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an item they were known as Pinorman, the subject of a waspish memoir by Aldington. 19 Lawrence had first met Orioli in Cornwall 20 during the First World War, and the two got on well: in Aldington’s view Orioli was ‘devoted’ to Lawrence, and the rather less than complimentary references to Lawrence’s ‘meanness’ and supposed suppressed ho- mosexuality in Orioli’s memoir were the work of Douglas – who fell out badly with Lawrence - rather than Orioli himself. Lawrence was aware that Orioli had opened bookshops both in London (ini- tially in the Charing Cross Road, later at 24 Museum Street) and in Florence (first in Via Vecchietti, later on the Lungarno) with his business partner Irving Davis, whom he had met at Cambridge. In 1929 Orioli launched a publishing venture, the Lungarno Series, which included Norman Douglas’s Capri and Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gipsy . ‘O Pino/What a bean-o!/when we printed Lady C.!’ wrote Lawrence in a light-hearted poem entitled simply ‘To Pino’. ‘Little Giuntina/couldn’t have been a/better little bee!/ When you told him/perhaps they’d scold him/for printing those naughty words/All he could say:/”But we do it every day!/like the pigeons and other little birds!”’. Unfortunately, even though Orioli himself had spent time in London the Italian printers had not, and there were therefore numer- ous misprints in the Tipografia Giuntina edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In his essay ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ Lawrence was remarkably tolerant, saying ‘the wonder is the book came out as well as it did’. If there were spelling errors, this was because ‘the book was set up in a little Italian printing shop’ in which ‘nobody knew one word of English’, Lawrence wrote. It was a mercy there were not more errors, he added. As for suggestions that the head of the Florentine printers had been ‘deceived’ into printing it without knowing the contents, Lawrence had on the contrary given him a frank account of ‘certain things’ described in the book, only to aphrodisiac recipes that was published in 1952 under the pseudonym Pila V Bey. 19 . Pinorman: A Composite Portrait, Heinemann 1954 20 . The Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s letters, Vol. 5, p. 450, n. 3, repeated by Brenda Maddox in her biography (1994). But a later biographer, Je V rey Meyers, says that by the time Lawrence went to Cornwall, Orioli had returned to Italy to fight.
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