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The Villa Fersen Opium Den, Graham Greene and his Couple of Pipes

Posted: January 13th, 2017 | No Comments »

Following the sad death of Shirley Hazzard last December I re-read her 2000 book Greene on Capri – her short memoir of her life on Capri, her friendship with her neighbour Greene and the island in general. A couple of things were thus remembered by me – the opium den in Capri’s Villa Fersen and Greene’s own supposed trial of the drug.

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The Villa Fersen, now the Villa Lysis, was built by the industrialist and poet Jacques d’Adelsward-Fersen (below) in 1905. Fersen had had to decamp from Paris after a rather unsavoury sex scandal. While the house was being built Fersen went on an extended trip to Sri Lanka, where he got addicted to opium.

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So Fersen created an opium den in the villa (below) where he could indulge his habit – ‘a low ceilinged room furnished with a curve of divans…an opium den in supposed imitation of a Roman nymphaeum.’ In other words quite marvellous. Sadly the ceiling fell in and largely destroyed the interior. Fersen died in 1923 after an overdose of cocaine.

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The villa fell to ruin, which was how Hazzard and Greene discovered it much later. They were able to see the ruins of the old opium den, which apparently pleased Greene much. Greene then told Hazzard that after he had been in Indo-China researching what became his novel The Quiet American a local Capri countessa had given him a tin of opium that she herself had been given by Fersen in the early 1920s but never opened. Greene remarked, ‘Very good it was, too. It provided several pipes, smoked in my London flat.’ Hazzard notes though that with Greene, ‘References to opium – or to Kim Philby – were never without bravado.’

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Greene maintained that unlike Cocteau (who he enjoyed reading apparently) he never became an opium addict. Greene had of course once wanted to journey to China to work, had indeed briefly studied Chinese with Lao She in London in the 1920s and was a great fan of Maurice Collis’s book on opium Foreign Mud.

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