Anatomy of Restlessness (18 page)

There is a lot more to the paper, including a fantastic rigmarole that attempted to resolve the headache of every racial biologist. Why should the gene for beauty go sauntering off in a different direction from the gene for goodness? How was it that a perfect Teuton soul had nested in the body of the Führer?—to say nothing of the fact that by 1942 the racists had to accommodate the Japanese?

Of course, one could dismiss all this as a temporary, if lethally ingenious, aberration, had Lorenz not continued to chum out many of the same ideas, the same metaphors, sometimes even the same passages – doctored here and there for postwar sensibilities – from 1950 to the present day. For example, when he discusses the ‘social fighting reaction' in
On Aggression,
he regrets the misuse of this primaeval drive by demagogues and hopes that ‘our moral responsibility may gain control over it'. In a paper written in 1950
⁴⁷
he says that anyone is pleased to find a substitute, or ‘dummy', as a target for his pent-up aggression, adding that ‘without this purely physiological basis all of the past cases of demagogically directed mass cruelty, such as witchcraft trials or anti-Semitic persecution', would not have been possible. But in 1942 he had only an exhortation to offer: ‘I accuse any young man who has not experienced this reaction on politically significant occasions of emotional weakness!'

In 1942 he never named the Jews. He could, arguably, have been referring to the Euthanasia Programme which did away with about 70,000 Gentile degenerates before the Nazis set to work elsewhere. But then Lorenz usually appeals to general principle, not to the sordid detail of a particular problem.

Going through Daniel Gasman's brilliant and disturbing book
The Scientific Origins of National Socialism,
one is struck, also, by how few of Lorenz's ideas on human behaviour rest on ‘inductive natural science' but how many of them repeat the tenets of Monism,
⁴⁸
the movement created by the biologist Ernst Haeckel to interpret Darwinism for social purposes and to combat socialist ideologies as contrary to nature's plan. The Monists were the first to attempt a fusion of biology and social science, and it was under the umbrella of Monist ideas that German academic circles were united with the most strident demands of German nationalism. The point made by Gasman, which cannot be emphasised too strongly, is that the Nazis believed in the final solution as ‘scientific' and thus sanctioned by Natural Law.
⁴⁹

Alfred North Whitehead once wrote: ‘Nature is patient of interpretation in terms of laws that happen to interest us.' And Lorenz's career is surely a warning to anyone who presumes to write an objective ‘biogrammer' or ‘ethological paradigm' for the human species. For it shows just how far the ‘facts' of our evolutionary past can be stretched or patterned to conform with the wilder flights of prejudice.

In a historical context, Lorenzian ethology falls into the category of what Lovejoy and Boas called ‘Animalitarianism'—‘the tendency to represent the beasts – on one ground or another—as creatures more admirable, more normal, or more fortunate than the human species.'
⁵⁰
That man himself is a flawed, aberrant being, that his Fall occurred even before he became human, is a constant theme in Western thought from the fourth century BC onward, especially among societies which have lost their nerve. For if the concept of the Good Savage encouraged reformers of a levelling temper to hope for a simpler and more equable life, the Myth of the Happier Beast damned hopes for a better world, engendered in man a disgust for himself and his works, absolved him from responsibility for his actions, and led him, in his desperate search for remedies, to fall into a collective moral anaesthesia and bow his neck to tyranny.

 

On the island of Capri there lived three narcissists who each built a house on the edge of a cliff. They were Axel Munthe, Baron Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen and Curzio Malaparte. All three were writers of the self-dramatising variety. All had a strong dose of Nordic sensibility. And all sought to expand their personalities in architecture. Their houses were thus acts of self-love – ‘dream houses' where they hoped to live, love, and work wonders of creation, but which, despite idyllic settings, were infected by a morbid atmosphere akin to that of Böcklin's
Island of the Dead.

Capri is, of course, the ‘Isle of Goats'. At the time of the Emperor Tiberius it was still a Greek enclave, and the illusion persisted into modem times that the Great (goat-footed) God Pan was not entirely dead, that Capri was still a pagan paradise in a Catholic sea, where the wine was excellent, the sun always shone, and the boys and girls were pretty and available. From the midnineteenth century on, a rush of romantically minded northerners descended on Capri – to buy, build or rent a villa.

There were German artists, English middle-class eccentrics, American lesbians and Russian ‘god builders'. Kaiser Wilhelm II came; so, at one time or another, did D. H. Lawrence, Rilke, Field Marshal Rommel, Edda Ciano, Gracie Fields and Lord Alfred Douglas (who sat it out in a villa while Oscar Wilde was in Reading Gaol).

Or there was Norman Douglas – scholar, hedonist, and absolutely no relation of Alfred's—who, having lost his own villa in a financial tumble, preferred the convenience of rented rooms. Or Fritz Krupp, the ‘Cannon King', who built himself a cliffside garçonnière—only to commit suicide when his homosexuality was noised about by a Naples newspaper. Or Maxim Gorky, who wrote
Mother
on Capri. Or Gorky's good friend Lenin, a popular fisherman known locally as Signor Drindrin.

But the key to Capri's history is the Emperor Tiberius. He owned twelve villas on the island, some in the hills, others by the sea. At his cliff-top palace, Villa Jovis, he built a lighthouse from which he could flash commands relayed to all quarters of the empire.

Tiberius' character is an academic battleground. Was he – as Norman Douglas believed – the shy, frugal, scholarly, mobhating and art-loving ascetic who startled his Greek philosopher friends by asking what songs the Sirens usually sang, and who found he could cope with government only by retiring to his airy pavilions, to be alone with his thoughts and his books? Or was he – as described by Suetonius – the hideous old pederast, whose left hand was so strong he ‘could poke a finger through a sound, freshly plucked apple, or into the skull of a boy or young man'?

Did he collect sexual athletes from all over the empire? Did he swim in grottoes with corrupted children? Did he play games with his victims before having them chucked from the Salto di Tiberio, a thousand feet into the sea?

Given the tenuous borderline between extremes of asceticism and of sensuality, the ‘good' Tiberius is probably the same as the ‘bad'. But it was the second, Suetonian Tiberius who inspired the Marquis de Sade, an early tourist on the island, to write a couple of sizzling debauches for the characters Justine and Juliette, and who also provoked Baron Jacques Adelswärd-Fersen, a young aesthete awash with dreams of future orgies, to build his Villa Lysis (or La Gloriette) on a tongue of land below the emperor's Villa Jovis.

‘It is one of my many crimes,' wrote Norman Douglas in Looking Back, ‘that I induced this apple of discord to establish himself on Capri. No: that is putting it too strongly. The fact is he turned up on the island one day and met me almost immediately. He was about twenty-three years old.'

Fersen's life has been dealt with in two novels, Compton Mackenzie's
Vestal Fire
and Roger Peyrefitte's
L'Exilé de Capri—
the result of which has been that the ‘real' Fersen has vanished into a lilac mist.
Vestal Fire
is a straightforward
roman à clef
(it must have seemed quite risky when it came out) which charts the incestuous comings and goings of an expatriate island colony treated to the irruption of an absurd French count, Robert Marsac, and his Italian boyfriend, Carlo. Peyrefitte's book, on the other hand, confuses famous historical figures with imaginary situations and is maddening to read.

Fersen apparently belonged to the same family as ‘le beau Fersen', the Swedish aristocrat and presumed lover of Marie-Antoinette whose attempt to rescue the royal family ended in the fiasco at Varennes. A cadet branch of the Fersens settled in the France of Napoleon III and founded a steel mill near Luxembourg. Jacques's father died at sea. Jacques was the only son, and was thus a very rich young man.

He grew up in Paris of the 1890s and seems to have modelled himself on Robert de Montesquiou (who also was the model for Des Esseintes and Baron de Charlus). He had, according to Norman Douglas, a ‘childish freshness' and blue eyes, and was always overtailored. His first volume of verse was circulated in respectable homes, despite its morbid tone and the poet's penchant for pink roses, or pink in general (‘Et nous serons des morts sous des vêtements roses'), an affectation derived, at a guess, from Montesquiou's
Les Hortensias Bleus.

His troubles began with the publication of
Hymnaire d'Adonis
—
Paganismes
—
à la Façon de M. le Marquis de Sade
. He was, however, about to forswear these frivolities and marry a Mlle de Maupeou when, without warning, the police arrested him for the corruption of schoolboys in his apartment on the Avenue de Friedland.

This episode is the subject of Fersen's own semi-autobiographical farrago of 1905,
Lord Lyllian, ou Messes Noires,
which Norman Douglas describes as having a ‘musty, Dorian-Grayish flavour' and which is not without unconscious humour.

Tried, sentenced, and then released, Fersen fled to Italy, where he met two American ladies, the Wolcott-Perry ‘sisters', who invited him to their villa on Capri. He then decided, as an act of defiance, to build his own dream house; and when Norman Douglas showed him the site under Monte Tiberio, Fersen said, ‘One could write poetry here.' He refused to be deterred even when warned that the house would get no more than two hours of sunshine a day in winter. While the building went up he travelled to Ceylon, where he picked up an opium habit. Then he picked up a newspaper boy in Rome, whom he installed on Capri as his secretary.

The boy's name was Nino Cesarini, and he had to put up with a lot. Fersen had ‘some loveable streaks', according to Douglas: he was not ‘disingenuous or false, but theatrical'. He was also vain, empty-headed and stingy. He mounted exotic festivities and quarrelled with all his guests. He forbade Nino to flirt with girls yet persisted in parading him round the island as if he were an ancient bronze Apollo. He took him to China, where they bought a collection of some three hundred opium pipes. He took him to Sicily to be photographed by Baron von Gloeden. Finally—if the story is true – he staged a mock human sacrifice in the Mithraic grotto of Matromania, with Nino as victim, and both of them were booted off the island.

When war broke out in 1914, Nino had to be detoxified from opium and went off to fight in the Apennines, while Fersen stayed in the south of France. Eventually he was allowed back to the Villa Lysis; but he had quarrelled with the Wolcott-Perrys, who shut their doors on him, and in addition to opium, he took to cocaine.

After the war Nino came back to care for his master, who, despite an illusion of perennial youth, was by this time very ill. ‘This house of mine', Fersen said, ‘has the flavour of death.' One stormy night in November 1923, ‘Count Jack' (as Fersen was known on the island), dressed in robes of rose-coloured silk, lolled back on the cushions of his subterranean opium den. Nino, who had gone to the kitchen, returned to find him semi-conscious. ‘How many grams?' he shouted. ‘How many grams?' ‘Five,' murmured Fersen, unclenching his fist as he slipped away—at least that was the version printed in the Naples daily
Il Mattino.

Fersen's family stripped the villa, used it for the odd picnic, and then sold it to a Levantine businessman. ‘There it stands,' wrote Norman Douglas in 1933, ‘like a castle in a tale, all empty and forlorn, and embowered or rather smothered in a tangle of trees ... because he grew so fond of his pines and ilexes and mimosas that he would not allow the smallest twig of them to be touched.'

And there it stands, or half-stands, in its dark, ‘holy' wood, again for sale – this alien ‘French' folly, which a Capriote wit once called the ‘visiting card of a courtesan', with its cracked stucco and splintering jalousies, silent but for the miaowing of cats, the crowing of cockerels, and the drone of powerboats in the sea below.

I found altars in the overgrown garden, and a
temple de l'amour.
(A relic of impossible yearnings? Of Versailles and the queen?) The concrete urns had come adrift of their rusty armatures and lay in little pieces in the grass. And in the colonnade under the salon, the villa's guardian had laid out carob pods to dry, and had tied up her sad beige dog.

She was a lithe young woman, jealous of her estate. She had a green thumb. In olive-oil cans she grew geraniums, pelargoniums, and canna lilies, which flowered with an almost supernatural brilliance on the steps below the portico. The house was in shadow. A black cat kept crossing my path, as if to warn me not to trespass. There were cats everywhere, puffy-faced cats, and the smell of cat piss. And there were banks of blue hydrangeas—
les hortensias bleus
of Montesquiou.

I found the salon's colour scheme had been white and blue and gold. But the roof had caved in and heaps of rubble now covered the chambre chinoise, with its yellow tiles and phony Chinese inscriptions, where Fersen once arranged his pipes in lacquered racks.