Sea and Sardinia (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By D. H. Lawrence and Gregory F. Tague

Sea and Sardinia (1921) is one of the most entertaining and witty travel narratives one can read. It includes rugged movement by boat, bus, and train and is filled with colorful descriptions of the vital people and beautiful places of Italy. Steeped in the turbulent and impulsive personality of one of the most important modern writers, it captures the mood after the Great War. Lawrence found solace in travel after the war and looked curiously across the blue sea to mountainous Sardinia, eager for wonders there. Sea and Sardinia encourages todays reader to enter curiously into another time and place, to embrace emotionally its people, and to apprehend a journey to discover self as well as to chart land and sea.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430907

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence, (185-1930) more commonly known as D.H Lawrence was a British writer and poet often surrounded by controversy. His works explored issues of sexuality, emotional health, masculinity, and reflected on the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. Lawrence’s opinions acquired him many enemies, censorship, and prosecution. Because of this, he lived the majority of his second half of life in a self-imposed exile. Despite the controversy and criticism, he posthumously was championed for his artistic integrity and moral severity.

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INTRODUCTION

Sea and Sardinia (1921) is one of the most entertaining and witty travel narratives one can read. A remarkable travel book dominated by robust motion, it includes rugged movement by boat, bus, and train and is filled with colorful descriptions of the vital people and beautiful places of Italy. Sea and Sardinia grows from D. H. Lawrence’s desire to be free physically and intellectually, to achieve health, and to find leadership in a world virtually destroyed by World War I. What makes the book interesting today is twofold. First, there is a bit of history in how it captures the mood after the Great War. Second, it is a work steeped in the turbulent and impulsive personality of one of the most important modern writers. Add to the mix Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, cousin to Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron flying ace of World War I, a connection that caused the Lawrences grief in England—they were scrutinized and harassed as spies. While Lawrence and Frieda found solace in travel after the war, even their new home, Sicily, could not completely appease inevitable boredom, so they looked curiously across the blue sea to mountainous Sardinia, eager for wonders there. Another twist is the tempestuous marriage of Frieda and Lawrence—Frieda is rumored to have once thrown a frying pan at Lawrence. Stress and strain combust violently and comically in the book. Sea and Sardinia encourages today’s reader to enter curiously into another time and place, to embrace emotionally its people, and to apprehend vigorously elemental life—a journey to discover self as well as to chart land and sea.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England. He was a scholarship student at Nottingham High School and later placed in the first division of the King’s Scholarship exam. After study at Nottingham University College for a teaching certificate, he worked near London at the Davidson Road School, Croydon. Lawrence was ill much of his life, and serious illness in 1911 (neither the first nor last) forced him out of the rigors of teaching. He decided to focus on writing as a career. His parents, who had a stormy marriage themselves, could not understand such a decision. His single-minded father (and most of the family) worked in coal mines, so it was assumed the sons would too. His practical mother, with genteel aspirations, preferred an established career and steady income. Lawrence, an intellectual and emotional maverick, had to forge his own way. The aspiring author had several romances and affairs up to the time in Croydon, and these are treated in his early works, The White Peacock, The Trespasser, and famously, Sons and Lovers. In May 1912, Lawrence visited a former professor to seek advice about tutoring in Germany, but Lawrence got more than he anticipated—he found sex. Lawrence met and ran off with the professor’s wife, Frieda, thus beginning their lifelong trek through Europe, the East, Australia, Mexico, and the American Southwest. Frieda, a personality in her own right, had lived in sexual freedom with her sister and Sigmund Freud’s pupil, Otto Gross, in Germany. Frieda is credited with introducing Lawrence to Freudian ideas, and one can trace aspects of her in some of the captivating female characters in his great works. In spite of his failing health and battle with tuberculosis (to which he succumbed, dying in Vence, southern France), D. H. Lawrence was a prolific writer of extraordinary originality and talent, redefining human consciousness and sexuality for generations of readers up to the present day.

Not only is Lawrence a great novelist, but he is an enduring poet, an important short-story writer, and his many nonfiction prose works, such as his travel writings, stand magnificently on their own. Human themes—still relevant today—that Lawrence addresses in Sea and Sardinia and in other works include the search for self-identity; the quest for an ideal community; the pursuit of living in contact with real people as distinct individuals; and the desire for liberty under a strong, heroic leader. Lawrence is regarded as one of the most important modern English writers from a time that includes such giants as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and Aldous Huxley. Typically, modernist works elicit new forms of expression (in rebellion to nineteenth-century realism and moral codes) and grapple with a world fraught with rampant instability and anxiety. Although Lawrence was familiar with notables from the famous Bloomsbury circle (such as the philosopher Bertrand Russell), he was not among their group. His controversial book The Rainbow, which was laden with sexuality and anti-war sentiment, was published in 1915. The novel was censured, banned, and destroyed. During the war (1916) Lawrence wrote another great work, Women in Love, critical of modern sensibility to such a degree that the book was not published until 1920 in New York and a year later in London.

Sea and Sardinia is the second of three travel books Lawrence wrote related to Italy, the others being Twilight in Italy (1916) and Sketches of Etruscan Places (posthumously 1932). Lawrence also wrote Mornings in Mexico (1927) in his continuing search for primal connection to indigenous people in nature. In the miasma of post-war fatigue, travel stimulates in Lawrence a search for new meanings and identity. Unlike other travel writers, Lawrence does not record and report, he participates in the spirit of the place. In the early 1920s, Lawrence was working on Aaron’s Rod (1922), the first of his so-called leadership novels and a book that examines sexual roles in marriage. The other leadership books are his Australian novel Kangaroo (1923) and his Mexican novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). Lawrence’s interest in what he calls maleness is, therefore, strongly felt in Sea and Sardinia. He regrets the passing of singularity and how the modern world eliminates the individual in its mandate to equalize and mediocritize. This enduring theme continues in Lawrence’s most daring and sexually explicit work, his compelling last novel written after life-threatening tubercular hemorrhages, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (privately printed in Italy, 1927).

Sea and Sardinia takes the reader from Palermo, through Sardinia, back to Sicily, where Lawrence and Frieda had made their home at the time (in Taormina). Lawrence scholar Howard Mills says that Sea and Sardinia is the single effective representation of all of Lawrence’s output. Author Richard Aldington, who personally knew Lawrence, says that the narrative is accessible to initiates of Lawrence’s work.¹ As late as 1971, novelist Anthony Burgess characterizes the book as charming.² When Sea was published, the initial reviews were mixed and apparently ignorant to Lawrence’s gifts of descriptive realism. Early critics failed to see the astute perceptions about the rising tide of fascism.³ Sea and Sardinia questions the banal inclusiveness of democracy and looks for the exceptional person who is different and heroic.

The book opens with a meditation on Mount Etna as a centering device for Lawrence’s psyche. Contemplating the magnitude of feminine nature in Mount Etna, Lawrence decides to go to Sardinia because he feels a need to escape what is European, desires a place remote from a world ravished by World War and mechanization. We are aware of Lawrence as a speaker, with his unmistakably incisive voice: angry but not without humor, a Romantic tendency to glorify one’s experience.⁴ Lawrence the author is also narrator-husband-character, conversing with himself about the wonders he encounters, creating a poetic prose of unsymmetrical beauty.⁵ It is more gratifying if the reader simply accepts that the narrator is self-consciously D. H. Lawrence. Jill Franks rightly describes the book as having an appealingly hyperbolic style—caricaturing Lawrence himself, Frieda, the Italians, men and women, and social ranks.⁶ While this book is not an imaginative work, it is not journalism, since there is a strong narrative voice that characteristically displays Lawrence’s particular wider than ordinary scale of values.⁷

For the Italians conversazione is primary—not just conversation but the ability to touch one another verbally. Sea and Sardinia is delightfully sprinkled with Lawrence attempting this sensation of touch, and he does so by invigorating certain Italian words. For example, Ecco! (Behold), Lawrence honestly reveals his opened palms to render forth symbolically the still-archaic Italian way of life. Quintessentially, Simpatico! (Engage), an untapped human tendency enabling one to be sympathetic and congenial. While Lawrence clearly stands apart from many people, his penetrating observations invite him to partake of and somehow to participate in the life he observes. Consequently, emotions are sometimes raw, and frequently Lawrence (and even Frieda) is enraged because of an incident, a person, or an ideological position. Often, Lawrence not only becomes angry but assumes that the reader knows his volatile temperament—perhaps his subtle way of drawing the reader into a book of incredible emotional vigor. Lawrence has a need to belong (to converse) while yet stand apart (to listen).

Approaching Sardinia, there is a cosmic sensibility and sensual sound to the poetic prose. Lawrence’s discourse on the wonders of sea travel (consider his poignant poem, The Ship of Death) reminds one of his life-quest for Rananim, an imagined utopia of exceptional individuals (somewhat realized at the Kiowa ranch in New Mexico). From the boat, Lawrence sees Cagliari as a remote place without limits, as a sustained primitive past exuding an enticingly strange essence. Elsewhere in the narrative, parts of rocky and remote Sardinia pleasantly remind Lawrence of Celtic Cornwall. At this point Lawrence says he is not a standard travel writer. He does not follow a formula prescribed by the publisher of a guidebook or compose a script readers would expect (found in the popular Baedeker travel guides of the time). Lawrence approaches a place through its people and asks readers to partake of a conversation at the feast of life. We find in Sea and Sardinia, similar to his Italian novel The Lost Girl (1920), an intriguing mystery, surprise, and wonder about the needs and desires of real people. Lawrence reforms travel writing as a genre, moving it beyond a task that reports to a medium that engages. In the aromatic Cagliari market Lawrence generates a catalog of poultry and meats, cheeses, breads and vegetables, served in radiant colors and delicious shapes.

Suddenly, Lawrence and Frieda encounter an unexpected sight, a carnival crowd of dancing men in costume. The experience of carnival is an important means for integrating oneself with the people—at a premium considering a moribund post-war Europe.⁸ Lawrence sees a peasant in costume and marvels at the subtle and confident exhibition of vital, not physical, manliness. The peasant man represents a remnant from the primal past, and Lawrence recognizes in him a passing of the strong individual. At present, Lawrence sees instead a mob mentality where individual identity is merged into the mass as a symptom of democracy. Peasant women, too, are bold and self-assured. The women are not held aloft, as they are in Sicily and Italy. Lawrence discovers in this costumed man a responsive archetypal image, an aspect of himself. In a similar manner, the reader is treated to the velvety, shadowy eyes of the Sardinians and the sense that there is something about them that precedes emergence from Plato’s cave, an instinctual rather than a rational knowing. As Anthony Burgess says, for Lawrence instinct predominates over reason.⁹

Lawrence has an uncanny ability to be observer-traveler and yet writer-participant. Such a complex posture occurs on the train to Sorgono when working men board and Lawrence is aware that they are separate and isolated. Here are men animalistic and primitive in their insistent free spirit. They possess a self-center, literally and figuratively, that gives them a balance lost to the modern European. These nearly medieval men, self-determined and not concerned with uniformity, possess and exude a fierce individualism. Men like these have not lost any distinct personal identity in the blended unity of modern political movements. Lawrence admires this type of courageous person, but it is not clear whether or not he advocates such rock-solid singularity to the exclusion of others. There is a salubrious singleness to the Sardinian which permits him or her to work alone and gives the reader something other than—a nature that is physical and yet transfiguring.

At a dirty hotel in Sorgono, Frieda and Lawrence encounter a representative primal man roasting a kid-goat. His quiet presence acts as a salve to Lawrence’s psychic discomfort. In spite of his isolation the old man embodies the archetypal image of self-contentment in place. Then there appears another representative type, a peripatetic hawker of goods, who tries to displace the sedentary roaster. Lawrence admires this second man since he wants nothing. The connection is understood in the moniker Lawrence attaches to the itinerant man, girovago—wanderer, much as Lawrence is in a literal (physical) and figurative (intellectual) sense. Never could Lawrence become part of the mass herd. Instead he stands on the perimeter and participates vicariously in observation. For instance, Frieda and Lawrence witness another carnival (in Nuoro), where young men dress as women and wear masks, a simple cloth covering the upper portion of the face. In their ritualistic, life-affirming game there is gentleness between the men and the women.

Homeward bound in a train from Rome to Naples, there is chatter of money and pensions (and defeat of the heroic Italian poet-nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio). Then someone discovers Lawrence is English and complains about the dreaded topic, the exchange rate (cambio) that allows the English to enjoy the benefits of Italy for practically nothing. Lawrence explodes, asserting that all he does is pay. For example, a tiny boy who carried luggage refused with ingratitude Lawrence’s tip and demanded more. Lawrence is infuriated that he is equated with a nation and its responsibility (or irresponsibility). While the author argues for individualism, in Naples, purchasing boat tickets to Sicily, he pushes himself to the front of the crowd, and in the thick of people he nevertheless feels sympathy with them. Symbolically, the book concludes with a puppet show in Palermo and Lawrence’s meditation on identity and leadership. In the theatre (with a playful undercutting of the individualism theme) Lawrence feels a warm contact with the others, a male camaraderie he is reluctant to relinquish.

Finally, as Lawrence would urge, Pronto! Get ready to begin your journey! Imagine a world without globalization, a Europe devoid of unification, a rudimentary place unsullied by tourists. So was Sardinia in 1921, a world struggling to overcome the baneful influences of World War I and grappling with modern machines and ideologies. Lawrence’s response to such strife and uncertainty can be felt among us today, and so we have in this book a reflection of what we are and the answer to who we should become.

Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D., teaches writing and literature at St. Francis College, New York. In addition to his published scholarly studies, reference articles, and literary essays, he is the author of Character and Consciousness (Academica Press, 2005).

CHAPTER I

AS FAR AS PALERMO

COMES over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

Why can’t one sit still? Here in Sicily it is so pleasant: the sunny Ionian sea, the changing jewel of Calabria, like a fire-opal moved in the light; Italy and the panorama of Christmas clouds, night with the dog-star laying a long, luminous gleam across the sea, as if baying at us, Orion marching above; how the dog-star Sirius looks at one, looks at one! he is the hound of heaven, green, glamorous and fierce!—and then oh regal evening star, hung westward flaring over the jagged dark precipices of tall Sicily: then Etna, that wicked witch, resting her thick white snow under heaven, and slowly, slowly rolling her orange-coloured smoke. They called her the Pillar of Heaven, the Greeks. It seems wrong at first, for she trails up in a long, magical, flexible line from the sea’s edge to her blunt cone, and does not seem tall. She seems rather low, under heaven. But as one knows her better, oh awe and wizardy! Remote under heaven, aloof, so near, yet never with us. The painters try to paint her, and the photographers to photograph her, in vain. Because why? Because the near ridges, with their olives and white houses, these are with us. Because the river-bed, and Naxos under the lemon groves, Greek Naxos deep under dark-leaved, many-fruited lemon groves, Etna’s skirts and skirt-bottoms, these still are our world, our own world. Even the high villages among the oaks, on Etna. But Etna herself, Etna of the snow and secret changing winds, she is beyond a crystal wall. When I look at her, low, white, witch-like under heaven, slowly rolling her orange smoke and giving sometimes a breath of rose-red flame, then I must look away from earth, into the ether, into the low empyrean. And there, in that remote region, Etna is alone. If you would see her, you must slowly take off your eyes from the world and go a naked seer to the strange chamber of the empyrean. Pedestal of heaven! The Greeks had a sense of the magic truth of things. Thank goodness one still knows enough about them to find one’s kinship at last. There are so many photographs, there are so infinitely many water-colour drawings and oil paintings which purport to render Etna. But pedestal of heaven! You must cross the invisible border. Between the foreground, which is our own, and Etna, pivot of winds in lower heaven, there is a dividing line. You must change your state of mind. A metempsychosis. It is no use thinking you can see and behold Etna and the foreground both at once. Never. One or the other. Foreground and a transcribed Etna. Or Etna, pedestal of heaven.

Why, then, must one go? Why not stay? Ah, what a mistress, this Etna! with her strange winds prowling round her like Circe’s panthers, some black, some white. With her strange, remote communications and her terrible dynamic exhalations. She makes men mad. Such terrible vibrations of wicked and beautiful electricity she throws about her, like a deadly net! Nay, sometimes, verily, one can feel a new current of her demon magnetism seize one’s living tissue and change the peaceful life of one’s active cells. She makes a storm in the living plasm, and a new adjustment. And sometimes it is like a madness.

This timeless Grecian Etna, in her lower-heaven loveliness, so lovely, so lovely, what a torturer! Not many men can really stand her, without losing their souls. She is like Circe. Unless a man is very strong, she takes his soul away from him and leaves him not a beast, but an elemental creature, intelligent and soulless. Intelligent, almost inspired, and soulless, like the Etna Sicilians. Intelligent daimons, and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on earth. Ach, horror! How many men, how many races, has Etna put to flight? It was she who broke the quick of the Greek soul. And after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards, the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired hour and broke their souls.

Perhaps it is she one must flee from. At any rate, one must go: and at once. After having come back only at the end of October, already one must dash away. And it is only the third of January. And one cannot afford to move. Yet there you are: at the Etna bidding one goes.

Where does one go? There is Girgenti by the south. There is Tunis at hand. Girgenti, and the sulphur spirit and the Greek guarding temples, to make one madder? Never. Neither Syracuse and the madness of its great quarries. Tunis? Africa? Not yet, Not yet. Not the Arabs, not yet. Naples, Rome, Florence? No good at all. Where then?

Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation. Like the Basque lands. Sure enough, it is Italian now, with its railways and its motor-omnibuses. But there is an uncaptured Sardinia still. It lies within the net of this Eureopean civilisation, but it isn’t landed yet. And the net is getting old and tattered. A good many fish are slipping through the net of the old European civilisation. Like that great whale of Russia. And probably even Sardinia. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia.

There is a fortnightly boat sailing from Palermo—next Wednesday, three days ahead. Let us go, then. Away from abhorred Etna, and the Ionian sea, and these great stars in the water, and the almond trees in bud, and the orange trees heavy with red fruit, and these maddening, exasperating, impossible Sicilians, who never knew what truth was and have long lost all notion of what a human being is. A sort of sulphureous demons. Andiamo!

But let me confess, in parenthesis, that I am not at all sure whether I don’t really prefer these demons to our sanctified humanity.

Why does one create such discomfort for oneself! To have to get up in the middle of the night—half past one—to go and look at the clock. Of course this fraud of an American watch has stopped, with its impudent phosphorescent face. Half past one! Half past one, and a dark January night. Ah, well! Half past one! And an uneasy sleep till at last it is five o’clock. Then light a candle and get up.

The dreary black morning, the candle-light, the house looking night-dismal. Ah, well, one does all these things for one’s pleasure. So light the charcoal fire and put the kettle on. The queen bee shivering round half dressed, fluttering her unhappy candle.

It’s fun, she says, shuddering.

Great, say I, grim as death.

First fill the thermos with hot tea. Then fry bacon—good English bacon from Malta, a god-send, indeed—and make bacon sandwiches. Make also sandwiches of scrambled eggs. Make also bread and butter. Also a little toast for breakfast—and more tea. But ugh, who wants to eat at this unearthly hour, especially when one is escaping from bewitched Sicily.

Fill the little bag we call the kitchenino. Methylated spirit, a small aluminium saucepan, a spirit-lamp, two spoons, two forks, a knife, two aluminium plates, salt, sugar, tea—what else? The thermos flask, the various sandwiches, four apples, and a little tin of butter. So much for the kitchenino, for myself and the queen bee. Then my knapsack and the q-b’s handbag.

Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim of the Ionian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow the cup of tea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we can find the house decent when we come back. Shut the door-windows of the upper terrace and go down. Lock the door: the upper half of the house made fast.

The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape. Looking across from the veranda at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold. The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long red slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalve which has held life between its lips so long. And here,