SOURCE: "Norman Douglas's Temporary Attachments," in Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 119-30.

[Fussell is an outspoken American nonfiction writer, essayist, and critic whose best-known works—including The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Class: A Guide through the American Class System (1983), and BAD: or, the Dumbing of America (1991)—are noted for their scrupulous scholarship, accomplished prose style, and often polemical tone. In the following excerpt, he examines Douglas's travel writings in light of his pederastic relationships with young boys.]

The titles of the two travel books Douglas published in the 20's, Alone (1921) and Together (1923), will suggest the alliance in his mind between companionship and the impulse to record perceptions of abroad. According to Acton, "He told me that each of his books had ripened under the warm rays of some temporary attachment: unless he was in love he had little or no impulse to write. Each of his books, therefore, was mingled with the happiest associations of a life-time." Or to put it another way, each of his books becomes a way of talking about pederastic satisfactions—not all of them sexual—with boys like Eric and René in an atmosphere where such things are not discussed, or if discussed, discussed in such terms as those of George V's reputed assertion, "I won't knight buggers."

Douglas's is a pre-modern sensibility. He was born in 1868, and although he lived until 1952, nothing in his emotional outlook or literary posture prompted him to any interest in Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, or Pound. Darwin and Herbert Spencer were his thinkers, Conrad his writer. He was a Scottish late-Victorian, a sort of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig turned inside out. Such a formulation at least would recognize the importance of his Germano-Scottish origins while doing justice to the Puritan determination of his atheism and hedonism, the stubborn assiduity of his pederasty, and the strongmindedness of his performance as a British eccentric abroad. His Nietzschean brand of naughtiness is of the 90's: like Shaw's or Samuel Butler's, his sub versiveness does not threaten the status quo, it teases it and requires it. His reputation for shadiness is like Frank Harris's (born 1856), as is his conviction that the Mediterranean is the natural locale for the seduction of very young persons. His Italy is the Italy of Pater, Symonds, and Baron Corvo. His improper limericks (with of course their perverse geography) suggest an Edward Lear who has cast off all restraint except verseform, just as his pleasure in little boys resembles Dodgson's in little girls. If rough-trade homosexuality of the Genet stamp is one sign of the self-consciously modern or post-modern, pederasty—Douglas seems to have been fondest of children ten to twelve—is pre-modern. Maurice Richardson remembers lunching with Douglas in 1943: "By the end of the lunch Norman was enthusing about the smell of children's armpits and I got faintly embarrassed."

The pattern of his life was a series of flights abroad. So often was he obliged to decamp across frontiers, or, as he says, "put a slice of sea" between himself and outraged parents, that he became learned in the details of European extradition treaties. "Burn your boats," he advised. "This has ever been my system in times of stress." His first precipitate departure was in 1896, from St. Petersburg, where, having impregnated a lady, he abandoned his post as Third Secretary in the Embassy and took off for Naples. In those days he was fond of ladies, marrying one in 1898 and fathering two boys. But his tastes had changed probably by 1908, when he lived with a peasant boy in Italy while writing Siren Land (1911), and certainly by 1916, when he was arrested in the South Kensington tube station for paying a boy too much attention and fled to Italy to escape trial. In the 30's there were two more similar flights, one from Austria, one from Florence. He finally came to rest, much passion spent, in southern France, only to be forced by the Second World War to Portugal and then back to London, which he hated. (In London under the bombings of 1943, with little drink and terrible food, and in appalling cold, he and Nancy Cunard would sit on a sofa and solace themselves by pretending it was the seat of a wagon-lit speeding across Italy to France in the old days of sun and freedom.) Despite poverty and age, his halcyon period began in 1946. He was now an Honorary Citizen of Capri (the only other one was Benedetto Croce) and one of the local sights, and he lived there in a handsome villa provided by his friend Kenneth Macpherson. He was attended by the ten-year-old Neapolitan Ettore, tenderly beloved by Douglas although denominated "a little tart" by some. His happiness was only slightly tarnished by the badgerings of somewhat faded American fans of South Wind. Near the end he had a few regrets but no apologies: "If I had stuck in the Dipl. Service," he wrote, "I should certainly have become an Ambassador and be now living on a pension of £5,000 a year." Instead he was raggedy, although he managed to maintain, Acton recalls, "the elegance of a Scottish Jacobite in exile." His constitution was rugged—another Scotticism. After a lifetime of excesses—confronted by temptation, he always followed his own favorite suggestion, "Why not, my dear?"—he apparently couldn't die, even at the age of 84, and finally had to put himself down with an overdose of pills.

He had a remarkable mind and vast learning, the result in part, as he liked to notice, of his having escaped a university education. His school was the Karlsruhe Gymnasium, and he was there in the 80's, when a German education meant languages (Russian, French, Italian), music (piano), and science. It did not include absorption in the self. The objectivity and curiosity Douglas learned at Karlsruhe made him an ideal traveler, and he started early. At the age of 19, he wrote his grandmother before his first trip to Naples: "I have been studying my Baedeker very diligently, and already seem to know my way about Naples quite well." Grown up and preparing for a trip to Greece, he writes: "I read one book on Greece every day, and will soon know the country and the language so intimately that it will be sheer waste of time and money going there." He grew up a scholarly, meticulous young mineralogist, taxidermist, and scrutinizer of lizards, author of the treatise On the Herpetology of the Grand Duchy of Baden (1891) and later scholar of the geology, archeology, and history of Capri, the Sorrentine Peninsula, and Calabria. "Externalize yourself!" enjoins the Count in South Wind. Douglas's curiosity about "out there" is Aristotelian, like his empiricism about sex, drink, food, and study. He was a scientist, a dissector. "Finding everything wonderful," as Mark Holloway says, "but nothing miraculous," he was that rare creature, "a happy man, who has got his values right for himself and knows it." In this he's like the other literary travelers of this period: all superbly know what they're doing, an achievement some will find refreshing.

If Douglas resembles any other twentieth-century writer it is Nabokov. The two share a similar erudition and devotion to natural history (Nabokov's lepidoptery is Douglas's herpetology), a similar secure individuality and contempt for the modern world, a similar commitment to the value of the aristocratic intellect, and a similar playfulness and waggery. Douglas's sense of security when he commends something resembles Robert Byron's, but he is a little like Lawrence too in his instinct to make literature out of his sense of being em-battled and his tendency to visit verbal violence upon the English. As in this Lawrentian moment from How About Europe? (1939):

Ribald persons used to say: Wake up, Britain! Easier said then done. The Anglo-Saxon is hard to wake up, being phlegmatic and self-righteous to such a degree that the only thing which will really wake him up is brute force. Sad, but true.

His literary and historical admirations offer a key to his own character and talent. One of his favorites was the nineteenth-century German historian of Rome, Ferdinand Gregorovius, some of whose chapters Douglas translated into Italian while a student at Karlsruhe. "I liked Gregorovius even then," he wrote 40 years later, "and in later years learned to appreciate more fully his humanism, his alloy of learning and descriptive power." Likewise he never forgot the model of Count Campo Alegre, whom he had known at the Spanish Embassy in St. Petersburg, "scholar and man of the world, [who] impressed his character on all he possessed and all he said.… He belonged to an almost forgotten race, the humanist; the man of boundless curiosity and boundless tolerance—of that tolerance which derives from satisfied curiosity, and can derive from nothing else." What he liked about the translations of Petrarch by another of his idols, Frederick Wharton Mann, is that they had nothing touristic about them: "His work was meticulous and refined, exclusive, anti-vulgarian."

It was in the spirit of these admirations that he traveled, not just in Russia and Italy, but to Africa (with Nancy Cunard), Greece, Turkey (he loved the beautiful, studious town of Bursa), India, Ceylon, Syria, and Kenya. He was accompanied everywhere by "Alfred" (sometimes "Alfredino")—the small hard pillow necessary to his sleep. But he spent more than half his life in Italy, and it is as an interpreter of the Italian mode of abroad to a grey, hangdog Anglo-Saxonry that he finds his career. He began before the war with Siren Land, a consideration of the ancient Siren myth in relation to the topographical and archeological features of the Bay of Naples. Here he achieves what will be his lifelong method of grasping "a place": he moves eye and mind rapidly over the whole, like someone "reading" a painting, in order to possess all the elements at once and unite them, no matter how contradictory the details or how puzzling the result. In aid of this method, his prose attains a wonderful dynamics. It is full of exclamations, assertions, and queries as he moves back and forth from present datum to past association. And in Siren Land he develops his personal structure for the travel book: narrative and description interrupted by frequent interlarded essays—on the ethics derivable from ruins, the local winds and their folklore, the character of Tiberius, local spooks and saints, caves and their traditional narratives, leisure, local wines. The method is a form of geographical gossip. Underlying the whole busy performance is the theme that he will develop a hundred different ways, the nastiness of positing "the antagonism of flesh and spirit, the most pernicious piece of crooked thinking which has ever oozed out of our poor deluded brain." That's a way of talking about his delight in the company of the peasant boy he took up with at Nerano while writing Siren Land, whose conversation gave Douglas most of what he needed of local folklore for the book. (This boy later cooked for Douglas on Capri while he was writing South Wind.) His next travel book, Fountains in the Sand (1912), follows the same method in its treatment of Tunisia. Here his companion was a German schoolmaster, "tall, young, and attractive." Despite Douglas's technique of associative impressionism, the book is topographically precise, and he was pleased to be told by an army Colonel in 1943 that his book had been more useful to the planners of the North African campaign than any official materials.

His companion while touring southern Italy for Old Calabria (1915) was the twelve-year-old Eric (Ernest Frederick Eric Wolton), a Cockney he picked up (his words) at the Crystal Palace. The grown-up Eric continued as Douglas's friend and ended as a police official in East Africa, retiring finally as Chief Superintendent of the Tanganyikan police. Eric kept his own diary of the trip ("Salami is a kind of sausage it is very beastly"), and seems to have enjoyed everything but the food and the malaria. "His curly hair dropped out," Douglas notes, "till he was nearly bald."

Douglas once said, speaking of the Great War: "A continent which can make such an exhibition of itself is not to be taken seriously." South Wind (1917) was designed in part as an uncontaminated island's rebuke to northern Europe, a plea for youth and sun and tolerance addressed to nations at suicidal war apparently contemptuous of these things. The novel is sometimes taken as a satyr's mere naughty recommendation of pleasure as the end of life, but seeing it in the context of the war makes it appear a more thoughtful critique. And a more subtle one than sometimes imagined. For example, its implicit celebration of the institution of conversation, especially conversation about ideas liberally conceived, makes its own comment on the nationalistic rigidities presiding up north, exposing the incivility of the noisy, wordless confrontation occurring in Belgium and France (as Count Caloveglia says, "Northern people, whether from climatic or other causes, are prone to extremes"). South Wind appears to be "a novel," but its earliest readers, like Arthur Eckersley writing in the English Review, sensed its proximity to the travel book: "One knew already that Mr. Norman Douglas was the ideal writer of travel volumes; the setting of South Wind enables him to give some vivid pictures of Italian scenes, so vividly realized that the book may be regarded as a kind of holiday substitute." There is a plot, a boyishly subversive one, but it's there less for its own sake than as a justification for the "travel" essays, which treat Nepenthe like an actual island visited by an actual curious traveler. Thus we are told about its topography, geology, and mineralogy, its customs, antiquities, and floraculture, sometimes almost in guidebook idiom. We encounter essays on aesthetics, fanaticism, comparative theology, folk-medicine, and cookery; as well as numerous character-sketches and even a mock saint's life. But South Wind is most like a travel book in its wonder about the magic of place, its curiosity about the inter-course between place and character. It is the anomalous sirocco, inseparable from Nepenthe, that tempts foreigners there to "strange actions," just as in A Passage to India, the work of another traveler and one of Douglas's admirers, it is the echo in a strange "place," the Marabar Caves, that changes everything.

In 1919, arriving in Menton by train, Douglas met a sweet-tempered boy of fourteen, René Mari, who helped him carry his suitcase. One thing led to another, and it was René (his parents approving) who accompanied Douglas on most of the walking tours in Italy recalled in Alone, published in 1921. Since he's toured with a companion, Douglas, in a footnote at the end, acknowledges that his title is "rather an inapt one." But, he concludes, "Let it stand!" It has the merit of some ironic concealment, as well as implying the author's aloneness as the last remaining honest man with aristocratic tastes and scorn for the modern world. The Introduction (first published as "The Tribulations of a Patriot") helps explain what this odd, strongminded Briton is doing in Italy. It details with rich sarcasm and anger his frustrations trying to get some kind of war work at home in the autumn of 1914. Rejected everywhere, he naturally packs his bags and takes off, alone. From Menton he proceeds to Levanto, Siena, Pisa, the resort town Viareggio, dead in February but awakening in May, and thence to Rome, "the most engaging capital in Europe." Off again to Olevano, Valmontone, Sorrento, and back to Rome again. Then finally to Soriano and Alatri. Douglas's method is to invite the places visited to cover their associations of earlier trips and earlier visitants, with the results that the book blends, as Holloway observes, "fact, fiction, and semi-fiction in a completely satisfying whole." As usual, Douglas throws in what interests him and ties it to a place. We meet characters, mostly rascals or nice children. We get natural-history notes on snakes, lizards, and birds; exotic speculations about human motives or institutions, examined historically; accounts of flirtations with young girls; renderings of walks and conversations with intelligent and unschooled—and therefore sensitive—young boys; hedonistic notes on local wine and food; quasi-dirty jokes, set forth so shrewdly they could pass for clean; anti-Puritan diatribes, focussing on "over-legislation" everywhere; an attack on gross-feeders (most of them British), who betray coarseness of soul by not caring what they eat; an excursus on the delusions of the mob and the orthodoxies and public pieties threatening the first-rate man; and observations on the corruption of rural life by cities and machinery. There is an essay on whether youth should drink wine at all or should leave it to age, which needs it more and knows how to manage it better. There are half-whimsical anthropological inquiries: why do the French develop noses that make them resemble rats? whence their devotion to scent? There are invectives against telephones, trams, noise, "progress"; and plans for outré literary projects, like an anti-fly anthology. All these excursions are realizations of curiosity in action, showing the reader what it's like to be interested in something for its own sake. They are exercises in a "liberal" kind of noticing, which misses no nuance and treasures associations because experience is blank without them. He once knew a lady in California whose fondness for the large, lurid wild flowers there prompted her to contemn the European varieties. If flowers were mere objects, Douglas says, she'd be right. He tried to explain to her that European flowers bear about them seven millenia of literary, mythological, and historical associations, which constitute their meaning: "a nimbus of lore had gathered around the humblest of them; they were hallowed; they had a past, an ancestry. There was nothing, I insisted, at the back of California flowers; no memories, no associations.… What poet had ever sung their praises? What legend had twined about them? She was deaf to this argument.…"

In Alone Douglas exploits virtually all literary methods, producing even mock-proverbs: "Consider well your neighbor, what an imbecile he is. Then ask yourself whether it be worth while paying any attention to what he thinks of you." Douglas divided up and scattered through the text of Alone essays already prepared, and the reader encountering the sentence, "Whoever suffers from insomnia will find himself puzzling at night over questions which have no particular concern for him at other times," might think himself embarked on an essay by Hazlitt or Lamb or Stevenson. Douglas has just described the disappointing Arno at Pisa, and is making one of his "transitions" to what he thought last night about heredity. With Alone Douglas begins his practice of making his own vigorous comic indexes:

Acqua santa, mineral fountain, its appalling
       effects
Alpenglühen, an abomination
Bacon, misquoted
Beds in England, neolithic features of
Cement floors, a detestable invention
Ghosts, mankind surrounded by, 111; away with
  them, 137
Imagination, needful to travel literature
Shelley,… recommends caverns to his readers,
  but lives comfortably himself
Viareggio, an objectionable place
Whistling, denotes mental vacuity,

and finally, with deep irony,

Zürich, its attractions.

He returned to the technique of the comic index in Together, and the index to Some Limericks (1928) provided ample opportunity for associating the outrageous with abroad:

Australia, floral design by a native of
Coblenz, a lucky kitchen-maid of
Horn, Cape, hypochondria among its aborigenes,
 86; imports French goods, Ibid.
Madras, indelicate behavior of local cobra
Stamboul, case of varicose veins at.

(It's like Nabokov, we notice, in his comic index to Pale Fire, where fanciful geography joins mock-scholarship and wry mock-Sehnsucht:

Kalixhaven, a colorful seaport on the Western coast, a few miles north of Blawick(q.v.), 171; many pleasant memories.

Kobaltana, a once fashionable mountain resort near the ruins of some old barracks, now a cold and desolate spot of difficult access and no importance but still remembered in military families and forest castles, not in the text.)

If Alone is about intellectual curiosity satisfied in proximity to a beloved person, Together, while affecting to be about a walking tour in the Austrian Vorarlberg, is a tour in time back to Douglas's childhood in that area. His companion is again René (here, "Mr. R."), whose young fondness for milk and eggs at inns is disclosed in the third paragraph. "I am past his stage," writes Douglas, "though still young enough to revel in that delicious raspberry jelly." Thus the theme of the book, the sweet conflict between youth and age, is set in motion. Douglas dedicated Together to his two sons, and it is full of memories and anecdotes about fathers and sons, families and heredity, and always the affectionate abrasion between young and old. To Douglas, Mr. R. appears pig-headed; to Mr. R., Douglas's problem is, as he puts it," troppo vino. You comprehend?" The odd thing is that Douglas used to be Mr. R. "How one changes!" Now, in every one of his perceptions, Douglas is conscious of the perceptions of the boy beside him. Maybe it was this feature that appealed so strongly to Lytton Strachey and Forster, both fervent admirers of Together. "The thrill that only you can give," Strachey, wrote him, "goes down my back."

Every literary traveler has an habitual practice. Douglas's is climbing up to an eminence whose height allows him to see something special in the prospect before him or to learn something inaccessible to ground-dwellers. In both Alone and Together, he performs this action numerous times; in South Wind the Count avails himself of it as a figure for arguing the loss of a former extensiveness of thought. The disappearance of Latin and of European commonality, he says, has led to narrowness and provincialism, to everyone's retreat behind the frontiers of his own vernacular. Modern commerce "has demarcated our frontiers with a bitterness hitherto unknown. The world of thought has not expanded; it has contracted and grown provincial. Men have lost sight of distant horizons. Nobody writes for humanity … they write for their country, their sect; to amuse their friends or annoy their enemies." On the other hand, "Pliny or Linnaeus or Humboldt—they sat on mountain-tops; they surveyed the landscape at their feet, and if some little valley lay shrouded in mist, the main outlines of the land yet lay clearly distanced before them." Over and over Douglas ascends to mountain- or hill-tops, and thence, like the speaker in an eighteenth-century prospect poem, surveys the land below, inviting it to serve now as matter for metaphor, now as data for historical speculation, now as a trigger of associative recall. His travel essay One Day (1929) is the record of trying to pack into a final twelve hours an indelible image of Greece. His method is to climb up: "Why not scramble in earliest morning, before breakfast, up the stony steps of the Lykabettus … for the sake of the view, and to watch the town at one's feet beginning to throb with life once more?" Why not, indeed. At the top, his felicity is complete, for in addition to the view he is vouchsafed the company of two schoolboys, typical of the Greek variety: "If you … care for their society, they will take you for walks singly, or in couples, or by the dozen, and ask sensible questions and impart useful and even edifying information.…"

These were his friends and his lovers, the temporary attachments he traveled for. "He could endure the society of fewer and fewer people over the age of fourteen," Acton reports of him in the 30's, by which time his main work was finished. Brigit Patmore asked him why he wasn't writing anything now. "I can only write if I have this," he said, gripping her arm tightly. "I knew he didn't mean my arm or me," she says, "but the confiding closeness, that ardent heightening of mind and senses through love or passion." In Aaron's Rod Lawrence delivered a portrait of Douglas as "James Argyle." Some of it is caricature, but some is not. Argyle says to the Marchese:

"A man is drawn—or driven. Driven, I've found it. Ah, my dear fellow, what is life but a search for a friend? A search for a friend—that sums it up."

"Or a lover," said the Marchese, grinning.

"Same thing. Same thing.…"