Richard Owen - DH Lawrence in Italy

First published in Great Britain in 2014 as
Lady Chatterleys Villa
by The Armchair Traveller
4 Cinnamon Row
London SW11 3TW

This first paperback edition published in 2020

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright Richard Owen, 2014, 2020

The right of Richard Owen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-1-909961-72-2
eISBN: 978-1-909961-73-9

Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

All rights reserved

Cover image: DH Lawrence and Rina Secker at the Villa Bernarda, 1926

With thanks to Pollinger Ltd for their kind permission to reproduce
material copyright The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli

Quotation from Footsteps: The Adventures of a Romantic Biographer reprinted by
kind permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, copyright Richard Holmes 1985

Biography meant a book about someones life. Only for me it
was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of
someones path through the past, a following of footsteps.
Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer

I am indebted to a number of people in England and Italy who helped me to trace Rina Secker and her connection to DH Lawrence. None of them, however, is responsible for any errors, which are my own.

I owe thanks first of all to Anthea Secker, Rina and Martin Seckers daughter-in-law, who first drew my attention to the story of Rina and the Lawrences on the Riviera, generously made material available to me from the family archives, and encouraged the project throughout. Her daughter Alice Briggs has also been unfailingly helpful, tracking down further letters, notes and photographs at Bridgefoot. Alice has taken a close interest in the emerging picture, together with her sister Kitty Cox and (in the United States) Adrienne Dion, the granddaughter of Rinas sister Anna Marie.

Among DH Lawrence scholars I thank above all John Worthen, Emeritus Professor of DH Lawrence Studies at Nottingham University, who read the original manuscript and offered invaluable advice. Others who commented on the manuscript and to whom I am most grateful include Claire Tomalin, the late Brenda Maddox, Isobel Colegate and John Woodhouse, Professor Emeritus of Italian at Oxford University.

At Bene Vagienna several residents were generous with their time and hospitality: Giacomo Borra, the mayor, Sergio Gazzera, Rinas cousin (and former mayor) and Michelangelo Fessia, head of the Bene Vagienna Cultural Association and a descendant of the Capelleros through his grandmother Giuseppina, Luigi Capelleros sister.

At Spotorno I am indebted to Giuliano Cerutti, the former town archivist, and Domenico Astengo, the Savona-based poet and literary scholar, both of whom have made life-long studies of DH Lawrences stay in Spotorno and generously shared their memories and expertise with me.

On the Italian Riviera I also thank my parents-in-law, Ray and Edythe Crosse, to whom I owe many happy stays in Alassio; Alessandro Bartoli; Jacqueline Rosadoni ne Poole, the English librarian at Alassio; Maura Muratorio; Valerie Falchi, ne Wadsworth; and Massimo Bacigalupo of Genoa University. Between them they have shown admirable dedication in preserving the memory of the British heyday on the Italian Riviera.

Alessandro and Cristina Mirenda were kind enough to show us round Villa Mirenda at Scandicci. At Fiascherino and Lerici I am indebted to Silvio Vallero and Pietro Ferrari, to Carla Sanguineti, and to Simonetta and Giovanna Fiori of the Hotel Fiascherino. At Monaco I thank the tat Civil office of the Mairie, the Bibliothque Louis Notari, and the office of the Journal de Monaco at the Ministere dtat.

My thanks to Andrew Harrison, director of the DH Lawrence Research Centre at Nottingham University; Jayne Amat and the staff of the Manuscripts and Special Collections archive at the Kings Meadow campus of Nottingham University; and the staff of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Gloucestershire Libraries and Westminster Libraries and Archives. I am indebted to Barbara Schwepcke, Ellie Shillito, Alice Horne and all at Haus Publishing.

Last, but very much not least, I thank my wife, Julia, my companion in over 30 years of travels, who joined me in following the footsteps of Lawrence, Frieda and Rina.

Italy was Lawrences true home, the Mediterranean his only sea, the gods of vine and olive the only ones that did not let him down.

Anthony Burgess

The English need this Italian physical way of approaching life.

Frieda Lawrence to Rina Secker from Florence, 13 May 1926

I WAS FIRST drawn to DH Lawrence while at Nottingham University in the Sixties, not long after the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial. I even had, I remember, a poster-sized photograph of him on the wall of my room. And I fell under the spell of the Italian Riviera and the history of its English (and Scottish) colonies over three decades of family holidays on the Ligurian coast. The two came together quite unexpectedly when I was offered access to the unpublished letters of Rina Secker, with their vivid eyewitness descriptions of Lawrences stay in the Riviera seaside town of Spotorno.

DH Lawrence is not often associated with the Italian Riviera. In Lady Chatterleys Lover Lady Connie makes love to the virile game-keeper Oliver Mellors in the woods while her impotent husband Sir Clifford, shattered by the First World War, is cared for up at Wragby Hall by his nurse and housekeeper, Mrs Bolton. The setting is the Midlands, the background is industrial unrest and the post-war decline of the upper classes in their grand houses. What could be more English?

Yet Lawrence wrote what he would later call his very improper novel not in England but in Italy, the country where he spent a third of his adult life. He loved and wrote lyrically about all the things the British have loved about Italy for centuries: the sunshine, the flavours, the landscape, the people. For a miners son from Nottingham the impact of Italy and he lived in some of the most delectable Italian spots of natural beauty was tremendous: [it is] so beautiful, it almost hurts as he wrote at Lerici. Lady Chatterley was written, as Lawrences wife Frieda points out, in the Tuscan hills in an umbrella pinewood, just after she and Lawrence had spent six months at a villa above the resort of Spotorno, beneath the ruins of a medieval castle, amid vines and orange trees. This period had brought back to Lawrence all the Italian sensuality and blood conscious love of life which had had such an impact on him during his first encounter with Italy 13 years before.

Frieda said that Lawrence had wanted to write Lady Chatterley all his life, adding that only an Englishman or a New Englander could have written it since it was paradoxically the last word in Puritanism. He still had in his mind vivid impressions of his last visit to his native Midlands, just before he left for Spotorno, when he was appalled by the dismal industrial landscape which forms the backdrop to the novel.