Lawrence’s journey to Turin was scheduled to take ‘about 22 hours only’ (3L 414), but, though he had a good crossing and there were no problems at the borders, the trains were ‘slow slow – slow’ (3L 415). He got in to Paris at 6.30 p.m. on 14 November (after 10½ hours of travelling) and caught his onward train at 9.30 p.m. This arrived at the border town of Modane at 1.30 p.m. the following day; it did not get in to Turin until eight o’clock, some 36 hours after his departure. Lawrence headed straight to the Beckers’ house at Val Salice, nearby. He spent two nights there. Sir Walter’s knighthood had been awarded in 1918 for his service to the nation in founding a hospital for allied troops in Turin; he had been invested just a few weeks before Lawrence’s arrival. Lawrence got on rather well with his wealthy hosts, though he had a ‘sincere half-mocking argument’ with ‘the old knight’ along fairly predictable lines: ‘he for security and bank-balance and power, I for naked liberty.’ Becker was subsequently incorporated rather unsympathetically into Aaron’s Rod as Sir William Franks, whose wife urges him to try on his three Order medals for the assembled guests after dinner.1
Lawrence left Turin for Florence on the morning of 17 November but broke his journey at Lerici. On his arrival, there was a ‘blazing blazing sun, a lapping Mediterranean – bellezza!’ (3L 417); he had gone in order to visit his old acquaintances in Fiascherino,2 yet found that things were ‘not so gay’ (3L 416) as they had been six years before. Two days later he went on to Florence, where Norman Douglas had secured him a room in the Pensione Balestri, in which Douglas and his friend, the American expatriate Maurice Magnus, were also staying. It was a ‘charming room’ (3L 420) close to the Ponte Vecchio, looking over the River Arno. Though Lawrence initially felt quite lonely, sending off numerous postcards to family and friends informing them that he was waiting there for his wife, he soon warmed to his two eccentric companions and appreciated their company and the opportunity to dine out with them. It helped that Lawrence shared a good number of friends and literary contacts with Douglas, a tall, middle-aged novelist and essayist who had recently had a notable success with his novel South Wind (1917), published by Secker. Douglas’ restless wit and unrestrained hedonism intrigued and slightly appalled Lawrence. Magnus proved equally fascinating. He was in his early forties with a penchant for the good life and a chequered past: he had worked in the theatre before the war, acting as manager for Gordon Craig and Isadora Duncan, had enlisted in the French Foreign Legion during the war, and now lived well beyond his means on the meagre income he generated from contributions to American magazines. Both Douglas and Magnus were married, though they were homosexual by preference and quite misogynistic.
In their company, Lawrence feared that he would ‘loaf away all my substance’ (3L 419), but he enjoyed the witty conversation and the liberal atmosphere of Florence; it must have shaped his perception of the ‘blessed insouciance’ (3L 422) which he still detected in the Italians. While waiting for Frieda, Lawrence probably began writing the essays on psychoanalysis which would eventually be published as Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious; he may also have started writing essays on Italy, beginning with ‘David’ (about Michelangelo’s statue outside the Old Palace in Florence) and ‘Looking Down on the City’. One of these two essays was sent to Murry on 6 December, with a view to publication in the Athenaeum.
Frieda arrived rather later than planned, in the early hours of 4 December; she had needed to get permission to travel and secure a visa for Italy before she could head south and was ‘a good bit thinner’ after her stay in Germany. Lawrence would continue to send food and money to Frieda’s mother ‘from England’ (3L 476) to offset the post-war austerity. Frieda soon grew to enjoy the witty repartee between Lawrence, Douglas and Magnus, though she found the gossipy atmosphere rather too much like ‘Cranford’; she disliked the mens’ ‘secret rejoicing in wickedness.’3 When Rosalind Baynes took up residence at the same pension in January, Lawrence was worried that she might be ‘touched or frightened’ by Douglas’ ‘scandals’ (3L 463). A few days after Frieda’s arrival, Lawrence heard back from Seltzer: he had sent Lawrence £50 to secure American rights to publish Women in Love.4 Lawrence wrote to inform Huebsch that Seltzer would not return the manuscript and had paid ‘money in advance of royalties’ (3L 429); he insisted that it was not his own fault that Seltzer had claimed rights to the novel.5 He mentioned Aaron’s Rod to Huebsch as a novel-in-progress which would be ‘more possibly popular’ (3L 426) than Women in Love.
On 10 December, the Lawrences left for Rome. Their stay there was a disaster. Frieda’s nationality meant that they were turned out of the pensione which Ellesina Santoro (a relative of Catherine Carswell) had booked for them. They went to Ellesina’s house, but Lawrence was robbed during his stay (a detail which he did not mention to anybody for fear of offending Catherine). It was the second occasion on which Lawrence had had possessions stolen in Italy (his pen had been taken in Florence).6 In his letters he refers dismissively to Rome as ‘impossible and crowded’ and ‘vile’ (3L 430–31). He and Frieda decided to travel on early to Picinisco, leaving on 13 December.
The journey there was arduous: they took a train to Cassino, a post-omnibus through the mountains to Atina, and from there went by cart and on foot to Orazio Cervi’s house. Lawrence reported back to Rosalind Baynes that it was ‘a bit staggeringly primitive’ (3L 431) and quite unsuitable for her and her three young daughters. He described the ‘natives’ as ‘brigands with skin sandals’ speaking a ‘perfectly unintelligible dialect,’ and explained that Picinisco itself was ‘2 miles away, a sheer scramble – no road whatever.’ The market was five miles away; they had ‘milk – also bread when you can get it – also meat – no wine hardly – and no woman in the house, we must cook over the gipsy fire and eat our food on our knees in the black kitchen on the settle before the fire’ (3L 432). The days were bright and warm, but the nights were freezing, and for all the local colour (people played bagpipes under their window as part of their Christmas celebrations) he knew that he and Frieda would be forced to move on once the weather worsened. It did not help that to collect his post he had to ‘scramble up an accursed goats climb of about 80 minutes, to the God-lost village of Picinisco’ (3L 434).
In these challenging circumstances, Lawrence corrected and returned the proofs of All Things Are Possible to Secker on 20 December.7 That day there was a heavy fall of snow and conditions became icy and impossible. Lawrence wrote again to Compton Mackenzie, telling him that it was too cold to stay. On 22 December (before a reply could arrive) he and Frieda left, travelling to Naples and from there taking a ferry to Capri. They were forced to stay overnight on the boat in Sorrento because the sea was too rough to enter the shallow port.
The weather was much milder in Capri, though Lawrence felt that it was not a place in which he would stay for any length of time: ‘it seems to me like a stepping-stone from which one steps off, towards elsewhere.’ He and Frieda took temporary lodgings and sought out Mackenzie. Unfortunately he was away. In addition to his own home (‘Casa Solitaria’), Mackenzie apparently had access to two cottages (one in Anacapri, the other at the Piccola Marina), but the cottage in Anacapri was rented to Francis Brett Young (a doctor-turned-novelist) and his wife Jessica, who were staying at the other, warmer cottage in Mackenzie’s absence, so the Lawrences decided not to wait for him and instead found their own apartment, above a café in the piazza at the social heart of the island. They moved in on Christmas Day. The apartment was part of the top floor of the Palazzo Ferraro and boasted ‘two great rooms, three balconies, and a kitchen above, and an enormous flat roof … Ischia, Naples, Vesuvius … smoking to the North – the wide sea to the west, the great rock of our Monte Solaro in front – rocks and the Gulf of Salerno – South’ (3L 451). Lawrence soon made friends with a young Romanian socialist who lived next door. He told Willie Hopkin that the man’s politics would please even him, though their discussions of ‘idealistic philosophy’ had to be conducted in several languages: Lawrence spoke in ‘bad English-Italian, larded with French,’ while the man answered in ‘his furious Roumanian-Italian, peppered with both French and German.’ The island, with its ‘overcosmopolitanised’ (3L 452) mix of nationalities, became a ‘little Babel’ (3L 453): there were ‘English, American, Russian by the dozen, Dutch, German, Dane – everybody on this tiny spot’ (3L 451). It was ‘pleasant and bohemian’ (3L 443), but also full of gossip and ‘spiteful scandal’ (3L 444). Lawrence gathered around him a sympathetic group of friends, including Mary Cannan (whom he was pleased to discover was also on the island).
Mackenzie had returned by 27 December. He and Lawrence evidently spoke at length about Lawrence’s financial prospects as a novelist; Mackenzie’s wealth – and the fact that he and his friend Brett Young were also Secker novelists – would have driven home Lawrence’s need to manage his own literary affairs far more cannily in future. Lawrence told Amy Lowell that he had become ‘a sort of charity-boy of literature, apparently’ (3L 475). He was happy to accept $100 from her as a New Year gift, and also a cheque for £25 7s 7d from three American admirers,8 but he was annoyed by a letter from Gilbert Cannan offering to collect a few dollars for him.9 Lawrence was determined to support himself properly with his writing. He still struggled to make any money from his plays: Norman Macdermott had optioned Touch and Go for £15, but was doing nothing with it; The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd was at least being produced, but this was on a small scale by the Altrincham Stage Society.10 Novels were another matter altogether; these needed to provide the mainstay of his income. Lawrence now felt that his finances had suffered from dealing with publishers in a ‘vague, half-friendly, in-the-air’ manner (3L 456). He decided to stop using an agent in England; on 27 December he wrote to Pinker, stating that he wished to sever their agreement.11 He confirmed his wish to act for himself in a further letter to Pinker on 10 January. Pinker would settle their accounts by sending him a cheque for £105.12 A year later Lawrence coined the term ‘bePinkered’ to signify the act of being ‘fogged … and kept … in the dark and never answered’ (3L 643).13
Lawrence’s decision to take a more decisive approach to financial matters necessitated some awkward negotiations with publishers between December 1919 and May 1920. He proposed that Secker might publish The Rainbow in England as ‘Women in Love Vol I’, and he offered to enter into a permanent agreement with Secker as his English publisher should he do this. If Secker was prepared to publish The Rainbow and Women in Love, then he might also expect to receive the next ‘perfect selling novel’ (3L 439), since Lawrence was waiting for the incomplete manuscript of ‘Mixed Marriage’ (formerly ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’) to be sent to him from Germany. On 16 January, he even wrote to Secker with a business proposition, suggesting that he was prepared to become a partner and shareholder in Secker’s company; Mackenzie had recommended that Lawrence should sell the short-term copyright in his novels to Secker, with ‘£200 for The Rainbow, £300 for Women in Love, and £500 for A Mixed Marriage’ (3L 458). After these titles had made Secker £1000, Lawrence would accept royalties at 20% as an investment in the company.14 Predictably, Secker chose not to take Lawrence up on his offer; he wanted instead to buy the rights to The Rainbow outright for £200. Lawrence refused and considered going back to Duckworth. However, once the latter confirmed that it would only publish The Rainbow if a whole chapter was left out, Lawrence went with Secker after all, allowing him to publish The Rainbow and Women in Love on a ‘fair royalty basis’ (3L 500).
Lawrence also took action over the publication of his work in America. On 16 February he wrote to Robert Mountsier, asking whether he would be willing to act as his unofficial agent, since he wanted to ‘plant my stuff first in America, and let England take second chance every time’ (3L 477). Mountsier had returned a positive answer by 11 April, though the relationship was not formalised until 23 July.15 Lawrence’s negotiations to establish a publisher for his novels in America proved problematic. He was initially inclined to transfer his business to Huebsch. In this spirit he wrote again to ask Seltzer to return the manuscript of Women in Love, and he offered to refund the advance he had received.16 In the meantime, Lawrence demanded that Huebsch should provide an account of all sales to date, and in future provide full sales details on a half-yearly basis (settling accounts within three months of royalties falling due).17 However, by 9 March he had agreed contracts with Seltzer for the publication of Touch and Go and Women in Love.18 He now felt that Huebsch had been too vague with him over business matters. By contrast, Seltzer and his wife Adele expressed a genuine enthusiasm for Lawrence’s work, and a desire to become his publisher; they even asked to see Studies in Classic American Literature, which Huebsch held on to in a non-committal fashion for some weeks.19 Lawrence opted to go with Seltzer, despite Gilbert Cannan’s warning that Seltzer was ‘bound to go bankrupt’ (3L 492–3). Huebsch’s subsequent decision to print sections from All Things Are Possible in the 7 April 1920 edition of his paper, The Freeman, without due acknowledgement of either Lawrence or Kot, seemed to confirm the prudence of Lawrence’s choice (though Huebsch actually paid Secker for these excerpts).20 Huebsch would not finally publish an edition of the Shestov book at all, nor would he publish the six essays later collected in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, which Lawrence forwarded to him on 29 April as a form of compensation for going with Seltzer.21
Friends felt the backlash from Lawrence’s anger at the way he had been treated by publishers in the past. Kot continued to worry about Secker’s decision to cut Shestov’s preface from All Things Are Possible and replace it with Lawrence’s foreword; he was now told in blunt terms by Lawrence that he was being ‘unnecessarily fussy’ (3L 441). Cyril Beaumont had finally published Bay on 20 November; Lawrence did not receive a copy until 29 January, when he was angered to discover that the ‘wessel-brained’ (3L 487) Beaumont had made two major printing errors, and had forgotten to inscribe it to Cynthia Asquith. He asked him to tip in the dedication.22 He also had misgivings about C. W. Daniel’s edition of Touch and Go in the ‘Plays for a People’s Theatre’ series, and was enraged when Goldring’s The Fight for Freedom was published first, upstaging him.23
Another case was far more troubling. After 6 December, Lawrence sent at least one more essay to Murry for the Athenaeum; it is possible that he had forwarded one or more of his psychoanalysis essays (all six had been completed by 29 January 1920).24 He may have felt that Katherine Mansfield would be particularly interested in these, since he had sent her a book by Jung and discussed the ‘Mother-incest idea’ with her in December 1918.25 In late January he received a rejection letter from Murry. It had been posted in Ospedaletti, near San Remo, at the end of a visit that Murry had made to Mansfield (who had moved there on the advice of her doctor). There had just been a three-week postal strike in Italy, which meant that the letter probably arrived with Lawrence at the same time as a later one from Katherine telling him about the terrible state of her health, and her imminent move to Menton in the south of France. Reading about Katherine’s woes at the same time as receiving the rejection (written by Murry but apparently forwarded by Katherine) clearly outraged Lawrence.26 Remembering the earlier rejection of the articles he sent from Derbyshire, he must have felt betrayed by them, and especially by Katherine (to whom he had once again grown close during his time in Middleton). He told Murry that he was ‘a dirty little worm’ (3L 467), and wrote separately to Katherine, telling her: ‘I loathe you, you revolt me stewing in your consumption’ (3L 470). It brought about a two-year breach in communication between the two couples.
Lawrence was ill with flu for a good part of February, and he began to grow weary of the smallness of Capri and its backbiting atmosphere. On 5 February he told Catherine Carswell that he was ‘very sick of Capri: it is a stewpot of semi-literary cats’ (3L 469). ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’ had arrived on 12 February and he started work on it immediately. Soon, however, a distraction dragged him away from it. Maurice Magnus, in trouble with his creditors, had gone to the monastery at Monte Cassino, an eleventh-century Benedictine abbey close to the town of Cassino, 80 miles south-east of Rome. Lawrence had told Magnus about his own move from Picinisco to Capri, and on receiving a flustered reply from an expensive hotel in Anzio, near Rome (where Magnus was then staying), he had intuited Magnus’ problems and forwarded £5 from the money he had received from his American admirers. In a subsequent letter, Magnus invited Lawrence to stay with him at the monastery; Lawrence promised to come for two days.27
On 19 February he travelled alone to the mainland. It was an 11-hour journey by foot, funicular railway, boat, steamer, train and carriage, and Lawrence stayed for just one full day and two nights; he returned on 21 February. The short visit is hardly mentioned in Lawrence’s extant letters: he merely told his uncle, Fritz Krenkow, that the area was ‘wonderful’ and the forty monks ‘charming’, but he was saddened to find that the monastery had been ‘divested of its power and turned into a sort of museum’ (3L 489). Yet the account he wrote of it almost two years later shows that it made a profound impression on him.28 Magnus was in some respects the kind of troubled, sensitive and vulnerable man with whom Lawrence could feel a deep underlying kinship; he was also, of course, radically different from Lawrence in his active bisexuality, and his commitment to sexual and financial risk, and even recklessness. In the historic remains of the monastery, Lawrence was confronted by a deeply poignant, painful vision of a rich European culture which had once been so dear to him – ‘all that lingering nonchalance and wildness of the Middle Ages’ (IR 27) – but which the war had effectively consigned to the past. In this setting it seems likely that he sought a kind of imaginative closeness and intimacy with Magnus. Magnus showed Lawrence the manuscript of ‘Dregs’, the memoir he was writing about his time in the French Foreign Legion in Algiers; the two men almost certainly discussed Magnus’ sexual experiences with both men and women, and Lawrence encouraged him to revise the book and to write about these things in a more explicit and honest manner. Lawrence would, in turn, have taken from their discussion a vivid sense of what it might have been like to go through the experiences Magnus had, and what they really meant to him. This would have been utterly compelling for an exploratory imaginative writer like Lawrence, who was committed to probing in his work the extremes of human feeling.29
Other aspects of Magnus’ life, experience and opinions were, however, decidedly less compelling. Lawrence was forced to discuss the pressing issue of Magnus’ awful financial situation; he gave Magnus a little more money and offered him some help in trying to publish his work. Lawrence distrusted Magnus’ announcement that he would study for two years to enter the order of the Benedictine monks, and he was wearied by Magnus’ ‘complacent’ (IR 31) class attitude and constant demand for sympathy. If Lawrence’s determination to return home early – in spite of Magnus’ plea for him to stay another day – reflected his strong reaction to the place itself, and its disturbing reminder of ‘the not-quite-dead past’ (IR 33), it also revealed the exhaustion he felt at living so close to Magnus. He later recalled the ‘sense of the past preying on one, and the sense of the silent, suppressed, scheming struggle of life going on still in the sacred place’ (IR 35). The last part of that phrase perfectly captures the powerful ambivalence of Lawrence’s feelings for Magnus: Lawrence was intrigued by Magnus, and by his fearless approach to experience, but the underhand behaviour necessitated by Magnus’ shameless commitment to the high life disgusted him.
On his return to Capri, Lawrence put into action a long-term plan to move to Sicily. He set off with Brett Young and his wife on 26 February, to see if he could find a suitable house for himself and Frieda on this much bigger island. Lawrence searched in Agrigento, Syracuse, Catania and Taormina, where he finally found the Fontana Vecchia, an imposing house on a steep slope looking out over the straits of Messina to the coast of Calabria. Lawrence rented the top two storeys for one year. He sent a joyful telegram to Frieda to inform her of his find, and told her to join him. Frieda travelled with Mary Cannan on 6 March. Mary stayed at the Timeo Hotel, whose chef – Francesco (‘Ciccio’) Cacópardo – was the Lawrences’ new landlord; Lawrence and Frieda put up at the Bristol Hotel until 8 March, when they moved into their new home.
Lawrence described Taormina as full of ‘dark influences,’ like ‘the Celtic land of Italy’; the view across the water from the Fontana Vecchia evidently reminded him a little of Cornwall. He had a certain ‘Heimweh, or nostalgia then, for the north; yet I am wavering South’ (3L 480). Sicily offered ‘more space, more air, more green and succulent herbage’ (3L 481) than Capri. It also satisfied Lawrence as a place with an ‘on-the-brink feeling’ (3L 494), at the edge of Europe, looking out at Asia and Africa.30 Lawrence had been thinking of living in Africa for some time, and he had been tempted by Mackenzie’s talk of a trip out to the South Seas to re-colonise the Kermadec islands.31 Taormina represented a jumping-off point from Europe.
There was sufficient company in and around the Fontana Vecchia, but Lawrence did not feel stifled, as he had in Capri. He and Frieda spent time with Mary Cannan, and they met Marie Hubrecht (the former owner of their new house), the South Africa artist Jan Juta and his sister Réné Hansard, and the Welsh painter and writer Alan Insole. In late April Lawrence travelled to Randazzo with Juta and Insole, visiting the Duca di Brontë (the Honorable Alexander Nelson Hood) at his house in Maniace before staying with Insole in Syracuse. Yet he also felt able to isolate himself in order to write. Once settled in Taormina, he turned his attention back to ‘Mixed Marriage’. By 22 March he had scrapped all the re-writing of ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’ that he had done in Capri and had begun again from the start, managing to write 30,000 words in around two weeks.32 This had risen to 50,000 by 31 March, when he considered giving the manuscript to Mary Cannan ‘to criticise,’ feeling that she (in her expensive but tasteless hotel) would represent ‘the public as near as I want it’ (3L 498). The novel – now entitled The Lost Girl – was finished by 6 May, in what had been an extraordinary burst of creativity.33 Lawrence told friends that it was ‘amusing’ (3L 490); its light, ironic and satirical tone reflected both his recent separation from the closed and gossipy world of Capri and his feeling – in Sicily – of coming ‘unstuck from England’ (3L 488). A letter to Compton Mackenzie of 28 April, in which he curses ‘gutsless, spineless, brainless Nottingham’ (3L 510), shows the extent of his detachment from the life and values of his home city in this period, and the wicked joy he took in sending it up.
Though the Fontana Vecchia was pleasingly remote, it was not immune from interruptions. On 8 April, Gilbert Cannan had surprised Lawrence by turning up from Rome in a foul temper. He wrote a cheque for £75 and gave it to Lawrence as proof that he had not failed to deliver the dollars he had collected from the Americans.34 Cannan also berated Lawrence for hurtful comments he had made about the recent marriage of Cannan’s former mistress (Gwen Wilson) to Henry Mond. Cannan was at pains to defend Gwen’s good character and the easy terms of their ongoing relationship.35 It was not the first time that Lawrence’s blunt comments on friends’ relationships had got him into trouble: David Garnett and Philip Heseltine had been similarly angered in the past. The two-hour exchange was heated, and the cordiality of their parting barely hid the resentment and contempt felt by both parties. The marvellous account of the visit which Lawrence provided in a letter to Compton Mackenzie of 9 April 1920 showcases his caustic humour: his verbal dexterity and skilful mimicry work to skewer Cannan’s social pretensions and his outrage.36
Then, on the morning of 30 April, the day after Lawrence’s return from Syracuse, Maurice Magnus turned up unannounced at Lawrence’s home. He had escaped Monte Cassino after being tipped off that the cheque he had written to pay for his hotel in Anzio had bounced and the police were after him. Finding the Lawrences away, he had checked himself into an expensive hotel. He now expected Lawrence to advance him money for his manuscripts, collect his things from Monte Cassino, and give him lodgings while he planned his next move, perhaps to Egypt. Lawrence gave Magnus 50 shillings, but refused to run the expensive and time-consuming errand to the monastery on the mainland. Frieda was adamant that Magnus could not stay at the Fontana Vecchia, though Lawrence did send a further 200 lire the next day and agreed to pay for the hotel, on the condition that Magnus moved out to a more modest place. Some 10 days later, Lawrence was asked to pay for Magnus’ current food and lodgings; he advanced Magnus the seven guineas which he was owed by Land and Water, for an article which Lawrence had helped to place.37 Lawrence was forced to pay it, but his insistence that Magnus should make the future payment from the magazine over to his name produced a hurt response, and Magnus decamped.
It was a painful exchange, which pitted the importance Lawrence placed on friendship and loyalty, and his attraction to Magnus’ instinctive generosity and free-spirited insouciance, against his aversion to financial irresponsibility. Lawrence was scandalised by Magnus’ presumption in throwing himself on another man’s mercy, taking money freely and without any compunction, yet he was also disturbed by Magnus’ wretched circumstances and could not completely dispel a residual feeling that he had betrayed Magnus in some way.
Lawrence saw Magnus again in mid-May, when he (Lawrence) and Frieda agreed to join Mary Cannan on a brief trip to Malta (paid for by Mary). Magnus left a note for Lawrence at the hotel in Syracuse where the group had put up, waiting for the steamer and the eight-hour crossing. Magnus accused Lawrence of ignoring him in the street; it was a move calculated to engineer a meeting between them. Lawrence agreed to give him a final loan, paying a hotel bill once again since the sale of various trinkets had not raised sufficient funds for Magnus to live on.
Magnus took the same boat to Malta as Lawrence, wandering from the second-class cabins to the first-class deck during the journey; he had travelled with various introductions to people on the island secured from his friend, the Benedictine monk Don Mauro Inguanez, and he soon found his feet on arrival, even entertaining Lawrence at his hotel. Lawrence and Frieda had intended to return after a few days, but a steamer strike kept them on Malta for 11 days, from 17 to 28 May. Lawrence’s response to the British territory was predictably critical. While he appreciated the beauty of Valletta and enjoyed the plentiful (and cheap) food on offer, he ‘hated … the British régime,’ finding it ‘so beneficent and sterile’: ‘English people seem so good, and so barren of life’ (3L 533). During his extended stay, Lawrence tried to interest Douglas Goldring in several plays in translation by Knut Hamsun, Leonid Andreyeff, Julius Bierbaum, Georg Baron von Ompteda and Hofmannsthal which Magnus wanted to sell ‘outright to a publisher’ (3L 532), while retaining the acting rights; he also arranged for both Goldring and Secker to read Magnus’ ‘Dregs’, which (under Lawrence’s influence) had become a very frank autobiographical book.38
Without an agent in England, Lawrence’s own literary dealings continued to demand a good deal of his attention. It certainly did not help that the Italian postal service was proving to be ‘awful’ (3L 515). Post between Taormina and New York could take three weeks to arrive and was unreliable, but even communications with England were troublesome and parcels were sent with considerable trepidation. The situation called for special measures: Lawrence sent The Lost Girl to America via his landlord, Ciccio Cacópardo, who travelled on 11 June to work as a cook-valet in Boston.39 He had been forced to get the manuscript typed in Rome by a Miss Wallace, and was charged 1348 lire, which was ‘exorbitant, even for a London expert, which she isn’t’ (3L 551).
Secker published All Things Are Possible in April, and Daniel’s edition of Touch and Go was published in May (followed on 5 June by Seltzer’s), while Huebsch published his American edition of New Poems on 11 June. In early May, Lawrence began writing a new novel (Mr Noon), and he continued to work fitfully on Aaron’s Rod.40 During June he put finishing touches to the six essays entitled ‘Education of the People’ in a vain attempt to interest Stanley Unwin in publishing them as a single volume.41 Negotiations for the publication of his completed novels were ongoing as the summer grew hotter in Taormina. As Lawrence warned Mountsier, he was a writer of risky material and therefore ‘a typo speciale’ (3L 547), forced to rely on smaller publishers and to make concessions and cajole them in order to get his own way. Secker was very wary about publishing The Rainbow and Women in Love. His nervousness about the critical reception of Lawrence’s work is evident in his desire to change the title of Women in Love to ‘The Sisters’ and The Lost Girl to ‘The Bitter Cherry’, so as to avoid attracting the attention of the censors.42 However, he liked The Lost Girl very much. He cabled Lawrence on 5 July: ‘Lost Girl excellent, greatly pleased’ (3L 564). Secker finally agreed to publish The Lost Girl first, followed by Women in Love and The Rainbow, with the money due on the latter novel being withheld for a time against the possibility of legal action.43 In America, Lawrence promised to let Seltzer have The Lost Girl, but only on the condition that he should also publish Women in Love;44 he withheld Cacópardo’s copy of the novel from Seltzer until he was assured of his co-operation. In a letter of 8 July, Huebsch clarified the situation with regard to Studies in Classic American Literature, informing Lawrence that he was handing the manuscript over to Seltzer.45
In the meantime, with the help of Richard Aldington and Michael Sadleir, Lawrence had managed to place several stories to good financial advantage in American journals. The Dial took ‘Adolf’ and ‘Rex’ for $40 and $50 respectively, and Carl Hovey accepted ‘Wintry Peacock’ for Metropolitan for the very handsome sum of $250.46 Lawrence enthusiastically pursued the option of serialising The Lost Girl in both England and America, seeing this as offering another source of income (potentially sufficient to fund a trip to Germany for Frieda to see her family); he thought that it might also provide ‘a safeguard against prosecutions’ (3L 537). Secker suggested that he approach Century magazine in the States; after his recent success with short stories, Lawrence also lined up Metropolitan and the Dial as other possibilities.47 In England, Hubert Foss (Assistant Editor of Land and Water) recommended that he send it to a magazine entitled The Queen.48
None of the editors chose to take up the option to serialise The Lost Girl. However, Lawrence’s approach to them demonstrates his willingness at this time to present his work in whatever form the market demanded. In early June he wrote to Mountsier asking him to pursue an enquiry from a man in New York offering to sell film rights for his works.49 Lawrence’s dislike of cinema, and refusal to be filmed himself,50 did not deter him from offering his work for adaptation to the new medium; he was far from being proprietorial about the integrity of his works in performance.51 He was also aware how a signed photograph in the front of a book could increase its sales; Jan Juta had recently completed a brooding charcoal sketch of him with an unruly beard which made him look like ‘the Wild Man of Borneo’ (3L 550), and he suggested that Secker might place a signed photograph of it at the front of any new collection of his poetry.52 In a marketplace where limited and signed editions were particularly attractive to collectors, such measures could make a real difference in earning extra royalties.
Lawrence’s interest in going to the South Seas was renewed in late June, when he heard that Mackenzie was considering buying a ketch named ‘Lavengro’. This was a fantasy sustained by his reading of books by Frederick O’Brien, Gauguin, Somerset Maugham and R. L. Stevenson.53 Sadly, by mid-July he had heard nothing from Mackenzie and the idea seemed ‘in abeyance’ (3L 572). Instead he made plans to travel north with Frieda, away from the intense heat of Sicily, up to Milan to meet up with Percy and Irene Whittley (the son-in-law and daughter of their former Cornish landlord, Captain John Short). Frieda would then leave for Baden-Baden, while Lawrence and the Whittleys went on a walking tour of the Italian Lakes (Como, Iseo and Garda), finishing up in Venice.
The Lawrences left Taormina on 2 August: the first batch of proofs of Women in Love arrived from Seltzer shortly before their departure. They travelled first to Monte Cassino, so that Frieda could see the monastery. From here, they posted a little cap for Joan King, the latest addition to the family of Lawrence’s sister Emily.54 They met Jan Juta in Rome, and went with him by motor car to his home in Anticoli Corrado on 7 August, since the heat made train travel ‘Hell to the nth. power.’ Lawrence found the place ‘pleasant’: there was ‘a courtyard with a fountain, and painters dropping in – yes, also in the fountain: nudes bathing: brutte nude. Country pleasant and hilly, Abruzzi: many trees, very nice’ (3L 587). They travelled to Florence on 12 August, and stayed there for three days before heading to Milan, where Frieda left for Germany and Lawrence met the Whittleys (who came laden with early birthday gifts from his sisters, and from Gertie Cooper).55 The walking tour was a great success, though they spent most of the time around Lake Como, arriving earlier than planned in Venice, around 25 August. Here, Lawrence corrected proofs of The Lost Girl sent by Secker and forwarded from Anticoli Corrado. He subsequently sent the other set on to Seltzer.56 Lawrence liked Venice very much: he found it ‘quite lovely,’ with bathing on the Lido ‘still going strong’ (3L 589). Yet, without the Whittleys or Frieda it proved lonely, too, so on 1 September he set off again for Florence, where he had ‘plenty of friends’ (3L 590).
He first stayed in a small pensione run by an English woman, located next to the British Institute (he had to ask for directions from the local bookshop owner, Giuseppe – or ‘Pino’ – Orioli). It proved to be ‘too intimate – old ladies etc.’ (3L 592), so after just one night he took up an offer from Rosalind Baynes to stay at her home, the Villa Canovaia in nearby San Gervasio. Rosalind had moved up the hill with her daughters to Fiesole when an explosion at a nearby ammunition dump had blown out several of the windows in the villa. For Lawrence, it was a perfect option: a ‘rambling old villa’ (3L 593) with its own garden (complete with a family of tortoises), where he could retreat from company if he chose. It was close enough to Florence for him to meet old friends like Reggie Turner and Anna di Chiara (an American expatriate whom he had known on Capri), and to become acquainted with new contacts, too (like the American Carlota Thrasher, who offered him the chance to stay rent-free on her 70-acre ‘Old Lynell Farm’ near the village of Westminster, Connecticut, four hours outside New York).57 Rosalind was within walking distance, and he enjoyed talking and cooking with her, and spending time with her children. Lawrence had always liked and cared for Rosalind, protecting her from any scandal associated with Norman Douglas in Florence, and even writing to her estranged husband (Godwin Baynes) to advise him against rushing too rashly into a divorce when freedom and self-sufficiency were all that really mattered.58
At the Villa Canovaia, Lawrence immediately wrote a short essay entitled ‘America, Listen to Your Own’, which he sent to Mountsier on 7 September; he seems to have thought of it as a possible introduction to Studies in Classic American Literature.59 It would be accepted by the New Republic for $40 and published in December. Lawrence felt comfortable in the house, and in time his intimacy with Rosalind resulted in a carefully managed romantic interlude with her, which involved the two of them sleeping together on at least one occasion.60 In the coming weeks he would produce some wonderful poetry: he wrote the ‘Fruits’ poems, later published in Birds, Beasts and Flowers, and also six ‘tortoise poems’ which would be published by Seltzer as Tortoises on 9 December 1921. These were forwarded to Mountsier on 15 and 30 September. Mark Kinkead-Weekes has suggested how Lawrence’s feelings of attraction to Rosalind, and the sadness of their inevitable separation, are subtly encoded in ‘Medlars and Sorb-Apples’, and in ‘Tortoise Shout’.61
These poems were not the only things that Lawrence produced in San Gervasio. He worked away again at Aaron’s Rod, though he told Compton Mackenzie (who had just bought a 60-year lease on two of the Channel Islands, Herm and Jethou) that it still proceeded jerkily and had stalled at the half-way point.62 He felt that he might have to progress the novel in ‘picaresque’ (3L 602) fashion, relying on imaginative leaps rather than carefully constructed plot outlines. His own movements since he had started work on the novel had almost necessitated such an approach. Poetry could be written to the moment during periods like this; novels needed weeks of stability. And literary work kept turning up to interrupt the flow (with post following him around Italy), whether it was proofs of ‘The Fox’ for Hutchinson’s Magazine, or an enquiry from Dr Anton Kippenberg of Insel-Verlag in Leipzig about acquiring the rights to translate Lawrence’s books into German and to publish them.63
Lawrence left the Villa Canovaia on 28 September, travelling to Venice to stay with Jan Juta and Alan Insole, and to await Frieda’s arrival from Munich (where she had gone after seeing her mother in Baden-Baden).64 Juta had hired a gondola for a month, so they lounged on the water, though Lawrence soon grew tired of ‘mouching about’ (3L 607) and longed to return to Taormina, and to a sustained period of writing. In this mood, Venice lost much of its charm and glamour: it became ‘rather shallow’ (3L 606), ‘very stagnant as regards life’ (3L 608). Thankfully, Frieda arrived on 7 October. She had enjoyed her stay in Germany, finding it much improved over the past year;65 by contrast, the political unrest between the socialists and the fascists in Italy was starting to make Lawrence feel uncomfortable, though Sicily seemed sufficiently remote from it at this stage. They stayed just a week together in Venice, before heading back to Taormina.
They were back in the Fontana Vecchia by 18 October. Lawrence wrote straight away to Mountsier setting out where things stood with his writings. He promised to send Mountsier ‘a complete MS., Birds, Beasts and Flowers,’ comprising the ‘Fruits’ poems and other similar verses. He was about to receive final proofs of Movements in European History from OUP, and he confirmed that he would begin to ‘collect short stories for a book’ (on Mountsier’s advice).66 John Lane offered Lawrence £150 to write a small travel book on Venice, to be accompanied by Frank Brangwyn prints; it was an attractive proposition, but one that he never realised.67
The final months of 1920 were restless ones. The weather in Sicily turned rainy in early November, and society was ‘more broken and unstable’ (3L 640) than before. Lawrence started to become ‘rather tired of Sicily’ (3L 641); in fact, he now thought of Italy as ‘less and less agreeable’ (3L 640) and of ‘The South’ as ‘a dead letter’ (3L 625). He turned his attention to Sardinia as a possible place to move to once the lease on the Fontana Vecchia ran out (on 9 March 1921),68 but he also retained his desire to say ‘Ta-Ta! to Europe’ (3L 626) altogether. In this period of transition, Lawrence added an extra chapter on Italian unification to Movements in European History (at the request of OUP).69 On 4 November, he sent the manuscript of Birds, Beasts and Flowers to be typed by Ruth Wheelock at the American consulate in Palermo (it was sent to Robert Mountsier on 9 December).70 He was still struggling to complete Aaron’s Rod, so instead he worked away at Mr Noon, which he described as ‘a sort of comic novel – rather amusing, but rather scandalous’ (3L 639). It gave him ‘much wicked joy’ (3L 646) to fictionalise the amorous entanglements of his old friend George Neville (and, perhaps, of a real-life Gilbert Noon whom he had known at the Pupil-Teacher Centre in Ilkeston);71 as the novel progressed, there would be a different – though equally sharp – pleasure in re-imagining (in a detached, ironic fashion) the earnest struggles he and Frieda had undergone in Germany and Italy back in 1912. Another kind of satisfaction came from copying ‘La Tebaide’, an early fifteenth-century Florentine painting in the Uffizi: ‘an amusing picture, primitive, with many many little anchorites’ (3L 639). Lawrence would eventually give it as a gift to Mary Cannan.72
What Lawrence’s extant letters do not reveal is that, at some point during the first half of November, he received a note from Don Mauro at Monte Cassino informing him that Maurice Magnus had committed suicide on Malta. This came as a huge shock to Lawrence: their association in Florence, Sicily and Malta had been short-lived, but he had felt implicated in Magnus’ plight, and now (more than ever) he felt troubled by a feeling that he had failed the man, or that he might have reached out to Magnus in a different way had he known the full extent of the problems. It transpired that Magnus had become closely involved with two Maltese men, Michael Borg and Walter Salomone: Borg had lent him money, while Salomone had offered to stand as financial surety to allow him to stay for more than three months on the island. When the two men became aware of Magnus’ true financial situation they withdrew their support and offered instead to find him a passage on a tramp steamer to Gibraltar. Magnus wrote to the police to try to secure three extra weeks on Malta. He received no reply. When, on 4 November, he was detained in the street by two detectives and realised that he was likely to be arrested and extradited for failing to pay the old hotel bill in Anzio, he asked whether he could go back to his house to change, hastily wrote a message to Don Mauro, and drank the hydrocyanic acid which he had stored up against just such an eventuality.73
Lawrence had always struggled to articulate what he really felt about Magnus. We know that he wrote one letter (now lost) to one of the two Maltese men and another to Norman Douglas in response to the news of the suicide; the fact that Lawrence does not mention the suicide at all in his other extant correspondence might be said to confirm the strength – and ambivalence – of his feelings. It would be a full year before he would confront the event, and his response to it, in writing.
For now, the usual ‘wrestle with publishers’ (3L 632) continued unabated. An advance copy of The Lost Girl arrived from Secker on 25 October, ‘brown and demure and anything but lost-looking’: Lawrence joked to Mackenzie that it appeared almost ‘testamental’ (3L 616). Secker had incorporated most of Lawrence’s corrections, but for financial reasons he had overlooked Lawrence’s specific instruction to change the name of one of its central characters, ‘Cicio’, to ‘Ciccio’ (its correct form).74 After Lawrence had received his advance copy, he was asked by Secker to re-write page 256 of the novel; the major circulating libraries (Smith’s, Mudie’s and Boots) had expressed serious objections to the scene in which Ciccio has sex with Alvina in her mother’s bedroom.75 Lawrence’s willingness to do this in order to appease the ‘MudieBootie people’ (3L 621) demonstrates his commitment to The Lost Girl as a commercial venture. He did not even spot several other changes which Secker had made to the novel without his permission.76 It was published on 25 November. By 3 December he was ‘not wildly interested’ (3L 632) in it; he expressed only mild irritation at indifferent reviews he read in the Observer and the Times Literary Supplement (the latter piece written by Virginia Woolf).77 The negative review which Murry published in the Athenaeum, with its reference to Lawrence’s ‘very obvious loss of imaginative power,’ was far more annoying.78 Lawrence rejoiced in early February 1921 when he heard that Murry had resigned as editor of the journal ahead of its merger with the Nation; he had found a glowing recent notice of Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories in the Athenaeum hard to stomach,79 and told Mary Cannan that he considered both of them ‘Vermin’ (3L 663). Sales of The Lost Girl proved disappointing. Two thousand copies were sold before the end of the year, and 300 more had been shifted by the end of January, though half of these had gone to the libraries.80 On 27 January, Lawrence told Francis Brett Young that it was selling ‘merely very moderately’ (3L 656); he had been furious when he heard that Secker had allowed some copies to be sent to America (threatening future sales of Seltzer’s edition, which did not appear until late January).81
Women in Love was a different matter altogether. This Lawrence considered ‘the best of my books’ (3L 619); it was the novel he held closest to his heart.82 Seltzer published the American edition on 9 November. When Lawrence received his 10 author copies on 11 December, he expressed delight at it and felt that it made Seltzer and him ‘friends for life’ (3L 635). Secker had continued to act cautiously with respect to the novel. In a letter of 14 October, he had asked Lawrence to add chapter titles at proof stage, on the grounds that they would help to ‘lighten the general appearance of the book’ (3L 606 fn. 2). He had also asked Lawrence to tone down the nudity in Chapter VII (which Lawrence entitled ‘Totem’): the scene in which Gerald and Birkin stay the night in the Soho flat belonging to Julius Halliday. Lawrence did this begrudgingly, but he was anxious to avoid any repetition of the furore caused by The Rainbow. He now felt that it would be better to advertise Secker’s edition of Women in Love in England, but not send out review copies.83 Secker had doubts about other parts of the novel, too. On 31 December he suggested the need for further ‘excisions or paraphrases’ (3L 647 fn. 1) in the novel if Lawrence wished it to be freely circulated; he was particularly worried about an actionable reference to Eleonora Duse.84 Though Lawrence understood the reason for Secker’s anxiety, he swiftly became exasperated by it. Secker became another ‘little worm’ (3L 653) whom he detested.