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No
doubt Italy played an important role in the development of Lawrence's
personality and thought. He travelled to Italy for the first time in the spring
of 1914, when he visited the Lake of Garda district with Frieda von Richthofen.
The landscapes he saw and the people he met, especially in Veneto, were to
produce a lasting impression on him, together with the feeling that the Italians
had a completely different attitude to life and religion. He gave shape to these
impressions in the travel sketches Twilight
in Italy (1916), written during his "forced" stay in England
during the war years. As soon as he was able to have his passport back, he left
England with Frieda and returned only for short periods.
Between
November 1919 and February 1922 he lived in Picinisco (Abruzzo) and Capri. He
finally settled in Fontana Vecchia, near Taormina, Sicily, whence he left for
short journeys, notably to Montecassino, Fiesole and Sardinia in January 1921.
From an artistic viewpoint the Italian years were very productive: his Italian
works include novels such as Aaron's
Rod and The Lost Girl, travel
books such as Sea and Sardinia and Etruscan
Places, essays (Fantasia of the
Unconscious and Psychoanalisis and the
Unconscious), translations with introductions (Mastro
don Gesualdo and Cavalleria Rusticana
by Giovanni Verga), a collection of poems (Beards,
Beasts and Flowers).
Italy
provided him with unvaluable material for the
setting of his novels and the delineating of the psychology of his
characters, always dissatisfied with their life and in search for themselves.
Both his heroes and heroines, driven by a desire for drinking life to the lees,
give the impression of finding an appeasement in Italy, particularly in the
South. This region was in fact uncontaminated by industry and good manners,
which in his opinion had tainted the soul of the English people, making them
unable of immediacy and spontaneity in interpersonal relations. In The
Lost Girl Alvina, fed up with her life in a narrow-minded middle-class town
in the Midlands meets Ciccio Merasca, a young man from Abruzzo, and elopes with
him though she is conscious of the troubles to come.
Aaron's Rod also starts in the Midlands: oppressed by the mediocrity
of his life and by the love of a possessive wife, Aaron, possibly Lawrence’s
alter ego, leaves to Italy where he lives in Novara and Florence, starting a new
life and becoming increasingly persuaded of the superiority of the individual
over the masses, a concept which would make Lawrence himself a sympathiser of
fascism.
