D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
R.M.S. 'Osterley' Tuesday, 28 February
My dear Mother-in-Law:
We have been gone for two days. We left Naples Sunday evening, 8 o'clock. Monday morning at 8 o'clock we came through the Straits of Messina and then for hours we saw our Etna like a white queen or a white witch there standing in the sky so magic-lovely. She said to me, 'You come back here,' but I only said, 'No,' but I wept inside with grief grief of separation. The weather is wonderful - blue sky, blue sea, still. Today we see no land, only the long thin white clouds where Greece lies. Later on we shall see Crete (Candia). We arrive on Thursday at Port Said. There this letter goes on land. We also for a few hours. Then we go through the Suez Canal and so into the Red Sea. This ship is splendid, so comfortable, so much room and not many passengers. The berths are not half taken. It is just like a real luxury hotel. In the morning at seven o'clock comes the steward with a cup of tea. - If you want to take a bath and if cold or hot or how. At 8 o'clock the breakfast gong rings and such a menu - cooked pears, porridge, fish, bacon, eggs, fried sausages, beefsteak, kidneys, marmalade, all there. Then afterwards one sits about, flirts or plays croquet. Eleven o'clock comes the steward with a cup of Bovril. One o'clock lunch - soup, jish, chicken or turkey, meat, entrées, always much too much. Four o'clock tea, 7 o'clock dinner. Ah no, one eats all the time. But you also have an appetite at sea, when it is still and so heavenly like now. I find it strange that it is so still, so quiet, so civilized. The people all so still and so easy and such a cleanliness, all so comfortable. Yes, it is better than Italy. The Italians are not good now, everything becomes base. Frieda caught a cold in Naples, and you ought to see how good the steward and stewardess are with her as she lies in bed. They come so quickly with tea or soda water or what she wants and always such gentle manners. After Italy it is extraordinary. Yes, civilization is a beautiful and fine thing if it only remains alive and does not become ennui. I can write to you again from Aden and then not again before Ceylon. Now I must go down and see if Frieda has got up. Her cold is better today.
I am sorry you were not there to see us go on board at Naples, with trunks and bits and pieces - baskets of apples and oranges (gifts) and a long board that is a piece of a Sicilian wagon painted very gaily with two scenes out of the life of Marco Visconte. Else knows how beautiful are these Sicilian carts and the facchini are always crying: 'Ecco la Sicilia - Ecco la Sicilia in viaggio per I'India!' For the moment a rivederci.
Frieda also ought to write a word.
D. H. L.
The whole afternoon we have seen Crete with snow on the mountains-so big the island. Also another little island, all yellow and desert with great ravines. Now the sun is down, the rim of the sky red, the sea inky blue and the littlest, finest, sharpest moon that I ever saw. It is already quite warm.
Wednesday Today only warm and still. Seen no land - seagulls and two ships. Tomorrow morning we arrive at Port Said - letters must be posted tonight before 10 o'clock.
D. H. L.
R.M.S. 'Osterley' Tuesday, 7 March Arabian Sea Dear Mother-in-Law:
Perhaps I can post this letter at Aden this evening, but we do not stop. We have come so far and so lovely. We stopped three hours in Port Said, and it was quite like the Thousand and One Nights. It was 9 o'clock in the morning, and the ladies of Port Said were all abroad shopping. Little black waddling heaps of black crêpe and two houri eyes between veil and mantle. Comic is the little peg that stands above the nose and keeps veil and headcloth together. There came a charabanc with twenty black women parcels. Then one of the women threw back her veil and spat at us because we are ugly Christians. But you still see everything - beggars, water carriers, the scribe who sits with his little table, and writes letters, the old one who reads the Koran, the men who smoke their 'chibouks' in the open café and on the pavement - and what people! Beautiful Turks, Negroes, Greeks, Levantines, Fellaheen, three Bedouins out of the desert like animals, Arabs, wonderful. We have taken coal on board, and then at midday off again into the Suez Canal, and that is very interesting. The Canal is eighty-eight miles long, and you can only travel five miles an hour. There you sit on this great ship and you feel really on land, slowly travelling on a still land ship. The shores are quite near, you can surely throw an orange at the Arabs that work on the shores. Then you see beautifully, wonderfully, the Sahara Wiiste, or desert - which do you say? The waterway goes narrow and alone through red-yellow sands. From time to time Arabs with camels work on the shores and keep on shouting 'Hallo, Hallo' when the big ship passes so slowly, in the distance little sharp sand hills so red and pink-gold and sharp ond the horizon sharp like a knife edge so clear. Then a few lonely Palms, lonely and lost in the strong light, small, like people that have not grown very tall.
Then again only sand, gold-pink and sharp little sand hills, so sharp and defined and clear, not like reality but a dream. Solemn evening came, and we so still, one thought we did not seem to move any more. Seagulls flew about like a sandstorm, and a great black bird of prey alone and cruel, so black between thousands of white screaming, quick-flying sea birds. Then we came to the Dead Sea, flat seas that extend very far, and slowly the sun sank behind the desert with marvellous colours, and as the sun had set, then such a sky like a sword burning green and pink. Beautiful it was, I have never seen anything so superhuman. One felt near to the doors of the old Paradise, I do not know how, but something only half human, something of a heaven with grey-browed, overbearing and cruel angels. The palm trees looked so little the angels should be much bigger and every one with a sword. Yes, it is a frontier country.
Next morning we were in the Red Sea. There stands Mount Sinai, red like old dried blood, naked like a knife and so sharp, so unnaturally sharp, like a dagger that has been dipped in blood and has dried long ago and is a bit rusty and is always there like something dreadful between man and his lost Paradise. All is Semitic and cruel, naked, sharp. No tree, no leaf, no life: the murderous will and the iron of the idea and ideal - iron will and ideal. So they stand, these dreadful shores of this Red Sea that is hot like an oven without air. It is a strange exit through this Red Sea - bitter. Behind lie finally Jerusalem, Greece, Rome, and Europe, fulfilled and past - a great dreadful dream. It began with Jews and with Jews it ends. You should have seen Sinai, then you could know it. The ideal has been wicked against men and Jehovah is father of the ideal and Zeus and Jupiter and Christ are only sons. And God be praised Sinai and the Red Sea are past and consummated.
Yesterday morning we came through the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, again into the open. I am so glad that we came this way. Yesterday we always saw land - Arabia naked and desert but not so red and sharp and like dried blood. Today we see no land but later on we shall pass Cape Socotra. This ship has gained fifteen hours. We are fifteen hours before time. Perhaps we arrive in Colombo on Sunday evening instead of Monday. It is very warm, but there is always air. The sea is covered with little white sea-horses, but the ship is still and sure. We have not had one single bad moment. All here on board so friendly and so good and comfortable. I work on the translation of 'Maestro Don Gesualdo ' and I let my inkpot fall on the deck. The 'Osterley' shall wear my black sign for ever. At 11 o'clock in the morning we do not get Bovril any more, but ice cream. The women all wear colourful summer frocks. In the evening we dance. We see now the little flying fish. They are all silver and they fly like butterflies, so wee. There are also little black dolphins that run about like little black pigs.
Benediciti, D. H. Lawrence
Fontana Vecchia had a large podere to it. Great 'vasche' were on the rocky slope toward the sea, pools of green water to feed the lemon and orange trees. The early almond blossoms pink and white, the asphodels, the wild narcissi and anemones, all these we found during our walks, nothing new would escape Lawrence and we never got tired finding new treasures.
We went on a jolly expedition to Syracuse with Renée and John Juta and Insole. Tra
ins had their own sweet way in Italy then and arrived when they felt like it. I remember being much impressed by how Renée Hansard, with the experience of a true colonial, was fortified with a hamper of food and a spirit lamp so we could have tea at any time.
She pulled out her embroidery with its wools from a neat little bag. She turned the railway car into a live little temporary home. The quarries of Syracuse impressed me much. Here at Syracuse the flower of the Athenian youth had been defeated; in these quarries the Greek men had been put to starve while the ladies of Syracuse took their walks along the top of the quarries to see them slowly die. A sinister dread impression it left in me. I doubt whether centuries can clean a place of such inhumanity, the place will retain and remember such horrors. Syracuse and its splendour have gone. Man is more cruel than nature but whenever he has been so he pays for it.
Of our winter excursion to Sardinia Lawrence has described every minute, it seems to me, with extraordinary accuracy.
Garibaldi, the picturesque, had begun his campaign here in Sicily with his thousand, with his Anita and his South American experience.
Along our rocky road the peasants rode past into the hills on their donkeys, singing loudly, the shepherds drove their goats along, playing their reed pipes as in the days of the Greeks. We had an old Greek temple in the garden; there was the beautiful Greek theatre at Taormina, facing the Etna; what a marvellous stage for a play, not a modern play, alas, but how I longed to see one of the old giants like Sophocles there. How I longed for the old splendour of life to come back to us in those shabby after-the-war days.
'Give me a little splendour, O Lord,' would be my prayer.
There in Taormina, in the whole of Sicily, one could feel the touch of the hands of many civilizations: Greek and Moorish and Norman and beyond into the dim past.
Old Grazia did our shopping and I loved watching Lawrence doing the accounts with her, her sly old Sicilian face spying his, how much she could rook him.
'She can rook me a little, but not too much,' he would say, and he kept a firm hand on her.
The sun rose straight on our beds in the morning, we had roses all winter and we lived the rhythm of a simple life, getting up early, he writing or helping in the house or getting the tangerines from the round little trees in the garden or looking at the goat's new kids. Eating, washing up, cleaning the floor and getting water from the trough near the wall, where the large yellow snake came to drink and drew itself into its hole in the wall again.
Wherever Lawrence was, the surroundings came alive so intensely. At the Fontana Vecchia we mostly cooked on charcoal fires, but on Sundays he lit the big kitchen stove for me, and I, who had become quite a good cook by now, made cakes and tarts, big and little, sweet pies and meat pies and put them on the side-board in the dining room and called them Mrs Beeton's show.
Once we had lunch with three friends at their villa. It was a jolly lunch. We had some white wine that seemed innocent, but it was not. When we left, going home, I felt its effects but soon got over it.
'We must hurry, because those two English ladies are coming to tea.'
So we hurried home and unfortunately the white Sicilian wine affected Lawrence later. The very English ladies came and Lawrence was terribly jovial and friendly with them. I tried to pull his sleeve and whispered: 'Go away,' but it was no use.
'What are you telling me to go away for?' he said.
I could see the two visitors being very uneasy and wanting to leave.
'No, no, you must have some mimosa, I'll get you some,' Lawrence insisted. So he went with them through the garden, tried to climb a small mimosa tree and fell.
The ladies hurried away.
Next day Lawrence was chagrined and he met one of the ladies and tried to apologize to her, but she was very stiff with him, so he said: 'Let her go to blazes.'
I think from this incident arose the story that Lawrence was a drunkard. Poor Lawrence, he who could not afford wine and didn't want it, who was so naturally abstemious. I have seen him drunk only twice in all my life with him.
We stayed at Taormina in the heat and I remember when the mulberries were ripe and delicious and he climbed a big mulberry tree in his bathing suit. The mulberries were so juicy and red and they ran down his body so that he looked like one of those very realistic Christs we had seen on our walk across the Alps years ago.
He wrote 'Birds, Beasts and Flowers' and 'Sea and Sardinia' at Fontana Vecchia, and also 'The Lost Girl.' Sea and Sardinia' he wrote straight away when we came back from Sardinia in about six weeks. And I don't think he altered a word of it. His other works, especially the novels, he wrote many times, parts of them anyhow. Sometimes I liked the first draft best, but he had his own idea and knew the form he wanted it to take.
One day I found the manuscript of 'Sea and Sardinia' in the W.C. at Fontana Vecchia. So I told him: 'But why did you put it there, it's such a pity, it's so nicely written and tidy.' I had then no idea it might have any value, only regretted the evenly written pages having this ignominious end. But no, he had a passion for destroying his own writing. He hated the personal touch.
'I would like to burn all my writing. Print is different. They-can have it in print, my stuff.'
Just as he wanted Lawrence, the private person, separate from Lawrence the writer, the public man. He guarded his privacy ferociously. He liked best to meet people who knew nothing about him. He really disliked talking about his writing. 'They don't like it, anyhow,' he would say. But I read every day what he had written; his writing was the outcome of our daily life.
I had to take in what he had written and had to like it. Then he was satisfied and did not care for the approval of the rest of the world. What he wrote he had lived and was sure of. Travelling with him was living new experiences vividly every minute.
Then from Fontana Vecchia, we were really leaving Europe for the first time.
We did so much with the little money we had, making homes and unmaking them.
We unmade our beloved Fontana Vecchia and went to Palermo where the 'facchini' were so wild and threw themselves on our luggage; I can see Lawrence struggling amongst a great crowd of them, waving his umbrella about, equally wild. It was midnight and I was terrified.
An American friend gave me the side of a Sicilian cart I had always longed for. It had a joust painted on one panel, on the other St Genevieve. It was very gay and hard in colour. I loved it. Lawrence said: 'You don't mean to travel to Ceylon with this object?'
'Let me, let me,' I implored. So he let me. And off we set for Naples. There we were bounced in the harbour into our P. & O. boat. We arrived nearly too late, the gang-plank was pulled up immediately the minute we got on board. How we enjoyed that trip! Everybody feeling so free and detached, no responsibility for the moment, people going to meet husbands or wives, people going to Australia full of the wonders that were coming to them, and Lawrence being so interested and feeling so well. How tenderly one loves people on boats! They seem to become bosom friends for life. And then we went through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, Arabia Deserta on one side, so very deserta, so terrifying. Then one morning I woke up and I was sure I could smell cinnamon; the ship stopped and we were in Colombo. It struck me: 'I know it all, I know it all.' It was just as I expected it. The tropics, so marvellous these black people, this violent quick growth and yet a little terrifying, a little repulsive, as Lawrence would say. We stayed with the Brewsters in a huge bungalow with all those black servants in the background. In the morning the sun rose and we got up and I always felt terrified at the day and its heat. The sun rose higher and the heat would rise. We went for a walk and I saw a large thing coming towards us, large like a house, an elephant holding a large tree with its trunk! Its guide made him salaam to us, the great animal - young natives would come and pay visits to us and the Brewsters, who were interested in Buddhism. Lawrence became so terribly English and snubbed them mostly. Some young Cingalese said I had the face of a saint! Didn't I make the most of it a
nd didn't Lawrence get this saint rubbed into him! Then we had the fantastic experience of a Pera-Hera given in honour of the Prince of Wales. Such a contrast was the elegant figure of the Prince sitting on the balcony of the Temple of the Tooth amongst the black seething tropical mass of men. The smell of the torches and the oily scent of dark men. Great elephants at midnight, and the heat in the dark. The noise of the tom-toms that goes right through some dark corner in one's soul. The night falls so quickly and the tom-toms begin and we could see the native fires on the hills all around. Noises from the jungle; those primeval criés and howls and the brainfever bird and the sliding noises on the roof and the jumps in the darkness outside. How could one rest under such a darkness that was so terribly alive!
I The climate didn't suit Lawrence and we had to leave. Lawrence was not well and happy in Ceylon. The tropics didn't suit him.
I was so enthralled with the life around us, it was like living in a fairy-tale. We would go to Casa Lebbes, a little jewelshop at Number 1 Trincomalee Street in Kandy, and look at his jewels. He would pull out a soft leather bundle, undo it, and put before our eyes coloured wonders of sapphires, blue and lovely yellow ones, and rubies and emeralds. Lawrence bought me six blue sapphires and a yellow one: they were round in order to make a brooch in the form of a flower. The yellow one was the centre and the blue petal-shaped ones formed a flower round it. Also he bought me a cinnamon stone and a little box of moonstones. The blue sapphire flower I have lost, as I have lost so many things in my life, and the moonstones have disappeared, only the cinnamon stone remains. I wanted to go to Australia; it attracted me. Off we set again, trunks, Sicilian cart, and all, and went to Perth. Only Englishmen and Australians on the boat and it really felt as if one was going to the end of the earth.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1103