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Norman Douglas
First full-lenght biography of Norman Douglas. Norman Douglas (1867-1952) lived a long, varied and on many occasions scandalous life. The son of a Scottish father and Austrian Mother, with a boyhood spent in the Voralberg district, he was by turns a young scholar of ripening repute, a man about town in London, a young diplomat in Russia. From Russia he had to make a sudden departure because of scandal over a woman. Later he had to leave equally hurriedly - this time because of boys. Much of his life was spent as an involuntary expatriate in his beloved Italy, where a host of friends stood by him. Norman Douglas was author of books like South Wind, Old Calabria, Fountains in the Sand and Siren Land.
Looking Back
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South Wind
In this witty novel of ideas, an intellectual and sensual adventure of the rarest kind unfolds amid a picturesque Mediterranean island. Generations of readers have delighted in the tale of an English clergyman's visit to a "rambling and craggy sort of place," where whitewashed houses perch on sheer rock cliffs above a gleaming sea. But underneath its tranquil surface, the island seethes with volcanic activity. And behind the aristocratic discourse on life and love lies a tangle of nefarious activities, from art forgery to murder. A memorable cast of characters includes the genteel visiting bishop as well as an elderly diplomat, a devilish magistrate, a malevolent barkeeper, and a host of other expatriates, freethinkers, eccentrics, zealots, and ne'er-do-wells. Their interactions generate a volatile mixture of notions that prove as unsettling as the sirocco, the hot, damp wind from the south. Combining elegant prose with glittering epigrams, mordant satire, and memorable characterization, this story offers thought-provoking entertainment.
South Wind
"Full of zest and high spirits." — The Christian Science Monitor This witty, elegant novel of ideas unfolds on the imaginary Mediterranean island of Nepenthe, where Thomas Heard, Bishop of Bampopo in the equatorial regions of Africa, stops off on his way back to England. His arrival and introduction to the local society sets the stage for an urbane and polished tale. South Wind brilliantly evokes the dreamy, languorous quality of life on Nepenthe, a town of whitewashed houses perched on sheer rock cliffs above a gleaming sea. While peasants clamber up roads of black volcanic lava to work in the vineyards, aristocrats while away the torpid midday hours on sun-dappled terraces, discoursing o...
Norman Douglas
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South Wind
This annoyed him. For he disapproved of sickness in every shape or form. His own state of body was far from satisfactory at that moment; Africa—he was Bishop of Bampopo in the Equatorial Regions—had played the devil with his lower gastric department and made him almost an invalid; a circumstance of which he was nowise proud, seeing that ill-health led to inefficiency in all walks of life. There was nothing he despised more than inefficiency. Well or ill, he always insisted on getting through his tasks in a businesslike fashion. That was the way to live, he used to say. Get through with it. Be perfect of your kind, whatever that kind may be. Hence his sneaking fondness for the natives—they were such fine, healthy animals.
Grand Man
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Alone
In exemplification whereof, let me tell a trivial Riviera tale. There was an Englishwoman here, one of those indestructible modern ladies who breakfast off an ether cocktail and half a dozen aspirins and feel all the better for it, and who, one day, found herself losing rather heavily at the tables. "Another aspirin is going to turn my luck," she thought, and therewith swallowed surreptitiously her last tabloid of the panacea. Not unobserved, however; for straightway two elegant gentlemen--they might have been Russian princes--pounced upon her and led her to that underground operating-room where a kindly physician is in perennial attendance. He brushed aside her explanations.
