Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  Graham’s feelings toward the Rosaio, as to the world in general, were much subject to circumstance and state of mind. He told us that he had intermittently considered giving up the house almost since acquiring it. In the early 1970s, when he again spoke of selling the Rosaio, he conceded: “My connection with Capri is odd. It isn’t really my kind of place.” When Francis asked, “What is your kind of place?” there was a laugh, the shrug. “Well, not Antibes. But—she’s there.” She, by now and until the end, was Yvonne.

  In Graham’s first years of visiting Capri, he had had the company, when he chose, of a handful of lively and literary resident compatriots and other English speaking visitors. He had enjoyed the last effulgence of Norman Douglas—then in his late, benevolent “Uncle Norman” phase, but entering the disabling illnesses that would cause him, in 1952, at the age of eighty-three, to take his own life. Douglas’s many lives are wonderfully recounted in a biography by Mark Holloway published in Britain in 1976.

  In his last years, Douglas still attracted a continuity of visitors from Britain and elsewhere—admirers of his works and, in some instances, writers themselves; and others merely curious to spend an hour with an unclassifiable and notorious figure of those still literary times. By then, Douglas was the doyen and survivor of the generations of expatriate talents from Britain and northern Europe, from Russia and America, who had sporadically lived on Capri in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Francis, staying on the island in 1950, several times saw the craggy old sage seated at his habitual table outside the Bar Vittoria (now the Caffè Funicolare) overlooking the bay, where he stationed himself to enjoy the Homeric scene that sweeps from Ischia on the one hand to Vesuvius on the other—with the great city extended between in a ripe tempera of Neapolitan light; its pastel palazzi, in the words of Charles Dickens at Naples, “dwindling down to dice.”

  At the Bar Vittoria, Douglas received the homage and the proffered wines and whiskies—all welcome in those lean years—of admiring travellers. The more considerate votaries left notes for him, to request appointments; others simply presented themselves at his table. Seeing this, Francis refrained—regretting, however, the lost, and last, opportunity for a brief encounter with that surviving fragment, as it seemed, of the pagan world: polymath, paedophile, classicist; satyr and scientist; husband, once, and father; and author of, among much else, Old Calabria and Looking Back, as he sat, in F.’s words, “handsome, humorous, incorrigible,” concluding his long affair with Siren Land.

  I must have heard in childhood the title of Douglas’s best known book, the novel South Wind.When, in adolescence, I first read it, I imagined the scirocco as a languorous breeze conducive to voluptuous scenes by Lawrence Alma-Tadema—whose “Roman” paintings are often set within the Bay of Naples. In my early twenties, living for the first time in Italy and at Naples, I learned the reality of that thick wind, deplored by Dante, which carries the sands of eroded Africa and an oceanic humidity into Italy—spreading red dust and black gloom before dissolving in rain; and accounting for, as Norman Douglas suggests, some outlandish local behaviour.

  Douglas’s funeral, on a cold day of February 1952, was attended by the Capri populace, whose menfolk—it would have been immodest, then, for women to appear at the head of a parade—walked behind the coffin in silent procession as it was carried by pallbearers from the piazza to the cemetery. Photographs convey the greyness and gravity of other times, and the solemnity of working men in their Sunday clothes: the pause occasioned by mortality. The non-Catholic section of the cemetery contains the neglected memorials of many foreigners who lived and died on the island during the past century and more. Among them, Douglas’s grave is marked by a long slab of dark green marble on which his name and dates are incised, with the plain addition of a line from Horace: Omnes Eodem Cogimur: “Where we all must gather.” The same quotation served as title for a memoir by Kenneth Macpherson written immediately after Douglas’s death. Interleaved with photographs by Islay Lyons, handsomely printed, and bound in cloth appropriately purple, the book was given to friends, and later acquired by a few outsiders. Remaining copies, injudiciously stored in Capri when Macpherson left the island (first for Tuscany, and then for Thailand) were ravaged by mould.

  In Douglas’s last years, Macpherson had sheltered him in independent quarters in Villa Tuoro on Capri—where, with Islay Lyons, Macpherson then spent much of the year. Macpherson—a writer and filmmaker, much of whose fortune derived from his former wife, the writer “Bryher”—died in 1971. Following Lyons’s death, in 1996, his heir, Manop Charoensuk, arranged for publication of a volume of his photographs, some of which again commemorate that postwar Capri of Douglas, and of Graham Greene.

  Graham paid his own tribute to Douglas by writing the introduction to Venus in the Kitchen, an aphrodisiac cookbook that was Douglas’s last work, published soon after his death. The brief foreword may be Graham’s most vivid and truly affectionate portrait of a friend—” of a life consistently open, tolerant, unashamed”; of Douglas in his final months, enthroned at his table in the Bar Vittoria, at the rim of a Capri cliff,

  on the borders of the kingdom that he had built house by house, character by character, legend by legend . . . He will be delighted in the shades at any success we may have with his recipes and bark with laughter at our ignominious failures, and how pleased he will be at any annotations and additions, so long as they are exact, scholarly, uninflated, and do not carpingly arise from a cold temperament. For even his enormous tolerance had certain limits. He loved life too well to have patience with puritans or fanatics. He was a gentleman and he disliked a boor.

  Acquiring the Rosaio in the period of Norman Douglas’s decline, and at the onset of his own wide fame, Graham Greene might have seemed the initiator of a new wave of literary Britons on Capri. However, that particular party was over. Writers would still visit, and revisit, the island. Some would, like ourselves, become occasional residents there. But there was never again a literary or artistic “colony” of closely knit and disputatious foreigners as in the past, wearing away damp winters at each other’s firesides: gossiping and quarrelling, reading and writing in an ancient and still enchanting place. Douglas had supplied a last point of reference in Capri’s long expatriate continuity; and Graham had been the last notable figure to profit from it—received, at his arrival, into an easy ambience of liveliness and eccentricity that, drawn together by the presence of Douglas, would disperse with his death.

  By the 1960s, that legacy of Graham’s English speaking friends on Capri had been mostly dissolved by deaths and departures. The entrepreneurial Edwin Cerio, a dominant presence on the island throughout his lifetime, died in 1960 at the age of eighty-four. Possessed of some genius, capable of generosity, Cerio—who made imaginative contributions to conservation and culture on Capri—leaves, alas, a lasting impression of opportunism and lack of principle. His father, Ignazio Cerio, a doctor from Abruzzo who settled on Capri in the 1860s and became an important and much loved benefactor of the island, was unable to transmit his own simple goodness to any of three sons, of whom Edwin was the most gifted and energetic, and the most worldly. Until his authority was over shadowed by the imperatives of fascism, Edwin Cerio reigned on Capri as a benevolent despot, entertaining dynastic ambitions—which, consummated in an obsessive acquisition of property, were thwarted by lack of a legitimate male heir.

  Graham had known Cerio in postwar years, again through Douglas, and maintained his friendship with Cerio’s daughter, Laetitia, for the rest of his life. An accomplished painter and linguist, Laetitia herself became, with age, a doyenne of Capri personalities, a stylish and fastidious grande dame, at the centre of the island’s occasions and institutions. Laetitia died in 1997, in her late eighties.

  Ian Greenlees, a cultivated and independent mind, had left Capri for Florence, where he long directed the British Institute; but retained, and regularly visited, his picturesque old Anacapri house, Villa Fraita, acquired from the wri
ter Francis Brett Young in the late 1940s. In appearance, manner, and pallor, a ringer for Sidney Greenstreet, Ian had a long past in Italy; and kept a specific—in some circles, inconvenient—memory of the country’s tribulation under fascism.

  Graham was fond of Gracie Fields, who shifted between her beach establishment at the Marina Piccola, on Capri’s southern shore, and a house in Anacapri. Gracie had simplicity, good humour, shrewdness: a human distinction. She, too, had kept faith with early experience. Handsome, with white hair, fine eyes, she had little of the varnished performer—rather, a suggestion of vulnerability. She told me—as other women have sometimes done—that she had never had a genuinely requited love. She was sought out by tourists from Britain, and particularly from Lancashire, with whom she was generous of her time and broad smiles, and even of her songs; enjoying her fame, up to a point. When I was with Gracie, once, on an obscure path, we were stopped by a foursome from Manchester who, exacting insistent snapshots, detained her over long. As we at last walked on, Gracie remarked, “Ah, loov, it’s well to be reminded that our own lot can be as gormless as anyone else’s.”

  Those long lingering presences were accepted, in the Italian way, as components of the scene and contributors to its story—together with other foreigners who had their share not necessarily of fame but of singularity.

  Graham’s acquaintances on Capri, seen sporadically, included the Scotsman John Cairncross, a connection from Graham’s “intelligence” era, and former member of the Cambridge group of moles, from which he had long seceded. During his years with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, Cairncross kept, near the Anacapri shore, a pleasant house that was sold soon after we rented our Capri rooms.

  In the postwar 1940s, younger Italian novelists whose talents were emerging from the eclipse of fascist decades had become a fluctuating presence on Capri. Of these, Graham knew Mario Soldati, lover of women and wines; and Alberto Moravia, who, with his wife, the novelist Elsa Morante, was long familiar with the islands of the Neapolitan gulf and had passed a period of “banishment” in the region under fascism. Of those Italian writers, few would stay at length on the island or feel sustained desire to cluster there. (An exception was the novelist Raffaele La Capria, who later acquired a house on the steep approach to Monte Solaro.) In Europe, it was a time of political and intellectual ferment, and clustering would be done in cities. Among thinking people, the need for withdrawal and reflection was evaporating, giving place to immediacy, assertion, and public commitment. Concepts of space, time, territory were also changing. The impetus for free movement, pent up under dictatorship and war, would now become airborne—novelty, rather than revelation, being sought in brief forays into far places.

  The city of Naples itself, a shambles from bombardment and from recent ravages of dictatorship and conquest, drew few visitors, then and for long thereafter. Those who came to know Naples in that era, however, would feel an attachment to it all their lives.

  Northerners in search of southern sun and permissiveness were still drawn, as in past centuries, to the beautiful surroundings of Naples; but there was some feeling that Capri, so long renowned, must have staled. Independent travellers who strayed along those coasts now lodged themselves, rather, in crannies near Positano or Amalfi, or on the sandier and lonelier shores of “unspoilt” islands such as Ischia or Procida, or more distant Ponza. Such solitary visitors were, by then, a dwindling phenomenon. Mass tourism was beginning its long march. Permissiveness, for its part, would soon become a global imperative.

  In 1948, when Graham Greene was taking possession of Il Rosaio, W. H. Auden and his companion Chester Kallman arrived on the neighbouring island of Ischia—forerunners in a movement to which the Ischitani would soon become accustomed. Far larger than Capri, and in those years far less worldly, Ischia offered readily accessible beaches, and the expansiveness of a handsome, hilly, countryside formed by extinct volcanoes—hospitable, as it proved, to new modern roads and cars, and to intensive building, in contrast to Capri’s limestone cliffs and dramatic mountain. Though lying close to the mainland, Ischia, which had been appropriated in the eighteenth century as a royal hunting ground for the Neapolitan Bourbons, had figured little in the memoirs of past travellers. The very name of Ischia (possibly a corruption of Pithecusa, as the Greeks from Euboea called the colony founded there in the seventh century before Christ) was scarcely known outside Italy in the postwar years, unless to archaeologists aware of the island’s antiquities, or to frequenters of her therapeutic muds and springs.

  In 1957, as Auden left a changing Ischia for return to transalpine chill, he described the impulse that had generated a last brief collective fling of Anglophone talents on Neapolitan shores:

  Out of a gothic north, the pallid children

  Of a potato, beer or whisky

  Guilt culture, we behave like our fathers and come

  Southward into a sunburnt otherwhere

  Of vineyards, baroque, la bella figura,

  To these feminine townships where men

  Are males . . .

  Some believing amore

  Is better down South and much cheaper

  (Which is doubtful), some persuaded exposure

  To strong sunlight is lethal to germs

  (Which is patently false) and others, like me,

  In middleage hoping to twig from

  What we are not what we might be next, a question

  The South seems never to raise . . .

  For Graham Greene, those were irrelevant considerations—his concern with nature, antiquity, architecture, visual art, sunbathing, contemplation, and even germs being notably circumscribed. Nor did he see himself—unmistakably and ineradicably English though he, as much as Auden, was—as a protagonist in regional contrasts. As to amore, he would bring that with him. Abrupt purchase of the Rosaio had presumably been prompted by the deepening love affair with Catherine Walston and by Graham’s desire to be “away” with her in an exotically private setting, remote from husband, children, bad weather, and all the shared associations of England: to be with her, and with his work. There was little inclination, on Graham’s part, toward expatriation or metamorphosis. Greeneland, like amore, travelled with him.

  In youth, Graham had journeyed to far and lawless places, of which he had written with stark originality. Concentrated work on his books had always been done in England. In 1948, in a published correspondence with Elizabeth Bowen and V. S. Pritchett, he had given his view:

  Another danger [to the writer’s fluency] is that privilege separates, and we can’t afford to live away from the source of our writing, in however comfortable an exile. I am one of those who find it extraordinarily difficult to write away from England (I had to do so at one time during the war), and I dread the thought of being exiled from home.

  In the same year, Graham bought the Rosaio, without intention of settling in Italy at any length. The house, with its vaunted equipment, was acquired—if I recall Graham’s account—with funds blocked in Europe, perhaps from royalties connected with The Third Man.At the time, it was almost impossible for a private person to take money out of Britain, while any sum brought into England from overseas was subject to annihilating tax. In his biography of Norman Douglas, Mark Holloway states that, in 1948, Graham Greene

  was to write the script [of a film of Douglas’s South Wind, for Italian Lux Films], and for convenience came over to the island and bought Rosaio, that charming little house in Anacapri which Cerio, Compton Mackenzie and Francis Brett Young had all lived and worked in.

  Holloway goes on to relate that Douglas, elderly and frail, grumbled, about making the trip up to Anacapri—from Macpherson’s house in Capri, in secluded Via Tuoro—for repeated discussions of the script. Since Douglas and Greene went on, however, to become firm friends and—as Islay Lyons’s photographs suggest—congenial drinking companions, the association probably contributed to the lasting connection that Graham formed with the island. The film, like ma
ny of its phantasmal brethren, apparently dissolved.

  In the event, “writing away from England” seemed to cause Graham no special difficulty. In the case of Capri, that may have been due to the relative brevity of his visits and to his detachment not only from the island’s life but also from the altered England of later years. Place itself had greatly changed, and had lost much of its hold on him, unless as stimulus or diversion. Beyond all that, there was the decline in expectations from the Muse. The inspired pain of the earlier fiction would not recur; or even the intensity of those lighter and livelier works that Graham had once differentiated as “entertainments.” What remained was professionalism: a unique view and tone, a practised, topical narrative that held the interest and forced the pace of the reader. Poignancy was largely subsumed into world weariness, resurfacing in spasms of authenticity. In the late work, sheer human sympathy makes an obligatory guest appearance, like an ageing celebrity briefly brought on stage. When from time to time Graham told us, “I have a book coming out,” he would occasionally add, “Not a specially good one.” With all this, there were, even so, high points and renewals. In 1973, after receiving a copy of The Honorary Consul, we cabled to tell him of our pleasure in the book—one of the most compelling of the later novels; and he wrote in reply:

  I can’t tell you how pleased I was that you liked The Honorary Consul.I do think it’s quite good myself but your praise warmed my heart. I am sorry that you and Francis are not on the list of Nixon’s Enemies and you will be jealous of me because apparently I am on Colonel Gadaffi’s cultural black list with D. H. Lawrence and curiously enough Henry James.