Twilight in Italy (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By D. H. Lawrence

Published in 1916, this small book of travel essays recounts Lawrence's experiences on his first extended trip outside England.  But don’t expect reviews of famous historical sports, for, as Anais Nin noted, Twilight in Italy "cannot be read as an ordinary travel book, for his voyage is philosophic, as well as a symbolic and sensuous one." 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Feb 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781411438248

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11th September 1881 in Eastwood, a small mining village in Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands. Despite ill health as a child and a comparatively disadvantageous position in society, he became a teacher in 1908, and took up a post in a school in Croydon, south of London. His first novel, The White Peacock, was published in 1911, and from then until his death he wrote feverishly, producing poetry, novels, essays, plays travel books and short stories, while travelling around the world, settling for periods in Italy, New Mexico and Mexico. He married Frieda Weekley in 1914 and died of tuberculosis in 1930.

Reviews for Twilight in Italy (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

[msarki_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this Twilight in Italy, yes, but rated it four stars as if I really liked it. The reason being it was so well-written. The subject not so interesting to me in total, but it felt as if I were in a dream of sorts. Sea and Sardinia is beginning more down to earth for me and I am interested in seeing how he brings the Queen Bee into the more personal and intimate equation.

[alanwpowers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Herbie, as we were wont to call the Love and Lover-man, lived on Lago di Garda,where I babysat my two year old grandson at Riva del Garda while his Mom was off working for a London law firm most of the week. With classic errors in the Italian I had read for 34 years, I reassured him, “Non preoccuparti, tua Momma sta andando,” Don’t worry, your Mom is going away. Herbie was further south, past the lemon groves; in his day prior to WWI, my Riva was on the Austrian border, and there was smuggling across the mountains. Lawrence was down in Gargnano with its two nearby monasteries, San Tommaso up on a hill above the town, the “Church of the Eagle,” and San Francesco right on the shore. Looking for the path up to the “plateau of heaven,” “I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village”(26). These passages led to old steps, used for centuries as occasional urinals. I first found these narrow paths in fortified hilltowns around Carrara like Nicola and Fontia. Wonderful to walk, with the cart-wide steps with a rounded lip for mule-drawn carts. At Nicola I saw pieces of chicken thrown out of second-story windows down to the pavement for cats and maybe ravens. Lawrence goes to the Theater at Salò on Garda. He sees D’Annunzio, Ibsen’s Spettri, which he considers depressingly phallic in the Scandinavian way, crossed with Italian phallicism (one thinks of the engraved phalluses at Pompei doorways), Good Luck. One night his padrone, the Di Paoli, invite him to Amleto, uno drama inglese.The evening honors the Actor-Director Enrico, sturdy short lead, on whom DHL is merciless, DHL arrives late, near the end of Act I: “Enrico looked a sad fool in his melancholy black. The doublet…made him look stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs”(73). We may forget that for all his confrontation of bourgeois British manners, Herbiewas thoroughly British in his valuing of dress and appearance—the aristocratic leg, the tallish figure. He accuses the whole cast, essentially, of not being English. The King and Queen were “touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman…The King, her noble consort…had new clothes. His body was real enough, but it had nothing to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by themselves”(74). But Lawrence is also very critical of Hamlet the character: “His nasty poking into his mother…his conceited perversion with Ophelia, make him always intolerable…repulsive, based on self-dislike.” Enrico played him as “the modern Italian, suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, laboring in a sense of physical corruption.” A later Italian historian, Fabio Cusin, would agree on the suspicion and isolation and self-disgust, in his Antistoria d’Italia (1970). DHL’s says To be, or not… “does not mean to live or not to live…[but the] supreme I, the King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be”(77). He runs on about the deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, or the desire to be immortal. He argues for the ancients, the supreme I, the Ego ruled, but for Christians, supremacy involves renunciation, surrender to the Not-Self. The pagan Ego became the greatest sin: Pride, the way to total damnation. A US citizen in 2018 cannot help but wonder how the “Christian Right (wing)” came to forget the worst Christian sin of Pride, the foolish pride of the US Trumpster president.