| Author | Norman Douglas |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | |
| Set in | Kingdom of Italy |
| Publisher | Martin Secker |
Publication date | 1917 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| 823.912 |
South Wind is a 1917 novel by British author Norman Douglas. [1] It is Douglas's most famous book [2] and his only success as a novelist. [3] It is set on an imaginary island called Nepenthe, located off the coast of Italy in the Tyrrhenian Sea, [1] a thinly fictionalized description of Capri's residents and visitors. The narrative concerns twelve days during which Thomas Heard, a bishop returning to England from his diocese in Africa, yields his moral vigour to various influences. Philosophical hedonism pervades much of Douglas's writing, [3] and the novel's discussion of moral and sexual issues caused considerable debate. [4]
The South Wind of the title is the Sirocco, which wreaks havoc with the islanders' sense of decency and morality. [5] Much of the natural detail in the book is provided by Capri and other Mediterranean locations that Douglas knew well. [3] The island's name Nepenthe denotes a drug of Egyptian origin (mentioned in the Odyssey) which was capable of banishing grief or trouble from the mind. [6] The novel was written in Capri and in London, and after its publication in June 1917 it went through seven editions rapidly, achieving startling large-scale success. [7] Critics at the time complained about the lack of a well-constructed plot. [8] The book was adapted for the stage in London in 1923 by Isabel C. Tippett, [3] and Graham Greene considered the possibility of writing a film script based on it. [9]
Paul Fussell writes:
South Wind appears to be "a novel," but its earliest readers ... sensed its proximity to the travel book.... There is a plot, a boyishly subversive one, but it's there less for its own sake than as a justification for the "travel" essays, which treat Nepenthe like an actual island visited by an actual curious traveler." [10]
In Dorothy Sayers' 1926 detective novel Clouds of Witness , Lord Peter Wimsey goes through the possessions of a murdered man – a young British man living in Paris, whose morality had been put in question. Finding a copy of South Wind Wimsey remarks, "Our young friend works out very true to type".
"When Charles Ryder, the hero of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited , arrives at Oxford in 1923, Douglas's South Wind is one of three books that he stacks on his shelf. Critics have credited South Wind with inspiring a raft of new novels by young authors, including Chrome Yellow (1921) and Those Barren Leaves (1925) by Aldous Huxley, and The Rock Pool (1936) by Cyril Connolly". [11] South Wind also appeared on the shelf of a character in Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight . [12]
In Robert McAlmon's Being Geniuses Together, he mentions meeting Norman Douglas in Venice in 1924, by which time he says South Wind was a minor classic. Apparently when sales continued for years afterwards, Douglas, to whom only a small amount was paid to begin with, received no further payments. [13]