page_title: Norman Douglas
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Norman Douglas / Life
caption_attribution_description: Norman Douglas, photographed by Carl Van Vechten on the Arno, Florence (Italy), 1935 June 23.
context_page_description: George Norman Douglas was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books such as his 1915 Old Calabria were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.
context_section_description: Norman Douglas was born in Thüringen, Austria (his surname was registered at birth as Douglass). His mother was Vanda von Poellnitz. His father was John Sholto Douglas (1845–1874), manager of a cotton mill, who died in a hunting accident when Douglas was about six. He spent the first years of his life on the family estate, Villa Falkenhorst, in Thüringen.
  Douglas was brought up mainly at Tilquhillie, Deeside, his paternal home in Scotland. He was educated at Yarlet Hall and Uppingham School in England,  and then at a grammar school in Karlsruhe. Douglas's paternal grandfather was the 14th Laird of Tilquhillie. Douglas's maternal great-grandfather was General James Ochoncar Forbes, 17th Lord Forbes.
  He started in the diplomatic service in 1894 and from then until 1896 was based in St. Petersburg, but was placed on leave following a sexual scandal. In 1897 he bought a villa (Villa Maya) in Posillipo, a maritime suburb of Naples. The next year he married a cousin Elizabeth Louisa Theobaldina FitzGibbon (their mothers were sisters, daughters of Baron Ernst von Poellnitz). They had two children, Louis Archibald (Archie) and Robert Sholto (Robin), and Norman's first published book, Unprofessional Tales (1901), was written in collaboration with Elizabeth and first appeared under the pseudonym Normyx. However, the couple were divorced in 1903 on grounds of Elizabeth's infidelity.
  Douglas then moved to Capri, began dividing his time between the Villa Daphne there and London, and became a more committed writer. Nepenthe, the fictional island setting of his novel South Wind (1917), is Capri in light disguise. His friends on the island included the opium addict Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen. 
  From 1912 to 1914 Douglas worked for The English Review. He met D. H. Lawrence through this connection. In late 1916 Douglas jumped bail in London on a charge of indecent assault on a sixteen-year-old boy, and he effectively lived in exile from then on. He later described himself as "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". He did not mention that the boy had complained to the police.
  Douglas's novel They Went (1920 ) is a fantasy based on Breton folklore.
  D. H. Lawrence based a character in his novel Aaron's Rod (1922) on Douglas, which led to a falling out between the two writers. Douglas and Lawrence continued the feud through their responses to the memoirs of the American author Maurice Magnus. (See "Norman Douglas in fiction," below.)
  In the book Twentieth Century Authors Douglas stated that he disliked Marxism, Puritanism and "all kinds of set forms, including official Christianity".
  
  During Douglas's years in Florence he was associated with the publisher and bookseller Pino Orioli, who published a number of Douglas's books and works by other English authors in his Lungarno series. Many of these books, notably the first edition of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, would have been prosecuted for obscenity if they had been published in London. Douglas probably had a major hand in writing Orioli's autobiography, Adventures of a Bookseller. 
  Further scandals led Douglas to leave Italy for the South of France in 1937. Following the collapse of France in 1940 Douglas left the Riviera and made a circuitous journey to London, where he lived from 1942 to 1946. He published the first edition of his Almanac in a tiny edition in Lisbon. He returned to Capri in 1946 and was made a citizen of the island. His circle of acquaintances included the writer Graham Greene, the composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and the food writer Elizabeth David.
  Douglas died in Capri, apparently after deliberately overdosing himself on drugs after a long illness (see Impossible Woman: Memoirs of Dottoressa Moore, ed. Greene). His last words are reputed to have been: "Get those fucking nuns away from me." The Latin inscription on his tombstone, from an ode by Horace, reads: Omnes eodem cogimur, "We are all driven to the same end"
caption: Douglas in 1935
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