South E-Book

Merlin Coverley

• Herausgeber: Oldcastle Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 395

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Artists and writers from the colder climes of northern Europe have long felt the lure of the South of the continent. Goethe was revitalised by his encounters with Mediterranean culture on his journey to Italy. Nietzsche took flight southwards to begin his life anew, while DH Lawrence sought the health-giving southern sun in Sicily and Sardinia. But across the centuries, other outposts of the South have provoked a similar obsession. The South Seas cast a spell over figures such as Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin. The American Deep South and the southermost reaches of Latin America have been celebrated in the works of writers as diverse as John Muir, Jack Kerouac and Jorge Luis Borges. While the Great White South of the Antarctic has provided the backdrop to the darkest imaginings of Coleridge, Poe and Lovecraft. Even London, south of the river, is a place where novelists compete today to stake out a literary territory of their own. Moving between geography and mythology, literature and history, South is the first book to look at all things Southern in one volume. It examines the idea of the South as a symbol of freedom and escape, as well as the depository for many of our deepest unconscious fears and desires. It also charts the history of the South as the chosen location for the utopian visions of the North. From the beaches of Tahiti to the streets of Buenos Aires, from Naples to New Orleans, Merlin Coverley's brilliant and wide-ranging study throws light on the ways in which the idea of the South, in all its forms, has come to exert such a powerful hold on our collective imaginations.

Leseprobe

How has the idea of the South come to exert such a powerful hold over our imagination? From the beaches of Southern Europe to the Great White South of the Antarctic; from South America to the South Pacific, South explores this most diverse and captivating of regions.

The South has long since cast its spell on writers and artists, from Goethe and Poe, to Gauguin, Lawrence and Kerouac; while landscapes of ice and snow, sand and sea, have lured explorers southwards for centuries, often with fatal consequences. This book will follow in the footsteps of Cook, Scott, John Muir and others as they recount their journeys.

About the author

Merlin Coverley is the author of five books: London Writing (2005); Psychogeography (2006); Occult London (2008); Utopia (2010) and The Art of Wandering: The Writer as Walker (2012). He lives in London.

‘I shall go further south – feel I want to go further and further south – don’t know why.’

DH Lawrence*

Contents

Introduction: The Idea of South

Chapter One: Goethe’s Law

The Grand Tour

Goethe’s Italian Journey

Nietzsche’s Discovery of the South

Heliotherapy and the Invention of Sunbathing

Southern Twilight: DH Lawrence in Italy

Gold Rush: Spain and the Tourist South.

Chapter Two: In the South Seas

Terra Australis and the Utopian South

Transit of Venus: De Bougainville, Cook and the Discovery of the South

The Arrival of the Missionaries

Paradise Lost: Melville and Stevenson

Noa Noa: Gauguin and the Tahitian Dream

The Nuclear South.

Chapter Three: Magic South

Deep South

Walking South: John Muir

Southland

South of the Border: Kerouac in Mexico

Sur, Borges and ‘The South’.

Chapter Four: The Polar South

Arctic and Antarctic

Antarctic Mythology

The Aristocrats of the South

Hollow Earth

The Polar Gothic: Coleridge, Poe and Lovecraft

The Antarctic as Refuge.

Chapter Five: South of the River

Bibliography

Copyright

Map of the South Pole by unknown artist (17th Century)

Introduction: The Idea of South

Every person is born with his own north or south, whether he is born into an external one as well – is of little consequence.

Jean Paul1

Our sense that north is ‘up’ and south is ‘down’ is purely an artefact of map-making conventions in the northern hemisphere.

Gyrus2

In 1989 the landscape artist, Andy Goldsworthy, constructed four circular arches from snow bricks, positioning them to face one another across the arctic axis at the North Pole. Goldsworthy named his sculpture ‘Touching North’, an ambiguous title for a work which demonstrates how the directions of the compass may effectively be rendered meaningless: emerge through any of the four arches and one finds oneself heading south.3 Goldsworthy’s work reminds us not only of the ease with which our man-made attribution of the cardinal directions may be overridden, but also of the way in which the meanings of these axial points are implied by one another. For there can be no north without south, as the OED entry for ‘South’ confirms: ‘Towards, or in the direction of, that part of the earth or heavens which is directly opposite to the North.’4 Such a definition suggests an equality between such designations, the one informed by the other, and vice versa. Yet within the family of cardinal points, some directions are clearly more equal than others. For ‘Touching North’ is also indicative of the unstated but nevertheless unequal relationship which governs our understanding of north and south, the one implicit within the other yet somehow ancillary to it.

The fact that most early civilisations are now believed to have developed to the north of the equator goes some way to explaining the privileged position the north has since acquired as the summit of the world. The enduring power of such a worldview is demonstrated by the fact that even civilisations such as that of the Mayans in the southern hemisphere regarded the North Pole as the ‘top’ of the world, despite the fact that at their latitude it is barely fifteen degrees above the horizon. While at an even more southerly latitude of some 13.5 degrees south of the equator, the indigenous population of the Incan capital of Cuzco in Peru also regarded the ‘upper’ part of their city as that which lay to the north, despite the North Pole lying well below the horizon, a fact which has since been attributed to the influence of the southward migration of Stone Age colonists.5 Even in medieval Europe, maps such as those found in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (c.560–636) located the cardinal point in the south not at the South Pole, as one might imagine, but rather on the equator, perpetuating a view of the world established in the early classical era in which the meridies, or Roman cardinal point for the south, signified the southern boundary of the known world, then located within the equatorial region.6 Historical representations of the south, as well as the mythology in which they are embedded, will be explored elsewhere in this book. But in seeking the origin of the dominant position which the north has come to hold over its southern counterpart, it is useful to note the comments of the author, John T Irwin, who has outlined the evolution of this disparity:

Just as there is a privileged pole in each of the oppositions associated with bodily directionality (i.e., front over rear, right over left), so there is also a privileged pole in each of the oppositions associated with geographic directionality. […] In the definitions of right and left and of east and west, it is stipulated that one be “facing north”; while in the definitions of north and south the condition is that one be “facing the sunset” (west). This preference for north over south and west over east as the directions one faces in order to define the other cardinal points and the sides of the body can perhaps be explained in terms of practical navigation. The privileging of the north probably results in part from the fact that on a day-to-day basis the North Star is a more reliable approximate indicator of true north than the rising sun is of true east or the setting sun of true west, while the privileging of the west may well be a function of the fact that in the modern world the sun’s setting is an event likely to be observed by more people on a given day than the sun’s rising. Yet in the privileging of one pole of a differential opposition over another, there is always a cultural bias at work, and certainly the favored status of north and west in these definitions results in part from their being the directions most closely associated with both the geographic location and the historical designation of that culture represented by the dictionary, the modern, scientific culture of that industrialized portion of the northern hemisphere traditionally referred to as the West.7

As Irwin’s comments suggest, both west and north, whether as a consequence of astronomical considerations or through cultural bias, have come to be seen as the privileged cardinal points, as well as the global designators of wealth and political power. As for the Orient (from the Latin oriens), this has long since been equated with the spiritual radiance of the rising sun, with the churches of the Christian faith orientated to the east; this is widely held to be ‘the pre-eminent sacred direction, the point by which to orient oneself, to place oneself in this world with regard to the divine.’8If then, these three points of the compass can so readily be assigned a role, albeit a symbolic one, what of the remaining cardinal point, the south? In what manner should this direction, this region of the globe, be portrayed? This book will attempt to provide an answer to this question, by exploring some of the world’s ‘souths’ and the many different ways in which they are represented.

One such way, of course, is via the convenient but monolithic shorthand of the Global South, the ‘collective name for the industrially and economically less advanced countries of the world, typically situated to the south of the industrialised nations.’9 Yet if this is a region which has, however unfairly, become perceived as one synonymous with poverty and deprivation, it is also one which has often been depicted historically, from a Western perspective at least, as an ‘empty’ region, a blank slate which has been repeatedly overwritten by the mapmakers and mythologists of the northern hemisphere.

There are many ways in which the cardinal points may be brought to life, and many symbols which may be attributed to them, from colours to mythological creatures; from times of the day to seasons of the year; from winds and weather to gender and bodily form. In Cesare Ripa’s iconographical compendium, Iconologia (1593), for example, they are personified in the following manner: the east is a ‘pretty youth, with golden locks’; holding flowers in his right hand ready to blossom, he represents the morning and the rising sun. The west, by contrast, is an old man holding a bunch of poppies in his left hand; his is the representation of the setting sun at the close of day. The north is depicted by a man in the prime of life, fair-haired, blue-eyed and of a ‘ruddy complexion’; suited in white armour, his hand clasping his sword, ‘his habit of body denotes the quality of the cold climate that makes men have a good stomach, and quick digestion’; his posture, as he stands tall against a backdrop of cloud and snow, reflects ‘the bravery of the northern people’. While in the south we see a young black man illuminated by the noon-day sun above his head; in his right hand, arrows, representing the sun’s penetrating rays, in his left, a lotus branch, symbolising water.10 One does not require a keen understanding of Ripa’s complex symbolic vocabulary to identify the dominant figure here.

Alongside such symbolic representations, another way in which the four corners of the earth have commonly been characterised is through the attribution of human temperament: hard-working or lazy; cunning or stupid; short-tempered or placid. This is the manner in which one group or region has traditionally portrayed its neighbour. Such is the case in Wu Che’êng-ên’s Chinese folk-tale, translated into English as Monkey, or Journey to the West, in which we encounter this passage:

One day when Buddha had been preaching to the Bodhisattvas and Arhats, he said at the end of his sermon, ‘I have been noticing that there is a lot of difference in the inhabitants of the Four Continents of the universe. Those in the Eastern Continent are respectful, peaceable and cheerful; those of the Northern are somewhat prone to take life, but they are so dumb, lethargic and stupid that they don’t do much harm. In our Western Continent, there is no greed or slaughter; we nurture our humours and hide our magic, and although we have no supreme illuminates everyone is safe against the assaults of the age. But in Jumbudvı-pa, the Southern Continent, they are greedy, lustful, murderous, and quarrelsome. I wonder whether a knowledge of the True Scriptures would not cause some improvement in them?’11

This less than flattering portrait of the inhabitants of the ‘Southern Continent’ is by no means peculiar to China in the sixteenth century. Indeed, at around much the same time in Europe, the Reformation was helping to forge a similar outlook, as new religious divisions between north and south emerged, and ignorance and suspicion gradually hardened into lasting prejudice.12Once established in the popular imagination, such prejudices have proven surprisingly enduring, and thus more than three hundred years later, we find John Ruskin’s description of European architectural styles betraying precisely the same chauvinism towards the south:

There is, first, the habit of hard and rapid working; the industry of the tribes of the North, quickened by the coldness of the climate, and giving an expression of sharp energy to all they do, as opposed to the languor of the Southern tribes, however much of fire there may be in the heart of that languor, for lava itself may flow languidly. […] Strength of will, independence of character, resoluteness of purpose, impatience of undue control, and that general tendency to set the individual reason against authority, and the individual deed against destiny, which, in the Northern tribes, has opposed itself throughout all ages, to the languid submission, in the Southern, of thought to tradition, and purpose to fatality, are all more or less traceable in the rigid lines, vigorous and various masses, and daringly projecting and independent structure of the Northern Gothic ornament: while the opposite feelings are in like manner legible in the graceful and softly guided waves and wreathed bands, in which Southern decoration is constantly disposed; in its tendency to lose its independence, and fuse itself into the surface of the masses upon which it is traced; and in the expression seen so often, in the arrangement of those masses themselves, of an abandonment of their strength to an inevitable necessity, or a listless repose.13

Of course, ideas such as these are replicated not only at a continental level, but within individual countries and individual cities; they reflect an outlook which is often dependent upon little more than which side of this, frequently imaginary, border one happens to inhabit, originate from, or identify with. In this light, one may compare the comments of Ruskin, above, with those of Antonio Gramsci, whose polemical essay, ‘Some Aspects of the Southern Question’ (1926), explores the effects of a similarly entrenched north-south axis within the borders of his own twentieth-century Italy. Here Gramsci reveals how such designations may be employed not only to highlight or caricature cultural differences but also in support of rather more pernicious ideological purposes:

It is well-known what kind of ideology has been disseminated in myriad ways among the masses in the North, by the propagandists of the bourgeoisie: the South is the ball and chain which prevents the social development of Italy from progressing more rapidly; the Southerners are biologically inferior beings, semi-barbarians or total barbarians, by natural destiny; if the South is backward, the fault does not lie with the capitalist system or with any other historical cause, but with Nature, which has made the Southerners lazy, incapable, criminal and barbaric – only tempering this harsh fate with the purely individual explosion of a few great geniuses, like isolated palm-trees in an arid and barren desert.14

Such divisions are equally visible in the UK, where the North-South divide remains a social and economic reality bolstered by similarly extravagant perceptions of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the populations on either side. This national disparity, both real and imagined, continues to be the subject of endless discussion, but amidst the multifarious voices which have been raised in celebration or denigration of their chosen side in this partisan and often parochial debate, there is one which is worthy of particular attention: ‘One must have a proper moral sense about the points of the compass,’ writes WH Auden, ‘North must seem the “good” direction, the way towards heroic adventures, South the way to ignoble ease and decadence.’15 According to his biographer, Rupert Davenport-Hines, Auden developed his acute and lasting association with northernness as a young boy, through the powerful influence of his father’s love of Nordic history, encouraging him to construct ‘a world of private associations around latitudes and longitudes: his artistic, moral and sensual criteria were all related to his personalised reordering of the planet.’16 Many writers, as we shall see, have expressed a similarly devout association with their favoured point of the compass; it is those of a more southerly disposition that I shall be discussing here. But few of them have been able to articulate such feelings with the degree of precision which Auden displays:

My feelings have been orientated by the compass as far back as I can remember […] To this day Crewe Junction marks the wildly exciting frontier where the alien South ends and the North, my world, begins.

For reasons which will be, perhaps, more obvious to psychologists than to me, North and South are the foci of two sharply contrasted clusters of images and emotions […] North – cold, wind, precipices, glaciers, caves, heroic conquest of dangerous obstacles, whales, hot meat and vegetables, concentration and production, privacy. South – heat, light, drought, calm, agricultural plains, trees, rotarian crowds, the life of ignoble ease, spiders, fruits and desserts, the waste of time, publicity. West and East are relatively neutral. West is more favourable, i.e., more northern, but conjures up the unheroic image of retired couples holding hands in the sunset; East is definitely southern and means dried figs and scorpions.17

Auden attributes his outlook to two formative factors, Puritanism and introversion, arguing that it is these traits which identify one as a ‘cold weather man’, temperamentally unsuited to what he catalogues as the lush vegetation, heat, noise and crowds to be found in the south.18Written in 1947, Auden’s words may still be seen as the definitive statement of ‘northernness’ as it is recognised in the UK, a moral position as much as it is one of temperament, contrasting the north, in all its hardy, austere simplicity, with the effete delinquency of the south. Almost seventy years later, however, and little appears to have changed. For Auden’s vision of the North continues to hold sway, a position which has only been reinforced by the startling array of publications to have appeared in recent years devoted to an analysis of all things northern.19 While at first glance such a septentrional obsession may appear a peculiarly English phenomenon, it is in fact one whose influence extends far beyond the borders of this country, including much of the wider world within its embrace. This is the prevailing current against which this book was written.

What Auden’s comments confirm, however, as do those of Ruskin and Gramsci before him, is that the parameters of one’s own north and south have far less to do with any cartographical convention than with one’s own sensibility; for just as the south is both a direction and a destination, so too is it a state of mind, an internal compass bearing through which one orientates one’s place in the world. That this is the case should become evident to any reader of this book, which was written from the perspective of a northern European, albeit one living in the south of a southern city. As a consequence, many of the souths that I shall be exploring in these pages are to be found in the northern hemisphere, while many of the literary representations of the southern hemisphere I shall be discussing were written by authors from Europe and North America; and as for the polar south, this is a region which has for much of its brief human history been viewed as little more than a southern outpost of the north. Of course, there are omissions too: the islands of the South Pacific, long since the site of the most exotic of all the many northern utopian dreams, find a place here; while Australia, the Great Southern Land itself, does not. Borges’ Buenos Aires is included as a representative of the ‘magic south’ of the Americas; Africa and Asia are absent. My home city, London, is discussed; but at the expense of the remainder of southern England which it overshadows. These choices are themselves a consequence of my own sense of the south, a sense shaped both by the north and through northern perceptions of the south.

Throughout this book I have used the idea of the south in a number of different ways: as a nascent tourist destination, from the Grand Tour in southern Europe to the development of the ‘Southland’ in the southern United States; as a personal trajectory that has impelled individuals southward in search of creative renewal, from Goethe and Nietzsche to Gauguin and Lawrence; as the destination of choice, often the final destination, for those simply following their feet, from naturalists such as von Humboldt and John Muir to the heroes of southern polar exploration; as the ever-changing goal of colonial ambition and political expediency, from the voyages of Cook and de Bougainville to the emergence of the Nuclear South in French Polynesia and elsewhere; and finally as the location for some highly esoteric ideas, from Hollow Earth theories to myths of Nazi survival. In doing so, I have brought together historical testimony, theoretical speculation and literary representation, in an attempt to establish a composite image of what the term ‘South’ has come to mean, and to highlight some of the extraordinary array of ideas and visions its usage continues to provoke.

Epigraph

* DH Lawrence in a letter to Cecily Lambert Minchin, 18 November 1919, quoted in Owen, p. 159.

Notes

1. Jean Paul [Johann Paul Friedrich Richter] quoted in Bertram, p. 213.

2. Gyrus, p. 203.

3. Gyrus, p. 237.

4. Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), prepared by JA Simpson & ESC Weiner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, Vol. XVI, pp. 67–69.

5. Gyrus, pp. 91–2.

6. Wortham, p. 65.

7. Irwin, pp. 161–2. For a discussion of the cognitive origins of this ‘vertical orientation’ between north and south and its consequences, see Murray, ‘Verticality and its Underbelly’ (2009).

8. Gyrus, pp. 101–102.

9. Oxford English Dictionary (Second Edition), prepared by JA Simpson & ESC Weiner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989, Vol. XVI, pp. 67–69.

10. Ripa, p. 77. See also Davidson, pp. 38–39.

11. Che’êng-ên, p. 88.

12. Davidson writes (p. 38):

In Europe the map of relations between north and south was catastrophically redrawn at the Reformation: a new set of divisions appeared and, from the sixteenth century, travel between north and south was gravely restricted. In the south the proverbial evil of the north was equated with the writings of Luther, the armies of Gustavus Adolphus –ab aquilone omne malum. In the north, the black legend began to grow of the backwardness and decadence of the south.

13. Ruskin, pp. 106–7.

14. Gramsci, p. 173.

15. WH Auden, ‘England, Six Unexpected Days’, AmericanVogue, 15 May 1954, quoted in Davidson, p.99.

16. Davenport-Hines, p. 16.

17. WH Auden, ‘I like it Cold’, House & Garden, December 1947, in The Complete Works, p. 335.

18. Auden, p. 335.

19. For example: Simon Armitage, All Points North (1998); Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (2005); Stuart Maconie, Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North (2008); Martin Wainwright, True North: In Praise of England’s Better Half (2009); John Bulmer, The North (2012); Paul Morley, The North: And Almost Everything in It, (2013) and Gyrus, North, (2014).

Goethe in the Roman Campagna by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1787) STÄDEL-MUSEUM FRANKFURT

1

Goethe’s Law

All dwellers in the Teutonic north, looking out at the winter sky, are subject to spasms of nearly irresistible pull, when the entire Italian peninsula from Trieste to Agrigento begins to function like a lodestone. The magnetism is backed by an unseen choir, there are roulades of mandolin strings in the air; ghostly whiffs of lemon blossom beckon the victims south and across the Alpine passes. It is Goethe’s Law and is ineluctable as Newton’s or Boyle’s.

Patrick Leigh Fermor1

The Mediterranean is the model for the concept south, and it is a rare Briton whose pulses do not race at mention of that compass direction.

Paul Fussell2

There are many ways to characterise the division between the north and the south in Europe. It may be done by highlighting differences in landscape and climate, the sea and the sun of the Mediterranean south contrasted with the colder more mountainous terrain of the north. Equally one may identify a fault line between the peoples of the north and south, their customs, language, religion and morality; the stereotypically easy-going existence of the Catholic south, for example, is often contrasted with what is frequently perceived (usually by those who live there) to be the more industrious lifestyles of their Protestant counterparts in the north. Architectural styles, diet, and a preference for beer or wine, the ways in which we confirm this continental divide seem endless; but what is more difficult to identify with any degree of precision is the point at which one world gives way to another. For we carry our own sense of north and south within us, an internal compass which regulates our worldview and which impresses our personal and imaginary vision onto the world around us. In his essay ‘Ordered South’ (1874), Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer whose life, perhaps more than any other, followed an unerring southerly course, has described the sensations that this moment of transition entails:

Moreover, there is still before the invalid the shock of wonder and delight with which he will learn that he has passed the indefinable line that separates South from North. And this is an uncertain moment; for sometimes the consciousness is forced upon him early, on the occasion of some slight association, a colour, a flower, or a scent; and sometimes not until, one fine morning, he wakes up with the southern sunshine peeping through the persiennes, and the southern patois confusedly audible below the windows. Whether it come early or late, however, this pleasure will not end with the anticipation, as do so many others of the same family. It will leave him wider awake than it found him, and give a new significance to all he may see for many days to come. There is something in the mere name of the South that carries enthusiasm along with it. At the sound of the word, he pricks up his ears; he becomes as anxious to seek out beauties and to get by heart the permanent lines and character of the landscape, as if he had been told that it was all his own – an estate out of which he had been kept unjustly, and which he was now to receive in free and full possession. Even those who have never been there before feel as if they had been; and everybody goes comparing, and seeking for the familiar, and finding it with such ecstasies of recognition, that one would think they were coming home after a weary absence, instead of travelling hourly farther abroad.3

Stevenson was ‘ordered’ south to the French Riviera on health grounds, but the experience he relates above was by no means unique to him, for by 1874, young men across Europe had been performing a similarly southward migration for more than two centuries. Of course, the motivations behind such excursions changed over the intervening years, as the Grand Tourists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave way to the invalids and sun-worshippers of the nineteenth and twentieth. Today the growth of mass tourism has transformed the coastal landscapes of southern Europe, creating a seemingly endless series of anonymous beachside communities, supported by a transient population of predominantly northern European holidaymakers. These changes, some gradual, others much less so, have been witnessed and recorded by an array of writers and travellers, from Goethe to Nietzsche; DH Lawrence to Laurie Lee; Norman Lewis to JG Ballard. Such a disparate series of observations and impressions, of different regions and at different periods, might at first glance appear to hold little in common, but on closer inspection all these accounts, regardless of time and place, demonstrate the endurance of our fluctuating, but apparently boundless, fascination with the south.

The Grand Tour

According to the historian, Ian Littlewood, the first recorded usage of the term ‘Grand Tour’ is in Richard Lassels’ travel narrative, The Voyage of Italy (1670), although twenty years earlier the diarist John Evelyn had described a traveller on a journey through Europe ‘making the tour as they call it.’4The ideas behind the Grand Tour, however, the custom of travelling through continental Europe which was undertaken, largely by aristocratic young men (young women would have to wait another 200 years or so), between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, have their roots in Enlightenment thought. Indeed, the very name, Enlightenment (in French,Les Lumières) is, as Adam Gopnik notes, suggestive of the metaphors of warmth, light and sunshine which were employed to illustrate the illumination of dark superstition through reason, and which had the inevitable, yet irrational, consequence of promoting the idea of distinct national cultures as reflections of their own particular climates.5With its newfound emphasis upon the senses and physical stimuli as the source of all knowledge, Enlightenment thinking saw the environment and the natural world take on a new relevance and as a result the idea of travel developed a role as a crucial part of a young man’s education. Thus from around the latter half of the seventeenth century, young men of a principally wealthy, predominantly northern European Protestant background began to head southward through continental Europe in search of the classical antiquities and Renaissance treasures of the south. Over time a well-trodden circuit was established through France and Switzerland before crossing the Alps into northern Italy. From there the intrepid traveller, accompanied, according to wealth and status, by a retinue of guides and servants would head southwards via Turin to Florence, before turning north to Padua and on to Venice, the cultural highpoint of the Tour. The ruins of ancient Rome came next, and finally Naples. For many this marked the southernmost extent of the Grand Tour, but for the more adventurous the Greek ruins on Sicily, or even Greece itself, awaited, before the return journey home, often via Germany and the Netherlands.

Describing the Tour as a rite of passage, the historian, John Pemble, writes: ‘On the threshold of the South he [the Grand Tourist] experienced an apotheosis. He passed from the circumference to the centre of things, and his thoughts dwelt on roots, origins, essentials and ultimate affinities’.6Lasting anywhere from a few months to several years, the Tour was certainly presented, perhaps even intended, as primarily an educational experience, one that provided an opportunity to expose oneself to the splendours of the classical world, while permitting the ruling classes to mix with aristocratic European society before returning home suitably elevated, both morally and spiritually. This in any event was the official version. In reality, however, the scholarly and artistic elements of the Tour paint only half the picture, and the unofficial version has less to do with cultural enrichment and more to do with sexual adventure.7That this was the case was not lost on the public left at home who often viewed the Tour and the motives of those who chose to experience it with great suspicion. If, however, the sexual element was a central feature of the Grand Tour from the outset, it is hardly surprising that such motivations remain unspoken in the numerous contemporary accounts of such travellers’ adventures, in which the cultural element is always in the foreground. For, as Littlewood notes, as a record of their observations, ‘letters home commonly tell of the churches visited, not the brothels.’8

The first wave of eighteenth-century Grand Tourists envisaged a role for themselves as that of the ‘cultural connoisseur’, whose goal was ‘to pick his way through Europe gathering information and artefacts, developing his understanding of social institutions, refining his manners along with his appreciation of the arts.’9 But in the following century this rather rigidly interpreted view of cultural acquisition gradually gave way to a sense that the Grand Tourist was engaged upon a quest for personal fulfilment. In his popular guidebook, The Grand Tour (1749), the scholar and antiquarian, Thomas Nugent, summarises the purpose first envisaged for the Tour: ‘to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgement, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word to form the complete gentleman.’10 Such worthy notions are, however, somewhat at odds with other rather less rarefied descriptions, such as the depiction of the traveller to be found in the following lines from Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1743):

… he saunter’d Europe round,

And gather’d ev’ry Vice on Christian Ground;

Saw ev’ry Court, heard ev’ry King declare

His royal Sense, of Op’ra’s or the Fair;

The Stews and Palace equally explor’d,

Intrigu’d with glory, and with spirit whor’d;11

The glaring disparity between such accounts simply confirms the existence of the Tour in both its official and unofficial guises, as well as acknowledging the unavoidable fact that the public, including, of course, the families of those whose sons had embarked upon the tour, were well aware of the twofold nature of the experiences awaiting them in southern Europe. In short, if not officially recognised, sexual liaisons were not only to be expected but to a degree actively encouraged as an important element of a young man’s education. Such an education inevitably gave rise to some unwelcome consequences and sexually transmitted disease came to be regarded as an occupational hazard; while the doctor who would have been responsible for administering an uncomfortable course of mercury treatment was seen as ‘an essential member of the supporting cast.’ Such considerations would have been further amplified by an awareness of the fact that ‘one of the main functions of the Grand Tourist when he got home was to breed sons to continue the family line.’12

If there was an awareness of the potential threat posed by what was widely seen as a degenerate and pervasive southern morality, then such a threat was seen as part of the implicit challenge presented by opposing ways of life to the established order at home. In the case of the Grand Tour, populated as it was almost solely by aristocratic and wealthy young individuals, any fear of potentially revolutionary sentiments being exported homeward was mitigated by the fact that few of these highly privileged individuals were likely to question a system which promoted their own interests.13 In terms of personal behaviour, however, in even offering up the opportunity to compare one’s own way of life with another which, in the south at least, appeared to be characterised by a sexual freedom unparalleled in the countries of the north, the Grand Tour ‘had opened another door to moral truancy.’14

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was one country, more than any other, which encapsulated, in the minds of northern Europeans at least, this twofold sense of the official and unofficial aspects of the Tour: Italy. The cultural axis of European travel as well as the notorious home to ‘every kind of sexual iniquity’, Italy remained throughout this period the primary attraction and principal lure of the Grand Tour. ‘No other country’, writes Littlewood, ‘has been so long and so consistently associated with erotic freedom. From the Renaissance until well into the twentieth century its identity for British travellers was shaped by a reputation for transgressive pleasure that stretched back to the more colourful Roman emperors.’15 While sodomy was regarded as the sexual act most peculiarly associated with Italy, its broader reputation for sensuality and decadence was as well-known to would-be visitors from the north as was its warm climate and its repository of classical treasures, and such a national perception went some way to maintaining the pivotal role that the country, and in particular Venice and the south, enjoyed within the standard European itinerary of the day. Of course, such an itinerary changed over time, subject to fluctuating intellectual and cultural (as well as sexual) fashions, but perceptions of just what constituted the ‘South’ and quite where it began and ended, were shaped most clearly by the political and social realities of the period. Thus throughout the eighteenth century, with the Turks continuing to control Europe east of Vienna, and in conflict with the Christian countries of the Mediterranean, the contours of southern European travel became rigidly delineated and the favoured route of the Grand Tour was fixed accordingly. Greece was effectively ruled out, with the consequence that the remnants of the classical Greek world still available for perusal in southern Europe were now to be found predominantly in Rome, southern Italy, and on the former Greek colony of Sicily.16It was here, on the extreme southern boundary of the European continent, that the idea of the ‘South’ was crystallised in the minds of those northern Europeans who had first made its ‘discovery’; and it was through their travels that perceptions of the region would be shaped for future generations.

Goethe’s Italian Journey

On 28 August 1786, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was on holiday in Carlsbad celebrating his thirty-seventh birthday. In the eyes of the public he was an enviable figure: as the author of Götz von Berlichingen and Werther he had been famous since his early twenties; as a Privy Councillor in the government administration at Weimar he had gained both respect and responsibility; in addition he had a long-term mistress in the form of Charlotte von Stein, an aristocratic member of the Weimar Court. Outwardly, then, all looked well; in reality, however, Goethe was frustrated, overworked and disillusioned. He was under pressure to produce a new work that would establish the promise of his youthful reputation; he felt suffocated by his life at the Weimar court and by his huge administrative responsibilities; and he was embroiled in an unsatisfactory and frustratingly platonic relationship with a woman eleven years his senior. In short, Goethe was a walking mid-life crisis and the time was ripe for him to make his escape.17

Goethe’s father, Johann Casper Goethe, had visited Italy in 1740, at the time an unusual journey to make for a German Protestant who was not an aristocrat. His journey was a highly influential one, however, for as a result of this trip he came to idealise the country, passing on his journal to his son and encouraging him to make his own pilgrimage south. Yet despite several opportunities, Goethe had thus far resisted the temptation to do so, getting as far as Switzerland and within sight of Italy in 1775 before choosing to return home. By 1786, however, his father was dead and when it came to turning his back on his life in Weimar there was really only one destination that Goethe had in mind. In the end, his journey appears to have been spontaneous rather than planned, and on 3 September 1786, in the middle of the night, he made his getaway: ‘On 3 September at 3 in the morning I crept out of Carlsbad, they wouldn’t have let me go if I hadn’t. They could tell I wanted to get away […] but I wasn’t going to be stopped, for it was time.’18 Leaving his travelling companions under the impression that he was taking a short excursion into the mountains, Goethe jumped into a coach and without a servant and travelling light and incognito – he assumed the name of Möller – he headed swiftly southward through Bavaria and Austria before crossing into Italy and moving on to Rome. And it was here, some eight weeks after his initial flight and by now having acquired another identity – this time that of a painter called Filippo Miller – that Goethe finally wrote home to disclose his whereabouts. An account of this headlong rush south can be found in his diary of this period (available in English as The Flight to Italy), but it is not through this document that Goethe’s journey has since been celebrated, but instead it is the account he was to write some twenty-five years after these events, in which he was to describe both this journey and the following two-year period he spent travelling through Italy, a period in which he shed his old self altogether to emerge a quite different person.

The Italian Journey was the work of an old man recalling his youthful, or at least younger self; published over 13 years, by the time the third and final part was completed in 1829, Goethe was almost 80 years old. As such, it is a book which is notable not only for what it contains but also for what it omits. Written in three parts covering the period from September 1786 to April 1788, the first section recalls the events outlined above on the road to Rome; the second recounts the continuation of his journey southwards to Naples and Sicily between February and June of 1787; while the third and much belated final part covers his second stay in Rome between June 1787 and April of the following year. Within these three parts, three major themes coexist. Firstly, an observation of nature; amongst many other things, Goethe was a naturalist, geographer, and meteorologist, and the Italian Journey abounds with detailed observations of landscape and climate, the latter setting the tone for future accounts of southern European journeys in which the climate is favourably compared with that of the north. The second theme records Goethe’s commentary on the progress of the composition of his collected works. Thirdly, and most memorably, Goethe recalls his encounters with the cultural antiquities of the Renaissance.19 In short, and in terms of the discussion of the Grand Tour above, if Goethe’s Italian Journey is to be read as a guide to one man’s experiences and impressions of eighteenth-century Italy, then it should be seen very much as the ‘official’ version.

While Goethe’s account demonstrates the transformative effects of his southern journey upon him personally, it is also painstaking in its attempts to offer an analysis of the differing characteristics of the peoples of southern and northern Europe. But where Goethe’s account differs from so many of his contemporaries, and indeed many of his successors, is in his refusal to equate the obvious poverty and discomfort he sees and experiences with some kind of spiritual or moral inferiority. For example, he is reluctant to endorse the widespread belief that laziness is an endemic characteristic of the south, writing: ‘Now that I am better acquainted with the conditions in the south, I suspect that this was the biased view of a person from the north, where anyone who is not feverishly at work all day is regarded as a loafer. […] I asked friends where I could meet all these innumerable idlers, but they couldn’t show me any either.’20 While elsewhere, despite acknowledging the merits of the northern character, he warns against any attempt to pass judgement on the south through the prism of one’s own, northern, perspective:

No doubt their national environment, which has remained unchanged for millennia, has conditioned the character of the northern nations, so admirable in so many respects. But we must not judge the nations of the south, which Heaven has treated so benevolently, by our standards. […] It is false […] to think of these people as miserable; their principle of going without was favoured by a climate which gave them all the necessities of life. Here, a poor man, whom, in our country, we think of as wretched, can satisfy his essential needs and at the same time enjoy the world to the full […] A Cynic philosopher would, I am certain, consider life in our country intolerable; on the other hand, Nature invited him, so to speak, to live in the south. Here the ragged man is not naked, nor poor he who has no provision for the morrow. […] This explains a good many things: it explains, for instance, why, in most kinds of skilled labour, their artisans are technically far behind those of the northern countries, why factories do not succeed, why, with the exception of lawyers and doctors, there is little learning or culture considering the size of the population, why no painter of the Neapolitan school has ever been profound or become great, why the clergy are happiest when they are doing nothing, and why most of the great prefer to spend their money on luxury, dissipation and sensual pleasures. […] To return to the common people again. They are like children who, when one gives them a job to do, treat it as a job but at the same time as an opportunity for having some fun.21

By the standards of the day, Goethe’s journey was a highly unorthodox one. ‘I am going to travel quite alone’, he writes, ‘under another name, and I have great hopes for this venture, odd as it seems.’22Travelling alone, without letters of introduction, with no servant or private transport, and in local dress, Goethe’s experience of Italy was quite different from that of the normal retinue of Grand Tourists who tended to travel with all the insulation that money and class could provide. As a result, theItalian Journeywas revelatory in depicting a view of the country that had never been seen before. By 1786, Goethe was already following in the footsteps of many of his countrymen, amongst them the writers Winckelmann and Lessing, but where his account differs from theirs is in the degree to which he felt able, indeed willing, to cast off his former identity (as his use of assumed names suggests) and to embrace everything that this new life presented to him: ‘I feel as if I was born and brought up here, and am now coming back from a whaling voyage to Greenland.’23Goethe had, in his own terms, experienced a kind of ‘rebirth’ in the south, a sense of renewal marked by a return to his youthful self, and nowhere was he to feel this sense of a new life more acutely than in Naples: ‘Naples is a paradise’, he wrote, ‘everyone lives in a kind of intoxicated self-forgetfulness, myself included. I seem to be a quite different person, whom I hardly recognise.’24The precise nature of this paradisiacal existence is uncertain as Goethe later destroyed the letters and diaries relating to his stay there. But what Goethe intimates here is the existence of the other, ‘unofficial’ aspect of his travels which, despite not appearing in the pages of theItalian Journeyare no less real than those which he chose to describe.

The principal charm of theItalian Journeyis Goethe’s seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm for almost every aspect of his Italian experience: climate; landscape; local customs and meetings with local people; art and architecture; alongside an awareness of the profound changes he is undergoing. Yet despite his repeated references to a sense of rebirth and renewal, the precise content of such changes and the experiences which have provoked them seem strangely undeveloped and at odds with the detailed appreciations to be found elsewhere in his journal. It is as if the eye which he turns so acutely upon the external world is unable to ascertain the contours of his own changing psyche. A more likely explanation, however, is, as many commentators have concluded, that the reason that some parts of his journal, most notably the final section concerning his second stay in Rome, are so markedly less vivid than the remainder, is precisely because it is at these points that the divergence between the ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ aspects of his journey is at its most stark.25For if one can truly characterise Goethe’s time in Italy as a period of renewal, then this renewal was not simply the spiritual and creative renewal outlined in his journal, but also a sexual renewal, wholly absent from his account.