Burning Man by Frances Wilson

Author:Frances Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

It is the revelation he had on Monte Cassino, that there is no looking back in Purgatory. But he now understood what he had to do.

Lawrence’s concern in Sardinia is with the lost savour of masculinity: the local men are dressed as women, he himself is buzzing around after the queen. ‘One realises, with horror, that the race of men is almost extinct in Europe’, that their ‘fierce singleness is quenched’.101 Like looking down on a city, or across a landscape, or at Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, the native Sardinian men are a vision of something passed away.

After nine days, Frieda and Lawrence return to Sicily via the mainland, where they once again take the train from Rome to Cassino. ‘Why, there is the monastery on its high hill! In a wild moment I suggest we shall get down and spend a night up there at Monte Cassino … but the q-b shudders, thinking of the awful winter coldness of that massive stone monastery.’102 It was a year ago that Lawrence first suffered the coldness of the place. He lets his plan subside, and they brew coffee instead on the station platform. Their train to Naples is filled with legionnaires from Fiume, where Gabriele D’Annunzio’s fifteen-month rule over the Croatian town has ended.

Lawrence later said that he disliked Sardinia. The yellow island ‘belonging to nowhere’ reminded him of Malta, and Sea and Sardinia is in many ways a thank-you-and-goodbye letter to all of Italy: ‘Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has found for me so much that was lost: like a restored Osiris.’ Having perfected himself in the country’s great past, the lost boy was ready to move forward.103

When Sea and Sardinia was published in England in April 1923, the reviewer for the New Statesman compared it to the sort of ‘individual’ travel book written by Norman Douglas. ‘Superficially there is something alike in them. The sort of people and scenes they delight in … both have the novelist’s gift of introducing little dramatic incidents, depending almost entirely on the close observation of one or two sharply cut figures …’104 Had he seen the review, Douglas would have felt his blood turn to ice and the sea go black.

Aaron’s Rod still wouldn’t move and Lawrence couldn’t stay still. Leaving Sicily again in April 1921, he returned briefly to Capri where he discussed his novel with two new friends, American Buddhists called Earl and Achsah Brewster. He had not yet got Aaron out of England, and Earl Brewster recalled how, ‘in his low sonorous voice with the quiet gesture of his hands’, Lawrence told the story of his hero and his flute and his friendship with Lilly. It was a beautiful account, ‘more beautiful than it ever could be written in a book’. And then ‘suddenly’, he stopped. What should Aaron do now, Lawrence asked, having left his wife and broken with the past?

We ventured that only two

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