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Writing the Journey: June 1999

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Through the eyes of D.H. Lawrence: Journeyman life philosopher charting a physical and metaphysical voyage

by Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D.

I.

In his so-called "Italy books" (Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, and Sketches of Etruscan Places), the expatriate traveler, D.H. Lawrence, not only paints a colorful physical landscape with his sharp eye attentive to the personal characteristics of the local people, but he transcends his frugal and arduous journey by simultaneously exploring realms of the metaphysical. In his Italy books there is a movement from German idealism, to a Jungian-type metempsychosis, to a Bakhtinian confusion of dialectics. Never far from his grounding in English practicality, Lawrence is however a spiritual traveler, content with ample, good food but seeking nourishment for the soul.

Covering a period from 1912 through 1927, Lawrence expands the notion of travel to include cultural, historical, and most importantly, philosophical reflection. At first, Lawrence leaves England, in 1912, as a free and rebellious young Englishman full of daring and hope travelling to northern Italy. Then, in 1921, Lawrence returns, moving around Florence, Capri, Sicily, and then writing about his trip to Sardinia, all while he is full of despair stemming from his personal and collective distress after the war. Finally, in 1927, near the end of his life and seriously ill, after having travelled to Ceylon, Australia, America, and Mexico, Lawrence explores small villages in Spotorno, the Tuscan hills, and central Italy to visit Etruscan tombs, a man full of consternation over the world but overflowing with the kaleidoscopic light of humanity. This tripartite Italian journey proceeds from the young Lawrence's grappling with definitions of self and soul, to a re-discovery of living archetypes, to a reified concept of humankind through its various incarnate civilizations.

II: The first voyage

In his insightful biography of D.H. Lawrence, DHL: The Early Years, John Worthen notes that although Lawrence and Frieda, a woman who, while still married, ran off with Lawrence to the continent, were strangers in Italy and were, at first isolated, the initial reaction by Lawrence is one of happiness; and, as months passed at the Lago di Garda, Lawrence became increasingly aware of symbolic possibilities--of tapping into his own sensibility, held in relation to the coarse yet simple people around him, to uncover something supremely unconscious (431, 439-40).In letters from 1912 the young Lawrence writes with excitement to his friends in England about the slow and peripatetic journey from Germany to Italy: "We take rucksacks--shoulder sacks--with food and methylated, cook our meals by some stream--and twice we have slept in hay-huts" (Coll. Letters 142). A charcoal brazier was used; large quantities of macaroni and grated cheese were consumed (CL 164) in order to fuel, in Lawrence's words, the "footling about from place to place " (CL 141).

Although Twilight in Italy consists of many different essays, first written in 1912 and then revised in 1915 after the war had begun, the repeated theme revolves around Lawrence's ground-breaking work on self and identity addressed in his just-then-completed novel, The Rainbow. The revised essays contain Lawrence's serious reflection of initial impressions and amplify his basic assumption that, first, there is something intangible driving nature and that, second, everything in fact tangible manifests a polar duality of opposites. For example, in the first essay, called "The English and the Germans" (1912)1, Lawrence complains that in the English there is a split between sense and soul; there ought to be a greater recognition that life is infinitely immense beyond one's own consciousness (8). Any division or disintegration of self and spirit is, for Lawrence, tantamount to making brittle and enervated the experience and consummation of lived life. Nevertheless, this split occurs because the average English person cares only for daily security and self-preservation--a certain joy is missing (8). The refinements of civilization have produced an atrophied state--a loss of what Lawrence calls the "brutal" way of life (9).

Lawrence illustrates the slippage away from human wholeness to a split in one of the first essays, "Christs in the Tyrol."2 The first Christ he sees, that is, folk-artistic creations of the Christian savior, is "human clay" (44), a peasant depicted as a combination of Prometheus and Christ, with a "soul" struggling "against the fact of the nails" (44). The carving of the religious figure is as if a craving by the secular man to understand the meaning of his single life (44). Life is a helpless suffering, a riddle of pain, and the wood carvings are emblems of anguish and fear (45). One of the Christs is in a glass case, and Lawrence describes him as a combination of fretting anxiety and pleasant dreaming (46), a remarkable confluence of the real peasantness of life and the imagined nobility of human aspiration.

In revising this essay,3 Lawrence notes how Bavarians move on the "poles of mystic sensual delight" where one's every action derives from "the blood" (93). There is at ready disposal the full sensate body and not the mind: the mind is there, not separate, just "kept submerged" (93). This is due to the "changeless not-being" of the snows (93). There is an eternal issuance in life where the mixture of work and flesh/blood/warmth reach to the everlastingness of the snow peaks (94). The emphasis, though, is not on unanswerable death but on what really and at present is (95). Despite, as modelled in the Christus figures, the anxiety and shame, there is, to use Lawrence's words, an "integral" and "ugly" "will" (99). The language of Lawrence, the emphasis on polar duality, and especially his insistence on integrity despite a hideous will, is dependent upon the nineteenth century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.4

Then, in a later essay, "The Lemon Gardens,"5 Lawrence marvels at and admires in the Italians a movement (over hundreds of years, away from abstractions of the middle ages) to flesh and pure sensation. There is not an absoluteness of Holy Word but an absolute, god-like "I"--because one's senses are one's own and not any other person's. Lawrence sees how this, over time, for the Italians, has become the important substance in direct opposition to the purposeful nothingness of German and English northern industry (117). Here is a Lawrentian interpolation of Schopenhauer with direct reference to the will but the placing of it in a physical location in the human body--the loins. This is essentially Schopenhauerian, although one can attribute to Schopenhauer's intellectual successor Nietzsche the Lawrentian description of a non-mental living presence (117-18).

Furthermore, in "The Spinner and the Monks" essay,6 Lawrence describes an old woman spinning fleece at the terrace of San Tommaso. He indicates how she does not act self-consciously because in her universe he is a stranger (107). Concerning Schopenhauer's observation that one can be (simultaneously) both micro- and macro-cosm, Lawrence insists that his lived life is the micro and his death is the macro, sending him to an all absorbing cosmos (107); although he distinguishes himself from the old woman, they are, inevitably, at death, intimately connected. Fiona Becket, however, has written of this encounter between Lawrence and the old woman that since it constitutes a condition of strangeness between physical and social spaces, there can be no genuine exchange in such a "mismeeting" (40-41).

Yet with emphasis on the body, and since the body is parallel to the intellect, both are a manifestation of the will (a single, human will and one that contains it, the greater inhuman will). The old woman to the observant Lawrence appears self centered: he sees her, rather, as an unchangeable eternal wholeness even in her particularity. Although there is a land (his England) she has not seen, it is nevertheless incorporated into her body and her knowledge (107-08). Later he talks about how snow between heaven and earth is an "ecstasy of consummation"; light and dark are one: there is an essential sameness in origin and issue (112): Lawrence asks where this meeting point is in humankind, knowing it is in Schopenhauer's notion of will.

In his argument against the religious and modern centers of Europe, Lawrence states that philosophers like Bishop Berkeley have distilled away his body, that poets like Shelley have dissolved him in the clouds like a skylark, and that German Idealists like Hegel have negatively consummated him with the Infinite--for then he must unfortunately eliminate the all important self (121). Loss of a self (that which is Italian) leads to a focus on science and on machines (that which is German and northern). Lawrence insists that the dictum of Alexander Pope, the representative Age-of-Reason poet, that "the proper study of mankind is man," calls for the destruction of the individual self and creates an abstraction of humankind (120). However, the Italians who are not abstract, who understand the beauty and the necessity of the flesh, have not exalted the concept of humankind above the real solid fact of that single human person in each one of us (124). The northerners, of whom Lawrence is one, recognize the original warmth of the Italians but cannot go back to it, because the northern races have perfected a spiral upward toward achieving a perfect completion. In the Englishman there is understanding and meaning in language, the impersonal. In the Italian there is emotion and feeling in language, what Lawrence refers to as blood knowledge or blood consciousness.7

Therefore, Lawrence acknowledges that the "consummation" of a person (or of humankind) consists of Self and Selflessness: the single self consists of a retrogressive backward motion to creative senses; the projection outward to an absolute oneness is a spirited shedding of self (125-26). Lawrence says that these are two infinities (negative and positive), polar opposites: the will and will-less-ness discussed by Schopenhauer.

III: A return trip

Mark Kinkead-Weekes has pointed out that Sea and Sardinia presents the hope of an unspoiled world, although there is an absence of facilities; discomfort, however, is not the main impression of this work: with Lawrence's use of the first person singular and with the moniker "queen bee" or "qb" applied to Frieda, it becomes a more straight-forward travel book and achieves an "artful spontaneity" that includes comic tones (621-623). Without completely yielding his ideas of polar opposites in duality, Lawrence's new focus is on observing basic archetypes of humankind.

In Sea and Sardinia, Lawrence opens by presenting the view of a dividing line between what he calls the foreground of one's own perception and the pivot of Mt. Etna in Sicily: he claims that one cannot see both perspectives simultaneously and what is needed, rather, is a metempsychosis (2). A metempsychosis is a transmigration of souls, but importantly, Lawrence calls for an archetypal, and not abstract/intellectual, response to his Italian surroundings. Abstractness of life is a threat to lived life; rather, a sensitive, living heart is necessary; in Nietzschean language there is a call for "the instinctive heart" over the intellect in order to propagate the "good warm life" (10-11).

Once in Sardinia Lawrence realizes that humankind in Europe is lost. He says, "The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone" (62). Lawrence at first glance, without yet finding the words to define it, sees a contrast between the enervating collectivity of "Europe" and the energizing ferocity of the single being in Sardinia. Lawrence proceeds to link these ideas with a description of the black and white peasant costume he observes: he asserts that not only is it familiar, but that he has previously dreamed about and moreover has worn it. He insists that the appearance of the costume belongs to him and to his past and arouses an "uneasy sense of blood-familiarity . . ." (62-63). He asserts a recognition of a priori knowledge. The peasant dress is a manifestation of a Jungian archetype (culturally) that Lawrence hinted at from the opening scenes. All he knows and feels is an awareness (not in a déjà vu sense) of having once before really lived this experience.

With reference to the artists Velasquez and Goya, Lawrence talks passionately about the "large, dark, unlighted eyes" (67) of the Sardinians. The eyes are soft, velvet, with a blank darkness that conjures something strange and old--a pre-conscious state before the civilizing forces of the Greeks (67). Mara Kalnins, with reference to Bakhtin,8 has noted that the sense of carnival plays an important part in Sea and Sardinia, for it promotes a spirit of fiesta where Lawrence is temporarily allowed to participate in psychological and social universal impulses toward integration into the life of the community (100, 110).

As he climbs the altitudes of Sardinina by train, Lawrence studies the miners and herders and is able to activate his perspicuity and penetrate their consciousness. The writer remarks how there is a gulf between himself and them, and, moreover, how each person is "limited to himself, as the wild animals are" (90). Without being negative he notes how these men have centripetal characters--pivots to themselves--that make them, truly, medieval. There is in them a lack of world consciousness but an abundance of dark, tenacious vigor--they are representative types of a past gone by, but yet, they manage to live today (91).

Lawrence is quite clear in this short travel book that a trip to Italy is an "act of self-discovery" because it enables one to tap the root of a forgotten past. In his inimitable manner he writes, "Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness" (123). This book is part of Lawrence's attempt to acknowledge archetypes that connect to the present, discoverable in Sardinia, necessary components for the puzzling together of a whole self, especially for the non-Italian.

Leaving Sardinina Lawrence regrets the change in "psyche," for he enjoyed the roughness of Sardinia, returning to the notion of transmigration of souls (metempsychosis) with which he opened, by saying that each human has not one soul but dozens: indeed, the Italian soul, to which Lawrence was keenly sensitive, is characterized (in his words) by "uncertainty and momentaneity" (181). The old Adam, primal man, reckless and untamed, but splendid and passionate, is in the Italian soul; by its nature of "molten spontaneity" it beckons outsiders to connect with it (203) and its universality.

III: A last look

Visiting the tombs of central Italy, Lawrence was impressed by the rich symbolism he found, convinced the life and consciousness of the Etruscans was rooted in a pulse and rhythm of eternal symbol (14) wiped out by a culture located, instead, in law and fixed language. In this final travel book on Italy, Lawrence manages, perhaps not unintentionally, to meld ideas of essence, duality, and archetype with an astounding similarity to Bakhtin's notions of heteroglossia (the irretrievable social and historical context of utterance). For Lawrence, the Etruscans were important since they had a real desire to preserve the sanctity of a living life that includes all task and ritual; they were not, as their ultimate Roman oppressors, focused on conquering power or an intellectual, abstract soul (26). In Tarquinia, Lawrence describes some small temples, like houses, with cornices and friezes and terra cotta crests and plaques. He observes a panoply of natural and human life described as ". . . alive with freely modelled painted figures in relief, gay dancing creatures, rows of ducks, round faces like the sun, and faces grinning and putting out a tongue, all vivid and fresh and unimposing" (26): here is a conglomeration of the many.

In describing the tombs in Tarquinia, sarcophagi of stone, with the figure of a man holding forth the sacred patera (a saucer for libations) with a raised knob in the center, Lawrence finds a symbolic germ of heaven and earth. The reader is introduced to Lawrence's notion of the living quick, a plasm, alive and unbroken to the end, the eternal quick of all things, a spark that is both unborn and yet undying in its vividness (30). This notion of the quick hearkens back to ideas of essence found in Schopenhauer's world as will and also to Jung's pervasively multi-faceted collectivity (rather than Freud's repressed, solipsistic singularity). Lawrence later says that "To get any idea of the pre-Roman past we must break up the conception of oneness and uniformity, and see an endless confusion of differences" (38). There is glory in a polyglot and heteroglossia of peoples, moods, temperaments--not a state of the union but a human state of tolerable instability.

It is in cave paintings that Lawrence discovers a visual manifestation of, as he says, the "confusion of differences." For example, in the tomb of the leopards he describes human dancers as beyond art with their ". . . sense of vigorous, strong-bodied liveliness . . ." while they remain part of the sea light and olive trees of the fresh day (39). The important contribution by Lawrence is the perception that the Etruscan paintings offer a representation of a "soft flow of touch" (46): and this is a re-presentation of depths of life different from ours and denied to us (48). It is not force (an effect) that is important but that which lives by delicate sensitiveness, such as the eternal but most frail grass (29). Without explicitly invoking them, Lawrence applies (in addition to Schopenhauer's duality and Bakhtin's multi-vocalness in context) ideas from Jung when he insists that the Etruscans maintained a living universe. He writes: "The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul there were myriad roving, lesser souls: every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness" (49). This equilibrium of nature includes (dualistically) a single soul and creature souls; the ultimate One and then (simultaneously) the separate-in-oneness one, both forever mingling and yet rushing apart (49-50). According to Lawrence this is an ancient idea of the universe, a polarity of action that remains manifest, perhaps to a lesser degree, in some of the Italians he admires. Etruscan art symbols--duck, deer, lamb, goat, cow--are not exactly scientific, as mere representations that appeared in Egypt, but have, somehow in this rudimentary shape and design, the ability to rouse in the spectator deeper emotions (57).

Not coincidentally (but certainly fortuitously) Lawrence encounters a young German, a university graduate who wants to be an archaeologist. Lawrence tells us that for this man, a representative of his generation, "The war cancelled most meanings . . ." (63). The German is labelled modern, characterized as only interested in the obvious, not the unthinkable (67). This German's favorite expression is Nicht Vielwert (i.e., not worth much). Returning to ideas brought out in Twilight in Italy, Lawrence notes how the German, when questioned about the symbolism in Etruscan painting, is without any response since he looks for the A, B, C of facts and not the myths of a pre-Greek cosmic religion (66). Although Lawrence does not set up the equivalency, when he talks about the Etruscan religion as non-anthropomorphic he seems to connect it to the Italians in Twilight and Sardinia, those Italians who Feel and who do not think (67).

When Lawrence says that the human being, to the Etruscan, was a bull or a ram, a bird or a serpent, a lion or a deer, a leopard or a lamb; and when he talks about these oppositions as a clash that is a form of unison (67); and when he talks about the suggestive edges of Etruscan art and how the represented bodies of things surge from a center to the surface atmosphere; and how, where each thing was related vitally to strange, other things (68); and how there is a swirling mystery where all creatures are a potential of a myriad consciousness (69) --he culminates not only his ideas about Italy and its people, but about life: for here, at the end of Etruscan Places, when he talks about all life emerging out of the "unbroken circle" (69), a reader is compelled to make reference to Schopenhauer, Jung, and Bakhtin.

Conclusion

Although it is true that, according to Jeffrey Meyers, Lawrence's great contribution to travel writing is to shift the center from the external world to the self (12), and although, indeed, as has been often noted, Lawrence travelled for reasons of health, in search of his ideal community, and for newness of place (18), and although Leo Hamalian has called Lawrence, in relation to Italy, "A restless spirit in quest of permanancy . . ." (vii)--the simple psychological and philosophical truth is that Lawrence sought freedom: he wanted to be freed from the nightmare of his childhood, freed from the restrictions of modern convention, and freed from the bloodless negativity prevalent in post-war Europe.

Notes

1 The 1912 version is quoted here.

2 Originally written in 1912; the 1913 version is quoted here.

3 "The Crucifix Across the Mountains," 1915-16, a revision of the second version of "Christs in the Tyrol."

4 See his main work, The World as Will and Representation.

5 1915-16, a revision of the 1913 version.

6 1913; the revised 1915-16 version is quoted here.

7 See "The Theatre" [1913] 139.

8 See his essays "Rabelais and His World" and "The Concept of Grotesque Realism."

Works Cited or Consulted

Becket, Fiona. "Strangeness in D.H. Lawrence." pp. 38-51. D.H. Lawrence in Italy and England. Ed. George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999.

Ellis, David. D.H. Lawrence: Dying Game. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.

Hamalian, Leo. D.H. Lawrence in Italy. New York: Taplinger, 1982.

Kalnins, Mara. "Play and Carnival in Sea and Sardinia." pp. 97- 115. D.H. Lawrence in Italy and England. Ed. George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1999.

Kindead-Weekes, Mark. D.H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile. Cambridge: CUP, 1996.

Lawrence, David Herbert. The Collected Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Ed. Harry T. Moore. London: Heinemann, 1962.

------. D.H. Lawrence and Italy: Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, Etruscan Places. New York: Penguin, 1997.

------. Twilight in Italy and Other Essays. Ed. Paul Eggert. Cambridge: CUP, 1994.

Meyers, Jeffrey. D.H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy. Philadelphia: U Penn P, 1982.

Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years. Cambridge: CUP, 1991.