the book collector
The Lady Chatterley trial now seems something from a past era. But its epoch-making significance has obscured a key ques- tion: if the novel is set in the Midlands, and Lawrence came from Nottingham, why was it published in Florence in the first place? The answer is that Lawrence had a long and deep involvement with all things Italian, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover was conceived not in England, but in Italy. I first became aware of this as Rome correspondent of The Times , when I went one day to my mailbox at the Foreign Press Club and found a letter from Anthea Secker, daughter-in-law of Martin Secker. I had published a piece in The Times about a scheme by F.A.I (Fondo Ambiente Italiano), the Italian equivalent of the National Trust, to open up places in Italy associated with British writers – among them D.H. Lawrence. Mrs Secker, a Times reader, noticed my reference to Lawrence: she had at her house in Buckinghamshire a collection of unpublished letters and documents relating to Secker and Lawrence, and more particularly to Secker’s Italian wife Caterina, known for short as Rina. Was I interested? I was. I already had an interest in Lawrence dating back to my time as a student at Nottingham University, where the library had a bust of the writer, although it was kept well hidden from view – not so much, I suspect, because of the controversy over the Lady Chatterley trial but more because Lawrence had committed the un- pardonable o V ence when he was himself a student at Nottingham of running o V with the wife of a professor, Frieda Weekley. Lawrence and Frieda started their life together by escaping to Europe and crossing the Alps. Lawrence spent a third of his adult life in Italy, setting some his most memorable works there – Sea and Sardinia , for example, or Etruscan Places , or the poem ‘Snake’, written in Sicily. He found the Italian landscape ‘so beautiful it al- most hurts’, and he fell in love too with all the other aspects of Italian life Anglo-Saxons inevitably find irresistible – the sunshine, the art, the wine, the people, the culture. When I started researching my book about Lawrence and Italy, Lady Chatterley’s Villa, I found that very few people I spoke to even knew that Lawrence had had an Italian life. At first this seemed odd, until I realised that we have a tendency to airbrush out the
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