I Love Books/7

Lawrence was a restless soul. He and his wife traveled the world, exploring different types of society in Australia, Italy, the United States and other places as well. Lawrence never felt he truly belonged anywhere and he kept seeking refuge and strong male leadership in various societies. However, he ended up as the person who he was when he was born.
Lawrence was always poor and lived on what he earned through his writing. As people in the creative arts know, there rarely is a steady paycheck. So when he and his wife traveled they took the cheapest form of transportation and lived just like the poor people–the peasants–wherever he’d landed.
Lawrence loved Italy, not Rome or Florence; he felt at home in the hilly regions of northern Italy where people worked on small family farms. They called him Lorenzo. This was a kind of sign of respect because he was always friendly with the Italian peasants and–for a while–made himself a part of things in the village. They ate the crude, farm-grown fruits and vegetables and grains found in the village, and DHL always baked his own bread. They were included in all the religious festivals.
DHL loved the Italians for what the British lacked–naive warmth, vitality, openness. He described in his many travel writings the Italian men, how they adored their wives and children and took naturally the fruits of the earth. How Lawrence longed for these qualities. He stayed in Italy a long time. That’s where Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written, in the Villa Mirenda in northern Italy. Frieda, his wife, wrote that Lawrence composed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, writing in the “blue books” of students, sitting on the ground, his back against a pine tree. He was so still that little creatures like iguanas ran quickly over his legs. For a while, he was not a misfit. But then the tuberculosis got the better of him and he died in a sanitorium in Vence, France.
Why do I love this man, what he wrote and what he stood for? I have something in common with him. I’m a restless spirit also who never quite fits in. My restlessness has been cured by finding this farm to live on. But do I actually “fit in” here? Lawrence took his manuscript to a small Italian publisher called Pino Orioli, knowing no English publisher would touch it. Lawrence explained that the book was about sexual behaviors between two lovers. When Orioli told his workers, speaking Italian because they did not speak English, their remark was…”But we do it every day.”