the jolly roger
memoir Adventures of a Bookseller 17 Pino Orioli, Lawrence’s Italian publisher, described the villa as ‘a dilapidated place….with no water supply and only one small fireplace’. But in fact there was a well (it is still there), the views from the villa were – and are - quite marvellous, and Lawrence was happy there, writing the first version of the novel (there were three altogether, the second one entitled John Thomas and Lady Jane) sitting with his back against an umbrella pine tree with lizards and birds nearby and woods full of violets and gladioli. The novel, he told Secker in October, was set in the coal mining area of the Midlands and was ‘rather improper’. The story asked whether a woman could have a permanent relationship with a social inferior, a man of a lower class, a peasant or a gipsy – or a game keeper. Secker, as we have seen, was not interested in taking on the risk thereby leaving the way open to Orioli becoming the facilita- tor, if not the publisher, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover . Orioli – whose real name was Giuseppino though he was always known as Pino – was born at Alfonsine near Ravenna in Emilia- Romagna in 1884, the son of a sausage-maker who (according to Richard Aldington) lost his job after nailing a donkey’s head onto the house of the local priest. He left school as a young teenager to work for a barber, but after encountering the English expat community at Fiesole discovered he had a passion for books – and for English. An autodidact, he left Italy for Paris and then for London (where he at first earned a living singing O Sole Mio to passers-by in Oxford Street) and then for Cambridge to teach Italian to undergraduates before returning to Florence to run an antiquarian bookshop. He spoke fluent English, albeit with a heavy Italian accent and a host of Italianisms. He was familiar with English literature and English writers - in fact he was more than familiar with one in particular, namely Norman Douglas, the openly gay author of South Wind and Siren Land , who became Orioli’s companion when he settled in Florence in 1922: they both lived at 14 Lungarno alle Grazie (where E.M Forster had set A Room with a View ), with a speaking tube between their two flats. So close were they 18 that as 17 . Chatto & Windus, 1938, London. The title page gives G. Orioli, author of Moving Alon g. 18 . Together they wrote Venus in the Kitchen or Love’s Cookery Book , a collection of
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