Florence (6 page)

Vanya met ruined
marchesi
and counts who lived in dilapidated palaces and quarreled with their servants over cards; he met engineers and doctors, merchants who lived the frugal, sequestered lives that their fathers had before them; he met budding composers who yearned for Puccini’s fame, aping him with their neckties and fat, beardless faces; he met the Persian consul, fat, solemn and benign, who lived near San Miniato with his six nieces; he met apothecaries; he met young men who were vaguely described as errand boys, English ladies who had gone over to Catholicism and, finally, Mme. Monier, an aesthetic and artistic lady who lived in Fiesole with a whole company of guests in a villa decorated with charming allegories of spring and commanding a view of Florence and the Valley of the Arno. Invariably cheerful and eternally a-twitter, she was tiny, ginger-haired and quite hideous.

Kuzmin’s account, with its catalogue of ‘types’, its reliance on semicolons, its faint whiff of a homosexual demimonde, is fairly typical of the period, yet it also suggests Florence’s catholicity and richness of character. Although social barriers exist, for foreigners, they seem to melt on contact, so that Vanya can move from the houses of the aristocracy to those of the middle classes to those of artists and ‘errand boys’ with an ease that would be unthinkable at home. (The Monsignor’s immunity to class distinction owes to his office;
no ordinary Italian could have made such a pilgrimage.)

As for the English ladies ‘who had gone over to Catholicism’, they may be the loudest presence of all. Even before the onslaught, Florentine society, with its entrenched aristocracy and class-consciousness, was distinctly English in tone, especially when compared to Rome or Milan. As Acton writes, many of the old Florentine families had ‘Anglo-Saxon ramifications’, which may have attracted the English. ‘They took root among the vineyards and became a part of the landscape,’ he continues. ‘Their eccentricities flourished in the clear Tuscan light.’ In
A Tuscan Childhood,
Kinta Beevor, who grew up in Florence, wrote that the city offered an ‘escape from the hidebound formality and false deference of home’; yet it also replicated the atmosphere of home, in that the region’s much-vaunted relaxed attitude came draped in the vestments of a social order as hidebound as any to be found in England. Thus in Florence, wealthy merchants were obliged to address titled, though penniless, aristocrats using the formal ‘Loro’. The intricate etiquette of correspondence amused
Forster, who in
Where Angels Fear to Tread
describes a letter sent by a young Tuscan to some English people:

Gino wrote in his own language, but the solicitors had sent a laborious English translation, where ‘Pregiatissima Signorna’ was rendered as ‘Most Praiseworthy Madam’, and every delicate compliment and superlative – superlatives are delicate in Italian – would have felled an ox.

More sensitive, perhaps, to the nuances of a world in which he spent only a few weeks than many of those who lived in it their whole lives, Forster appreciated the ‘delicacy’ of Tuscan society, which smiled on the very fluidities against which England was at that moment constructing dams. The smile was as subtle, as ambiguous, as the
Mona Lisa’s,
but it was a smile nonetheless. In Florence you could chat with a fellow expatriate at Doney’s or La Giocosa, attend a formal ball at the
palazzo
of a Frescobaldi, and then at midnight stroll over to the Loggia dei Lanzi, where boys always loitered, happy to barter sex for money or cigarettes. What was absent was threat: the
blackmailer’s as much as the officer’s. Firbank captured the town’s split personality perfectly in a description, from
Sorrow in Sunlight
(1924), of the imaginary Caribbean capital Cuna-Cuna:

Now, beyond the Alemeda, in the modist fauborg of Faranaka, there lived a lady of both influence and wealth – the widow of the Inventor of Sunflower Piquant. The
veto
of Madame Ruis, arbitress absolute of Cunan society, and owner, moreover, of a considerable portion of the town, had caused the suicide indeed of more than one social climber. Unhappy, nostalgic, disdainful, selfish, ever about to abandon Cuna-Cuna to return to it no more, yet never budging, adoring her fairy villa far too well, Madame Ruiz
[sic],
while craving for the International-world, consoled herself by watching from afar European society going speedily to the dogs. Art-loving, and considerably musical (many a dizzy venture at the Opera-house had owed its audition to her), she had, despite the self-centredness of her nature, done not a little to render more brilliant the charming city it amused her with such vehemence to abuse.

Cuna-Cuna is also a city in which ‘the number of ineligible young men or confirmed bachelors’ provides ‘a constant source of irritation’ to mothers seeking husbands for their daughters.

Chapter Three

Florence’s reputation as a sodomitical hotbed goes way back. As early as the first years of the eighteenth century, (Henry James’s cousin) H. Montgomery Hyde notes, an anonymous work titled
Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England
was blaming ‘women for the increase in homosexuality, besides foppish clothes, continental manners, tea-drinking and Italian opera’; the work also observed ‘that sodomy is considered a trivial matter in Italy, since no sooner does a stranger set foot in Rome than the procurers rush to ask if he wants a woman or a young man’. A 1749 pamphlet titled
Satan’s Harvest Home: or the Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication,
Procuring, Pimping and Sodomy … And Other Satanic Works, daily propagated in this good Protestant Kingdom
stated the case more baldly, calling Italy the ‘mother and nurse of sodomy’.

No doubt such diatribes had the opposite effect of what their authors intended; by vilifying Italy, they actually added to the country’s appeal as a place of settlement for homosexual Englishmen obliged to flee their homeland. Among others, George Nassau Clavering-Cowper, third Earl Cowper – a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire and noted art collector, whom
The World
newspaper accused posthumously of having addicted himself ‘to the practice and use of the most criminal and unmanly vices and debaucheries’ – spent most of his life in Florence, where he died in 1789. In 1797 the Revd John Fenwick, Vicar of Byall, flew to France and then to Naples after a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of assaulting a man named Harper, who had had to jump out of a library window in order to escape his attentions. In 1809, George Ferrers, Earl of Leicester, having been disinherited by his father after the exposure of an affair
with a waiter called Neri (a Florentine name), settled in the Villa Rostan at Pegli, near Genoa. In 1841 William John Bankes, a parliamentarian, who had some years before been accused, Hyde writes, of ‘committing an act of indecency with a soldier in a public lavatory outside Westminster Abbey’, fled to Venice after he was brought to court a second time, for ‘indecently exposing himself in a London park’.

Even before the adoption of the Code Napoléon – which, in contrast to English law, made a point of
not
criminalizing sodomy – Florence displayed an exceptionally permissive attitude toward homosexuality. Sodomy, if not homosexuality in the modern sense, had been a prominent feature of life in the city since at least the 1300s, when erotic relationships between men and boys were so prevalent that a special tribunal, the so-called ‘Office of the Night’, had had to be established to deal with the matter. In
Forbidden Friendships: Sodomy and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence,
the historian Michael Rocke describes a society in which sex between men and boys was tolerated so long as the passive partner was under
eighteen. On the other hand, older men who took the passive role were looked upon as monstrous, and were often executed or maimed in public, their ears or noses cut off. The Ponte Vecchio, then the exclusive domain of butchers (it is now the exclusive domain of gold sellers), was something of a carnal war zone, a corridor down which no boy dared venture lest he should ‘have his cap stolen’. By the early sixteenth century, a German dictionary was defining ‘Florenzer’ as ‘buggerer’ and the verb ‘Florenzen’ as ‘to bugger’.

The city’s twin status as a capital of great art and a haven of permissive sexual attitudes made it a particularly appealing destination for homosexual artists and scholars. Among the earliest of these to travel there was Winckelmann, the subject of a long chapter in
Studies on the History of The Renaissance.
‘In German imaginations,’ Pater observed here, ‘even now traces are to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North (
cette fatigue du nord
), which carried the northern peoples away into those countries of the South.’ (Many years later the young Sybille Bedford, crossing over the Brenner Pass, would likewise respond
to ‘the first sight on a September morning of a southern sky and light … with the alert joy of a creature born and emerging from the north’.) And what were these Germans – Winckelmann prominent among them – looking for? Art and love, ‘the exercise of sight and touch’, passionate friendships from which the erotic, bravely, was not excluded. ‘There had been known before him,’ Madame de Staël wrote of Winckelmann, ‘learned men who might be consulted like books; but no one had, if I may say so, made himself a pagan for the purpose of penetrating antiquity.’ Pater adds, ‘That his affinity with Hellenism was not merely intellectual, that the subtler threads of temperament were inwoven in it, is proved by his romantic, fervent friendships with young men. He has known, he says, many young men more beautiful than Guido’s archangel.’

Alas, the last of these friendships proved fatal; in 1768 Winckelmann decided to go back to Germany, traveled as far as Regensberg, then – homesick for Italy – cut his visit short and turned south again. Waiting in Trieste to sail, he fell in with a handsome café
waiter, who murdered and robbed him in his hotel room. The waiter was Florentine, and his name, ironically, was Arcangeli.

The first edition of
The Renaissance
appeared in 1873, when Ouida was enjoying her greatest successes and trying, somewhat ineptly, to shock people at the Langham Hotel. This was a fraught moment in English social history, marked on the one hand by an increasing sexual boldness on the part of citizens, and on the other by a government-led effort to enforce sodomy laws as a defense against perceived Continental decadence. Among the earliest victims of the tension that resulted was Lord Henry Somerset, second son of the Duke of Beaufort (the Duke invented the game of Badminton, which was named after his estate) and the first of the so-called Uranian poets. A former MP for Monmouthshire and Comptroller of Her Majesty’s Household, Lord Henry escaped England for Florence in the late 1870s after his wife, Isabel, caught him
in flagrante delicto
with a teenage boy named Harry Smith. Because she had gone public with the reasons for their separation, and thus
flouted the Victorian code of ‘reticence for women’, Lady Isabel soon found herself
persona non grata
in English society. At home she became a pariah, while abroad, Lord Henry enjoyed (if that is the right word) an exile’s odd notoriety; he is probably the ‘suave Lord X’ to whom Acton refers as having ‘had to flee from the London police because he was a “Greek born out of due time” …’ Then about ten years later Lord Henry’s youngest brother, Arthur, was also obliged to flee for the Continent after being implicated in the famous ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’, which erupted in July 1889 when police stumbled upon a male brothel near Piccadilly staffed by telegraph boys, and catering to a generally aristocratic clientele. (Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor, or ‘Prince Eddy’, the heir presumptive, was also reputed to have been a client at the brothel; certainly he was a frequent guest at the Hundred Guineas Club, a homosexual gathering place where he was known as ‘Victoria’.)

The atmosphere in England had become especially oppressive since the 1885 passage of the Labouchére Amendment – named for
Henry Labouchére, the parliamentarian who wrote it, and who would soon become a member of the Anglo-Florentine colony in his own right, settling upon retirement at the Villa Cristina. (That he and Lord Henry should have ended up living cheek by jowl is further evidence of Florence’s oddity, its status as a place outside the ordinary rules.) In essence, this amendment criminalized acts of ‘gross indecency’ between adult men in public or private, making them punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment, with or without hard labor. (The maximum penalty was life imprisonment if minors were procured.) Previously, only anal intercourse – ‘buggery’ in England and ‘sodomy’ in Scotland – had been a crime.

Surprisingly, Labouchére was neither a religious zealot nor a conservative; on the contrary, he was a famous radical, the editor of a muckraking journal called
Truth
that was constantly being sued for libel. His amendment arrived in Parliament attached to a bill intended to curb the rise of syphilis among prostitutes, and was seen as contributory to an effort to contain this crisis. Previously,
‘fallen women’ themselves had been blamed for the ills associated with prostitution. Now lawmakers, at the urging of so-called ‘social purity’ feminists, were pushing the idea that the men at whose hands these women had ‘fallen’, rather than the women themselves, ought to be held accountable. According to this thinking, homosexual sex was simply the most extreme form that masculine depravity could take; men who engaged in acts of ‘gross indecency’ with each other, rather than categorisable ‘inverts’, were monsters of carnality, as likely to go hunting girl virgins to corrupt as to soil together the beds of decent hotels. Desire itself, in other words, was the crime that had to be punished.

The problem, of course, was that outside the imagination of Victorian physiologists, such polysexual demons as those at whom the law was aimed did not, by and large, exist. ‘Inverts’, on the other hand, were legion, and in the end it was they who suffered the most from the Labouchére amendment, in great part thanks to the words ‘in public or private’, which were seen as giving the green light to blackmailers, and soon led to its being dubbed
the ‘blackmailer’s charter’. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 arrest under the amendment’s provisions sent homosexuals into a panic, and provoked the rather fantastic exodus that Frank Harris describes in his inventive biography of Wilde: