In preparing the volume of Elisabeth Moor’s memories, Graham told us that he was adding certain of his own recollections and supplementing the Dottoressa’s “omissions” with his versions of her presumed responses. In his Editor’s Note to the published book, he acknowledges such adjustments, concluding: “Nor have I hesitated on occasion to insert memories which did not appear on the tapes because the right question was not asked.” In an epilogue Graham also mentions having drawn on the Dottoressa for the character of Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt.
Among her reminiscences of life on Capri, the Dottoressa had included recollections of Jacques d’Adelsward Fersen, a rich poetaster, who, styling himself Count Fersen, claimed descent—perhaps authentically—from that eighteenth-century Axel von Fersen romantically associated with the last years of Marie Antoinette. Reaching Capri from France in 1904, apparently in the aftermath of homosexual scandal, Jacques Fersen proclaimed himself a votary of the Emperor Tiberius. In order to inhabit Tiberian ground, he bought, through the intervention of Edwin Cerio, a windswept spur of the eastern height of Capri, where a limestone cliff falls three hundred metres to the sea below the ruined imperial palace that is called, by its ancient name, Villa Jovis—the domain of Jove; or, by the Capresi, simply “Tiberio.”
On the summit of that steep natural fortress, in the first century A.D., Tiberius passed the last decade of his life in self-chosen exile, neglecting his vast imperial responsibilities but conserving his power at Rome through a system of couriers travelling by sea and land, and by means of messages transmitted to and received from the mainland by beacon and smoke signal and by flashes of light on metal. A rambling pile, now, of roofless rooms and disrupted promenades long since despoiled of decoration (and, at this writing, shamelessly unkempt), Villa Jovis still crowns, dramatically, its half-circle of sheer escarpments encompassing a drop known as the Salto di Tiberio—the Tiberian Leap, where, according to Suetonius, those who had displeased, or overpleased, the emperor were flung down to their deaths.
The ornate new house created by Fersen a century ago, on his outcropping below Villa Jovis, was given the name Villa Lysis, in homage to a boy whom Socrates interrogated on the nature of human affections. The main entrance, in a columned portico where marble steps descend to the garden, carries in Latin the inscription “Sacred to Love and Pain.” Fersen’s practices there, his relations with other well-to-do foreigners then residing on Capri, and his death—a presumed suicide—at forty-five supply, in faithful if excessive detail, the theme of Compton Mackenzie’s ironic roman à clef, Vestal Fire, which traces expatriate squabbles and trisexual scandals on the island during the first quarter of the twentieth century. In a companion novel, Extraordinary Women, Mackenzie—himself undeclaredly bisexual—again drew closely from expatriate homosexual life on Capri at that time, and on the larger rapprochement of mutual exploitation between foreign residents and islanders. Both books—necessarily, then, without “explicitness”—are now period pieces, of special interest to those who know Capri. Both are well observed and well written, and have their admirers.
First published in the 1920s, the two novels resulted in Mackenzie’s banishment from Capri. The interdiction may have been due, in part, to fascist policies of that time. Mussolini had seized power in 1922; and the dictatorship, while confirming its hold with gangsterish brutalities at home, was concerned to make a show of discipline and “purity” abroad. The more immediate reason for Mackenzie’s exclusion was the irreverence with which, in Vestal Fire, he had depicted, recognisably if under fictitious names, the Cerio brothers and other leading figures of the island community itself—persons with access to power who retaliated without compunction.
Mackenzie went on to write other books, and to inhabit other, colder islands. So far as I know, he never revisited Capri. He lived long on the island of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides; and died in 1972, in Edinburgh, at ninety. I do not know whether Graham Greene ever met him—one of many details that I wish I had asked. Graham of course had read the novels set on Capri, and much else of Mackenzie’s prolific writings. The two Capri books came up in our talk from time to time, and perhaps had a bearing on Graham’s handsome donation to a fund for restoration of the non-Catholic cemetery—a mossy segment of the island’s main cemetery, where a number of Mackenzie’s foremost protagonists are buried, in damp proximity and, one hopes, reconciled, on a terraced slope overlooking the bay.
Restoration of that decayed Cimitero Acattolico was begun on the initiative of a retired British Intelligence official, the late James Money, whose volume Capri: Island of Pleasure provides an idiosyncratic guide to the island’s expatriate past. Money’s arrival on the island, in 1973, was inspired by Mackenzie’s pages—from which he himself, an eccentric of anachronistic stamp, might have issued, so entirely did he seem to belong to, and inhabit, Capri’s Edwardian adventures. Although his association with Intelligence circles was intended to be secret, the Capresi, with meridional intuition, dubbed him La Spia almost from the hour of his arrival.
Villa Fersen—as Villa Lysis has long been known—still clings to the historic cliff, taking the full force of Capri’s spectacular storms. After sixty years of disrepair and absentee ownership, the house was resold, restored, and reinhabited in the 1990s. At the time of Graham’s work on the Dottoressa Moor, however, it was a near-ruin, scarcely touched since Fersen’s death in 1923. Inexpressibly romantic in its solitude and decline, it was cared for by a custodial Caprese family who for years intrepidly occupied the kitchen quarters at the landward rear of the building, while the haunted drawing rooms, shedding stucco and gold leaf, teetered ever closer to the limestone brink. The damp garden, tended by the housekeeper, was ravishing: suitably overgrown, encroached on by a cloud of ferns, creepers, acanthus, agapanthus, amaryllis; shadowed by umbrella pine, and by cypress and ilex; lit from within by massed colours of fuchsia, hortensia, azalea, and all manner of trailing mauves, blues, and purples—wisteria and iris in spring, solanum and “stella d’Italia” in high summer; in autumn, plumbago and belladonna lilies. Geraniums were the size of shrubs, and of every red and coral gradation. The different jasmines flowered there, on walls and trellises, in relays throughout the year.
In September and October, crowds of wild cyclamen, small fragrant flower of Italian woods, sprang from crevices of the rock-face in which the house is virtually framed. (Once, climbing up to gather them, I nearly slipped from the cliff: an instant of horror that stays vivid.) Fersen’s in those years was a garden of mossy textures and dark dense greens, with impasto of luminous flowers: a place of birdsong and long silence; of green lizards and shadowy cats, and decadent Swinburnean beauty.
Francis and I were fairly often, then, at Villa Fersen, making a detour to visit it in the course of the longer, steeper walk to the ruins of Villa Jovis. One pulled the bell at the Fersen gate and asked for admittance. It was possible to wander through pale, disintegrating rooms, to climb the graceful stair to the upper floor, where bedrooms and a long terrace looked grandly on the bay. Gradually, with inroads of the elements, the upper rooms were shuttered and became inaccessible, portions of the terrace fell away, the stair itself grew dangerous, the ballroom developed long fissures, the airy ground floor showed strain. Glass tesserae dropped from mosaic decoration indoors and out, floors were powdered by fallen stucco, and holes at the far edge of a garden path terrifyingly revealed the emerald sea far below. We did continue to ring at the gate, greet the dark-eyed custodian and her beautiful daughter in the secluded landward kitchen, and make a cautious round of the garden by a path uneasily near the drop in order to peer into the fumatorio, a sizeable low-ceilinged room, half-sunk into rocky ground,furnished with a curve of divans, where Fersen had created an opium den in supposed emulation of a Roman nymphaeum. Subsequently, the ceiling of the den fell in, all but crushing the grotto-like deécor, and adding to the eerie danger of the whole.
Ever since Fersen’s death, his Capri years have provided material for writer
s of various nationalities and varying abilities. Graham, at work on the Dottoressa and her memoirs, told us that Fersen and his villa were featured in the Dottoressa’s recollections; and proposed that we make the walk with him and Yvonne to visit the house, which he had never seen. Afterwards, we would resume the ascent to Villa Jovis and lunch together at a rustic trattoria then existing on the south flank of the Tiberian cliff, looking out to the Amalfi coast and the gulf of Salerno.
The thought of that day gives pleasure—for its interest, and extraordinary scenes; and as a day on which Graham’s good spirits held up throughout. (If Graham didn’t enjoy an outing, one was made to feel it, and to feel in some way culpable. We left it to him to propose such excursions, but that did not necessarily let one off the hook.)
We met in the piazza, Graham having completed “my three hundred and fifty words” for the day, and being ready for a dry martini. From there we set out, with the spaniel Sandy, for Via Tiberio. The path to Villa Jovis is a steady panoramic climb of an hour or more, exigent only on a hot day. Anacapri and the Monte Solaro lie at your back, the Bay of Naples to the left, with the Tiberian hill slowly asserting itself ahead. The digression to Fersen’s house turns off among orchards and vineyards, concluding in a small grove of umbrella pines that leads upward to the gate of the villa. En route, there was much calling for Sandy, who, by then unleashed, rambled excitedly among vegetable plots and underbrush, unsettling cats from low walls, unable to believe his luck.
Graham was delighted with the villa—with its haunted strangeness, and its histrionic queerness authenticated by decay. What measure of beauty or of nature he perceived, one could not say, but effects and atmosphere were never lost on him. At that time, the ground floor could still be entered, and we looked round the high rooms in silence, Graham enjoying, with slight smile, the unimaginable. Outside, within a low, broken parapet, we skirted the house and the drop, and stared into the “smoking room,” which pleased Graham most of all. The den was then dustily intact, its low-slung circle of divans proposing the vanished company of jaded oddities with their etiolated host.
Graham said, “When I came back to Capri after Saigon, the Dottoressa gave me a tin of opium she’d had from Fersen, unopened all those years. Very good it was, too. It provided several pipes, smoked in my London flat.”
References to opium—or to Kim Philby—were never without bravado.
Francis remarked that Cocteau’s depictions of his withdrawal from opium in the 1920s were cautionary.
GG: I was never an addict, which Cocteau was, I gather, for most of his life.
FS: He gave it up, and suffered. Resumed, and suffered. Those drawings are probably the best of his graphic work—so, in that instance, perhaps it evened out.
Graham would presumably have agreed with the poet Leopardi, whose proposed remedies against tedium were “sleep, opium, suffering. And this last is the strongest: for while a man suffers, he is not bored.”
I remembered the glazed, sometimes stupefied, clerks and merchants in Chinese shops and offices. We had read Maurice Collis’s Foreign Mud, and began then and there to talk of the East India Company and the Opium Wars—standing at the verge of the Tyrrhenian drop, looking into Fersen’s ghostly room through cracked glass while Sandy snuffled round our feet.
When we left Villa Fersen and started the climb to Tiberio, Graham said, “We’d never have seen it but for you.” Francis responded, “You’d have got here on your own,” but Graham shook his head. He told us that on first visits to Capri he had “walked about the island a good bit. But it’s years now since I was up at Tiberio. The first time I went up, they tried to put me on one of those donkeys.”
Small donkeys, the ciucci that had immemorially borne the burdens of Capri, were provided for sightseers in the island’s carless districts into relatively recent years, when they were replaced by small electric carts designed for steep and slender paths. For touristic purposes, and to give rides to children, a terminal pair of donkeys called Tiberio and Michelangelo—the ciucci often being named, there, for artists and emperors—were stationed, through summers of the 1970s, beside the fashionable terrace of the Quisisana Hotel, where their occasional indecencies, in amorous mood, enlivened the cock-tail hour for wealthy patrons. Out of season, they led a less glamorous life, rented out to carry loads for masons and contractors. They had their moments of high life, even so. The photographer Horst told us that, arriving on the island in earlier years to take pictures of a fashionable American beauty, Mona Harrison Williams, in her villa above the port, he had been able to pile his equipment on to some minuscule Augustus or Leonardo.
Graham said that the attempt to mount him on a donkey was defeated by his height, which allowed him to bestride the narrow donkey with both feet resting on earth. In a second attempt, the saddle revolved as he put his foot in the stirrup, Graham and Caravaggio ending in close embrace on the ground.
The climb to Tiberio concludes with a few minutes’ walk on a last calm elevation, an unencumbered path that introduces the ruins—which, massive, tawny, labyrinthine, are honeycombed into and over that eastern peak of the island. What remains of Tiberius’ villa is a maze of Roman brick, reticulated wall, and undulant floors, all interspersed with passageways, grasses, and the yellow-flowering broom, and culminating in a series of grand constructions—huge arched chambers that had served as cisterns or storerooms. The remains of the imperial quarters—the rooms of habitation, the imperial baths, the loggia and terrace—reach to the edge of the drop. Alongside is the ambulatio, a columned walkway where the emperor paced alone to reflect on state matters, and on lives and deaths, defended by impregnable surroundings and encircled, as today, by some of the loveliest scenery on earth.
On that day, as often in those years, we were almost alone there. From a wooden table by the parapet, we looked out to Siren Land across the three-mile strait that divides Capri from the tip of the Sorrentine peninsula. We ourselves were overlooked by the ravaged Faro, a Roman watchtower and beacon stripped down by the centuries to brick—and, in recent years, harshly restored. We drank the sulphurous house wine, crumbled good bread, harangued by a mother cat who appeared on the rounded edge of the retaining wall and called up her kittens, contemptuous alike of the mortal drop below and of our starchy offerings of bread and spaghetti.
That homely little trattoria, of good pasta and uncertain hygiene, has long since disappeared, its rustic building becoming the ticket office for visitors to the ruins. On the pitted outer wall of the room then serving as the trattoria’s kitchen, there remains a modern plaque quoting the poet Statius, who, favoured in first-century Rome, wrote loyally of his native Neapolitan shore—where many rich Romans enjoyed “the blend of Roman dignity and Greek indulgence.” The plaque at Villa Jovis reminds the traveller that the ruined Faro once reassured benighted mariners by the flare of its tall beacon: reassurance needed even on the rough passage of the strait between Capri and the mainland, where one of the bocche—the “mouths” from the open sea—flows strongly into the Bay of Naples.
When the promontory facing us across the strait was under Greek dominion, a Doric temple dedicated to Athena stood there, renamed for Minerva in the second century before Christ, after power had passed from Greece to Rome. Statius is one of several Roman writers who allude to the sanctity of these narrows, where sailors poured into the sea a propitiatory libation to the goddess for a safe outward voyage, or in thanks for their return.
Graham wondered if anyone now read Statius. Finding that we did, he laughed: “What swank.” A little news from the ancient world usually went, with Graham, a long way; but that day, in receptive mood, he asked about the life of Statius, and the writing. Francis said that he had an agreeable impression of the poet from his poems—only regretting that Statius was overpleased by an
invitation to the Emperor Domitian’s table; and, in the same vein, too much downcast at being passed over for the foremost literary prize of his time.
Graham asked: “W
ho won?” (It isn’t known.)
When we had reached coffee, and were looking out at the Amalfi coast and at the sunburnt Siren rocks—locally called Li Galli—that lie just off Positano, Graham asked us, “Do you think those islands are ever really green?”
This, again, was Browning, from his Sorrentine poem, “The Englishman in Italy”—
and there slumbered as greenly as ever Those isles of the siren, your Galli . . .
We had seen them fleetingly topped with green once in a while—in a rainy spring, or during a mild wet winter—and doubted that things were different when Browning, writing in the 1840s, set his evocation of that coast and countryside in a “long hot dry autumn.”
“Greenly,” said Greene, “was needed for the line, then. Well, that’s all right.”
Isola Lunga, most prominent of the Galli isles, has the outline of a miniature Capri, and carries on its stony saddle a low-set house—at that time, white and plainly visible, on fair days, from the Tiberian end of Capri. In later years, that simple house would be extended, and there would be other construction alongside it. In the era of our walk to Tiberio with Yvonne and Graham, the little island still belonged to Léonide Massine, who first saw it in 1917 during the three months’ trip, consequential for the arts, that he made to Italy with Picasso and Cocteau. (The story of the difficult acquisition of Isola Lunga and of Massine’s long attachment to it has been told in an excellent biography of the dancer by the late Vicente Garcia Marquez.) After Massine’s death, in 1979, the island was bought by Rudolf Nureyev.
Greene on Capri Page 9
