Greene on Capri

by Shirley Hazzard

  When that ultimate blow fell on the Dottoressa, Graham suggested that she recount her memoirs, “as therapy.” By then, perhaps, her mind was inconsistent. Her tales of Capri are often fictitious; at times, they are fanciful “firsthand” versions of well-known events that took place years before the Dottoressa knew the island. To enhance her own favourable—and, on occasion, unblushingly admirable—role, she was reckless with the good name of decent persons.

  Kenneth Macpherson, who would have restored some truth, was dead. Graham accepted the hodgepodge without enquiry, impatient to send a new book to press. Neither Graham nor the Dottoressa considered a possible response from the islanders—few of whom, in truth, would ever read Una donna impossibile.

  Graham was annoyed by our own attitude to this book. Although we praised its lively qualities, the suggestion that even small corrections were in order for future printings angered him. After a few bad moments over dinner, we let that lapse forever. The following evening, however, he greeted us with exasperated smile: “And now I’ve had a letter from this Doctor Webber.”

  Giorgio Weber, who briefly intersects the story of Greene on Capri, was born on the island in 1894, and died at his daughter’s home in Florida in 1990. He probably understood and loved Capri more, and more intelligently, than anyone in the past century. We knew him first in 1970; but had often seen him in previous years on the island’s paths—a fine, tall figure, white-haired, greeted and venerated by the populace as visible evidence of a brave and extraordinary life. He has left an unpublished memoir, of which his letter to Graham Greene regarding the Dottoressa Moor should one day form a part.

  Some years after writing to Graham, Weber—finding that we ourselves had reservations about that book—sent us a copy of his long letter, together with Graham’s lengthy reply: a double portrait, one might say, of the Commendatore and Don Giovanni that could, in another context, have drawn Graham’s interest.

  Dear Mr. Greene,

  I was born on Capri, grew up on Capri, and practised and was Health Officer there for a number of years until December 1929, when I left the island for political reasons and emigrated to the United States. Therefore, I was understandably very interested . . .

  It had not occurred to Graham that the island’s past would speak back: that an eyewitness might come forward not only to vindicate the maligned personalities of the Dottoressa’s account, but to testify to salient events of 1905, or 1925. Graham knew the truth when he heard it; but he could not yield:

  Dear Doctor Weber,

  Thank you very much for your long and most interesting letter which I shall preserve with a copy of an impossible woman. Of course, I quite realised that the old Dottoressa’s memories were sometimes inaccurate and sometimes she imagined that she had been present when she had only heard of these events later . . .

  Of Evelyn Waugh, in an analogous case, Martin Stannard has observed: “Sanity depended on his being right.” Such sanity is itself a form of aberration. Graham’s response to Weber’s unanswerable letter silenced, as intended, an inconvenience. (Weber wrote to us: “I was tempted to reply but then gave up, realising that he was too slippery for me.”) Graham would have put Weber’s letter away, and forgotten it: aware, as he did so, that it was irrefutable. With all his predilection for the unexpected, he would not have welcomed, among much else, Weber’s illumination of the Dottoressa’s account of Fersen’s interment, or of that “small tin of opium which Fersen gave me I don’t know why—a joke, a whim. That tin many years later I gave to Graham Greene . . .” Graham now learnt from Weber that

  by the time the Dottoressa settled in Anacapri in 1927, Count Fersen had been dead nearly four years.

  I ought to know because it was I who prepared his body for shipment to Rome for cremation.

  Weber, who had forfeited his livelihood and risked his life by openly contesting fascism in Italy, would have read with irony the Dottoressa’s assertion that, on Capri, “one had not noticed” the dictatorship. In fact, the island, being frequented by notable foreigners, was important to Mussolini as a showcase; and Mussolini himself had sent a crony, Marino Dusmet, to Capri as fascist podestà. The party secretary, Teodoro Pagano, a young Caprese hotel owner who had been Weber’s schoolmate, was nominally the leading fascist official of the island; but it was Dusmet who, behind a social façade, made the squalid decisions and issued the grim commands, while Pagano was there, as Weber remarked, “to do the dirty work.” Weber was driven into exile: “It was this that divided my life—two halves that could never be reconciled.”

  In the autumn of 1943, as Allied forces reached Neapolitan shores—where Weber himself would soon return as a medical officer with the United States Army—Dusmet disappeared, spirited away, it was said, to Mexico or California. A quarter-century later, just as unaccountably, he reappeared. Revisiting Italy with apparent immunity, he came regularly to Capri for some years. He and his American wife would dine near us at Gemma, reverentially greeted by certain older Capresi who stopped by his table—to reminisce, no doubt, about the good old days and to assure him that all had gone to hell on the island since his departure.

  With his wartime disappearance, Dusmet had left Pagano to face the music. Dr. Weber, arriving on Capri at that time to an emotional welcome, learned that Pagano was a prisoner at Naples, awaiting judgment by the Allied Tribunal within the massive walls of Castel Capuano. Presenting the Allied authorities with the story of Dusmet’s escape and Pagano’s subordinate status, he obtained Pagano’s conditional release.

  Into his nineties, Giorgio Weber passed the Capri autumn at the Hotel Gatto Bianco, where he received, in the pretty garden, a succession of relatives, friends, historians, admirers. Among his visitors was his old schoolmate Teodoro Pagano, who came to recall their island childhood. Weber told us: “Such things occur when one is ninety. There are only three of us left from those schooldays. So here we sit, Pagano and I, exchanging our memories. With some lacunae, of course.”

  We asked him whether Pagano knew that Weber had obtained his release from Castel Capuano.

  “He knows, yes.”

  “Has he ever mentioned it?”

  Slight smile. “No.”

  Teodoro Pagano outlived Giorgio Weber by several years. He died at the age of 103, an obdurate fascist to the last.

  The Capri to which Graham Greene came in 1948, and which I first knew a few years later, had much in common with the island of Giorgio Weber’s birth; and even with that Capri visited, since the seventeenth century, by northern travellers drawn by its ancient fame, and by the romance of islands—this one within sight and reach of a mighty city that was itself a capital of civilisation. By 1701, Joseph Addison, arriving in Italy and lingering at Naples, “could not dispense with myself from making a little voyage to the Isle of Caprea.” Landing there, he found the fertile expanse between Capri’s mountainous extremities “cover’d with Vines, Figs, Oranges, Almonds, Olives, Myrtles, and Fields of Corn, which look extreamly fresh and beautiful, and make up the most delightful little Landskip imaginable”—a description corresponding to the view painted by the German artist Jacob Philipp Hackert in 1792; and much resembling the scene that greeted the traveller as late as 1960.

  For Hackert, as for Addison ninety years earlier, the long ribbon of the so-called Phoenician Stair, uncoiling down the western face of Monte Solaro, would have been more significant than it appears today—being, then, the sole means of direct communication between Anacapri and the main port; and the arduous route by which the men, women, and children of Anacapri carried burdens up and down on their heads. Hewn from the rock by Greek settlers several centuries before Christ, and repaired by the Romans in the Augustan era, these eight hundred deep steps were superseded only in 1877 by the carriage road constructed between the towns. They were in daily use into the 1940s; and have been repaired, now, for their third millennium.

  From Graham’s editing of the Dottoressa Moor’s memoirs, it is clear that he was unaware of the presence of t
hose ancient stairs; since he applies their name, of “Phoenician Steps,” to the modern stairway of rubble and cement that merely links the curves of the Anacapri road, leading eastward to quite another part of the island.

  Today, despite a white rash of angular new houses, that aspect of Capri remains recognisably “fresh and beautiful,” its erratic continuity confirmed in the pictorial record left by generations of artists. In the past, striking changes of “landskip” had mostly reflected the deforestation, and replanting, of Capri’s woods, which—predominantly of ilex and pine—were periodically sacrificed to grazing or for fuel, or to unforeseen emergencies—such as the 1914-18 war, when Capri, all but bankrupted by the evaporation of tourism, found itself once more thrown back on natural resources.

  The capacity of an island less than four miles long, with an area of five and a half square miles, to sustain the ever-increasing tourism of nearly three centuries is one of its mysteries. The Grand Tour of eighteenth-century “milords” brought many well-to-do Britons and their entourages to Naples following the revelation, in the 1730s and 1740s, of the buried Vesuvian cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii—that influx accompanied by a wave of painters and writers who, in making the Neapolitan scene familiar to the world, further stimulated travel to the famous bay. At first the object of an excursion from Naples, Capri began to attract visitors seeking lodgings for an extended stay; and the idea of wintering on Capri took hold not only with British families but with Russians, Germans, Scandinavians, and Americans, some of whom lived on the island at length—and died there, as attested by their tombs. In the late nineteenth century, and into the 1920s, fine houses were built, mostly for foreign “gentry,” on the periphery of the Capri township. Comfortable hotels were constructed, and small pensioni; and in 1907 Rilke was already lamenting the blight of those “hideous impositions.”

  The winter of south Italy, with its short daylight and damp chill, was then the preferred season of visitors. Prosperous northerners, coming south, were glad of the relative mildness and shorter duration of the Mediterranean winter; of palms, umbrella pines, and camellias, and the regular surprise of warm, brilliant mornings. That measure of reprieve sufficed. There was as yet no inclination on the part of caparisoned and corseted women, or of their bewhiskered and waistcoated menfolk, to strip for terrace or beach life; nor, until the all-shattering explosion of the First World War, could a northern society founded on duty, piety, and seemliness readily adopt an existence of indolence, near-nudity, and egoistic hedonism.

  Other compulsions caused foreigners to winter on Capri. Faith in curative properties of the southern climate—the same belief that sent the dying Keats to Rome—brought invalids to resorts near Naples. On Capri, the new hotels served in part as sanatoria for ambulatory tubercular patients. (The island’s grandest hotel, the Quisisana—today vastly enlarged, and still the most luxurious on Capri—took its name from an Italian phrase meaning “Here, one is healed.”) Still other travellers came to Capri in retreat from the disapproval of society: unwed lovers, homosexual partners, and, less commonly, couples of mixed race. And there were the solitaries, who stayed because they had come to love the place.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, these seasonal residents made up a “colony” of between one and two hundred persons, while, in the course of a year, thousands of Cook’s tourists and other trippers came to the island as daily visitors. Of the polyglot “colony,” most were worldly, and solvent. Among the wealthy, there were members of Swedish royalty and of British and Russian aristocracy. From Germany, there were financiers and industrialists: for two of these—the banker Andreas and the armaments manufacturer Krupp—the passion for Capri was to end in tragedy and suicide.

  The British, at one time preponderant, were subsequently outnumbered by the Germans. In the interim, it was the turn of the Russians, who increasingly wintered on Capri throughout the nineteenth century. In a letter of 1871, Turgenev told a friend that the island

  is a miracle, and not because of the marvellous Blue Grotto, but because the entire enchanted place is a virtual temple to the goddess of Nature, the incarnation of Beauty . . . I have made three visits to Capri, each for considerable time, and I tell you this: that the impression will remain with me until I die.

  Prevalent on Capri among foreigners in the 1890s, these well-to-do Russians would soon be joined by unexpected numbers of their countrymen.

  Following the aborted revolution of 1905, a stream of Russian intellectuals, reformers, insurgents, and Bolsheviks sought refuge in the West. Many came to Naples, where they formed a Russian enclave on a height above the town. Scores of them, nearly destitute, reached Capri, where Maxim Gorky had established himself in exile in 1906. Gorky became their protector; and, with proceeds from European editions of his books, rented a house and barracks for them near the Marina Piccola. The little island thus contained, for some years, two distinct Russias.

  Writing to Fyodor Chaliapin in 1911, Gorky commented:

  This place is full of Russians. Moreover, I am on bad terms with them, and they would miss no chance of a scandal, if only to needle me. In addition to the locals, we have weekly crowds of tourists from Russia, they arrive in herds, fifty at a time, a wild and vulgar lot.

  In those years, Gorky received a succession of Russian artists and writers—among them Chaliapin and Ivan Bunin, whose novella “The Gentleman from San Francisco” is set on Capri. In 1908 and 1910, Lenin was Gorky’s guest, to the consternation of the supposedly “secret” police sent from Rome to keep conspicuous watch over the revolutionaries.

  The extended visits that Lenin made to Gorky in his handsome house overlooking the Marina Piccola have passed into that Capri legend where many mighty, and some monstrous, personalities have been subsumed. Into recent decades, there were islanders who keenly recalled Capri’s “Russian” years; and, in particular, Lenin’s presence in Via Mulo. In the 1970s, Francis would sometimes exchange Russian phrases with an aged Caprese who, as the daughter of Gorky’s gardener, had been taught some Russian at Lenin’s knee. (Lenin had given her the Russian expressions for “How much does it cost?,” “We don’t give discounts,” and so on: looking ahead, accurately enough, to the child’s future as a Capri shopkeeper.)

  In its long tradition, the island was hospitable to all these strangers. In the Municipio, the politicians were devious and greedy; but the community at large accepted its foreign guests with tolerance and good manners, making possible the expatriate existence of those years. Beyond that, the Capresi provided the reality and continuity that sustained and sweetened the rootless life of outsiders. The populace pursued their rites and tasks, spoke their dialect, and went their way—glad of the measure of prosperity that flowed from visitors so long as significant lines were not crossed: to a large extent, incurious; in some matters, implacable.

  In the social and political convulsion that, in Italy, followed the First World War, thought and polemics were devoted to Capri’s future. In 1922, in the shadow of Mussolini’s imminent seizure of power, a historic congress considered the island’s soul in the modern world. In large part, but not entirely, the Convegno del Paesaggio was a Futurist event, attended by figures from the movement that had acted as an inspiration to fascism. Filippo Marinetti, as its star, weighed in against the banalities of Nature, heavily favoring the lightbulb over the moon. The presiding figure from the island’s hierarchy was Edwin Cerio, who, in an unsigned introductory address, permitted himself to execrate “the Jewish banks that, having set themselves to strip the corpse of the late war, had fallen on Capri in the island’s moment of utter demoralization and debilitation.” At a different level, however, the Convegno aired essential questions, which—like most such gatherings—it did nothing to resolve. Its document, now republished by Capri’s Libreria Conchiglia, remains a revelatory work in the island’s written story.

  What had most linked Capri’s long past to the years of change that followed both world wars was the rural nature of the isla
nd’s life. By the 1950s, Capri’s modern prosperity was already astir, but there remained an old guard of those who worked the land and fished the surrounding sea; and even those by now owning, or employed in, hotels, restaurants, or shops could still turn their hand to earthy tasks. The Pucci-clad summer scene in the piazza was interspersed with the unselfconscious passage of purposeful women carrying baskets or demijohns on their heads, and of men pushing or hauling a laden cart. Into the 1970s, the fashionable clientele of the cafés could rise to applaud the bull periodically brought, on his rounds, to service the few cows remaining on the Tiberian hill—the jet set clamorously toasting him in Cinzano or spumante as he was led by the nose towards Villa Jovis. The hard labour of the old rustic life was, by then, undergoing change and reduction, much of it merciful. But nature still defined the island’s presence, touching its particular magic with infinity.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, however, Capri was entering another of its millennial mutations: in this instance, a reflection of accelerating change—economic, social, religious, political, ethical, aesthetic—convulsing Italy and Western Europe. Having for so long kept terrestrial and temperamental distance from the eventful world, the island was now becoming a microcosm of the contemporary condition, moving from immemorial, if fractured, continuity towards an assertive modernity. Here, too, there was the story of peoples in newly prosperous movement, of swelling numbers gathered in finite and increasingly urban space; of mariners deserting the sea and farmers leaving the land; of vaunted, attestable gains and silent, inestimable losses.