Norman conquests: major writer or devil incarnate?
The tall, handsome, leonine Norman Douglas (1868-1952)—a stylish and well-bred gastronome, bohemian, sexual libertine and cad—was a lover of Italy and a lover of boys. Born in Austria and educated in Germany, he was a linguist and diplomat who began a promising career in St. Petersburg. A strange alloy of savage and scientist, he also wrote erudite monographs on zoology and geology. He became a traveller and travel writer; author of South Wind (1917), a hedonistic and amoral novel of Capri; and with Pino Orioli in Florence a successful publisher of his own, sometimes obscene, works. Douglas frankly admitted the pleasures of homosexual pursuit and his deepest conviction, following Rabelais’ dictum “Do what thou wilt,” was “Always do as you please, and send everybody to Hell, and take the consequences.”
Rachel Hope Cleves’ title Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality (Chicago UP, 2020) comes from Lynn Sacco’s book Unspeakable on father-daughter incest (2009). Her title omits Douglas’ name and is misleading, since everyone gossiped about his unspeakable life and she too speaks about him for a few hundred pages. There’s a striking contrast between her lively discussions of Douglas’ priapic encounters and her quotations from the rather heavy-going “scientific” theories of sexuality. As Douglas said of sex, “He wasn’t sick of the acts. He was just sick of sociology on the subject. It was ‘all balls.’ ” Cleves includes a long, familiar prelude on the heterosexual phase of his life, based on Mark Holloway’s 1976 biography, before she finally gets to her main subject on page 96: Douglas’ pederasty.
The paradoxical theme of Cleves’ innovative book is: “By present standards Douglas was a monster. During his lifetime he was considered a great man. . . . Douglas behaved shockingly by having sex with children, but countless people, including many of those children, loved him devotedly. . . . [This book] is a history of the social world of sex between men and children before the 1950s. . . . Today we can only see his wrongdoing, and the mores of our era won’t permit us to take seriously any claims to his greatness.”
Like his hero Oscar Wilde, Douglas had been married and had two sons. Cleves misses an important opportunity to explain why Douglas and many other homosexuals—including Paul Verlaine, André Gide, Somerset Maugham and Siegfried Sassoon—got married. They wanted to have a normal life with children and found affectionate, often wealthy wives. They thought they were, and tried to be, heterosexual, but found they were really attracted to men. They then lived with their wives as friends and companions rather than as sexual partners. The wives wanted to stay married, tolerated their homosexual affairs, took lovers and led their own lives. They provided, when homosexuality was illegal, a useful cover for their husbands’ sexual behavior.
Unlike the expatriate aesthetes whom Douglas dismissed as “Cinquecento Charlies”, he had no interest in the art and architecture of Renaissance Florence. That city, like the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples, was merely an unusually tolerant playground for his sexual proclivities.
Though Douglas was a pederast, he was also very fond of the poor and neglected children he had sex with, and gave them attention and affection. He spent a great deal of time caring for them, educating them, travelling with them and living with them. He was not bored by their company. The parents willingly, even eagerly, acquiesced for financial gain; the boys admired and loved him, not only at the time but also later when they grew up and got married. They sent him loving letters, and he even visited Tanganyika to see one boy who became the local Chief of Police.
Complaints about Douglas generally came from the police, not from the parents or children. At the same time as he was having sex with the boys, he shamefully neglected his own two sons, whom he bitterly associated with his late wife. The sons, who knew all about his embarrassing habits, had predictably disastrous lives, but also remained loyal to him. Douglas did not behave with his boys like the older man who traumatised the twelve year old E. M. Forster. That man “undid his flies, told me to take hold of his prick and said, ‘Dear little fellow, play with it, dear little fellow, pull it about.’ ”
Pino Orioli’s unpublished diaries and Douglas’ Some Limericks (1928) reveal that he sodomised young boys who did not yet have hair in their armpits, which he loved to smell. Douglas boasted about a youthful waiter, “Hasn’t got a hair on his body. It slips into him like a knife in butter.” But it was not so easy for the boys, who found it painful and could not sit down afterwards. Orioli, who got additional pleasure by recording and reliving their sexual adventures, noted their plein air frolics in Austria: “N. is undecided if to sleep in the wood and toss off F. or go to our pub in a proper bed. . . . They end on sleeping a bit in the wood—I tossing off—and then struggling over a kind of flabby cock and lukewarm coming (spunk)” (203-4).
Douglas’ obscene and notorious limericks describe aged men. The first portrays the perils of penetration in Turkey:
There was an old man of Stamboul
With a varicose vein in his tool
In attempting to come
Up a little boy’s bum
It burst, and he did look a fool.
Another, set in Spain, is more egoistic and aggressive:
There was an old man of Madrid
Who cast loving eyes on a kid.
He said: “Oh, my joy!
I’ll bugger the boy,
You see if I don’t”—and he did.
The polymorphously perverse Douglas, desperate when boys were unavailable, occasionally resorted—faute de mieux—to sleeping with his attractive friend Nancy Cunard. He also (why not?) tried out a hermaphrodite in India: “great fun and full of surprises.” He even had sex with a dog—a real bitch!— which proved that buggers can’t be choosers.
Cleves writes that since most of Douglas’ friends “either shared his predilection for boys or were sexual radicals they did not judge him for his tastes. . . . Some merely tolerated Douglas’ relationships with boys; others found them amusing.” Frieda Lawrence thought he was “brilliant fun but wicked”; the homosexual Osbert Sitwell called him “a very good advertisement for the evil life,” to which Douglas replied, “Yes, I know! It’s uphill work now; still, I try to do my best.” He achieved literary notoriety with his witty and sexually immoral novel South Wind.
Douglas justified his egoistic behavior by claiming that it inspired his writing. He told his son that if he bagged his next boy his “novel and all future novels are assured”. The challenge, he explained, was to evoke a pederastic theme while preserving propriety and evading the ever-vigilant English censors. He slipped an orgasmic passage into his novel In the Beginning (1927): “Linus tries to wrestle Ayra to the ground. While they struggle, ‘the world went out. It was as if some star had burst within him, its fragments invading every limb with a torrent of delight.’ ”
Sometimes, however, the danger was greater than the pleasure. Douglas was first arrested in wartime London in November 1916 and charged with “loitering to commit a felony” and “indecent assault”. Two months later he jumped bail and fled to Italy. But the old reprobate was not going to change the habits of a lifetime to suit the whims of the police. Referring to England, Austria and Italy, Cleves (hot on his trail) writes, “between 1936 and 1938, Douglas fled arrest in three different countries on at least four different occasions.” Arrested in his native Austria, he was held for a week and released when he agreed to leave the country and never return. In 1937 he had to “hop it”—to use his favorite phrase—from Florence to France to avoid arrest for kissing and fondling a young girl. When her brother tried to take her away from Douglas she screamed in protest, and a witness who misunderstood her wishes called the police. Yet Douglas always managed to avoid conviction and prison.
Douglas could walk 20 miles a day in his prime and had a remarkably robust constitution, but “years of drinking, feasting, rough travel, and bouts of syphilis, malaria and rheumatism badly withered him”. Finally, poor health, like the police, caught up with him in his eighties. Suffering from crippling arthritis and a raw skin infection, as well as alcoholism, poverty, boredom and the fear that he’d get caught, on Capri in January 1952 he took a fatal overdose of painkillers.
Douglas admired Wyndham Lewis and quoted him in South Wind. Just before his suicide he said, “You keep the old bugger. I shan’t need him,” which echoes the suicidal hero in Lewis’s The Vulgar Streak (1941), “Whoever finds this body, may do what they like with it. I don’t want it.”
Though Cleves’ book is intelligent and well-researched, she is unaware of Douglas’ literary allusions and often misses the essential meaning of his work. Nepenthe means forgetting one’s cares; the owl symbolizes the wisdom of Athena; the complete Italian proverb, which nicely describes Douglas, is “Un inglese italianato è un diavolo incarnato”; “guide, philosopher and friend”: Dante on Virgil in the Inferno; “loved not wisely but too well”: Othello; “no down had appeared on his smooth cheek”: Milton, Ludlow Masque; “woke up to find himself famous”: Byron after publishing Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Douglas’ epigram, “I have been subject to temptations from earliest childhood, and always know beforehand whether I shall yield or not. I always yield,” echoes Wilde’s, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it”; “His sexual rapacity led to dangers as well as to pleasures” recalls Wilde’s, “Homosexuality is like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.”
Cleves makes a few mistakes when she casts her sexual net too carelessly. Walter Pater was repressed and asexual, not a “pederast”; Somerset Maugham did not “share Douglas’ proclivity for male youths,” his lovers were adults; D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (unlike Women in Love) was not “homoerotic,” and Lawrence was censorious, not tolerant, of Douglas’ sexual tastes.
Cleves’ style is also problematic. (There are typos on 234 and 296.) She pads the book with lengthy quotes that have nothing to do with her argument, and includes two long and boring lists of names that clog the narrative. For unintentional comic relief she mentions Douglas’ unfortunately named friend Martha Crotch, notes his appeal to the Vice Consul in Naples and calls the old satyr’s pederasty “beneficial on the whole.”
This useful book also suffers from logorrhea and has more than 60 torture-to-read repetitions. Crippled by poor writing and poor editing, she seems to be addressing a group of dim students. Instead of providing new evidence and advancing her argument, she constantly repeats herself in the vain hope of persuading the reader. On pages 70-71, for example, “Douglas kept custody of the children” and on the next line, “Douglas was granted legal custody”; He never saw his mother again. . . . the boys never saw their mother again”; “bubbling in tranquil fashion . . . enough to make anyone bubble with contentment. . . in the bubbling exuberance.” As Cleves disapprovingly says of Douglas’ friend, “Cunard made her point again and again.”
Cleves has redemptive final chapters on Richard Aldington’s attack on Orioli and Douglas in Pinorman (1954). But she doesn’t realize that the embittered Aldington, who felt he never got the recognition he deserved, was notorious for fierce onslaughts, in biographies of his former friend D. H. Lawrence in 1950 and of the revered war hero
- E. Lawrence in 1955. She also discusses the reasons why several other authors failed to write Douglas’ biography before Mark Holloway’s book appeared in 1976.
Cleves concludes by explaining her own ambiguous feelings about him:
I have been seduced by Douglas, and I have lashed out at him in resentment. How do I weigh the balance of Douglas’ life? He was a brilliant linguist. He wrote masterful prose. He had a curious mind. He was charming. He could be a loyal and generous friend. He was charismatic. He had a tremendous spirit of fun. He was an independent thinker. He despised cant. He despised tyranny. He did terrible things. He had sexual encounters with countless pubescent and prepubescent children, mostly boys, also girls. He cruelly separated his wife from their children and laughed at her tragic death [by fire]. He neglected his sons and possibly abused them. He used rich friends for their money. He cared only about himself and his own pleasure.
Instead of condemning Douglas, Cleves shows what drew her to him by examining his character, the positive aspects of his relations with boys and the permissive ambience, even during the oppressive Italian fascist period from 1922 to 1943, in which he lived and thrived.
The ambiguity of Douglas’ character and sexual life reminds readers of this book that many social practices that were once condemned are now tolerated: obscene language, marijuana, nudity, pornography, premarital sex, illegitimate children, mixed marriages, transgenders, homosexuality, sodomy (once punished by death), polygamy (among Mormons), torture (by America), rape (in wartime), female circumcision (in Africa), flogging, mutilation and slavery (in Saudi Arabia). Still frowned upon are pederasty, incest, coprophilia, necrophilia and cannibalism. But following the modern trend, they may also one day be tolerated.
Jeffrey Meyers will publish both James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Hitler to Arbus and Plath with Louisiana State University Press in 2024.
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