It's describing people who have lived for generations on Marsh Farm.
They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels,
feeling the pulse and body of the soil that opened to their furrow for the grain and became smooth
and supple after their ploughing and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire.
They took the order of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men,
the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men.
But the women looked out from the heated blind intercourse of farm life to the spoken world beyond this male female classification fits some,
if not all, of the novel. The chapter, called The Widening Circle, is concerned with Ursula, a female's development integrator consciousness.
This male female classification also fits Lawrence's parents.
Author Lawrence was the son of a cloth trader who went down the mines when he was aged seven and spent his working life in the mines.
Lydia Bedsore, Lawrence's mother, was the granddaughter of a Methodist composer.
She was not quite middle class, despite the impression she tried to give to her husband.
But she did value education and successfully determined that none of her children should go down the mine.
And yet, in his nonfictional works, including Fantasia of the unconscious,
Lawrence made the reverse classification that it was women who represented the unconscious,
the sensuous, the soil, the blood, the centre and men who represented the mentor, the word exploration, the circumference, the widening circle.
This better fits the relationship of Birken and Ursula, perhaps of Lawrence and Frida Lawrence.
Certainly all his life struggles, strove to widen his circle aesthetically,
intellectually and importantly for the purposes of this lecture culturally.
When he was a child, his family's prised possession was a 20 volume international library of Famous Literature,
which contained excerpts from works of many places. And in this he read greedily.
It offered him his first contact with many writers who were to influence him and his first contact,
albeit virtual, with other countries at Nottingham University or University College Nottingham.
He studied alongside botany, modern languages. There is something of him in his creation.
Tom Brangwyn, who yearns for something beyond farm life, he finds it in Lydia Leonski,
a Polish widow who has come to his village as the vicar's housekeeper when he first sees her on a street, even without knowing who she is.
He says to himself, that's her. As it happens, Lydia Lawrence's younger sister, ADA, married APOEL Fritz Kirienko, this aunt ADA had a sister in law,
Yohana, who in January 1912 invited Lawrence to come and stay with her and her husband at their home northeast of Bonn.
Finally, Lawrence had a means to travel. Before he undertook that journey, though, he met Frieda.
She wanted to go to Metz to see her father because he was about to celebrate 50 years of military service.
And so they set out together on their separate visits to Germany and thus began their life of restless movement.
Amongst his fictional works, it's Mr. Noone, from which I've quoted plenty already.
It's a novel of nineteen twenty to twenty two that we get a sense of what it was like for him for the first time.
Seeing Germany, the first half of the novel is a parody and an infantilization of Lawrence's own early life.
It ends with the provincial schoolteacher Gilbert Noone,
extracting himself after he's been caught in flagrante with a certain Emmy by her father in his greenhouse.
Thankfully, she gets herself engaged to someone boring or to use Lawrences language of no account.
And he's in the clear. As the second half of the novel opens.
Suddenly we find ourselves in what the chapter title calls Hi Germany.
A fine apartment in Munich, he's working as a research assistant to a professor and we see him going for a walk in the Bavarian hills.
It was a lovely ringing morning bright world for the Englishman, vast and glamorous.
The sense of space was an intoxication for him.
He felt he could walk without stopping onto the far northeastern magic of Russia or south to Italy.
For the first time, he saw England from the outside, tiny, she seemed, and tight and so partial, just a little bit amongst the rest.
Her marvellous truths and standards and ideals were just local, not universal.
They were just a piece of a local pattern in what was really a vast, complicated, far reaching design.
He saw the white road, which seemed to him to lead to Russia, and he became an English.
Indeed, Lawrence did from 1912 onwards, he and Frida moved from England to Germany to Italy, Germany, Switzerland,
Italy, England, Germany, Italy, England for the war to Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Germany, Sicily, Ceylon, Australia,
New Zealand, Tahiti, the United States, Mexico, the states, Mexico, England, the States, England, Italy, Germany,
England, Italy, Austria, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, England, France.
And even this list doesn't reflect the number of times that they moved home within each country.
Even after dying, he roamed five years after Frida's lover, Antonio, rather likely later to become her third husband,
Doug Laurence up, cremated him and brought his ashes to be buried at the ranch in New Mexico, where Lawrence and Frida had lived.
Various factors favoured their travelling Freeda wanted to visit her mother every so often people with tuberculosis seek places in the sun.
Lawrence had a gift for languages until 1920.
He was poor and living in Italy was cheap.
After Lance entered literary circles around 1912, he made friends who lived in many countries and who would put him and Frida up temporarily for free.
But Lawrence also had a restlessness see in Sardinia.
Lawrence's account of their stay in Sardinia in nineteen twenty one opens with the line, comes over one, an absolute necessity to move.
Lawrence has a gift and a taste for this, a syntactic structure.
The phrase comes over, one comes out of nowhere and compels us towards that subject, an absolute necessity to move.
Every lecture in this series has stressed the value placed on change, change of attitude towards every subject he thought of.
And it also turns out change of place when in Women in Love, Birken and Ursula go to a market to buy furniture to set up a home together.
Working suddenly realises. The truth is we don't want things at all.
The thought of a house and furniture of my own is hateful to me.
This startled her for a moment. Then she replied. So it is to me, but we must live somewhere.
Not somewhere, anywhere, he said one should just live anywhere, not have a definite place.
I don't want a definite place. As soon as you get a room and it is complete, you want to run from it.
Now, my room's at the mill are quite complete. I want them at the bottom of the sea.
And we are never to have a complete place of our own, never a home.
She said, pray God in this world. No, he answered, but there's only this world.
She objected. He spread out his hands with a gesture of indifference on the one hand.
Then there is his dislike of fixity and completion, which is the stick and the other.
There is the character of the place that he wants to move towards.
The quotation from the opening of C in Sardinia goes on and what is more to move in some particular direction,
a double necessity than to get on the move and to know whether.
At the end of Women in Love, Ursula knows where to go when she wants to escape the Alps, which is to Italy and specifically to Verona,
this directed movement contrasts with her sister's feelings soon after this conversation.
So this is when her relationship with Gerald is completely broken down. And look asks her, you were going away tomorrow.
Yes. Fukin. That was the question for HINH, whether.
For him, what a lovely word, she never wanted it answered, let it shine forever, I don't know, she said, smiling at him.
He caught the smile from her one never does, he said. One never does, she repeated.
But he laughed. Where will you take a ticket to? Oh, heaven, she cried.
Well, must take a ticket. Here was a blow. She saw herself at the Wicked at the railway station, then relieving thought came to her.
She breathed freely. But one needn't go. She cried. Certainly not, he said.
I mean one needn't go where one's ticket says. That struck him one might take a ticket so as not to travel to the destination,
it indicated one might break off and avoid the destination, then take a ticket to London.
He said one must never go there. Right. She answered Goodwins anywhere and definitely not London ends up as being Dresden with lurker.
This is what comes of not knowing Vautin. For Gerrold, it's worse once he's tried to murder Gouldian and walk away into the snow.
He was not really conscious. He only wanted to go on, to go on whilst he could to move to keep going.
That was all to keep going until it was finished. He had lost all sense of place after his death.
Birken goes and finds the place where he went to sleep in the snow and sees a rope.
Quote, Gerald might have found this rope. He might have hauled himself up to the crest.
He might have heard the dogs in the Marion Hotel and found shelter. He might have gone on down the steep, steep fall of the south side,
down into the dark valley with its pines onto the great imperial road leading south to Italy.
Lawrence was once disturbed by being caught out on the question of Fortuyn.
He was expanding his project of Romanian, which is his utopian idea for a colony of about 20 souls who could live together in harmony.
In winter 1914, he was trying to encourage John Middleton, Mary Katherine Mansfield and Scott Wolanski,
his Ukrainian friend, to move with him and Frieda to an unpopulated island.
Catherine gathered up a pile of maps and asked him to indicate precisely where this island was.
He said very little after that and ran in and did not materialise,
the pattern of his travelling was there on arrival in a place he would have a difficult period because the
journey would have strained him physically and finding accommodation and settling in and in some cases,
learning a language was all strenuous. Then he and Frieda might have a good period, then would come over her or him an absolute necessity to move.
One result of this is a biography which it is fun to research expensive financially.
And in terms of carbon footprint, some people have tried to visit all the places that Lawrence knew.
One is the comedian and journalist Geoff Dyer.
You may know his 1997 book Out of Sheer Rage, which which is the autobiographical account of his failure to write a biography of D.H. Lawrence.
After much stressful to do under the Sicilian Sun, he finally locates the Villa Fantana Versailles in Tahmeena,
where he is rewarded for his persistence by finding a plaque which says D.H. Lawrence, English author, lived here.
Nineteen twenty nineteen twenty three, Dyas says, We had found it.
He's with his girlfriend. We stood silently. I knew this moment well from previous literary pilgrimages.
Perhaps you also do you look and look and try to summon up feelings which don't exist.
You try saying a mantra to yourself, D.H. Lawrence lived here, you say, I am standing in the place he stood seeing the things he saw.
But nothing changes, everything remains exactly the same a road, a house with sky above it and the sea glittering in the distance.
Well, maybe you haven't had such problems, Lawrence had no such difficulties,
places were instantly meaningful for him and he was able to write down those meanings immediately.
And in contrast to die at speed, he had read much travel literature before starting to write, but his own differed from all his models.
Several points are worth noting about his travel writing, by which I principally mean the collection's entitled Twilight in Italy.
Nineteen sixteen CE in Sardinia, 1921, Mourning's in Mexico.
Twenty seven sketches of Etruscan places, twenty eight and many uncollected essays.
He had two strong tendencies in his mode of composition. Some things he wrote rewrote in their entirety.
And then again, and perhaps again. Sons and lovers, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover of this kind of the things he wrote at speed,
then sent to be published after hardly reading, let alone rewriting them.
Most of his travel writings are of this kind. In particular, before the war, there was a financial reason for this.
When he eloped, he had given up his teaching job and was supporting Frida as well as himself.
He financed their travels through Germany and Italy by sending essays to Pinker, his agent in London.
In the early twenties, a friend of his visited him in an Italian city.
Lawrence had arrived there for the first time in his life on an earlier train on the same day.
By the by the time that this friend reached Lawrence's hotel, he found him sitting at a desk in his room,
writing an article about the city in which he had just arrived, diagnosing its spiritual vices and virtues.
To an extent, then, Lawrence would use a place as an allegory or vocabulary with which to express whichever spiritual thoughts had been
planted in him by his initial experiences of it when he was towards the end of his life researching the Etruscans,
the predecessor, predecessors of the Romans in central Italy, he wrote to a friend,
I should just have to start in and go ahead and be damned to all authorities.
There really is next to nothing to be said scientifically about the Etruscans must take the imaginative line.
His fiction, too, was influenced by his travel, Arun's world is partly set in Italy, Kangaroo Set in Australia,
the plumed serpent in Mexico, not to mention many short stories set in each of these.
He began kangaroos soon after he and Frieda arrived in Sydney and finished it.
But for the last chapter within five weeks,
one thing which will strike modern readers in all of these writings is his attitude towards the divisions of humanity into type's,
which we might now call nations, races or ethnicity.
The noun, which in anthropological parlance correlates with the adjective ethnic.
It's a useful noun to have he delighted in the variety of mankind.
Mr Noon, when he's looking out across the hills of Bavaria, thinks many magical lands,
many magical peoples, all magnetic and strange, uniting to form the very patchwork of Europe.
This seemed to break his soul like a chrysalis into a new life.
There were so many, many lands and peoples besides himself and his own land.
It was so nice to be one amongst many so far so tolerant, multicultural.
Mr Noone is rejoicing that a thousand flowers of national defence do bloom on the face of the Earth.
Correspondingly, Aaron, quote, had no eye for the horrible sameness that was spreading like a disease over Italy from England and the north.
This is a repeated theme, Florence, the homogenisation of Europe starting from the North.
But how had these differences between peoples arisen in the first place?
The eleventh chapter of the Book of Genesis, as you know, explained it by the story of the Babylonians,
who tried in their hubris to build a tower which would reach heaven.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is won and they have all one language.
And this they begin to do. And now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do,
go to let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the Earth, and they left off to build the city.
In the last lecture, I mentioned that Lawrence reinvented the Bible in his own way in Fantasia of the unconscious,
he gives his own version of this story, which has much geological and esoteric reading behind it.
He also claims that mankind was originally one quote,
just as mathematics and mechanics and physics are defined and expounded in the
same way in the universities of China or Bolivia or London or Moscow today.
So it seems to me in the great world previous to ours,
a great science and cosmology were taught esoterically in all the countries of the globe Asia, Polynesia, America, Atlantis and Europe.
The seabeds of today must have been comparatively dry.
The Easter Island in the Marquesas and the rest Rose Lufti from the marvellous, great continent of the Pacific.
In that world, men lived and taught and knew and were won in complete correspondence all over the Earth,
men wandered back and forth from Atlantis to the Polynesian continent.
As men now sail from Europe to America, the interchange was complete and knowledge science was universal over the Earth, cosmopolitan as it is today.
Then came the melting of the glaciers and the world flood,
the refugees from the drowned continents fled to the high places of America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific islands,
and some degenerated naturally into cavemen, Neolithic and Palaeolithic creatures,
and some retained their marvellous innate beauty and life perfection like the South Sea Islanders.
And some wandered savage in Africa and some like Druids or Etruscans or child
Deion's or Amerindians or Chinese refused to forget but taught the old wisdom.
More or less forgotten as knowledge, remembered as ritual, gesture and myth, story,
floods and fire and convulsions and ice arrest intervene between the great glamorous civilisations of mankind.
But nothing will ever quench humanity and the human potentiality to evolve something magnificent out of a renewed chaos.
As much of the Old Testament indicates, the idea of nationalism is as old as the ancient Jews.
I'm using nationalism not in the colloquial sense of a strong version of patriotism,
but in the academic sense of a belief that mankind is or should be and or should be divided into two distinct political and cultural groups.
Lawrence stands on the far side of a long history of developing European theories on nationalism, particularly from the Renaissance onwards.
In the 19th century,
German romantics such as Howard and Fisht theorised the nation in essentialist terms and developed the idea of the national character.
In the 20th century, more political and pluralist theories of the nation have developed,
and some people now argue that with the help of such transnational units as the EU and the UN,
the 500 year age of so-called nationalism is coming to an end.
Others point to the Balkanisation of the Balkans in the 1990s and say that ethnic nationalism is alive and kicking.
So how to locate Lawrence's ideas in this spectrum for a start?
As usual, he has no coherent theory or vocabulary. He uses the term people, nation and race in a range of ways.
But he normally uses a particular noun such as the Etruscans, in preference to any one of those abstract nouns.
He is not a civic nationalist.
That is to say, someone who believes that a nation is made up by citizens who are conscious of and consent to being part of a nation.
Lawrence was not interested in political structures or the issue of statehood, and his sense of history is inconsistent.
He describes the Japanese as an old nation, which makes some sense.
But he describes the Germans and not the Italians as a young nation, despite the fact that they were unified as modern states at about the same time.
One of the most important theorists of the nation when Lawrence was growing up was the Frenchman and Eleanor in 1882,
after the secession of Alsace Lorraine to Germany, and this included Frida's hometown of Mezze.
He wrote the book. Keskin asks, What is a nation?
He answered that the nation is a form of morality and solidarity sustained by a distinctive historical consciousness.
The existence of a nation, as he put it, is a daily plebiscite.
Lawrence, on the other hand, thought that Italians were Italians, whether they liked it or not,
nor would he have liked her nose sentiment that common suffering is greater than separate happiness in women in life.
One of the arguments between her Maione and Birken concerns Italian unification, which happened in the late 60s.
Amaney says. I'm interested in it in Italy. In her coming to national consciousness.
I wish she'd come to something different from national consciousness then, said Birkin,
especially as it only means a sort of commercial industrial consciousness.
I hate Italy international randt.
Lawrence also has little interest in the kind of nationalism alternatively theorised by the German romantics how to sort that sense,
one's experience of life was filtered by language. One's essence was determined by the particular language that one spoke.
And that the essence of a nation is located in its language, philology was therefore brought to the service of group psychology.
How does contemporary Fisht politicised this view and argued that linguistic nations should have their own states?
Of course, these ideas cannot account for multi multilingual nations such as the Swiss or multi-state languages such as Arabic and English.
Lawrence was a good linguist and by the end of his life had a reasonable knowledge of German, Italian, Spanish and French.
He scattered their terms across his writings with varying degrees of consideration for readers who don't know those languages.
But he showed very little interest, interestingly, in language per say.
Occasionally, he notes difficulties he has in communication. For example, in his 1913 essay, The Spiner and the Monks,
in which an elderly Italian woman speaks to him at length, he doesn't understand and eventually he runs away.
This is presented as comic, but not as profoundly interesting in his version of the Bible story.
He doesn't mention language only cultural difference.
When he read literature in translation, he, frustratingly for his researches, didn't make a note of whose translation he read.
He himself wrote translations from the Italian and helped Cottam Jansky with his translations from the Russian.
But he didn't reflect on the process. He made spiritual extrapolations from many aspects of the culture, but not from its language.
He was, however, interested in what would nowadays be called psychogeography, the effect of a place upon soul.
Having lived for half a year in Sicily, he decided to leave for Sardinia because he found the proximity of the volcano Atnah oppressive,
this timeless atnah in her lower heaven loveliness.
So lovely, so lovely. What a torturer.
Not many men can really stand her without losing their souls.
She's like Soucy. How many men, how many races has Etna put to flight?
It was she who broke the quick of the Greeks. So and after the Greeks, she gave the Romans, the Normans, the Arabs, the Spaniards,
the French, the Italians, even the English, she gave them all their inspired our.
And broke their souls. As a result, the Sicilians who were the one people who have remained in her proximity, according to Lawrence,
are intelligent demons and humanly, according to us, the most stupid people on Earth.
For him, the influence of space can override the direct transmission of culture across generations.
So, for example, he finds on reading American literature that in the great writers,
the voice, the voice, the voices of Native Americans are suppressed, but audible.
So it would seem that immigrants to America absorb this native voice just by being their.
He sees the modern Italians as the spiritual, if not necessarily the genetic descendants of the forerunners of the Romans in central Italy,
the Etruscans, not of the Romans themselves after visiting an Etruscan tomb.
He notes that, quote, in the full, dark, handsome, jovial faces of his fellow tourists on the bus.
Surely you see the lustre still of the life loving Etruscans.
So this is, of course, a problem for the fascists,
the fascists considering themselves in all things Roman Roman of the Caesar's heirs of the Empire and world power
have to confront the fact that Italy today is far more Etruscan in its polls than Roman and will always be.
So why try to revert to the Latin Roman mechanism and suppression?
And I suppose that's one way of interpreting the Italian fascists failure to be as enthusiastic and efficient as as the Nazis.
In his 1969 essay, The Crucifix Across the Mountains, to which I return next week,
he speculates maybe a certain Gersen van that's megalomania is inherent in the German nature.
If only nations would realise that they have certain natural characteristics,
if only they would understand and agree to each other's particular nature.
How much simpler it would all be. And yet, Lawrence is not what contemporary sociologists or anthropologists would call a primordia list,
that is someone who believes that national Essence's are fixed across time.
He is, if anything, a perennial list. He believes that nation's pop up and dissolve.
They are cultural, not natural categories. They rely not on genes, not on language, and certainly not on politics or consent.
They are mutable spiritual phenomena that have a certain relationship to place.
And in this, he partly resembles his contemporary, the German philosopher Osvald Spangler.
His most famous work is that one took on this ardent Londis, The Decline of the West, published in the same year as Arun's Road.
This argues that all cultures pass through a life cycle of growth and decay.
Western Europe is currently entering the final stage of its existence.
This was a hugely influential work with which Lawrence had considerable sympathy.
Women in Love represents an exhausted European civilisation tearing itself apart in war.
One of the alternative titles was Love amongst the Ruins. It won't surprise you to hear that the Nazis also embraced Spangler,
but then rejected him in 1933 for refusing to accept their racial theory and for being pessimistic about the future of Germany.
But there is a further feature of Lawrence's national thinking,
which is peculiarly his it's his thinking in terms of binaries of polar opposites amongst peoples.
We see this in studies in classic American literature. Nineteen nineteen, he says that the Romans thought in terms of the Gallic African opposition.
Modern Europe, he says, is divided by the German Italian polarity at the Renaissance.
Europe and America became polar opposites to each other within America,
the poles of the European Puritans who lost physically to control the spirit and the Native Americans who were the other way around.
He wrote the essay, The English and the Germans in 1912, soon after coming into contact with the Germans for the first time in this,
he characterises the Germans as not as old a nation as we as less couth than the English, less and less civilised and less cynical.
The English ask implicitly to be destroyed by a more brutal nation.
And that, he says, is why there is a German scare. In Fantasia, the unconscious, he describes the tuto Roman polarity as follows.
When the legions crossed the Rhine, they met the faceless silence of the Black Forest,
the enormous power of these collective trees stronger in their sombre life even than Rome.
No wonder the soldiers were terrified.
No wonder they thrilled with horror when deep in the woods, they found the skulls and trophies of their dead comrades on the trees.
The two German has something of the sap of trees in his veins.
Even now he is a tree. God and his gods are not human.
But after bone dry Italy and after the jibbering of myriad people all rattling their personalities,
I am glad to be free with the profound indifference of faceless trees.
Correspondingly, when in the countryside near Trento, Mr Noone says the Romans doesn't want to feel the Romans, one does, said Yohana grimly.
Bear in mind she's German to her fresh northern forest leaved.
So it was indescribably hideous. The dry vineyards on their terraced hills, the the treeless slopes.
Women in love itself, however, is orientated around a larger scale spiritual binary to which I return next week,
the African and the Arctic, the African is represented by the fetish in Halliday's flat, a sculpture of a woman in childbirth.
Birken asserts about it, There are centuries and hundreds of centuries of development behind that carving,
it is an awful picture pitch of culture, pure culture and sensation, really ultimate physical consciousness, mindless, utterly sensual.
The Arctic is represented by Jarold, which may be why he shudders when he sees the sculpture, when Gudrun first sees him,
she perceives that in his clear northern flesh and his father was a glisten like sunshine refracted through crystals of ice.
And he looked so new and pure as an Arctic thing.
Birken sees these as alternative modes of death, the white race is having the Arctic north behind them, the vast abstraction of ice and snow.
This is psychogeography, again, would fulfil a mystery of ice, destructive knowledge, snow, abstract annihilation,
whereas the West Africans controlled by the burning death abstraction of the Sahara had been fulfilled in sun destruction.
Burkean thinks of Jarold as one of those strange, white, wonderful demons from the north.
Was he fated away to pass in to pass away in this knowledge, death by perfect cold?
As it turns out, of course, he is these polls, the Arctic and the African are not the lion and the unicorn on which the crown of life is balanced,
to borrow the image from his essay, The Crown. They are not eternal opposites which guarantee each other's existence through their very strife.
There were Scylla and assuredness, both to be avoided as most people living either in the Arctic or the Sahak,
so as people generally avoid living either in the Arctic or the Sahara, he reflects,
there was the other way, the remaining way, and he must run to follow it.
He thought of Ursula. They must marry and go and live in a temperate zone in Italy.
Lawrence is thinking about race, therefore differs from his thought about individuals of individuals,
be they are dandelion or a rabbit or a horse or a man.
He demands that they be themselves, that they fulfil perfectly whatever they are.
But as an African or as an eiseman, and perhaps also as an Englishman,
one should not embody one's race to perfection because that is to end up spiritually burned or frozen or desiccated.
So far, I've tried to describe the nature of Lawrence's thoughts towards people's,
but in the last part of this lecture, I want to turn more to the contents of those feelings.
The obvious place to start with this is Germany, because that's where Lauren started.
His feelings towards it were mixed. On the one hand, he loved and admired not only his wife, but her family.
It turns out the freedom was not a one off her sisters. Two were strong, liberated, unconventional and intelligent.
He chose German names for his heroines was a good one.
Initially, he wanted the dedication of the rainbow to Elsa, his sister in law, to be printed in German for Elsa and in Gothic script.
His publishers refused. This was nineteen sixteen.
Lawrence's staunch refusal to be anti German during the First World War undermined support for the novel in
some who might otherwise have more strenuously protested against its suppression on grounds of obscenity.
Lawrence was also more strongly drawn to the philosophy of Germany than to that of any other country.
Schopenhauer needs to Heidegger Spangler.
On the other hand, he detested Prussian militarism, as I've mentioned, Frida's hometown of Mezze had until recently been French.
Her father, the Baron FleetBoston, which too often was garrison administrative officer of the occupying Prussian army,
Lawrence and Freeda, once nearly arrested for accidentally straying into a military zone.
And Episode two accounts in how a Spy is arrested, ironically, in 1912.
This story was rejected for publication in England as being too anti German.
His 1914 essay, With the Guns, which is a chilling description of witnessing German shooting training, was published in Germany.
Then was Lawrence's intellectual home perhaps more than any other country, but it was in Italy that he was more spiritually and physically at home.
He lived for longer there than in any other country.
After England, after he'd given up on Old and New Mexico, it was to Italy that he returned to him.
The Italians, and especially the Etruscans, were non-intellectual, non-spiritual and a blessed relief in sketches of Etruscan places.
Nineteen twenty eight. One of his last works, he writes, One must love Italy if one has lived there.
It is so non-moral, it leaves the soul to be free over these countries, Germany and England.
Like the grey skies, lies the gloom of a dark moral condemnation and judgement and reservation of the people Italy does not judge.
Why is England so shabby, the Italians here sing and the women walk straight and look calm and the men adore children.
I think they haven't many ideas, but they look well and they have strong blood.
When he goes to the theatre, he finds that Italian actors make a nonsense of Ibsen and a hash of Hamlet just because they are too full of life.
Quote, Every Italian I've seen lives by the human ties which connect him to his neighbour, but Hamlet had no neighbour.
When a living creature begins to question whether he ought to live or ought not to live.
He is like a rotten fungus. And it turns out that Italians are not good at acting the part of rotten fungi.
Lady Chatterley's Lover, which is his book of advice to the English on How to Live, was partly written in Italy.
One unfortunate feature of the latest French Lady Chatterley film is that it is filmed in France under a perpetual sun.
There is no doubt that Italy gave Florence what Aaron Sison finds there, quote,
a feeling of bravado and an almost swaggering carelessness, which is Italy's best gift to an Englishman.
Like his contemporary E.M. Forster, Italy represented a liberated natural foil to English civilisation.
This was how he felt on first discovering Italy and again by the end of his life.
But during the First World War, he had come to believe that, quote, Our European way of living is superseded.
In response, he looked in opposite directions, east and west.
And with startling precedents, he decided that the future lies with the United States of America and Russia.
He could see their similarities,
they slowly expanded at precisely the same time over the two preceding centuries in opposite directions to cover a whole continent.
They had tiny cultural elites who were conscious of and sought to reduce their reliance on European culture.
And their literature was on the rise at the time when Lawrence wrote a book entitled Studies in Classic American Literature,
Classic and American literature were contradictions in terms America was the most favourable outlet for his work in the world,
and much of his income across his career came from there. He planned to visit both countries.
But once Russia had descended into civil war, only his visits to America materialised.
But he was sorely disappointed he found the United States, according to his writing,
a place of mechanisation egoistic wilfulness and self-conscious posturing.
He immediately wanted to get away from the cities and into the open spaces for a while on his ranch in New Mexico,
which was given by a friend in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers.
He found peace. It was then in Mexico that he diagnosed vitality, the plumed serpent concerns a contemporary Aztec revival cult,
which involved the submission of women to men and of all to a strong leader.
It is one of his so-called leadership novels. And we will touch on this in the class on fascism in eighth week.
Whatever one makes of its politics, one must remember that it locates the spiritual future of humanity in a non-white people and that
this was sharply at variance with much imperial and racist thinking of his time and country.
But Lance himself did not become a member of an Aztec revivalist cult,
he never attempted to deliberately on English himself to this extent, and he returned to Europe for good in nineteen twenty five.
Worth noting that he always dressed as an Englishman, wherever he was, he knew by now that the pattern of his life was fullfillment,
followed by disappointment, and that these two opposite states were made meaningful by each other.
Travel expressed this and travel caused him to know.