In the autumn of 1904, after Joseph Conrad had published Nostromo
to disappointing reviews, and with his always precarious financial
situation vitiated by an operation for his wife, Jessie, he abandoned
England to spend the winter in Capri, motivated by thrift and the hope
that the climate would conduce to her recuperation. He met Norman
Douglas soon after his arrival, and they became fast friends. Conrad
wrote to H. G. Wells that he had met “a Scot (born in Austria) once in
diplomatic service, [which] he threw up I fancy in sheer intellectual
disgust. A man who can not only think but write.” The purpose of the
letter was to enlist Wells’s aid in getting Douglas published. To soften
him up, Conrad added that he, Douglas, and Thomas Jerome had discussed
Wells’s visionary novel A Modern Utopia, which was then being serialized in The Fortnightly Review, and they agreed that Wells was “the one honest thinker of the day.” ...
Fifteen years later, another modern master
of the novel came to Capri for a longish stay and wrote a small-scale
tour de force that was distinctly unlike his best-known works. D. H.
Lawrence met Norman Douglas in London when Douglas was working at The English Review,
edited by Ford Madox Ford, where Lawrence launched his literary career.
In November 1919, when Lawrence decided to leave England to live
abroad, beginning in Italy, he wrote to Douglas, who was then living in
Florence, to ask him to recommend a cheap lodging there. Douglas put him
up at the same flophouse where he was staying with an American
journalist named Maurice Magnus, previously an artist’s agent who had
represented Isadora Duncan. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-island-that-inspired-conrad-and-lawrences-queerest-characters/
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