Old Calabria Book

You might mistake him in a photograph for a country vicar or dahlia fancier but he was no such creature. See him instead as a well-groomed satyr or an uncle of ill repute whose conduct shames the family but whose occasional letters, posted from exotic locales, you secretly cherish for the black glamor of their prose.

Norman Douglas first distinguished himself by being dismissed from the British diplomatic service in 1896 after a St Petersburg intrigue that may or may not have left a relation of the Russian imperial family with child. Next year he married his cousin, swiftly begot two more children, and then divorced his wife for her (it's said) infidelity. Scandal after scandal followed. Most infamously, he was charged with forcing advances on a lad of sixteen. He described himself as "Norman Douglas of Capri, and of Naples and Florence, [but] formerly of England, which he fled during the war to avoid prosecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling." He lived most of his life in exile.

In the midst of his unsavory gambols Douglas wrote a fair number of books, occasionally using pseudonyms like Normyx or Pilaff Bey. South Wind (1917), his most famous novel, was set in a lightly fictionalized Capri and peopled with characters sketched from friends and acquaintances who didn't all care for their portraits. In addition to novels he also published travelogues, a study of children's street games, a book on Italian geography, another on food, another on aphrodisiacs, a study of animals mentioned in the Greek Anthology, and a collection of pornographic limericks.

Does anyone read Norman Douglas these days? I recently finished Old Calabria, the 1915 record of his travels across the unwashed toe of Italy. The style is conversational - but it's the conversation of a jaundiced, prejudiced, overeducated Faust. He drops names and learned allusions like dandruff. He expects you'll be as well read in classical and medieval history as he is. He quotes, unapologetically and without translation, not only from French but also from Italian, Latin, Greek, and (get ready for it) Albanian. He's a scoffer, a cynic, a dissipated aesthete. And yet, Old Calabria is a wonderful book.

It's wonderful, I say, but not always nice. For all its fine scenery and a history reaching back to the Greeks, Calabria was a shocking backwater at the time of Douglas's visit - the people impoverished and mostly illiterate, the countryside half-depopulated since the young men had all decamped for instant riches in America. Douglas very much liked the place but never softened a judgment in the interest of encouraging tourism:

"Morano, so far as I was able to explore it, is a labyrinth of somber, tortuous, and fetid alleys, where black pigs wallow amid heaps of miscellaneous and malodorous filth - in short, the town exemplifies that particular idea of civic liberty which consists in everyone being free to throw their own private refuse into the public street and leave it there, from generation to generation."

And then Douglas can never pass up a chance to describe an outrage. He must have kept a lovingly compiled index of the unspeakable practices and unnatural acts he encountered:

"These countryfolk can fare on strange meats. A boy consumed a snake that was lying dead by the roadside; a woman ate thirty raw eggs and then a plate of maccheroni; a man swallowed six kilograms of the uncooked fat of a freshly slaughtered pig (he was ill for a week afterwards); another one devoured two small birds alive, with beaks, claws, and feathers. Such deeds are sternly rebrobated as savagery; still, they occur, and nearly always as the result of wagers…

"I have also met persons who claimed to have been cured of rachitic troubles in their youth by eating a puppy dog cooked in a saucepan. But only one kind of dog is good for this purpose, to be procured from those foundling hospitals whither hundreds of illegitimate infants are taken as soon as possible after birth. The mothers, to relieve the discomfort caused by this forcible separation from the new-born, buy a certain kind of puppy there, bring them home, and nourish them in loco infantis. These puppies cost a franc apiece, and are generally destroyed after performing their duties; it is they who are cooked for curing the scrofulous tendencies of other children."

Appalled half the time, he is enchanted the other half. Douglas hunts down obscure ruins mentioned in doubly obscure Renaissance manuscripts. He speculates on the origins of the dragon myth, the legacy of Pythagoreanism, and impressively plausible Calabrian inspirations for Milton's Paradise Lost. He tramps up a mountainside to participate in a peasant festival, the first outsider in living memory. He gobbles up bandit lore, and interviews the banditti in person whenever possible. He compares his own impressions against those of Brits who'd toured Calabria before him: Sir Thomas Hoby in the 1540s, George Berkeley the philosopher in the 1710s, and Edward Lear (of Nonsense fame) in the 1840s.

His humor sometimes falls flat ("These sovereigns were murdered in so many castles that one wonders how they ever found time to be alive at all"), but then it often hits the mark (of the lax Tarentines, he says: "Thirty centuries of mussel-eating cannot but impair the physical tone of a people"). Even his verbal excesses are at least droll: Douglas describes a bout of seasonal allergies as "not your ordinary hay-fever, oh, no! but such as a mammoth might conceivably catch, if thrust back from his germless, frozen tundras into the damply blossoming Miocene."

Douglas befriends the locals with surprising ease. The first place he stops in any village is the barbershop, for conversation and gossip. He generally avoids hotels, sleeping now in an elderly widow's spare bed, now in a farmer's barn. Quite unconsumed with anything resembling zeal for his native Presbyterianism, he is a reflexive anti-Catholic and keen spotter of pagan survivals in ritual practice, like his compatriot George James Frazer. And yet he sincerely enjoys the company of priests, especially those of a scholarly bent or who keep a good wine cellar.

Travel inspires Douglas, as it does so many others, with reflections on the essential character of one nation versus another, but with interesting results:

"And what, I sometimes ask myself - what is now the distinguishing feature between these southern men and ourselves? Briefly this, I think. In mundane matters, where the personal equation dominates, their judgment is apt to be turbid and perverse; but as one rises into questions of pure intelligence, it becomes serenely impartial. We, on the other hand, who are pre-eminently clearsighted in worldly concerns of law and government and in all subsidiary branches of mentality, cannot bring ourselves to reason dispassionately on non-practical subjects."

He doesn't, however, overestimate the value of such insights and understands that, in respect to essential character, we differ as much from our own ancestors as we do from contemporaries of other tribes:

"What has the Englishman of today in common with that rather lovable fop, drunkard, and bully who would faint with ecstasy over Byron's Parisina after pistolling his best friend in a duel about a wench or a lap-dog? Such differences as exist between races of men, exist only at a given moment."

Douglas travelled alone in Calabria, and perhaps it's no wonder. He must have been a difficult friend on the road: careless of comfort, opinionated, whimsical, prickly, given to weird enthusiasms and unpredictable repulsions. The book is adapted from a journal, which may have been for him the only welcome companion. Even then a curtain is drawn. He never talks about himself, his life history or feelings. In our confessional age this strikes us as offish and impersonal, but I suspect that travel for Douglas was less about self-discovery than self-forgetfulness, and we profit from his guidance without the expense of his company.

Born in 1868, Norman Douglas died on Capri in 1952. An unregenerate pagan to the end, his last words were said to have been, "Get those f***ing nuns away from me."