More Unwritten Reminiscences of Capri

FRANCIS BRETT YOUNG

In Which Compton Mackenzie Is Gently Reminded of Some Things Which He May Have Forgotten

IT was in the Autumn of 1919, on the eve of my first winter out of khaki, that the question of taking my African malaria for a trip to the South was raised by my publisher, Martin Seeker. From a publisher's point of view there is no author like an absent author; all Seeker's authors had been drifting back, one by one, from trenches, jungles, seas and deserts, expecting to be taken out to lunch and talking about new books that ought positively to be published next week for the sheer love of Literature, to say nothing of harrowingly intimate War-Diaries and poems scribbled, on the point of death, in the place which they considerately left vacant for you to write your will on at the end of the Field Service Pocketbook—all Seeker's authors, I repeat, were descending on him in a bunch, and when he saw the chance of getting rid of one of them for six months, he thanked God (I hope) for malaria, and, almost too eagerly, suggested Capri. "You'll find Compton Mackenzie there," he urged. "He'll get you a house in no time. I should go there as soon as possible and get on with your book. You've no idea how easy the journey is. You can travel second-class. It costs next to nothing to live there." And Seeker, who not only loved to think of his authors living on next to nothing but honestly believed it was their duty to their artistic consciences to do so, grew quite emotional about the cheapness of cab-fares on the island. "But we can't live in cabs for six months, my dear Seeker," I protested. "Even Madame Bovary . . ." So Seeker, who felt, I feel sure, that an author of sufficient distinction to be on his list ought, at a pinch, to be able to live anywhere, but didn't really mind where I lived as long as it was far enough away to prevent my calling at his office and worrying about figures, undertook, with ill-concealed zest, to write to Mackenzie about us.

VERY promptly and most charmingly Mackenzie replied, suggesting that we should take Rosaio, a cottage belonging to Edwin Cerio, the author of That Capri Air, which was occupied at the moment by Respighi, the composer, but would soon, he said, be vacant. His letter, he concluded, was as vague as one. that he'd heard Henry James dictate about six jars of marmalade that he wanted from the Stores. It was anything but vague: the letter of the quite admirable man of business that he is. He told us all about Capri, its flies and mosquitoes included. He even enclosed a number of photographs of Rosaio: pictures of vinewreathed pergolas and white Saracen roofs against a background of gleaming mountain-side. The little place looked ravishing—so ravishing that we showed the photographs to Bernard Shaw who descended on us, enveloped in a chorus of female Fabians, for tea—or rather for milk and water, for tea he eschews—the following week. Shaw scrutinized the photographs apparently unmoved by our ecstasies. The chorus waited for him to speak. "But what are you going to do at Capri?" he asked at length. "We're proposing to live there," I told him. "To live there?". he repeated. "But my dear fellow, people don't go to Capri to live; they go there to elope."

I showed him another of the Rosaio photographs, a veritable Enchanted April. He shook his head sadly. "I thought as much," he said. "This confirms my worst suspicions. Let me know if you come back together," he added gloomily.

As for us, we had no suspicions. A dream of opulent wistaria surrounded us. Laden with mosquito-nets and insect-powder to counter what, apparently, were the only flies in the ointment, we set out and sat up (secondclass) for two days and nights on the journey from London to Naples. Seeker, unfeignedly thankful to get at least one rising author out of sight, waved us a grateful goodbye. Mackenzie, he said, would certainly meet us at Capri.

HE didn't. That wasn't his fault. An attack of sciatica which tortured him, had him by the heels; but he did the next best thing, which was to send his gardener to conduct us to Casa Solitaria (another of Cerio's houses) in which he was living. We found him, haggardly vivacious, in sky-blue Harris tweed, with a flaming orange necktie and floral decorations to match. Our house was all ready; a servant had been engaged; the gardener would take us up to Anacapri, etc., etc. Tobacco? He released the secret of a smoking-mixture, compounded of one local and one imported brand, that was guaranteed not to burn the most delicate tongue. He had invented this himself, and, apropos of inventions, he had just invented the Coming Romantic Revival, which recently, in Vanity Fair, he has fathered on me. Categorically, here and now, looking backward to that first day on Capri when I made myself so inconspicuous a part of a colour-scheme in sky-blue, white and orange, I disclaim all responsibility for its parentage, and give notice that I shall resist all affiliation proceedings. That Coming Romantic Revival was conceived in 1911, as the result of a Passionate Elopement. "A Romantic Revival," Mackenzie said, "is bound to come."

And looking at the man himself, so romantically featured, so romantically clothed, against a background of stupendous rock and sea that was simply shatteringly romantic,

I agreed with him passionately. I couldn't conceivably do otherwise; for there, at our first meeting, he was so gracious as to depute to me a minor share in the resuscitation of Romance. "You and I . . ." he said (or was it "I and you"?) In any case before I left Casa Solitaria—how's that for the Romantic? —I was filled with the exultant conviction that the future of the English Novel which, up to that moment, had rested (according to Punch) on Mr. Mackenzie's shoulders, was now, in a limited sense, supported by my own. In the proportion, roughly speaking, of one to ten: two thousand copies, say, to twenty thousand. I told him how, in the days before the war, we had read his enormous Sinister Street over a peat fire in the ruins of Llanthony Abbey. It was, he admitted, a nice little work. And so was that book of mine—what was the name?—ah, yes, The Dark Tower. But wait . . . ! If he lived, and could once overcome this exhausting sciatica, he had that in his brain which would make the bulk of Sinister Street look small, the plan for—oh no, not another Rougon-Macquart—avaunt all Realism!—for a modern, romantic and English Comedie Humaine. "The mantle of Balzac?" I asked. He smiled discreetly.

But, indeed, romantic or realist, nobody in the wide world could have been kinder, more helpful, or more picturesque than my new partner in the rehabilitation of Romance and the support of the English Novel. Everything that an experienced neighbour could do for us, Mackenzie did. There was wisdom in his original choice of Rosaio for us; for it meant that we lived at one end of the island and he at the other and that neither interfered with the other's literary scene. The partnership continued smoothly; we admired each other like anything—and I hope do so still. When the first proof of his Vanity Girl came up to Anacapri for correction, the sheets of my Tragic Bride were being read in Solitaria. "If you'd cut it in half," Mackenzie said, "it would make one of the best short stories in the language." Sometimes we would meet, so to speak, on neutral ground, at the Capri cafe which in those days was really Morgano's. Mackenzie would come there in a sombrero and a huge cape, appropriate to Henry Irving in Faust, and lined (if I'm not mistaken) with bright blue velvet. He managed it as the great Victorian actresses managed their trains. When I asked him if that were the mantle of Balzac, he seemed to wonder if I were poking fun at him. Or was it that he had just acquired a new one? A few days later an Italian told me that Mackenzie was il Dickens moderno. And indeed, with regard to certain qualities, he wasn't entirely wrong.

SO I, on my mountain, settled down to write The Black Diamond, and Mackenzie, on his headland, turned night into day with Poor Relations, and The Romantic Revival went merry as a marriage bell until November, and, with it, gales and torrents as would wash and blow the bottom out of any Romance. If Bernard Shaw could have seen Rosaio then, with its dank walls, its dishevelled pergolas and its smoking fire of wet olive-wood, before which we sat facing the alternatives of freezing or asphyxiation, he wouldn't have chosen it as a place to elope to.

We sent down an S. O. S. to Mackenzie, whose house, seven hundred feet below ours, was quite ten degrees warmer. I told him that if something wasn't done about it we should freeze to death in Rosaio and remain there, forgotten, until our presence pestified the mountain in the Spring. Mackenzie, generous as ever, immediately sent us the key of a cottage at the Piccola Marina, on sea-level, which he had rented for bathing, but did not use in winter. He had just had a note, he said, from another cold novelist: to wit D. H. Lawrence, who had been freezing somewhere in the Abruzzi, and was now coming to Capri, with his wife, for good. I knew this would happen, he wrote. We weren't at all sure, we decided, that a course of ice mightn't be quite a good thing for him. Mackenzie had only met Lawrence once, and I not at all; but both of us were aware of his figure in the gallery of caricatures wherein Seeker, a mischievous but benevolent Boswell, preserved the intimate aspects of his authors—ourselves included. If Lawrence lived up to his own, we were in for thrilling times. He came. His flannel trousers had not been washed with Lux. All the laundries in Italy had evidently conspired to shrink them, and his beard, very thin and red, waved about his head like a scarf. A card, with a note scribbled on it, pushed under the door of the deserted Rosaio, announced his advent. "I hear you have two houses," he wrote; "please say which of them you intend to live in." We assured him that Rosaio, at that time of year, could give points of frost to the Abruzzi, and soon, with Mackenzie's help, the Lawrences were established midway between him and me, in a fourth-floor flat on the top of Morgano's cafe, where he plunged at once into his Fantasia of the Unconscious and cooked maccheroni amid mists of charcoal smoke and Neo-Platonism. At the moment, unfortunately, he had given up novelwriting (as well he might have done, after the brutal censorship of his book, The Rainbow) and seemed firmly determined that nobody else should write novels either, dividing his mornings between Solitaria and the Piccola Marina, where Mackenzie and I were grimly trying to finish ours. "You blessed novelists," he said, "live in glass cases. What do our dirty little novels matter, after all?"

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Still, Sunday lunches at Solitaria in those days were occasions that we all remember, I think, with a poignant wistfulness. We were all of us still among "the younger novelists;" and however contemptuously we might speak of our "dirty little books," we were all convinced, in our hearts, that they mattered quite a lot, and that the English Novel was reviving (romantically or otherwise) there and then, in Capri. I can see Solitaria now: Mackenzie, the incomparable mimic, reducing us to an incapable stage of laughter by his versions of the great and the ludicrous figures of our time; Lawrence, with eyes ablaze and his red scarf waving, egged on by Mackenzie's mischief to intone Yeats' Innisfree, in the manner of Maud Gonne with an Irish harp accompaniment, or beating out the time of Auprès de ma Blonde with a waving finger; myself—but does one ever see oneself? The only art with which we didn't concern ourselves was music; for Mackenzie, in the days before the gramophone, neither knew nor loved it.

He is shocked (also in Vanity Fair) to hear that I have recently discovered that Beethoven had a dull mind; but Heaven knows that my mind is not as dull as that, and, since this method of correspondence between old friends saves postage, if not time, may I now assure him that the Beethoven to whom his informant referred must be as apochryphal as W. J. Turner's Wagner, and not my adored master, and his?

We were all rather solemn and young, on occasion, and yet, as I think of it now, not entirely without humour to see the fantastic side of our own solemnity. One Sunday, at Solitaria after lunch, I can hear Mackenzie saying: "It's extraordinary, isn't it, how literary history repeats itself? To think that a hundred years ago— in eighteen-twenty—Byron, Shelley and Keats all happened to be living in Italy." And he indicated, with a wave of the hand, himself, and Lawrence and me. "You see how well it fits in. Lawrence has been living at Lerici, and you, my dear Francis, like Keats, were once a medical student."

"Absit omen!" I said; "for Keats, if I remember rightly, died just a hundred years ago next week." "Well, in that case, when one incarnation's done with, you can go on being Trelawny. You needn't turn up your nose at the Mantle of Trelawny. The Adventures of a Younger Son is a great book." "In that case," I remarked, "I should have the privilege of burning Lawrence's body on the seashore and assisting at Mackenzie's deathbed in Greece." But, a few weeks later the restless Lawrence evaded that fate by rushing off to Sicily in our company, which is another story. And here am I, ten years later, exchanging the mantle of Trelawny with Mackenzie himself.