Dalla Biblioteca

Capri, Island of Pleasure, by James Money, first published in Great Britain in 1986, is one of those books essential to one's sanity, and to one's over-all sense of well-being that one picks up at random, reads desultorily--skipping from this oddity to that quizzical reflection over the space of a week or so till it dawns on you:  This is the most important damned book that you have read this past decade.  It even has the true story of that perfect little wine called 'Tiberio' that we had at lunch--with the absolutely fucking sublime spaghetti alle vòngole--at that quite reasonably priced (on Capri!) little resort that Alexei, the Russian lad from Vilnius, and I, spotted down at the end of the goat path running down from, and for a little ways along side, with but a low stone wall between them, the  suffocatingly glitzy Rodeo Drive that flaunts its treasures on the top and in the middle of the island, and which we venturesomely jumped over the wall of and scouted out, and where we (our guided tour group far behind us) spent the afternoon swimming ("bathing," as Somerset Maugham called it), sun-bathing, and, like I say, having lunch with real, moderately priced Italians and their squealing kids: True story being that, along with the vintage from the vines you see growing under the funicular, it's a blend, with other white wines of the Campania, and so maybe not as special and grand cru as its nom d'empereur suggests--but I defy anybody, though with white burgundy which it resembles, or champagne, to make a more delicious wine-pairing with spaghetti alle vòngole, plain and simple, perfectly seasoned and cooked, and at first blush almost too chewy.  Oh God.  You may believe that I tipped 20%.

Well, one of life's savory mysteries has been elucidated by this wonderful book--and many more besides, some quite unsavory:  How the English colony, for example, pursued the persecution of the recently-imprisoned Oscar Wilde, walking out en masse of whatever unfortunate establishment he happened also to frequent.  The brutal Axis and Allied bombings of Naples.  Who Gracie Fields was.  The ménage à trois hommes that the ("indefatigably prolific") E.F. Benson was living in on Capri, while Austria and Russia, and Germany and England and France, armed and threatened and negotiated and rendered pompously inevitable the fucking bloody end of civilization, and how aghast they all were at the very idea of a female roommate.  Jeez, guys, priorities?  It reminds me (those high summer months on the Isle of Capri in 1914), for all the world, of how we were, in Seattle in 1970, with Nixon bombing Cambodia and declaring war on marijuana, while we (fashionable bright young masculine Gay Liberationists) entertained the Cockettes (a guerrilla theater group from New York City!), no less, at the swankest three-day parties in the biggest and fanciest Old Victorian houses (which, in those days before gentrification, pretty much fell into our hands as club houses) on the West Coast--and asked our Lesbian/Feminist sisters (for thus much we would acknowledge them to be) kindly to define if they pleased "Patriarchy," or to shut the fuck up about it.

Just the man to have got so many narrative threads woven into their exact historical context is James Money, whose qualifications, credentials, scholarship and interests are simply too numerous to mention in complete detail, but of which I like particularly his having graduated from Cambridge with a degree in Classics Parts I and II, and his having written the first draft of Admiral Mountbatten's Report on the South-East Asia command--being fanned the while, and refreshed, I feel sure, by a few or several of Lord Louis' favorite 11-year-old punkhawallahs.  In those days before air conditioning--and long after the cruel, peremptory vandalism of the British Raj had shut down the pumps which once had drawn water  from the sacred Jumna to the Lotus Fountain in the Rang Mahal, whence flowed the "River of Paradise," dispersing the last coolness of Himalayan snows, in jets and pools and rivulets throughout the Red Fort--one took what comfort one could find on the vast, broiling sub-continent.