ETTORE MASCIANDARO (1936-2014)
BY EDMUND MARLOWE
The Austro-Scottish author Norman Douglas (1868-1952) was undoubtedly a great travel writer. His circle of close friends of all ages and both sexes thought of him as a great man too, immensely charming, witty and erudite. To these qualities, I shall now add one that must be of special interest to those seeking to understand Greek love. My study of the subject led to my having the personal opinion that he was the ideal lover of boys, by which I mean two things he embodied more than anyone else I have heard of: he was possessed of precisely the qualities that tend to attract boys and he did for his boys what an ideal lover of boys should.[1]
Those wishing to get to know Douglas are extremely lucky in two of the books that have been written about him.[2] Very few biographies have been written of anyone that are as insightful, balanced and, above all, thorough as that of Douglas by Mark Holloway, of which extracts will be found here and a review here. Most unusually for a lover of boys, we also know how Douglas’s boys looked back on their intimacy with him thanks to the publication of their letters to him in Dear Doug! Letters to Norman Douglas from Eric Wolton, René Mari, Marcel Mercier and Ettore Masciandaro and a selection of letters from Emilio Papa.
Until the little bit of research I recently undertook, there had been one possible fly in the ointment, however. It never looked like a terrible fly, just a slightly disappointing conclusion to a magnificent life. The boy, for fly I now believe he was not at all, was Douglas’s last love, Ettore Masciandaro, whom he encountered in the ruins of Naples in October 1946, when Ettore was ten and Douglas seventy-seven.
Despite Ettore being one of the boys listed in the full title of Dear Doug!, the letters from him there are no more than two very short (though warm) expressions of gratitude written while he was Douglas’s beloved; he was only fifteen when Douglas died. In contrast, the letters from Douglas’s other boys make abundantly clear how they felt about him long after their love affairs with him had evolved into close lifelong friendships. The editor, Michael Allan, would seem to have regretted the lack of more information, remarking, “Ettore would now, in 2008, be about 72 years of age. It has so far proved impossible to determine whether he is still alive” (page 138).
It was particularly unfortunate that of all Douglas’s boys, Ettore should be the one whose voice could barely be heard because he was also the only one about whose affair with Douglas the latter’s friends expressed misgivings. Holloway reported that they thought Douglas was clearly being exploited financially by Ettore and his family and was thus making rather a fool of himself. The literary critic John Davenport, a close friend of Douglas in his old age, was even harsher:
there was little love or joy […] His melancholy – N D’s – saddened me. There was obviously no reciprocal love. It was as commercial as the modern Christmas we both deplore. […]: not surprisingly. I felt, and he felt, I am sure that there was no mutual satisfaction.
This judgement, especially coming from a man as decent and open-minded as Davenport, rather shocked me. Could it really be true? Two rather sweet photos of Douglas and Ettore survive which suggest strong mutual affection and the only anecdote Holloway records about Ettore is in a similar vein to them, suggesting a boy who liked to give rather than take.
Holloway himself observed astutely:
When other forms of self-indulgence had had to be drastically curtailed, this affair with Ettore seems to have been an outlet that was pursued à la folie, as occasionally happens when the old are ensnared in a late skirmish with love. Their friends can only stand aghast, or amazed. The fact usually forgotten by the onlookers is that the so-called victims do not mind whether they are being exploited or not; they only wish to go on feeling the compulsion of love, whether it be physical, or sentimental.
This takes much of the sting out of Douglas’s friends’ remarks. One can easily imagine that in their impatience, personally very fond of Douglas but not of the boy, they were deeply unfair on the latter and failed to consider his true feelings. Nevertheless, without counter-evidence, one is still left feeling that the affair of Douglas and Ettore “lacks Theocritan grace or charm”, as Davenport put it, a debatably significant stain being left on both man and boy that their friendship was transactional and thus very different from Douglas’s earlier loves.
It seemed to me terribly unfair that this failure to have discovered Ettore’s feelings might have led to an unfair verdict by history, so I made my own effort to find him. Unfortunately, I did this too late, as though he was very much still alive when Allan tried to find him, he had died in the meantime. I did, however, find his daughter Antonella in June 2022. She had read Dear Doug! after her father’s death and was naturally wary of discussing such an extremely delicate matter with a stranger. I think it shows extraordinary courage and generosity that she finally yielded to my plea to let be known what she knew about her father’s true feelings (as well as giving some basic but hitherto unpublished biographical details).
In the following summary of Ettore’s life, his daughter is the source of information for his date of birth and everything about him after Douglas’s death. A fuller account of his years as Douglas’s special friend will be found in Holloway’s aforementioned biography.[3]
Una bella persona
The title is Signora Masciandaro’s summary of her father.
Ettore Masciandaro was born on 6th October 1936, the eldest of the three sons of an electro-technician in Naples and his wife Antonietta. Their father was taken away to Germany as a prisoner, presumably in September 1943, when the Germans rounded up young Neapolitan men as conscript labour following the armistice between Italy and the allies. “Their mother was in an air raid shelter when their house was blitzed and they lost everything they possessed on earth,” explained Douglas in a letter to a friend.[4] Presumably this was around the time of the father’s arrest, when the bombing of Naples was at its heaviest. For the next two years, Ettore starved in the streets. The father came back after the war to find his job had been given to someone else, though he eventually got a small job on the railway that was “better than nothing.”
Douglas found Ettore in October 1946, while staying in Naples just before taking up residence in Capri, where he was to spend the rest of his life. As he wrote in the same letter: “He was a mere skeleton, and so pale that he seemed to be transparent, or at least translucent. I think three more months of that life would have done for him. […] I have got Ettore into some kind of shape physically, but morally he is still rather dislocated and restless. He goes to school now – for the first month or so he couldn’t; in fact, I had some difficulty in making him eat.”
The school was in Capri, where Douglas took Ettore to live with him, having promised his mother to take care of his education when she agreed to entrust him to his unexpected new friend. Together they moved in August 1947 to live in the villa there of Douglas’s friend Kenneth Macpherson, and there Ettore remained until his mother came to reclaim him in February 1948 and send him to another school, which Douglas called “the most severe blow I have had for ages.” Fortunately, Ettore carried on coming to stay with him for school holidays for the rest of Douglas's life, and Douglas exhibited an enduring and extreme emotional dependence on him that exasperated many of his friends.
For the full catalogue of Ettore’s comings and goings and Douglas’s acts of indulgence to him and expressions of affection for him in his letters, I refer the reader to Holloway’s biography. However, this being after all the story of a pederast and his last love, one point should be touched on that Holloway may not have known the answer to. Douglas was proud rather than ashamed of loving boys and he despised chastity. Despite the serious limitations imposed by his old age, his affair with Ettore, at least when the latter was fourteen, was not chaste, as Michael Allan wrongly guessed without having read the then-unpublished letters of John Davenport with the explicit detail Douglas had confided in him.
Ettore’s final education was at the Mario Pagano Technical Commercial Institute in Naples. Thereafter, he worked in various professions. He had an electrical and household appliance shop in Naples until he married, on 5 April 1964, and moved to Rome.
In Rome, he worked as a salesman and warehouse manager in an important electrical materials company where he was highly appreciated for his precision and seriousness in carrying out his work, but above all for his beautiful calligraphy (these being times when everything was still manual).
Later, in the mid-1970s, he took up the activity of Sales Agent for a famous made-in-Italy cosmetics brand where he worked with passion and dedication, making fine use of the talents of the great man he was: dialectics, fine humour and delicate persuasion. He carried on there until 1997, when he was forced to take early retirement due to health problems.
In retirement, he lived in Pomezia in Lazio. He died on 29th September 2014, eight days before his 78th birthday, leaving two daughters, Antonella and Paola, of whom the former has two daughters herself.
Much my most important request to Antonella Masciandaro was for her to tell me what her father thought about Douglas and their friendship. Having forewarned me that “the dark years of the war and the difficulties of those times led both my father and mother to expound (or remember) just the essentials. Both did not excel at great narratives,” she replied:
“Non ci sono stati racconti particolari di mio padre che spiegassero l'incontro tra lui e Douglas.
Posso dire con certezza che mio padre parlava con grande entusiasmo e stima della sua amicizia con lo scrittore quasi incredulo che non fosse citato sui miei testi scolastici. Mostrava a tutti, con immenso orgoglio, i libri che lo scrittore gli aveva fatto dono, alcuni con dedica.”
“There were no particular accounts from my father explaining the meeting between him and Douglas.
I can say with certainty that my father spoke with great enthusiasm and esteem of his friendship with the writer, almost incredulous that he was not mentioned in my school textbooks. He would show everyone, with immense pride, the books that the writer had gifted him, some with dedications.”
Corrections to Michael Allan’s editing of Dear Doug!
Signora Masciandaro has also kindly corrected the following misunderstandings in the editing of Dear Doug! The following refer to the footnotes on page 138 (scanned above) to the letters of 20 June (probably 1948) from Ettore and his mother to Kenneth Macpherson.
No. 2. “The picture postcards my grandmother, my father’s mother, refers to are photographs printed on cardboard, the back of which has the typical subdivision of postcards (lines on the right for the recipient’s address, white space on the left for the message) that photographers used to print at the time.”
No. 4. “Carmine was not my father’s brother but a friend of my grandmother’s.” Hence his surname was not Masciandaro, as stated on page 153.
No. 5. “The names given are correct and refer to my father’s younger brothers: Gigino (short for Luigi) and Peppino (short for Giuseppe).”
[1] A fine summary of what boys got out of their intimacy with Douglas will be found in a passage of Holloway’s biography of him, p. 170.
[2] They are the most important two books in forming my personal opinion of Douglas, but are by no means the only ones. See also his own writings, especially his memoir Looking Back.
[3] The latest biography of Douglas, Unspeakable: A Life Beyond Sexual Morality by Rachel Hope Cleves (2020), though wonderfully well-researched, adds little that is useful to Holloway’s account of Ettore. The author was evidently petrified of seeming at all sympathetic to a pederast, however likeable, so her book is peppered with waspish interpretations and little twists. What she adds to Holloway about Ettore mostly comes from Douglas’s supposed younger son Robin, described by his father’s close friend the literary critic John Davenport as “a dreary business executive in Chicago,” who “when I met him on Capri […] was having an affaire with his illegitimate daughter (married to a South African) in vain emulation of his putative papa’s naughtiness.” (See the article John Davenport on Norman Douglas). Robin Douglas’s jealousy and pathological hatred of little Ettore emerges from correspondence Cleves found revealing he seriously contemplated arranging the boy’s “accidental” death, besides longing for his father to commit suicide.
[4] Letter of 8 June 1947 to Annie Bryher.