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Elizabeth Louisa Theobaldina FitzGibbon (1898–1903)
George Norman Douglas (8 December 1868 – 7 February 1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.
Life
Norman Douglas was born in Thüringen, Austria (his surname was registered at birth as Douglass).[2] His mother was the German aristocrat,[3] Vanda von Poellnitz. His father was John Sholto Douglas (1838–1874), manager of a cotton mill. Douglas's paternal grandfather was the 14th Laird of Tilquhillie. Douglas's maternal great-grandfather was General James Ochoncar Forbes, 17th Lord Forbes.[4]
Douglas' father died in a mountaineering incident and his mother immediately married a housepainter; Douglas never mentioned the remarriage in any of his writings.[3] Douglas spent the first years of his life on the family estate, Villa Falkenhorst, in Thüringen.
Douglas was brought up mainly at Tilquhillie, Deeside, his paternal home in Scotland. He was educated at Yarlet Hall and Uppingham School in England, and then at a Gymnasium in Karlsruhe.[5] He was fluent in the German and English languages during his youth and later learnt French and Italian.[4] Douglas developed an interest in natural science as a child and began contributing articles to papers about zoology at the age of 18.[3]
Douglas started in the diplomatic service in 1894 and from then until 1896 was based in St. Petersburg. He was placed on leave after an alleged affair.[3] In 1897 he bought a villa (Villa Maya) in Posillipo, a maritime suburb of Naples. The next year he married a cousin Elizabeth Louisa Theobaldina FitzGibbon (their mothers were sisters, daughters of Baron Ernst von Poellnitz). They had two children, Louis Archibald (Archie) and Robert Sholto (Robin),[6] and Norman's first published book, Unprofessional Tales (1901), was written in collaboration with Elizabeth and first appeared under the pseudonym Normyx. However, the couple was divorced in 1903 because of Elizabeth's infidelity.
Douglas then moved to Capri, began dividing his time between the Villa Daphne there and London, and became a more committed writer. Nepenthe, the fictional island setting of his novel South Wind (1917), is Capri in light disguise. His friends on the island included the opium addict Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen.
Douglas's novel They Went (1920) is a fantasy based on Bretonfolklore.[5]
D. H. Lawrence based a character in his novel Aaron's Rod (1922) on Douglas, which, according to Richard Aldington, led to a falling out between the two writers.[7] Douglas and Lawrence continued the feud through their responses to the memoirs of the American author Maurice Magnus.[8]
In the book Twentieth Century Authors Douglas stated that he disliked Marxism, Puritanism and "all kinds of set forms, including official Christianity".[5]
During Douglas's years in Florence he was associated with the publisher and bookseller Pino Orioli, who published a number of Douglas's books and works by other English authors in his Lungarno series. Many of these books, notably the first edition of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, would have been prosecuted for obscenity if they had been published in London. Douglas probably had a major hand in writing Orioli's autobiography, Adventures of a Bookseller.[9]
Douglas in 1935
Further scandals led Douglas to leave Italy for the South of France in 1937. Following the collapse of France in 1940 Douglas left the Riviera and made a circuitous journey to London, where he lived from 1942 to 1946. He published the first edition of his Almanac in a tiny edition in Lisbon. He returned to Capri in 1946 and was made a citizen of the island. His circle of acquaintances included the writer Graham Greene, the composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and the food writer Elizabeth David.
Douglas died in Capri, apparently after deliberately overdosing himself on drugs after a long illness (see Elisabeth Moor, An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri).[10] As he was lay dying, he was approached by German nuns who offered assistance and his last words are reputed to have been: "Get those fucking nuns away from me."[11][12][13] The Latin inscription on his tombstone, from an ode by Horace, reads: Omnes eodem cogimur,[6] "We are all driven to the same end".[14]
Sexual assault allegations
In 1916, Douglas was charged with an offence against a 16-year-old boy at his home.[15] In 1917, he was also charged with the indecent assault of two boys (one being Esmond Knight) but the case was dropped after Douglas provided an alibi.[16]
Douglas was granted bail and fled the country for Capri, Italy. He was also forced to flee Florence in 1937 following allegations that he raped a 10-year-old girl.[17][18]
Visiting the Villa Torricella Capri (October 1906). Norman Douglas sits in the middle, leaning against the column.
Reception
H. M. Tomlinson, a contemporary of Douglas's, concluded his 1931 biography by saying that Douglas's kind of prose "is at present out of fashion". He found his writing "at times as ruthless in its irony as Swift's" and "as warm and tender as Sterne's".[19]
Peter Ackroyd describes Douglas's London Street Games as "a vivid memorial to the inventiveness and energy of London children, and an implicit testimony to the streets which harboured and protected their play."[20]
John Sutherland reports that "Douglas's Mediterranean travel writing chimed with the public taste", and that "there was a time when, in smart literary conversations, Norman Douglas was regarded as one of the smartest things going. Part of that smartness was his keeping, for the whole of his long depraved life, one jump ahead of the law."[21]
In The Grand Tour and Beyond: British and American Travellers in Southern Italy, 1545–1960 (which is chapter 4 of The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance), Edward Chaney wrote that "the true heir to the great tradition of the 'pedestrian tour' in our own [20th] century has been 'pagan-to-the-core' Norman Douglas. Having first visited the south of Italy with his brother in 1888, before he was 30 he had abandoned his pregnant Russian mistress and his job at the British Embassy in St Petersburg and purchased a villa at Posillipo. By then he had also published his first piece on the subject of southern Italy...."[22]
Works
Douglas's most famous work, South Wind, is a fictionalised account of life in Capri, with controversial references to moral and sexual issues. It has been frequently reprinted.[5]
His travel books combine erudition, insight, whimsicality, and fine prose. These works include Siren Land (1911), Fountains in the Sand, described as "rambles amongst the oases of Tunisia" (1912), Old Calabria (1915),[23]Together (Austria) (1923), Alone (Italy) (1921), and the short “One Day” (Greece) (1929).[23] Reviewing Douglas's work in Italian Americana, John Paul Russo wrote:
Douglas ... published three travel books of his walking tours of Italy: Siren Land, ... Old Calabria ... and Alone.... Scholars prefer the first; Douglas and his aficionados, the third; but the common reader has decided upon the middle work as the masterpiece.[23]
Douglas's early pamphlets on Capri were revised in Capri (privately published, 1930). His last published work was A Footnote on Capri (1952).
In 1928, Douglas published Some Limericks, an anthology of more-or-less obscene limericks with a mock-scholarly critical apparatus. This classic (of its kind) has been frequently republished, often without acknowledgment in pirate editions. A definitive edition has now been published.[24]
List of works
Unprofessional Tales (T. Fisher Unwin, 1901) as "Normyx" with his then wife Elsa FitzGibbon[25]
Birds and Beasts of the Greek Anthology (Privately printed, 1927)
In the Beginning (Privately printed, 1927), novel
Some Limericks: Collected for Students & ensplendour’d with Introduction, Geographical Index, and with Notes etc. (Privately printed, 1928), Atlas Press
One Day (The Hours Press, 1929)
How About Europe? Some Footnotes on East and West (1929, Chatto & Windus, 1930)
Capri: Materials for a Description of the Island (G. Orioli, 1930)
Paneros: Some Words on Aphrodisiacs and the Like (G. Orioli, 1930), essay
Three of Them (Chatto & Windus, 1930)
Summer Islands: Ischia and Ponza (Desmond Harmsworth, 1931)
Looking Back: An Autobiographical Excursion (Chatto & Windus, 1933), autobiography
An Almanac (1941, Chatto & Windus/Secker & Warburg, 1945)
Late Harvest (Lindsay Drummond, 1946), autobiography
Venus in the Kitchen editor (Heinemann, 1952), cookery, written under the pseudonym Pilaff Bey
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955). According to Frances Wilson, "Douglas, Nabokov told his wife, was a 'malicious pederast', and as such is surely the model for Lolita's Humbert Humbert. Nabokov ensures Douglas a part in the novel: Gaston Godin, Humbert's homosexual colleague at Beardsley College, has a photograph of Norman Douglas on his studio wall...."[26]
Roger Williams's Lunch With Elizabeth David (Little, Brown, 1999) features Douglas as a major character.
Alex Preston's In Love and War (2014) features Douglas as a character.
D.H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod (1922). According to Richard Aldington's Life for Life's Sake (1941), p. 375 (and also Aldington's Pinorman (1954), pp. 165, 185), the character James Argyle, in Aaron's Rod, is based on Douglas. In Life for Life's Sake, p. 375, Aldington writes that Lawrence's portrait of Douglas as Argyle "was the real cause of the breach between those two and of Norman's anti-Lawrence pamphlet, though the ostensible casus belli was Lawrence's superbly written introduction to the Memoirs of Maurice Magnus...." In Late Harvest (1946), p. 52, however, Douglas writes, "No. The playful caricature of myself in Lawrence's Aaron's Rod is not the reason why I took up arms against him. The reason was that he had distorted the character of a dead friend of mine [Maurice Magnus] whose memory I wished to defend."
Notes
^Capri Tourism. Capri Tourism. Retrieved 10 August 2011.
^ abcdKunitz, Stanley J.; Haycraft, Howard, eds. (1950). Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (3rd ed.). New York: H. W. Wilson. pp. 393–5.
^Douglas's side of the feud is recounted in A Plea for Better Manners, a privately printed pamphlet (1924), reprinted with changes in Douglas's collection, Experiments (1926). See section of this entry, "Douglas in fiction."
^Lawrence replied to A Plea for Better Manners with "The Late Mr Maurice Magnus: A Letter," in New Statesman, 20 February 1926. Lawrence's letter is reprinted in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, 1936, pp. 806-807; in Selected Essays, Penguin Books, 1950, pp. 349-351; and in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume V, 1924-1927, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 395-397. Both A Plea for Better Manners and "The Late Mr Maurice Magnus" are reprinted in Lawrence, D. H., Memoir of Maurice Magnus, edited by Keith Cushman, Black Sparrow Press (1987) ISBN978-0-87685-716-8.
^In his book, Pinorman, Richard Aldington writes, "Pino did know English well and spoke it fluently, though with certain mistakes which gave it a peculiar flavour. And he was perfectly capable of writing those books himself, except that verbal correction would have been needed". (The books are apparently Adventures of a Bookseller and Moving Along: Just a Diary.) Aldington then adds that Norman Douglas, rather than make corrections to the two books, "rewrote Pino's books, and spoiled them, by taking out the special quality which was Pino and substituting his own much less amusing mannerisms". (p. 29)
^Edited with an epilogue by Graham Greene, New York: Viking Press, 1976.
^Another introduction to Old Calabria reports, "He was just entering his eighty-fourth year when I last saw him on Capri some months before his death, and I can still hear the mock despair of his parting words: 'For God's sake, dearie, preserve me from those *******.'" John Davenport, in Old Calabria, London: Secker & Warburg (1956), p. vii.
^Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations since the Renaissance, 2nd edition, Routledge, 2000, pp. 127–128.
^ abcRusso, John Paul (Summer 1998). "Reviews: Old Calabria by Norman Douglas". Italian Americana. 16 (2): 208–216. JSTOR29776512.(subscription required)
Davenport, John (1955). 'Introduction' to a reprint of Old Calabria.
Dawkins, Richard MacGillivray. Norman Douglas. G. Orioli, Florence, 1933 (Lungarno series). Enlarged and revised edition: Rupert Hart-Davis, London, 1952.
FitzGibbon, Constantine (1953). Norman Douglas: A Pictorial Record. New York: The McBride Company.
Holloway, Mark (1976). Norman Douglas: A Biography. Secker & Warburg.
Leary, Lewis (1968). Norman Douglas. Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, Columbia University Press.
McDonald, Edward D. (1927). A Bibliography of the Writings of Norman Douglas: With Notes by Norman Douglas. The Centaur Book Shop, Philadelphia.
Meusberger, Wilhelm (2004). Norman Douglas: A Portrait. Edizione La Conchigli, Via le Botteghe, Capri.
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