Florence (7 page)

Every train to Dover was crowded; every steamer to Calais thronged with members of the aristocratic and leisured classes, who seemed to prefer Paris, or even Nice out of the season, to a city like London, where the police might act with such unexpected vigour … It came as a shock to their preconceived ideas that the police in London knew a great many things which they were not supposed to concern themselves with, and this unwelcome glare of light drove the vicious forth in wild haste.

Florence was where most of them landed, since it offered, as Barbara Strachey primly put it in her memoir
Remarkable Relations,
‘an ideal place for the unconventional Anglo-Saxon at this time. Lord Henry Somerset … had taken refuge there … and the large expatriate community abounded in “Sapphists”, eccentrics and those whose marital arrangements were irregular.’

She was neither generalizing nor indulging in overstatement. The lesbians in residence included, most notably, Radclyffe Hall, author of the banned novel
The Well of Loneliness,
who lived in Florence with her lover, Una, Lady Troubridge. Then there was the travel writer Maud Cruttwell, who dressed in men’s clothes and told Mary Berenson ‘how pleased she was to ride behind my donkey when she thought it was a female ass, and how disgusted she was when she found out it was a “maschio” ’. The Florence-born Violet Paget, known as Vernon Lee, kept her hair cropped short and, like Maud Cruttwell, wore a man’s necktie. James described her as ‘exceedingly ugly, disputatious, contradictious and perverse ... a really superior talker with a
mind –
almost the only one in Florence’. Likewise the German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand recalled in a letter a dull evening enlivened by her intellectual vigor:

During the dinner there was desultory chat; then we sat out till half past eleven near the little gate and I had a long discussion with Vernon Lee on the nature of truth. She was very aggressive and brilliantly intelligent, and after two hours succeeded in proving triumphantly the very statement she had undertaken to combat …

John Singer Sargent painted her portrait; her writing impressed Pater, and she enjoyed a long if rivalrous friendship with Berenson, who held court, with his wife Mary, at I Tatti. Visitors streamed in and out of the villa, among the oddest of them the poet Michael Field, not one man but two women, an aunt and niece named Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who lived together from the time that Edith was a small child until her death in 1913. (Katharine died a year later.) Of ‘the Mikes’, as they were not so affectionately known, Mary Berenson wrote:

They think they are a Great Poet, unappreciated at present but certain to be famous and adored in the next generation – and they think their souls are united and that it is good for them to be together. As a matter of fact the utter mistake of both these theories is ‘obvious to the meanest intelligence’ …

(A stanza from their interminable ‘Variations on Sappho’ proves the point:

Maids, not to you my mind doth change;

Men I defy, allure, estrange,

Prostrate, make bond or free:

Soft as the stream beneath the plane

To you I sing my love’s refrain;

Between us is no thought of pain,

Peril, satiety.)

Berenson’s own marriage to Mary, as it happened, was among the more ‘irregular’ in Florence, encompassing a relatively open
ménage à trois
of which the third member was his female secretary, Nicky Mariano. Heterosexual members of the colony, it seemed, had reasons no less pressing for living in Italy. Thus the Hon. Mrs George Keppel, former mistress to King Edward VII and mother of yet another lesbian, the novelist Violet Trefusis, settled with her patient husband at the Villa dell’Ombrellino in Bellosguardo. (What choice did she have besides Florence?) Lord Arthur Acton was a zealous amateur photographer in the tradition of Baron von Gloeden, except
that his nude subjects were young girls instead of, as in von Gloeden’s case, (mostly) young boys; as the novelist Francis King recalled in
Yesterday came Suddenly,
he ‘had been involved in a scandal before the First World War, when the police were tipped off by a mother dissatisfied with her pay-off that, along with a local politician, he was photographing pubescent girls in a studio rented for that purpose’. He also fathered numerous illegitimate children by Florentine women, one of whom would later sue for half his estate. Yet for all his indiscretions, Arthur showed little tolerance toward his son, who even in his late forties was allowed neither use of the family car (he took the bus instead) or his own key to the villa; instead, James Lord writes in ‘The Cost of the Villa’, whenever Harold returned late at night, he would have to clamber up the wall and enter by a window.

Although today he is better remembered for his memoirs and his history of the Bourbons of Naples, Acton also wrote three novels –
Humdrum, Peonies and Ponies,
and
New Lamps for Old –
as well as numerous forgotten short stories, including one called ‘The Soul’s Gymnasium’.
Here a mad old man in orange robes tries to persuade young male visitors to his Florentine garden to ‘doff their worldly garments’ and dive into a ‘pool of purification’. The second of these young men, an American named Al Randy, has earlier ‘doffed’ his garments to pose naked alongside a copy of the
David,
to whose physique his own compares favorably.

Acton’s homosexuality was an open secret in Florence – which did not stop him from threatening a lawsuit when he heard that he was to be ‘outed’ in a biography of Nancy Mitford. (His putative motive was to protect the delicate sensibilities of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, who had recently stayed at La Pietra.) In two long volumes of memoirs, he never once acknowledged his own homosexuality, though he spoke often of homosexuality in the abstract – in the first volume, for instance, writing, ‘One was continually hearing that certain men in Florence were queer, not that it made much difference to their popularity: on the contrary! The queerer, the dearer.’ Significantly, the subject of this observation, rather than himself or one of his lovers, is a stranger glimpsed at a
distance, and identified by a
female
companion as queer. ‘But wherein did this queerness reside?’ Acton asks disingenuously.

I must find out. In trying to solve this problem I stared at the young man until he flushed with embarrassment. ‘But I can’t see anything queer about him,’ I exclaimed, and was told to mind my own business, which led to further cogitation. Thinking him over, I came to the conclusion that he was prettier than a man was supposed to be; and that might have something to do with it. But how could he help having curly hair and a pink and white complexion? If he shaved his head and wore a beard he might look more manly, of course, but wouldn’t that be rather affected?

Were it not for the fact that he was in no way pretty, Acton might have been talking about himself here; far from a minor ‘problem to be solved’, queerness was for him a dilemma requiring the use of an ever-more complex algebra of evasion – thus the displacement of homosexuality, in the memoirs, on to a remote (and ‘safe’) third party, or the observation,
when assessing the failed marriages of some of his friends, ‘I could congratulate myself on being a bachelor.’ (‘As if the option had been exercised after dispassionate contemplation!’ James Lord notes wryly.) During the Second World War, Acton had been refused a post in Peking, where he had lived in his youth, due to a report claiming that his behavior there had been less than that befitting an officer and a gentleman. Resentment of this ‘slander’ still burned in 1968, and in the introduction to
More Memoirs of an Aesthete,
Acton characterizes the author of the denunciation as ‘some epicene dunderhead from the Foreign Office. His rage against my independent way of life was that of the perennial snake in the grass, the envious Philistine.’ In analyzing this passage, Lord points out that in general usage the definition of ‘epicene’ is effeminate. ‘How can Harold have been so rash as to attribute to his accuser a characteristic which must have been central to the accusation against himself?’ Lord asks. ‘Did he actually fancy that no one knew?’

It’s hard to imagine, just as it’s hard to imagine that Pino Orioli really believed he
was fooling anyone when he described in
Adventures of a Bookseller
a dispute that arose between him and his partner Davis after they fell in love with the same ‘creature’ – a ‘creature’ whose gender, in the course of a long passage, is never specified. (Italian, with its evasive articles, is even more pliant than English in this game of gender obfuscation.) Yet Orioli shows no similar reticence when lamenting the superfluity of ‘Geoffreys’ passing through Florence ‘singly or in couples’, since the observation does not implicate him:

Not all of them are called Geoffrey, but most of them bear that name which, somehow or other, suits them perfectly. The name conjures up for me the vision of a young fellow, generally from an English University, generally arriving in his own or a friend’s car, generally effeminate; always well dressed, always rich, and always close with his money… . Decorative boys but quite empty-headed, and rather a nuisance into the bargain.

(Along the same lines, a character in Jocelyn Brooke’s ‘Gerald Brockhurst’ makes the observation
that in novels as well as life, ‘Geralds’ are almost inevitably athletic and straight: ‘There’s one in E. M. Forster, and another in Lawrence – you know, the man in
Women in Love
– and I once read a novel by Gilbert Frankau, when I was at school, called
Gerald Cranston’s Lady;
the hero was just the same type, terrifically hearty and military, with a mustache.’)

For Orioli as much as for Acton, it was one thing to observe the faintly embarrassing ways of foreigners, and another to talk about oneself. Thus Orioli can recall a group of Germans who ‘used to meet every afternoon at a certain table – it happened to be square and not round – in the Café Gambrinus, which was the most fashionable at the time ... If you passed near them, you could hear one or the other of them saying charming things about Donatello or Dante or Michelangelo or Bruno or Benvenuto. If you took a table near enough to overhear what they were saying, you soon realized that they were not comparing the merits of those famous Italians of bygone days, but those of the best-looking modern youngsters about town who bore the same names.’

Of course, it is about as easy to believe that Orioli merely ‘took a table near enough to overhear’ this conversation as that Proust, in
Time Regained,
chose by chance a gay brothel when he decided to check into a hotel to take a rest. Far more probable is that Orioli was sitting with the Germans, taking part in their conversation, as entranced by the boys with the artists’ names as they were.

Among the most entrenched relics of the homosexual community in Florence during the first part of the twentieth century was Lord Henry Somerset, who – following his flight from England – settled at 1 Via Guido Monaco, not far from the station of Santa Maria Novella. In prelapsarian days, Lord Somerset had not done much of anything; now he became slightly famous as a songwriter (‘All Through the Night’, ‘The First Spring Day’, ‘Where’er You Go’, etc.). He was also the author of a slim volume of verse,
Songs of Adieu
(1889), inspired by his great love Harry Smith, who would die in New Zealand in 1902. Here is one of these poems, entitled ‘The Exile’:

O PRAY for me!

That weeping stand on a distant shore,

My young days darkened for evermore –

O pray for me!

Pray for the homeless, outcast one,

Pray for the life crushed out and done

Ere yet its youth had scarce begun –

O pray for me!

O think of me!

I loved you well in the days gone by, Together,

you said, we’d live and die –

O think of me!

Think then of those imperial years,

Think, think of all my bitter tears,

My racking doubts, my dismal tears –

O think of me!

Yea, dear one, morning, noon, and night,

I think, and weep, and pray for thee,

And through my tears my one delight

Is born of thy dear memory.

My life with thine is past and o’er,

We can but weep for evermore.

Oscar Wilde, reviewing the
Songs of Adieu
in the
Pall Mall Gazette
of 30 March 1889,
concluded, ‘He has nothing to say and says it’; a quip that did not keep Somerset from entertaining Wilde when he came to Florence to visit Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894. ‘Podge’, as Somerset was known, was as tragicomic an eccentric as the hero of ‘The Soul’s Gymnasium’. Osbert Sitwell, who made something of a career out of memorializing Anglo-Florentine dinosaurs, portrayed him as ‘Milordo Inglese’ in one of the poems that comprise ‘On the Continent’, the third section of his 1958 collection
Poems about People,
or
England Reclaimed.
Here Podge is ‘Lord Richard Vermont’, whom ‘some nebulous but familiar scandal / Had lightly blown … over the Channel, / Which he never crossed again.’