Spotorno and Scandicci,
1926–1928
LAWRENCE returned to Europe in poor health and without a permanent home. During the next five years he continued his restless quest for a congenial climate and an attractive place to stay. He lived mostly in small villages in Italy, first in Spotorno, on the Ligurian coast west of Genoa, and then in Scandicci, seven miles southwest of Florence. He made his last journey to England in the summer of 1926. In the spring of 1927 he went on a walking tour of the Etruscan places, and spent the early fall in Austria and Germany. In 1928 he divided his time between Tuscany, the Swiss Alps and an island off the south coast of France. His quarrels with Frieda were as violent as ever, and his tuberculosis became increasingly grave.
Lawrence found England in October 1925 dark, dismal and depressing. The rain, bad economic conditions and general gloom made it seem “almost gruesome,” even worse than his previous visit, in December 1923. “There’s no kick in the people,” he complained, “they’re about as active as seaweed.” During his month in England he visited his two sisters. Emily was “a fair, stolid-looking Midlands type”; Ada, “a handsome, dark version of Lawrence, had a rather unhappy adoration for him,” and he could not fully reciprocate her feelings. He met for the first time the novelist William Gerhardie, who noted the gravity of his illness: Lawrence’s “satanic look was absent. In the sunlight his red-bearded face looked harrowed and full of suffering, almost Christ-like.”1 He saw Cynthia Asquith; and when he met Murry for the last time, attacked his soppy Christianity.
He also stopped briefly in Buckinghamshire, first with Martin Secker and then with Catherine Carswell. Secker, three years older than Lawrence, was “round-headed, fresh-complexioned, with jet-black hair, short and slim; he spoke with an almost imperceptible drawl, and laughed heartily but not very often.” He had worked as a reader for Eveleigh Nash, founded his own firm in 1910 and had offices at 5 John Street, just off the Strand, near Charing Cross. Secker’s first great success was Compton Mackenzie’s novel The Passionate Elopement (1911). He also published Frank Swinnerton, Hugh Walpole, James Elroy Flecker, Francis Brett Young and Norman Douglas as well as Mann’s Buddenbrooks and Kafka’s The Castle. He became Lawrence’s publisher in 1918. Fredric Warburg, who took over the firm when it collapsed in 1935, felt Secker lacked energy and ambition. Lawrence called him “quite nice, really, and perfectly unassuming—shy.”2
Catherine Carswell thought that in 1925 (as in 1923) Lawrence seemed very solitary. He “did not speak of his health, and, as usual, there was nothing of the invalid about him; but under his big-brimmed Mexican hat his face looked pinched and small, and one easily guessed that he could not face London in the winter.” After a walk in the country, an unexpected visitor appeared. This was Yvonne Kapp, a friend of Catherine and an aspiring author, whose husband, Edmond, had in 1923 done a pencil drawing of Lawrence. Yvonne found Lawrence extremely sympathetic and later recalled: “He treated me with what I can only call tender respect, talking to me as though I were a fellow-writer, in all seriousness. I feel immensely grateful and fond of him.” Yvonne noted the striking contrast between Lawrence’s wasted appearance and Frieda’s bulky figure. They reminded her of those species who mate by the tiny male fastening onto the back of the enormous female.3
Summarizing his depressing and disappointing visits to family and friends in England, Lawrence told Brett that he had coughed like the devil in the filthy air of the Midlands, could not bear to see the gloomy Kot, felt he had lost his old intimacy with Cynthia, had nothing in common with the self-absorbed Murry and was sorry for Catherine’s poverty.
In 1921 Secker had married Rina Capellero, who came from Spotorno, a village he recommended to Lawrence. Though Lawrence was not especially fond of the Riviera and preferred to live farther south, in Capri or Sicily, they compromised because Frieda wanted a place that would be more accessible to her children and their friends. Lawrence rented the Villa Bernarda from mid-November until April 1926. The four-story villa, with a peasant living in the cellar, was perched on a hill overlooking the village and the sea. Sitting on the balcony and writing in the sun, Lawrence told friends that he liked the clear air and the mild Mediterranean winter, though the rough winds often confined him to the damp and chilly house:
But the house is on the hill above the roofs, just under the castle, and the sea goes in and out of its bays, and glitters very bright. There is something forever cheerful and happy about the Mediterranean: I feel at home beside it. We’ve got a big garden of vines and almond trees, and an old peasant Giovanni.
Ten days after settling into the villa, Lawrence, who had expressed his weariness with travel while in England, was already making plans for the spring and consoling himself for being an invalid by fantasizing about travel. He had started to learn Russian, still longed to visit the isles of Greece and sail through the Bosporus—though Rananim “had sunk out of sight.” He wanted to see the coasts and islands of Spain, Sicily, North Africa and Yugoslavia. He had published ten important novels as well as many volumes of poems, plays, travel books and essays, but had very little cash with which to realize his dreams:
Now then, let’s do something [he told Earl Brewster]. The Ship for preference. Or Spain in March—Balearic Isles, Majorca and Minorca—or central Sicily, that place, is it Castelvetrano, in the centre, where the flowers are really a wonder, in March. It’s where Persephone rose from hell, each spring. Or Calabria—though most people get typhoid there, with the filthy water. Or Tunis, and to Kairowan, to the edge of the desert. Or across Italy to Dalmatia, Spalato and Ragusa, very lovely; and Montenegro. But with the ship we could do all that to a marvel. I could put £100 sterling to the ship.4
Though Lawrence could not bear the conventional chirpiness and conceit of Frieda’s daughters (then in their early twenties), he was, despite his fierce temper, very kind when the long-legged Barbara arrived on her first visit in December. Lawrence had tutored adults—Jessie Chambers, William Henry and Stanley Hocking, Knud Merrild and Kai Götzsche—as well as children. He was also curious about Barbara Weekley, took a friendly and fatherly interest in her, taught her Italian, helped with her painting, gave advice and affection, cunningly roused her resentment against her mother and enlisted her sympathy during his battles with Frieda. He was pleased when the peasants in the village thought Barbara was his child and told him: “Your daughter is tall like her father.”
Lawrence knew that one day he would be considered a great writer and in “The Border Line” had autobiographically written: “Alan had had a weird innate conviction that he was beyond ordinary judgment.” He told Barbara that when Frieda had been childishly terrified during a storm at sea, he calmed her by asserting: “No boat that I’m on will ever go down.”5
Sensing a potential ally in Barbara, Lawrence attacked Frieda for smoking too many cigarettes, eating too many pastries, bobbing her hair, acting like an aristocrat, expressing muddled thoughts, trying to be intellectual and imitating his ideas. Huxley captured a characteristic exchange in Point Counter Point:
“Oh, for god’s sake shut up!” said Rampion.
“But isn’t that what you say?”
“What I say is what I say. It becomes quite different when you say it.”
Frieda recorded that one evening at dinner, Lawrence, jealously enraged, exaggerated Frieda’s egoism and emotional defects, and told Barbara:
“Don’t you imagine your mother loves you; she doesn’t love anybody, look at her false face.” And he flung half a glass of red wine in my face [as he had done in Mexico]. Barby, who besides my mother and myself was the only one not to be scared of him, sprang up. “My mother is too good for you,” she blazed at him, “much too good; it’s like pearls thrown to the swine.” Then we both began to cry. I went to my room offended.
“What happened after I went?” I asked Barby later on.
“I said to him: ‘Do you care for her?’ ‘It’s indecent to ask,’ he answered; ‘haven’t I just helped her with her rotten painting?’ ”
Ada’s appearance in this emotional maelstrom in February 1926 provoked a bitter, three-sided quarrel and a separation that was as serious as the crisis in New York in August 1923, when Frieda had returned to England without him. Ada was possessive, Frieda hostile, Lawrence ill. He complained bitterly about his wife to his sister. Ada, who may have noticed Frieda’s interest in their Italian landlord, assumed her mother’s dominating role and felt Frieda was bullying Lawrence when he was ill. She lost control and shrieked at Frieda: “I hate you from the bottom of my heart.” When Frieda went to Lawrence’s room, she found it locked against her and discovered that Ada had taken the key and excluded her from nursing Lawrence. It was “the only time he had really hurt [her].” So she hardened her heart and thought: “Now I don’t care.”
In a tactical retreat, Frieda moved into a hotel with her daughters. After a fortnight Ada returned to England, Lawrence wandered around central Italy for six weeks and Frieda returned to the villa. He visited the Brewsters in Capri; inspired Brett’s sexual fantasy in Ravello; and then took a little giro with two older women painters—Millicent Beveridge and Mabel Harrison, whom he had known in Sicily in 1921—to Rome, Assisi, Perugia, Florence and Ravenna. Frieda relented and wrote more mildly; but she still irritated Lawrence by justifying herself and laying down the law. He sent her a drawing of Jonah about to be devoured by the whale, with the minatory inscription: “Who is going to swallow whom?”6
Frieda’s daughters urged reconciliation. When Lawrence returned to Spotorno on April 3, the three women were dressed festively to greet him. “For the moment I am the Easter Lamb,” he told his mother-in-law. “When I went away, I was very cross. But really one has to forget a lot, and to live on.” After living for a few weeks with their mother, Barbara and Elsa’s childhood resentment resurfaced. They began to sympathize with Lawrence, and he came to admire—and even envy—their technique of handling their mother: “Frieda’s children are very fierce with her, and fall on her tooth and nail. They simply won’t stand her egotism for a minute: she is furious, then becomes almost humble with us all. I think they’ve taught her a lesson. Being her own family, they can go for her exactly in her own way, and pretty well silence her. It makes me die with laughing. She’s caught more than she bargained for, in her own offspring. Makes her really appreciative of me.”
Frieda—the daughter of a Prussian officer, brought up in a garrison town—had always admired soldiers and uniforms. In September 1914 she told Edward Marsh: “I used to think war so glorious, my father such a hero with his iron cross and his hand that a bullet had torn.” Eleven years later, she wrote Brett that she was attracted to their landlord in Spotorno: “We have a nice little Bersaglieri [elite corps] officer to whom the villa belongs. I am thrilled by his cockfeathers; he is almost as nice as the feathers!”7
Angelo Ravagli, twelve years younger than Frieda, was born in Florence in 1891. He entered the war as a corporal; was wounded twice and decorated three times, promoted to lieutenant and captured by the Austrians in October 1917. Frieda’s biographer described Angelo’s appearance, background and sexual affairs:
He was smaller than Frieda, but well-proportioned, and his movements were graceful. His virile, open features betrayed his peasant origin, but were otherwise in no way remarkable. It was the face of a man who had worked himself up from below and who set great store on outward appearances. He did not allow the fact that he was married and had three children to stand in the way of his erotic adventures: his wife, a schoolteacher, lived far away [from his army posts] in Savona.
Barbara, who disliked Angelo, called him an ordinary chap: practical and capable, but limited, dull and rather too pleased with himself.8
On her honeymoon in 1912 Frieda had slept with Udo von Henning, Harold Hobson and a German woodcutter in order to show her freedom and independence; in Cornwall in 1917 she had had a liaison with Cecil Gray to compensate for Lawrence’s infatuation with William Henry Hocking. Richard Aldington remarked, with some exaggeration and hostile intent, that in 1926 “Frieda used to go about complaining that [Lawrence] had become impotent”—no doubt to justify her own behavior. Frieda—who had hardened her heart against Lawrence and thought: “Now I don’t care”—probably began her affair with Angelo after her quarrel with and separation from Lawrence in February 1926, just as she had revenged herself with Murry under similar circumstances in the fall of 1923. Barbara and Juliette Huxley both thought Lawrence knew about Frieda’s affair. But he was determined to maintain his marriage. He understood Frieda’s nature and expected her to have a life of her own. He tolerated her selfishness and underestimated the seriousness of her attachment to Angelo. Though he must have found it sad and painful to have to share Frieda’s love at the end of his life, he rarely became jealous or upset about Ravagli.9
In April 1926, when the lease expired on the Villa Bernarda, Lawrence moved south to Florence, partly perhaps to avoid Angelo’s visits. There he met Arthur Wilkinson, a conscientious objector and a Socialist, who had a wild red beard, wore sandals and carried a knapsack. He painted, played the guitar, made puppets and wrote puppet plays, which he performed while touring in a caravan around the villages of England. Wilkinson lived with his wife and two children in Scandicci, a few miles from Florence in the Tuscan hills, and told Lawrence about the nearby Villa Mirenda, which became his last home in Italy.
The house belonged to Raul Mirenda, an army officer passionately devoted to history and literature. Close to the city, where Lawrence had several old friends, it was also secluded, restful and well suited to his work. It was a mile and a half from the terminus at Scandicci, where a half hour’s tram ride took one to the Duomo in the center of town. The large, square, white-stone farm villa, which dated from the days of the Medici, stood in unspoiled country near the church of San Paolo Mos-ciano. Perched on a hill overlooking gardens, fields, vineyards and olive trees, it had a picturesque and paintable view of the woods and meadows of the Val d’Arno. The rooms had red-brick floors and were big and bare; there was little furniture and no kitchen utensils or linens. The Lawrences rented the top floor and garden for 3,000 lire (about £70) a year and lived there, off and on, until June 1928. Frieda seemed to be happiest at the Mirenda, the most settled home they ever had.
Pino Orioli, the Florentine bookseller, called Mirenda “a distant and dilapidated place,” and Lawrence was not exaggerating when he said it had no comforts. It lacked electricity and running water, and the cooking had to be done on a charcoal fire. Lawrence reported that there was “no light, rainwater to be pumped up, sanitary arrangements primitive, the whole thing very rough—linen just calico, beds hard.” It was too hot in high summer, too cold in midwinter, and not the best place for an invalid.
Yet in June and July Lawrence painted an idyllic picture of the place. The fireflies were thick in the garden, the cicadas rattled away in the sun, the church bells rang, the girls sang while cutting the wheat and corn. The peasants, who worked the land and gave half the produce to the landlord, brought in huge baskets of ripe cherries, apricots, figs, peaches and plums, and the big white oxen walked slowly home past the olive trees. Lawrence’s country life was completely different from the lives of most foreigners, who lived in cities, went to the museums and bought antiques: “There is something eternal about it: apart, of course, from villas and furniture and antichità and aesthetics. But we see few people, and live rough, which is what I prefer.” Lawrence retained his independence by living economically and spending only £300 a year. He felt he had undermined his health with The Plumed Serpent and did very little work in hot weather. Despite relative idleness, the days passed quickly. He read, did the household chores, walked in the surrounding hills, talked to the Wilkinsons and observed the life of the peasants.
In June, Lawrence visited Sir George and Lady Sitwell, the parents of the poets, who owned a strange and rather disheartening castle some fourteen miles outside Florence, and whose eccentric existence was antithetical to his own. He mischievously explained that “Sir G. collects beds . . . as if he were providing for all the dead . . . those four-poster golden Venetian monsters that look like Mexican high-altars. Room after room, and nothing but bed after bed. I said ‘but do you put your guests in them?’—Oh! he said. They’re not to sleep in. They’re museum pieces. Also gilt and wiggly-carved chairs. I sat on one. Oh! he said. Those chairs are not to sit in!—So I wiggled on the seat in the hopes that it would come to pieces.”10
After settling into the Villa Mirenda, the Lawrences traveled north from mid-July to late September in order to escape the intense heat of summer. As the Mediterranean expatriate Norman Douglas wrote: “Anything for fresh air; anything to escape from the pitiless blaze of the South, and from those stifling nights when your bedroom grows into a furnace, its walls exuding inwardly all the fiery beams they have sucked up during the endless hours of noon!” Travel for Lawrence was at times a struggle for existence, a pilgrimage from country to country in search of warm climate and good health. Both Taormina and Taos had extreme summer and winter temperatures, which forced him to leave for part of the year. He often blamed the place for his illness and felt he had to abandon houses in which he had been gravely sick.
In Baden-Baden, which reminded Lawrence of Holbein’s Dance of Death, the aged and infirm, clutching at life, seemed proud to be still alive. Later on, Lawrence, conscious of his approaching death, prophetically wrote from there: “Truly old and elderly women are ghastly, ghastly, eating up all life with hoggish greed, to keep themselves alive. They don’t mind who else dies. I know my mother-in-law would secretly gloat, if I died at 43 and she lived on at 78.”
Lawrence’s last, two-month trip to Britain during the General Strike of 1926 inspired his grim portrayal of industrial England in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He visited the cold and showery Scottish Highlands and Isle of Skye with the lively painter Millicent Beveridge, driving to the various lakes and picnicking around a damp wood fire. Though Lawrence was not one to go banging at the birds, he wittily told Brett that “Grouse shooting began day before yesterday—an event for those that shoot, and a still bigger one for those that get shot.”11 He spent a few days on the sweeping sands of the “bracing and tonicky” Lincolnshire coast, where he had taken holidays as a boy. After visiting his sisters in the Midlands (he never saw his older brother, George) and taking a last walk around “the country of my heart” with Willie Hopkin, he saw a few friends in London before returning to the Villa Mirenda in early October.
Lawrence found Weimar Germany freer and more pleasant than Italy. Fascism had driven Italy into a state of nervous tension and spread the blight of authoritarian boredom. Mussolini urged his countrymen to live dangerously, but enacted hundreds of repressive laws to protect the power of the state. As Lawrence conclusively told his disciple Rolf Gardiner, who admired totalitarian governments: “One can ignore Fascism in Italy for a time. But after a while, the sense of false power forced against life is very depressing.”12
It is scarcely surprising that Lawrence finally broke with another would-be follower, Middleton Murry, in the spring of 1926. He could not stand Murry’s sentimental self-exposure in the Adelphi or his repulsive mixture of ingratiating impudence. In January, Murry wrote spitefully to Lawrence about Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine (1925) and then, Lawrence said, “adds insult to injury, asking if I will allow him to print the essay on power [“Blessed Are the Powerful”], gratis, and various other things, gratis, in his Adelphi; ‘as the gift of one man to another.’ To which I can only say; ‘as one writer to another, I will give you nothing, paid for or unpaid for.’ He is an incorrigible worm.” Murry retaliated by continuing to condemn Lawrence’s major works in the Adelphi. According to Murry, The Plumed Serpent showed that Lawrence had “lost faith in his own imagination”; the Collected Poems contained a “hard, bleak quality of dogmatic asseveration”; and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was “a deeply depressing book.”13
In the fall of 1926 Aldous Huxley, who was also living in Italy and seeing a good deal of Lawrence, replaced Murry as Lawrence’s closest friend. Tall, thin and bespectacled, nine years younger than Lawrence, Aldous was the grandson of the eminent Victorian scientist Thomas Huxley. Educated at Eton (where he later taught George Orwell) and at Balliol, he had overcome a period of blindness, been Murry’s assistant on the Athenaeum and published several witty, stylish and intelligent novels, including Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923). In 1919 he had married the gentle Maria Nys, a Belgian refugee who had entered the Garsington circle and become a protégée of Ottoline Morrell.
Lawrence, the intuitive mystic, and Huxley, the scientific rationalist (who later had a mystical phase), had originally met at Garsington in 1915. Ottoline noted then that the rather reserved Huxley, like Forster and Russell, was alarmed by Lawrence’s personal, penetrating analyses: “I think he was puzzled and rather overcome, and perhaps scared, at Lawrence’s quick and immediate approach, brushing away all preliminaries—vetting him in fact, putting him under his X-ray.” But their friendship developed swiftly in Italy, where they exchanged visits and took holidays together. Huxley was attracted by his temperamental opposite; Lawrence by Huxley’s gentleness, incisiveness and formidable intelligence, by his dependability and devotion. In a letter of July 1927 to his father, Huxley praised Lawrence’s genius and remarked that his temper had been tamed by illness: “He is a very extraordinary man, for whom I have a great admiration and liking—but difficult to get on with, passionate, queer, violent. However, age is improving him and now his illness has cured him of his violences and left him touchingly gentle.” After Lawrence’s death, Huxley defended him against his detractors and called him “the most extraordinary and impressive human being” he had ever known, “a being, somehow, of another order, more sensitive, more highly conscious, more capable of feeling than even the most gifted of common men.”14
Though weak, Lawrence seemed to be slowly recovering from his first serious hemorrhage. But in Spotorno in February 1926, he had a second hemorrhage (which he called “bronchial” rather than “tubercular”). Toward the end of 1926 and throughout the following spring, while he lived at the Villa Mirenda, Lawrence’s health seemed to deteriorate. In his letters, he frequently mentioned his sore chest, bronchial trouble, pneumonia, influenza and a recurrence of the malaria that had begun in Ceylon and continued in Mexico. At Eastertime, anticipating the mood of The Man Who Died, he seemed to be losing his grip on life and drifting toward death: “I’m just simply suffering from a change of life, and a queer sort of recoil, as if one’s whole soul were drawing back from connection with everything. This is the day they put Jesus in the tomb—and really, those three days in the tomb begin to have a terrible significance and reality to me.”
On a hot afternoon in early July, after gathering peaches in the garden, Lawrence went inside to rest. Frieda wrote that he suddenly
called from his room in a strange, gurgling voice; I ran and found him lying on his bed; he looked at me with shocked eyes while a slow stream of blood came from his mouth. “Be quiet, be still,” I said. I held his head, but slowly and terribly the blood flowed from his mouth. I could do nothing but hold him and try to make him still and calm and send for Doctor Giglioli. . . . In this great heat of July nursing was difficult—Giulia, all the peasants—helped in every possible way. The signor was so ill—Giulia got down to Scandicci at four in the morning and brought ice in sawdust in a big handkerchief, and milk, but this, even boiled straightaway, would be sour by midday. . . . I nursed him alone night and day for six weeks, till he was strong enough to take the night train to the Tyrol.
Lawrence bravely wrote, in a note to Pino Orioli: “early this morning the hemorrhage came again. Frieda wept, and I felt like all the martyrs in one. But it doesn’t seem bad, and I shall get up again tomorrow—deo volente [God willing].”15
Dr. Giglioli could give little more than a coagulant and feeble reassurance. As Lawrence optimistically explained to Mark Gertler, who had recently been treated in a sanatorium: “It’s chronic bronchial congestion—and it brought me on a series of bronchial hemorrhages this time. I’ve had little ones before. It would be serious if they didn’t stop, he says: but they do stop: so it’s nothing to worry about. . . . These hemorrhages are rather shattering—but perhaps they take some bad blood out of the system.” The real problem, as Lawrence admitted to the Brewsters, was that he needed “a new breathing apparatus.”
In August, Lawrence recovered sufficiently to spend two and a half months in Villach, Austria; at his sister-in-law’s villa in Irschenhausen, Bavaria (where he had lived in the summer of 1913); and in Baden-Baden. In Bavaria he was examined by two German doctor-writers: Max Mohr and Hans Carossa. Carossa gave a comforting diagnosis and warned him against a pernicious treatment: “He listened to my lung passages, he could not hear my lungs, thinks they must be healed, only the bronchi, and the doctors are not interested in bronchi. But he says not to take more inhalations with hot air: it might bring the hemorrhage back.”
The truth, however, was quite different. And Lawrence, who had two and a half years to live, was probably not deluded. For Carossa told the literary editor Franz Schoenberner, with devastating accuracy: “An average man with those lungs would have died long ago. But with a real artist no prognosis is ever sure. There are other [psychological] forces involved. Maybe Lawrence can live two or even three years more. But no medical treatment can really save him.” Huxley confirmed Lawrence’s will to live when he wrote: “by all the rules of medicine, he should have been dead. For the last two years he was like a flame burning on in miraculous disregard of the fact that there was no more fuel to justify its existence.”16
In mid-October, Lawrence returned to the Villa Mirenda, which had lost its charm and now reminded him of his serious illness in July. He was depressed by his lack of money and of energy, his inability to work, his physical deterioration and his proximity to death. “I’m not very happy here,” he told Kot, “and I don’t know where else to go, and have not much money to go anywhere with—I feel I don’t want to work—don’t want to do a thing—all the life gone out of me. Yet how can I sit in this empty place and see nobody and do nothing. . . . I do think this is the low-water mark of existence. I never felt so near the brink of the abyss.”
In January–February 1928, desperately in search of a remission if not a cure, the Lawrences rented a house near the Huxleys in Diablerets, Switzerland, and near the tuberculosis sanatoria of the Alps. The doctors said the altitude, thin air and snow would be good for him, but he actually felt worse than in Tuscany. He coughed, panted and could not walk uphill.
They spent the spring months at the Villa Mirenda, and then left the house forever. Signora Mirenda later recalled Lawrence’s friendship with the peasant families, his illness and his painting:
He was very thin with a red beard and looked like Jesus. They often quarreled, shut in their rooms, he often shouted at his wife. They loved our peasants: the Pini, Orsini, Bandelli. On Christmas they used to [decorate a tree and] arrange a great feast for more than twenty people, and there were many presents for the children. He suffered from tuberculosis and when he had a hemorrhage, he was helped by Giulia, a girl of twelve, daughter of the Pini. We were so worried for her, for the danger she was suffering by nursing a patient like that. Then, when he started writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he used to paint strange paintings, shameful ones, and even painted Pini while ploughing, naked.17
In mid-June the Lawrences met the Brewsters in the French Alps, where an unpleasant incident occurred. They settled into a charming inn at St. Nizier, in the mountains above Grenoble. The next morning the owner knocked on Earl’s door and complained about the coughing that had lasted through the night: “He was sorry not to be able to keep Lawrence, but there was no choice, since the law on that plateau prohibited his having guests with affected lungs. Monsieur would have to go.” According to their daughter, Harwood, the Brewsters took no precautions against his disease and even used the same utensils as Lawrence. And Lawrence continued to maintain that his coughing resulted from an annoying irritation of his bronchials. But this was the first time he had been evicted from a hotel, and the episode must have jolted the Brewsters into acknowledging the seriousness of his illness.
The Brewsters and Frieda decided not to tell Lawrence what had happened. They pretended they disliked the place and wanted to leave, obtained his agreement and never knew if he suspected what had occurred. But Lawrence, remembering his humiliating encounter with the American officials at El Paso, knew perfectly well what had transpired. A few days later, he wrote Pino Orioli: “That St. Nizier place was very rough—and the insolent French people actually asked us to go away because I coughed. . . . I felt very mad.”18
The Lawrences, once again without a fixed place to live, spent July to mid-September in Gsteig, Switzerland, where his sister Emily and her daughter Margaret visited him. In Margaret’s photograph Lawrence, looking tense and sitting on a bench outside the villa, has wasted away and wears a loose, baggy suit that seems much too large for him.
In October he stayed at Port-Cros with Richard Aldington, who was then having affairs with the American Dorothy Yorke and the Irish Brigit Patmore, both of whom Lawrence had met during the war. He sent the Brewsters a lively description of the island, an old coastguard fort off the coast of Toulon:
The Vigie isn’t a castle but a top of a hill with a moat and low fort wall enclosing a bare space, about 2 acres, where the wild lavender and the heather grow. The rooms are sort of cabins under the walls—windows facing the inner space, loop-holes looking out to sea—a nice large sitting room—a bedroom each—then across, a great room where we throw the logs, and a kitchen, pantry and little dining-room. It’s very nice, rather rough, but not really uncomfortable—and plenty of wood to burn in the open fireplaces.
But the grim reality was entirely different. Lawrence was clearly dying and, according to Aldington, became embittered when Frieda returned from a tryst with Ravagli and infected him with her cold:
He had to spend his days in bed or in a deck-chair, so weak that he could pass the drawbridge only for a few yards, and was almost too weak to climb to the glassed-in look-out. Most unfortunately, Frieda came back with one of her usual heavy colds, which Lawrence instantly caught, and this ended up in a hemorrhage. . . . Night after night I listened to his deep hollow cough. . . . Only then did I realise how frail and ill he was, how bitterly he suffered, what frightening envy and hatred of ordinary healthy humanity sometimes possessed him, how his old wit had become bitter malice, how lonely he was, how utterly lonely he was, how utterly he depended on Frieda, how insanely jealous of her he had become.
At the end of November, Lawrence felt a change of continent and the clean air of the Rockies might do him good. But he told Brett that he dared not risk the trip: “At present I feel America rather hostile to me and they might do something mean to one, if one came over. . . . They hate you so if you cough—particularly on ships—and cough I do.”19
In early April 1927, after a year in the Villa Mirenda and during the last period of relatively good health before his serious hemorrhage in July, Lawrence took a two-week walking tour with Earl Brewster to the Etruscan towns of central Italy. In the three summers before the war, Lawrence and Frieda had crossed the Alps on foot, and he had met Kot on a walking tour of the Lake District in August 1914. But he would soon lose the remnant of strength he still possessed; and the long walk to Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Volci and Volterra was the last he would ever take.
Lawrence’s last travel book, Etruscan Places (serialized in Travel in 1927–28), is a synthesis of history and direct experience. It combines description and interpretation with social criticism and political commentary, and concerns both the past and the present of Italy. The central paradox of the book is that the Etruscans, though destroyed by the Romans, still live in their art and are more vital than their conquerors: “the carved figure of the dead rears up as if alive, from the lid of the tomb. . . . The underworld of the Etruscans becomes more real than the above day of the afternoon.”20
Though Lawrence relies heavily on Etruscan scholars like George Dennis, Pericles Ducati and Fritz Weege for factual information, he instinctively opposes their negative interpretation of the people. He also condemns their efforts to tear Etruscan art from its customary setting in the rough hillside, where the guide kneels to light his lamp and the travelers quite naturally dive down into the little one-room tombs “just like rabbits popping down a hole.”
The vague and mysterious quality of the Etruscans, who half emerge from the dim background of time, allows and even encourages Lawrence to construct an imaginative but entirely convincing picture of their vanished life, to re-create them in his own image. He laments that “We have lost the art of living” and believes that the Etruscans, who express the qualities he admires, can by their still vivid example restore their precious gifts to modern man.
Lawrence announces, on the opening page, that he is instinctively attracted to the Etruscans, who have captured his imagination. He makes specific connections between the characteristics of the ancient Etruscans and the modern Italian peasants. According to Lawrence, Etruscan places have a stillness and repose. The Etruscans were connected to a primitive and prehistoric Mediterranean world, were in touch with the gods, and had a phallic as opposed to the present-day mental and spiritual consciousness. They possessed a delicacy, sensitivity and spontaneity, and saw death as a pleasant continuance of life, with wine, flutes and dance. Their religion, which preceded the Roman gods, was expressed in terms of ritual, gesture and symbol; their ship of death represented “the mystery of the journey out of life.” Everything they made was ephemeral, conveyed a sense of everlasting wonder and provided immediate pleasure. Their confederacy of loosely linked, independent city-states expressed the Italian political instinct and resembled modern Italy before unification in 1861—and even afterward. In a magnificent passage that proclaims his vitalism in the face of death, Lawrence writes:
To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred. . . . Every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness.
And it has to-day.
The active religious idea was that man, by vivid attention and subtlety and exerting all his strength, could draw more life into himself, more life, more and more glistening vitality, till he became shining like the morning, blazing like a god.
In Lawrence’s view, the brutal, imperial Romans were antithetical to the Etruscans. The Romans dominated and eventually destroyed their charming neighbors, who held out against overwhelming mechanical force for more than a hundred years. The historical justification for the destruction of Etruria was that the people were vicious. Lawrence stoutly defends them against the charge of cruelty and convincingly refutes the traditional “picture of a gloomy, hellish, serpent-writhing, vicious Etruscan people who were quite rightly stamped out by the noble Romans.”
Lawrence associates the ancient Romans with the modern Fascists just as he equates the Etruscans with the peasants. He thus gives a satiric twist to the nationalistic propaganda of the Italian conquerors, who revived the Roman salute, spoke of the Mediterranean as mare nostrum and were inspired by imperial ambitions to invade Africa. But Lawrence notes, with considerable perspicacity, that Fascist (like Roman) power is doomed because the party members do not trust their leaders: the Nietzschean “will-to-power is a secondary thing in an Italian, reflected onto him from the Germanic races that have almost engulfed him. . . . Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness.”21