Lawrence and Frieda in the 1920s
You can do worse, it has been suggested, than read the works of DH Lawrence - though FR Leavis, Cambridge’s abrasive Lawrentian sage, would have put it more affirmatively than that. Could you, he might have asked, ever do better?
On trips to Italy, where for a time Lawrence travelled restlessly, I feel I have been reading him for most of my life, not least during the twenty years I was lucky enough to own a tiny property in the mountains above Lake Como, where my Lawrence fixation was linked with another one involving Alessandro Manzoni, whose passion for the Italian north inspired his substantial historical novel The Betrothed. It is a book, I was to discover, as enthralling as Lawrence’s famous reflections on the trek he made just over a century ago with Frieda, his future wife, from southern Germany across the temperamental Alps to the sunny security of Lake Garda at the age of 27, examining wildflowers and eventually munching figs as he progressed.
Manzoni, dedicatee of Verdi’s Requiem, placed his indelible stamp on Italian literature with the adventures of Renzo and Lucia, the young lovers around whom he assembled The Betrothed, and I have delved into this panorama of old Italian life again and again on trips when a music critic should do more with himself than devour the works of Donizetti.
My targeted village was no international tourist spot - it was a workplace, not only for me but for the cheesemakers, creators of the Taleggio now sold by Sainsbury, who were among its other inhabitants. The place never quite became my home, which indisputably remained Edinburgh, especially when people, spotting me in the Queen’s Hall, approached me with a jovial shout of “Back from Tuscany.”
I was conscious that, with its fireflies on warm nights, its platefuls of polenta, its attractive self-containment, home was what in fact my abode in Lombardy could easily have become, if I had allowed it to. I paid Italian tax, had a local bank account, and was registered as a resident. Though friends and relations frequently came calling I never stooped commercially to sub-letting it. But if I had truly lived there, I would no longer have been able to go there. I would be there already. I wanted to retain the joy of being a visitor.
My village’s name was Introbio and I prized it because it was so simply itself. I knew from reading Manzoni that an attack on its ancient fortified tower, during a period of north Italian strife, had prompted him to launch a chapter of The Betrothed with the words “Introbio has fallen.” But each summer when I was there, villagers from far and wide - from neighbouring Primaluna and Pasturo or from Barzio and Ballabio along the valley - commemorated its historical rescue from adversity by ascending mile after mile to a triple conical peak, the Pizzo di Tre Signori, highest in the area called the Valsassina, for a sprawling outdoor service of thanksgiving.
With Sue in quest of Lawrence
Twilight in Italy, the first of DH Lawrence’s collections of Italian travel essays, would spring to mind, even though it was about a different, though not dissimilar, Alpine pass, further to the east. While Sue, whom I was soon to marry, posed with me on one occasion for a snapshot as if we were Lawrence and Frieda tramping the the Pfitserjoch in less settled weather, observing “the crucifix in the mountains,” as Lawrence called it at the start of his book, and dallying at rustic refuges in prediction of episodes from Women in Love, his greatest novel, the circumstances of their renowned walk came invariably into focus.
Even a minor accident, when I slipped and fell while being followed down a narrow track by a random cow with a Mahlerian bell clanging on its neck and was nearly flattened beneath its feet, was all part of the picture.
Previously, on our first overland traversal of the Alps, Sue had driven me south from Alsace with a small cargo of furniture in alarming snow and fog over the top of the St Gotthard Pass before spending a night in a fire-lit chalet run by the Nestle chocolate family as a guest house. There, with a small group of Americans, we had eaten thick veal chops and fresh rosti potatoes for our supper on the heights above the flashy ski resort of St Moritz before descending next day to the small Italian town of Chiavenna, where one of our village friends used to go to have his hair cut, and from there to Lake Como.
But it is the Lawrence route which has now become glamorous showbiz, his long mountain hike evoked on film by Catherine Brown, a British authority commissioned a year or two ago by the BBC Culture Show to follow the track, in company with a fellow Lawrentian, the lanky Geoff Dyer, author in 1997 of Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of DH Lawrence, an oblique but hilarious study of the man. At one point while writing his book Dyer had resolved, he said, not to write it, but he did so all the same, choosing its title from Lawrence’s Collected Letters where, “out of sheer rage, ” Lawrence had been contemplating the idea of a short biography of Thomas Hardy.
As Lawrence, reputedly a man of infinite anger, had asserted, he had no real wish to write about Hardy. Dyer took this as his cue and, scribbling with manic virtuosity, had progressed with his own book.
In Catherine Brown’s filmed re-enactment of Lawrence’s Italian journey, there were unexpected problems to contend with. She had never made a film before and, with a cameraman lugging his big movie camera up the track like a cross-bearer, found it all much harder than expected. The weather was erratic. Her climbing boots leaked. She had a hangover induced by an Alpine liqueur and was feeling dehydrated. But in Lawrentian terms the adventure represented Eternity with a capital “E.” The film, ripened by references to his vivid vocabulary, would endure until the world ended.
She and Dyer were expected to converse on foot about Lawrence’s vexed sense of humour, which she believed in and said definitely existed. She quoted examples but the BBC’s film director was not amused. After several takes, clearer evidence was demanded.
As a side issue there was the knowledge that, en route, Lawrence and Frieda had encountered two young male friends, with one of whom Lawrence went botanising while, in a mountain shed, Frieda had a secret fling with the other. Now this was something with dramatic, possibly even humorous, potential. But when, to Lawrence’s discomfort, she divulged the truth to him a day or two later, they had reached the perilous top of the pass in darkness five miles higher and things were not looking good for Frieda’s safety.
Lawrence’s book and its incidents are now gorgeously evocative and visual, still savoured and avidly pored over, the whole experience re-enacted in the film and on a travel page of the Financial Times featuring Brown and Dyer in transit, accessible on the internet.
The original walk was a far cry from Lawrence’s native mining community of Eastwood near Nottingham, which he wanted to destroy brick by brick, and in two subsequent collections of essays - Sea and Sardinia, with its emotive opening words, “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move,” and in its successor Etruscan Places - move was what he undoubtedly did, while asking people continually where he should move to.
But before then, from high in the Alps, his descent to Lake Garda with Frieda went without mishap. They rented a house set back from the lake. They ate figs. Later they would continue south to Tuscany and ultimately to the coastal resort of Taormina in Sicily, with its views of smoking Mount Etna. There, for three years, they rented another house, the Villa Fontana Vecchia, on the edge of what is now the via David Herbert Lawrence, where the premises with their identifying plaque would later be occupied by a local Sicilian and his nonagenarian mother who, as a girl, had once delivered Lawrence’s letters.
What remains of his furniture - a sofa and the desk at which he furiously wrote and did translations -- is reportedly still there.
Sue and I honeymooned in Taormina in 1995. Following the Lawrence trail has become high-edge travel, an ongoing, unending reality for all who do it, and, with Sue, I remain exultant to have done a few small bits of it.
30 September 2016
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