D.H. Lawrence - Sea and Sardinia (5)

Etna across there is smothered quite low, quite low in a dense puther of ink-black clouds. Playing some devilry in private, no doubt. The dawn is angry red, and yellow above, the sea takes strange colors. I hate the station, pigmy, drawn out there beside the sea. On this steep face, especially in the windless nooks, the almond blossom is already out. In little puffs and specks and stars, it looks very like bits of snow scattered by winter. Bits of snow, bits of blossom, fourth day of the year 1921. Only blossom. And Etna indescribably cloaked and secretive in her dense black clouds. She has wrapped them quite round her, quite low round her skirts. At last we are down. We pass the pits where men are burning lime, red-hot, round pits, and are out on the high-way. Nothing can be more depressing than an Italian high-road. From Syracuse to Airolo it is the same: horrible, dreary, slummy high-roads the moment you approach a village or any human habitation. Here there is an acrid smell of lemon juice. There is a factory for making citrate. The houses flush on the road, under the great lime-stone face of the hill, open their slummy doors, and throw out dirty water and coffee dregs. We walk over the dirty water and coffee dregs. Mules rattle past with carts. Other people are going to the station. We pass the Dazio and are there. Humanity is, externally, too much alike. Internally there are insuperable differences. So one sits and thinks, watching the people on the station: like a line of caricatures between oneself and the naked sea and the uneasy, clouding dawn. You would look in vain this morning for the swarthy feline southerner of romance. It might, as far as features are concerned, be an early morning crowd waiting for the train on a north London suburb station. As far as features go. For some are fair and some colorless and none racially typical. The only one that is absolutely like a race caricature is a tall stout elderly fellow with spectacles and a short nose and a bristling moustache, and he is the German of the comic papers of twenty years ago. But he is pure Sicilian. They are mostly young fellows going up the line to Messina to their job: not artizans, lower middle class. And externally, so like any other clerks and shop-men, only rather more shabby, much less socially self-conscious. They are lively, they throw their arms round one another's necks, they all but kiss. One poor chap has had earache, so a black kerchief is tied round his face, and his black hat is perched above, and a comic sight he looks. No one seems to think so, however. Yet they view my arrival with a knapsack on my back with cold disapprobation, as unseemly as if I had arrived riding on a pig. I ought to be in a carriage, and the knapsack ought to be a new suit-case. I know it, but am inflexible. That is how they are. Each one thinks he is as handsome as Adonis, and as "fetching" as Don Juan. Extraordinary! At the same time, all flesh is grass, and if a few trouser-buttons are missing or if a black hat perches above a thick black face-muffle and a long excruciated face, it is all in the course of nature. They seize the black-edged one by the arm, and in profound commiseration: "Do you suffer? Are you suffering?" they ask. And that also is how they are. So terribly physically all over one another. They pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips. They catch each other under the chin, with a tender caress of the hand, and they smile with sunny melting tenderness into each other's face. Never in the world have I seen such melting gay tenderness as between casual Sicilians on railway platforms, whether they be young lean-cheeked Sicilians or huge stout Sicilians. There must be something curious about the proximity of a volcano. Naples and Catania alike, the men are hugely fat, with great macaroni paunches, they are expansive and in a perfect drip of casual affection and love. But the Sicilians are even more wildly exuberant and fat and all over one another than the Neapolitans. They never leave off being amorously friendly with almost everybody, emitting a relentless physical familiarity that is quite bewildering to one not brought up near a volcano. This is more true of the middle classes than of the lower. The working men are perforce thinner and less exuberant. But they hang together in clusters, and can never be physically near enough. It is only thirty miles to Messina, but the train takes two hours. It winds and hurries and stops beside the lavender grey morning sea. A flock of goats trail over the beach near the lapping wave's edge, dismally. Great wide deserts of stony river-beds run down to the sea, and men on asses are picking their way across, and women are kneeling by the small stream-channel washing clothes. The lemons hang pale and innumerable in the thick lemon groves. Lemon trees, like Italians, seem to be happiest when they are touching one another all round. Solid forests of not very tall lemon trees lie between the steep mountains and the sea, on the strip of plain. IL RITMO DELLA LIBERTA' - Introduzione a D.H. Lawrence Lawrence durante il soggiorno in Australia, nel 1922, dopo un lungo viaggio in India e a Ceylon, trovò l’ispirazione per scrivere Kangaroo (Canguro). Si spostò quindi (agosto dello stesso anno) in Nuova Zelanda; visitò le Isole Cook e Tahiti, approdando infine a San Francisco. Arrivato in Messico (marzo 1923) inizierà la stesura del romanzo The plumed Serpent (Il serpente piumato) che verrà pubblicato nel 1926. Durante il soggiorno a Firenze, nel 1928, pubblica L’amante di Lady Chatterley, in edizione privata; parte poi alla volta della Svizzera, e poi si recherà in Francia nell’autunno dello stesso anno. Il clamore e i problemi giudiziari seguiti all’uscita del romanzo-scandalo, lo porteranno a difendersi con lo scritto A proposito dell’Amante di Lady Chatterley, pubblicato a Parigi nel 1929, la cui prima parte venne utilizzata come introduzione all’edizione francese del romanzo. In quel breve saggio l’autore rifiuta l’accusa di oscenità, ribadendo che questa sussiste solo quando lo spirito disprezza e teme il corpo, e quando quest’ultimo, a sua volta, odia, teme e disprezza lo spirito, e gli resiste. Lawrence prosegue con la riflessione che lo spirito e il corpo devono assolutamente vivere in piena armonia e in uno stato di naturale equilibrio se si vuole che la vita sia sopportabile. Più oltre e più volte Lawrence ribadisce a chiare lettere che è necessario che uomini e donne siano in grado di pensare il sesso in maniera completa, piena, onesta e pulita. Per Lawrence la causa della fragilità e della superficialità della società occidentale è legata all’abbandono del ritmo del cosmo sia nella quotidianità sia nei desideri più profondi, e tutto ciò ha portato a impoverire amaramente la vita. La specie umana, dal punto di vista della vitalità, è moribonda, ed è dunque assolutamente necessario rimettere le radici dell’uomo nell’universo. La motivazione che lo ha spinto a scrivere L’amante di Lady Chatterley è stata dunque una sfida alle convenzioni ed è questa la ragione che lo ha portato a chiamare le cose con il loro nome, non gà per scandalizzare, ma per dare una spallata all’idealismo. Ancora un viaggio a Barcellona e a Palma di Maiorca; di nuovo nella stazione termale di Baden Baden, in Germania. Un ultimo soggiorno in Toscana; infine trasferimento a Bandol (località balneare sulla Costa Azzurra) dove scrive Apocalisse, uno sferzante saggio che analizza l’opera di Giovanni di Patmos e che costituisce il suo testamento spirituale a coronamento di una vita spesa contro la disumanizzazione dell’uomo, costretto dai vincoli religiosi e dalle convenzioni sociali a non poter vivere appieno il suo vero ruolo, cioè quello di un essere libero, pienamente e armoniosamente inserito con perfetta simbiosi nella natura, nel cosmo. Nel mese di febbraio del 1930 si convince ad accettare il ricovero presso la Casa di cura di Vence, località collinare a circa 25 chilometri da Nizza. Dopo un mese di ricovero, insofferente alla vita nella Casa di cura, decide di trasferirsi nella Villa Robermond, dove muore il 2 marzo del 1930.