Grove Koger
Today’s post from my book When the Going Was Good describes an early travel work by Norman Douglas, who was born December 8, 1868 and died on the Italian island of Capri in 1952.
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Siren Land (London: Dent, 1911)
Scottish-German writer Norman Douglas grew up among the peaks of western Austria. As a teenager his wrote his first published articles on subjects in natural history, a field in which he would remain interested throughout his life. Prompted perhaps by his facility in languages, Douglas went on to serve briefly in the British foreign service in Russia, but an indiscreet love affair forced him to quit that country in 1896.
Douglas had fallen under the spell of the region around Naples as early as 1888, and after some years of travel bought a villa in what he fondly labeled “Siren Land.” Subsequently he would live on nearby Capri, compiling antiquarian pamphlets on the island’s history and selling articles of more general interest to British magazines. After he moved to London in 1910, writers Joseph Conrad and Richard Garnett helped him find a publisher for the pieces that would become Siren Land.
This sunny and genial volume opens appropriately enough with a consideration of “Sirens and Their Ancestry,” a typically straight-faced if playful disquisition that exhibits Douglas’s considerable erudition. Other chapters treat the uplands of the Sorrentine Peninsula (which separates the Bay of Naples and the Gulf of Salerno), the “Siren-loving” Emperor Tiberius, and the differing attitudes of Northern and Southern Europeans toward Capri’s Blue Grotto. Douglas’s philosophy was keenly skeptical and robustly hedonistic, a product perhaps of his background in natural history. “What you cannot find on earth,” he insisted, “is not worth seeking.”
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Editions published by Harcourt, Brace (New York, 1956) and Penguin/Peregrine (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1962) contain an introduction by John Davenport. The edition from Marlboro (Marlboro, Vermont, 1993) contains an introduction by Jon Manchip White but lacks the map and index found in the other editions.
For further information on Douglas, see Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Mark Holloway, Norman Douglas: A Biography (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976); Ralph D. Lindeman, Norman Douglas (New York: Twayne, 1965); and Wilhelm Meusburger, Michael Allan, and Helmut Swozilek, eds., Norman Douglas: A Portrait (Capri: Edizioni la conchiglia, 2004).
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My Penguin copy of Siren Land (top) was published in 1948. The photograph was taken in 1949 and shows Douglas at age 80 contemplating his bust as a child.
World Enough 