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SOUTH WIND
by Norman Douglas
Indypublis.com, November 2002
352 pages
$21.99
ISBN: 1404332995


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Note: This book was originally published in 1917.

Most readers have a favorite year-in, year-out novel, and this is mine. It justs happens also to be a murder mystery, although not necessarily in the most classic sense.

SOUTH WIND was for years the most popular book in the Modern Library series, but it almost defies pegging as to genre. I suspect some readers have used it as a vocabulary builder, for its erudite language refuses to cave in to the lowest common denominator in any way. It's the inquisitive bibliophile's dream, for one could spend almost a lifetime running down all its allusions to history and literature. Its humor is an exquisite aperatif, and its common-sensical philosophy almost a guidebook for getting by in a hostile world that seems to treat the individual so unfairly.

An author with a streak of independence may find encouragement in Douglas's own view of his book, as when he writes in the Introduction to the 1925 edition: "Many reviewers declared themselves unable to find the slightest semblance of a 'plot' in SOUTH WIND, which annoyed me so furiously that ... I told them what I thought of them and their perspicacity and proved, to my own complete satisfaction, that SOUTH WIND is nothing but plot from beginning to end."

Of course, we shouldn't take too much stock in Douglas's words. When he tells us that his fictional Italian-speaking island called Nepenthe is NOT Capri, he is lying. In truth, Nepenthe is more Capri than Capri itself. When he says the characters he named Caloveglia, van Koppen, the 'good Duke,' Eames, Keith and Don Francesco are "pure inventions," we know he speaks with a forked tongue, although he admits that his character Bashakuloff is based on Rasputin. Miss Wilberforce, who dances nude in the town square every time she drinks too much, was, according to Douglas, based on a "dozen dames of that particular alcoholic temperament." I happen to know that, actually, with a prescience few authors are capable of, Douglas based the delightful Miss Wilberforce on a character from Sherwood Anderson's 1919 novel, WINESBURG, OHIO.

Too, the "good Duke" is easy to track down, being based on no less that the Emperor Tiberius. In 1990 my wife and I, an American student at Oxford, and a headmaster from a school in the north of England climbed to the ruins of Villa Jovis on Capri and had a picnic lunch, and all the time when I was not thinking of Tiberius, I reflected on Douglas's SOUTH WIND and how fortunate I was that such as book is in existence, and there I was in the middle of it.

The book is full of hyperbole, satire, irony, sarcasm, gentleness, gentility, generosity, melancholia, sentimentalism, and a host of other substantive literary desirables. Above all it has charm and good-natured humor. It has a hero, Mr. Heard, Bishop of Bampopo in the equatorial regions of Africa, who is returning to England. He stops by Nepenthe to see a cousin, Mrs. Meadows, who resides with her baby in her Villa called Mon Repos in Old Town (read Anacapri) while her husband is serving in India.

On the boat from the mainland, Bishop Heard meets a thoroughly disreputable looking and speaking Mr. Muhlen and a rather corpulent Catholic priest, Monsignor Don Franceso. In the Introduction, Douglas calls Don Francesco the only respectable person in the whole crowd, perhaps because the Monsignor is extremely broad-minded, outrageously frank, and content to accept religion as a job rather than a calling. As soon as they land, Don Francesco is off to see the Duchess of San Marino, an American expatriate who owns Villa Khismet, and tell her about Heard's arrival. The socially prominent Duchess loved gossip, and, like so many others of the large expatriate colony on Nepenthe, equally loved something new, and Mr. Heard was new. She also served most delicious meals, so that an invitation to Villa Khismet was much coveted.

The Duchess is accompanied by a 19-year-old man from England named Denis Phipps, who might seem like a chameleon since he usually adopts the colors of those he is talking to, but he is actually in the deeply ratiocinative process of trying to find himself. We are also introduced to a band of exiled Russians headed by an ex-monk, Bashakuloff, a self-appointed Messiah, who pronounces pithy dogmata wherever he goes, which raise havoc with the local population, and then with his band goes on to other places, leaving those behind glad to see the back of him.

Other characters are a poor remittance man, whose family in England pays him to keep away. Several others are remittance men, I believe, including Commissioner Freddy Parker. Parker has a non-paying position as Financial Commissioner to the island representing Nicaragua, and he also is president of the Club, which serves gut-rotting liquor at exorbitant prices to the more rowdy of the British expatriates and gives them a place to play cards, spout bullshit, and get into fights.

Ernest Eames is known as the Bibliographer, his chosen life's work being to annotate a book of the island's history, fauna, and flora, ANTIQUITIES OF NEPENTHE, published in 1709 by a Monsieur Pirelli. Few locales as small as Nepenthe have had such an expansive and interesting history, not only with the Good Duke, who was known as merciful when he merely arbitrarily killed someone outright rather than torture the person to death, but also Saint Dodekanus, who was devoured by one of many historic tribes, the Crotalophoboi, and who left a tremendous lore of information for the more intellectually curious. The island has frequently suffered from blow-offs by the mainland volcano, and the scirocco that comes every year, that infamously infernal south wind, is every bit as much a character as are the humans.

Then there are Count Caloveglia and the multimillionaire Mr. Van Koppen. The count lives in the Upper Town and is hallowed by his aristocratic family lines going back through the misty veil of antiquity. Proud, highly cultured, full of grace and good manners, a true gentleman, alas, this exemplary nobleman is poor as a churchmouse. The American, Van Koppen, arrives regularly in his yacht, like the swallows returning to Capistrano each year, the occasion being eagerly awaited by his friends on the island with open palms, for they know the generosity of this man who made his millions from the manufacture of condoms, and no one benefits more than Count Caloveglia. It's an annual contest of the minds to see if Van Koppen can find ways to give money to the Count without bruising the Count's noble pride, and this year the Locri Faun gives him his opportunity.

Someone is murdered, but no one seems to care. Who can care about anything when that south wind is blowing so infernally? Except the Bishop, who finds himself confronted by a horrible dilemma. Yet, he has been on the island a while now, and perhaps his Christianity has been ameliorated a bit by the company he's been keeping. We shall draw a curtain and let the Bishop meditate.

The truth is that there's just too much in SOUTH WIND to describe in a book review. In fact, there's too much to read in one reading, which is why I read it over and over, I don't know how many times, but there is always a freshness to it.

Who could fail to like a book where we find such dicta and parables as these (written no later than 1917):

"Be perfect of your kind, whatever your kind may be."

"If he values his skin, he must accommodate himself to current dogmas."

"The secret of happiness is curiosity."

"We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State."

"No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble."

"Whatever fails to elevate the mind is not truly profitable."

"Female Emancipation is going to do away with a lot of cant and idealism."

"That is the worst of dining with a man. You have to be civil the next morning."

"I defy you to name me a single-barreled crank. If a man is a religious lunatic, or a vegetarian, he is sure to be touched in some other department as well."

"The Russian Government is notoriously tender-hearted."

"To find a friend, one must close one eye."

"They produce a new kind of public, a public which craves for personalities rather than information."

"When people cease to reflect, they become idealists."

"What is all wisdom save a collecting of platitudes?"

"She distilled scandal from every pore."

"Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother."

"She possessed the most priceless of all gifts: she believed her own lies."

And I'll leave off gently with a small passage of infinite charm and truth: A boatman is speaking. "Dam-fool foreigner here, he collect flowers. Always collecting flowers on bad rocks; sometimes with rope around him, for fear of falling; with rope, ha, ha, ha! Nasty man. And poor. No money at all. He always say, 'All Italians liars, and liars where go? To Hell, sure. That's where liars go. That's where Italians go.' Now rich man he say liar to poor man. But poor man, he better not say liar to rich man. That so, gentlemens. One day he say liar to nice old Italian. Nice old man think: 'Ah, you wait, putrid puppy of bastard pig, you wait.' Nice old man got plenty good lot vineyards back of cliff there. One day he walk to see grapes. Then he look to end of cliff and see rope hanging. Very funny, he think. Then he look to end of rope and see nasty-man hanging. That so, gentlemens. Nasty man hanging in air. Can't get up. 'Pull me up,' says he. Nice old man, he laugh -- ha, ha, ha! laugh till his belly hurt. Then he pull out knife and begin to cut rope. 'See knife?' he shout down. 'How much to pull up?' Five hundred dollar! How much? Five thousand! How much? Fifty thousand! Nice old man say quite quiet: 'You no got fifty thousand in the world, you liar. Liars go where? To Hell, sure. That's where liars go. That's where you go, mister. To Hell.' And he cut rope. Down he go, patatrac! round and round in air, like firework wheel, on to first rock -- paff! Second rock -- paff! fifty rock -- pa-pa-pa-paff!" [Note: This is NOT the murder whereof I speak.]

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, May 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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