DH Lawrence in Italy by Richard Owen

Author:Richard Owen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909961739
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘BARBARA HAS BEEN HERE A WEEK, goes back tonight,’ Lawrence wrote to Martin Secker on 20 January 1926. ‘My sister arrives this day fortnight, for two weeks. Rina and Barby and I walked to the top of the ridge this afternoon, and made plans for outings when you come again.’ Shortly afterwards he reported ‘It’s been a lovely day, Rina here to tea, after a small walk behind the castle … I had a good whack at my gipsy story tonight and nearly finished it, over the climax and on the short down slope to the end.’ Rina ‘thinks she would really like to start translating The Fox or The Captain’s Doll. You might send her that vol. And let her try. Tanti saluti!’

Lawrence had finished writing The Virgin and the Gipsy by 21 January 1926. ‘Here is the rest of the gipsy story,’ he wrote to Secker that day. The previous day had been lovely, ‘but today is cold and rainy. Barbara came last night. We wanted to go to Savona and buy colours, but the day’s not good enough, leave it till tomorrow.’ He adds, to reassure Martin that Rina is keeping warm, ‘All well at the Villa Maria – the paraffin stove a great success. It will be useful today.’

He was, at last, productively happy. There was no point in killing oneself like Keats ‘for what you’ve got to say’ he wrote to Murry. This would be ‘to mix the eggshell in with the omelette’. He hoped to have enough money to live on, but that was about it. He was now 40, ‘and I want in a good sense, to enjoy my life’. On 1 February Lawrence thanked Secker for sending him the ms of The Virgin and the Gipsy (‘Frieda doesn’t like the title’), adding – using an Italian or Germanic word order – ‘On the 9th arrives my sister, with a friend which will make an interlude, while Barby and Elsa Weekley are apparently going into the Ligure with a friend, a Mrs Seaman. Vive les femmes e la stagione inglese!’

Ellen Seaman was Elsa’s future mother-in-law; Ada’s Nottingham friend was called Lizzie Booth. Women were descending on the little Spotorno colony, creating tensions which would shortly boil over, and which apparently had an affect on Rina and her parents as they awaited the new arrivals. ‘A bit of friction down at the Villa Maria,’ Lawrence reported to Martin in a postscript, ‘but probably it’s only the weather. Rain again today.’ The following day he wrote to Brett, who was in Capri, to thank her for typing Glad Ghosts, adding that he had sent it off ‘but they’ll never find a magazine to print it’. It was ‘beastly weather’ in Spotorno, ‘cold and rainy and all the almond blossom coming out in the chill’.

He felt a ‘revulsion from America … We might keep this house on till April. But I simply don’t know what I shall do. I wish I wanted to go to the ranch again; but I don’t, not now.

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