by Tim Parks
‘There is a stillness and a softness in these great grassy mounds with their ancient stone girdles, and down the central walk [of the burial ground] there lingers still a kind of loneliness and happiness … The same when we went down the few steps, and into the chambers of rock, within the tumulus. There is nothing left. It is like a house that has been swept bare … But whoever it is that has departed, they have left a pleasant feeling behind them …’37
All his adult life, Lawrence had sought to live as a pagan in the modern world. Not an atheist, atheism being, as he saw it, just a negative dogmatism brought into being by monotheistic religion. He had looked for a way out of repressive Christian morality, while never seeking to be either immoral or amoral. And he had likewise looked for a way out of the general scramble for money and social status. But the supreme test of any life comes with the imminence of death. Reconstructing the mindset of these people who left us almost nothing but their tombs, yet whose tombs impart a deep sense of peace, Lawrence is seeking to prepare himself for the final journey.
It’s a beautiful story. Crawling into one burial chamber after another with his friend, a guide and a couple of candles, Lawrence examines the many paintings on the ancient walls, conjuring up from their strange detail and symbolism the Etruscan way of life, their aesthetic sense, their religious practices, social hierarchy, how they lived in intimate contact with their bodies and nature. ‘The things they did,’ he remarks, ‘in their easy centuries, are as natural and as easy as breathing. They leave the breast breathing freely and pleasantly, with a certain fullness of life.’38
For a man who suffered such severe lung problems, this was an achievement to yearn for. Finally, Lawrence had found a pre-modern culture that did not disappoint him as, over recent years, Sardinia, Ceylon, Mexico and New Mexico had all in their different ways disappointed. The reason is obvious. The Etruscans are no longer around to bother Lawrence with poor food, indifferent table manners and dodgy sanitation.
Or are they? The key to a reading of Etruscan Places is the idea of continuity. ‘Death, to the Etruscan, was a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. It was neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment. It was just a natural continuance of the fullness of life. Everything was in terms of life, of living.’39
If a sense of continuity is the right approach to death, then Lawrence will reproduce the principle in his book. Where another writer would have focused entirely on the Etruscans, on the tombs and their paintings, he moves freely between the artefacts of past millennia and the modern Tuscan landscape outside, between reflections on migration in the fifth century BC and the boy who drives him and his friend across the low, windy hills in a pony cart, and then the hotel proprietors, the waiters, the part-time guide who works on the railways, the young German archaeologist at once so knowledgeable and so unimpressed. With a sureness of touch that isn’t quite there in the earlier works, Lawrence leaves it to the reader to grasp the connection between the Fascist busybody determined to examine his passport in Civitavecchia and the Romans who destroyed the Etruscans. And he is entirely convincing when he finds in the faces and manners of the local village women the same traits he has seen in the underground paintings. One way or another, he decides, the Etruscans will always be with us. And slowly but surely this ease of movement between ancient and modern, burial chamber and hotel room, begins to establish a curious mood of alert tranquillity, something as far from the Doomsday defiance of the earlier Lawrence as one could possibly imagine.
An Etruscan prince, Lawrence tells us, would have ‘a little bronze ship of death’40 on the stone bed beside his sarcophagus. The prince, unlike his people, was an initiate in the mysteries of the cosmos, and above all in the ‘mystery of the journey out of life and into death’.41 He was at once a ruler and a priest. ‘Try as you may,’ Lawrence remarks, and certainly he had tried, ‘you can never make the mass of men throb with full awakedness … Only a few are initiated into the mystery of the bath of life, and the bath of death.’42
Now, visiting the tombs of the Etruscan princes, Lawrence feels a growing identity with these ruler priests. He too is an initiate in life’s mysteries. He too would build his ship of death, a vessel that might take him across the stormy waters beyond the final horizon of being. Etruscan Places marks the moment when Lawrence consciously began to build that boat. It would not be complete until, on his deathbed, he wrote the extraordinary poem ‘Ship of Death’. As with Etruscan Places, the tone was one of quiet, unblinkered acceptance. ‘Oh build your ship of death,’ runs one short stanza,
… your little ark
and furnish it with food, with little cakes, and wine for the dark flight down oblivion.43
Reading these lines, it’s hard not to remember the kitchenino of Sea and Sardinia, so carefully packed for the voyage out, hard not to think of the little cakes that he and his queen bee sought so avidly in Trapani and Cagliari, and indeed of all the dark wine drunk, chapter after chapter, in these three remarkable books on Italy. As with the Etruscan paintings he so lovingly described, the sense of continuity between life and death is powerful. Perhaps, at the very end, Lawrence had managed to become truly pagan.
Places and dates of first publication
* * *
Lawrence – The Fighter: New York Review, September 25, 2003
Bassani – Gardens and Graveyards: New York Review, July 14, 2005
Dostoevsky – After the Struggle: The Nation, June 14, 2004
Mussolini – The Illusionist: New York Review, April 7, 2005
Hardy – Fear is the Key: New York Review, April 12, 2007
The Disenchantment of Translation: Paper delivered at Katha Utsav, Delhi, January 6, 2004
Beckett – Still Stirring: New York Review, July 13, 2006
Bernhard – Genius of Bad News: New York Review, January 11, 2007
Jelinek – Let Sleeping Beauties Lie: New York Review, July 19, 2007
Cioran – A Polished Pessimism: Spectator, 1996
Machiavelli – True Scandal: Introduction to The Prince, The Folio Society, London, 2006
A Model Anomaly: New York Review, October 18, 2001
Lorenzo – Mad at the Medici: New York Review, May 1, 2003
Fleur Jaeggy – Love Letter: New York Review, February 12, 2004
Hypertext – Tales Told by a Computer: New York Review, October 24, 2002
Zola – Real Dreams: Introduction to The Dream, Hesperus Press, London, 2005
World Cup Football – A Matter of Love and Hate: New York Review, July 18, 2002
Garibaldi – Hero Betrayed: New Yorker, June 2007
1848 – Siege of the Serenissima: London Review of Books, December 1, 2005
D’Annunzio – The Superman’s Virgins: Introduction to D’Annunzio, The Book of Virgins, Hesperus, 2003
Lawrence and Italy – A Pagan in Italy: Introduction to D. H. Lawrence and Italy: Etruscan Places, Sea and Sardinia, Twilight in Italy, Penguin Classics, 2007
References
* * *
The page references in this section refer to the printed edition from which this ebook was created.
The Fighter
1. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse (London, Penguin, 1995), p.60
2. D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. IV (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.108
3. Ibid., VIII, p.114
4. Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence: A Biography (New York, Cooper Square Press, 2002), p.17
5. Ibid., p. 17
6. Michael Squires and Lynn K. Talbot, Living at the Edge: A Biography of D. H. Lawrence & Frieda von Richthofen (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), p.199
7. Meyers, p.18
8. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London, Penguin, 1982), p.541
9. Meyers, p.27
10. Ibid., p.52
11. Ibid., p.54
12. Ibid., p.50
13. Lawrence, Letters, VIII, p.3
14. Philip Callow, Body of Truth: D. H. Lawrence – The Nomadic Years, 1919–1930 (Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 2004), p.xii
15. Ibid., p.x
16. Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.7
17. Callow, p.155
18. Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage (London, Abacus, 2003), p.113
19. Lawrence, Letters, V, p.519
20. Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, p.34
21. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London, Penguin, 2006), p.328
22. Ibid., p.332
23. D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Short Novels (London, Penguin, 1982), p.155
24. Women in Love, p.431
25. Ibid., p.397
26. Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence (London, Routledge, 2002), p.51
27. Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, p.7
28. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.14
29. Squires and Talbot, p.274
30. Meyers, p.241
31. Lady Chatterley, p.101
32. Lawrence, Letters, III, p.92
33. Lawrence, Studies, p.17
34. Callow, p.83
35. Critical Guide to D. H. Lawrence, p.61
36. D. H. Lawrence, Foreword to Women in Love (New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1920)
37. Lawrence, Letters, V, p.201
38. Women in Love, p.349
39. Meyers, p.109
Gardens and Graveyards
Quotations are from the Italian edition of Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, and translated by myself.
1. Giorgio Bassani, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Turin, Einaudi, 1999), p.39
2. Ibid., p.128
3. Ibid., p.263
After the Struggle
1. Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, trans. Mary Mackler (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), p.552
2. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky, The Seeds of Revolt, 1821–1849 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1976), p.270
3. Grossman, p.495
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London, Everyman, 2004), p.5
5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Jessie Coulson (London, Penguin, 1972), p.18
6. Loc. cit.
7. Loc. cit.
8. Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky, The Stir of Liberation (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986), p.252
9. Notes (Pevear and Volokhonsky), p.54
10. Frank, The Star of Liberation, p.57
11. Notes (Coulson), p.29
12. Notes (Pevear and Volokhonsky), p.6
13. Ibid., p.7
14. Ibid., p.6
15. Ibid., p.7
16. Ibid., p.11
17. Notes (Coulson), p.54
18. Ibid., p.59
19. Loc. cit.
20. Ibid., p.60
21. Ibid., p.61
22. Grossman, p.396
23. Notes (Coulson), p.100
24. Notes (Pevear and Volokhonsky), p.118
25. Notes (Coulson), p.123
26. Notes (Pevear and Volokhonsky), p.94
27. Frank, The Star of Liberation, p.295
28. Notes (Coulson), p.122
29. Frank, The Star of Liberation, p.224
30. Notes (Coulson), pp.50–1
The Illusionist
1. Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: A New Life (London, Phoenix Press, 2005), p.32
2. Ibid., p.37
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, entry on Mussolini
4. Richard Bosworth, Mussolini (London, Hodder Arnold, 2003), p.116
5. Farrell, p.113
6. Ibid., p.124
7. Ibid., p.120
8. Ibid., p.126
9. Ibid., p.7
10. Bosworth, p.114
11. Peter Neville, Mussolini (London, Routledge, 2003), p.36
12. Ibid., p.12
13. Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani (Milan, Feltrinelli, 1991), p.47
14. Ibid., p.51
15. Farrell, p.111
16. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce, Gli anni del consenso,1929–1936 (Turin, Einaudi, 1996), p.50
17. Denis Mack Smith, Garibaldi: A Great Life in Brief (Greenwood Press, 1982)
18. De Felice, p.48
19. Farrell, p.111
20. Ibid., p.46
21. Ibid., p.101
22. Bosworth, p.262
23. De Felice, p.20
24. Ibid., p.51
25. Farrell, p.305
26. De Felice, p.50
27. Bosworth, p.296
28. Ibid., p.216
29. Farrell, p.93
30. Ibid., p.359
31. Ibid., p.304
32. Ibid., p.305
33. Bosworth, p.346
34. Ibid., p.340
35. Ibid., p.338
36. Ibid., p.342
37. Farrell, p.311
38. Ibid., p.112
Fear is the Key
1. Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (New York, Penguin Press, 2006), p.222
2. Ibid., p.223
3. Ibid., p.222
4. Ibid., p.288
5. Ibid., p.24
6. Ibid., p.323
7. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (New York, Signet, 1999), p.17
8. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London, Penguin, 2003), p.24
9. Ibid., p.49
10. Tomalin, p.27
11. Loc. cit.
12. Ibid., p.40
13. Ibid., p.46
14. Ibid., p.82
15. Ibid., p.70
16. Ibid., p.64
17. Loc. cit.
18. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (London, Palgrave, 2001), p.312
19. Tess, p.74
20. Ibid., p.200
21. Tomalin, p.273
22. Tess, p.169
23. Tomalin, p.228
24. Tess, p.123
25. Ibid., p.183
26. Ibid., p.151
27. Ibid., p.170
28. Ibid., p.152
29. Ibid., p.225
30. Ibid., p.229
31. Loc. cit.
32. Ibid., p.182
33. Ibid., p.234
34. Poems, p.237
35. Tomalin, p.247
36. Poems, p.313
37. Tomalin, p.231
38. Tess, p.xix
39. Ibid., p.xx
40. Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd (London, Penguin, 2000), p.8
41. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (New York, Bantam, 1981), p.5
42. Ibid., p.47
43. Tess, p.85
44. Loc. cit.
45. Ibid., p.226
46. Tomalin, p.224
47. Loc. cit.
48. Ibid., p.259
49. Ibid., p.239
50. Ibid., p.170
51. Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings (New York, University Press of Kansas, 1969), p.124
52. Poems, p.346
53. Tomalin, p.322
54. Poems, p.553
The Disenchantment of Translation
1. Quoted in Barbara Milberg Fisher, Noble Numbers, Subtle Words: The Art of Mathematics in the Science of Storytelling (Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), p.32
2. Loc. cit.
3. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1983), Vol. III, p.175
4. Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Milan, Mondadori Parallel Texts, 1992), p.132
5. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (London, Penguin, 1982), p.430
6. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London, Vintage, 2000), p.117
Still Stirring
1. Samuel Beckett, The Grove Centenary Edition, Vol. IV, p.492
2. E. M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations, trans. Richard Howard (London, Quartet, 1992), p.129, footnote 1
3.
Beckett Remembering, Remembering Beckett, ed. James and Elizabeth Knowlson (New York, Arcade, 2006), p.295
4. Ibid., p.293
5. Ibid., p.189
6. Ibid., p.299
7. Cioran, p.135
8. Beckett, Centenary Ed., I, p.3, footnote 2
9. Ibid., IV, p.503
10. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (London, Calder, 1983), p.171
11. Loc. cit.
12. Beckett, Centenary Ed., I, p.27
13. Ibid., II, p.407
14. Ibid., IV, p.472
15. Ibid., I, p.164
16. S. E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett After Beckett: Essays (Gainesville, Florida University Press, 2006), p.67
17. Beckett, Centenary Ed., I, p.205
18. Ibid., I, p.211
19. Beckett Remembering, p.113
20. Ibid., p.105
21. Ibid., p.109
22. Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett (New York, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2001), p.95
23. Beckett, Centenary Ed., I, p.370
24. Ibid, p.369
25. Ibid., p.379
26. Ibid., II, p.190
27. Ibid., IV, p.430
28. Beckett Remembering, p.174
29. Beckett, Centenary Ed., III, p.40
30. Cioran, p.129
31. Beckett Remembering, p.166
Genius of Bad News
1. Gitta Honegger, Thomas Bernhard: The Making of an Austrian (New Haven, CT, and London, Yale University Press, 2001), this is the quotation that opens the book, page unnumbered
2. Ibid., p.xiii
3. Thomas Bernhard, The Lime Works, trans. Sophie Wilkins (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986), p.47
4. Honegger, p.8
5. Ibid., p.31
6. Ibid., p.42
7. Loc. cit.
8. Ibid., p.57
9. Ibid., p.64
10. Thomas Bernhard, Frost, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York, Knopf, 2006), p.9
11. Ibid., p.15
12. Ibid., p.94
13. Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp.12, 13
14. Ibid., pp.181, 182
15. Honegger, p.118
16. Ibid., p.36
17. Ibid., p.13
18. Ibid., p.142
19. Ibid., p.141
