Twilight in Italy Read online

  In retrospect too, when the play is over, how revealingly rigid are the social distinctions among the playgoers – the grocer and the baker visit each other between acts, the barber looks in on the carpenter, the besaglieri run en masse all the way back to their barracks, but there is no warm handshake for the Lawrences, when they pause themselves to say goodnight to the wrong class of acquaintance.

  Out of it all, then, from his single attendance at the theatre, Lawrence extracts several anthropological generalizations and another mystic message, this time concerning the concept of an Absolute:

  What is really Absolute is the mystic Reason which connects both Infinites, the Holy Ghost that relates both natures of God. If we now wish to make a living State, we must build it up to the idea of the Holy Spirit, the supreme Relationship. We must say, the pagan Infinite is infinite, the Christian Infinite is infinite: these are our two Consummations, in both of these we are consummated. But that which relates them alone is absolute. This Absolute of the Holy Ghost we may call Truth or Justice or Right. These are partial names, indefinite and unsatisfactory unless there be kept the knowledge of the two Infinites, pagan and Christian, which they go between. When both are there, they are like a superb bridge, on which one can stand and know the whole world, my world, the two halves of the universe.

  Got it? If this is travel writing, it is travel writing in excelsis – beyond the spectacle, beyond the experience, beyond even the interpretation, into profounder conclusions of the spirit.

  ∗  ∗  ∗

  After a month or two the Lawrences left their house at the lake’s edge, and went three miles up the mountain behind to stay at a farmhouse on a headland above the sea. This gave Lawrence more intimate insights into the life of the people, and he describes his hosts at the farm in detail. Paolo the father is a handsome peasant of 53, robust and powerful, with an “almost classic simplicity and gentleness, an eternal kind of sureness”. His aristocratic presence reminds Lawrence of the peasants pictured in northern Italian art. In contrast Maria his wife reminds him of an ox – broad-boned, massive in physique, slow in her soul, “weighted down by her heavy animal blood”. Of their two sons, Marco is a little bovine too, but Giovanni is beautiful, courtly, warm, “ready to flush like a girl with anger or confusion”.

  The relationships between the four of them are, so to speak, pre-ordained. Paolo and Maria are the light and the dark, the flint and the steel. Maria is ambitious and avaricious, eager for change and devoted to her stolid son Marco. Paolo is fundamentally conservative, respectful of authority, priesthood, hard work and social superiority, and close to Giovanni. It is only towards the end of the essay that we realise there is a fourth member of the family, the child Felicina, “affected, cold, selfish, foolish”, born when Paolo returned after five years in the gold-mines of America. The marriage has never been the same since, and in their old age, the parents, Lawrence tells us, are living in a relationship of complete negation.

  This family condition Lawrence dissects with great subtlety in the fifth essay of Twilight in Italy, and now we begin to realise the significance of the book’s title. The essay opens with some of the most lyrical writing in the book, a glorious poetical register of the passing of the seasons in rural Italy. Here Lawrence lets his affinity with nature run riot. The sunshine of winter is “still and pure, like iced wine”. The days of spring leap “all clear and coloured from the earth”. And in summer the mornings open wide and spacious, and the noondays are heavy with sensual fragrance.

  But all was not what it seems. Twice in the book Lawrence deplores the alienating effect of modernity upon Italian country society, with its ancestral allures of tradition, superstition, prejudice and love. Once he meets a villager who, having spent some time in America, seemed bewitched into returning there for good:

  He seemed scarcely like a person with individual choice, more like a creature under the influence of fate which was disintegrating the old life and precipitating him, a fragment inconclusive, into the new chaos.

  And once, in Switzerland, he comes across a group of expatriate Italian factory-workers, former peasants perhaps, who talked about nothing but Italy, the old songs, the old ways, the polenta, the bells and the sun, the sun. All their blood, says Lawrence, all their senses were Italian, needing the Italian sky, the speech, the sensuous life: but the great world had captured them, and they would never go back. For the old order of Italy was passing away, “the aristocratic order of the supreme God, God the Father, the Lord” – the order of the earth itself and its sustenance.

  And here is Lawrence’s message for you and me, his readers: it is passing away for us, too.

  ∗  ∗  ∗

  Lawrence thinks a great deal about nationality, about race and ethnicity and national characteristics, and often enough he lets his prejudices and preferences slip. Everything Swiss, for instance, was so ordinary, so average, so soulless – utter cold materialism was the norm. Germanness depressed him too. A German landlord he encountered was thin and trembling, collarless, with his waistcoat unbuttoned to accentuate his pot-belly, while his wife was snobbish, surly and disapproving, and spoke an unbeautiful dialect. As for the one Englishman he bumps into, Lawrence admires him for his awkward courage, but judges him to be stifled by the awful monotony of his life in London, and the diurnal slavery of his office job.

  When it comes to Italianness, though, Lawrence’s responses are essentially sensual, even sexual. Here for a start is a portrait of an Italian vine-grafter who has lived in America, and who gets a chapter to himself. Lawrence is evidently fascinated by him, and his literary response is suggestively homo-erotic:

  He was very handsome, beautiful rather … His hair was jet black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird’s wing, his brows were beautifully drawn, calm above his grey eyes, that had long dark lashes … His eyes, however, had a sinister light in them, a pale, slightly repelling gleam, very much like a god’s pale-gleaming eyes.

  In short he was a copy-book Italian, straight out of romantic fiction. The sixth essay in the book is all about Italianness, and is extremely sexual. It concerns a dance at the farmhouse attended by two visiting Englishwomen, and its tone is set by the beautiful boy Giovanni (remember him?), who prefers to dance with Lawrence rather than with either of the women. “‘It’s better like this, two men?’ Giovanni says to me, his blue eyes hot, his face curiously tender”, and the essay trembles with suggestion. The Englishwomen are the only women dancers, the men are peasants in heavy boots, and the music comes from mandolins and guitars. They dance to a lilting polka-waltz round and round the small room, dust rising from the floor, and Lawrence’s vocabulary trembles sensually with them – climaxing in a sentence so full of passion, so suggestive with the red dust rising and the twinging of the mandolins, that it lasts for 820 words without a full stop.

  Consider the responses of the Englishwomen. They are transfixed by the dark aura of the occasion, and one of them finds herself in the arms of a strange, one-legged wood-cutter, silent, proud and fierce. At the climax of the dance his great strange strength rushes out, “liquid, perfect, transcendent”, and the temper of the prose seems to be edging towards pornography. When the music ends the wood-cutter, “jerking his head strangely”, invites the woman to join him in the darkness outside, but although she is, we are told, “dilated and brilliant”, she prefers to stay with safer company indoors …

  Does this startling interlude, as it might be from a pulp paperback, have a message for us? Perhaps not, or perhaps only as an illustration, to show us how close are the God-given primal passions, the ways of the old order, to our lesser instincts – for Maria the avaricious landlady has made a satisfactory profit from the evening. “Her cupidity,” Lawrence tells us in the final words of the essay, “seemed like her very blossom”.

  ∗  ∗  ∗

  The final essay of the book is called “The Return Journey”. Lawrence appears to have made the journey home alone. The presence of Fri
eda has seldom been mentioned in Twilight in Italy, but has been innate throughout the work: now she seems almost tangibly absent. When her husband steps out towards the west “a light seems to flash out under every footstep”, but the thoughts that occupy his mind on the way are not all cheerful. He is perhaps working out for himself, as we must for ourselves, the real master-theme of this book, if there is one. We have learnt some messages already, concerning the condition of Italy, but in the conclusion to Twilight in Italy we discover at last a more universal meaning.

  Lawrence has perhaps been reading John Ruskin, whose works were still at a zenith of their influence in the years before the First World War, and who shared Lawrence’s preoccupations with natural beauties, the dignity of labour, inherited craftsmanship and the overbearing threat of the Machine Age. Somewhere in Switzerland, on the way home, he comes across a village which depressingly reminds him of his own birthplace in the smoky north of England – a “hideous, crude factory-settlement” in a valley of the Alps. Here, perhaps for the first time, he makes explicit the purpose of this work.

  It is the hideous rawness of the world of men, the horrible, desolating harshness of the advance of the industrial world upon the world of nature, that is so painful. It looks as though the industrial spread of mankind were a sort of dry disintegration advancing and advancing, a process of dry disintegration.

  It starts to happen, he says, when the peasant leaves home and becomes a workman, and presently the whole social structure breaks down. Now we remember the hints and messages he has been dropping into his narrative throughout the essays of this so-called travel book, and those glimpses of premonition come back to us more clearly.

  What can one do, he asks himself, and us, contemplating the grubby little settlement in the Alpine valley, and comparing it with the glorious isolation of the high snows all around, and he concludes that in fact the kingdom of the world, the world humanity had made, has lost all importance, all significance. “What could one do” he wonders, “What could one do but wander about?” He was to spend much of the rest of his life – 18 years of it – wandering about, and perhaps his art too was engendered down all the years by these instincts of rootlessness and escape.

  Certainly the conclusion of Twilight in Italy is bitterly inconclusive. We find its author sitting at last in the Cathedral Square of Milan, drinking a Campari on a Saturday afternoon. All around him, he tells us, was vivacity. Life itself was vivid, multitudes of activities engaged the human mind and body: “But always there was the same purpose stinking in it all, the mechanising, the perfect mechanising of human life” – and there, I take it, is the twilit final message of this book.

  The Crucifix Across the Mountains

  The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany.

  And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid.

  Maybe a certain Grössenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only nations would realise that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other’s particular nature, how much simpler it would all be.

  The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South. That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But still it is there, and its signs are standing.

  The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.

  As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realises here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country, remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial processions.

  Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one’s interest is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.

  But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointed hood.

  I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly, invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.

  It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.

  Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the farmhouse with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent, carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.

  The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the shirt clings to the hot, firm, skin and the rain comes with heavy, pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one’s body in the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve one’s arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill, hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with the burden.

  It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat, a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.

  For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains, there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.

  And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must needs live under the radiance of his own negat
ion.

  There is a strange, clear beauty of form about the men of the Bavarian highlands, about both men and women. They are large and clear and handsome in form, with blue eyes very keen, the pupil small, tightened, the iris keen, like sharp light shining on blue ice. Their large, full-moulded limbs and erect bodies are distinct, separate, as if they were perfectly chiselled out of the stuff of life, static, cut off. Where they are everything is set back, as in a clear frosty air.

  Their beauty is almost this, this strange, clean-cut isolation, as if each one of them would isolate himself still further and for ever from the rest of his fellows.

  Yet they are convivial, they are almost the only race with the souls of artists. Still they act the mystery plays with instinctive fulness of interpretation, they sing strangely in the mountain fields, they love make-belief and mummery, their processions and religious festivals are profoundly impressive, solemn, and rapt.

  It is a race that moves on the poles of mystic sensual delight. Every gesture is a gesture from the blood, every expression is a symbolic utterance.

  For learning there is sensuous experience, for thought there is myth and drama and dancing and singing. 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.

  At the same time, always, overhead, there is the eternal, negative radiance of the snows. Beneath is life, the hot jet of the blood playing elaborately. But above is the radiance of changeless not-being. And life passes away into this changeless radiance. Summer and the prolific blue-and-white flowering of the earth goes by, with the labour and the ecstasy of man, disappears, and is gone into brilliance that hovers overhead, the radiant cold which waits to receive back again all that which has passed for the moment into being.