First Edition. 8vo, publisher's original blue cloth lettered in gilt on the upper cover and spine. 311 pp. An uncommonly well preserved copy, the cloth with only very minor mellowing. RARE FIRST EDITION of these essays and observations on Italy and Italians by one of the most "Continental" English writers of the period. It was also D.H. Lawrence's first work of nonfictional prose. It was written at what many have called the height of his creative genius and these seven short pieces sparkle with both humor and sensuality. The English issue by Duckworth had a total print run of only 1500 copies. In his bibliography published in 1925 Edward MacDonald already referred to the first edition as scarce and stated that fine copies were virtually impossible. "Be that as it may, TWILIGHT IN ITALY is worth having in any condition." - MacDonald.

The First World War really was something wasn’t it. The confrontation of automated, industrial scale murder and the philosophical ideals of the Romantic school led to reflective works by certain authors that I, in my admittedly limited reading career, seem to find mostly unchallenged in their acuity and profundity. Riding the coattails of the Industrial Revolution, the First World War gave the grandest expression possible to the evils inherent in generalised mechanisation. And yet it wasn’t quite as technologically sophisticated as the warfare carried out in the Second World War, it occupies an awkward interim position which bore an unmistakably human element (I suppose of course that all wars inevitably do, and that this trend of sophistication has only gone on to exponentially increase over time, with that human element slowly but surely diminishing).

Now, to a reader who has just put down this short work and is quickly scanning the reviews on this site to get the general consensus on this book they may end up being slightly surprised by such an opening paragraph. Lawrence here has written a fairly nice little travelogue, at least one could certainly read it in that way. The mentions of the war are slim, there are soldiers on mountain ranges near Lugano performing military drills, and a few miles away from a particular inn Lawrence stays at the characteristic crack of gunfire and rumble of distant mortars and grenades ring out. But these things are brushed past, cursorily mentioned by him. And yet they preternaturally haunt the entire book, the rumination Lawrence haphazardly undertakes continuously bubbles over with a concerted fascination with death. His pen as he writes is sodden with the stuff of death, the Alps that engulf the landscapes he wanders through are death itself, with the sparse populations below them described as automaton-like outcasts obsessed by the melancholy Eternal, obsessed solely by it so that they can suppress the all-encroaching symbols of death which leer at them through their own cabin’s windows.

The war, and this war especially as a mechanised production of death, influences everything. The Weberian musings on disenchantment are rife, Lawrence managed to live long enough to not only read Nietzsche but to digest him, and assessed the various national characters along such lines. The cold hard rationalisation of the Northern population contrasted with the learnedness in the sensual and sensuous exhibited by the Southern peoples, the methods by which they both contend with the Phallus, the Godhead, with Death, with women and meaning, the ways in which the design of a crucifix betrays an entire network of meaning which shifts as Lawrence romps through country after country, the various crucifixes lining the endless series of roads giving off a character entirely different from the one preceding it. The need to unite the two Infinites, the Christian conception and the Pagan, under the Holy Spirit as a connective tissue of mystic reason: suffering their consummations, but standing beneath the absolute nature of their necessary union.

To become slightly less highbrow, cryptic and academic I must say that a great deal of this book consists of Lawrence simply comparing Italians to naive children. I’m not going to be a dullard and decry this as some great crime, but for a mind as great as Lawrence’s it seems like a bit of an unsophisticated position for him to take, it’s certainly beneath his calibre. But oh well! It’s occasionally funny. Of course Lawrence’s writing technique also shows its usual flaws once again, as his infamous method of not bothering to edit pieces but simply rewrite them in their entirety whenever he was dissatisfied with them leads to unintended repetition and occasional poor turns of phrase. However, the greatest part of this work is that it perfectly expounds the hints of a more developed philosophical position which can often be found by observant readers in his fictional work. It’s all here folks. Also there’s some pretty great analysis of Ibsen and Shakespeare in here.

Read it. It’s short. And it’s good. ( )

Herbie, as we were wont to call the Love and Lover-man, lived on Lago di Garda,
where I babysat my two year old grandson at Riva del Garda while his Mom was off working for a London law firm most of the week. With classic errors in the Italian I had read for 34 years, I reassured him, “Non preoccuparti, tua Momma sta andando,” Don’t worry, your Mom is going away.
Herbie was further south, past the lemon groves; in his day prior to WWI, my Riva was on the Austrian border, and there was smuggling across the mountains. Lawrence was down in Gargnano with its two nearby monasteries, San Tommaso up on a hill above the town, the “Church of the Eagle,” and San Francesco right on the shore. Looking for the path up to the “plateau of heaven,” “I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village”(26). These passages led to old steps, used for centuries as occasional urinals. I first found these narrow paths in fortified hilltowns around Carrara like Nicola and Fontia. Wonderful to walk, with the cart-wide steps with a rounded lip for mule-drawn carts. At Nicola I saw pieces of chicken thrown out of second-story windows down to the pavement for cats and maybe ravens.
Lawrence goes to the Theater at Salò on Garda. He sees D’Annunzio, Ibsen’s Spettri, which he considers depressingly phallic in the Scandinavian way, crossed with Italian phallicism (one thinks of the engraved phalluses at Pompei doorways), Good Luck. One night his padrone, the Di Paoli, invite him to Amleto, uno drama inglese.
The evening honors the Actor-Director Enrico, sturdy short lead, on whom DHL is merciless, DHL arrives late, near the end of Act I: “Enrico looked a sad fool in his
melancholy black. The doublet…made him look stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs”(73).
We may forget that for all his confrontation of bourgeois British manners, Herbie
was thoroughly British in his valuing of dress and appearance—the aristocratic leg, the tallish figure. He accuses the whole cast, essentially, of not being English. The King and Queen were “touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman…The King, her noble consort…had new clothes. His body was real enough, but it had nothing to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by themselves”(74).
But Lawrence is also very critical of Hamlet the character: “His nasty poking into his mother…his conceited perversion with Ophelia, make him always intolerable…repulsive, based on self-dislike.” Enrico played him as “the modern Italian, suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, laboring in a sense of physical corruption.” A later Italian historian, Fabio Cusin, would agree on the suspicion and isolation and self-disgust, in his Antistoria d’Italia (1970).
DHL’s says To be, or not… “does not mean to live or not to live…[but the] supreme I, the King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be”(77). He runs on about the deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, or the desire to be immortal. He argues for the ancients, the supreme I, the Ego ruled, but for Christians, supremacy involves renunciation, surrender to the Not-Self. The pagan Ego became the greatest sin: Pride, the way to total damnation.
A US citizen in 2018 cannot help but wonder how the “Christian Right (wing)” came to forget the worst Christian sin of Pride, the foolish pride of the US Trumpster president. ( )

I liked this Twilight in Italy, yes, but rated it four stars as if I really liked it. The reason being it was so well-written. The subject not so interesting to me in total, but it felt as if I were in a dream of sorts. Sea and Sardinia is beginning more down to earth for me and I am interested in seeing how he brings the Queen Bee into the more personal and intimate equation. ( )

Absolutely beautifully written. Amazingly descriptive and intensly calming memoir of the authors travels across Italy. ( )