Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Penguin Classics (1997), Paperback, 320 pages
Description
The imperial road to Italy goes from Munich across the Tyrol, through Innsbruck and Bozen to Verona, over the mountains. Here the great processions passed as the emperors went South, or came home again from rosy Italy to their own Germany. And how much has that old imperial vanity clung to the German soul? Did not the German kings inherit the empire of bygone Rome? It was not a very real empire, perhaps, but the sound was high and splendid. Maybe a certain Gr ssenwahn is inherent in the German nature. If only nations would realize that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other's particular nature, how much simpler it would all be. The imperial procession no longer crosses the mountains, going South. That is almost forgotten, the road has almost passed out of mind. But still it is there, and its signs are standing.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member MSarki
I liked this Twilight in Italy, yes, but rated it four stars as if I really liked it. The reason being it was so well-written. The subject not so interesting to me in total, but it felt as if I were in a dream of sorts. Sea and Sardinia is beginning more down to earth for me and I am interested in
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seeing how he brings the Queen Bee into the more personal and intimate equation. Show Less
LibraryThing member AlanWPowers
Herbie, as we were wont to call the Love and Lover-man, lived on Lago di Garda,
where I babysat my two year old grandson at Riva del Garda while his Mom was off working for a London law firm most of the week. With classic errors in the Italian I had read for 34 years, I reassured him, “Non
Herbie was further south, past the lemon groves; in his day prior to WWI, my Riva was on the Austrian border, and there was smuggling across the mountains. Lawrence was down in Gargnano with its two nearby monasteries, San Tommaso up on a hill above the town, the “Church of the Eagle,” and San Francesco right on the shore. Looking for the path up to the “plateau of heaven,” “I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village”(26). These passages led to old steps, used for centuries as occasional urinals. I first found these narrow paths in fortified hilltowns around Carrara like Nicola and Fontia. Wonderful to walk, with the cart-wide steps with a rounded lip for mule-drawn carts. At Nicola I saw pieces of chicken thrown out of second-story windows down to the pavement for cats and maybe ravens.
Lawrence goes to the Theater at Salò on Garda. He sees D’Annunzio, Ibsen’s Spettri, which he considers depressingly phallic in the Scandinavian way, crossed with Italian phallicism (one thinks of the engraved phalluses at Pompei doorways), Good Luck. One night his padrone, the Di Paoli, invite him to Amleto, uno drama inglese.
The evening honors the Actor-Director Enrico, sturdy short lead, on whom DHL is merciless, DHL arrives late, near the end of Act I: “Enrico looked a sad fool in his
melancholy black. The doublet…made him look stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs”(73).
We may forget that for all his confrontation of bourgeois British manners, Herbie
was thoroughly British in his valuing of dress and appearance—the aristocratic leg, the tallish figure. He accuses the whole cast, essentially, of not being English. The King and Queen were “touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman…The King, her noble consort…had new clothes. His body was real enough, but it had nothing to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by themselves”(74).
But Lawrence is also very critical of Hamlet the character: “His nasty poking into his mother…his conceited perversion with Ophelia, make him always intolerable…repulsive, based on self-dislike.” Enrico played him as “the modern Italian, suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, laboring in a sense of physical corruption.” A later Italian historian, Fabio Cusin, would agree on the suspicion and isolation and self-disgust, in his Antistoria d’Italia (1970).
DHL’s says To be, or not… “does not mean to live or not to live…[but the] supreme I, the King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be”(77). He runs on about the deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, or the desire to be immortal. He argues for the ancients, the supreme I, the Ego ruled, but for Christians, supremacy involves renunciation, surrender to the Not-Self. The pagan Ego became the greatest sin: Pride, the way to total damnation.
A US citizen in 2018 cannot help but wonder how the “Christian Right (wing)” came to forget the worst Christian sin of Pride, the foolish pride of the US Trumpster president.
where I babysat my two year old grandson at Riva del Garda while his Mom was off working for a London law firm most of the week. With classic errors in the Italian I had read for 34 years, I reassured him, “Non
Show More
preoccuparti, tua Momma sta andando,” Don’t worry, your Mom is going away. Herbie was further south, past the lemon groves; in his day prior to WWI, my Riva was on the Austrian border, and there was smuggling across the mountains. Lawrence was down in Gargnano with its two nearby monasteries, San Tommaso up on a hill above the town, the “Church of the Eagle,” and San Francesco right on the shore. Looking for the path up to the “plateau of heaven,” “I was quite baffled by the tortuous, tiny, deep passages of the village”(26). These passages led to old steps, used for centuries as occasional urinals. I first found these narrow paths in fortified hilltowns around Carrara like Nicola and Fontia. Wonderful to walk, with the cart-wide steps with a rounded lip for mule-drawn carts. At Nicola I saw pieces of chicken thrown out of second-story windows down to the pavement for cats and maybe ravens.
Lawrence goes to the Theater at Salò on Garda. He sees D’Annunzio, Ibsen’s Spettri, which he considers depressingly phallic in the Scandinavian way, crossed with Italian phallicism (one thinks of the engraved phalluses at Pompei doorways), Good Luck. One night his padrone, the Di Paoli, invite him to Amleto, uno drama inglese.
The evening honors the Actor-Director Enrico, sturdy short lead, on whom DHL is merciless, DHL arrives late, near the end of Act I: “Enrico looked a sad fool in his
melancholy black. The doublet…made him look stout and vulgar, the knee-breeches seemed to exaggerate the commonness of his thick, rather short, strutting legs”(73).
We may forget that for all his confrontation of bourgeois British manners, Herbie
was thoroughly British in his valuing of dress and appearance—the aristocratic leg, the tallish figure. He accuses the whole cast, essentially, of not being English. The King and Queen were “touching. The Queen, burly little peasant woman…The King, her noble consort…had new clothes. His body was real enough, but it had nothing to do with his clothes. They established a separate identity by themselves”(74).
But Lawrence is also very critical of Hamlet the character: “His nasty poking into his mother…his conceited perversion with Ophelia, make him always intolerable…repulsive, based on self-dislike.” Enrico played him as “the modern Italian, suspicious, isolated, self-nauseated, laboring in a sense of physical corruption.” A later Italian historian, Fabio Cusin, would agree on the suspicion and isolation and self-disgust, in his Antistoria d’Italia (1970).
DHL’s says To be, or not… “does not mean to live or not to live…[but the] supreme I, the King and Father. To be or not to be King, Father, in the Self supreme? And the decision is, not to be”(77). He runs on about the deepest impulse in man, the religious impulse, or the desire to be immortal. He argues for the ancients, the supreme I, the Ego ruled, but for Christians, supremacy involves renunciation, surrender to the Not-Self. The pagan Ego became the greatest sin: Pride, the way to total damnation.
A US citizen in 2018 cannot help but wonder how the “Christian Right (wing)” came to forget the worst Christian sin of Pride, the foolish pride of the US Trumpster president.
Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1916
Physical description
320 p.; 7.72 inches
ISBN
0140189947 / 9780140189940
Local notes
Cambridge Lawrence Edition