Another, Darker Continent

‘I like these old travellers,’ wrote Norman Douglas, ‘not so much for what they actually say, as for their implicit outlook on life.’ The comment comes apropos his early eighteenth-century predecessor in southern Italy, the ‘loquacious . . . restless’ Pacicchelli. Nearly a century on from the first publication of Old Calabria (1915), the equally loquacious and restless Douglas has himself become something of an old traveller.

Not that Douglas’s outlook on life is ever implicit. If you haven’t read him and want to get a feel, don’t bother with the blurb – go to the index:

Albanians, . . . preposterous language, 173, 187 . . . Arabs, bigots because half-starved, 126 . . . Avanti, a corrupt rag, 280 . . . Breakfast in Italy, dislocates moral stability, 18, 25; responsible for homicides, 127 . . . Commercial travellers, an objectionable brood, 31, 296

This is only a taste of the text itself. The victims of his verbal lashings are many and various: baroque architecture, the ‘buffoonery’ of Italian law, Matthew Arnold, the aesthetics of Calabrian towns – which ‘have solved the problem of how to be ineffably squalid without becoming in the least picturesque’ – ‘emasculate’ saints, ‘the megalomaniac rhetoricians who control their country’s fate’ (plus ça change), priests, yuccas, tax-men – ‘uncouth savages, veritable cavemen, whose only intelligible expression is one of malice striving to break through a crust of congenital cretinism . . .’ Who would get away with this in a travel book today? And on a different but perhaps more telling note, who would get away with quoting without translation not only from the antique Italian of the loquacious Pacicchelli (who was, at least, a Fellow of our own Royal Society) but also from the texts of dozens of even more obscure historians and travellers? They crowd the index, alongside the preposterous Albanians and homicidal breakfasts, from Aceti, T., compiler of a catalogue of 2,000 celebrated Calabrians, to Zavarroni, A., author of Historia Erectionis Pontifici Collegi Corsini Ullanensis, etc. Does anyone actually read this sort of stuff nowadays – I mean Douglas, let alone Zavarroni? Apparently not. Having myself written four books that declare themselves on their jackets to be Travel, I recently discussed the question of What next? with my publisher. I told him I was contemplating a complete change with the next opus. He looked relieved: ‘Oh, good, I was going to give you a lecture about Travel . . .’ Travel, it seems, or at least the richly flavoured British version of it that developed over the twentieth century, is hardly to be seen onthe bigger publishers’ menus at the moment. As for a book like Old Calabria, its archaic tang seems as fogeyish as devilled kidneys. For a start, it describes a land so distant from today’s easyJettable EU that it might be in another, darker continent. Northern Italians used to exclaim, aghast, ‘Nobody travels south of Rome!’ They still do; but in Douglas’s day there was good reason for the warning. The Bourbons might have been expelled and the brigands exterminated, but the Calabrian forests still teemed with wolves and the beds with bugs. Vast areas were malarious, and cholera made regular and murderous visitations. Poverty caused mass economic migration, and there was uncontrolled logging of primeval forests and an almost Haitian loss of life in earthquakes. (There were compensations: at Manfredonia, ‘amid Rembrandtesque surroundings, you can get as drunk as a lord for sixpence’.) But Old Calabria’s old-fashionedness goes further than the land it describes. Douglas assumes that we, his readers, have had a decent education, and can take in our stride not only eighteenth-century Italian but also Athanasius Kircher’s Latin on the medical uses of Cimices lectularii (bedbugs; but you probably knew that, being a Slightly Foxed reader). We are expected, moreover, to have enough historical nous to find our own way round the rambling ruin-mound of the Calabrian past – Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Hohenstaufen, Bourbon – while our errant guide fossicks about, throwing up finds as curious as they are disordered. And then there are the digressions – chapter-length scholarly essays on subjects as diverse as the identity of Horace’s ‘fons Bandusiae’, the influence of Salandra’s Adamo Caduto on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and that of Pythagoras on ‘the quaint Alexandrian tutti-frutti known as Christianity’. Douglas takes no intellectual prisoners. He takes no prisoners at all –

Eucalyptus trees, a scandalous growth, 97, 98 . . . Goats, a baneful quadruped, 149, 286 . . . Law-breaking, unsuspected joys of, 36 . . . Monumentomania, an Italian disease, 4 . . . Pope, A., prince of snobs, 127

At first sight, Norman Douglas seems as much of a period piece as his books. Born in 1868 in Austria, his family (minus his father, who had fallen off the ghastly precipice of Gamsboden while chamois-shooting) moved back to their ancestral Scotland six years later. His brief spell at Uppingham he hated, and he was sent instead to study in Germany, at Karlsruhe Gymnasium. He joined the British Foreign Office in his mid-twenties and served in St Petersburg, but resigned after only three years; there seems to have been a scandal of some sort – the first of many. From then until his death on Capri in 1952 he lived mostly in Italy, with a number of unhappy wartime and other interludes elsewhere. The writing career began surprisingly, in view of what was to come: his first published work, in 1891, was On the Herpetology of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Could anything be more Victorian? Douglas had other period enthusiasms. His Italy was that of the fin-de-siècle boy-ogling barons, Corvo and Gloeden. In Aspromonte for example, ‘the roughest corner of Italy’, he engaged as a guide ‘a slender lad of unusual comeliness – an earthquake orphan . . . He had a roving eye and the mouth of Antinous . . .’ (Who would get away with that nowadays? And I don’t just mean the classical allusion.) As it happened, this particular boy also had a large knife and proved too rough even for Douglas to handle. Not so the others – many others. Anthony Burgess’s cameo in Earthly Powers of ‘filthy Norman Douglas’ seems to have been well earned. The ‘filthy’ epithet, however, might equally have been earned by another enthusiasm of Douglas’s. This eventually saw the light as Some Limericks, privately printed in Florence in 1928. To give an example,

There was a young man of Nantucket, Whose p–

but on second thoughts, suffice it to say that the young man’s ability to give pleasure not only to himself but also to the more puerile-minded of us is undimmed by the years. Douglas’s limericks would have made Edward Lear and his old men blush to the roots of their beards. But perhaps they are not to be dismissed as mere smut. Take the less blush-making

young man of Australia, Who painted his bum like a dahlia . . .

He is given (of course) an index entry – ‘Australia, floral design by a native of ’ – and also, like all the other young men and very occasional young woman, a substantial and faux-learned note, musing on the identity of both painter (‘we must suppose him to have been a native’) and flower (dahlias not being native to Australia). ‘Douglas’s is a pre-modern sensibility,’ wrote the best critic of twentieth-century travel literature, Paul Fussell. But is it? To take the sort of texts one might see on the walls of a public lavatory and publish them with a critical apparatus – it looks strikingly modernist, the literary equivalent of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, the urinal as fine art. ‘Preposterous drivel!’ I can hear him snorting, over his snuff and apéritif at the Café Vittoria on Capri. He may well be right. But there are instances when the sensibility is indisputably that of the twentieth century. Discussing a ‘phallic’ pillar in a church in Venosa, the object of ‘trembling . . . wallowing . . . anti-hygienic’ visitations by childless local women, Douglas mocks Edward Lear’s bowdlerized account of the same feature as ‘pre-eminently a “Victorian” version’. This was a year before Eminent Victorians appeared (Lytton Stracheywas a fan). And when, on the very last page of Old Calabria, we suddenly seem to leave behind that chaotic, choleraic country of ignorant priests and cretinous tax-men and emerge into ‘a land so luminous . . . it brings us to the ground, where we belong’, where life is ‘a blithe discarding of primordial husks’ – we have come upon the Italy of D. H. Lawrence. Perhaps most clearly, most contemporaneously, Douglas’s pitiless atheism echoes the way God was dying, for so many, in the trenches of the Great War – where his sybaritic novel South Wind, set in a re-imagined Capri, was a best-selling antidote to the mud, the mustard gas and the padres. High Victorian in vintage, Douglas became a twentieth-century man. And if the inter-war years of that century were the Golden Age of British travel writing, then Douglas was its presiding Saturn. From him his great admirer Robert Byron derived his brilliantly reconstructed dialogues, marked with musical dynamics; from him Byron learned about the all-important balance between entertainment and edification – ‘lust and lore’, as our medieval forebears called them. And when Patrick Leigh Fermor set off across Europe with the totemic rucksack, ‘rife with mana’, that had been round Athos with Byron, it was rife too with Douglasian sensibility. We owe Norman Douglas a lot, all of us who have tried to write enjoyable and intelligent books about our travels. He wrote no more travel after the 1920s, and little else. But he lived on, grandly impecunious – like a Jacobite in exile, Harold Acton said – to become a sort of living tutelary deity of sunny southern hedonism for a new generation of travellers, escapees from a north torn once again by war. Lawrence Durrell, in a verse-letter from Ischia, recalls bumping into him,

worn as if by sea Like some old whorled and rubbed-out ocean shell. . . Eyes a Homeric blue and hands quite firm, An air of indefinable ancient charm . . .

Graham Greene left a portrait of him in his final months on Capri, with his snuff-box and the typescript of his last book, Venus in the Kitchen – a collection of aphrodisiac recipes (‘Very stimulating, my dear,’ Douglas warned). Norman Douglas was many things – linguist, herpetologist, diplomatist, philologist, homosexualist, hedonist, atheist, anticlericalist; perhaps even modernist, malgré lui – and he didn’t give a damn: ‘Everything that ends in “ism”’, he once wrote, ‘is just balls, so far as I am concerned.’ The one exception was individualism. ‘Extreme individualism’, he explained, was the reason why English travel books are so rich. It is also one of the reasons why travel isn’t on the publishers’ bill of fare today. Norman Douglas would certainly have a hard job finding a publisher in 2011. Not just because of his Pacicchelli and his Horace, his unashamed polymathy and his unabashed pederasty. Rather, because he’s too idiosyncratically himself. (He could always publish on the Internet; but somehow I can’t imagine him adding bloggery to his other activities – ‘So ephemeral, my dear.’) For the paradox is that now, when – at last! – we’re all meant to be individuals, it’s the books that have to conform, to the Genre, to the Market. Travel is by its nature too restless, too unpredictable. The best of it will always refuse to conform:

Priests, . . . a decayed profession, 60 . . . Puccini, archbishop, recommends fetishism, 26 . . . Stoics, victims of misfeeding, 126 . . . Tree-torturing, a southern trait, 83 . . . Zoophilomania, an English disease, 120

That is exactly why we like these old travellers. May there be more of them to come.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © Tim Mackintosh-Smith 2011