Sea and Sardinia by D. H. Lawrence

First published: 1921

Type of work: Travel writing

Time of work: January, 1921

Locale: Sicily, Sardinia, and Civitavecchia, Italy

Principal Personages:

• D. H. Lawrence, a British novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright
• Frieda (The Q-B) Lawrence, his wife

Form and Content

Sea and Sardinia is chronologically the second of D.H. Lawrence’s Italian travel books, after Twilight in Italy (1916) and before Etruscan Places (1932), which was written two years before Lawrence’s death and published posthumously. In most respects, Sea and Sardinia is not like a travel book at all, at least not as one normally understands that genre, for there is little in the way of specific guidebook commentary or romantic reflections. Though written almost as a journal of the brief trip to and through Sardinia which he and his wife, Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence, took from their home on Sicily, Sea and Sardinia is actually a highly subjective collection of Lawrence’s impressions. The Lawrences made their excursion in order to investigate the possibility of living on Sardinia, but the normal considerations of those seeking a new home appear only obliquely behind the motifs of inertia and mobility, freedom and bondage, masculinity and femininity which are important elements in other Lawrence works.

Lawrence, predisposed to melancholy in most of his first-person writings, is predictably irascible throughout much of the trip. His mood contrasts markedly with Frieda’s determined amiability. Lawrence grumbles about everything, from the cold weather they face upon setting out to the general filth of the port of Palermo, the arrogance of peasants they meet, and the low rate of currency exchange. At times, he appears even to resent Frieda’s ability to accept it all with good grace. Nevertheless, in the midst of one of these tirades, he will burst out in extravagant praise of some detail of scene which he considers worthwhile or beautiful. His Palermo steamer is crowded and unbearably small, but its maple panels and ebony fittings are wonderful, old-fashioned, and splendid. The Sardinian peasantry is either uncommunicative or rude, but their universal black-and-white costume is magnificent because it allows them to stand as individuals.

The contradictions in these observations do not concern Lawrence. He notes the individuality of the Sardinian peasantry even as he observes its unvarying clothing. He generalizes repeatedly about what he calls “the races” but objects when Italians consider him typically English. He inveighs often against local discourtesy yet enthusiastically shakes the hand of the fat peasant who sits beside him at the play he attends. He admires their generosity and spontaneity, and he is sorry to leave them.

Above all, Lawrence is candid in these sketches, often embarrassingly so; though he is inconsistent at nearly every turn, it is the honest inconsistency which troubled him throughout his life. The working title of Sea and Sardinia, which Lawrence abandoned before its publication, was “A Diary of a Trip to Sardinia.” Though neither a diary nor a conventional travel book, it nevertheless retains a naive intimacy which tells as much about Lawrence’s personality as a revealing biography.

Critical Context

In early 1912, Lawrence, not yet twenty-seven and already a writer of great promise, went to the home of Ernest Weekly, his former languages tutor at Nottingham University. He was hoping for Weekly’s advice about his career but while there met the professor’s wife, Frieda, the daughter of Baron von Richthofen, the German aristocrat and soldier. In what became a cause celebre, Frieda left her husband and three children for Lawrence, journeyed with him to the Continent, and was married to him after receiving her divorce in July, 1914. Edwardian sensibilities were offended by their conduct, and many who probably never would have read Lawrence’s works took it as a sacred mission to forestall their publication and rigorously enforce censorship laws in order to modify them.

Critics have discerned elements of this affair in Lawrence’s novels The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), and it is certain that the restless existence of his life from 1912 to its end in 1930, not to mention the equivocal feeling he had for England, stemmed from this experience. Victorians and Edwardians perceived a freer moral climate in what they called “the South,” referring generally to the Mediterranean basin but specifically to Italy; by journeying to Italy, Lawrence added his name to a long list of talented but discontented artists who sought relief there.

Still, Lawrence found no peace in Italy, as anyone who reads his Italian travel books can see. If anything, he becomes more restless and ill at ease during the years between Twilight in Italy and Sea and Sardinia; the series of small unhappy experiences which fill his trip to Sardinia are but one indication of the psychological and physical malaise he felt at the time. Readers who come to his third travel book, Etruscan Places, without first reading Mornings in Mexico might well have the impression that Lawrence had limited his search for happiness to Italy, but such was not the case. He and Frieda never moved to Sardinia, but they did spend two years after the final publication of Sea and Sardinia in both Mexico and New Mexico. For a time, Lawrence was seriously considering a kind of utopian community near the town of Taos, New Mexico; indeed, a modern artists’ colony continues to thrive there.

Sea and Sardinia is not important as a romantic travel book, and it is certainly not a tourist’s guide to the island. It does, often with disarming candor, describe the pathetic and tragic condition of Lawrence in his final years. It also sets forth his philosophical perspective, frankly and with all the inconsistencies which characterized the man himself.

Bibliography

Ellis, David. “Reading Lawrence: The Case of Sea and Sardinia,” in D.H. Lawrence Review. X (1977), pp. 52-63.

Gersh, Gabriel. “In Search of D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia,” in Queens Quarterly. LXXX (1973), pp. 581-588.

Janik, Del Ivan. The Curve of Return: D.H. Lawrence’s Travel Books, 1981.

Meyers, Jeffrey. D.H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy, 1982.

Tracy, Billy T., Jr. D.H. Lawrence and the Literature of Travel, 1983.

Weiner, S. Ronald. “The Rhetoric of Travel: The Example of Sea and Sardinia,” in D.H. Lawrence Review. II (1969), pp. 230-243.