DH. Lawrence

DH. Lawrence

Enamoured expatriates of Florence

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Thu 06 Oct 2005 12:00 AM

DH. Lawrence was a bit of a bad boy. Lady Chatterley’s Loverwas the last and probably the best-known novel by the British writer (1885-1930), but in 1928 when it was published it was considered so scandalous and sexually explicit that the only place Lawrence was able to get his book published and distributed was Florence. It was banned in the United States, France, and the UK and was only allowed to be released in those countries more than thirty years later. The novel, which Lawrence originally wanted to call Tenderness, tells the story of a woman, Constance Chatterley, caught between two men. Her husband, Sir Clifford, is paralysed from the waist down and passionless. The other man in her life is their robust gamekeeper, Mellors. Perhaps to modern readers it seems tame, and some wonder what all the fuss was about, but as Lawrence explains in his A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, written two years after the novel, “The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while. Is this because the mind is depraved by habit? Not a bit. It is that the words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at all. People without minds go on being shocked, but they don’t matter. People with minds realise that they aren’t shocked, and never really were: and they experience a sense of relief.”

Although there were many pirated copies circulating on the black market, the original Florence edition of Lady Chatterley was bound in a cover of mulberry-red with a phoenix, the symbol of immortality, printed in black on the front. It was published by a little family-run printing shop where no one spoke English, hence the many spelling mistakes. According to Lawrence, “The proofs were terrible. The printer would do fairly well for a few pages, then he would go drunk, or something. And then the words danced weird and macabre, but not English. So that if still some of the hosts of errors exist, it is a mercy they are not more.” But also due to their lack of English understanding, “they were spared all blushes.” One critic of the banned novel joked that Lawrence must have deceived some poor Italian printer into printing the book. But Lawrence assures us that the little white-moustached man who printed the book was told exactly what kind of words were used, what scenes were described in the book, and then given the option not to print if he thought he would get into trouble for doing so. “And when told, he said, with the short indifference of a Florentine, ‘Oh! Ma! But we do it every day!’ – And it seemed, to him, to settle the matter entirely. Since it was nothing political or out of the way, there was nothing to think about. Everyday concerns, commonplace.”

Lawrence spent much of his short life living abroad, and spent several years living in Italy, an important experience for him. His letters and the letters written by his wife, Frieda, constantly describe the happiness with which Italy filled him. Italy symbolised the sensuality and unconsciousness that were always a deeper part of him but that he initially lacked the confidence to reveal. The change in culture brought out another side of him: “If you were here tonight we’d go to Carmen, and hear those delicious little Italians love and weep. I am just as emotional and impulsive as they, by nature. It’s the damned climate and upbringing and so on that make me cold-headed as mathematics.”

While in Lago di Garda in 1913 he wrote, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect.” He made a direct link between this belief and his experience in Italy:  “That is why I like to live in Italy. The people are so unconscious. They only feel and want: they don’t know. We know too much. No, we only think we know such a lot.” On the other hand, Lawrence saw his fellow countrymen (“swathed in restraint and Puritanism and anti-emotion, until they are walking mummies”), as completely afraid of spontaneous feelings, immediate desires. Lady Chatterley is Lawrence’s “honest, healthy” answer to this anxiety, an attempt to “cleanse the mind” of dirty thoughts about sex, which the Florentines, who had the foresight to publish the bestseller thirty years before anyone else would, had no problem with: “Ma! but we do it every day!”

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