0 Cop CAPRI 25 - Caesar Augustus

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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 ▼ 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 ▼ 63
PERSONAGGI 64 za di Capri, per essere sicuro di non far tardi; le lampade elettriche della piazza illuminavano la facciata del campanile; ed eravamo, allora, ad un tiro di pietra, lassù nel Palazzo Ferraro, di fronte al tetto a cupole del piccolo duomo. Strana, buia mattina d’inverno, col mare aperto, che si vedeva oltre i tetti, dalla finestra, e la linea sottile delle luci di Napoli che scintillavano, lontanissime». L’amico Mackenzie I due mesi a Capri furono quindi grigi e difficili, nonostante la coppia cercasse di allacciare amicizia con i pochi che accettavano la loro compagnia, tra cui lo scrittore Compton Mackenzie, che Lawrence stimava. Ciononostante lo scrittore era affascinato dall’isola, specie quando s’immergeva nel maestoso paesaggio che ammirava dalle sue alture. Così scriveva ancora alla Asquit: «Vedere la costa velata con le sue rocce a picco, le chiare montagne rocciose, è così bello, come per Ulisse, che ci si disfa delle proprie incarnazioni per riacquistare un io perduto, mediterraneo, anteriore a noi». I momenti felici, però, duravano poco, e ricominciavano i disagi e le incomprensioni. Lo scrittore, ossessionato dai problemi del sesso, mentre era allora tutto concentrato nella elaborazione di Fantasia dell’incoscio, un giorno si produsse in Piazza in una torbida sce- David H. Lawrence con la moglie neggiata.Indican- Frieda. La coppia arrivò a Capri per la prima volta nel dicembre do la patta dei pan- del 1919. taloni, proclamò D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. con la sua voce The couple first visited Capri in December 1919. stridula: «Quello che dobbiamo imparare è a pensare qui». L’episodio fece grande scandalo che emarginò ancora di più la coppia, tanto da spingerla ad abbandonare l’isola. Destinazione Sicilia, prima tappa Taormina. Era la metà di marzo del 1920. Lo scrittore così scrive della decisione di lasciare Capri all’amica Carswell: «Qualunque cosa avvenga, me ne devo andare da questa Capri simile alla malevola Cranford: troppo per i miei nervi. Tutto ciò mi inaridisce il cuore». All’amico Mackenzie riserva, invece, parole più piane: «Spero ▼ BETTMAN - CORBIS visited the Amalfi coast many times, they had fallen in love with it and would have liked to move there, sick of “the stewpot of semi-literary cats” living on Capri. In the same period the writer organized a brief “escape” to Montecassino, also, recorded in his “Introduction” to Magnus’s Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, in which he magically describes the departure from the island: “I always remember getting up in the black dark of the January morning, and making a little coffee on the spirit-lamp, and watching the clock, the bigfaced, blue old clock on the campanile in the piazza in Capri, to see I wasn't late. The electric light in the piazza lit up the face of the campanile. And we were then, a stone's throw away, high in the Palazzo Ferraro, opposite the bubbly roof of the little duomo. Strange dark winter morning, with the open sea beyond the roofs, seen through the side window, and the thin line of the lights of Naples twinkling far, far off.” His friend Meckenzie So the two months they spent on Capri were grey and difficult, though the couple tried to make friends with the few people who would accept their company, among them the writer Compton Mackenzie, whom Lawrence admired. But despite all this, the author was fascinated by the island especially when he immersed himself in the majestic countryside that he admired from the island’s high ground. This is what he wrote to Cynthia Asquith: “[to] see the dim, sheer, rocky coast, the clean rocky mountains, is so beautiful, so like Ulysses, that one sheds one’s avatars, and recovers a lost self, Mediterranean, anterior to us.” The happy times did not last very long, however, and the discomforts and misunderstandings began again. While he was concentrating on writing the essay Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Lawrence, with his obsession for sex problems, one day acted out a rather crude scene in the Piazza. Pointing to his flies, he proclaimed in a strident voice: “What we need to learn is to think here.” The episode caused a great scandal that marginalized the couple even further, so far as to push them to abandon the island. Their destination was Sicily, with the first stop at Taormina. It was the middle of March 1920. Lawrence wrote about his decision to ▼
Page 1 and 2: COPIA OMAGGIO EDIZIONI PRC COMPLIME
Page 3 and 4: 6 Lucio Dalla durante un concerto a
Page 5 and 6: Camerelle rantina, di cui ancora og
Page 7 and 8: conobbe Mabel Norman, ricca e affas
Page 9 and 10: LUOGHI 16 1947, quando per la prima
Page 11 and 12: Usanze, consuetudini e cerimonie ch
Page 13 and 14: del gruppo musicale intonava l’Av
Page 15 and 16: 24 INTERIOR L’essenza del lino Fr
Page 17 and 18: 26 INTERIOR Per rinnovare la voglia
Page 19 and 20: anni, sei lingue parlate perfettame
Page 21 and 22: Per Anne Nivat «Arrivare a piedi s
Page 23 and 24: il cavernicolo Come Diefenbach, Pau
Page 25 and 26: millenni al tormento del ferro di b
Page 27 and 28: 38 U. DʼANIELLO FASHION Idee di ma
Page 29 and 30: 40 NATURA Sinfonia blu di TULLIA RI
Page 31 and 32: NATURA 42 Fries, a “riscoprire”
Page 33 and 34: NATURA del popolo» (dall’autobio
Page 35 and 36: NATURA 48 una pelle di alabastro. Q
Page 37 and 38: affacciano su via Fuorlovado, nel c
Page 39 and 40: un... pesce no forte, capaci di abb
Page 41 and 42: L’offerta di pietanze di pesce ne
Page 43 and 44: Braciole di tonno Tuna steaks Ingre
Page 45 and 46: 60 PERSONAGGI L’uomo che amava le
Page 47: PERSONAGGI 62 Scrivendo ad un’ami

0 Cop CAPRI 25 - Caesar Augustus

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