Old Calabria

Publisher Marketing: SARACEN LUCERA I FIND it hard to sum up in one word the character of Lucera--the effect it produces on the mind; one sees so many towns that the freshness of their images becomes blurred. The houses are low but not undignified; the streets regular and clean; there is electric light and somewhat indifferent accommodation for travellers; an infinity of barbers and chemists. Nothing remarkable in all this. Yet the character is there, if one could but seize upon it, since every place has its genius. Perhaps it lies in a certain feeling of aloofness that never leaves one here. We are on a hill--a mere wave of ground; a kind of spur, rather, rising up from, the south--quite an absurd little hill, but sufficiently high to dominate the wide Apulian plain. And the nakedness of the land stimulates this aerial sense. There are some trees in the Belvedere or public garden that lies on the highest part of the spur and affords a fine view north and eastwards. But the greater part were only planted a few years ago, and those stretches of brown earth, those half-finished walks and straggling pigmy shrubs, give the place a crude and embryonic appearance. One thinks that the designers might have done more in the way of variety; there are no conifers excepting a few cryptomerias and yews which will all be dead in a couple of years, and as for those yuccas, beloved of Italian municipalities, they will have grown more dyspeptic-looking than ever. Contributor Bio:  Douglas, Norman An Austrian-born Scott, Douglas spent much of his adult life traveling the world partially to see it and partially to escape the law in whatever country he recently had departed. Although he married his cousin in 1898 and fathered two sons (the marriage later ended in divorce), the year before that marriage he was having an affair not only with a mistress but also her fifteen-year-old brother. In 1916, Douglas fled England to, in his own words, "avoid persecution for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling." The sixteen-year-old boy in question described the matter less innocently to police, leading Douglas to be charged with indecent assault. Douglas settled in Capri. His book of travel Together, published in 1923, finds him traveling with a companion he refers to as "Mr R," who in fact was a fifteen-year-old Italian boy who went by the name of Rene. Douglas was admired by E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey ("the thrill that only you can give goes down my back," Strachey wrote to him after reading Together), and more recently by Paul Fussell, who likens him to Nabokov. D. H. Lawrence was fascinated with Douglas enough to base the character James Argyle on him in Aaron's Rod. Indeed, Lawrence uses Argyle to make one of his more profound statements on love between men, the same sort of statement found in the final pages of Women in Love. Addressing the Marchesse, Argyle says, "A man is drawn or driven. Driven, I've found it. Ah, my dear fellow, what is life but a search for a friend-that sums it up." The Marchesse smiles and adds, "Or a lover," to which Argyle rejoins, "Same thing, same thing..." An even more intriguing characterization of Douglas is found in Roger Williams's Lunch with Elizabeth David. The book is written from the point of view of twelve-year-old Eric Wolton, a working class boy Douglas took with him through Calabria. In Julie Gray's review of the book for the New York Times (13 Aug 2000), she writes, "The question at the novel's center concerns Douglas: Is he, as one character puts it, 'a monster, the pedophile of the century, ' or is he, as Eric says, a great man who had led him into a 'warm and sensuous world of adventures and light'?" Eric, no doubt, would insist he should have the final word. As for Douglas, his final words, after intentionally taking an overdose of pills to end a prolonged illness, are reported to have been: "Get those fucking nuns away from me."