BOOKS

PARODY OF THE HISTORICAL NOVEL

THE EXILE OF CAPRI, by Roger Peyrefitte (with an introduction by Jean Cocteau). London, 1961. $4.00. Reviewed by Oberon.

"Ah, gentleman, Italy is the only possible country!" In this Italy, among the wealthy and decadent exiles of the Continent, the sexual aesthetes, the dandys, the homosexuals, who found on Capri preceding the First World War, a tender sort of home, everything is possible and nothing in fact happens. Tender Capri, opiate island, we pluck the grass and know by the wind where sits our dream! And just as the great motors that drive us storming across the open sea to this home divide us from one another in a cool privacy of sound, among the flutters of engine and waters, so, even where our lives are touched on occasion with public scandal and historic presence, and the final act of suicide, as is the hero's in this novel, we are yet untouched with the event of meaning. Our lives are always private, and too often the proof of an underpriviledged solipsism. We are footnotes in search of a page.

This book is not only a historical novel, but, more importantly, a cool and witty critique-a parody-of the style and manner of the historical novel. Justas in the common variety of such fiction we are introduced with a painful artfullness to "a fellow named Socrates," or "Alcibiades," or that interesting military governor of Gaul-"Julius Caesar" so here a flotsam of personage drifts through the pages like the impediment of a particular time. We hear of Dreyfus and Proust, of Gide ("At Biskra several Arab boys asked if he knew 'Papa Gide' ") and the young actress Colette; we meet Norman Douglas, who in South Wind wrote the most famous English novel about Capri, and who, like the hero of this novel, was a pederast; we are introduced to others, less important now, but still wonderful, such as the Baron Magnus von Manteuffel, who makes three journeys around the world in order to gather material for his never-to-be-completed Phallophysiognomy ("In everyday life the Baron von Manteuffel's scientific integrity drove him to follow any man whom he noticed going into the lavatory. He was apt to emerge with a black eye, but still, with a note to add touching some hitherto unrecorded variation in the species."); we hear of politicians, poets, actors, painters, and philosophers; but these familiar ghosts (and I must add that I believe in the Baron by Faith alone-I do not know if he existed) do more mattachine REVIEW

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in this novel than convince us of the reality of its hero's adventures. For the novel in part-as Cocteau tells us in his introduction—is about "those who, incapable of creating masterpieces, try to become one in their own persons." In the first pages the young Comte Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen indirectly meets the disgraced Oscar Wilde and, with Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas. Immediately at issue between Jacques and an older friend is the matter of those who insist on discretion, and their own privacy, and those who, like Jacques, are born under what his friend calls "the distressing sign of Oscar Wilde." And, like Wilde, Jacques is to suffer disgrace, prison, exile, and, beyond Wilde, suicide. But, unlike Wilde, Jacques suffers events as parody. Meaning disappears even before the gesture of meaning is complete. With all the motions of a dandy, Jacques is yet an imperfect dandy. His is what Cocteau calls a "lyrical impotence.'

But if Wilde serves as a critique of Jacques, so does the young dandy dent, with a hidden smirk, the perfection of his master's dream. Cocteau may be fortunate that he has to guess without personal knowledge that "to be granted dreams but not genius must be the worst of tortures;" but he fails to understand how the historical novel puts even genius into question-or rather, puts into question what genius can communicate, and whether the imposition of meaning on a life, even through art, does not in fact limit that life as well as broaden it. We know Wilde as a legend, and as a playwrightanother sort of legend, Poor Wilde, how was he to know that there would be three trials, not one, and that heroism would have retreated from the repeated public shows into a private demonstration of personal strength? Bad dramaturgy: in a play, an existentialistic hero can find definition in the fact of a final curtain; but in our own lives-even in those of the greatest—definition escapes and the life continues. At best, death itself promotes only a false clarity. And it is that clarity which we most often call bistory.

In The Exile of Capri, M. Peyrefitte compels form to submit to parody, and hence rescues from that form its secret inspiration. The novel is of a type and idea with which we are now familiar, dealing with a variety of life of which we have too often heard. Never boring, however; sharp even while, as in similar novels such as South Wind, action halts for discussion; grand in its exploitation of decadence. Example: "Jacques and Nino took leave of their host and hostess and promised to come again. Two young footmen carrying torches escorted them to the shore and surprised them by proceeding to strip when they reached it: they explained that they had orders from the Princess to swim besides the visitors' boat as far as the yacht Eros." This book, like the most valuable novels, returns us to our privacy and the surprise of its wealth. Oscar Wilde himself, in what I consider the most serious definition of the subject that I know, once stated that History is only gossip. This is the most solid implication of M. Peyrefitte's historical