The Island That Inspired Conrad and Lawrence’s Queerest Characters

In the autumn of 1904, after Joseph Conrad had published Nostromo to disappointing reviews, and with his always precarious financial situation vitiated by an operation for his wife, Jessie, he abandoned England to spend the winter in Capri, motivated by thrift and the hope that the climate would conduce to her recuperation. He met Norman Douglas soon after his arrival, and they became fast friends. Conrad wrote to H. G. Wells that he had met “a Scot (born in Austria) once in diplomatic service, [which] he threw up I fancy in sheer intellectual disgust. A man who can not only think but write.” The purpose of the letter was to enlist Wells’s aid in getting Douglas published. To soften him up, Conrad added that he, Douglas, and Thomas Jerome had discussed Wells’s visionary novel A Modern Utopia, which was then being serialized in The Fortnightly Review, and they agreed that Wells was “the one honest thinker of the day.”

Capri disappointed Conrad, for reasons cited by many visitors before and after him. In a letter to his friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford, he reported,

I’ve done nothing. And if it were not that Jessie profited so remarkably I would call the whole expedition a disaster. This climate what between tramontana and sirocco has half killed me in a not unpleasant languorous melting way. I am sunk in a vaguely uneasy dream of visions—of innumerable tales that float in an atmosphere of voluptuously aching bones . . . The scandals of Capri—atrocious, unspeakable, amusing scandals, international, cosmopolitan, and biblical flavored with Yankee twang and the French phrases of the gens du monde mingle with the tinkering of guitars in the barber’s shops . . . All this is a sort of blue nightmare traversed by stinks and perfumes, full of flat roofs, vineyards, vaulted passages, enormous sheer rocks, pergolas, with a mad gallop of German tourists lâché à travers tout cela [loosed amid all this] in white Capri shoes over the slippery Capri stones, kodaks, floating veils, strangely waving whiskers, grotesque hats, streaming, tumbling, rushing, ebbing from the top of Monte Solaro (where the clouds hang) to the amazing rocky chasms of the Arco Naturale—where the lager beer bottles go pop.

Although Capri did not prove to be a good place to work, it provided the raw material for a brilliant short story, a genre that Conrad undertook infrequently in its pure, Chekhovian form. His near neighbor in Capri was a Polish compatriot, Count Zygmunt Szembek, who told him about an unpleasant incident he had experienced in Naples. “Il Conde,” subtitled “A Pathetic Tale,” is told by a classic Conradian narrator, chatty and confidential, an honest but unreliable informant. On a visit to Naples, he meets an elderly Bohemian aristocrat, “a good European,” an “intelligent man of the world, a perfectly unaffected gentleman.” They are staying at the same hotel, where they become dining companions. The Count, a widower, is elegantly dressed in a dinner jacket and evening waistcoat “of very good cut, not new—just as these things should be.” He reveals that he is a regular visitor to the Gulf of Naples, where he stays at hotels in Sorrento or rents a villa in Capri, for relief of a painful and dangerous rheumatic affliction. When the narrator leaves for a few days in Taormina, to look after a sick friend, the Count sees him off at the train station.

When the narrator returns, he finds the Count a changed man. After dinner, over cigars, the Count tells him about an “abominable adventure” that occurred in a public park in Naples. He went to hear a musical concert, he says, where he encountered a well-dressed young man of a certain type, “with colorless, clear complexion, red lips, jet-black little moustache, and liquid black eyes, so wonderfully effective in leering or scowling.” They shared a table without speaking. Soon after, the Count strolled near the bandstand and saw the young man again, and they exchanged glances. When the music began, the Count wandered down a poorly lit alley, where he once more encountered the young man, who asked him for a light for his cigarette. When the Count reached for his matches, the youth put a stiletto to his chest and demanded his money.

The Count tells the narrator that he felt powerless to call for help, because the robber could have thrown down the knife and claimed that he was the victim. “He might have said I attacked him” or “bring some dishonoring charge against me.” The Count handed over what little money he had but refused to give up his rings, one a gift from his wife and the other a legacy from his father. The robber melted into the night.

Shaken, the Count stopped at a café in Galleria Umberto to eat a risotto. After he sat down, he saw the cutthroat sitting at the end of the banquette. A cigar seller informed him that he was “a young Cavaliere of a very good family” and a capo of the Camorra. After the Count paid his bill with a gold coin he kept hidden for such an emergency, the hoodlum menaced him for the last time: “Ah! So you had some gold on you—you old liar.” He called him a rascal and a villain, and concluded, “You are not done with me yet.” The Count decides that he must leave Italy at once and never return, which the narrator calls the equivalent of a death sentence. He sees the Count off at the station and ends his story with the maxim “Vedi Napoli e poi mori”—See Naples and die.

“Il Conde” has excited as many critical theories as some of Conrad’s novels. The story anticipates the themes of anarchy and nihilism that he elaborates at length in The Secret Agent, which he was writing at the same time, and the novel that followed, Under Western Eyes. Modern critics have been attracted to the story because of its homosexual subtext, rare in Conrad’s work. Jim’s affectionate friendship with his native sidekick, in Lord Jim, possesses a sentimental edge, but the textual justification for a sexual charge is flimsy there and absent elsewhere in the novels. In “Il Conde,” however, the homosexual element is scarcely submerged.

From the start, the hints are plentiful. The narrator and the Count, both men traveling alone, first meet at the National Archaeological Museum when they are standing next to each other contemplating the bronze sculpture of a nude ephebe from Herculaneum, known as the Resting Hermes. Even before they meet, the Count attracts the narrator’s notice when he leaves a yellow silk parasol behind at the hotel’s dining room and a “lift boy” chases after him to return it.

The Count’s narrative of his abominable adventure is transparent. He sits at the young man’s table, they exchange glances in the crowd, he strolls past him as he sits alone in a dark alley. It is a classic description of what would come to be known as cruising, which culminates in asking for a light, the clichéd opening for a homosexual proposition. There is scant ambiguity, too, in the phrase “dishonoring charge”—what could it be, given the Count’s age and social position, apart from a sexual advance?

Yet the narrator of “Il Conde” portrays the Count not only in a positive light but affectionately. The gay reading of the story got support from Count Zygmunt Szembek’s grandson, who told Conrad’s Polish biographer that his grandfather was in fact homosexual. He also contributed a Pole’s insight that the plebeian Conrad might have been impressed by the real Count’s aristocratic polish, his air of instinctive cultivation, and even the discreet elegance of his wardrobe.

A more interesting issue than speculation about the elusive fictional “truth,” whether the Count went to the concert in search of a young man for sex, is the perennial question in Conrad of the relationship between the narrator and his tale. Does the Count suppress important information telling his story to a naive, credulous confidant? Or is the narrator himself a player in the game, who intends his story to be a cautionary tale, lightly coded, to other homosexuals? The latter approach might not have occurred to Conrad: although he was friends with several writers who were gay, he appears to have been oblivious or indifferent to their private lives and might have been naive about the phenomenon, as most of his contemporaries were. Perhaps he simply took a storyteller’s passing interest in the subject after meeting the charming, urbane Count Szembek and the intellectually brilliant Norman Douglas, who belied the stereotype of the predatory pederast, which resulted in this unique work.

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Fifteen years later, another modern master of the novel came to Capri for a longish stay and wrote a small-scale tour de force that was distinctly unlike his best-known works. D. H. Lawrence met Norman Douglas in London when Douglas was working at The English Review, edited by Ford Madox Ford, where Lawrence launched his literary career. In November 1919, when Lawrence decided to leave England to live abroad, beginning in Italy, he wrote to Douglas, who was then living in Florence, to ask him to recommend a cheap lodging there. Douglas put him up at the same flophouse where he was staying with an American journalist named Maurice Magnus, previously an artist’s agent who had represented Isadora Duncan.

The three penniless writers passed a few strange days together eating, drinking, and bickering until Lawrence departed for Capri for a rendezvous with his wife, Frieda, and Magnus, for obscure reasons, left to take up residence at Monte Cassino, a Benedictine monastery eighty miles southeast of Rome. Lawrence transformed these encounters into Memoir of Maurice Magnus. Barely a full-length book, it is now all but forgotten, yet Lawrence himself later called it “the best single piece of writing, as writing,” he had done.

He is at his trenchant best in his account of bumping into the two men by the Ponte Vecchio immediately after his arrival in Florence, while he was looking for the hotel. In his observation, they are a music-hall comedy team: “Douglas tall and portly, the other man rather short and strutting,” the former “decidedly shabby and a gentleman, with his wicked red face and tufted eyebrows,” and Magnus “very pink-faced, and very clean, very spruce, very alert, like a sparrow painted to resemble a tom-tit.” Lawrence pours on his contempt for Magnus. For all his bewhiskered apparatus of bohemianism, Lawrence was middle-class in his soul, “determined to keep a few pounds between me and the world,” as he put it, whereas Magnus lived beyond his means, cadging handouts from friends to pay for first-class train tickets.

In this memoir, Lawrence’s scorn is complicated by contempt for his new friend’s effeminacy. When he calls on him in his room, Magnus “minced about in demi-toilette,” looking “like a little pontiff in a blue kimono.” Even at this dingy boardinghouse, everything was “expensive and nicking,” with silver-studded suitcases and ivory-backed hairbrushes. “On his dressing-table stood many cut-glass bottles and silver-topped bottles with essences and pomades and powders.” In Lawrence’s observation, Magnus was “queer and sensitive as a woman with Douglas,” while his idol treated him disdainfully and even seemed to despise him. Yet, of a piece with Lawrence’s lifelong ambivalence toward homosexuality in principle and in particulars, he found himself charmed by the painted sparrow and promised to come visit him at the monastery.

Lawrence was even more acidulous about Capri than Conrad had been. He and Frieda soon became regulars in the island’s quarrelsome social scene, yet he held himself aloof, calling Capri “a gossipy, villa-stricken, two-humped chunk of limestone, a microcosm that does heaven much credit, but mankind none at all.” Soon after he had settled in, Lawrence received a wistful note from Magnus. He asked for nothing, but Lawrence intuited that it was an appeal for help. He made a fatal misstep: having just received a wind-fall from an American journal, he posted off a check for five pounds. Magnus wrote back immediately, overjoyed, reiterating his invitation to come for a visit at Monte Cassino. At this point, Lawrence’s memoir begins to resemble James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, about a man pursued by a familiar spirit, a grinning demon who turns up in his path everywhere he goes.

The narrative of his visit to Monte Cassino is a bravura performance of travel writing in a gloomy, gothic key. Lawrence’s journey begins in Capri, waking

in the black dark of the January morning, and making a little coffee on the spirit-lamp, and watching the clock, the big-faced, blue old clock on the campanile in the piazza in Capri, to see I wasn’t late. The electric light in the piazza lit up the face of the campanile. And we were there, a stone’s throw away, high in the Palazzo Ferraro, opposite the bubbly roof of the little duomo. Strange dark winter morning, with the open sea beyond the roofs, seen through the side window, and the thin line of the lights of Naples twinkling far, far off.

Lawrence arrives at the monastery, icy cold in January, and finds Magnus living in a sumptuous, well-furnished room with a dressing table for the pomades and powders. The monks appear to share Lawrence’s disdain for Magnus’s lordly pretensions and to have accepted him as a guest as an act of charity. Magnus lends Lawrence a luxurious overcoat lined in sealskin, made for him, he says, by one of the best tailors in New York, and takes him on a tour of the monastery. The monks are at their evening prayers, so “we went by our two secret little selves into the tall dense nearly-darkness of the church.” Magnus shows him the pillars and pavements, “all colored marbles, yellow and gray and rose and green and lily-white, veined and mottled and splashed,” and mosaics of trees and birds glinting with gold and lapis lazuli. “We tiptoed about the dark church stealthily, from altar to altar, and Magnus whispered ecstasies in my ear.”

Lawrence’s final encounter with Magnus was in Malta, an island he hated even more than Capri. There, he found him sponging off a pair of innocent locals who owned small businesses in the port. When the police came to arrest Magnus for bad debts, he bolted the door and killed himself by drinking poison.

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Excerpted from Pagan Light: Dreams of Freedom and Beauty in Capri by Jamie James. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 19, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by Jamie James. All rights reserved.