Twilight in Italy , livre ebook

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70 pages

English

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This book contains D. H. Lawrence’s 1916 travel book, "Twilight in Italy". Lawrence’s first attempt at travel writing, it contains details about his voyage through Germany, the Alps, and Italy. Although fundamentally a travel book, "Twilight in Italy" is also a philosophic journey through alien cultures that deals heavily with the author’s own personal experiences when confronted with magnificent landscapes and mountains. This book is highly recommended for lovers of interesting travel writing, and it is not to be missed by fans and collectors of Lawrence’s work. The chapters of this volume include: “The Crucifix Across the Mountains”, “On The Lago Di Garda”, “The Spinner and the Monks”, “The Lemon Gardens”, “The Theatre”, “San Gaudenzio”, “The Dance”, “John”, “Italians in Exile”, and “The Return Journey”. David Herbert Richards Lawrence (1885 - 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, literary critic, and painter, famed as the author of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Sons and Lovers". Many vintage texts such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now, in an affordable, high-quality, modern edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author.

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Travel

Germany

Europe

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Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	04 juin 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781473375192
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0350€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

TWILIGHT IN ITALY
by
D. H. Lawrence

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Contents
D. H. Lawrence
The Crucifix Across the Mountains
On the Lago di Garda
Italians in Exile
The Return Journey

D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Lawrence was born on 11 September 1885 at Eastwood, a small mining town in the North of England. He was a prolific novelist and poet, responsible for some of the finest modernist works of the twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Lawrence’s oeuvre reflects the unsettling effects of industrialisation and renewal, but all within the remit of individual concerns; the emotions, extemporaneity and character. Lawrence’s style, both as a novelist, but also as a literary critic, earned him many enemies and he suffered both in terms of personal reputation and professional status, especially during the latter half of his life. He was the fourth child of Arthur Lawrence, a working-class miner from Nottinghamshire. David Lawrence was an intellectually gifted child and attended the local Beauvale Board School , winning a scholarship to Nottingham High School in 1898. He left education in 1901 to become a Junior Clerk at a surgical appliances factory, but after contracting pneumonia and reputedly being accosted by a group of factory girls, Lawrence took time off to convalesce. During this period, he worked on his first short stories and the draft of a novel which was eventually to become The White Peacock. In 1908 Lawrence moved to London, where his poetry was noticed by Ford Madox Ford, the editor of The English Review, as well as the influential publisher William Heinemann. This support enabled Lawrence to publish The White Peacock (1910) , his first major novel, followed by The Trespasser (1911); a novel based on the intimate diaries of a friend experiencing an unhappy love affair. It was at this time that he met Frieda Richthofen, a married woman with three young children. Richthofen and Lawrence embarked on a life-long romance and eloped to her parents’ home in Metz, Germany. The couple toured across Germany, over the Alps and into Italy – a journey during which Lawrence wrote Sons and Lovers (1913), an intense portrayal of the grim actuality of working-class provincial life. This was the start of Lawrence’s controversial private sexual life; Frieda later accused him of a homosexual relationship with a Cornish farmer, William Henry Hocking. This was a shocking accusation for a man living in early twentieth century Britain, and caused a great deal of scandal. The accusation was not aided by the added suspicion of spying and signalling to German submarines off the coast of Cornwall. Lawrence’s next novel, The Rainbow (1915) was suppressed after an investigation into its alleged obscenity; a bleak vision of humanity, it depicted the reflections of four major characters on friendship, sexuality, art and politics. Unfit for war-time Britain, it remained unpublished until 1920. After constant harassment by the authorities, Lawrence was forced to leave Cornwall in 1917, given three days notice under the Defence of the Realm Act. He moved to Derbyshire, but soon escaped Britain to travel the world; Australia, America, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Italy and France. Lawrence spent the remainder of his life peripatetic and only returned to Britain for two short visits. He continued writing during this period, producing some of his finest works; The Lost Girl and Mr Noon as well as several travelogues. It was in Italy that Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Published in Florence and Paris, it cemented Lawrence’s scandalous reputation. Although the author responded robustly and penned many short tracts and satirical poems against those ‘shocked sensibilities’, the novel was not published in Britain until 1960. Lawrence continued writing into his final days, despite rapidly declining health. He died on 2 March, 1930, at the Villa Robermond, France, from tuberculosis.

The Crucifix Across the Mountains
The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany.
And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid.
Maybe a certain Grössenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other’s particular nature, how much simpler it would all be.
The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South. That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But still it is there, and its signs are standing.
The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.
As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country, remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial processions.
Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one’s interest is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.
But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointed hood.
I was startled into consciousness one evening, going alone over a marshy place at the foot of the mountains, when the sky was pale and unearthly, invisible, and the hills were nearly black. At a meeting of the tracks was a crucifix, and between the feet of the Christ a handful of withered poppies. It was the poppies I saw, then the Christ.
It was an old shrine, the wood-sculpture of a Bavarian peasant. The Christ was a peasant of the foot of the Alps. He had broad cheekbones and sturdy limbs. His plain, rudimentary face stared fixedly at the hills, his neck was stiffened, as if in resistance to the fact of the nails and the cross, which he could not escape. It was a man nailed down in spirit, but set stubbornly against the bondage and the disgrace. He was a man of middle age, plain, crude, with some of the meanness of the peasant, but also with a kind of dogged nobility that does not yield its soul to the circumstance. Plain, almost blank in his soul, the middle-aged peasant of the crucifix resisted unmoving the misery of his position. He did not yield. His soul was set, his will was fixed. He was himself, let his circumstances be what they would, his life fixed down.
Across the marsh was a tiny square of orange-coloured light, from the farm-house with the low, spreading roof. I remembered how the man and his wife and the children worked on till dark, silent and intent, carrying the hay in their arms out of the streaming thunder-rain into the shed, working silent in the soaking rain.
The body bent forward towards the earth, closing round on itself; the arms clasped full of hay, clasped round the hay that presses soft and close to the breast and the body, that pricks heat into the arms and the skin of the breast, and fills the lungs with the sleepy scent of dried herbs: the rain that falls heavily and wets the shoulders, so that the shirt clings to the hot, firm skin and the rain comes with heavy, pleasant coldness on the active flesh, running in a trickle down towards the loins, secretly; this is the peasant, this hot welter of physical sensation. And it is all intoxicating. It is intoxicating almost like a soporific, like a sensuous drug, to gather the burden to one’s body in the rain, to stumble across the living grass to the shed, to relieve one’s arms of the weight, to throw down the hay on to the heap, to feel light and free in the dry shed, then to return again into the chill, hard rain, to stoop again under the rain, and rise to return again with the burden.
It is this, this endless heat and rousedness of physical sensation which keeps the body full and potent, and flushes the mind with a blood heat, a blood sleep. And this sleep, this heat of physical experience, becomes at length a bondage, at last a crucifixion. It is the life and the fulfilment of the peasant, this flow of sensuous experience. But at last it drives him almost mad, because he cannot escape.
For overhead there is always the strange radiance of the mountains, there is the mystery of the icy river rushing through its pink shoals into the darkness of the pine-woods, there is always the faint tang of ice on the air, and the rush of hoarse-sounding water.
And the ice and the upper radiance of snow are brilliant with timeless immunity from the flux and the warmth of life. Overhead they transcend all life, all the soft, moist fire of the blood. So that a man must needs live