Locating Lawrence: October 1926

Lawrence returns to the warmth of Tuscany. It’s a busy period as ‘the peasants are bringing in the grapes, in a big wagon drawn by two big white oxon’ suggesting it will be ‘a good wine year’. These are hung as ‘festoons in the rooms’ and to be eaten at leisure. Lawrence scoffs so many grapes that he suspects this has inflamed his innards, but it is most likely ‘a mild form of gastric flu’ no doubt picked up in Paris on his route home.

He’s had his fill of socialising and so doesn’t inform anyone of his return as ‘it will be nice to be still for a bit’. He has no interest of venturing out into public as ‘Italy, humanely, isn’t very interesting nowadays. Fascism, whatever else it does, spreads the grand blight of boredom’. This was, among other things, due to the austerity measures imposed by Mussolini, such as the restriction of all daily newspapers to six pages. 

But people are welcome to come and visit him. Aldous Huxley swings by in his ‘grand new car’. He offers Lawrence his old one, but he has no desire to be ‘struggling with a machine’ or to ‘rush from place to place!’ He has found a simpler formula for happiness: ‘I go out in the morning and sit in the pine woods alone and do a bit of writing – then take a walk.’

Here he begins planning ‘a new sort of relationship, between people’ with Rolf Gardiner. This involves a few men learning ‘to dance and sing together, without strutting’ - there’s always a caveat with Lawrence. For this ‘new rhythm of life’ to evolve ‘we need to come forth and meet in the essential physical self’. Basically, Lawrence needs a man hug. He’s a millennial at heart.  

These video essays are based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence one hundred years ago and are published monthly. To see previous Locating Lawrence videos from 1926, click here, from 1923, click here, from 1924, click here, from 1925, click here.