It was fun reading this D.H. Lawrence travelogue-cum-memoir while we were travelling through Sardinia ourselves. Over at Purple Tern, I've already talked about his boat trip from Palermo, his impressions of Cagliari, and his trip to Mandas.

Lawrence (1885-1930) and his wife, Frieda (referred to throughout the book as the "q-b", short for queen bee), undertook their journey to Sardinia at the beginning of 1921. The whole adventure didn't last much more than a week. Lawrence took a copy of Baedeker with him, but no notebook. He wrote everything up from memory when he returned home to Sicily, working (as William Atkins puts it) "like a mine truck dumping its ore at a smelter". Hardly a month after leaving Sardinia, he had finished his book.

Extracts of the text were first printed in The Dial in the latter months of 1921, and the whole thing came out in book form that December, complete with very beautiful illustrations by Jan Juta:


For example: Terranova

It's difficult to define the genre here. It's not a travel book, for sure. "I am not Baedeker," Lawrence announces firmly at one point. And the couple never seem to find anything particularly interesting in the places they visit. Nothing to see; nothing to do -- that's the refrain.

Talking about Nuoro, Lawrence explains why this might be. Here again, there's apparently nothing to see: "Which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore... Happy is the town that has nothing to show. What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves! Life is then life, not museum-stuffing... Life is life and things and things. I am sick of gaping things, even Peruginos. I have had my thrills from Carpaccio and Botticelli. But now I've had enough. But I can always look at an old, grey-bearded peasant in his earthy white drawers and his black waist-frill, wearing no coat or over-garment, but just crooking along beside his little ox-wagon. I am sick of 'things,' even Perugino."

Which is laudable in its way. There's no harm in celebrating the everyday. But it's nevertheless rather odd that there's nothing about the history of the places the Lawrences visit, and nothing sustained or systematic about culture or politics or art. They hardly stay anywhere for more than five minutes anyway...

There's certainly a helter-skelter quality about this book. As Atkins notes: "It was the instant that detained him always, travel not as a fluid progression but as a series of impressions. No wonder he considered calling the book ‘Sardinian Films’, as if the journey were built of umpteen freeze-frames."

What it does superbly, however, is evoke... After sitting at dinner with other guests, or in a train compartment with fellow-travellers, Lawrence can offer you a keen description of everyone present, warts and all, and the little everyday scenes he describes are so full of life it's as though you're watching them in the theatre.

He can write really beautifully, there's no doubt about it. In Sea and Sardinia, he couples a kind of stream-of-consciousness style with exquisite description.

There's that brilliant first sentence: "Comes over one an absolute necessity to move." Any traveller will recognize that feeling, and the urgency is emphasized by the initial verb. (This verb-or-adjective-first technique recurs frequently, driving the text along: "Arrives an individual at our side...; pretty that looks in the sombre street...; beautiful the goats are: and so swift"...)

And any traveller will smile at the next sentences, too: "Why does one create such discomfort for oneself!" You can't sleep the night before. You get up in the dark: "The dreary black morning, the candle-light, the house looking night-dismal. Ah, well, one does all these things for one's pleasure. So light the charcoal fire and put the kettle on. The queen bee shivering round half dressed, fluttering her unhappy candle. 'It's fun,' she says, shuddering. 'Great,' say I, grim as death." You can't not laugh...

They take the train to Messina -- "Etna across there is smothered quite low, quite low in a dense puther of ink-black clouds. Playing some devilry in private, no doubt" -- and there they change for Palermo. They take the steamer to Cagliari, and then proceed by train and bus to Mandas, Surgono, Nuoro, and Terranova Pausani (now Olbia -- it was Mussolini who ordered the change back to what had been its ancient name).


Cagliari

***

The book also offers plenty of insight into Lawrence himself. Sometimes what you see is annoying:

-- His constant frustration with what he finds. He has moments of delight, it is true. But his default setting is impatience with anything that he deems sub-standard. So he readily sounds contemptuous about the places he visits. Orosei, for example, despite its once grand architecture, is "a dilapidated, sun-smitten, god-forsaken little town not far from the sea"; Siniscola is "a narrow, crude, stony place, hot in the sun, cold in the shade".

-- His fetish about "maleness". Having seen his "first peasant in costume", he muses: "How handsome he is, and so beautifully male!... How beautiful maleness is, if it finds its right expression. -- And how perfectly ridiculous it is made in modern clothes... One realises, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe. Only Christ-like heroes and woman-worshipping Don Juans, and rabid equality-mongrels. The old, hardy, indomitable male is gone. His fierce singleness is quenched. The last sparks are dying out in Sardinia and Spain. Nothing left but the herd-proletariat and the herd-equality mongrelism, and the wistful poisonous self-sacrificial cultured soul. How detestable." Good grief...

-- The way this trumpeting maleness is never that far from misogyny. He remarks, approvingly: "Tenderness, thank heaven, does not seem to be a Sardinian quality... Here men don't idealise women, by the looks of things... I should think the grovelling Madonna-worship is not much of a Sardinian feature... The defiant, splendid split between the sexes, each absolutely determined to defend his side, her side, from assault... Give me the old, salty way of love. How I am nauseated with sentiment and nobility, the macaroni slithery-slobbery mess of modern adorations." And he can't do with confident women, who are consistently denigrated: "The women are self-conscious in a rather smirky way, bouncy... [Some women displayed] that dangerous hard assurance... as they strode along so blaring... [One young woman at an inn is "a full-bosomed young hussy, and would be very queenly and cocky".

-- His lack of empathy with the convicts who travel, under guard, on the boats. His views sound so extreme that I wasn't sure they weren't a black joke.


Mandas

But sometimes you get glimpses of a person who might be likeable:

-- He confesses to a horror of carnival maskers; he struggles to cross the road at Quattro Canti in Palermo; he goes into ecstasies about the beautiful vegetables on display in the market in Cagliari; he feels the cold...

-- Anyone who can describe trains in this playful way cannot be all bad: "The two trains run alongside one another, like two dogs meeting in the street and snuffing one another... The various trains in the junction [at Mandas] squatted side by side and had long, long talks before at last we were off... It is a queer railway. I would like to know who made it [you see, a real travel writer would have found out who made it, but hey...]. It pelts up hill and down dale and round sudden bends in the most unconcerned fashion, not as proper big railways do, grunting inside deep cuttings and stinking their way through tunnels, but running up the hill like a panting, small dog, and having a look round, and starting off in another direction, whisking us behind unconcernedly... At every station we were left ignominiously planted, while the little engines -- they had gay gold names on their black little bodies -- strolled about along the side-lines, and snuffed at the various trucks. There we sat, at every station, while some truck was discarded and some other sorted out like a branded sheep, from the sidings and hitched on to us."


Mandas

-- And the depiction of the night sky in Terranova could only come from a person who is wide open and sensitive: "The stars were marvellous in the soundless sky, so big, that one could see them hanging orb-like and alone in their own space, yet all the myriads. Particularly bright the evening-star. And he hung flashing in the lower night with a power that made me hold my breath. Grand and powerful he sent out his flashes, so sparkling that he seemed more intense than any sun or moon. And from the dark, uprising land he sent his way of light to us across the water, a marvellous star-road. So all above us the stars soared and pulsed, over that silent, night-dark, land-locked harbour."


"Ahead we saw the big lump of the island of Tavolara, a magnificient mass of rock which fascinated me by its splendid, weighty form..." This is Tavolara, viewed from Olbia


On the far left, Tavolara, as seen from Golfo Aranci

***

At the end of the day, then, this is a book about Lawrence as much as, if not more than, it's a book about Sardinia. Atkins again: "It is the book -- at least among his nonfiction -- in which he allows himself to be most visible to his readers. Visible at the expense of the place itself, it’s true. Visible to the extent you sometimes want to look away..."

Atkins recalls a tribute written after Lawrence’s death by Rebecca West. She and writer Norman Douglas visited Lawrence in Florence in 1921: "‘Douglas,’ she writes, ‘had described how on arriving in a town Lawrence used to go straight from the railway station to his hotel and immediately sit down and hammer out articles about the place, vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people.’ And when the pair found him, what was he doing but precisely that, ‘pounding out articles on the momentary state of Florence with nothing more to go on than a glimpse of it’? If it seemed to West ‘obviously a silly thing to do’, she later came to appreciate his method: ‘I was naive. I know now that he was writing about the state of his own soul at that moment.’"

Curious...


Terranova/Olbia: "We saw a magic, land-locked harbour, with masts and dark land encircling a glowing basin..."

***

Among the noteworthy historical references:

-- Many people are pretty fed up with the British, and Lawrence finds it tedious to keep having to listen to their complaints. The Italians he meets see Britain as having profited from WWI, resent the way it is trying to call the shots, and envy the apparent wealth of the Britons living in Italy, who profit, they say, from good exchange rates and kind Italians.

-- Admiring the characteristic dress of the Sardinian peasantry, Lawrence says: "Will the last waves of enlightenment and world-unity break over them and wash away the stocking-caps? Or is the tide of enlightenment and world-unity already receding fast enough? Certainly a reaction is setting in, away from the old universality, away from cosmopolitanism and internationalism... Which motion will conquer? The workman's International, or the centripetal movement into national isolation? Are we going to merge into one grey proletarian homogeneity? -- or are we going to swing back into more-or-less isolated, separate, defiant communities? Probably both." How very prescient... Yet, for me, he's on the wrong side: "I am glad," he says, "that the era of love and oneness is over: hateful homogeneous world-oneness... I shall be glad ... when men fiercely react against looking all alike and being all alike, and betake themselves into vivid clan or nation-distinctions..." He didn't live to see these proudly self-isolating, drum-beating communities go on to hammer the crap out of each other in World War II.

-- He mentions novelist Grazia Deledda, born in Nuoro (five years later, she would win the Nobel Prize).

-- We hear again of Gabriele D'Annunzio (whom we first encountered in Trieste). The people Lawrence overhears seem to think his attempt to occupy Fiume was a really big mistake...


We saw this mural in Olbia. Everyone who quotes this text (here, for example) says it comes from Sea and Sardinia. It doesn't. Well, not from my version of the text anyway...

***

Verdict, then? Well, it's beautiful. Unquestionably. I enjoyed reading it, and -- as I've noted -- it's a little slice of Lawrence and his times.

But there is definitely much that jars: The brutally essentializing account of another culture, the conjecture, the subjectivity, the lack of empathy, the lack of anything that smacks of research...

I'm going to quote again from Atkins, because he sums up very succinctly the way I felt about this work: "No book has made me think more deeply, more uncomfortably, about the impertinence of describing a place that is not your home -- about what is owed to your subject, and what is owed to your reader, and about whether those twin obligations can ever be reconciled."

Lawrence, says Atkins, had read the Baedeker he took with him, and left Sicily knowing in advance what he was going to find. And he finds it, leaving little room for other ideas to break in. Referring to Lawrence's enraptured description of a lone figure working his way across the landscape, and his elevation of this figure to a sort of symbol, Atkins comments: "Nothing pleases him more than this ant personage, far off, and therefore not really a human, the Sardinian peasant in his traditional outfit, bent to the land. He represents everything Lawrence had expected to find here: manliness, individuality, multifariousness, a peasantry that knows its place and can imagine no other. Yet the black-and-white ‘lord of toil’, like a figure in a painting, is always too distant to have its own voice."

These are all sobering considerations for anyone who writes -- in however minor a fashion -- about other places.

***

Sea and Sardinia didn't sell that well in England. But it changed Lawrence's life. Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy American heiress, loved it, and she was so convinced that Lawrence could do an equivalent job on New Mexico that she invited the author and his wife to come and stay. The beginning of a whole new chapter...