If I were asked to suggest which books of Lawrence should be read first by someone to whom they were all unknown I think I should suggest Sons and Lovers, and Sea and Sardinia. These two books, I believe, bring you Lawrence at his most accessible, though some might prefer his poems or essays. At the same time they rather neatly illustrate the two kinds of books into which Lawrence’s main writing naturally fits, either the long concentrated book over which he laboured for years as he poured out the experience of years, or the book thrown off in a spurt of inspiration and hardly retouched at all.
Sons and Lovers was created from Lawrence’s whole early life and was worked over time and again from 1911 to 1913. The whole action of Sea and Sardinia occurred between the 4th and 10th of February, 1921; and the book itself was written in six weeks wholly from memory, without a single note. The book abounds in Lawrence’s special quality, namely that he experiences and remembers more vividly than other men and, without any straining, is able to pass on his experiences to others in words so appropriate and felicitous that Lawrence’s experiences become the reader’s.
Sea and Sardinia, in itself so perfect, came out of a period of wandering and of growing restlessness. The “iniquitous” prosecution of The Rainbow in November, 1915, the even more iniquitous expulsion of the Lawrences from Cornwall as suspected spies in October, 1917, convinced him that he had no option but to exile himself Even that was refused during the war (though Ile was graded as unfit for military service) and was vexatiously delayed after the war until November, 1919. Of course he wanted to go, he was glad to go. In the spring of 1919 he had told Middleton Murry that the only hope of a new life was out of England. And in January, 1919, when he again renewed his efforts to get out, he had written: “I feel I am shaking myself free to get out of this country, for good and ever”. And, in fact, he never did return except for brief visits to his family and one or two old friends.
Although Lawrence had been abroad before, 1920 was really the first year in which he could do a little modest care free travelling without the dire threat of lacking money. His pre-1914 life at Lake Garda and Lerici, even Iris walks in the Tyrol and Switzerland, had always been pinched for money. Between 1914 and 1920 he had been close to deprivation and hunger, and had eked out existence by “precarious borrowings”. But as the war receded there came at last a demand for his books, particularly in America. By comparison he was now rich. His diary jottings show that by May, 1920, he had paid off most of his debts and had a balance of £171. Still, he was cautious, and took his wife and Mary Carman to Malta only after she had offered to pay their expenses. In July Frieda Lawrence went to see her mother and sisters in Germany. Lawrence, “fearfully English” as always, did not care to enter a still hostile country where he might be insulted. For a few weeks he wandered through Italy, visiting and staying with friends, and saw Naples, Rome, Florence, parts of rural Tuscany, Como, and Venice. And after all this expense, when they returned to Taormina at the end of October, he found he still had £164.
Yet, despite his summer wanderings, he had been back only a few weeks when he felt “an absolute necessity to move”. We should remember that his poetical descriptions of Taormina and Etna refer to sunny clays, and that during November and December, 1920, it rained “with such persistence and stupidity that one loses all one’s initiative and remains cut off” There was “lovely weather” on the 1st January, 1921, but on the 20th lie was writing that “it thunders and lightnings for twenty-four hours, and hailstorms continually”. In his diary he made the laconic note: “meditate trip to Sardinia”.
Why Sardinia, and in winter? It is very hard to say. In spite of his cockiness and dogmatism Lawrence was secretly much given to moods of self-mistrust and vacillation. He may have chosen Sardinia because he had been tempted in exactly the opposite direction by reading a book about Africa by a learned German who had invented an ancient African civilisation which fascinated Lawrence. Moreover, Lawrence constantly wavered between the needs of his amiable social self and his revulsion from the society in which he .found himself involved. He might easily have revolted from the English-speaking inhabitants of Taormina, more especially as he was really preparing himself to leave Europe altogether. A little later, discussing that flight, he wrote his American .friend, Brewster: “Dio mio, I am so ridiculous, wavering between east and west”. And this uncertainty and restlessness of early 1921 were symptoms of the greater urge which was to take him round the world of Ceylon, Australia and Mexico.
In Sea and Sardinia there is a quite unconscious portrait of the author, that irresistibly charming Lawrence who had the gift of making even the most commonplace things seem wonderful. There was a kind of magic in his company which to a much less extent passed into his written words. If you can respond to that magic you may go happily and interestedly with him through every mile of that journey. The magic perhaps will not reach the highbrow literary person or those who are enslaved by journalism; but there are others. All the time Lawrence is giving out life, giving you the sensation of Iris unique perception of a world which to him was marvellously alive and variously interesting. He cares nothing about writing for writing’s sake, that self-conscious and abject conforming to the artificial tastes of literary sects which is so boring. In his critical vocabulary the most contemptuous of adjectives was “literary”.
You will not then be surprised to find that the majestic grandeur of Etna and Calabria and the Ionian Sea serves as a frame for the clerks and other poor workers waiting for the early morning train at Taormina station “like a line of caricatures between oneself and the naked sea”. In his zest for life Lawrence enjoyed re-living the railway journey to Palermo and the people he saw in the train and at the station as much as that gorgeous religious procession at Nuoro. The contents and packing of the “kitchenino” are as interesting in their place as the first glimpse of Cagliari and the starry sky over the Mediterranean. And this is not because he was unselective, but because, like Kipling in his very different way, Laurence saw nothing common in the world, had a wider than ordinary scale of values. He loved the lonely landscapes and picturesque villages and old-world people, but in another way he enjoyed the soup-sucking socialists of Manilas just as much.
Parts of Sea and Sardinia appeared in The Dial for October and November, 1921. and Lawrence was dismayed and annoyed by the cuts made. “Had Dial with scrappy Sea and Sardinia — hate it that they mauled it about. A vile Sunday”. (30th October, 1921.) It first appeared in book form in the United States, being issued in December, 1921, by Seltzer, with eight coloured illustrations by Jan Juta. Martin Seeker’s edition (same illustrations) did not appear until April, 1923. Lawrence’s bibliographer says of the Seeker edition, “taken merely as a hook, this is perhaps the most beautiful Lawrence item”.
RICHARD ALDINGTON