A Sense of Ancient Gods
Cód:
491_9781999883829
1919 — The Great War is finally over. D.H. Lawrence had not been called up, his health too frail for military service. But for himself and his German wife Frieda, the war years had brought trials and hardships of their own. In 1915 they had moved to Cornwall, partly to live cheaply and partly to escape the clamour of war, (to which he was opposed). But in 1917, they fell under the absurd suspicion of signalling to German u-boats off the Cornish coast, and were summarily expelled from the county. They returned to London, spending the next two years moving about, staying with various friends. At a time of great patriotism, Lawrence’s anti-war voice had made him unpopular, his new novel, The Rainbow, had been banned for obscenity, and the Cornish episode had left its mark on him. At the end of the war, Lawrence was poor, embittered and physically exhausted.In September 1919, he finally received his long awaited new passport, and in November he set off once more for his beloved Italy. Frieda had gone to Germany to see what condition her poor old mother was in, [Germany was being made to pay the price of the Kaiser’s war, rations were meagre]. At the beginning of December, she joined Lawrence in Florence. There was a great collective sigh of relief to finally be out of England and back in a country they loved, and where they had spent two happy productive periods before the war.After a few days sightseeing in Florence, they headed south for Rome — and it is at this point that they leave the well-trodden path of great Italian art and culturel, and make a little-known journey out into the wild Abruzzo mountains to stay at the house of a strange old character who had been an artist’s model in late Victorian London, one Orazio Cervi.It is unlike anything they had expected, as if they have crossed a hidden frontier into a land of myth, the unearthly paean of ancient bagpipes, the men, like brigands, with conical hats, skin sandals, and white swa
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