George Norman Douglas (8 December 1868 – 7 February 1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. His travel books, such as Old Calabria (1915), were also appreciated for the quality of their writing.
His sexual encounters with children—girls and boys, some as young as eleven—led to charges of indecent assault and his flight from England to Italy. He subsequently fled Florence to avoid arrest for the rape of a 10-year-old girl. His biographer Rachel Hope Cleves described him in 2020 as "[b]y present standards ... a monster".Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 1.
Life Norman Douglas was born in Thüringen, Austria (his surname was registered at birth as Douglass;The Douglas Archives . douglashistory.co.uk. Retrieved 12 February 2012. he dropped the second s as an adult).Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 20 (photo caption). His mother was the German-Scottish aristocrat Vanda von Poellnitz (1840–1902). His father, John Sholto Douglass (1838–1874), was the 15th Laird of Tilquhillie. He was the manager of a local cotton mill; in his spare time, he was an archaeologist, researching the history of the Vorarlberg, and was also an enthusiastic mountaineer. Douglas's paternal grandfather, the 14th Laird of Tilquhillie, had established the factory in the 1830s, in order to pay off debts on his ancestral lands in Aberdeenshire. Douglas's maternal great-grandfather was General James Ochoncar Forbes, 17th Lord Forbes. Douglas had an older brother, John, and a younger sister, Mary. John "remained devout throughout his life, but Douglas came to consider religion a pernicious absurdity".Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 19. "In September 1874, when Douglas was five years old, his father, John Sholto Douglass, fell a thousand feet to his death while hunting chamois in the mountains".Cleves, Unspeakable, which raises the possibility that it was a suicide, pp. 18-19, 85. "It's probable that the death of his father, a devout Presbyterian, contributed to Douglas's rejection of religion".Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 19.
Five years after Douglas's father died, his mother married Jakob Jehly, a local painter. Both her Douglas in-laws and her own von Poellnitz family objected to the marriage, because Jehly was of a peasant background, Catholic, and fourteen years younger than Vanda. They pressured Vanda to send Douglas and his brother John to school in England, which she did.Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 23. Douglas never mentioned the remarriage in any of his writings.
Douglas spent the first years of his life on the family estate, Villa Falkenhorst, in Thüringen, and was brought up mainly at Tilquhillie, Deeside, his paternal home in Scotland. He was educated at Yarlet Hall, then at a Leicestershire vicarage under the Rev. Green before attending Uppingham School in England, and finally, at a Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. He was fluent in German and English during his youth and later learnt French and Italian. Douglas developed an interest in natural science as a child and began contributing articles to papers about zoology at the age of 18.
Douglas started in the diplomatic service in 1894 and from then until 1896 was based in St. Petersburg. He was placed on leave after an alleged affair. In 1897 he bought a villa (Villa Maya) in Posillipo, a maritime suburb of Naples. The next year he married a first cousin, Elizabeth Louisa Theobaldina FitzGibbon, known as Elsa; their mothers were sisters, daughters of Baron Ernst von Poellnitz. They had two children, Louis Archibald (Archie) and Robert Sholto (Robin),Collection Norman Douglas – Robert Kohler . Normandouglas.ch. Retrieved 10 August 2011. and Norman's first published book, Unprofessional Tales (1901), was written in collaboration with Elsa and first appeared under the pseudonym Normyx. However, the couple divorced in 1903 because of Elizabeth's infidelity. Douglas then moved to Capri, began dividing his time between the Villa Daphne there and London, and became a more committed writer. Nepenthe, the fictional island setting of his novel South Wind (1917), is Capri in light disguise. His friends on the island included the opium addict Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen.
From 1912 to 1916 Douglas worked for The English Review. He met D. H. Lawrence through this connection.Cleves, Unspeakable, pp. 113, 172. From 1918 to 1920, Douglas contributed fifteen pieces to the Anglo-Italian Review, "detailing his travels throughout Italy" and including descriptions of "charming boys and girls."Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 132.
Douglas's novel They Went (1920), whose original title was to have been “Theophilus”, is a fantasy based on Breton folklore.
D. H. Lawrence based the character James Argyle in his novel Aaron's Rod (1922) on Douglas, which, according to Richard Aldington, led to a falling out between the two writers,Aldington, Richard (1941). Life for Life's Sake, p. 375; Aldington, Richard, Pinorman (1954), pp. 165, 185). which Douglas denied. Lawrence also wrote an introduction to Maurice Magnus's book, Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, which was published two years after Aaron's Rod.Magnus, Maurice. Memoirs of the Foreign Legion. London: Martin Secker (1924); New York: Alfred A. Knopf (1925). Lawrence's introduction is reprinted in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works by D. H. Lawrence (The Viking Press, Inc. 1970); in Cushman, ed. (1987); in Introduction and Reviews in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence (2004); and in Life With a Capital L, Penguin Books Limited (also published by New York Review Books as The Bad Side of Books), essays by D. H. Lawrence chosen and introduced by Geoff Dyer (2019). Douglas criticized the introduction in A Plea for Better Manners.A Plea for Better Manners was a privately printed pamphlet (1924), reprinted with changes in Douglas's collection, Experiments (1926).Lawrence replied to A Plea for Better Manners with "The Late Mr Maurice Magnus: A Letter," in New Statesman, 20 February 1926. Lawrence's letter is reprinted in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, 1936, pp. 806-807; in Selected Essays, Penguin Books, 1950, pp. 349-351; and in The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Volume V, 1924-1927, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 395-397. Both A Plea for Better Manners and "The Late Mr Maurice Magnus" are reprinted in Cushman, ed. (1987). In Life for Life's Sake (1941), p. 375, Aldington writes that Lawrence's portrait of Douglas in Aaron's Rod "was the real cause of the breach between those two and of Norman's anti-Lawrence pamphlet, though the ostensible casus belli was Lawrence's superbly written introduction to the Memoirs of Maurice Magnus".Aldington repeats this language in Pinorman, pp. 178-179. In Late Harvest (1946), Douglas wrote, "No. The playful caricature of myself in Lawrence's Aaron's Rod is not the reason why I took up arms against him. The reason was that he had distorted the character of a dead friend of mine [Maurice Magnus] whose memory I wished to defend."Douglas, Norman (1946). Late Harvest. London: Lindsay Drummond, p. 52. Rachel Hope Cleves is in accord with Douglas, writing that, despite objections Douglas expressed in private letters to Lawrence's portrayal of him in Aaron's Rod, "Douglas remained friendly with Lawrence. The breaking point came two years later, when Lawrence published the memoirs of their mutual friend Maurice Magnus, who had committed suicide in 1920".Cleaves, Unspeakable, p. 185. Aldington, however, sticks to his position, writing in Pinorman (1954), p. 191, "that even after the publication of the Magnus pamphlet ... Norman was trying to use the annoyance created by Aaron's Rod against its author."
In the book Twentieth Century Authors Douglas is quoted as stating that he disliked Marxism, Puritanism and "all kinds of set forms, including official Christianity".
During Douglas's years in Florence he was associated with the publisher and bookseller Pino Orioli, who published books by Douglas and other English authors in his Lungarno series. Many of these books, notably the first edition of Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, might have been prosecuted for obscenity if they had been published in London. Douglas probably had a major hand in writing Orioli's autobiography, Adventures of a Bookseller.In his book, Pinorman, Richard Aldington writes, "Pino did know English well and spoke it fluently, though with certain mistakes which gave it a peculiar flavour. And he was perfectly capable of writing those books himself, except that verbal correction would have been needed". (The books are Adventures of a Bookseller and Moving Along: Just a Diary.) Aldington then adds that Douglas, rather than make corrections to the two books, "rewrote Pino's books, and spoiled them, by taking out the special quality which was Pino and substituting his own much less amusing mannerisms". (p. 29)
The possibility of arrest for raping a child led Douglas to flee Italy for the South of France in 1937. Following the collapse of France in 1940 Douglas left the Riviera and made a circuitous journey to London, where he lived from 1942 to 1946. He published the first edition of his Almanac in a tiny edition in Lisbon. He returned to Capri in 1946 and was made a citizen of the island. His circle of acquaintances included the writer Graham Greene, the composer Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji and the food writer Elizabeth David.
Douglas died in Capri, apparently after deliberately overdosing himself on drugs after a long illness (see Elisabeth Moor, An Impossible Woman: The Memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri).Edited with an epilogue by Graham Greene, New York: Viking Press, 1976. As he lay dying, he was approached by German nuns who offered assistance and his last words are reputed to have been: "Get those fucking nuns away from me."Old Calabria (via Google Books), by Norman Douglas; Northwestern University Press; 1996 edition; introduction by Jon Manchip White, page xvi.Another introduction to Old Calabria reports, "He was just entering his eighty-fourth year when I last saw him on Capri some months before his death, and I can still hear the mock despair of his parting words: 'For God's sake, dearie, preserve me from those *******.'" John Davenport, in Old Calabria, London: Secker & Warburg (1956), p. vii.Rachel Hope Cleves writes that Douglas's friend Algernon Islay de Courcy Lyons "joked it was probably 'Get those fucking nuns away from me,' but later conceded it may have been 'love to so-&-so.'" Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 257. The Latin inscription on his tombstone, from an ode by Horace, reads: Omnes eodem cogimur, "We are all driven to the same end".Horace, Ode 2.3. Merriampark.com. Retrieved 10 August 2011.
Sexual encounters with children
Douglas biographer and historian of sexuality Rachel Hope Cleves writes, "In the Berg Collection room at the New York Public Library, I came across Norman Douglas's transcriptions of the travel diaries of Giuseppe "Pino" Orioli ... Orioli and Douglas were boon companions in Florence, where Douglas lived during the 1920s and '30s. The two men went on numerous walking tours together in Italy and abroad ... Douglas's transcriptions ... didn't sanitize his accounts of Douglas's paid sexual encounters with the boys they met along the way."Cleves, Unspeakable, pp. 4–5.
Cleves adds, "In 1923, when he was fifty-four years old, ... Douglas boasted that he'd had sex with eleven hundred virgins during his lifetime. Those were just the girls. In his thirties, he switched mostly to boys. No one knows how many boys there were."Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 1. "Sex between adults and children," Cleves writes, "was more normal during Douglas's early adulthood than it is now."Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 86. "Douglas entered into a series of long-lasting relationships with boys," some of whom "remained bound to Douglas throughout their adult lives."Cleves, Unspeakable, p. 87.