to him as a gift.
Romaine reserved most of her bounty for John Brooks, whom she called “my closest friend” in her memoir. His situation had declined from poverty to ruin; he had run out of friends to borrow money from and was selling his possessions one by one to pay for food. “But now it was no longer a question of more presents,” she wrote. “All his debts had to be paid off and an income supplied if he was to continue living in Capri. Why I should have thought it was up to me to see this project through is now hard to understand.” It is one of the most puzzling passages in a memoir full of puzzles—not for what it says, which is plain enough, but for what it omits to say: she accomplished this project by marrying him. In the typescript of her memoir in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University, she never mentions her marriage to John Brooks, whom, for some reason, she calls “Mr. G.” John Brooks died in 1929, before she began writing the memoir, so there was no motive of discretion.
The marriage was implausible, even irrational. When Brooks had mooted the idea just one year before, she dismissed it as absurd. Her homosexual inclination had not yet expressed itself clearly, but his had. On the surface, it might have appeared to be a marriage of convenience, in the sense of providing cover for the partners’ homosexuality, a common enough arrangement at the time. The marriage was undoubtedly a convenient one for Brooks, for financial reasons, but Romaine, after her experiences as the only female student in her life-drawing classes, had long since given up any interest in satisfying the expectation of proper behavior for ladies in Edwardian society.
Perhaps she wanted the immunity from the unwelcome advances of men like groping Mr. Burr that the estate of marriage would confer, but the simplest explanation, that she felt an emotional attac
hment to Brooks, has much to recommend it. His personal charm was warmly attested by all who knew him, even those who despised his sense of entitlement. The Cambridge graduate and the heiress from Philadelphia were well enough matched socially, and they held similar, aristocratic views about Capri and its inhabitants. In 1903, a few months after the marriage unraveled, John Brooks (signing himself Ellingham Brooks) published a sonnet, preceded by a couplet in French, which summarized the ideal of the island as a pagan paradise in terms that closely resemble those in Romaine’s memoir. His theme is the feast of San Costanzo, Capri’s patron, one of the island’s principal festivals. “Festival of San Costanzo—an Island Carnival,” published by a British ladies’ magazine called The Gentlewoman, is one of the few works Brooks managed to publish:
Paganisme immortel, es tu mort? On le dit
Mais Pan, tout bas, s’en moque et la Sirène en rit.6
What mean these flower-strewn lanes, these banners gay,
These blue-veined maidens in this fair attire,
These gossips come to see and to admire,
These ruddy youths, who make such a brave display,
A long procession files in slow array,
Aloft, a silver image gleams like fire,
Borne shoulder-high, amid a white-robed choir,
The patron saint moves on his festal way.
Great Pan is dead? Ah, No! he lives. ’Tis we
Blind with the scales of centuries on our eyes,
Have lost belief and thus the power to see.
These humble folk, in their simplicity,
Perceive the glory which around them lies
And commune with their Gods perpetually.
Somerset Maugham wrote several stories set in Capri; the most lyrical of them, virtually a parable extolling the island’s beauty, is “The Lotus Eater,” which is transparently based on the life of John Brooks. Maugham’s wise and worldly narrator, on a visit to the island, meets an Englishman named Wilson, who came to Capri on a holiday in midlife and decided to stay there to the end of his days. When he arrived, a joyous festival resembling that of San Costanzo was being celebrated in the village, and in the evening he strolled down in the moonlight to see the Faraglioni, Capri’s iconic stone stacks rising from the sea, painted a thousand times and encapsulated in countless souvenir snow globes. Wilson cashes out his bit of capital in London and lives an idle, modest existence in Capri for twenty-five years, wandering the hills, reading, and playing the piano badly. When his money runs out, he goes to pieces and ends up living off the charity of the Capriote woman who had been his maid. Finally, Wilson’s body is discovered on a hillside. “From where he lay he had been able to see those two great rocks called the Faraglioni, which stand out of the sea. It was a full moon, and he must have gone to see them by moonlight. Perhaps he died of the beauty of that night.” It is not a portrait lifted precisely from life, like “Mayhew,” Maugham’s story about Thomas Jerome: Wilson is a middle-class bank manager, and there is no fortunate marriage to a rich lesbian. Yet Maugham clearly has his old housemate in mind in this neatly turned appraisal of Wilson: “You may say that it was a grossly selfish existence. It was. He was of no use to anybody, but on the other hand he did nobody any harm.”
Brooks’s uselessness would not have deterred Romaine; she was happy to be the one doing things. Dispelling any notion that she married him to create an appearance of what would come to be known as heteronormativity, soon after the wedding she began to experiment with gender presentation. “I decided to forgo the many hateful prerogatives of my sex,” she wrote, “the complexity of female clothes, for instance.” She dreamed of living the simple life, “garbed solely in male sport attire.” She planned a rural walking tour, “burdened only with knapsack and sketchbook.” On a visit to London, she “spent many hours in Our Boys Shop, so as to be sure of ordering myself a genuine sport outfit.” When she appeared before her husband wearing baggy trousers and hiking shoes, with her hair chopped short, “ready for what I hoped would be my future life,” he was horrified, declaring that in her company “his reputation would be forever damaged.” Romaine’s vision of the relationship anticipated that of the protagonist of Radclyffe Hall’s landmark lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, who forms her first overt attachment in adulthood to a young sportsman who shares her love of the outdoors and horseback riding, and is bitterly disillusioned when he proposes a conventional marriage, with sex. Romaine was looking for a male chum with whom she could pursue traditionally masculine activities.
She could hardly have made a worse choice. In the first place, John Brooks was much too lazy for country walks. His ideas about marriage proved to be utterly conventional. He wanted his wealthy wife to buy a mansion on a square in London and preside over dinners for his friends; he wanted to be invited to join the right clubs. Conventional, with a hypocritical Edwardian twist: his prenuptial boyfriend was hanging around the house, casting baleful looks at his new feminine rival. It was an insupportable situation. Romaine rented a house of her own, with a tower, where she could paint and sleep alone. Brooks responded fretfully, “But what on earth will the people in Capri say?,” a remark that must have elicited her contempt. When he began to drop heavy hints that Romaine should make a will to ensure the transfer of the Waterman millions to him after her death, she pursued the strategy of her years of poverty: she bolted, for London.
A year after it began, the marriage was finished, though there is no evidence of a divorce decree. Uncle Charley wrote to Charles Freer in September 1904, “Mrs. Brooks has returned to London. Brooks is not with her and was not when she was here. They are parted forever.” She gave Brooks a stingy annual pension of three hundred pounds (in the words of Alan Searle, Somerset Maugham’s secretary and companion in the writer’s later years, “Enough for meat, but not enough for pickles”) and reneged on her promise to send him her address in London for an eventual reunion.
She arrived a few months after the death of James Whistler, the master of shades of gray, and bought a studio on the same block of Tite Street where he had lived. “Of all the painters of that period,” she wrote, “I of course admired Whistler more.” Yet her admiration was complicated and far from adulatory: “I wondered at the magic subtlety of his tones, but thought his ‘symphonies’ lacked in corresponding subtlety of expression. There was no surprise, no paradox, no complexity.” Another famous American painter, John Singer Sargent, the city’s reigning society portraitist, lived in a house opposite hers on Tite Street, yet, she wrote, “as his work did not interest me I never sought to know him.” One of her motives in marrying John Brooks might have been simply to put her life as a Goddard behind her. “I was born an artist,” she wrote. “Née an artist, not née Goddard.” The only thing of value she got from her husband was his name. When she began her career as a painter in earnest, and for the rest of her life, she was Romaine Brooks.
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EVERY RESORT GIVES rise to a community of artists to paint views for visitors to buy as souvenirs. In Capri, the market developed soon after August Kopisch’s Discovery of the Blue Grotto put the island on the international tourist’s itinerary. By mid-century, there were scores of industrious hack painters active in Capri, mostly Neapolitan and a few from abroad. Casa Rossa, John MacKowen’s toy castle in Anacapri, is crowded with views of the island’s famous topographical features, with fishermen at work or rustic maidens at rest in the foreground. The municipal collection includes just one work by a native Capriote, a fine seascape in moonlight by Michele Federico (1884–1966). Charles Coleman’s studio was virtually a factory for pretty pastels of the Gulf of Naples, with Vesuvius, the burning god, as the pictorial focus. The American symbolist Elihu Vedder, best known as a book illustrator, was frequently Coleman’s guest at Villa Narcissus. After Vedder scored a smashing success with his edition of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, in 1884, he designed and built a villa of his own in Capri, called Villa Quattro Venti, which was sit
ed atop a high saddle of land exposed on every side. Vedder produced some competent genre paintings of island life during his tenure in Capri, but he relocated to the mainland after he discovered that his house was all too aptly named and was uninhabitable when the winds blew, as they almost always did.
The first painter with an international reputation to visit Capri was Camille Corot, who arrived in 1828, almost immediately after the publication of Kopisch’s book. He made a brief call there during an Italian tour, early in his career, and painted a fine picture of Monte Solaro, the great rock outcropping on the island’s western side, with Capri village in the middle ground. A complex, carefully composed exercise in coloristic harmony, it bears the hallmarks of Corot’s mature work, yet it is indistinguishable from the paintings he produced on the mainland, exhibiting no discernible sense of place.
Capri exercised a potent influence on John Singer Sargent, who made a sojourn there in the summer of 1878, when his career was just beginning. Like Brooks an American painter primarily known for portraits of women, also born in Italy (Florence, in 1856), Sargent spent his youth in the doting company of his parents and sisters. His mother was a hypochondriac who roamed Europe in search of warm winters and cool summers, avoiding the major cities and glamorous watering holes, and his father, a taciturn eye surgeon from Philadelphia, docilely followed her. The family rarely stayed in one place long enough to make friends. As a result of this nomadic life, John received only a smattering of education outside the home until he was accepted as a student at the atelier of the portraitist Carolus-Duran, in Paris, when he was eighteen. Carolus-Duran taught a radical approach to painting, which eschewed preliminary sketches in favor of drawing directly on the canvas with color. A devotee of Velázquez, he wandered through the atelier chanting the Spanish master’s name like a mantra.
