LANDSCAPE AND IDENTITY:

D.H. LAWRENCE’S IMPERIAL JOURNEY

TO MULTIPLE REALITIES

CARMEN MUŞAT

Of the blood and of the senses1

On 17 January 1913, during his stay in Gargnano, at Villa Igéa, D. H.

Lawrence confessed in a letter to Ernest Collings:

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the
intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and
believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.
What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood,
direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not. I
conceive a man’s body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame forever
upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed onto
the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things
around;—which is really mind:—but with the mystery of the flame forever
flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and
being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights up. We have got so
ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything—
we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor
flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of
chasing the mystery in the fugitive, half lighted things outside us, we ought
to look at ourselves, and say ‘My God, I am myself!’ That is why I like to
live in Italy. The people are so unconscious. They only feel and want: they
don’t know. We know too much. No, we only think we know such a lot. A
flame isn’t a flame because it lights up two, or twenty objects on a table.
It’s a flame because it is itself. And we have forgotten ourselves.2

After spending four months on Lake Garda, in what seems to be a

1
David H. Lawrence, “Twilight in Italy” (1916), in Twilight in Italy and
Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 93. (Hereafter TI).
2
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume I, ed. James T. Boulton
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 503–504. (Hereafter L1).
voyage of self-discovery, D. H. Lawrence feels free to reveal his deep
belief in corporeality, in what he calls a religion of blood and flesh which
is defined by a “mystic sensual delight.”3 Confirmation of his constant
preoccupation while in Italy with the cognitive dimension of physical and
sensuous experience can be found at the very beginning of Twilight in
Italy: the Bavarian highlanders he met on his trip to Italy are living proof
that “everything is of the blood, of the senses. There is no mind. The mind
is a suffusion of physical heat, it is not separated, it is kept submerged.” 4
Some years after this experience, in 1922, while writing Fantasia of the
Unconscious, Lawrence’s conclusion will be much more categorical:
“better passion and death”5 than false or counterfeited ideals and purposes
that ignore the living being. What both the image of the crucified Christ,
multiplied in the crucifixes he encountered everywhere in the mountains,
and that of the “tiger burning bright” 6 have in common is the sensuous
experience of living and suffering, and the mystery of death and revival.
After all, it is “the spirit of the tiger” as the “supreme manifestation of the
senses made absolute”7 that fascinates Lawrence. He recalls Blake’s poem,
underlining “the supremacy of the flesh, which devours all.” 8 Yet, such an
incandescent burning reveals the deep spiritual dimension of corporeality,
the same transfiguration that Bernini’s Saint Teresa of Avila evokes. In
Lawrence’s vision, one can reach the Everlasting God through the gate of
flesh and blood, since “in the sensual ecstasy, having drunk all blood and
devoured all flesh, I am become again the eternal Fire, I am infinite.” 9
The stress on the senses and the life of blood and also his rejection of
dualism place Lawrence in close proximity to Wordsworth and
Romanticism, on the one hand, and phenomenology and modern
psychology, on the other. Nevertheless, he was attuned to the studies into

3
Lawrence, TI, 93.
4
Ibid.
5
David H. Lawrence, “Fantasia of the Unconscious,” in David H.
Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the
Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 200.
6
Lawrence quotes Blake’s poem, The Tiger, to develop his own vision of
the ever-consuming forests of the senses. Yet, for him “the essential fire of
the tiger is cold and white, a white ecstasy” (TI, 117) and the very symbol
of “the transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh” (Ibid.).
7
Lawrence, TI, 117.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
primitive cultures10 done by Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, Frobenius, and Sir
James Frazer, as well as to the researches of Freud and Jung. He refers to
The Golden Bough in the Forward to Fantasia of the Unconscious and
acknowledges it as one of the major influences in his work, which is
evident in his preference for symbols and symbolic knowledge. In spite of
so many and varied references, Lawrence’s thought was coherent and
original, a provocative artistic synthesis of literature, philosophy,
anthropology and psychoanalysis, combined within a heretical discourse.
He was deeply and thoroughly a “man of letters”, but also a passionate
creature of flesh and blood, whose

branching, rhizomatic, anarchic, iconoclast style of thinking moves to and

fro between the domains of literature and philosophy, his metaphysic
permeating his art and vice versa. 11

The Romantic temper of D. H. Lawrence is therefore “poured” into

modern forms and linguistic structures. Although some of his friends,
including Edward Garnett, criticized him for his “formlessness”, their
accusation would seem unfair. Lawrence experiments with new forms,
new literary formulas fit for his unconventional approach which ignores
both social and literary rules. It was Frieda who felt compelled to add a
few lines on this subject in a letter to Edward Garnett, sent from Villa Igéa
on 19 November 1912: familiar with the modernist shattering of form,
Frieda makes a passionate plea for Lawrence, whom she thought to be “the
only revolutionary worthy of the name.”12 In the commonsensical coda of

10
On 7 April 1916, he wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell and expressed his
preference for Tyler’s Primitive Culture rather than Frazer’s The Golden
Bough. It is the same letter in which he meditates upon Michael Angelo’s
“Great God of Power and Might” who is now dead. The idea that Michael
Angelo’s Christian-aristocratic epoch is as pernicious as the Christian-
democratic epoch in which he lives makes Lawrence want to escape from
a world of nothingness and falsity: “One must forget, only forget, turn
one’s eyes from the world: that is all. One must live quite apart, forgetting,
having another world, a world as yet uncreated. Everything lies in being,
although the whole world is one colossal madness, falsity, a stupendous
assertion of non-being.” (The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 2, 593).
11
In Anneleen Masschelein’s essay “Rip the veil of the old vision across,
and walk through the rent. Reading D. H. Lawrence with Deleuze and
Guattari,” in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Stephen Ross
(London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 23–39, 24. (Hereafter Rip veil).
12
Lawrence, L 1, 479.
her letter to Garnett, she underlines D. H. Lawrence’s originality in a very
convincing manner: “any new thing must find a new shape, then
afterwards one can call it ‘art’. I hate art, it seems like grammar, language
was first and then they abstracted a grammar. “13 Subjective though she
may be, Frieda has a point and is correct in her defence of a spontaneity
and vividness that require no preconceived notions or forms: “We have
lost the faculty of seeing things unprejudiced, live off our own bat, think
off our own free mind.”14 Proof of his utter dissatisfaction with the
mainstream of cultural perception is scattered throughout Lawrence’s own
work and letters, not only in Frieda’s interventions. In “The Novel and the
Feelings” (1925) he openly expresses his contempt for society’s hypocrisy:

[…] We are creatures of circumstance, and must fill our bellies and our
pockets. Convenience! Convenience! There are convenient emotions, and
inconvenient ones. The inconvenient ones we chain up, or put a ring
through their nose. The convenient ones are our pets. Love is our pet
favourite. And that’s as far as our education goes, in the direction of
feelings. We have no language for the feelings, because our feelings do not
even exist for us.15

Unwilling to confine himself within convenience and stereotypes, he

ventures to invent a brand new language capable of expressing the tumult
of intense and passionate feelings. Fully aware that “to be civilized we
must not deny and blank out our feelings” 16, Lawrence provides
alternative types of narrative discourse, which take into account his
commitment to spontaneity and the powerful feelings that are able to
reveal to us “the two Infinites”, the “twofold approach to God”17
comprising

The Father and the Son, the Dark and the Light, the Senses and the Mind,
the Soul and the Spirit, the self and the not-self, the Eagle and the Dove, the
Tiger and the Lamb.18

13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
David H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed.
Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 202–203.
(Hereafter STH).
16
Lawrence, STH, 204.
17
Lawrence, TI, 126.
18
Ibid., 125.
 Therefore, it is not Lawrence’s formlessness that is at fault, but rather
his contemporaries’ inability to judge a bright new style and form which
go beyond conventions.

Transcendent knowledge and the power of words

Twilight in Italy demonstrates Lawrence’s subversive use of literary
form and his challenging vision. Therein, the writer forges a highly
original narrative formula, one worthy of critical attention given that it
“cuts across literary genres.”19 It brings together narrative, essay and
poetry while depicting inward images, “selfscapes” full of warmth and
colour. In his subtle commentary on Lawrence’s travel writing, Stewart
emphasizes the author’s “intensified ‘acts of attention,’” which make each
“place” a “sensory/imaginative complex of surface and depth, vision and
detail.”20 Lawrence does not describe something that exists prior to his
intense gaze. His language prompts reality to acquire narrative shape. And
it is fascinating to witness the emergence of a whole new world, of nature
as a palimpsest, where the structures of outer “reality” and deep “self”
merge. The palimpsest-like quality of Lawrence’s descriptions emerges as
a consequence of the superimposition of his inner world (defined by both
memory and imagination) upon the actual landscape:

San Gaudenzio is already becoming a thing of the past. Below the house,
where the land drops in sharp slips to the sheer cliff’s edge, over which it is
Maria’s constant fear that Felicina will tumble, there are the deserted
lemon gardens of the little territory, snug down below. They are invisible
till one descends by tiny paths, sheer down into them. And there they stand,
the pillars and walls erect, but a dead emptiness prevailing, lemon trees all
dead, gone, a few vines in their place. It is only twenty years since the
lemon trees finally perished of a disease and were not renewed. But the
deserted terrace, shut between great walls, descending in their openness
full to the south, to the lake and the mountains opposite, seem more terrible
than Pompeii in their silence and utter seclusion. The grape hyacinths
flower in the cracks, the lizards run, this strange place hangs suspended
and forgotten, forgotten for ever, its erect pillars utterly meaningless.21

19
Jack Stewart, “Movement, Space and Rhetoric in Lawrence’s Travel
Writing,” in D. H. Lawrence: New Worlds, ed. Keith Cushman and Earl G.
Ingersoll (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 151.
20
Ibid., 153.
21
Lawrence, TI, 165.
 Even in the passage quoted above, as rhythmical and artful as any that
can be found in either his poetry or his fiction, Lawrence’s emphasis on
the emptiness and desolation surrounding the lemon gardens is enhanced
by the reference to Pompeii. Given the visual quality of Lawrence’s
mention of the ancient city, the spectral character of the deserted terrace in
San Gaudenzio is merely a result of the overlapping of past and present
scenery. Not surprisingly, in Twilight in Italy Lawrence succeeded in
seizing the instant and conquering it through complex narrative
description (one that posits the truth of a description and the fictionality of
a narrative). His obsession with rendering the experience of “the pure
present”, which he acknowledges in his Preface to the American edition of
New Poems (1920), can be detected in his preference for simple present
and continuous tenses throughout the book. He laments over the

realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of
time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have
hardly recognized: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the
instant.22

This is what “rare new poetry” does anyway: it seizes the instant. And
this is what Lawrence tries to achieve in his travel writing. From this point
of view, although the distance between the act of perception and the act of
writing cannot be fully erased, Lawrence’s discourse creates the illusion of
simultaneity. For Lawrence, the utmost achievement of narrative technique
is to convey the “immediate instant self” (which is also “the incarnate,
carnal self”23) in repetitive musical prose, rich in descriptions and
inventories, which are formal correlatives of his endeavour to equate the
time of perception with the time of transcription. This is another, narrative,
way of conceiving the immediate present that Heidegger named Jetztzeit24.
Lawrence’s longing for poetry to be “the incandescence and the coldness
of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and haste
and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now” 25 echoes

22
See David H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence,
introduction and notes by David Ellis (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2002),
618. (Hereafter CP2).
23
Ibid.
24
Heidegger defines the “now-time” in the 6th Chapter of his Sein und
Zeit, paragraphs 421, 423, 426: Zeit (als Jetzt-Zeit). The English version
that I used is Martin Heidegger. Being and Time. Translated by John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962).
25
Lawrence, CP, 616.
many of the ideas Wordsworth expressed in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads.
For Wordsworth, the same as for Lawrence, words have to be an
“incarnation of the thought”26. It is this none other than the corporeal
dimension of both perception and language, the interdependence of
language and thought, of senses and reflection that this late Romantic (for
whom Blake, Wordsworth and Melville are constant references) attempts
to express in poetry, as well as in prose. Lawrence’s subtle commentary on
Melville’s Typee and Omoo may give us yet another hint towards
interpreting his own work:

Melville at his best invariably wrote a sort of dream-self, so that events

which he relates as actual fact have indeed a far deeper reference to his
own soul, his own inner life.27

As a matter of fact, nothing comes to the human mind but through the
senses, which is another way of saying that the “instant self” is rooted in
the author’s “own inner life”. Lawrence’s language, full of “tastes” and
“smells”, of tactile and audible images, not to mention the symphonic use
of visual imagery, provides lively intimations of how the perceived world
is the mirror of this instant self much more than of reality (if there be any
reality). In James Wood’s view, “Lawrence’s words work against their own
repetition, to enact a change and movement” while his ‘sentences move
toward the light’ so that eventually what he describes is no longer an outer
space since “it is his writing he is really describing here. He has become
the landscape.”28

26
Wordsworth expressed his belief that “all good poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings”, while the use of the language of poetry
means to “follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the
great and simple affections of our nature.” In William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, introduction
and notes by Martin Scofield. (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2003), 8.
27
This is not the only trait Melville and Lawrence have in common. In the
same essay, he remarks that “Melville hated the world: was born hating it.
But he was looking for heaven”. See Studies in Classic American
Literature. (Harmonsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 142. (Hereafter
SCAL).
Which reminds me of the confession he made to Ottoline Morrell, saying:
“I hate the ‘public’, the ‘people’, ‘society’, so much that a madness
possesses me when I think of them” (L 1, 593).
28
“D. H. Lawrence’s Occultism” in James Wood, The Broken Estate:
Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Picador, 2010) 132–143, 143.
 The “fearful symmetry”29
Lawrence’s Twilight in Italy is a prismatic work where one can find
many of the themes and patterns of his work as a whole. It seems that in
this book he experienced a great many of the rhythms, literary formulas,
and stylistic devices that were later to become his distinctive marks. Many
of his literary qualities seem to be ingathered here, both in terms of style
and ideas. More importantly, Lawrence’s hunger for knowledge, as well as
his obsession with capturing the instant, strive to find shape in rich,
brilliant, fluid and sensual language. Lawrence swims in poetry, touching
the words with as much ravishment as Blake or Wordsworth. Twilight in
Italy is a book where language explodes into multiple realities,
engendering past and present united in one instant –– the Jetztzeit:

In the morning I often lie in bed and watch the sunrise. The lake lies dim
and milky, the mountains are dark-blue at the back, while over them the
sky gushes and glistens with light. At a certain place on the mountain ridge
the light burns gold, seems to fuse a little groove on the hill’s rim. It fuses
and fuses at this point, till of a sudden it comes, the intense molten living
light. The mountains melt suddenly, the light steps down, there is a glitter,
a spangle, a clutch of spangles, a great unbearable sun-track flashing across
the milky lake, and the light falls on my face. Then, looking aside, I hear
the little slotting noise which tells me they are opening the lemon gardens,
a long panel here and there, a long slot of darkness at irregular intervals
between the brown wood and the glass stripes.30

Choosing a language in which one can hear the “hypnotic refrains of

the chapel hymns of his boyhood, the rocking of an anxious infant, or, as
Lawrence maintained, the rhythmic thrust of the sexual act,”31 Lawrence
builds for himself a textual refuge from a world that makes him feel like
an intruder. Over and over again, he complains about the disenchantment

Although Wood refers to a passage in Mornings in Mexico, his remarks are

true for many descriptions in Twilight in Italy.
29
William Blake, The Tiger: “Tiger! Tiger! burning bright/ In the forests of
the night,/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful
symmetry?,” in Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996),
85.
30
Lawrence, TI, 128.
31
James Wood, TBE, 134.
of modernity. And it is his complete rejection of the industrialized modern
world, a world severed from its natural roots that urges him to search for
primitivism and genuine beauty. In his descriptions of the Italian
landscape, the perceived world is enhanced by the reality inside his own
subjectivity, which incorporates the arrogance of the senses, the
supremacy of the flesh, and the powerful imagery engendered by both
memory and imagination. For D. H. Lawrence, walking through Italy (or
Sardinia, or Mexico, or the “Etruscan places”) is like voyaging through
more than one reality, discovering not only new landscapes, but also
multiple times and worlds. This “voyage to the sun” is at once a poetic
voyage within history, enabling the author to better understand not only his
personal identity but what Englishness means as well. Is it nature or
culture Lawrence is interested in? Is it the actual landscape that he sees
and describes? Reading the account of his travels in Italy it seems obvious
that Lawrence’s Italy is not only a place for him to discover, but also a
work of art (and a work of mind) for us to explore. Like a modern King
Midas, Lawrence transforms the landscapes he sees and the men and
women he encounters into fictional places and beings. His writing has the
power to turn them into sheer poetry.
However “realistic” we might find Lawrence’s description of nature
and places, it is clear that the landscape is never an external visual
impression, but rather an inward narrative; the landscape is the story, and
not any story, but one that is highly intimate. Beneath the surface of each
and every scene, Lawrence tries to identify a deeper, multi-textured reality,
permeated with myth and mystery. This inward reality is steeped in his
passionate feelings and is nourished by a highly imaginative sensibility. At
the centre of Lawrence’s aesthetic doctrine lies the idea of an
overwhelming tension between nature and culture, between past and
present, and such a tension pervades all his fictional works, from The
White Peacock to Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as literary essays such
as Studies in Classic American Literature or Study of Thomas Hardy.
“Rip the veil of the old vision across” urges Lawrence in his Foreword
to Fantasia of the Unconscious, published six years after Twilight in Italy,
in which one can find the same plea for the supremacy of blood-
consciousness and the same emphasis on the idea that “knowledge must be
symbolical, mythical, dynamic,”32 completely apart from mental

32
Lawrence, FU, 111. For Lawrence, the ultimate goal of human destiny is
not “know thyself”, but “be yourself”, live and experience all that is vital
and dynamic. “The supreme lesson of human consciousness is to learn not
to know. That is, how not to interfere. That is, how to live dynamically,
consciousness.
In his wandering through the Italian villages in the vicinity of Lake
Garda, Lawrence is concerned with deciphering the “cosmic graphs” 33
which lie behind each and every person he meets, behind each and every
place he walks through. What the old spinning-woman and the two monks
have in common is their apparent absence, their motionless existence that
reveals the fundamental identity of being and non-being:

After all, eternal not-being and eternal being are the same. In the rosy snow
that shone in heaven over a darkened earth was the ecstasy of
consummation. Night and day are one, light and dark are one, both the
same in the origin and in the issue, both the same in the moment of ecstasy,
light fused in darkness and darkness fused in light, as in the rosy snow
above the twilight.34

In her earthy appearance, the old woman seems mysteriously linked to

the cosmic order, a living “intersection” of past and present, of mineral
and organic life. Her fathomless blue eyes heighten the impression of
strangeness and absence, which Lawrence regards as the distinctive marks
of the creative being. He reiterates this idea in his Foreword to Fantasia of
the Unconscious: “I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and
rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations”35. Such was the
civilization he met near Lake Garda, such were the instances of
immemorial times that somehow managed to attain contemporaneity and
to remind Lawrence of the transcendent order to which everything
belongs. Most of the men and the women he met there, or at least most of
those he chose to write about, seemed to “live and see according to some
gradually developing and gradually withering vision” 36 that Lawrence
endeavoured to comprehend all his life. It is their withdrawal from the flux

from the great Source, and not statically, like machines driven by ideas and
principles from the head, or automatically, from one fixed desire.”
(Lawrence, FU, 111).
33
Lawrence uses this syntagma in the Foreword to Fantasia of the
Unconscious: “And so, besides myths, we find the same mathematic
figures, cosmic graphs which remain among the aboriginal peoples in all
continents, mystic figures and signs whose true cosmic or scientific
significance is lost, yet which continue in use for purposes of conjuring or
divining.”
34
Lawrence, TI, 112.
35
Lawrence, FU, 64.
36
Ibid., 65.
of everyday life that appeals to Lawrence, this “singleness” 37 which places
them beyond the present world, thus helping him to identify a means “to
cross a horizon into another life”, as he puts it in his essay on Melville. 38
There, he is surrounded by the savage beauty of the Italian landscape,
mindful of the mystery of life in all its forms, longing to get away from
humanity, away from our human life. The old lady and the two monks
share a kind of absence that links them to the non-human dimension of life
that so obsessed Lawrence. After all, his sojourn in Gargnano, San
Gaudenzio and Riva was the result of his running away from home, from
the known world into the unknown: a whole new world and a whole new
life to discover and create for him and Frieda, after their elopement.
Lawrence’s sharp sensitivity is obvious in the intensity of his writing, in
his emphasis on passions and feelings. Though we may read Twilight in
Italy as travel writing, the fact that Lawrence conveys his own, highly
personal, version of the Italian landscape places this writing in the
category of fictional narratives (not fictive, but fictional) since it gives
prominence to the embodied experience of the adventure of self-discovery
and self-creation.
Rereading Lawrence’s work with Deleuze and Guattari in order to
grasp the originality of both his art and his thought, Anneleen Masschelein
observes:

The movement of the line of flight is not directed towards a goal. It is a

vibration as well as an oscillating movement, a rotation. Rather than
ending, the line of flight becomes something else while remaining in the
same place. Finally, in the Dialogues, Deleuze relates the line of flight to
writing. A writer does never arrive; he disappears as a subject in a process
of becoming someone or something else while remaining essentially
himself.39

In the lost villages surrounding Lake Garda, living on the edge

between the natural world of the past and the industrialized world of the
future, whose germs had already spread far and wide, Lawrence developed
the main characteristics of his vision. This was one of the most fruitful
periods of his entire literary career, when most of his literary projects—be

37
Notable comments on this term coined by Lawrence are to be found in
Anneleen Masschelein’s essay, Rip veil, 26: “…since man and woman
naturally belong to different spheres, it is equally important to withdraw
from union and regain strength in singular, independent existence.”
38
Lawrence, SCAL, 142.
39
Masschelein, Rip veil, 30.
it novels, travel writing or essayistic works—took shape. Needless to say,
Lawrence was interested not only in exploring the neighbouring villages
of Gargnano, but also in reading and writing. One may detect the influence
of Romanticism in Lawrence’s oxymoronic vision of the human being,
conveyed in the palimpsestic image of the tiger. Blake’s metaphor of the
“tiger burning bright” may be retrieved in the image of the “blazing tiger
wrath”40 used by Lawrence as a counterpart for the mechanized selfless
force. Moreover, it is the starting point of a subtle meditation on the
human condition. No wonder Lawrence considers the essential duality of
the Italian landscape—the everlasting struggle between light and shadow,
between high mountains and deep valleys—to be the key to an
understanding of human nature. For him the landscape is not neutral
scenery as long as it provides the royal road to an understanding of the
inner paradox of the human being: which is to say, the quest for perfect
freedom and liberty, on the one hand, and, on the other, the need to
consume the Self, which is the battlefield of a never-ending conflict
between the spirit of the tiger (that is of life itself) and that of the machine,
“the great reconstructed selfless power.”41 Lawrence saw the Renaissance
as the crucial moment for modern consciousness and in particular for the
emergence of a Self, which is at the same time carnal and abstract, derived
from the experiences of the body, from its sensations and “memory”.
There is an autobiographical impulse in all of Lawrence’s writings and
one can feel the anguish and the intensity of his feelings and thoughts in
each and every page he wrote, regardless of whether it be poetry or prose.
However, Twilight in Italy lacks the intimate, domestic details that prevail
in Sea and Sardinia, however. Much more reflexive and philosophical,
Lawrence’s quest for transcendence and tranquillity is an account of his
ongoing preoccupation with whatever might lie beyond the visible. His
stylistic powers are at their best in this lamento on the ubi sunt theme,
albeit one that is oriented not towards the past but towards the future:

Where is the supreme ecstasy in mankind, which makes day a delight and
night a delight, purpose an ecstasy and a concourse in ecstasy, and single
abandon of the single body and soul an ecstasy under the moon? Where is
the transcendent knowledge in our hearts, uniting sun and darkness, day
and night, spirit and senses? Why do we not know that the two in
consummation are one; that each is only part; partial and alone for ever;
but that the two in consummation are perfect, beyond the range of

40
Lawrence, TI, 121.
41
Ibid.
 loneliness or solitude?42

Impressed by the “terrifying sightlessness” shared by the old spinner

woman, the two monks and the soldier he met near the lemon gardens of
Signor Pietro, Lawrence in fact asserts that the neutrality they all have in
common is a consequence of the eternal fusion of light and darkness, of
day and night, of being and non-being, of past and present: “The flesh
neutralizing the spirit, the spirit neutralizing the flesh” 43. It is the metaphor
of twilight that conveys the same intimation of “the ecstasy of light and
dark together”, lending a deep metaphysical sense to what seems to be
“the supreme transcendence of the afterglow” 44. While sitting on the
deserted terrace of San Gaudenzio, “high up, far, far from the ground” 45,
the solitary wanderer perceives “the dead emptiness” which remains
behind after all the momentous splendour has passed away. Like the
“deserted lemon gardens” he noticed soon after coming to Lake Garda,
San Gaudenzio seems to be the epitome of the old order that has already
passed. It is for Lawrence an acknowledgement of the transcendent
meaning of twilight, which he endeavours to express in language
dominated by stylistic repetition and rhythm. I dare say that there is a deep
motivation in Lawrence’s choice of repetition as the stylistic device best
able to convey the rhythm of the blood, the rhythm of life and death, or, in
his own words “the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself
like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme
moment of the end”46. Ultimately, this is what repetition is: language
turning back upon itself; the addition of new meanings each time a word is
reiterated in a different linguistic context; perfect identity and yet visible
difference. Let us take a closer look at the way in which he describes the
strange and lilting movement of the dancing men in “The Dance”: there is
the same sensual, even sexual suggestion that one can find in the
description of Gerald Crich riding his horse in Women in Love. It is
strength and tenderness, intensity and passion, “leisurely dignity” and
“transported wonder” taking possession of the dancers, who seem to take
flight, “transfigured with a kind of brilliant surprise” 47. Real people he met
during his travels reoccur as powerful characters, belonging to the
42
Lawrence, TI, 113.
43
Ibid., 112.
44
Ibid., 113.
45
Ibid., 165.
46
David H. Lawrence, introduction to the American Edition of New
Poems, in CP, 615.
47
Lawrence, TI, 167.
untamed variety of nature rather than to society. Paolo, Il Duro, “John”, or
the Italians in exile he encountered in Switzerland have something of
natural forces about them, something dark, sensuous and wild, “the
dominance of the old pagan form, the old affirmation of immortality
through procreation”48. Through the artful alchemy of narrative, real
people become characters in a “divine comedy” of suffering and surviving.
“Italians in Exile” can be read as a short story, with vivid dialogue and
sharp portraits, allowing Lawrence to represent “slices” of life as he
actually remembers and re-constructs them (let us not forget that he
worked on “Italians in Exile” in October 1915, years after the moment of
his encounter with the group). Lawrence’s narrative is true both to life and
to the creative mechanism of memory that transforms moments from the
past into ever-present instances of art.
There is a magical quality about Lawrence’s writing; his prose has a
brilliant substance and a complex suggestiveness, due to the original and
convention-free manner in which he uses the English language. He can
construct and deconstruct reality in a swift manner, paying attention to the
“fluid relationship” that unites different moments in time and different
states of being. Ultimately, the journey to Italy turns out to be a journey of
creation: not only self-creation (one might name it a journey of discovery
or invention of what he calls the “pulsating, carnal self, mysterious and
palpable”49), but also literary creation.

Published in Lake Garda: Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the

Sun. Edited by Nick Ceramella, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013, pp.
225-239.

48
Ibid., 200.
49
Lawrence, CP, 617.
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