Portland Public Library

An impossible woman, the memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri, edited and with an epilogue by Graham Greene

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

An impossible woman

2116757

Wobbe, R.A. Graham Greene, A61b

edited and with an epilogue by Graham Greene

the memories of Dottoressa Moor of Capri

"Elisabeth Moor arrived in Capri in 1926, with two of her children, to practice as a doctor. Her passionate devotion to the poor of the island gradually won her their affection, and in her forty years there she was to become a familiar and controversial figure in Capri society. Graham Greene remembers her 'small square body with the big teeth ... startlingly blue eyes, the tough electric hair as alive as a bundle of fighting snakes. She was always on the move--down to the Marina Grande ... taking small tributes here and there, a lettuce from a stall in Caprile, an apple from the fruit shop on the Capri Steps ....' The Dottoressa had what she called her 'grand patients' as well-members of the shifting and exotic foreign colony who lived on or visited Capri at one time or another. Axel Munthe, the lover of the Queen of Sweden; Norman Douglas, who called her 'the best of my two doctors ... she doesn't try to stop me drinking like the other does'; the Compton Mackenzies; the Principessa Nera, in perpetual mouming for a lost lover, with black lipstick, black nails, black clothes, black sheets .... In her own eccentric but expressive language the Dottoressa ranges, not always chronologically, over her whole life: her wild girlhood in the Vienna of Franz Josef; her turbulent marriage to the Swiss artist Gigi Moor; the early years of being a doctor, when a mob of angry peasants attacked her with sticks; the host of lovers in a disordered Bohemian life that makes today's liberation seem almost tame by comparison. Graham Greene, who has edited these memories, says of the Dottoressa that she 'possessed even in her seventies a quality of passionate living which l have known in no other woman, though I tried to give it another form an habitation in Aunt Augusta of Travels with my Aunt.'"--Dust jacket

Part 1. The hairdressers' child ; Always alone ; A holy bitch ; A beating in Anacapri ; The Archduke ; With the nuns ; First love ; A sort of hotel ; The big time ; Studying medicine ; Another affair ; A certain Alfons ; Meeting Gigi Moor ; In Tunisia with Baudisch ; Steerage with the cows ; Happiness in Vienna ; Shirts for Gigi ; War declared ; Marrying Gigi ; Because of a simple foetus ... ; The Russian lover ; Don Domenico and the Devil ; Gigi and Maja -- Part 2. Typhoid in Capri ; A naval officer called Tutino ; A daughter of the Devil ; An agreement with Gigi ; The torments of jealousy ; So strange is life ; The birth of Andrea ; A divorce -- Part 3. To Anacapri ; The Cerios ; A vile coward, a creep ; Grand patients and poor people ; A handful of men ; Seeing Gigi again ; In East Prussia ; An urgent call from Basel ; The Black Princess ; The Compton Mackenzies ; Axel Munthe ; Count Fersen ; Fear in Capri ; An island of much pain ; The co-respondent ; The Anacapri murderer ; Baron von Schacht ; An exile from Capri ; A secret return -- Part 4. Anacapri again ; The death of Andrea -- Epilogue / by Graham Greene