Twilight in Italy by D. H. Lawrence

First published: 1916

Type of work: Travel essays

Time of work: 1912-1913

Locale: The Tyrol; Lago di Garda, Italy

Principal Personages:

• D. H. Lawrence
• Frieda Weekley, later Frieda Lawrence, the Signora
• Il Duro, an Italian peasant
• John (Giovanni), an Italian immigrant to America

Analysis

TWILIGHT IN ITALY is a small book of travel essays, worth reading both for their own sake and for the light they throw on the context of Lawrence’s work.

D. H. Lawrence was a prolific and versatile writer whose plays, poems, novels, novellas, and short stories—more than forty volumes produced in a writing life of twenty years—often need to be read in the context of his essays, pamphlets, and travel books. There are four of these last, excluding the passages of description in his letters recording his expatriation in Europe, America, and Australia. The first of these journeys is recorded in his first travel book, TWILIGHT IN ITALY.

Both journey and book came at an important time in his life. Thereafter the gift for natural description and for the “felt” characterization which distinguishes his fiction was so broadly used as to make him geographically the most universal English writer of this century.

In August, 1912, Lawrence and Frieda, then Mrs. Ernest Weekley, walked south from Icking, near Munich, to Riva on Lago di Garda, which was then in Austrian territory, and later, in September, to the Italian Gargnano, farther down the lake. They stayed there till April 1913, while Lawrence worked at his writing as he had not previously been able to do. There he completed the final draft of SONS AND LOVERS, wrote the German stories, collected in THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER, and began the poems published in LOOK, WE HAVE COME THROUGH. To this versatile performance he added the first versions of the travel essays published in first the English Review and in 1916 as TWILIGHT IN ITALY.

The first of the essays deals with a walking trip in the Tyrol before the journey south to Italy; it is entitled “The Crucifix Across the Mountains.” The key word “strange” is employed on the first page and thereafter frequently, for that was not only a strange country in its people and its language, but also in customs, such as wayside crucifixes, new to Lawrence’s Congregationalism. The different forms of these fixed objects allow Lawrence’s fancy to bring each to life; the essay becomes a portrait gallery of pitiable, terrifying, beautiful, violated, male Messiahs who suffered hideously for bringing their message. The significance of this gallery in Lawrence’s work need not be stressed.

The release of Lawrence’s fancy on strange objects stemmed from his decision not to return to teaching after his illness in 1911 and 1912, but to live by his pen. This courageous decision gave him three novel sensations in Gargnana. He was living with Frieda as a married man, his time was his own, and he was in a foreign country. He completed several old manuscripts which would be published in the next two or three years and he began new work. The completion of SONS AND LOVERS marked the first stage in his withdrawal from his Nottinghamshire material, a withdrawal continued in THE RAINBOW and effected in Aaron’s visit to Italy in AARON’S ROD. Placing his personal material in clearer artistic focus marked also the beginning of his major phase as a writer. He changed the style of his writing, as first seen in the poems in LOOK, WE HAVE COME THROUGH, and this change accorded with the growing resolution of his ideas into what is usually called his “philosophy.” The effect of these changes was to break the first draft of his next novel into two novels, THE RAINBOW and WOMEN IN LOVE, but the ideas behind these changes are apparent in TWILIGHT IN ITALY, the first groping statement of the Lawrencian mystique.

The essays in the book are four, of which the second, “On the Largo di Garda,” is divided into seven short sketches amounting to more than half the book. Lawrence records conversations with chance acquaintances on his hike across the Alps and his walks around Gargnano. More than a picture of foreign people, the essay records Lawrence’s reflections precipitated by novel surroundings and time to think; his developing consciousness of the “dark sun” in man first finds utterance in this book; it has very little to do with Italy. That consciousness was to be developed in his later novels and fed by his travel books on Mexico, Sardinia, and Etruria. His cheerfully free use of the material of TWILIGHT IN ITALY is shown by the three versions of “Christs in the Tyrol” or “The Crucifix Across the Mountains,” by his reference to this material at the conclusion of WOMEN IN LOVE, and by the exclusion of at least two travel pieces belonging to this period, sketches published posthumously in LOVE AMONGST THE HAYSTACKS in 1930.

Although Frieda Weekley appears fleetingly as “the Signora” (as she was to appear as “the Queen Bee” in SEA AND SARDINIA), her interest in the bambini—she had recently left her own children for Lawrence—is a clue to the deeper influence she had on this book and Lawrence’s writing. By her act Lawrence moved from childish observer or adolescent dabbler in the rites of married love to full participant; the currents he had felt in married couples he now knew at first hand, and could graft his insights on to the Italians he watched as a semi-tourist: “Il Duro” and his women, for example. But although there is also observation of parents and children, as in the story of “John,” the main interest is in individuals. Where their individuality is respected, the observation is sufficiently keen, as in “The Spinner and the Monks,” to present a vivid and poetic picture; the individual male characters, such as the padrone in “The Lemon Gardens,” tend, however, to become either “Italians” or “males,” and the glib use of national or universal labels tends to make them meaningless. One feels that the subject here, as frequently elsewhere, is simply Lawrence, and the projections of emotion tell us about him, not about the objects he scrutinizes.

The total value of TWILIGHT IN ITALY to Lawrence was threefold: first, it established his technique of obtaining his material by rapidly “glimpsing” his objects; second, he glimpsed for the first time the “dark sun” or “dark god” in strange objects; third, from this vision he worked out his philosophy of the “demon” which drove him and his characters to do what they did not consciously want to do, giving his work its characteristic harshness and truth to life. Only New Mexico was to provide an equally valuable novelty.

Although Lawrence was always a tourist, his travels made it possible for an Englishman to write memorable poems on cypresses and a snake. After TWILIGHT IN ITALY he preferred not to see the object but to know it intuitively. The technique of glimpsing the object allowed him to develop the shorter forms of fiction, to establish a flow of introspection as his main device in characterization, and to shift abruptly scenes, characters, and emotions, resulting inevitably in the typical close to a Lawrence story: the characters simply move on. The heat and light and shadows of Italy were necessary to the formation of his technique and his philosophy of blood-knowledge; but in order to realize this fact to the full it was necessary for him to see the object indistinctly, in the twilight.