Pagan Light

by Jamie James

  The interior is made for deep conversations and heavy psychodrama, a destiny achieved when Jean-Luc Godard shot Le mépris (Contempt), his film based upon Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo, at Casa Malaparte. The house’s spare, elegant furnishings were designed by Alberto Savinio, the painter and writer who co-founded the Metaphysical school of art with his brother, Giorgio de Chirico, and Carlo Carrà. The majolica pavements resemble the stones of an ancient Roman road, graced with the motif of a lira coin, a theme borrowed from Goethe’s Italian Journey. Among several ingenious innovations in the house, a glass-bottom fireplace provides a view of the sea when it is not in use, and when it is, it functions as a signal to visitors approaching by boat that the house is occupied. The living room has four large windows, among the earliest picture windows in Europe, which frame spectacular, perfectly composed views of the Faraglioni and the Sorrento coast, justifying Malaparte’s grandiose boast that he had designed the scenery.

  After the war, he hosted the intellectual and artistic elite of Europe at Casa Malaparte. Camus and Picasso stayed there, among many others. One of his most frequent visitors was Alberto Moravia, whom he had hired as a foreign correspondent based in London, when he was the editor of La Stampa and Moravia was wanted by the Italian police for “anti-Fascist activities.” The maverick Fascist and the ardent Communist were close friends, to the continuing surprise of no one more than themselves. Moravia often came to Capri for long stays. He wrote one of his best books there, a short novel called Agostino, about a sheltered middle-class boy’s loss of innocence when he becomes involved with a gang of feral youth on the beaches of the Sorrento coast.

  Contempt is one of Moravia’s most widely read battlefront dispatches from the war between the sexes, based upon his tormented marriage to Elsa Morante. It tells the story of Molteni, a writer who dreams of writing literary stage plays but undertakes hackwork for the cinema to pay for a comfortable modern apartment for his bored, sexy, utterly conventional wife, Emilia. Battista, a crass film producer, hires Molteni to write a screenplay based upon The Odyssey, to be directed by a German director, “certainly not in the same class as the Pabsts and the Langs” but an artist deserving of respect. Battista wants a sword-and-sandal blockbuster, but Rheingold, the director, wants to make a film based upon his interpretation of Homer’s poem. Rheingold’s premise is that Penelope was unfaithful to Odysseus, which prompted him to leave her and join the siege against Troy. In the second half of the novel, work on the film script begins in Capri, where Battista seduces Emilia, mirroring Rheingold’s conception of The Odyssey. In the denouement, Emilia leaves Molteni and dies in a traffic accident after her return to the mainland.

  In Godard’s film, the protagonist is Paul Javal, a French writer living in Rome, played by Michel Piccoli, yet as in most of the director’s films the protagonist is actually Godard himself. His wife, Camille, played by Brigitte Bardot, likewise becomes Bardot, with nude scenes that mark the peak of her filmic incarnation of Aphrodite; Rheingold is Fritz Lang, playing himself; and Battista is transformed into Jerry Prokosch, a heavy-handed caricature of the American barbarian, played by Jack Palance, whose leering pursuit of Camille verges on the ludicrous. Thus none of the principal characters in a story about the making of an Italian film in Italy is Italian.

  Godard’s Contempt has been analyzed and puzzled over by film critics and scholars as much as their counterparts in architectural history have spun theories about Casa Malaparte. The film makes a stunning impact with its fusion of big ideas, expressed in dialogue that alternates between sharp, staccato blasts and elaborate monologues, filmed in a gorgeous, romantic flood of saturated Technicolor. The ravishing flood of symphonic music, by Georges Delerue, almost Mahlerian in its intensely moving blend of the ecstatic and the tragic, is the binding agent in this cinematic fresco. The real star of the film is Casa Malaparte, with its bespoke scenery. Raoul Coutard’s photography created the definitive image of the house, which may outlast the building itself. When the film was shot, in 1963, the house was in a state of mild disrepair, the red stucco peeling and the iron grates rusting, which only adds to the illusion of permanence, by creating the sensation that the building is as old as the cliff it is built on.

  The two works are not in competition, but there is no doubt that Moravia’s novel presents a more nuanced psychological narrative in its subtle palette of ironies than the film does. The reader is aware, even if Molteni is not, that he is pimping Emilia to advance his career. Battista is a complex character, eager to be taken as a serious participant in the creative process; Jack Palance’s Jerry Prokosch is a contemptible human gorilla. The dramaturgical catastrophe of Godard’s film, the car crash that kills Prokosch and Emilia, is shocking cinema, whereas the final pages of Moravia’s novel are a rich synthesis that weaves together the themes of disappointed love, the classical conception of destiny, and the indestructible power of Capri as a primordial land of dreams, floating beyond the limits of ordinary human experience. In a vivid daydream that begins at the Marina Piccola, Emilia returns to Molteni, who has not yet learned of her death. She declares her love for him and explicitly offers every reassurance that he has sought from her in vain until then. Overjoyed, he takes the phantom Emilia by boat to a grotto to consummate the rebirth of their love, but he gets lost in the cavern’s gloom. He awakens from the enchantment to find himself alone, wrapped in sea mist and tormented by the echo of his own voice.

  * * *

  THE MOST DISTINGUISHED writer who sought refuge in Capri after the Second World War was Pablo Neruda, who came to the island as a political exile, as Gorky had done. Neruda became an international literary celebrity at the age of twenty with the publication of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, in 1924, one of the most widely read books of poetry in the twentieth century. A zealous Communist, in his twenties Neruda served Chile as a diplomat in Burma, Java, Argentina, and Spain. After his return to Chile, in 1943, he was elected to the Senate. Five years later, when the right-wing government of González Videla outlawed the Chilean Communist Party, he was forced into hiding, in a series of urban basements and forest encampments. After more than a year of life underground, he escaped to Argentina on horseback, riding over a high pass in the Andes.

  In his exciting Memoirs, originally published with the title Confieso que he vivido (I confess that I have lived), Neruda wrote, “In the course of these wanderings from place to place as an exile, I came to a country I had never visited, and I learned to love it deeply: Italy.” In Milan, Florence, Genoa, and Venice, he recited his poems at crowded public events, followed by ceremonies where he was feted and made an honorary citizen. After champagne toasts, “between embraces and hand-kissing, I would finally make it down the front steps of the city hall,” where the police, “who never gave me a moment’s rest, would be waiting for me in the street.” Neruda was warmly embraced by socialist municipal authorities, but the constabulary did not approve of the dangerous allusions to peace and the people’s struggle in his poetry. After he was lionized by civil officials, the police would send him on to the next jurisdiction like a tramp.

  It was a genteel persecution. “The police,” he wrote, “never mistreated me but hounded me without respite.” It all came to a head in Naples, where the police took him into custody at his hotel and informed him that he had to leave Italy immediately. Apologizing profusely and carrying his bags, they put him on a train out of the country. When Neruda stopped in Rome to change trains, there was an enormous throng of well-wishers waiting on the platform. “I saw great commotion and confusion. Armfuls of flowers advanced toward the train, raised over a river of heads. ‘Pablo! Pablo!’”

  With the arrival of their hero, the crowd became unruly. Neruda glimpsed prominent writers and painters among them, including Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, who struck a policeman on the head with her silk parasol. Carlo Levi, author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, presented him with a bouquet of roses. The police begged Neruda to quell the fury of the mob,
which chanted, “Let the poet stay! Let the Chilean stay!,” but he was powerless. Finally, a superior arrived, granting Neruda permission to stay in Italy. “I left the station, sad to be walking on the flowers the battle had scattered everywhere.” The next morning, he received a cable from a stranger, Edwin Cerio, Capri’s native historian, naturalist, and architect, inviting him to come to Capri as his guest.

  Neruda, who defended Stalin and Stalinism to the end of his life, was a more faithful Communist than lover. In exile he was traveling with his mistress, Matilde Urrutia. He had sent his wife, Delia del Carril, home to Chile, ostensibly to prepare for his triumphant return from exile. Delia herself had hired Matilde to nurse Neruda when he was stricken with phlebitis in Mexico City, where he was serving as Chile’s consul general. The two lovers arrived in Capri on a winter’s night. “The coast loomed through the shadows,” Neruda wrote, “whitish and tall. What would happen? What would happen to us?” When they arrived at the house Cerio had prepared for them, he was waiting, “standing in the glow of a burning candelabra,” a tall, white-haired man wearing a white suit. He welcomed the lovers to their house, Casetta Arturo, overlooking the Marina Piccola, and left them with the promise that they would not be disturbed.

  “Matilde and I took refuge in our love,” wrote Neruda. “The small island, divided into a thousand tiny orchards, has a natural splendor too much commented on but strictly true.” They became a part of “the hidden Capri,” discovering “where to find the good wine and where to find the olives that the natives of Capri eat.” Pablo and Matilde’s sojourn on the island was an idyll of illicit love borrowed from an overwrought melodrama by D’Annunzio. In My Life with Pablo Neruda, Matilde Urrutia wrote, “I have always said that I have experienced a taste of the perfect life and that, yes, a paradise does exist: we had the good fortune to experience it when we lived in Capri.”

  Soon after they arrived, Matilde discovered that she was pregnant with Pablo’s child. Overjoyed, he told her, “Today I’m going to get a ring made that you will wear for the rest of your life.” The ring was engraved, “Capri, 3 May 1952, your Captain.” The night he gave her the ring, the couple performed a symbolic wedding by moonlight, with no guests, at their villa, bedecked with paper flowers the poet had made. “Pablo, in a very serious tone,” Matilde wrote, “asked the moon to marry us. He explained to the moon that we were not able to marry on Earth, but that with her, the muse of all poets in love, we could be married.” Humming the wedding march from Lohengrin, they went into the house to consummate their union.

  Neruda called himself Matilde’s captain in reference to a book of poems he completed in Capri, in which he imagines the island as a ship, with himself at the helm. Two months after the lunar wedding, he published The Captain’s Verses in Naples, anonymously, in the hope of protecting Delia del Carril, “sweetest of consorts, thread of steel and honey,” from learning about his infidelity. It was issued in a luxurious limited edition of forty-four copies, printed on handmade ivory paper. The production costs were paid by the Italian Communist Party, in homage to an “exiled comrade and poet.” The book’s authorship “remained a secret for a long time,” Neruda wrote in his memoir, “as if the book itself did not know who its father was. There are natural children, offspring of natural love, and in that sense, Los versos del capitán was a natural book.” One of the love poems he wrote for Matilde in Capri, “Night on the Island” (La noche en la isla), conceives of the island as a little bark, bearing the dreaming lovers through a dark sea:

  All night I have slept with you,

  the two of us together at sea, on the island.

  Savage and sweet you were between the pleasure and the dream,

  between fire and water.

  As he often does in his mystical love poetry, Neruda mixes intensely vivid concrete images with enigmatic abstractions. The lovers are lost in time, united only in their dreams, which connect above them like branches moved by the same wind, and in the earth below, “like red roots that touch.” In sleep, Matilde’s dream drifts apart from the poet’s

  and searched for me

  across the dark sea

  like before,

  when you did not yet exist,

  when even before I caught a glimpse of you

  I sailed at your side.

  When they awake, they are entwined physically, in real time, yet the dream lingers. The poem concludes on a sensual, ecstatic note:

  Your mouth,

  quitting your dream,

  gave me a taste of earth,

  of seawater and seaweed,

  from the depth of your life,

  and I received your kiss

  moistened by the dawn

  as if it came to me

  from the sea that surrounds us.

  The association of Pablo Neruda with Capri was strengthened, albeit erroneously, by the popular film Il postino (1994), an Italian production directed by Michael Radford and Massimo Troisi. It is an old-fashioned romance in the tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac, in which a fictional Neruda, in exile in Capri, schools a timid, awkward young postman in the arts of love, helping him to overcome his shyness in the pursuit of the girl he likes. It is a classic example of the movies taking bold liberties with literature. Il postino is based on a short novel by the Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta, who set his story in Chile, at Isla Negra, Neruda’s home for most of his life. Isla Negra is in fact not an island but a village on the coast, south of Valparaiso. The film’s script, credited to five writers, relocated Skármeta’s story to Capri for obvious reasons. The actors and crew were Italian; filming in Capri must have been cheaper than in rural Chile; and, mainly, anywhere you point a camera in Capri, it frames a stunning view.

  NERUDA’S VISION OF a night of lovemaking in Capri as a night at sea, the poet sailing on the island at the side of his beloved, marks the end of an era, or two. Neruda was the last major artist who came to Capri seeking a place conducive to creativity and made it a theme of the work. Norman Douglas died a few months before the publication of The Captain’s Verses, in 1952. Compton Mackenzie was knighted that year, beginning his slow decline into a tartaned caricature of a professional curmudgeon. Curzio Malaparte’s best work was behind him, too: in his final years, he produced a satirical revue called Sexophone, stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a right-wing Republican, and toured the Soviet Union and China as a Communist. Writers and painters of distinction continued to visit Capri on holidays, of course. Notable among them would be Graham Greene, whose decades-long association with the island is told in Greene on Capri, a memoir by Shirley Hazzard, who, with her husband, Francis Steegmuller, befriended him on their visits there.

  The only book Greene had a hand in that took Capri as its setting was the memoir of Elisabeth Moor, a Viennese doctor who practiced medicine on the island for fifty years. Dottoressa Moor, as she was known, who attended Norman Douglas in his final illness, was a flamboyant personality with a sexual appetite prodigious even by the lusty standards of Capri. In her old age, she lapsed into a deep depression after she witnessed the accidental death of her young grandson by electrocution, in a shoe shop in Zurich. Greene suggested that she write her memoirs as a therapeutic measure. He arranged a series of taped interviews, which were conducted in German by an anonymous Hungarian who had never met her and then translated into bad English. The task of editing this mess fell to the filmmaker and novelist Kenneth Macpherson, who had cared for Douglas in his old age. Macpherson died before he completed the job, and Greene took it over. He finished the book, revising it with a heavy hand—to the point of writing several passages himself narrating events that “did not appear on the tapes because the right questions were not asked.” An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri, with an epilogue by Greene, was published shortly before Moor’s death, at ninety. It is generally reckoned among Greene’s weakest literary projects and has small value as a historical record, for Moor was a notorious prevaricator.

  In the 1950s,
Capri began a new life as a playground for film stars and fashion icons, giving up its air of mystery for tabloid glamour. Audrey Hepburn kittenish in Capri pants, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton lounging by the pool, champagne parties aboard Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, Jacqueline Onassis pattering barefoot through the village: images such as these contributed to the boom in mass tourism that transformed the island. Inevitably, Capri succumbed to the global currents it had resisted for so long. James Money, an amateur archaeologist and devoted reader of Compton Mackenzie, wrote a compendious chronicle of the island’s scandals, Capri: Island of Pleasure, which concludes with this lament: “The elegance of Capri life which was notable in the ’sixties and still evident in the ’seventies had vanished by the early ’eighties, when vulgarization, overcrowding, pressure on the island’s facilities, and assault on the environment began to turn Capri into a Mediterranean version of Coney Island.”

  Money published his book in 1986. The number of short-term visitors has multiplied many times since then, and so have the complaints. Capri, once known as a remote destination, Goethe’s “dangerous, rocky island,” had become all too easy to get to by the end of the twentieth century. In 2016, the mayor of Capri proposed that the number of ferries from and to Naples be reduced, to relieve “problems of congestion which are doing irreparable damage to our reputation.” Jostling in the Piazzetta may be a mild amusement, but when the place is so densely packed that one cannot enter, it’s another thing. If the subject of Capri comes up among the French, they will smirk and sing the chorus of “Capri c’est fini” (Capri is finished), a catchy pop song recorded by Hervé Vilard in 1965, in which a young lover swears he will never return to the island. His disenchantment with Capri is caused not by overcrowding or a decline of elegance but rather by a broken heart, the end of his first love affair, which began there, but now the title has a broader implication.