by Tim Parks
But just as that beautiful sunset flames across the peaks, in the valley below him Lawrence sees two monks pacing back and forth together between ‘bony vines’15 in their ‘wintry garden’. It’s a place bereft of either sunlight or shadow, not a consummation of opposites, but an annulling of all differences in a twilit world of sterile mental reflection. ‘They did not touch each other … as they walked’ he notices. ‘Their hands were hidden … in the long sleeves … of their … robes … Yet there was an eagerness in their conversation.’16 Then Lawrence produces one of those extraordinary, almost mad paragraphs in which, from a close observation of real phenomena, he leaps to the most fanciful conclusions.
‘Neither the flare of day nor the completeness of night reached [the monks], they paced the narrow path of the twilight, treading in the neutrality of the law. Neither the blood nor the spirit spoke in them, only the law, the abstraction of the average. The infinite is positive and negative. But the average is only neutral. And the monks trod backwards and forward down the line of neutrality.’17
Any big idea in Lawrence is set up to be shot down. Never take anything as Bible. He hated the book. All the same, the concept here is central: there is a fruitful and natural way for polarities to encounter each other in conflict, consummation, intensity: a flaming sunset, a red-hot argument with Frieda; and there was a negative, merely destructive way, the mind coldly and mechanically neutralising opposites in arid codes of thought and manipulation. This was the territory of Frieda’s respectable husband, of contemporary intellectual individualism, of industrial mechanisation. Only Lawrence, it has to be said, could have seen the world’s modern ills symbolised in the crepuscular back and forth of two monks in an Italian garden.
Twilight in Italy proceeds with a gallery of local characters, the fascinating, sometimes hilarious account of the performances of a local theatre company, the sensual excitement of an evening’s dancing between local peasants and two visiting Englishwomen. On every page Lawrence’s ability to capture physical presence is remarkable: ‘The Bersaglieri sit close together in groups, so that there is a strange, corporal connection between them. They have close-cropped, dark, slightly bestial heads, and thick shoulders, and thick brown hands on each other’s shoulders … And they are quite womanless. There is a curious inter-absorption among themselves, a sort of physical trance that holds them all and puts their minds to sleep … They are in love with one another …’18
At times his indiscretion takes the breath away. Is there any writer today who would follow a sympathetic description of his foreign landlord and landlady with a profound analysis of their imagined sex life and the way the meeting of their bodies is expressive of their different relationships with the land and the community? It is this that most astonishes about Lawrence: the naturalness, almost insouciance, with which he goes deeper than you would have thought possible.
Yet beyond, or rather through, these character studies, what he is writing about is the twilight, as he sees it, of a certain Italian mentality: the shedding of the old oneness of man and land in a hierarchical community – the world of the spinner – and the movement towards an obsession with all that is countable and mental and egalitarian, the modern money-driven neurotic life. Hence his concentration on the local Gargnano men who have been or dream of going to America: the peasant who went and came back and remained completely untouched by the modern world – in a sense was never really away from his vines and olive trees – and the younger man whose encounter with New York has made life in rural Gargnano impossible and who is about to abandon a newly wedded wife to cross the ocean once more. Profound changes of the spirit are in the air, even in this tiny Italian community. Lawrence understands that. And the reader understands that below the surface Lawrence is seeking to see these things in relation to his own escape from England with Frieda.
So it’s appropriate that Twilight in Italy should end with another walk across the Alps in which Lawrence encounters a number of Italian emigrants working in a textile factory in Switzerland. They are escaping conscription. They are looking for money. They are nostalgic for home, for the soil and the food and the sun, but that nostalgia isn’t strong enough to take them back. It’s moving, among all the chatter and comedy of these episodes, how profoundly and personally troubled Lawrence is by these people and above all by their strange readiness to embrace everything mechanical. ‘Give a man control of some machine’, as he says elsewhere, ‘and at once his air of importance and more than human dignity develops.’19 This would be one of the great themes of The Rainbow. As he walks back from Switzerland into Italy, watching the spread of roads and railways and factories eating into the mountain landscape, he gives us reflections that might have been written, less eloquently, by some proponent of the anti-globalisation movement of today:
It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible desolating harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of nature that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a process of dry disintegration. If only we could learn to take thought for the whole world instead of merely tiny bits of it.20
Frieda is barely mentioned in Twilight in Italy. It’s as if Lawrence were still too insecure to let us make her acquaintance. He keeps her to himself, writing poems about her, about how they have overcome their problems. In a way they are coercive poems, informing Frieda and the world that Lawrence’s determination for the couple to make a success of it has indeed won the day. In 1913 they returned to England to be married.
But by the time we get to Sea and Sardinia, everything has changed. True, Lawrence had seen lean times in the First War. In 1915 The Rainbow had been banned for obscenity almost as soon as it was published. Too frail to be a soldier, he was nevertheless repeatedly called up and subjected to humiliating medical examinations. In 1917 he and Frieda were evicted from Cornwall on suspicion of spying for Germany, this as much a punishment for Lawrence’s pacifism as Frieda’s nationality. In the same year – an even more ridiculous error – his publishers rejected Women in Love.
But with the end of the war came the chance to shake the dust of England from their feet and almost immediately the Lawrences were in Italy, first on the island of Capri and then in Taormina on the eastern slopes of Etna looking back across the sea to mainland Calabria. And despite all the setbacks, Lawrence now had a reputation. Sons and Lovers had won critical acclaim. Above all, he himself had understood the importance of The Rainbow and Women in Love. He was thirty-six. Much had been achieved. Ideas that had still needed to be thrashed out and validated a decade ago were now thoroughly thought through and could be allowed to fall into the background. So there is a different kind of confidence about Sea and Sardinia; we can be allowed to meet Frieda.
Lawrence didn’t travel to write travel books. ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move’ he tells us in the first startling sentence of this book. Perhaps writing all day, living frugally in remote locations, he needed travel for the stimulus of confrontation. ‘I love trying things,’ he once famously remarked, ‘and discovering how I hate them.’21 Certainly he hated much of what he found in Sardinia.
Where Twilight in Italy is a collection of largely disconnected moments, character studies and descriptions held together by theme and style, Sea and Sardinia is a rapid, blow-by-blow account of a dozen nightmare days on the move – Sicily to Sardinia and back – a classic collision between exuberant high spirits and repeated disappointments. In this sense it is a comedy of the Three Men in a Boat variety. Except that where Jerome K. Jerome’s charming threesome entertained ordinary middle-class yearnings for a quiet break in idyllic surroundings, Lawrence was once again looking to Sardinia to give him examples of a pre-modern community of dignified manhood. Indeed, he and Frieda had half a mind to set up home there. Naturally, the greater the expectations, the greater the comedy of disappointment …
With masochistic energy the Lawrences de
part from their remote villa before dawn. They have packed their ‘kitchenino’, a little food hamper, with bacon sandwiches and a Thermos flask (an object of mystery to the Italians). Lawrence carries their clothes in a knapsack, another imported novelty that brings such stares from the Sicilians that he might as well be ‘riding on a pig’.22 The description of the dawn commuters on the platform at Catania is sublime, likewise the experience of the packed train from Messina to Palermo, the interminable delays, the inexplicably numerous officials: ‘You know them by their caps. Elegant tubby little officials in kid-and-patent boots and gold-laced caps, tall long nosed ones in more gold-laced caps, like angels in and out of the gates of heaven they thread in and out of the various doors.’23
On the boat from Palermo, too, the multitudinous crew are only occasionally and casually involved in the business of navigation. Their real task is to make life miserable for the passengers. Again and again Lawrence launches into rhapsodies: how he loves the freedom of the sea, how he appreciates Sicilian baking, only to be quickly and comically deflated by seasickness, rudeness and squalor. When he and Frieda get off the boat at Trapani in search of some nice little cakes they find that the city that ‘looked so beautiful from the sea … is a cross between an outside place where you throw rubbish and a humpy unmade road in a raw suburb with a few iron seats, and litter of old straw and rag.’24
Never actually named, Frieda is referred to at first as ‘the queen bee’,25 which is as much as to say: she who is ministered unto by all while rather grandly doing nothing herself. But what the queen bee does do is to offer a foil to Lawrence’s ups and downs. When Lawrence is disgusted by the begging of a filthy little girl pushing a fat baby against him, Frieda kindly talks to the girl, asks the baby’s name. In fact, Frieda talks to everybody who irritates Lawrence and seems to dislike everyone he likes. Perhaps it’s because of this that ‘queen bee’ very quickly becomes just ‘q-b’ in the ironic shorthand of the now established marriage.
The climax of the trip comes when, after many vicissitudes, they reach the tiny village of Sorgono, deep in the Sardinian interior. Lawrence has been enthusing wildly about the ‘lovely unapproachableness’ of the Sardinian peasants in their traditional dress and strange black stocking caps: ‘they wear them as a sort of crest, as a lizard wears his crest at mating time … A handsome fellow with a jaw of massive teeth pushes his cap back and lets it hang a long way down his back. Then he shifts it forward over his nose, and makes it have two sticking-out points, like fox ears, above his temples. It is marvellous how much expression these caps can take on. They say only those born to them can wear them. They seem to be just long bags, nearly a yard long, of black stockinette stuff.’26
Lawrence loves this. He loves the fact that these men still refuse to accept ‘the world’s common clothes. Coarse, vigorous, determined, they will stick to their own coarse dark stupidity and let the big world find its own way to its own enlightened hell.’27
This is fantastic. And the way they treat their women, brusque, hostile almost, as befits people who accept ‘the defiant, splendid split between the sexes’28 makes our champion of polarities even more appreciative. No twilight here. Sex is about opposites, about kissing and strife, as he once wrote. ‘Give me the old, salty way of love. How I am nauseated by sentiment and nobility, the macaroni slithery slobbery mess of modern adorations.’29
Then they arrive in Sorgono where the only hotel is filthy and cold, the proprietor is filthy and rude, and the streets are filthy and smelly, for the simple reason that they are used as toilets. Lawrence now falls into a sort of John Cleese rage, a wonderful send-up of himself: ‘I cursed the degenerate aborigines, the dirty breasted host who dared to keep such an inn, the sordid villagers who had the baseness to squat their beastly human nastiness in this upland valley. All my praise of the long stocking-cap vanished from my mouth. I cursed them all, and the q-b for an interfering female.’30
Yet the more things go wrong the more, deep down, Lawrence seems pleased, as if the most frightening scenario would have been to find what he was looking for, the ideal place for himself and Frieda to live. Indeed, Sea and Sardinia has a great deal to say about fear, and it is this that establishes its centrality in the writer’s oeuvre. Everywhere he goes Lawrence is concerned he will be cheated, robbed, badly served, badly fed, bored by hangers-on, harangued by ignorant people blaming him for the British government’s foreign policy (‘I am not the British Isles on two legs!’).31 He immediately picks up on such details as shoes left outside a hotel room, or doors left open on the streets, as indications of the level of local honesty. Towards the end of the book, afraid of not finding a cabin on the night steamer from Naples back to Palermo, he and Frieda try to save time by making their own way to the docks while the train is still stopped in the station. Afraid now of being fleeced, they reject the idea of a taxi – ‘I am weary of that boa-constrictor, a Naples cabman after dark’ – and walk alone through ‘the vast black quicksands of that harbour road’, where ‘one feels peril all around’.32 Did Lawrence go to Italy, one sometimes wonders, precisely because it had a reputation for being dangerous?
When they reach the ticket office, he plunges ‘into the fray. It is literally a fight. Some thirty men all at once want to get at a tiny wicket in a blank wall.’33 Lawrence constantly has to look to his wallet. Yet he is not upset: ‘Somehow or other, waking and sleeping, one’s spirit must be on its guard nowadays. Which is really what I prefer, now I have learnt it. Confidence in the goodness of mankind is a very thin protection indeed … Therefore, tight on my guard, like a screw biting into a bit of wood, I bite my way through that knot of fellows, to the wicket, and shout for two first class. The clerk inside ignores me for some time, serving soldiers. But if you stand like Doomsday you get your way. Two firsts, says the clerk. Husband and wife say I …’34
To ‘stand like Doomsday’! Isn’t this how Lawrence had won Frieda? Isn’t this how he had convinced the publishers to accept his work? And how he survives in Italy? An act of sheer will, of fear turned into desperate forcefulness. ‘Husband and wife’ indeed. What a proud proclamation! With all its comic encounters, little disasters, raptures, and above all its exhausting search for decent food and shelter, Sea and Sardinia is the book that most candidly reveals Lawrence as he must have been on his many travelling adventures, friendly one moment, aloof the next, then belligerent, and always up or down according to whether Frieda was down or up. One thing in particular that emerges is the tension between his enormous appetite (for food and life) and an incredible parsimoniousness: he was determined to save every possible penny. Hence it’s an added twist to discover that the original manuscript of Sea and Sardinia, written over a matter of weeks immediately after the trip, was thereafter consumed as toilet paper.
Turning to Sketches of Etruscan Places, the last of Lawrence’s travel books, we find that Frieda has disappeared again. We are six years on, Lawrence is forty-two, and everything has changed. The two of them have travelled in Asia, Australia, the USA and Mexico. Vast amounts of writing have been done. Lawrence is recognised as one of the great novelists of his time, of any time. But his health is collapsing. In 1924 he suffered a serious bronchial haemorrhage. In 1925 tuberculosis was diagnosed. In 1926, back in Italy again, Frieda had taken a lover, Angelo Ravagli, a man twelve years younger than herself. Now, in early April 1927, she left Lawrence in their rented accommodation near Florence to visit her family in Germany, but quite probably, as her husband no doubt understood, stopping in Trieste on the way to see Ravagli.
Partly to console himself, Lawrence set off with an old friend, Earl Brewster, on a tour of the Etruscan tombs in various small towns fifty or so kilometres north-west of Rome on the Tyrrhenian coast. If Twilight in Italy was written from the excitement of his first home with Frieda and Sea and Sardinia in the heyday of their relationship as they searched for a new home and lifestyle, Etruscan Places more sombrely but very beautifully describes a different kind of house hunt: the expl
oration of a number of underground chambers and tunnels ‘cut out of the living rock’,35 yet ‘just like houses’. The houses of the dead. Returning to the antique past, Lawrence was looking to his own future. He was dying. Tuberculosis was not an enemy against whom one could stand like Doomsday. It was Doomsday. Before very long there would be no impediment to Frieda Lawrence becoming Frieda Ravagli.
Lawrence’s interest in the Etruscans, whose many city states thrived in central Italy before the founding of Rome, was not new. For many years he had seen this forgotten people as emblematic of the sort of pagan consciousness he admired and emulated. Most emblematic of all was their total destruction at the hands of, as he saw it, a mechanistic, militaristic Rome. Having just finished a second draft of the polemical Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence opens Sketches of Etruscan Places in the same argumentative spirit. In particular, he is eager to underline the deep alliance throughout history between the brutal will to power and puritanical morals, an alliance, as he sees it, still alive in 1927 both in imperial Britain and Fascist Italy. The Etruscans loved the symbols of the phallus and the ark (the womb) and displayed them everywhere. Small stone phalluses are placed in niches outside the tombs of all the men. This, Lawrence says, is why Etruria had to be wiped out. ‘Even in their palmy days the Romans were not exactly saints. But they thought they ought to be. They hated the phallus and the ark, because they wanted empire and dominion and, above all, riches: social gain. You cannot dance gaily to the double flute and at the same time conquer nations or rake in large sums of money.’36
But gradually the polemics fade and Etruscan Places finds a rhythm all its own, becoming, before too long, the most serene and unstrained of Lawrence’s books. It is the spirit of the landscape and the spirit with which the Etruscans approached death that alter the tone.