Lawrence & Italy

BOOK REVIEWS films (however inadequate these might appear to the specialist) and featured on booklists of gender studies courses, Forster's novels, far from being marginalized by the explosion of the canon, have in the twenty-five years since his death gained a wider readership. Criticism, as witnessed by this volume, by Tony Davies and Nigel Wood's recent collection of essays on A Passage to India in the Open University's Theory in Practice series, and Alistair M. Duckworth's volume on Howards End in the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series continues to open new perspectives, to re-examine old assumptions, and to rake over in lively, sometimes tendentious, ways the multiplicity of issues raised in and around his work. In short, the trough of the early 1970s occasioned partly by the publication of his minor fiction appears to have bottomed out, and his work garners the attention of critics interested in the latest critical technologies. Forster's stocks appear to be doing very well indeed. J. H. Stape Japan Women's University, Tokyo Lawrence & Italy D. H. Lawrence. Twilight in Italy and Other Essays. Paul Eggert, ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. lxxv + 327 pp. $79.95 D. H. LAWRENCE'S EXPERIENCE of Italy was extensive and various. Altogether he spent nearly six years there during three primary sojourns, one immediately before and one after the First World War and again after his nearly fatal last visit to America in 1924-1925. Italy was in part for Lawrence a place of refuge where he could live inexpensively and where his always precarious health might benefit from the agreeable climate and more leisurely pace of life. Of course Italy, particularly areas far removed from the more populous, tourist-oriented centers, became important to Lawrence as an imaginative stimulus also. Novels such as The Lost Girl (1920) and Aaron's Rod (1922), several stories including "Sun" (1925), many of the poems in Look! We Have Come Through! (1917) and Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), as well as three travel books—Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Etruscan Places (1932)—were inspired in part by Italy. He first encountered the country in his twenties, during his dramatic "elopement" with Frieda Von Richthofen Weekley, and last visited there in the summer of 1929, less than a year before his death at forty-four. Because Lawrence habitually thought of his travels, no less than his novels, as 91 ELT 39 :1 1996 a species of "thought-adventure" or quest, an awareness of his engagement with Italy over a span of almost eighteen years goes a long way toward tracing the complex trajectory of his artistic vision during these years. Twilight in Italy grew out of that initial encounter, and indeed commemorated Lawrence's inaugural journey outside his native land. After a walking tour through the Bavarian Alps, Lawrence and Frieda arrived in northern Italy in September of 1912, soon settling in the VuIa Igèa near Gargnano on the western side of Lake Garda. Here they remained for about seven months, with brief excursions up the lake to Campione and San Gaudenzio. During that winter and early spring, Lawrence wrote the first versions of a series of essays, "By the Lago di Garda," that would be published in the prestigious English Review the foUowing September: "The Spinner and the Monks," The Lemon Gardens of the Signor di P.," and The Theatre." The last of these grew out of the curious cross-cultural experience of seeing local productions of Ibsen and Shakespeare. Interestingly, the day after he attended a performance of Hamlet Lawrence wrote the famous letter proclaiming as his personal religion "a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect," a preference that he associated with the provincial Italian peasant. In AprU he and Frieda left Italy for Bavaria and England, not to return until the following September when (at this point still unmarried) they were reunited in Milan, before moving south to Fiascherino. There they remained for the next eight months. Once they departed, political as well as personal circumstances would prevent their seeing Italy again for more than five years—except through the...