Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (55 page)

Caprese.

There was a time when, in smart literary conversations, Norman Douglas was regarded as one of the smartest things going. Part of that smartness was his keeping, for the whole of his long depraved life, one jump ahead of the law. Douglas raised literary escapology to a Houdini level. He was caricatured everywhere in the fiction of his period. The most vivid portrait is the giggling, drunken, wicked, travel writer, with exquisite manners and frayed shirt cuffs, ‘James Argyle’ in D. H. Lawrence’s
Aaron’s Rod
. Douglas was actually admired, when not despised, by Lawrence and unequivocally admired by E. M. Forster, Ford Madox Ford, and even Virginia Woolf. Graham Greene – in his Capri visits – reckoned him a ‘friend’. Joseph Conrad was a house guest and, on one occasion, helped save Douglas from arrest. Elizabeth David, another long-term Caprese, cooked for him, and picked up recipes from him. Echoes of Douglas’s one lastingly important novel,
South Wind
(1917), are thrown back everywhere in Aldous Huxley’s earliest work. Nabokov also admired Douglas and ‘Sebastian Knight’ has a newly published copy of
South Wind
on his shelves. James Joyce used Douglas’s non-fiction book on the street games of London children as a quarry for
Finnegans Wake
.

Douglas was born of mixed Scottish and German extraction in Austria. His mother was the daughter of a baron, his father a distinguished archaeologist, who killed himself chamois-hunting when Norman (the third son) was five. There was money as well as breeding in the Douglas family, deriving from cotton mills in Germany. He was educated at English schools although German remained his first language (of many) throughout life. As a prelude to a long career in sexual delinquency he was kicked out of Uppingham School, aged fifteen. He completed his education at a
Gymnasium
in Karlsruhe where, over the following six years, he embarked on a promising career in zoology. He was publishing in learned journals before he was twenty.

Douglas’s first, life-changing, visit to the island of Capri, ‘Siren Land’, was in 1888, ostensibly to capture blue lizards. Reptiles were his special subject. In later life he affectionately called the children he abused ‘crocodiles’. Douglas resolved on a career which would enable him to travel and in 1893 he sailed through the necessary examinations and entered the British Foreign Office. His first posting was to St Petersburg. What might have been a promising start in life was dashed by his incorrigible sexual turpitude. He conducted affairs, simultaneously, with three aristocratic Russian women and impregnated one. He was lucky to escape with his
life and prudently took early retirement. He had, fortuitously, just come into his patrimony. Now rich, he purchased a villa in Naples. The following year, 1898, he married a cousin, Elsa FitzGibbon – it was an inauspicious register office affair. She was pregnant and he feared he had contracted a dose of syphilis. The couple devoted themselves to travel, had two sons and many quarrels.

The first year of the new century saw Douglas’s first literary production,
Unprofessional Tales
. It was written in collaboration with his wife in North Africa and published under the pseudonym ‘Normyx’. The dedication was to Ouida, a fellow lover of Italy. However, the Douglases divorced in 1904 on the grounds of her adultery – her protests about his pederasty did not hold up in court. Having disposed of his sons at British boarding school, Douglas then removed to Capri, where he built himself a villa. The publication of his successful travel book,
Old Calabria
(1915), coincided with the total loss of his fortune. For the second forty years of his life he lived by his pen and sponged his way to the comfortable lifestyle that was essential to him. In 1904 he claimed his sexuality had switched: from this point on his interests were exclusively pederastic.

Douglas’s Mediterranean travel writing chimed with the public taste. But his career was more conveniently prosecuted in London, where he moved in 1910. From 1912 to 1916 he worked, as assistant editor, on Ford Madox Ford’s
English Review
. He was now a figure in literary circles and a sought after diner-out, relished for his naughtiness. The naughtiness went rather too far when, in 1916, he was arrested for indecent assault on a sixteen-year-old boy. The war years were not (as for D. H. Lawrence, whose
Rainbow
was on the censor’s bonfire) tolerant years for the sexually heterodox. Douglas, as he would always do, fled, ‘burning his bridges behind him’, as was his motto. He jumped his bail and escaped jail, later composing a mocking valediction: ‘Norman Douglas of Capri, and of Naples and Florence, was formerly of England, which he fled during the war to avoid persecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling.’

Douglas returned, inevitably, to tolerant Capri. At this point, in 1916, he set to writing
South Wind
– his love letter to the island. What he particularly loved, and celebrated, was its ability to evaporate everything – particularly things like sex, religion and politics that so preoccupied the larger world – into airy unimportance.

South Wind
is a conversation novel – Peacock-like if one looks backward, Huxley-like if one looks forward in literary time. It is essentially plotless. There is some faint dribble of narrative towards a crime of violence which has no impact whatsoever. What stays in the mind, and can still delight, is the clever schoolboy flights of satire – as that on the island’s patroness of sailors, Saint Eulalia:

She was born in 1712 at a remote village in the Spanish province of Estramadura. Various divine portents accompanied her birth. Her mother dreamed a strange
dream about a sea-serpent; her father was cured of a painful gouty affliction; the image of Saint James of Compostella in the local church was observed to smile benignly at the very hour of her entry into the world. At the age of two years and eleven months she took the vow of chastity. Much difficulty was experienced in keeping the infant alive; she tormented her body in so merciless a fashion. She refused to partake of food save once in every five weeks; she remained immovable ‘like a statue’ for months on end; she wore under her rough clothing iron spikes which were found, after death, to have entered deeply into her flesh. She was never known to use a drop of water for purposes of ablution or to change her underwear more than once a year, and then only at the order of her confessor who was obliged to be in daily contact with her.

South Wind
came out in England in 1917, the grimmest, coldest year of the war: an event which, although contemporary in setting, it studiously makes no reference.

After the war, with Capri as his base, Douglas toured the fleshpots of Europe. He had a profitable sideline in collectors’ editions of his monographs about Capri finely produced by his Italian publisher, Pino Orioli, famous as the publisher of the first edition of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. Orioli’s editions de luxe helped him get by, along with the odd annuity, legacy, and much cadging.
Lady Chatterley
irritated him intensely. In 1928, the year Orioli published it, Douglas brought out his privately printed booklet,
Some Limericks
, which comprised scabrous poems with mockingly owlish apparatus. When I was in the army, in the late 1950s, national servicemen were still merrily (and unknowingly) bawling out Douglas’s limericks. A particular favourite was:

There was a young man from Australia

Who painted his bum like a dahlia.

Tuppence a smell was all very well

But thruppence a lick was a failure.

So much for
Kangaroo
.

In 1937, offences against minors (including, by way of variety, infant girls) forced Douglas out of Italy, with only an hour to spare. More painfully, the Second World War forced him back to London. He was now a much-faded figure on the literary scene and wretched on the short rations allowed even a gentleman like himself. After the war he returned, gratefully, to Capri, where he lived out his long vicious life, crippled in his last years by arteriosclerosis. He died, apparently from a self-administered overdose of drugs: excess had always been his style. According to
Time
magazine, he died ‘in penury in a rented villa’. In fact he was still, from various sources, pulling in £1,000 a year – which probably counted as penury to Norman
Douglas. There are two versions of his last words. One has it that they were ‘love, love, love’. Another, more plausible, is they were: ‘Get these fucking nuns away from me.’

Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy.

Tarkington is a famous novelist whose actual name is everywhere forgotten. Echoes of his grandiloquent prose (in Orson Welles’s fruity baritone and filmic montage) have kept his work, if not its author, fresh and alive, while contemporaries like Winston Churchill (the other one, the American who wrote novels) – judged greater in their time – have faded utterly. Booth Tarkington was Indiana-born (a ‘Hoosier’) and a lifelong booster of the region, particularly his native Indianapolis which changed during Tarkington’s lifetime from a quiet rural town to an industrial powerhouse – this is the background to George Minafer’s ‘comeuppance’, and his family’s decay, in the last scenes of
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1918). Tarkington’s first novel – not his best but his most characteristic – was
The Gentleman from Indiana
(1899). His father was a lawyer, later a judge, and his pedigree was locally ‘magnificent’. Like the Ambersons, the Tarkingtons were among Indianapolis’s ‘top 500’. Booth’s unused forename, ‘Newton’, honoured an uncle, currently Governor of California.

Tarkington attended Princeton where he enjoyed king-of-the-campus status: he was voted most popular man in his 1893 class. A fellow student recalled him as ‘the only Princeton man who had ever been known to play poker (with his left hand), write a story for the
Nassau Lit
(with his right hand), and lead the singing in a crowded room, performing these three acts simultaneously.’ Such ambidexterity rarely makes for academic achievement and Tarkington did not graduate (although in the years of his fame Princeton would award him two honorary degrees). He tried public life, unsuccessfully, and was, for one term in 1902, a State Representative in the Indiana government. He married twice; the only child to his marriages dying early. The vicissitudes of childhood would be a principal theme in his best-known and bestselling fiction.

Tarkington had his first bestseller with
Monsieur Beaucaire
(1900), a ‘no man
is a hero to his valet’ spoof on the current American rage for historical fiction. His hero is an aristocrat who disguises himself as a barber. The novel was made into a successful silent movie, with Rudolph Valentino and later into a 1940s comic vehicle for Bob Hope. Tarkington’s stories slipped very easily onto the screen – it was a major source of his large income in later life. But he had even greater success with his comic epics about the trials of youth. Adolescence, the awkward years between childhood and adulthood, was a psycho-genetic category invented in America at this period by G. Stanley Hall. Tarkington popularised it in
Penrod
(1914). Penrod Schofield – invariably accompanied by his dog Duke, and latterly with his gang: Sam Williams, Maurice Levy, Georgie Bassett and Herman (the second Jewish and the last black) – is an eleven-year-old rebel against the middle-class values of his Midwest family and community. His little battles are narrated in arch-ironic style by Tarkington.
Penrod
clearly draws on
Tom Sawyer
and just as clearly inspired Richmal Crompton’s
Just William
(1922). Addressed principally to adult readers, both depictions of juvenile machismo exude tolerant adult amusement at the barbarism of the young male child in Western civilization.
Penrod
inspired the sequels
Penrod and Sam
(1916) and
Penrod Jashber
(1929).

Tarkington continued this bestselling vein with
Seventeen
(1916). With eighteen-year-olds (and, after 1917, American boys) dying by the hundred thousand in France in 1914–18, his idylls offered escape to a safer, if imaginary, world. Adolescence
agonistes
of a more tragic kind is portrayed in Georgie Minafer of
The Magnificent Ambersons
(1918). This novel made up a trilogy with
The Turmoil
(1915) and
The Midlander
(1924) and earned Tarkington two prizes and a front page on
Time
magazine in 1925. Like everyone else, the young Orson Welles read them admiringly.

Around this period Tarkington was losing his sight, and his later novels – none of which enjoyed the success of the earlier – were dictated. Royalties and film rights enriched him and allowed him to indulge a taste for English eighteenth-century painting and fine furniture for his mansion in Indianapolis. He was increasingly right-wing in later years, conceiving a violent distaste for FDR, the New Deal, and virtually everything that happened after 1929 – not least to his beloved Indianapolis. It is this lifelong visceral antagonism to change, together with a fatalistic acceptance of it, which gives eloquence to such speeches as Eugene Morgan’s – the Henry Ford ‘man of the future’ – in
The Magnificent Ambersons
. The speech is delivered, verbatim, by Joseph Cotton in the Welles-directed film: