0 Cop CAPRI 25 - Caesar Augustus

ono più volte “in terraferma”, in cerca di
una piccola casa, dal momento che a Capri
erano disponibili solo quelle grandi e dispendiose.
Avevano visitato più volte la costiera
amalfitana, di cui si erano innamorati
e dove avrebbero desiderato trasferirsi,
stufi del “crogiolo di bisbetiche” che vivevano
a Capri. In quello stesso periodo lo
scrittore organizzò anche una breve “fuga”
a Montecassino, ricordata nell’Introduzione
alle memorie di Magnus, in cui così descrive
magicamente la partenza dall’isola:
«Mi alzai che era buio pesto, una mattina
di gennaio, e mi feci un po’ di caffé sulla
lampada a spirito, e intanto guardavo l’orologio,
il grande quadrante azzurro del vecchio
orologio del campanile della Piaz-
G. SIMEONE - SIME/SIE
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THE MAN WHO LOVED ISLANDS
by GIUSEPPE MAZZELLA
Having come in search of sun
and peace and quiet, the writer
D. H. Lawrence found only gossip
and misunderstanding on Capri
place is sympathetic for a time.
But it seems to me like a stepping
“This
stone, from which one steps off,
towards elsewhere; not an abiding place.» Thus
David Herbert Lawrence wrote to his friend
Martin Secker, just after he had arrived in Capri.
It was the 27th December 1919. The English
writer and his wife, Frieda, had arrived just a
few days before, after a short stay at Picinisco,
a “cold and primitive” village in Ciociaria, as
guests of an Italian friend who worked in
England. They had only lasted a few weeks in
that uncomfortable lodging where they had to
share a large, bare room, heated only by the
stove on which they prepared their meals, after
carrying the meagre products from the village
two kilometres away.
Although he was used to the harsh climate of
Eastwood, the small town in
Nottinghamshire, where he was born in
1885, the fourth son of an unhappy marriage
between a miner and a primary school
teacher, Lawrence came to Italy driven by a
longing for sunshine and to get away from
the echoes of the scandal caused by his
marriage in 1914 to Frieda Weekley, the
firstborn daughter of Otto von Richtofen,
Governor of Alsace-Lorrraine, who had been
the wife of a university professor. After a
brief period of teaching, having obtained a
teaching certificate from the University
College of Nottingham, Lawrence eventually
devoted himself entirely to creative writing,
publishing three novels, The White Peacock,
The Trespasser and The Rainbow, that had
by this time already brought him some fame.
It was the last of these novels, published in
1915, that created serious problems for him
when it was confiscated for obscenity. Nor
was that his only problem: the writer’s
poetics, that developed around the
antagonism between instinct and reason, the
conflicts between nature and industrial
civilization and the problems between men
and women, had to some extent isolated him
from the European intelligentsia, who found it
hard to accept an art that opened up deep
rifts in the most profound and disturbing
intimacies of human beings. For a time he
was even kept under observance by the
police, suspected of espionage and
collaboration with the enemy during the First
World War. All these difficulties aggravated
his state of health, already in a serious
condition since he suffered from a type of
consumption that made his already prickly
personality even more intolerant.
Lawrence was in Italy with Frieda from
1913 to 1916, and he spent long and fruitful
periods on Lake Garda and in Liguria
where, in Tellaro and Fiascherino, he spent
a very happy time as regards his emotional
life and his creative activity. Despite his
intensive productivity, which had already
won him a reading public, Lawrence still
remained an author who was not generally
understood and with limited financial
resources. He was therefore forced to work
for newspapers and periodicals, writing
material that he would later collect in his
illuminating travel books.
From Picinisco to Capri
His “escape” from Picinisco to Capri was
decided suddenly, the night before Christmas
1919, after it had snowed all day. At 5.30 in
the morning the couple walked as far as
Atina. From here they took the mail boat to
Cassino where they caught the train to
Naples. They embarked for Capri at about
3.00 in the afternoon. However, as soon as
the boat had left the Gulf of Naples, the
difficult sailing conditions forced it to go back
and shelter in Sorrento for the whole night. It
was only in the late morning of the next day
that it was possible to land on the island. The
couple, feeling cold and seasick, found
lodgings in Palazzo Ferraro, a small
apartment with two bedrooms “right over
Morgano’s, on the neck of Capri, looking to
the sea and Naples on the right, the sea and
space on the left: the duomo the apple of our
eye.” The environment was warmer and
more welcoming than at Picinisco, but the
writer was not so happy about being so near
to the large “English clan”; writing to his
friend Catherine Carswell, he criticized the
“spiteful scandal”, the favourite sport in
Capri, in comparison to which “London is a
prayer-meeting” adding that “Suetonius
would blush to his heels, or Tiberius would
feel he’d been a fleabite.”
It was not the best of encounters with the
azure isle, and was made more difficult by a
very harsh winter. In a letter to another
friend, Lady Cynthia Asquith, he writes more
maliciously: «But Capri itself is a gossipy,
villa-stricken two-humped chunk of
limestone, a microcosmos that does heaven
much credit but mankind none at all. Truly,
humanly, it is a bit impossible – for long.”
Setting aside this severe judgment on Capri,
Lawrence was tormented all his life by a
restless nomadism that would not let him
remain for long in any one place. So much so
that during their stay of little more than two
months, Lawrence and Frieda went several
times to the mainland in search of a small
house, since only large and expensive
houses were available on Capri. Having
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