[Greene was one of the most popular and respected authors of the twentieth century. A prolific novelist, dramatist, critic, and essayist, he is perhaps best known for the novels Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), and The Third Man (1950). In the following essay, originally published in 1952, he fondly recalls Douglas's life and discusses what South Wind meant to his generation of writers.]

In those last years you would always find him between six and dinner-time in the Café Vittoria, unfashionably tucked away behind the Piazza. Through the shabby windows one stared across at Naples—one could go only a few steps further without tumbling off the island altogether. Crouched over an aperitif (too often in the last years almost unalcoholic), his fingers knotted with rheumatism, squawking his 'Giorgio, Giorgio' to summon the devoted waiter who could hear that voice immediately above all the noises of Capri, snow-white hair stained here and there a kind of butterfly-yellow with nicotine, Norman Douglas sat on the borders of the kingdom he had built house by house, character by character, legend by legend.

One remembers him a few months before he died, handling the typescript of this book, [Venus in the Kitchen], resorting the loose carbon pages: there wasn't enough room on the café table what with the drinks, the old blue beret, the snuff-box, the fair copy; the wind would keep on picking up a flimsy carbon leaf and shifting it out of place, but the old ruler was back at the old game of ruling. He wouldn't have given even the menial task of assembly to another. With a certain fuss of pleasure and a great tacit pride he was handling a new book of his own again. There hadn't been a new book for—how many years? Sometimes something seemed to be wrong with the typescript: a monologue of exaggerated grumbles marked the misprints—not one of those earlier misprints carefully preserved in proof, to be corrected later in manuscript gratis for a friend and at a price for collectors—'Cost him a tenner, my dear'—and that sudden laugh would break like an explosion in a quarry, over before the noise has reached you.

My generation was brought up on South Wind, although I suppose the book was already five years old before we opened it and read the first sentence, 'The bishop was feeling rather sea-sick', which seemed to liberate us from all the serious dreary immediate wartime past. Count Caloveglia, Don Francesco, Cornelius van Koppen, Miss Wilberforce, Mme Steynlin, Mr Eames, Saint Dodekanus, the Alpha and Omega Club: Nepenthe had not been Capri, but Capri over half a century has striven with occasional success to be Nepenthe. South Wind appeared in 1917, superbly aloof from the catastrophes of the time: it was the age of Galsworthy, Wells, Bennett, Conrad: of a sometimes inflated, of a sometimes rough-and-ready prose. Novelists were dealing with 'big' subjects—family panoramas, conflicts of loyalty. How reluctantly we came to the last sentence: 'For it was obvious to the meanest intelligence that Mr Keith was considerably drunk.' This wasn't the world of Lord Jim or the Forsytes or the dreary Old Wives.

South Wind was to have many inferior successors: a whole Capri school. Douglas was able to convey to others some of his tolerance for human foibles: characters like Mr Parker and Mr Keith were taken up like popular children and spoiled. It became rather easy to write a novel, as the reviewers would say, 'in the manner of South Wind'. None of Douglas's disciples had learnt to write as he had. Nearly a quarter of a century of clean, scholarly, exact writing, beginning so unrewardingly with a Foreign Office report on the Pumice Stone Industry of the Lipari Islands by the Third Secretary of Her Majesty's Embassy in St Petersburg, published by the Stationery Office at a halfpenny, went to the creation of Perelli's Antiquities and 'the unpublished chronicle of Father Capocchio, a Dominican friar of licorous and even licentious disposition, a hater of Nepenthe.…'

Douglas died in the middle eighties after a life consistently open, tolerant, unashamed. 'Ill spent' it has been called by the kind of judges whose condemnation is the highest form of praise. In a sense he had created Capri: there have been suicides, embezzlements, rapes, thefts, bizarre funerals and odd processions which we feel would not have happened exactly in that way if Douglas had not existed, and some of his tolerance perhaps touched even the authorities when they came to deal with those events.

It is fitting, I think, that his last book should be as unserious and shameless as this collection of aphrodisiac recipes, to close a life in which he had enjoyed varied forms of love, left a dozen or so living tokens here and there, and been more loved himself than most men. (One remembers the old gypsy family from northern Italy who travelled all the way to Capri to spend an afternoon with Douglas and proudly exhibit to him another grandchild.) With its air of scholarship, its blend of the practical—the almond soup—and the wildly impracticable—Rôti sans Pareil, the crispness of the comments (we only have to add his customary endearments to hear the ghost speak): 'Very stimulating, my dear', 'Much ado about nothing', 'Not very useful for people of cold temperament', with a certain dry mercilessness in the introduction, this book will be one of my favourite Douglases: it joins Old Calabria, Fountains in the Sand, They Went, Looking Back, London Street Games, the forbidden anthology of limericks.

He will be delighted in the shades at any success we may have with his recipes and bark with laughter at our ignominious failures, and how pleased he will be at any annotations and additions, so long as they are exact, scholarly, uninflated, and do not carpingly rise from a cold temperament. For even his enormous tolerance had certain limits. He loved life too well to have much patience with puritans or fanatics. He was a gentleman and he disliked a boor. One of the finest passages of invective written in our time is his pamphlet against D. H. Lawrence in defence of Maurice Magnus, and an echo of that old controversy can be found in these pages.

'Not many years ago I met in the South of France a Mr D. H. Lawrence, an English painter, whom I interested in this subject and who certainly looked as if his own health would have been improved by a course of such recipes as I had gathered together.

There are said to be certain Jewish rabbis who perform the operation of circumcision with their thumbnail so rapidly and painlessly that the child never cries. So without warning Douglas operates, and the victim has no time to realize in what purgatorio of lopped limbs he is about to awake, among the miserly, the bogus, the boring, and the ungenerous.