Abstract
Although the critical literature today about the novels of D. H. Lawrence is immense, his standing as a short-story writer very high, and his poetry hardly diminishing as an object of critical interest and appreciation, insufficient attention has been given to the travel books. This is a serious oversight, for Lawrence's travel writings represent an important component of his career. They are a pleasure to read — engagingly descriptive, vividly abtruse, and very human. What a bizarre privilege it is to be at the side of the author of The Rainbow and Women in Love as he reacts to a child vomiting during a sea trip (it upset Lawrence and Frieda, but not the child's parents) or to a Fascist police agent trying to force Lawrence to show an J.D. (" 'I want to look at your pass- port.' 'It is in the valise. And why? Why is this?' "). The Lawrence interpreting a Tarquinian wall-painting in the Etruscan tombs, or half-amusedly dramatizing the remorseless efficiency of the Sardinian bus driver that he names after Charlotte Bronte, Mr. Rochester, is also the iconoclastic artist who in a late novella rather overtly implied that the resurrection is (or includes) an erection, and in the posthumous Apocalypse, that heaven is on this earth or nowhere.
Recommended Citation
Gutierrez, Donald
(1981)
"The Ideas of Place: D.H. Lawrence's Travel Books,"
University of Dayton Review: Vol. 15:
No.
1, Article 16.
Available at:
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/udr/vol15/iss1/16
