Norman Douglas

He thought that I was Harre¹. Harre¹ from *They Went* who had grown up and wanted to get in touch with him again. In those days I was near enough in temperament to that imp for the mistake to be a natural one. An unfathomable curiosity was always leading me into strange adventures.

It was the early autumn of 1923 and I was on my way with friends to Florence, where Douglas then lived. I had read *South Wind* and liked it; but although I knew something about Herpenthe, it had not fired my imagination. It was different with *They Went*, (perhaps I too recognised Harre¹). I loved the book, laughed over it and immediately wrote to Douglas.

It has always been a habit of mine, if a book really arouses my enthusiasm, to write its author. This is only elementary courtesy, because writing is dreary work and recognition of literature, if it reflects the future as it should, is often slow and sometimes never comes at all. Many of my friendships, that have lasted half a lifetime, began with a letter. What did I say? I know there was some joke (but why?) about riding up on an elephant wreathed with marigolds; anyhow Douglas replied, inviting me to meet him. Where? In some piazza or near the cathedral? After thirty years, I cannot remember the details.

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I was tempted to keep the appointment but it did not seem fair. I wrote sorrowfully to disillusion him, to say that I was condemned to petticoats instead of to deerskin breeches, but would he come to lunch, if he could bear the disappointment.

He came, he conquered all of us, and that was the beginning of an odd friendship that lasted between us for years. I say odd, because although N.D. (as I was told to call him) professed himself appalled at my ignorance of words then commonly expunged from both books and conversation, he was far more strict with me than my own strict family.

"Did I hear that you walked down the Via Tornabuoni alone at six o'clock yesterday?" he asked at one of the first of our almost daily meetings.

"Why, yes. Miss X (an elderly spinster) asked me to tea at Doney's. It was quite close to the hotel and I knew the way perfectly well."

"Never do it again," Douglas looked at me as severely as if I had broken his favorite snuff box, "No lady goes out alone in Florence after four o'clock. What were you doing in a tea room anyhow? Poisonous places, full of envy and gossip. And very bad for the liver. If you ever go again, take a cab; and remember it must be a closed one, otherwise

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I shall have to leave what I am doing and escort you home
myself."

If anybody else had suggested that I could not take
care of myself, there would have been a slap and a fight.
But you did not argue with Douglas, you obeyed him or left
the town. We stayed in Florence about two months that year,
and returned for several weeks in 1924, and four or five
times a week N.D. called for me at about one o'clock, took
me out to lunch with him and then for an immense walk in
the neighbourhood of Florence, bringing me back punctually
at dusk.

Only a few days after our arrival something happened
that was to have a great influence on my life. We had
arrived in Florence just after the famous march on Rome.
The Florentine fascists organised a parade to celebrate
their seizure of power, and Douglas invited us with some of
his other friends, to watch it from his balcony. He was
then living in a couple of rooms at the top of the Pension
Nardini.

It was a clear, almost warm, November afternoon and
as the shouts increased and the bands came nearer, we went
out on the perilous-seeming balcony overlooking the piazza.
Half Florence was below us, cheering and shouting, as they

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had acclaimed first one duke and then the other, whoever happened to be victorious, all through the Renaissance. Throng了 of black-shirted boys came stamping down the road, like some spoiled legion who had just shifted its allegiance to a new commander. It was far from me, I was simply in Italy for a few weeks, I felt a vague uneasiness but I watched them without emotion.

An Englishman was standing beside me, I forget his name if I ever heard it, but he was writing some economic reports on Italy I believe Douglas told us, for the *Times* and other papers. He looked gravely down at the cheering mob, seemed to be counting each shirt. Then he said, with a pause between every word, "Watch what is happening. This is the beginning of the next war. If these fellows keep control, in fifteen years, because of these black-shirted fools, Europe will be struggling, not for victory, but for her very existence."

It was 1923. In 1939, when it came, he was precisely one year out. I remember that I pressed him to explain the movement to me, and he gave me figures and an analysis that I found difficult to follow, about the economic results of non-productive capital. I should have understood this perfectly fifteen years later, but then, we had only just got over the first war and all that I could think about was writing.

5

Years later, as I helped refugees to go to America, I often remembered this stranger's words, Because of him I saw the danger of totalitarian movements, so that later on, I had no doubts or hesitations, nor was I ever tempted by appeasement.

Douglas did not like the fascists either, less because of what they might do in the future, "politics are no concern of scholars, my dear", than because they had dismissed a friend of his, an Italian doctor who had struggled against malaria in the swamps for years, and had replaced him with an ardent black shirt just out from his hospital training. The doctor had been too engrossed by his work to join the party and so had first to leave the job, to which he had given up his life, and then to watch his rival decorated, for what he had accomplished during those many years. He must have thought, by that time, that mosquitoes were gentler than man.

What did we talk about during those first two winters and on shorter, subsequent visits? Mostly about the classics, or girls. There was a natural division between us as regards antiquity; on the whole he preferred the Latins, I liked the

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Greeks. I had been brought up to the sea, and the Greeks were sea-farers; I was young, I liked Theocritus and the Anthology, and I had spent some happy weeks at Athens or among the islands. Douglas was never at his ease with ships, even if they were floating above the calm waves of a sunny day near Nerpenthe; he liked the world's wisdom, and the assurance of the Roman rule. I once saw a sculptured head in a small museum; was it that of a general or of one of the later emperors, that might have been a portrait of himself. "I see you are Roman," I ventured once, when we were sitting in the big room of his apartment on the Lung'Arno, only to have him snort, "At present I am sick of everything Italian."

He made me read Athenaeus and Theophrastus, in translations of course, the original Greek was beyond me, and I have always been grateful. How much ancient lore I learned as well, I could not list now; it is part of my unconscious mind. He was always pointing out some movement of a peasant in the fields and relating it to a quotation or to a picture on a painted vase, or turning over a word, or linking the whole to the really profound studies of his youth. "Pliny, much of what he wrote is lost and that is writing I regret," he would say walking over to the window and taking an enormous pinch of snuff, "but already the Romans had him; they were

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moralists, you know, whereas Athenaeus was non-moral; he was interested in life purely as it appeared to him. And now, how about a pinch of snuff? They say the Scots introduced it into England."

I always experimented, I felt it cleared the head, and I always sneezed.

"A virgin! A virgin!" Douglas used to roar with laughter. "Delicious, my dear, and so refreshing, just persevere. What were we talking about? Pliny, yes, you must read the classics. They have a background."

Sooner-or later, however, the conversation would shift from books to people. He told me many stories of the two girls from his St Petersburg period, who are mentioned in *Looking Backwards*. He had dressed one of them in boy's clothes and took her for long sleigh drives, under the noses of his fellow diplomats. "They thought I was learning Russian," he would add with a delighted chuckle at the solemn fellows who had supposed his companion to be a young scholar. The other girl was a princess. She had loved him deeply. Unluckily they had been surprised together in the boudoir, one afternoon, "and I had to hop it, my dear, that very evening." The princess was inconsolable. (After M.D's description of the formalities of Russian court life, this was not surprising).

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She sent him a dozen telegrams a day to Paris in an incom-
prehensible code. Experts tried to break it but without
success, until a wire arrived at last, _au clair_, "consultez
dictionnaire javannais." His colleagues were perturbed, and
though he stayed on in the service for a short time, he
eventually sent in his resignation. "It was a mill stone
round my neck to know two weeks ahead that I had to attend
some ceremonial dinner." Only ceremonial was not the ad-
jective that he used!.

Then there was the shadowy figure of an Italian girl
in some palazzo. She belonged to an old and scholarly
family. (Was she a daughter of Count Caloveglia?) N.D.
became engaged to her for several years. He always spoke
of her with the greatest respect and I do not think that
she is mentioned in his writings, nor did his other friends
seem to know anything about her. There was apparently no
break between them but they saw each other, gradually, less
and less frequently. I often wondered what quality she had
had, to be put in such a class apart! His sister was the
only other woman of whom he spoke in the same tones. He
had been very fond of her and still grieved over her early
death.

We discussed solemnly and in great detail the arrange-
ment whereby a daughter in some poor Italian family would

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become some gentleman's friend and thus earn not only her
own dowry but sometimes those of her sisters. "Prices have
gone up," he would say, shaking his head and watching me to
see if I showed the slightest reaction. "In 1905 it was a
hundred liras. Ah well, I've had eleven hundred virgins in
my time, but that's all over." Then he would take a pinch
of snuff and add, "Remember, the secret is never to deal
with the girl directly but with her family. But a virgin isn't
much use to you," He would look at my skirt, "Never mind, have
a pinch of snuff, you'll get over it." At that point I usually
disappeared into my handkerchief amidst a gale of sneezes
while he continued, "Very happy they were too. I gave the
liras to the father and each of them a turquoise bracelet.
Most of them made excellent marriages." It was cool, impersonal and extremely Roman.

Yet it was not only girls; we could not walk five yards
along the narrow Florentine streets without an old woman, an
olive grower or a child, rushing up to us with greetings and
much obvious joy, to salute the "Signore" and ask his advice
about some problem, or invite him in for a glass of wine.
There was a very old priest, who spoke excellent Welsh,
having spent most of his life in Wales. Or we might meet
an elderly French diplomat who still spoke to Douglas as if

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they were young men en poste together in some foreign city.
And of course there were the "crocodiles", dark-haired, mis-
chievous urchins, with Renaissance names, whom he scolded
and spoilt, as if they were a team of puppies.

Actually what Douglas had was an astounding capacity
for romantic love. After a lifetime of observation, I sus-
pect that it is a comparatively rare condition. We have
become accustomed to the depressing parodies of it on the
cinema, to a vulgarisation of feeling, or the tiresome
babble of people who would shrink in terror from real emotion.
Perhaps it is our diet! "Degeneration comes from lack of
nourishment. Look at people to-day! Living on canned peas
and a biscuit. Food is the secret of liberty. You still
have a little of it in Italy but not in France. Look at
French beefsteaks! I always order six of them and get up
hungry." Anyhow, in its true manifestation, as I saw it with
Douglas, it rises above both mental processes and erotic
realities into an engulfing and tremendous tidal wave. It
is difficult to describe, because though some of us may feel
its consequences, it is beyond our personal experience as a
rule; a form of love, though not the only form. At certain
moments, Douglas looked at some object; it might have been a
boy, an old woman with a glass of wine, or a child. He did

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not need to touch them; some power rose in him and transformed
whoever was there into what they had dreamed of being, the
old became young again; the ugly, beautiful.

Curiously enough, although I was then young and with-
out the psychological training that I acquired later in life,
I never felt this direct force. I stood beside N.D. so close
that I once saw an old, bent woman change into a beautiful
and happy girl for a brief moment, but I was immune, although
Douglas was immensely kind to me, and we liked and respected
one another. Or was I? There was just one incident... Yes,
I suppose I too had my taste of it.

One afternoon I walked across to the other side of the
Arno, where Douglas was living until he could move to the
apartment that then became his home for so many years. This
temporary place was sunless and cold, with one lovely round,
but ancient window set into the wall. N.D. seemed not de-
pressed but less gay than he usually was. We started out
for a walk but just in front of the door we met a man with a
donkey cart, loaded with coal and logs. Douglas turned and
looked at me. I do not remember that he spoke, I do not even
know what happened, but when I recovered my wits, a few moments
later, I was pressing a five hundred lira note, that I had
just got from the bank to pay my hotel bill, into his hand

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and the old peasant was carrying the bags of coal upstairs.
I have never regretted the liras; it still seems a honor to
have been able to give them to him, but I wish I knew how he
had managed it! He was fifty then; what must he have been
like in his youth?

Of course such power has its darker side. Ordinary
mortals do not like to be lifted by an eagle into a terrestrial
heaven and then have to wake up next day and surrender their
place to a rival. There is naturally jealousy and disappoint-
ment. Who likes to eat the powder after licking off the am-
brosial jam? Yet Douglas himself was unconscious of the havoc
he caused; he was without envy, sure of himself and obedient
only to this force that most people cannot understand because
they have never seen it. A man who has it would need more than
mortal strength to tame it, I imagine, and can hardly be judged
by ordinary standards.

It is the room, facing the Arno, with the rows and rows
of books and the morning sun, falling on the amber Indian
hangings, that I remember chiefly, whenever I think of those
months. There was usually a map as well, lying on the table
like a papyrus scroll or pinned open with a block of beautifully

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colored marble, "dug up from a garden, my dear." He once gave me its fellow. How often I sat there, looking across at the smudged brown stones under almost green arches, while N.D. carried on some conversation that he had begun with his note-book after an early cup of tea. "The only time I ever drink the stuff, and it must be pure Darjeeling." Sometimes it would be the varieties of lizards to be found in southern Europe, (he was one of the few people I have known able to handle all reptiles, including snakes,) another time it would be travel. "I was writing about cold hands this morning," he began on one occasion, "the cold hands of an Alpine salamander. Wonderful little claws but ice-cold, like a Hindu's hands. If you want mystery, you must go to India, the men and women are perambulating flowers."

"I would rather go to Greece again."

"This restless modern spirit, it will never get you anywhere. Still, who would work unless they had to? Watch the Arno, it is never the same. The color changes and the volume alters. Chrysophase and celandine, what's that other word for lemon yellow? Find a new word for the Arno every morning and settle sensibly in Florence."

Celandine was a good word but it was thin, chrysophase was as thick as milky quartz. Both were excellent but I shook my head, I had been born a wanderer.

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"Greece!" N.D. continued, looking at me very seriously.
"Do be careful what you eat. I still think powdered rhubarb is the most efficacious. And there's no harm in taking a bottle of castor oil along as well, even if it is old-fashioned."

He was right of course; the more beautiful the island, the worst the sanitation.

"You had better come to Calabria with me instead. You can walk, can't you, and eat cheese? Good. You'll only need a rucksack. I will get you some clothes, suitable for a goat-herd, and teach you how to move. It's a girl's knees, as a rule, that give her away. Then I'll show you what made the Greeks write their poetry. Yes, you must come with me to Calabria."

I am sure that he would have taken me, if I had shown the slightest enthusiasm. I should have loved to pass as a goatherd, but the Greeks, just then, had me by the throat. I wanted to see the "violet light" again and watch Athens from Lykabettos.

"Or India, we could go to India."

"I told you once that I ought to arrive here on an elephant."

"An elephant!" He offered me some snuff. "That would be something. We should have to hang the verandah with catmint.

["15", "Do you suppose the beast would react to it the way that cats\ndo? Ha..." he shook with laughter, \"I should like to watch\nit shake down all the rickety shutters in this street.\"", "He was ageless. I never thought of him as being young,\nnor dreamed that he could grow old. Nor did I think of him\nas a writer; we never discussed modern books. No, he was a\nbeing, straight out of a myth, or a Roman who, feeling that\nchange was in the air, had consented to live again when\nanother empire (this time the whole of Europe) opened with\nfinal glory, into its last, sunflower summer.", "Perhaps we talked too much about antiquity and the\nEast? One late afternoon, it was almost the forbidden hour\nof dusk, I left him at his door and hurried back along the\nLung'Arno. I was used to the curious play of light and shadow\nthat sometimes made Florence seem upside down in the lengths\nof smoky silk, flowing between the bridges. That evening,\nas I looked up, I saw a mirage. It was, no doubt, some\noptical illusion, but floating along the river, rising above\nthe hills, was a Persian city. I have never been in Persia\nbut there were the courtyards and the minarets, it was softer\nthan Cairo or Tunis, and not white, but the rose colors in a\nbroken shell or the grey that is thinner than smoke and with-\nout the hard edges of silver. It stayed, or rather floated,"]

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a creation of immeasurable beauty, until I turned up the
Via Tornabuoni. Shadowy, shadowy, and yet real, just as when
Douglas talked about the past; the elemental things were
there, and the centuries were merely a color that a painter
changed at will, as the light built this city, or merely
tipped the edge of a parapet with sunshine, according to its
mood, or the time of day.

There was his immense kindness. Perhaps because I feel
the cold so much, I have an Eskimo affinity with fats. He
discovered that I liked marrow bones, so about once a week,
after his morning cup of tea but before he settled to his
work, he went over to the market, prowled among the stalls
like a chef, found the bone he wanted, bargained for it,
and then carried it himself to the restaurant where we were
to meet later in the day. I found it on our arrival four
hours later, cooked to perfection. "Have nothing in front
of it, my dear, eat it alone, that is the way to get the
flavor." He would sit back and smile, watching me a little
anxiously all the same, to see that I ate it seriously and
with proper appreciation.

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Afterwards some incident from his youth would occur to him, and I listened almost in a trance; he was a marvellous teller of tales. He was more of an architect than a painter in his books, the prose had not the glorious exuberance of his conversation. How he used words! Pure pigments, in great blocks. Or we looked at the other guests and wondered about them. "Do you see those two girls over there?" I looked. One was dark, the other almost a Titian red.

"They are worth watching. The dark one has taken half an hour to choose a banana for her friend. That is the secret of life, an intelligent interest in food. They are fond of one another."

Douglas himself ate like a southerner, well, but moderately. "Sometimes two leaves of salad are enough to make a meal memorable, but they must be perfectly prepared." We had wild boar; another time, a strangely flavoured but delicious cheese, sold only at the beginning of the autumn. I was always ready to experiment with food, but when it came to wine, I was no pupil at all. I never drank it, but, apart from a joke or two, Douglas never pressed me to take it. "Strange," he would say, "you have the temperance of the south, yet you say you are northern."

People crowded up to talk to us, of course, but Douglas never introduced me. "Remember abroad you know nobody or everybody." This was an excellent rule, if one were trying

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to work. "What a life, my dear, why can't people leave me alone?" Then he would slide from English into French, from German into Italian, equally fluent in them all, and with such clear emunciation that though I did not know Italian, I often imagined that I could understand him.

There was, of course, the incident of the Toscana. I did not like cigarettes, I wanted my hands free. The scent of a cigar was pleasant, and if I smoked, I liked something strong once a day, after dinner, when work was over. N.D. used to bring me tiny cigars but he insisted that they were poor stuff, only a boy would put up with them. What I needed was a Toscana. "Blow your head off, my dear, but you'll get to like it." I must be courageous, I felt, and offered one, I accepted it. Alas, next day I missed my lunch with him, it was the only occasion I believe that winter, but I have seldom been more sick. Afterwards, as I dislike being conspicuous and could not smoke cigars in public, I got used to cigarettes. I don't know which delighted N.D. most, that I had risked a Toscana or that the sequel had been what he had predicted.

We left Florence in due course but met Douglas again

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by chance at Naples during the early spring. He was about to return to Capri for his first visit since the 1914 war. We knew the island but were easily persuaded to re-visit it, and for some reason got there first, and I was at the port to wait for his steamer.

I shall never forget the scene that followed. We drove to the hotel and left his bags, but it was a beautiful March afternoon and he suggested a walk. By that time, the news of his arrival had spread from mouth to mouth. No political leader ever enjoyed such a triumph. Men rushed down narrow streets to shake him by the hand and offer him wine. Women rushed up with a whole new crop of babies, laughing and crying. Children brought him flowers, everybody talked at once, and Douglas shouted jokes back at them in a ribald Italian that I could not understand, kissed the boys, kissed the girls, and patted the babies as if they were kittens. The Signore had designed to return to his kingdom, and I verily believe that they thought the crops would be better and the wells dry up less quickly. No one could mistake the love that they had for him, nor, for that matter, how much he loved them.

In an agony of bulldog embarrassment, I slipped away and left him to the crowds. No doubt that is why Nemesis overtook me the next day.

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Douglas had already invited me to dinner on the following evening. I had often had lunch with him, but I had never dined alone with him or with anybody else. I was a little apprehensive (it was only 1924) as to the propriety of the proceedings. Seven o'clock came and I waited in the hotel lounge. He was always punctual to the minute. Ten minutes passed and there was no sign of him, I wondered whether I had mistaken the day; but no, I looked at my letter, it was clearly there in his beautiful handwriting. I watched the minutes crawl to twenty past, on again to half past. Then I asked the porter to see if he were in his room. A message came, asking me to wait and finally he tottered up, stared at me as if he did not know me and said, with considerable vagueness, "What time is it?"

I should have been warned.

However, I had not the experience then that I very quickly acquired. I produced his note, he gave it back to me and slapped me on the shoulder, an action that surprised me very much as normally we seldom even shook hands and said, "Kept you waiting, did I, never mind. I'll take you to a brigand's den where there have been a dozen murders. But Constanza is there, my dear, (was it Constanza?) and she's the best cook in the island. She was the prettiest girl, too, thirty years ago, and she still dances the tarantella better than anybody."

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We set off, Douglas leaned heavily on his stick and occasionally caught my shoulder. "Most of the people here don't know how to cook. If you wanted to eat, you should have stopped in Florence. They're a crowd of cut throats, my dear," He gurgled alarmingly and pointed to his throat. "Every inch of this island has been steeped in blood, several times over. Proud, you know. They're near Africa, but Constanza will do us all right."

I wondered why we never kept a straight line and there were stairs that proved very difficult to handle, but eventually we got to a table; there were more greetings, and an enormous lobster was produced for him.

It was like listening to a second edition of *South Wind*. N.D. told me stories of the island, beginning with its lizards and ending with the more than strange, human inhabitants. I cannot remember the details however, because as I sat transfixed with terror, he began to chew the lobster up, shell and all. "Tough, my dear; how wise you were to stick to an omelette." I grew more and more bewildered; finally Constanza herself came to his rescue. It was only as we got up to leave that I realised that he was drunk.

It was a warm March evening, the sky was at its most velvet, the almonds were out, there were patches of gold and dark brown wall-flowers in the gardens. All that I wanted to

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do was to get home, but I did not know the way, and I had no
confidence that N.D. was leading me in the right direction.
There I was wrong; we wandered along terraces, climbed up and
down steps, but eventually, to my infinite relief, we saw the
hotel in front of us. Weekend tourists were strolling up and
down, the sounds changed from Italian to English, I tried to
slip away again, but Douglas clung to my arm. "Let's make a
night of it, come to Monte Solar." I hoped, oh how I hoped,
that my three compatriots had not heard him. It was true that
I had never seen them before, but they must be schoolmistresses.
They were walking briskly, not loitering, along the road, and
I am sure that they were shocked that Nature was so wanton;
she was adding a moon to the slightly scented air and the out
lines of the fruit blossom. "Don't be so damned careful, it's
a stiff climb, but you're young. I want to show you sunrise
from Monte Solar," Douglas bellowed. "Another day," I mur-
mured; five steps more and I should be in the hall. "Another
day? What is the matter with you this evening? How do you
know that you will live to see it? You might be stabbed or
fall off the cliff." I did not answer; I guided Douglas as
gently as I could towards safety. Unluckily at that moment
he saw the three ladies. He stared, broke away from my grip,
and pranced up to them, dignified but full of purpose. He

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took off his hat, bowed and remarked courteously but in a
voice that could have been heard at the far side of the
piazza, "And who are you tucking in with, to-night?"

The years passed and it was natural that we grew, not
less friendly but more distant from one another. We wrote
letters, exchanged books, there were occasional meetings in
Florence, the south of France, Switzerland and eventually
London, but our day-to-day companionship was over. Once I
had given up Harre's woad and deerskins (though never Harre's
heart) I became part of that turbulent western world that was
so alien to him; not as they used to say in wartime, "because
there was nothing else to do", but because I was genuinely
at home in it.

I would rather not remember our last meeting. It was in
London, in 1946, and there was neither wine, nor sun, nor
sympathy. He babbled about Italy like an octogenarian in a
fever. His power had left him. It must have been harder for
him, than for most of us, to grow old. He had to suffer in
that English dampness for a few more months; then his story
had a partially happy ending. We could not give him back the

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past, but he returned to Capri and the devoted care of faithful friends, and he had six years longer in his much loved island.

A tradition has gone; his death marks, far more than any
superficial changes, the end of a way of thought. The books
will survive, but how am I to make you feel, through mere words,
the force of that love of the visible world, that when we were
with him was so overwhelming that we forget that he was a
writer and a scholar, as well as the walking philosopher of
the momentary experience. How cold it must be now in the
places that knew him, without the click of the box lid and
that familiar roar - "How about it! Have a pinch of snuff."
Of course there were sad and difficult moments during those
last years; sickness bewildered and irritated him, but fate saw
that the pattern was correctly knotted; there were Scots and
Austrians with him when he died, as well as his Italians.

It has taken me thirty years to realise how much I owe
to chance advice, flung over his shoulder, as we struggled up
stony paths, to sit on a wooden bench among the vines. And I
am only one among hundreds of friends. What can any sentence
make of him but a pale shade? The legend will remain and not
all of it will be true, but if I come again to that to me now
empty island, what is there to carry up the hillside to his
grave, except a twig of laurel?