Twilight in Italy

"Twilight in Italy is a book of travel writing that he undertook out of urgent financial necessity. He eloped with Frieda von Richthofen, the wife of his former university professor. And, although she was an aristocrat by birth, she was not personally wealthy. Lawrence had been a schoolteacher for a few years in Croydon, but did not have much money either. So he needed to write fast. He wrote travel writing about the landscapes that he and his wife-to-be were passing through. He and Frieda had initially met up in Bavaria, and then in 1912 crossed the Alps into Italy, where they settled for some months. Twilight in Italy is divided into sections. The first section is about Bavaria and the High Alps, whilst the later sections are about Italy. There are a number of stunning essays. In particular, I would single out ‘The Crucifix Across the Mountains’ and ‘The Spinner and the Monks’. Lawrence came to the Alps at a wonderful time—on his first trip abroad. As a working class Nottinghamshire lad, the son of a miner, he had not previously had any opportunities to travel. He had not seen landscapes other than his native ones. By the time he first time he broke out of England, he was already an adult. He had his aesthetic and spiritual faculties already in adult mode when he saw the Alps. He experienced a passionate and immediate response which then affected his thinking for the rest of his life. He was capable, along with a subset of the population at large, of mountain ecstasy: of looking at mountains, or standing on top of a mountain, and experiencing extreme spiritual elevation and ecstasy. Although he felt mountain ecstasy, he also partly distrusted it, and wondered how one could descend from it. If you are not to die on top of a mountain, how on earth are you going to come down? In the loose sense. This is one of the aspects of Lawrence that I find speaks particularly today—his attitude to religion. In his own time, most people in England were Church of England-going or chapel-going. Lawrence himself was brought up as a chapel-goer. Now, of course, this is no longer the case. And yet, I suspect that only a small minority of the English are confident intellectual atheists and materialists. Therefore, I think that many people today are in a similar position to that of Lawrence. They cannot accept the dogma of any established religion, and nor can they accept a material and meaningless universe. This means that we have to do what Lawrence did, and what he told us we must do, which is to work it out for ourselves. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He has a wonderful essay called ‘On Being Religious’, which is collected in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine . In this essay, he has a metaphor of God as a shifter who was accessible through Jesus Christ for many centuries. You truly did reach God through Christ. But now God has got bored of that and has moved on in the universe. So people who are trying to access him through Christianity no longer find that they can. That is a very moving description of many people’s relationship to Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries. They sense that God is, but they can’t quite come into relationship with him through any dogmatic or conventional Christianity. Lawrence said that Christ himself told us what to do when this would happen. When he was taken away through the Ascension, one of the last things he did was to give people the Holy Spirit. He said that the Holy Spirit would guide you. That, says Lawrence, remains the case. What we have to do is to hear the Holy Spirit barking like a dog in the wilderness and follow. To follow and hunt down the Holy Spirit is God’s own great fun. And so Lawrence presents the religious quest as an exhilarating experience. “Lawrence presents the religious quest as an exhilarating experience” In ‘The Crucifix Across the Mountains’, he describes how the crucifixes he saw as he walked changed from those that depicted stoic Bavarian peasant-Christs on the German side, to increasingly Renaissance, ornate, physically-pained, melodramatic and self-pitying Christs on the Italian side. He much preferred the former to the latter. This is the beginning of a very intense dialogue that Lawrence conducted throughout his life between himself and Christ. He saw himself as a latter-day Christ, as a rival and an alternative, and as someone who was in a position to advise Christ and correct him. His extraordinary late short story ‘The Man Who Died’—otherwise known as ‘The Escaped Cock’—imagines Christ being resurrected in the flesh. He stays on earth and lives the life that he did not live before. He realises that he had overdone it, and had given too much. This is partly a self-reproach on Lawrence’s part as he neared death. He thought that he had given too much of himself to people. It is also an example of his Nietzsche-inflected criticism of Christ. Yes, as can many of his writings. In Twilight in Italy , we find an early example of his binary thinking. There are binaries throughout his thought. One of them is north/south. In Women in Love , he takes this to an extreme by opposing the Arctic and the African. In Twilight in Italy , it is merely northern and southern Europe. The north he associates with industrialisation, and the south with nature. One of the things that he laments in Twilight in Italy is the encroachment of the north upon the south. He thought that the Italians were being turned into northerners. He was aware that it was in the north of Italy that industrialisation was most advanced, in part by virtue of its proximity to northern Europe. He was concerned with this for what one would today call environmental reasons. In a way, environment degradation was more visible in Lawrence’s day by virtue of the physical blackness of soot. By contrast, many greenhouse gases today are simply not apparent to the eye. But in a wider sense, he was also concerned with the effect that industrialisation has on man. These concerns are linked by the understanding that Lawrence had about man’s position in relation to the non-human living world. This understanding is very radical, and speaks loudly to modern eco-critical concerns today."