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| Villa Fontana Vecchia with orange groves below in c.1920 when Lawrence and his wife Frieda moved in |
The villa, built into the side of the mountain, has stone walls that are a half-meter thick. Many of those stones were taken from a Roman aqueduct that predates Christ. The villa fronts to the southeast, so there are few days of cold wind. As long as one keeps the doors and windows closed and stays bundled up, the house stays reasonably comfortable in spite of the cold temperatures in winter. The sun is shining in the window and the coffee is hot. This is a fine day to write about this magical villa.
Built in the around 1650, Fontana Vecchia is one of the
best-kept secrets of Taormina. One would be hard pressed to find a single
Taormina resident that even recognizes the names of these two famous writers.
Yet, a street is named for D.H. Lawrence and another for the villa Fontana
Vecchia. The natives go about their business without so much as a thought about
these literary greats as though they never existed, yet alone lived among them.
Wonderful, beautiful, tranquil, serene, awe-inspiring, magic
and good fortune are a few adjectives that come to mind when describing the
villa. D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, lived here in 1920-22. When
Lawrence lived in the house was located in a field of orange and lemon groves.
A winding dirt road led to town. Thirty years later, Truman Capote moved into
the villa. Rather than describe this experience solely in my words, I will let
two writers explain in their own words what it was like for them.
D H Lawrence
In 1914, Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, the
daughter of a German baron and a [distant] cousin of the famous German ace who
shot down eighty Allied planes in World War I. When the couple landed in Italy
in 1920, they had scarcely more than pocket change. Lawrence had twenty-nine
English pounds to his name.
Brenda Maddox, in her biography, D.H. Lawrence, states, "Almost
as soon as he returned from Monte Cassino, he and Frieda headed south and
rented a fine square villa, the Fontana Vecchia, on the outskirts of Taormina
on Sicily's east coast. It was really a move from a small English colony [Capri]
to a larger one, with many of the same friends..."
The Lawrences loved Fontana Vecchia and might have stayed
on years longer were it not for his wandering nature. It was a veritable
Garden of Eden with a garden filled with orange and lemon trees and a marvellous
view of the Ionian Sea and the largest active volcano in Europe, Mount Etna [the view to Etna is actually the opposite way]. To make it more appealing, the villa was priced
right--only two thousand lire (ten dollars) a year. During the two years
Lawrence was here, he completed some of his most impressive works, and left
Sicily an internationally famous writer with financial security.
Frieda expressed her delight with Fontana Vecchia. "Along
our rocky road the peasants rode past into the hills on their donkeys singing
loudly; the shepherds drove their goats along, playing their reed pipes as in
the days of the Greeks."
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| Taormina - View from the Greek theatre towards Etna |
All through the winter roses bloomed. Their daily lives were governed by a simple rhythm, always with Lawrence helping with the household tasks. They made many excursions away from the villa, but Frieda loved her Fontana Vecchia, "Our own house above the almond trees, and the sea in the cove below, the lovely dawn-sea, where the sun rose with a splendour like trumpets every morning!"
During the period Lawrence lived at Fontana Vecchia, he
completed one play Touch and Go (1920) and three of his novels were published,
Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), and Arron's Rod (1922). The Lost
Girl did well and won the James Tait Black Prize in Edinburgh and brought a
prize of a hundred pounds, the only work of Lawrence to ever win an award.
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| The Bay of Taormina, Sicily. "This is the dawn-coast of Sicily. Nay, the dawn-coast of Europe. Steep, like a vast cliff, dawn-forward." (Sea and Sardinia) |
In a letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith in May, 1920, Lawrence writes, "Fun if you came to Taormina this summer; but August and September are supposed to be monstrous hot. But perhaps you like heat. We in our Fontana Vecchia are about ten minutes out of town, lovely and cool. We've had some sweltering days already--but our house with its terraces doesn't get too hot: so many green leaves. It is very dry here--all the roses out, and drying up, all the grass cut, the earth brown. There is a lot of land, peasant land, to this house. I have just been down in the valley by the cisterns, in a lemon grove that smells very sweet, getting summer nespoli. Nespoli look like apricots, and taste a bit like them--but they are pear-shaped. They're a sort of medlar. Wish you had some, they are delicious, and we've got tree-fulls. The sea is pale and shimmery today, the prickly pears are in yellow blossom.
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| Cover of "Sun" |
"Meanwhile Secker is actually doing Women in Love and The Rainbow. That is, he is sending Women in Love to press at once, so he says--and The Rainbow to follow almost immediately, if all goes well. Of course, he is rather in a funk, fearing the censor. Meanwhile life at Fontana Vecchia is very easy, indolent, and devil-may-care." [Secker's wife Rina was inspiration for Lawrence's sensual short story "Sun", set around a villa very like Fontana Vecchia... "...she had a house above the bluest of seas, with a vast garden, or vineyard, all vines and olives, dropping steeply in terrace after terrace, to the strip of coast plain; and the garden full of secret places, deep groves of lemon far down in the cleft of earth, and hidden, pure green reservoirs of water;then a spring issuing out of a little cavern, where the old Sicules had drunk before the Greeks came; and a grey goat bleating, stabled in an ancient tomb with the niches empty. There was the scent of mimosa, and beyond, the snow of the volcano."]
And as Lawrence is departing he writes, " Very dark
under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden,
Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible.
Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman
tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip
under its massive tilt. Ah, dark garden, dark garden with your olives and your
wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces
ledged high above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the
rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate, on to the cruel steep stony road. So
under dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village.
There I have got so far."
The ancient Roman
tomb predates Christ and lies but thirty feet from the villa. Many of the
trees are still living. The fragrance of jasmine and orange blossoms still
lingers in the air. The path is now bricked and leads down to the gate below,
but in the night it is still dark and treacherous.
Lawrence's life in Fontana Vecchia was not entirely
pleasant. As early as 1916, he had begun to battle with Frieda during their
infamous rows, often in front of friends. Their Sicilian landlord claimed he
could hear the couple's screaming from his villa two hundred meters away.
Lawrence's novel The Rainbow was seized and banned on the
grounds of obscenity, and he learned that his novel Women in Love had been
described in John Bull as "a shameless study of sex depravity which in
direct proportion to the skill of its literary execution becomes unmentionable
vile."
If that weren't enough, Lawrence was sued for libel
by Philip Heseltine, who charged that Lawrence's effeminate character Halliday
was a representation of himself. After the publisher approached Heseltine, he
accepted a settlement of fifty pounds. Heseltine consoled himself by growing a
beard. The payment of hush-money so enraged Lawrence he let his distaste for
Heseltine and his wife be known to a long time friend, Samual Koteliansky, "Well,
they are both such abject shits it is a pity they can’t be flushed down a
sewer."
Frieda had a legion of lovers during the Lawrence's rocky
marriage. Her episodes continued at Fontana Vecchia. Brenda Maddox sheds
more light on the subject in her book, D.H. Lawrence. "The full list of
Frieda's lovers, it has been said, would fill a small telephone book.
Unfortunately, the book has not been found. (One lover, who declared himself
somewhat belatedly, was an elderly Italian immigrant living in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, in 1990. Just before he died, Peppino D'Allura announced that he
had been Frieda Lawrence's lover in Taormina in the early 1920s. At the time a
mule driver for a wine merchant, D'Allura claimed that one day when he was
visiting the Fontana Vecchia, Frieda suddenly appeared in the nude. She offered
him the gift of herself, which he accepted."
Early in 1921, Lawrence agreed to rent Fontana Vecchia
for another year, but in a letter to Eleanor Farjeon that same month he
expressed second thoughts, "Well perhaps you'll be glad you haven't
come to Sicily. It thunders and lightens for 24 hours, and hailstones
continually, till there is hail-ice thick everywhere, and it is deadly cold and
horrid. Meanwhile the almond blossom is almost full out--a sea of blossom,
would be, if it weren't shattered. I have said I will take this house for
another year. But I really don't believe I shall come back for another
winter."
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| A portrait of Lawrence painted by Jan Juta at Taormina in 1920. "He said in his heart, the day his beard was shaven he was beaten, lost. He identified it with his isolate manhood." (Kangaroo) |
While at Fontana Vecchia, Lawrence's income and fame in America were exploding. In January, he received an advance of five hundred dollars for The Lost Girl in January and fifty dollars for 'Tortoises' in March. Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious was to be published in 1921 and gave notice that America had discovered a great English writer.
On November 5, 1921, Lawrence received a letter from an
admirer of his Sea and Sardinia which was to change the Lawrences' life.
The letter was written by Mabel Dodge Sterne. Mrs. Sterne invited
Lawrence and his wife to come to live in Taos, New Mexico. The move made
perfect sense to Lawrence since he was rapidly become more famous in America
and he quickly responded to the invitation. "Truly, the q-b (Queen Bee,
as he often referred to Frieda) and I would like to come to Taos--there are no
little bees." Frieda shared Lawrence's enthusiasm for leaving Italy
because she felt expatriate cluster colony of Taormina was not well disposed
for Lawrence's writing.
Fontana Vecchia had been kind to Lawrence. When he and Frieda left the villa, he had $1729.54 in an American bank account alone and more in his Italian and London bank accounts. The reader can get a relative sense of value when one considers that T.S. Elliot had an annual income of 250 pounds, working as a full-time bank employee and struggling as a part-time writer. At the time, Lawrence was earning an annual income in excess of 400 pounds as a full-time writer and world traveller.
In February 1922, Lawrence and Frieda bid farewell to Fontana Vecchia to begin their unrelenting worldwide "savage pilgrimage". With regret, Lawrence walked down the road to the centre of town with wistful glances back towards the "dark garden" and its Mediterranean abundance. Lawrence eventually succumbed to tuberculosis and died in Vence in the south of France on March 2, 1930 at the premature age of 44.
Truman Capote and the Taormina werewolves
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| Capote in Portofino, Italy in the 1950s |
"Fontana Vecchia, Old Fountain," Capote writes in The Dogs Bark. "So the house is called. Pace, peace: this word is carved into the stone doorstep. There is no fountain; there has been, I think, something rather like peace. It is a rose-coloured house dominating a valley of almond and olive trees that sinks into the sea. Across the water is a view on clear days of Italy's tip end, the peninsula of Calabria. Back of us, a stony, wavering path, travelled mostly by farming peasants, their donkeys and goats, leads along the side of the mountain into the town of Taormina. It is very like living in an airplane, or a ship trembling on the peak of a tidal wave. There is a momentous feeling each time one looks from the windows, steps onto the terrace, a feeling of being suspended, like the white reeling doves, between the mountains and above the sea. This vastness reduces to an intimate size particulars of the landscape-the cypress trees are small as green pen quills; each passing ship could be held in the palm of your hand." [Published in The Dog's Bark ]
Fontana Vecchio was spacious but rather spartan. Capote's biographer Gerald Clake says.. "The top floor had two bedrooms and a bath; the living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the floor below; a partially detached tower contained a small room for guests; and the ground level was occupied by the owner. Plenty of space it had, but the Fontana Vecchia was far from luxurious. There was no phone or refrigerator; the two-burner stove always seemed to run out of fuel at dinnertime; hot water was dispensed by a wood-burning heater, and the only space heating came from fireplaces. Not much of a drawback in May, that was a considerable hardship during the winter, which was short but so cold that Truman sometimes wore gloves to write."
Capote's hunch about his good fortune must have been an omen because during the thirteen months he lived in Fontana Vecchia, he completed his most famous work to date, The Grass Harp, a book that catapulted him into international stardom.
"We do not have many visitors at Fontana Vecchia; it
is too far a walk for casual callers, and days go by when no one knocks at the
door except the ice boy."
It's the ice boy who tells Capote about the local werewolf population... "One evening in August, when the moons were so preposterous, the ice boy and I had a small but chilling exchange. He asked, What do you think of the werewolf? Are you afraid to go out after dark? As it happened, I'd just that day heard of the werewolf scare: a boy walking home late at night claimed to have been set upon by a howling animal, a human on all fours. But I laughed. You don't believe in werewolves, do you? Oh yes. "There used to be many werewolves in Taormina," he said, his gray eyes regarding me steadily; then, with a disdainful shrug, "Now there are only two or three.""
Cecil Beaton came to stay with them for a few days but made a sudden excuse to leave soon after sampling the inexperienced young cook's chicken dish. It was a great black bird, twice boiled, fried and roasted but still "troppo duro" or "hard as nails" with a blackened head and cockscomb still attached.
Truman Capote was often seen with Tennessee Williams
where they sipped drinks together at the famous Wunderbar in Taormina's centre.
So much did Capote treasure the friendship with Williams that he dedicated a
book to him, "Music for Chameleons."
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| Caffe Wunderbar |
The following quote is from Gerald Clarke who wrote Capote,
A Biography, "The view from the huge windows and broad terraces was
as wonderful as Truman said, however, a more than adequate reward
for the hike up that steep and stony path; down below, a valley of olive and
almond trees, the blue Ionian Sea beyond, and, in the distance, the mirage-like
outline of the Italian mainland."
Clarke reports on their departure... on June 10 [1951], thirteen months after they first ascended that rocky goat path, they said their farewells to the Fontana Vecchia, where they had worked so well. Their friends saw them off at the train station, and after a four-day stopover in Rome, they proceeded to Venice". Fontana Vecchia and good fortune must have smiled on Capote for he went on to become the most photographed writer of his generation. Chances are likely the enchanting villa will bring good fortune to its tenants for another 350 years."
"Welcome to the villa where D.H. Lawrence once resided and was the home of Truman Capote. I invite all fans, friends, and writers to come for a visit. Renting is available. For more information, please contact me by email. Best regards, Norman Harrison 1998"
Howard Agg feels the shadowy spirit of DH Lawrence
Although Truman Capote’s account of his time contains the occasional reference to the supernatural beliefs of the locals, it doesn’t indicate that he, personally, felt any kind of mystical presence in the house. The same cannot be said for English writer and music critic Howard Agg whose book, A Cypress in Sicily (1967), relates the curious tale of a bearded apparition.
By the side of the bridge, rusty iron gates opened on a private track leading up the other side of the valley. We followed the track, shaded by olive trees and cypresses, round a corner, up a series of broken steps, past an outhouse and a cage with rabbits, hens and turkeys, through a garden, and then, not till the last minute, did we see the house, set high above the path among the trees. A pink and white villa of three storeys with balconies and a slanting roof: Villa Fontana Vecchia.
Hearing our footsteps, Signor Francesco Cacopardo, affectionally known as Don Ciccio, came out of the house and greeted us. He drew up chairs on the patio outside his green front door, and we sat in the shade of an oleander, while a cat stretched itself voluptuously against the sun-baked wall, and a pair of doves wheeled in the sunlight. The Signor was a dapper little man of some age, wearing a bright check shirt, tweed trousers and a panama hat set at a rakish angle. He had keen eyes and a prominent nose, of Jewish cast, and spoke English tinged with an American accent. He brought out glasses and a bottle of vermouth, and for a few minutes we chatted amiably. He told us that Lawrence and his wife had occupied the top two floors of the villa, and took us round the corner of the house to a flight of stone steps that ascended in the shape of an inverted V to the upper apartment. By the side of the steps grew a magnificent cypress, straight as an arrow, sixty or seventy feet in height."
The Signor took us over the rest of the house; through the salone into the kitchen. "Lawrence used this as his bedroom," he told us. "He liked to be able to get out of bed and walk out on to the balcony in his pyjamas." A flight of wooden stairs led up to the two bedrooms and bathroom - all with balconies overlooking the sea. The lovely, lovely dawn-sea, where the sun does nothing but rise towards Greece the land of Homer in the morning-past, and towards the east."
Agg's Taormina landlady explained.. "It's always been a house for artists," she replied. "There was Lawrence of course. Then a German musician who was an authority on old music, and played the harpischord and the lute enchantingly. He stayed there for years. There have been one or two writers - I forget their names [most recently a lesser known Truman Capote] - and a painter and sculptor." She handed me a glass of Aurum."
Drawn by his love of Lawrence’s works, Agg was eventually persuaded to rent the property as a sabbatical from his music journalism career in London. He's vague on the year he moved in. Probably the February after Capote moved out in June 1951. After his initial 1 week holiday at the end of June (1950) at Villa Pancrazio (Capote had moved into Fontana Vecchia during April 1950) he returned to London for a year and came back for a second holiday at Villa Pancrazio for the last 2 weeks in September the next year (1951). Capote had meantime moved out in June 1951. Agg looks at Fontana Vecchia for the first time which is not rented out (an Italian family are showing an interest though) then returned to England and came back for good "at the beginning of the following February" 1952. He died in 1968 and his gravestone in Taormina cemetery says he lived among the Taorminese for 18 years so that must include the initial 2 holidays. When Capote returns to Taormina the following year in early April 1952, Fontana Vecchia he says is not available so he stays elsewhere with a view of Etna. Agg must be the tenant.
Agg's first night at Fontana Vecchia is a welcome change from the winter hustle of London... "Through the open windows of my room came no sound but the murmur of the sea on the beach hundreds of feet below the villa."
The strange phenomena began with unusual air currents and the eerie sound of disembodied footsteps on the stairs. The situation was then heightened by a darting light that bore no relation to the shadow play from street lamps. The final straw came when he heard a voice and experienced a light that projected across the entirety of his bedroom wall without forming a silhouette.
Fearing ridicule, he finally established that his cook was experiencing similarly disturbing events. It was the vision [the advice of] of an elderly sage, believed to be able to communicate with the other side, who convinced Agg to look in the direction of D H Lawrence for the origin of these manifestations. The mystic told him that the presence belonged to a man with a beard – perhaps a tenuous link, but Agg was happy to back his supposition with evidence from Lawrence’s letters. David Herbert had felt a deep sense of the past filtering through to the present when living at the Fontana and now Howard was experiencing the man from Nottingham’s own past, believing he was feeling the writer’s desire to be tangibly linked to one of the few places where he had been truly happy.
It seems this realization and a willingness to stay and embrace the mysterious episode was enough to quell the turbulent spirit of David Herbert. The rest of Agg’s stay went by without significant incident, although the parallels with the Lawrences continued as Howard battled the owner to keep him from cutting down some of the garden’s magnificent tree specimens. In addition to his memoir, Agg also left for posterity a collection of plays with Sicilian themes including, The Happy Day and Silk and Sawdust, a tale that draws on the island tradition of puppetry.
THE END
Notes and sources
https://www.sicilyartexperience.it/taormina-cult/fontana-vecchia/; https://archive.org/details/cypressinsicilyp0000aggh/page/84/mode/2up?view=theater&q=lawrence; https://archive.org/details/capotebiography0000clar/page/220/mode/2up?view=theater&q=fontana; https://archive.org/details/dogsbark00trum_0/page/120/mode/2up?view=theater&q=vecchia;
- DHL on the rain storms... "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 seems like a land inside an aquarium - all water and people like crabs and black-grey shrimps creeping on the bottom. Don't like it."
- Snake
A Short Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Snake’
‘Snake’ is probably D. H. Lawrence’s best-known poem. Lawrence wrote ‘Snake’ while he was living on the island of Sicily, in the beautiful resort, Taormina, on the east side of the island. ‘Snake’ is conversational in tone, which makes it reasonably accessible; nevertheless, some words of analysis on the poem’s language and meaning may be useful.
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.
Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second-comer, waiting.
He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.
And I wished he would come back, my snake.
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.
D. H. Lawrence’s free verse is very different from the kind we find in that of his fellow modernists and contemporaries, Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, and T. E. Hulme (among others). Instead of following the French vers libre style, Lawrence’s free verse has more in common with the free verse of the Psalms and Walt Whitman. Yet we should not think that the freer-flowing, more colloquial style of Lawrence’s free verse means his poem is simply ‘prose chopped up’ (a common charge against much free verse, and in some cases deserved), or that the poem comprises simple assertions which require no further commentary or explanation. The language is not self-consciously ‘poetic’ in some respects; but it still has the denseness we associate with poetry.
Take those opening lines:
A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
The words are straightforward, but the wording is not. Although we can understand that both the snake and the speaker (whom we might tentatively take to be Lawrence himself) have come to the water-trough to drink, the syntax of Lawrence’s lines refuses to come out and say this plainly. The clause ‘and I in pyjamas for the heat’ is dropped in without Lawrence clearly signalling the relationship between his actions and the snake’s: the snake has come to the trough to drink (it is hot, after all), and Lawrence, because of the heat, is in his pyjamas, but to whom does that third line, ‘To drink there’, refer? To the snake, or to Lawrence? Or both? There is an uneasiness to the phrasing here, which immediately establishes the uneasy relationship between Lawrence and the snake, which the rest of the poem will seek to explore and analyse. Is the snake dangerous? Does it pose any threat to the poet? Should he kill it, just in case?
The subsequent lines, in summary, make it clear that the snake is there to drink, and so is Lawrence. Lawrence’s gendering, and anthropomorphising, of the snake as ‘he’ stages a masculine battle (or stand-off – well, if snakes could stand, anyway) between him and the snake, two males facing off against one another. (Lawrence also refers to how the snake ‘mused’ as it drank at the trough, another piece of anthropomorphising.) Since this snake is yellow-brown in colour rather than black, and the ‘gold [snakes] are venomous’ on Sicily, Lawrence feels that he should kill the snake so that he will be safe from it. Enacting a sort of inner drama, an interior monologue where he takes on the roles of both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, taunting himself over his masculinity (‘if you were a man / You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off’).
Indeed, Lawrence feels a certain kinship with the snake. He wonders if he was too cowardly to lash out and kill the snake. Was it cowardice? He doesn’t think so – indeed, he felt ‘honoured’ that the snake had opted to be his ‘guest’, drinking at his trough – but the nagging doubt persists in his mind. Is he a coward? What stopped him killing the animal: fondness for it, or his own cowardice?
No: he concludes that, although he was afraid to kill it, his delight in the snake having chosen to grace his presence, and his water-trough, outweighed his fear. But as he watches it retreating from the trough, the horror at this deadly beast prompted him to pick up a nearby log and hurl it at the snake. He misses; and immediately regrets having tried to harm the animal. ‘I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education’: those ‘voices’ are the so-called ‘civilised’ voices of Lawrence’s upbringing, when we are taught self-preservation and to watch out for danger, guarding ourselves against it at all costs. We are also warned about dangerous and deadly animals and taught to fear them, driving a wedge between us and them and preventing us from seeing them as our fellow creatures (sharks are another good example). Lawrence recalls the albatross from Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the killing of which brought down a curse upon the mariner and his ship and crew.
D. H. Lawrence concludes ‘Snake’ by expressing the opinion that the snake seemed grand and noble, like a king in exile: the implication being that animals have been forced to live subservient to humans, who see themselves as ‘kings’ of the world. But creatures like the snake are the true king – a once and future king, for Lawrence, ready to be crowned again. In this respect, Lawrence anticipates the move towards greater awareness of animals’ sentience and more powerful support for animal rights over the last century. He ends by seeing his treatment of the snake as ‘pettiness’, which he needs to ‘expiate’ or make amends for. Perhaps many of us have similar reparations to make.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Notes
Agg describes other visitors though... "On one of the worst days the doorbell rang and Saro came to tell me that a forestiere wished to see me. He came into the salone looking like a drowned rat. He introduced himself in English - though it turned out he was a Swede - and told me he worked in radio in Stockholm and was collecting material for a programme in which, as the narrator, he would guide listeners along the route taken by Ulysses in his wanderings. It seemed a formidable undertaking, but he had blazing faith in it. He had made his way along the coast from Syracuse, and was continuing on to Messina to deal with Scylla and Charybdis, but he had paused in Taormina, knowing of Lawrence's association with the town, with the idea of perhaps drawing Lawrence into the web of his programme.
He was not the first visitor to Fontana Vecchia who came on account of Lawrence - after all, I had done so, myself. - But living in the house made me realise the very lively interest taken in Lawrence today. All kinds of people and nationalities came out to the villa to see for themselves the house in which he had lived. It must be admitted that some were a nuisance as they crawled about the garden, clambered up on walls with their cameras to take photographs, or rang the bell to ask if they could see over the apartment. Others brought camp-stools and painting equipment, and sat about making sketches. Earnest young Americans with scholarships, on a sabbatical in Europe, writing erudite and, no doubt, lengthy theses, made themselves known to me and enquired about Lawrence. A young Englishman, who so far had never had a word published, talked confidently of the book he was engaged in writing, which was to be a definitive comparison between Lawrence and Dostoevsky - though his knowledge of Lawrence's works seemed surprisingly limited. More interesting was a bespectacled American professor from a university in the Middle West who had lectured on Lawrence, and written a book about him. But they all came on fine days in the spring and summer. My present visitor had risked being soaked to the skin to make his pilgrimage, and for this I admired him."
https://www.timesofsicily.com/literary-ghosts-taormina/
2 - Francesco Cacópardo (or Don Ciccio to his friends) features in Nehls Composite Biography Volume 2 of DHL. The anecdotes are similar to those he told Howard Agg with more facts. Nehls (or Harry T Moore) may even have been the American professor "who had published a book about Lawrence" who comes to visit and is mentioned in his book...
*CACÓPARDO, FRANCESCO. Proprietor of the Fontana Vecchia at Taormina, Sicily; Lawrence's landlord, Mar., 1920-Feb., 1922. A professional chef, he lived for periods in both Eng. and U.S. Nickname "Cicio" (or "Ciccio").
Written just prior to Nehls publication in 1957 - "When D. II. Lawrence and Frieda rented our villa near Taormina, I was away in Manchester, England, working as a professional chef, so my family handled the original transaction. However, I have many recollections of Lawrence from the time I met him after my return.
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| DHL 1921 by Millicent Beveridge |
The situation of Villa Fontana Vecchia Old Fountain, it is called- is picturesque and appealing in its tranquillity, free from any abrupt noise except the tinkle of goat bells and now and then the playing of a Sicilian flute along the path. It rests on a terraced slope overlooking a wide, green valley lined with citrus groves and vineyards. From the sun-porch one looks down the valley to a magnificent, solitary beach, and sees Homer's Rock of the Sirens rising from the water in the curve of the Cape of St. Andrea, and in effect, it is a cloud home.
Lawrence occupied the second and third floors, which form a unit to themselves and have their own ground-level entrance, while my family retained the first floor. Except for the addition of modern plumbing in the kitchen and bathrooms, the apartment stands now just as Lawrence left it. The main living room is quite large with a fireplace and big. gothic-style windows. Before Lawrence moved in, these windows were hung with full, dark-red curtains. Almost the first thing he did was to remove them, exclaiming, "You build these beautiful windows and then hang curtains that keep the sun from coming in!" They have never been rehung
My mother often laughed about the time Lawrence came down to ask for goat's milk soon after he arrived. He had a habit of squinting his eyes until they were almost closed when trying to remember something, and on this day he tried to learn the phrase May I have some goat's milk? So now he closed his eyes, strained his face, and asked, "Si posso avere latte di capro?" giving the goat a masculine gender.
In those days the town had no central water supply, and cistern water supplied our household needs; but our drinking water came from a spring about 100 yards away. Lawrence often went to fetch it himself, fresh and cool, in a big terra cotta jug. Sometimes these trips took several hours, for he would loiter along the way and then relax on the little wall sur- rounding the reservoir, watching the other people come and go. He walked a great deal-up into the mountains when the Sicilian wild- flowers were in bloom, and down into the valley to visit the olive press. There he spent most of the day, watching the long process from beginning to end and taking his lunch with the workers.
When the Lawrences learned that my mother baked her own bread each week, they were eager to see just how it was done. They went into the wheat fields to see the grain separated in the age-old manner of tossing it into the air and letting the wind take away the waste. They saw it ground and then baked in the large, primitive oven in our kitchen, and asked that we bake a little loaf for them, which we always did after that.
Lawrence had a preference for seeing people at breakfast and at no other time of the day if it could be avoided. An amusing incident occurred one morning: The Mayor of Taormina came to call on him out of respect for a celebrated English writer. When he arrived, Lawrence was in the middle of a quarrel with Frieda, which ended with his hurling a dish of fried potatoes at her. He hardly heard a word the Mayor said, and the Mayor left in confusion, convinced that he had been the cause of the whole incident.
Lawrence was the first writer to stay in the villa, but since then it has been rented almost exclusively to writers and musicians. Perhaps he left it a kind of artistic legacy. Before leaving, he gave me a large, red silk handkerchief as a little omaggio which I still keep, although it is now in tatters. With my brother, Carmelo, he left an overcoat, which is also still in his possession.
When Lawrence discovered that I planned to leave Taormina and re- sume my previous work in Manchester, he could not understand why I wished to forsake the Mediterranean climate and beauty of Sicily for life in England.
"How can you prefer Manchester to this happy, smiling land?" he asked.
A short time later, however, he forsook it himself and went away to Ceylon, Australia, and the New World. He wrote me one or two letters from Mexico, which I appreciated because they showed that he had not forgotten Taormina. I have regretted many times since then that I de- stroyed these letters after reading them, but I am afraid I did not realize how famous he was to become 66"
Notes to Cacopardo piece:
63 D. H. L. letter to Ada Lawrence, from Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicily, dated 4 March 1920, Ada Lawrence and Gelder, p. 96.
64 Prof. Harry T. Moore has noted that this anecdote was also told by a reporter in a Milan newspaper, the Corriere d'Informazione (December, 1947). The same story carries the sensational report that at Taormina, the king of England slipped ashore incognito to pay Lawrence a secret visit of homage (1).-Moore, Intelligent Heart, p. 268.
Frieda's comment on the story of the Mayor of Taormina: "The story of the mayor of Milan [Taormina] who came to breakfast in Taormina, with Lawrence throwing plates at me, made me weep tears of laughter. I had never heard it before! And we were poor and did not have so many plates."-Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, "The Bigger Heart of D. H. Law- rence," The New Republic, 132 (No. 9, Issue 2101, 28 February 1955), 17. Among others, Truman Capote. For a statement of his effect upon the
65 life of Fontana Vecchia and Taormina-and for another glimpse of Signor Cacópardo-see Herbert Kubly, "Confusion in Trumanland," Esquire, XL (No. 2, Whole No. 237, August, 1953), 66, 107. 66 Original publication of a memoir completed in January, 1954. Francesco
Cacópardo was, and is, the proprietor of the Fontana Vecchia. A professional chef, he lived for periods in both England and the United States. Lawrence may have used his nickname Cicio (or Ciccio) and some of his characteristics in creating the character by the same name in The Lost Girl. On 3 June 1920, Lawrence noted in his Diary: "Sent Things [?] for Amy [Lowell?] via Cicio," and on 11 June 1920, "Ciccio sails & takes MS. of Lost Girl to America."-Tedlock, p. 90. [This is confirmed by Howard Agg in A Cypress in Sicily]
In a letter to Amy Lowell, dated 26 June 1920, Lawrence wrote that "Ciccio is rich and speaks 3 languages."-Moore, Intelligent Heart, p. 266. From a further entry in Lawrence's Diary dated 22 February 1921, it would seem that there was an early plan for Signor Cacópardo ("Ciccio") and his brother Vincenzo to accompany or follow the Lawrences to America. Tedlock, pp. 92, 319. For a meeting with Signor Cacópardo, see the "Note" to Witter Bynner's Journey with Genius, pp. xiv-xv.
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