D.H. Lawrence’s island-hopping

What more is there to do, except to stay?

And that we cannot do.

John Ashbery, “The Instruction Manual”

H. Lawrence’s lifelong motto was “When in doubt, move,” expressed in the impulsive-compulsive first sentence of his travel book Sea and Sardinia (1921), “Comes over one an absolute necessity to move.” When he seemed to be running out of new places to see, he had the urge to visit the most remote locales on earth: the Himalayas, Siberia, the South Seas and even Greenland. He exclaimed, “I wish I were going to Thibet—or Kamschatka—or Tahiti—to the Ultima ultima ultima Thule.  I feel sometimes, I shall go mad, because there is nowhere to go, no ‘new’ world.”

Yet Lawrence’s travel writings shifted the centre of interest from the places he visited to himself.  His desire to discover the landscape and culture of islands was a means  of exploring his own inner nature, and revealing his feelings and thoughts.  For Lawrence, travel was “a stream of reflections, where images intertwine with dark thoughts, and obscure emotion, and the whole life flows on turbulent and deep and transitory.  Travel is reflection, thinking back on travel and on life, and in the mirror sense, throwing back snatches of image.”

Constantly searching for a country and climate that would reveal his new mode of consciousness, an original way to think and create, he escaped from ordinary life to a total of ten alluring islands in England, the Mediterranean, Asia and the South Seas: the Isle of Wight, Capri, Sicily, Malta, Sardinia, Ceylon, Rarotonga, Tahiti, Port-Cros and Majorca.  Cut off from the mainland, islands seemed unusual and elite.  They were cheap, beautiful and, even in Italy, each island seemed like a different country.  Their scenery was spectacular and, surrounded by the sea, living on the islands was like sailing on a ship.

But when crowded they are constricted; when empty, they are isolated and remote.  Lawrence feared that if he ever found a perfect place—beautiful, unspoiled, healthy, inspiring, and cheap—he would have to settle down.  But he didn’t want a permanent locale, only an island a little less flawed than all the other places he had seen.

Lawrence’s travels were influenced by three factors: he came from an ugly industrial town and constantly sought natural beauty; he was poor and had to travel cheaply; he was sick and searched endlessly for a salubrious and restorative island.  He travelled east from Europe and around the world.  Eager to reach his friends in Ceylon, he sailed right past the stunning and congenial Greek islands.  On his return to Europe he visited his last two islands in France and Spain.  He journeyed with his German wife, Frieda, was stimulated by frequent movement and continued to write as he pressed on from place to place.  He was good at languages, and his knowledge of French, German, Italian and Spanish put him in touch with the local people.  He had the extraordinary ability to record his immediate impressions, describe the essence of a new island and capture what he called the spirit of place.

###

In August 1909 the 23-year-old Lawrence, accompanied by his mother and sister, took his maiden voyage to an island: the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.  He wrote rhapsodic but rather commonplace  observations to his girlfriend, Louie Burrows, about the attractive landscape of the holiday resort that provided a welcome relief from the industrial horrors of Nottingham: “Here we are, in a most lovely place.  We are sitting on the cliffs among the bracken looking down through the ash-trees at the sea.  The sea is shimmering pale green and purple.  It is the most charming place imaginable. . . .  We sailed round the island yesterday.  It was delightful.  We passed close to the Needles –great, ragged lumps of white rock walking out into the sea.”  He also saw Victoria’s favorite home and took a (perhaps justified) stab at the old queen and her Teutonic consort Prince Albert: “We went over Osborne House: it was very nice, but Queens have poor taste—German and vulgar.”  Lawrence set some scenes of his second novel, The Trespasser (1912), on the Isle of Wight.

###

Lawrence’s description of Capri emphasises his emotional response to the island.  His mood shifts, as always, from expectation and pleasure to disappointment and anger, as if he were recording the volatile temperature of a feverish patient.  On his first visit in 1919-20, Lawrence settled comfortably into the grandly named Palazzo Ferraro, above the caffé that was the center of social life in the town: “We have a little apartment here, 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—gall-apple.  The place is sympathetic, for a time.  But it seems to me like a stepping-stone from which one steps off, towards elsewhere: not an abiding place.”  His response was typically ambivalent.  The view was spectacular, but the only apple in his Eden was inedible.  The just-occupied flat was already temporary, a launching pad to his next unknown destination.

A week later he again praised his flat on the wasp-waisted island with a hint of displeasure.  The Piranesi staircase was sinister, the so-called cathedral was a whitewashed oddity: “We have two beautiful rooms and a kitchen we share—150 francs a month—at the top of this old palazzo, which has a staircase like a prison, not a palace.  It is extremely beautiful—just on the very neck of the little town, on the very neck of the island: we can touch the queer bubbly Duomo, almost, from our balcony: all the island goes beneath us: and then away on the right, the sea, Ischia in the distance, the bay of Naples: on the left the wide open Mediterranean.”  He also personified the sun hastening to his fiery destiny in Hades: “the weather is wondrous fine—brilliant, hot sun, brilliant, beautiful.  I watched him go down red into the sea.  How quickly he hurries round the edge of the horizon, as if he had an appointment away below.”

But still, still, there was a thorn in the flesh, an unsatisfied yearning, a vague fear, a sense of being trapped rather than stimulated by the oppressive weight of Roman history, which almost made him weep: “I get a strange nostalgia for I know not what.  I stand on my roof and evoke so many gods, and look at the four corners of the winds, and begin to feel even a bit frightened, as if I’d got to the middle and did not quite know how to get out.  The past is simply immense here, and not yet dead.  I feel like bursting into tears.”  Friends in wintry England envied his apparently carefree life on the paradisal island—where the sun shone, rocks glimmered and sea waved—and couldn’t understand what he was complaining about.

The main personal attraction was Compton Mackenzie, a mediocre but wealthy novelist who owned three villas on the island.  Lawrence called him “a man one can trust and like”—with the inevitable provisos: “He seems quite rich, and does himself well, and makes a sort of aesthetic figure . . . walking in a pale blue suit to match his eyes, and a large woman’s brown velour hat to match his hair.”  But after only a week on the blessed isle Lawrence was both sick in and sick of Capri.  He declared that the built-up rocky island, ruined by foreign homes, “a gossipy, villa-stricken, two-humped chunk of limestone. . . . Truly, humanly it is a bit impossible—for long.”

Mackenzie in 1914

In 1905 Joseph Conrad had called the notorious scandals on the island “atrocious, unspeakable, amusing, international, cosmopolitan and biblical.”  Intensely irritated by the sharp-tongued  English residents, in five famous words Lawrence condensed the place to an agitated mish-mash of second-rate writers and nasty quarrels, a “stewpot of semi-literary cats,” and added, “I can’t stand this island.  I shall have to risk expense and everything, and clear out.”  It was high time to launch off the ephemeral stepping-stone.  In late February 1920 he left Capri for Taormina, at the foot of the volcanic Mount Etna in Sicily, where  he lived for the next 18 months during 1920-22.

From Taormina in March 1920 Lawrence, ambivalent and capricious as ever, wrote a strangely apologetic letter to Mackenzie: “I hope you won’t scorn us too much for moving to Taormina.  It was chiefly, I think, the arid sort of dryness of the Capri rock: a dry, dry bone.  But I don’t know—I feel a bit of a stranger here—feel the darkness again.  There is no darkness in Capri.”  Capri was bright but too dry and seemed to affect his lungs; Taormina was too dark but healthier.  He had English friends in Capri; was an outsider with no one to talk to in Taormina.  He also made some cryptic comparisons.  Capri was an “unhatched” infertile egg.  Like  Lawrence himself, it was floating and lost at sea, “all the time like a ship which is going to arrive somewhere [but where?], and doesn’t.”  After only a week in Taormina, he confessed that he felt homesick for Capri.

On his third visit in 1926, he stayed with Earl and Achsah Brewster, expatriate American painters and Buddhists, in their villa Quattro Venti (Four Winds).  Lawrence told his sister in the darkest Midlands, “I saw most of the old people in Capri, all very nice to me indeed, but the place not half so jolly as it used to be—going dead.”

Capri appeared tangentially in two of Lawrence’s works in the early 1920s.  In his Introduction to Maurice Magnus’ Memoirs of the Foreign Legion (1924), he describes leaving Capri at dawn to accompany Magnus to the Benedictine monastery at Montecassino, and repeats the “bubbly roof” and sinister staircase from his letters: “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. . . . I went down the smelly dark stone stairs of the old palazzo.”

###

The triangular, mountainous Sicily, lying at the foot of the Italian peninsular between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, is only 100 miles north of Tunisia.  Throughout its history Sicily had been invaded and settled by the Greeks, Romans and Arabs up to the French, Spanish and finally the Italians.  Lawrence preferred Sicily to Capri.  Taormina was a handsome old town with a mild climate, strung along the spine of a hill overlooking the sparkling sea a few miles below, and dominated by a Dominican monastery.  In his house, Fontana Vecchia, named after the old fountain in the garden, Lawrence had the pleasurable sensation of being “on the brink,” able at any moment to hop out of Europe, across the sea to North Africa or to the ends of the earth: “We have quite a lovely villa on the green slope high above the sea, looking east over the blueness, with the hills and the snowy, shallow crest of Calabria on the left across the sea, where the straits of Messina begin to close in.  The fountain still runs, in a sort of little cave-place down the garden.”

But he soon became less enthusiastic and more critical and about the island.  When the winter storms swept down in November 1920, he lamented: “It rains with such persistency and stupidity here that one loses all one’s initiative and remains cut off.  Everywhere seems very far off.  Sicily at the moment feels like a land inside an aquarium—all water—and people like crabs and black-grey shrimps creeping on the bottom.”

As his mood changed with the fair weather he lyrically described the brilliant colours of the sunrise and the sea: “Away behind us the sun was just coming above the sea’s horizon, and the sky all golden, all a joyous, fire-heated gold, and the sea was glassy bright, the wind gone still, the waves sunk into long, low modulations, the foam of the wake was pale ice-blue in the yellow air.  Sweet, sweet wide morning on the sea, with the sun coming, swimming up, and a tall sailing barque, with her flat fore-ladder sails delicately across the light, and a far-far steamer on the electric, vivid morning horizon.”

In the Introduction to his translation of Giovanni Verga’s Sicilian novel Mastro-don Gesualdo (1925), he noted the powerful distinction between the exhilarating landscape and the impoverished peasant life: “Sicily, the beautiful, that which goes deepest into the blood.  It is so clear, so beautiful, so like the physical beauty of the Greek.  Yet the lives of the people all seem so squalid, so pottering, so despicable: like a crawling of beetles.  And then, the moment you get outside the grey and squalid walls of the village, how wonderful in the sun, with the land lying apart.”  As usual, he yearned for a cooler, cleaner, more orderly place, where the children did not beg and life was not sordid or degrading.

###

In May 1920 Lawrence accepted an invitation from his friend Mary Cannan to come as her guest to Malta, in the Mediterranean between Sicily and North Africa.  He thought he had escaped the clutches of the homosexual swindler and parasite, the former Legionnaire and future suicide Maurice Magnus.  But when he boarded the ship from Palermo to Valetta, traveling second class, he spotted Magnus chatting with the captain on the first-class deck—his ticket paid for with the money he had extracted from Lawrence.

In Valetta he inevitably ran into Magnus and they went for a drive around the island in a car.  Magnus loved Malta, which had been a strategic centre in the fight against Muslim power in the eastern Mediterranean and was now controlled by the British.  Lawrence, by contrast, found the place dreadful: “It’s a bit of stony desert by the sea, with unhappy villas and a sordid scrap-iron front, a bone-dry, bone-bare, hideous landscape. . . . A horrible island—to me: stone, and bath-brick dust. All the world might come here to sharpen its knives.”  As always, the itinerant invalid was affected by the intense heat.  He recalled, “We went to Malta, and it was so hot I feel quite stunned.  I shouldn’t wonder if my skin went black and my eyes went yellow.”

###

Only the powerful compulsion to travel, to go anywhere, enabled Lawrence to endure the tedious vicissitudes of Sardinia in January 1921.  Unlike most writers who romanticised and glorified their experience, he was frank about the torments of his trip and his own self-created hardship.  Economic necessity determined his mode of travel.  He could not afford luxury, or even comfort, and had to accept crude transport and lodging.  As soon as he had devoured the good English bacon and tea he had brought from Sicily, his food became horrible.

Lawrence had several motives for travelling to Sardinia.  He took Ulysses as his model and wanted “to be free of all the hemmed-in life—the horror of human tension, the absolute insanity of machine persistence.”  He vainly hoped a change of place would lead to a change of heart.  He had a prewar nostalgia for a lost past and was attracted to a remote place free from his own cultural associations, which he could penetrate in a “fascinating act of self-discovery—back, back down the old ways of time.”  Sardinia, which (Lawrence claimed) “has no history, no date, no race, no offering,” lay outside the circuit of civilization.  There the strange, sinister spirit of place still prevailed against the grey, mechanical sameness of modern urban life.

In contrast to what he called the callous, slovenly and extortionate Sicilians, the more remote Sardinians had a “pleasant natural robustness of spirit, and something of a feudal free-and-easiness” without constraint or presumption.  The solitary, self-contained men did not idealise their women, and were courteous, hospitable and unselfconscious.  In the market of Cagliari he saw “peasant women, sometimes barefoot, dressed in their tight little bodices and voluminous coloured skirts behind piles of vegetables.  I have never seen such splendour as under the market roof at Cagliari: so raw and gorgeous.”

By the time Lawrence got from the port of Cagliari in the south to Nuoro in the centre, where of course there was nothing to see, he felt wittily relieved—emphasised by the alliteration of p and s—from touristic duties: “Sights are an irritating bore.  Thank heaven there isn’t a bit of Perugino or anything Pisan in the place: that I know of.  Happy is the town that has nothing to show.  What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves.”

###

For six weeks in March-April 1922 Lawrence again visited Earl and Achsah Brewster, his American expatriate friends, who had become Buddhists, studied Pali scriptures and now lived in Kandy, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).  Lawrence and Frieda sailed from Naples on the P&O liner Osterley in late February, passed Sicily and Crete, went through the Suez Canal and entered the Red Sea.  In the clear desert air he saw Mount Sinai, a symbol to Lawrence of the cruel Old Testament God, which stood up “like a vengeful dagger that was dipped in blood many ages ago, so sharp and defined and old pink-red in colour.”  He translated Verga’s Mastro-don Gesualdo aboard ship and reached Colombo in mid-March.

Kandy, a hill town in the center of Ceylon about fifty miles northeast of Colombo, is one of the most beautiful places in Asia.  The views are magnificent, the foliage luxuriant; the town has a large lake in the center and is dominated by an exotic temple that is said to hold a tooth of the Buddha.  The Brewsters had leased an old bungalow with a broad veranda and many servants, about a mile and a half from the center of town.  It was isolated in the midst of the jungle, stood on top of a high hill, and overlooked Kandy Lake and the Great Elephant River.  Lawrence led a peaceful life with the gentle Brewsters.  He walked through the jungle, watched the animals, boated on the river, bought sapphires and visited the temples in this holy place of southern Buddhism.  He translated Verga for four hours in the morning and in the afternoon read the work aloud to his friends.  

Temple of the Totoh, Kandy

The outstanding event of his visit was the Perahera ceremony.  Buddha’s sacred tooth was taken out of the temple, placed on the back of an elephant and carried in a colorful religious procession before great crowds of people who had swarmed into Kandy for the festival.  Lawrence sent his sister a breathless, excited account of the lavish spectacle:

The Perahera was wonderful: it was night, and flaming torches of coconut blazing, and the great elephants in their trappings, about a hundred, and the dancers with tomtoms and bagpipes, and half naked and jeweled, then the Kandyan chiefs in their costumes, and more dancers, and more elephants, and more chiefs, and more dancers, so wild and strange and perfectly fascinating, heaving along by the flames of torches in the hot, still, starry night.  Afterwards fireworks over the lake, and thousands and thousands of natives, so that it looked like some queer dream when the fire flared up and showed their thousands of dark faces and white wraps packed on the banks.

Lawrence also expressed his excitement about the dazzling midnight procession under the bright tropical stars in his long, incantatory, satiric poem, “Elephant,” whose theme is the transformation and expression of power.

But the extreme heat and steamy humidity of Ceylon, which would not have bothered a healthy man, had a terrible effect on Lawrence.  He found it difficult to breathe in that debilitating climate, the antithesis of the dry Alpine air recommended for lung disease.  He could scarcely drag himself around, but always refused to be pulled in a rickshaw.  Achsah Brewster explained that “Lawrence sat disconsolately, his voice reduced to a minor key, reiterating that he felt his ‘heart’s blood oozing away, but literally ebbing out drop by drop.’ ”  He later told Earl that he loathed most of his time in Ceylon and had never felt so sick in his entire life.  He suffered from dysentery and, though he did not know it at the time, had also contracted malaria.

Lawrence shifted, quite dramatically and characteristically, from fascination with the spectacular beauty to disenchantment with the teeming masses of Ceylon.  Only two weeks after the Perahera he was repelled by the “barbaric substratum of Buddhism” as well as by the overpowering heat, the oleaginous people, the sickening smells, the claustrophobic jungle, the screeching of birds and animals, the nastiness of the monks and tawdriness of the temples.  In two cathartic letters he exploded with anger about all the things he loathed:

Here the heat is terrific—and I hate the tropics.  It is beautiful, in a lush, tangled, towsled, lousy sort of way.  The natives too are quite good-looking, dark-skinned and erect.  But something about it all just makes me sick. . . . My inside has never hurt me so much in all my 36 years as in these three weeks.—I’m going away. . . .

The East doesn’t get me at all.  Its boneless suavity, and the thick, choky feel of the tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrific noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night: and the scents that make me feel sick, the perpetual nauseous overtone of cocoanut and cocoanut fibre and oil, the sort of tropical sweetness, which to me suggests an undertang of blood, hot blood, and thin sweat; the undertaste of blood and sweat in the nauseous tropical fruits; the nasty faces and yellow robes of the Buddhist monks, the little vulgar dens of temples: all this makes up Ceylon to me, and all this I cannot bear.

As usual, he blamed his illness on the climate and told Earl, “My being requires a different physical and psychic environment: the white man is not for this region.”   He was glad to have seen that corner of the East, where he’d once foolishly planned to settle, so he would have no more illusions about it.  In 1928, when he was living in France, he recalled the menacing atmosphere of Ceylon: “The nights were black, oh black.  The jungle was just outside the bungalow and it seemed to step closer and bend over us when the darkness came.  Sounds boomed, some animal shot a cry at you.”

In Ceylon, cut off for the first time in his life from Western culture, he felt physically ill and psychologically threatened.  Once his initial enthusiasm had quickly changed to extreme, almost comically hysterical revulsion, Lawrence was eager to escape and continue his search for a healthy climate that would cure his illness and save his life.  He always thought that if he could get away from a noxious place he would get better.

###

Lawrence spent the next three months in Australia.  Then, before sailing in August 1922 from Sydney to Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and then 715 miles to Tahiti, Lawrence told Earl Brewster, with perverse satisfaction, that he actually courted disappointment in the South Pacific and announced one of the cardinal principles of his savage pilgrimage: “I’m determined to try the South Sea Isles.  Don’t expect to catch on there either.”  If he ever found an island he really liked, he’d have to find something offensive so he could experience the pleasure of rejecting it.

Earl H. Brewster ca. 1928.

As he’d predicted, these islands could no longer sustain the legend of an exotic paradise established by Herman Melville, Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson.  Lawrence found the tropics as rancid and revolting as Ceylon, and thought the people were “ugly, false, spoiled and diseased”.  Wasted by illness himself, he detested plump people and their ambience of illness: “Papeete is a poor sort of place, mostly Chinese, natives in European clothes, and fat.  I never want to stay in the tropics.  There is a sort of sickliness about them, smell of cocoa-nut oil and sort of palm-tree reptile nausea.  They are supposed to be the earthly paradises: these South Sea Isles.  You can have ’em.”  He added, with his usual contradictions, “We got pretty tired of Tahiti, though she was comfortable.  But the people uninspiring . . . Hot—lovely Island—but town spoilt—don’t really want to stay.  But having a very good trip.”  He put the final knife in by exclaiming, “If you are thinking of coming here, don’t.  These soft brown people are disappointing.”

###

After returning to Europe from fifteen months in New Mexico, Lawrence spent October and November 1928 with his writer-friend Richard Aldington on the Mediterranean island of Port-Cros.  The increasingly ill Lawrence sent the Brewsters a lively description of the island, where they stayed in an old coastguard fort about 40 miles off the coast of Toulon: “The Vigie isn’t a castle but a top of a hill with a moat and a low fort wall enclosing a bare space, about 2 acres, where the wild lavender and the heather grow.  The rooms are sort of cabins under the walls—windows facing the inner space, loop-holes looking out to sea—a nice large sitting room—bedroom each—then across, a great room where we throw the logs, and a kitchen, pantry and little dining-room.  It’s very nice, rather rough, but not really uncomfortable—and plenty of wood to burn in the open fireplaces.”

His favorable first impression was inevitably followed by disillusionment and recognition of the hardships of living there: “The island of Port-Cros is rather lovely, all tangled forest like Corsica.  The Vigie—fortress—is an hour’s stony walk uphill—and no way except to walk. . . . The island is all  green pine-tops, seen from above—then blue sea and other islands.  It’s nice because one is quite alone—but of course I don’t want to live here.”  When the weather suddenly changed, they were marooned, then left as soon as possible: “We’ve had great storms and torrents of rain, and the boat doesn’t come and then there’s no food—so we are leaving the island.”

###

In April-June 1929 Lawrence found Palma de Majorca, off the east coast of Barcelona, quite pleasant and Mediterranean, not terribly exciting but comfortably restful: “This island—Majorca—is rather like Sicily, but not as beautiful, and much more asleep.  But it has that southern sea quality, out of the world, in another world.  I like that—and the sleep is good for me.”  Praising the dolce far niente atmosphere, he remarked, “This is a wonderful place for doing nothing—the time passes rapidly in a long stretch of nothingness—broken by someone fetching us out in a motor, or somebody else in a donkey-cart.”

Palma Cathedral in Palma de Mallorca, Majorca, Spain

His mercurial moods depended on his health and the weather, and could change from day to day: “Frieda thinks I ought to be in ecstasies over this place—Majorca is one of her oldest dreams—and I don’t really care for it.  True, the sea is usually a most heavenly blue, and the old town lies round the bay, pale, phantom in the strong light, all a funny heapy-heap of buff and white.”  But “this place gets on my nerves all the time, the people are dead and staring.  I can’t bear their Spanishy faces, dead unpleasant masks, a bit like city English—and my malaria came back.”

Excursions distracted but did not please him: “Yesterday we motored to Valldemossa, where [like Frieda and Lawrence] Chopin was so happy and George Sand hated it.  –It was lovely looking out from the monastery, into the dimness of the plain below, and the great loose roses of the monastery gardens  so brilliant and spreading themselves out.—then inside, the cloister so white and silent.”

He liked the tranquil, restful island, but always found the worm in the bud:

“Majorca is very pleasant and sunny, right on the sea, and very peaceful,  They call it the island of calm, and indeed it is. We went across to the other side of the island.  There are lovely little bays with pine trees and sand and no people.  One could be a lonely hermit here if one wanted—and the climate seems to me very good, about the best in Europe, I should say.  Yet there is a certain deadness in the human atmosphere at least, which makes it unattractive in the long run.  I don’t want to stay.”  An attack of malaria prevented him from renting a house on the island, or from travelling to Madrid and the cities of southern Spain.

###

Lawrence had been glad to meet the writer Compton Mackenzie on Capri, but resented his popular success and wealth, his precious personal style and patronising manner.  In “The Man Who Loved Islands” (1927) he satirised Mackenzie, who actually owned islands in the English Channel and in the Inner and the Outer Hebrides.  In the story Cathcart, a hopeless egoist and failed writer, is possessive and domineering, perverse and morbid.  He becomes disillusioned with three increasingly smaller islands and, with no inner peace, cannot find happiness.  The first spooky island swallows up thousands of pounds and impoverishes him; on the second he marries a serving girl, then abandons her and their child, and severs his last human contact; on the third tiny, barren and ascetic island, the monkish man deliberately cuts himself off from all human contact.

The moral fable begins: “There was a man who loved islands.  He was born on one, but it didn’t suit him, as there were too many other people on it, besides himself.  He wanted an island all of his own. . . . This story will show how tiny it has to be, before you can presume to fill it with your own personality.”  On the first island a cow falls off a cliff and marks the beginning of malice, fear and hatred among the resident families: “The island was still mysterious and fascinating. But it was also treacherous and cruel, secretly fathomlessly malevolent.”  So Cathcart has to sell it at a considerable loss to a hotel developer.

He could walk around the second island, a hump of rock in the sea, in only twenty minutes.  His housekeeper becomes his lover.  But they are driven by her will rather than by his passion, neither of them really wants the connection and he resents the power she has gained over him.  The third islet, deliberately cut off from the world, has seabirds but no inhabitants.  Like the biblical Adam, Cathcart names everything he sees.  But he feels “profound repulsion of the whole of the animal creation,” and asks “What repulsive god invented animals and evil-smelling men?”  His regressive retreat moves from flowery life to starvation and frozen death.  Seeking impossible to endure solitude, he ignores John Donne’s admonition, “No man is an island.”

A perpetuum mobile who owned nothing, Lawrence condemned Mackenzie’s acquisitive materialism.  But this fable is also a criticism of Lawrence himself, whose travels led him, as Andrew Marvell wrote in “Bermudas,” to isles long unknown yet far kinder than his own.  He, too, constantly searched for a healthy place to form an ideal community, but was always dissatisfied and always moved on to continue his quest.

###

As Lawrence became quite ill, he rather bitterly concluded, “As I get older I care less and less about merely seeing things or places—or people. . . . I think you shouldn’t ask too much from the outside world” or you would only become more disappointed after your travels.  In letters of 1922 Lawrence expressed his unusual voyager’s credo: “Travel seems to me a splendid lesson in disillusion—chiefly that. . . . One suffers getting adjusted, but that is part of the adventure. . . . I love trying things and discovering how I hate them.”  He had no permanent home, and kept moving until he died and couldn’t move himself any more.  But he continued to move even after his death in 1930, when his ashes were transferred from France and reburied on his ranch in New Mexico.

Jeffrey Meyers has published D. H .Lawrence and the Experience of Italy (1982),  H. Lawrence and Tradition (1985), The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence (1987) and  H. Lawrence: A Biography (1990).

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.