When the hero of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool was asked which modern writers he admired, he replied, ‘Eliot, Joyce and Norman Douglas.’ Eliot and Joyce have held up well enough, but Douglas? ‘I thought he was quite forgotten,’ one well-read friend remarked to me.
So perhaps he is. But he loomed quite large between the two world wars, and his reputation was still high for a decade or so after his death in 1952. There were admittedly extra-literary reasons for this. Admiring Douglas marked you out as a free spirit who had broken the bonds of Anglo-Saxon Puritan conformity. Douglas was a rebel, a scoffer, a hedonist, a pagan in the antique Mediterranean style. ‘Why prolong life save to prolong pleasure?’ he wrote. Our northern Puritanism is now dead, or in abeyance, Douglas’s message therefore superfluous. At the same time his own style of paganism looks decidedly old hat: ‘Many of us would do well to Mediterraneanise ourselves for a season, to quicken those eth[n]ic roots from which has sprung so much of what it best in our natures.’ Douglas’s Mediterranean was not that of mass tourism.
I once intended to write a biography of Douglas; it was indeed to be my first book. I got warm encouragement from John Davenport and from one of Douglas’s oldest friends, Edward Hutton, tepid encouragement from Harold Acton and cool discouragement from Kenneth Macpherson, his literary executor, in whose villa on Capri Douglas spent the last years of his life.
Macpherson was quite right to discourage me. I wasn’t up to the task I had set myself, being far too immature. But the enterprise had taken me for the first time to Italy: to Rome, Florence, Naples, Capri and Calabria where I wandered for weeks in the early summer of 1964.
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