LET'S free associate. If I say Capri, what comes to mind? Glamour, gorgeous views, ritzy shopping — the uninterrupted leisure of la dolce vita. And what if I say Graham Greene? Troubled faith, espionage, unforgiving, “cinematic” realism, seedy characters in sordid places. “Greeneland” can be thrilling on the page, but not many of us would want to go there on vacation.
In other words, there's good reason to assume that the 20th-century British novelist and the sparkling island in the Bay of Naples are mutually incompatible, that the two should never be linked in the same sentence. Greene, typically succinct, had this to say about Capri: “It isn't really my kind of place.”
Once a second home to Roman emperors, it's now a tourist destination, and Greene, one of the most traveled writers of all time, was temperamentally unsuited to tourism: The notion of traveling for fun wouldn't have occurred to him.
And yet he bought a small house on Capri in 1948 and kept it for more than 40 years, returning for short visits, mostly in the spring and fall, until the very end of his life, when he became too ill to travel. The house, Il Rosaio, was a rare constant in Greene's restless existence (“one of nature's displaced persons,” Malcolm Muggeridge called him). In 1978, Greene was made an honorary citizen of the town of Anacapri, and in a brief speech on the occasion, he gave the obvious explanation for his biannual pilgrimage to an island that wasn't at all to his taste: On Capri, he said, “in four weeks I do the work of six months elsewhere.”
Case closed. Writers must sit alone at a desk and write — that's the only way the books get written, and Greene wrote a great many, including 26 novels. “The End of the Affair” (1951), “The Quiet American” (1955), “Our Man in Havana” (1958), “A Burnt-Out Case” (1961), “Travels With My Aunt” (1969) — portions of all of these were written in the bare, whitewashed study at Il Rosaio. If you need further proof that the connection between Greene and Capri was essentially utilitarian, consider this: Though he wrote copiously while he was on the island, dutifully turning out his minimum daily quota of 350 words (“One has no talent,” Greene perversely insisted, “I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time”), he never once used Capri as material for his fiction.
But if you go there with his books on the brain, you'll discover the moment you arrive that Capri and Greeneland are not necessarily so far apart. From a distance, as the ferry crosses the wide bay, with Naples and Mount Vesuvius at your back, the island promises the delights of a Mediterranean paradise: dramatic limestone cliffs capped with a thick canopy of trees; a cheerful splattering of houses, white and pastel, climbing up steep hills from a harbor crowded with sumptuous yachts.
As the ferry docks, the brute logistics of day-trip tourism take over: thousands and thousands of bodies flow in and out of the port every day of summer, disembarking in the morning only to trudge back up the gangplank, sweaty and tired, late in the afternoon. The pier, with as many as half a dozen ferries swallowing or disgorging passengers, is packed alarmingly tight.
Greene had captured the feel of this kind of human tide a decade before he first came to Capri. In the opening pages of his masterpiece “Brighton Rock” (1938), he described the holiday crowds arriving in Brighton, 50,000 of them down from London for a day at the seaside, “stepping off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air.”
The air in the Marina Grande is glittering, yes, but not fresh — diesel and sunblock perfume the tawdry scene. Get out as quickly as you can — the title of Greene's second volume of autobiography springs to mind: “Ways of Escape” (1980) — and avoid centers of population until the evening, when the day-trippers have departed.
The vast majority of tourists take the funicular up to the town of Capri, where the modest, winding streets have been hijacked by high-end retail: Prada, Tod's, Bulgari, Gucci. Imagine Rodeo Drive squeezed into the narrow lanes of an Italian hill town and swept by a surging stream of visitors in sneakers and knapsacks, a ululating Babel that circulates in and out of the main piazza like a video on a playback loop.
Others take stubby orange buses and convertible taxis across the sheer face of a cliff and up and around Monte Solaro to Anacapri, the quieter of the island's two towns. It, too, has a touristy pedestrian shopping street, noticeably less chic, that peters out as it wends westward. Piazza Caprile, the small, dusty square closest to Greene's house, could be the center of any ordinary Italian village. No trace here of either la dolce vita or the day-tripping masses, only an optometrist, a fruit and vegetable store and a betting parlor. Old ladies with canes are dressed in black, woolly tights on their swollen legs; children, running home for lunch, wear smocks; grizzled men stand in doorways in groups of two and three, smoking. A spreading olive tree promises that the piazza is as it was and will be.
The street down to Greene's house narrows past the bakery, the hardware store and the self-service laundry. Bougainvillea spills over the whitewashed walls of villas, a cascade of bright flowers, cactus crowning a doorway. Around a bend, a hazy slice of the Tyrrhenian Sea in the distance is just a shade darker than the cloudless sky. Palm leaves rattle in the breeze, and from farther away comes the sound of unhurried construction. Around another corner is Il Rosaio. Near the wrought-iron gate, a marble plaque erected in 1992 by the Lions Club of Capri informs visitors (in Italian) that this was the residence of Graham Greene, honorary citizen of Anacapri. Two loud American women march by, huffing from their hike; they pass without a glance at the house or the plaque — just about the only visible trace of Greene left on the island.
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