1Lawrence’s contribution to travel writing as a literary genre culminated with his Sketches of Etruscan Places, a record of his visits with Earl Brewster between 6^th and 11^th April 1927 to some of the historical sites of Etruria. His plans were only half-completed as he got no further than seeing Cerveteri, Tarquinia, Vulci and Volterra. The six resultant essays were written by the end of June 1927 and only four of them were published in his lifetime, initially in the American periodical Travel, between November 1927 and February 1928. The six were not available together in book form until after Lawrence’s death and did not receive the revision for book publication that Lawrence regularly gave to previously published essays and stories, for example for Twilight in Italy (1916). The essays were published in September 1932 by Secker in the UK and Viking in the United States in a book titled Etruscan Places. It was then a further sixty years before they were published in the Cambridge Edition as Sketches of Etruscan Places (1992), with sporadic reprinting in between. This history of patchy publication does not reflect the brilliant insights of the book and, as I shall demonstrate, critics have been slow to grasp its full significance in Lawrence’s thinking and, specifically, its importance in the context of his later work. It is first worth looking at the genesis of the book, looking at Lawrence’s stated intentions, and how that related to its later reception.

3In Lawrence’s correspondence up to the time of his tour of the Etruscan sites he gave little away about what a book about them might contain and his approach to Etruscan civilisation, although he had read widely about the Etruscans and what was left of their settlements and artefacts. In March 1926 he visited the National Archaeological Museum in Perugia, after which he wrote of “the Etruscan things, which interest me” (5L 416) and of writing “a book about Umbria and the Etruscans: half travel-book, scientific too” (5L 412) but by June 1926 this approach had changed and he wrote ‘There is nothing to be said, scientifically, about the Etruscans. Must take the imaginative line” (5L 473). It was only in April 1927, having completed half of his projected tour that he set out the essence of his views, with what we would see now as a clearly ecological focus:

They were a lively, fresh, jolly people, lived their own life, without wanting to dominate the life of others. I am fond of my Etruscans. They had life in themselves, so they didn’t have so much need to dominate. I should like to write a couple of sketches of Etruscan places – nothing scientific, but just as it is now, and the impression one has. (6L 33-4)

4It is this approach which latterly has led to Sketches of Etruscan Places finding a place in ecocriticism. Ecocriticism is very wide in its scope and this paper will focus on the branch of ecocriticism that analyses imaginative texts and argues that such texts can provide a regenerative and revitalising message for the world. Increasingly Lawrence’s popularity rests on his messages about the environment and his texts are being revisited to find those messages. It is perhaps surprising that Sketches of Etruscan Places has not had wider exposure in that context. Before exploring those issues, I will survey the earlier development of its reception.

5In the section of the introduction to the Cambridge Edition that deals with the reception of Sketches of Etruscan Places de Filippis surveyed the reviews published at the time of its first publication. She concluded that it:

received on the whole favourable comments from its English and American reviewers who generally limited their criticism to the lack of scientific authority and to the predominance of Lawrence’s beliefs, whereas the major focus for appreciation was the quality of its prose and style. (xlix)

6She was only able to look briefly at Aldous Huxley’s particularly favourable review in the Spectator. Looking at the review in its entirety one can say that he provided what he would have considered to be a complete answer to any negative criticism the book received. For example, Huxley wrote:

The record of his journey through modern Italian space and Etruscan time is not only a beautiful and delicate work of literary art; it also makes a real contribution to historical knowledge. For Lawrence has felt his way into the minds of the Etruscans. What he says about their ways of thinking and feeling and being is, I am convinced, fundamentally true. (quoted in Coombes 271)

7In an early anticipation of the more plainly expressed ecological views to follow, Huxley added “Lawrence loved the Etruscans for the whole-hearted acceptance of the universe, and because they respected the natural flowering of life” (ibid.). He did not describe the modern world as “anthropocentric,” a word then in use but much used by later critics in this context. Instead to make a similar point he added that:

The philosophy and practice of non-acceptance have made it possible for man to become, in some respects, more than human. […] he has, too often, degenerated and become less than human. Lawrence considered the price of our partial super-humanity too high and proclaimed the need to return to the old philosophy and practice of acceptance. (ibid. 273)

8De Filippis also quotes another insightful and particularly favourable review, written by Lorine Pruette for the New York Herald Tribune Books. Following the theme of Lawrence’s quest for a people who would seem to Lawrence to be truly alive she wrote:

Lawrence restores to us those scenes from the life of the ancient people, making them surely more vivid than they would be for most of us were we to visit the tombs ourselves […] He makes us share with him the lightness and the joy, the casualness of the old Tuscan life […]. The book is like a day in the country with Lawrence, happily enough, in a peculiarly benign mood. (li)

9In addition to the reviews, it is worth mentioning the introduction by Richard Aldington to Secker’s first English edition of Lawrence’s uncompleted Apocalypse, also published in 1932. It is in the form of a letter to Frieda Lawrence. In it Aldington wrote at length about Sketches of Etruscan Places, seeing it along with Apocalypse and The Man Who Died as “very important towards an understanding of [Lawrence]” (xxiv). He judged that Lawrence believed that the Etruscans “had lived largely in the way he wished to live and thought that we should all live. The Etruscans were a great convenience, for, since nobody knows much about them, nobody could contradict what he said” (xxv). However, Aldington did not make some of the deeper connections between these and other books that were to follow.

10The next significant contribution to an understanding of Sketches of Etruscan Places was by Harry T. Moore in 1951, in his The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence. Much of what he wrote was a purely factual statement of the content of the book and the circumstances around its composition, with less analysis than Huxley provided. However, the analysis that he did provide about the book is less partial than Huxley. For example, he talked of Lawrence’s intuition being “allowed free play” (288). Referring to the work of Lawrence’s father in the Nottinghamshire mines, Moore perceptively noted:

an ancestral symbolism in Lawrence’s visiting [the tombs], though as he descended into one burial-cavern after another, instead of confronting walls of coal he found frescoes left by a “dark” people that was also a sun people. The Etruscans had no false literary culture, but lived in the phallic consciousness: to the man of ancient Etruria, “the universe was alive, and in quivering rapport. To him the blood was conscious; he thought with his heart.” (289)

11In commenting on Lawrence’s views about the conquest of the Etruscans by the Romans, Moore went on to point out:

Lawrence’s anti-civilisation philosophy again, with the Romans and the Etruscans as value-symbols. Lawrence at this time frequently thought of the Romans in terms of modern civilisation; theirs was a materialistic social order that, like the scientific and industrial world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crushed the instinctual faculties of man. (290)

12Whilst noting the “Lawrencean travelogue quality” of the book (291) and the fact that it was written during the period Lawrence was working on the three versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Moore made no connections with the themes in that or other Lawrence books, as later critics did.

But what is this Etruscan vitality that glows from those fleshy images frescoed in the tombs of Tarquinia but the bursting forth of sexual energy free from the constraints of deadening inhibitions. The author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover saw this imaginative vision as being also a symbolic and emotional issue, matter for scathing polemic against his contemporaries. (21)

14Whilst that connection was embryonic, Pallottino importantly concluded with a recognition that Sketches of Etruscan Places “contains alongside the wildest imaginings, hints worthy of the meditation of the historian and the art critic” (25).

16Criticism of Sketches of Etruscan Places took a big step forward in 1959, with the publication of Christopher Hassall’s essay “Black Flowers: A New Light on the Poetics of D.H. Lawrence.” It saw the book as “the record of an act of spiritual excavation,” as Lawrence had “exhumed […] something of his essential being” and coupled with his introduction to the American edition of New Poems (1920) Hassall continued:

his last travel book becomes his most revealing statement on the name and nature of poetry, although poetry is never specifically mentioned, and poems themselves are disguised as what he calls “black flowers.” From among the archaeological facts and his deductions there emerges a prose poem on a theme of literary criticism. (371)

17The 1920 introduction was confirmation of Lawrence’s move to a freer style adapted from Whitman, and Hassall connects that freer style with that of the Etruscans, Lawrence’s developing form of poetry having the same quality of evanescence as many Etruscan things. Hassall saw a parallel between the natural flowering of life Lawrence perceived in the Etruscans and how poetry should be instantaneous. Hassall saw parallels in painting too:

When in his travel book he turns to Etruscan painting, it is the same quality of “life” itself rather than what we academically regarded as “art” which attracts his notice. The subtlety in such work lies “in the wonderfully suggestive edge of the figures. It is not outlined. It is not what we call “drawing.” It is the flowing contour where the body “suddenly leaves off upon the atmosphere.” It is this “suggestive edge” of his own verses, which at first gives the appearance of a rough sketch, and instead of exhibiting formal shape suggests a state of flux, a flowing contour with the body “suddenly leaves off upon the atmosphere,” which is characteristic of Lawrence. (376)

It was the Etruscan experience which freed Lawrence from the “world of care,” which restored to him the ability to stand aside from the rush towards death, from clocks and calendars, trains and motor-cars, self-sacrifice and salvation; to give up his “savage pilgrimage,” his exhaustive and exhausting quest. He has not found a living embodiment of his desire. Yet what could be more living than the hunters, fishers and divers, dancers and musicians, wrestlers and horsemen of Tarquinia? (215)

20R.E. Pritchard, in his 1971 D.H. Lawrence: Body of Darkness provides very much a descriptive account of Sketches of Etruscan Places and does not take the argument much further. However, he does note that it is “one of [Lawrence’s] most satisfying works, remarkable for its beauty, vividness and freshness of writing” (200) and usefully concludes that Lawrence’s vision was of “the trans-valuation of life and death – upon which he had been engaged, from almost the beginning of his career – so that tomb and womb fuse together” (204-5). Frank Kermode in his 1973 monograph Lawrence followed Sagar in referring to Lawrence’s view of a “prelapsarian world” (118) but focussed there on the religious aspects, connecting Sketches of Etruscan Places again to Apocalypse. As Kermode put it:

Lawrence reads into Etruria the mystery religion, with its rites of death and rebirth, its esoteric caste of initiates, that he was also to discover, hidden under Jewish and Christian sophistications, in the text of the Book of Revelation. In the pre-Apollonian world of this religion there was true sensual knowledge, an authentic delight in, and on proper occasions horror of, life, the phallic mystery. (117)

21Donald Gutierrez in a wide-ranging essay from 1976, “D.H. Lawrence’s Golden Age” also saw Sketches of Etruscan Places as an underappreciated work and although he noted that it was one of a number of last works focused on death and rebirth did not look at other works in detail. Rather, he examined it against a background of Etruscological scholarship (377), revealing Lawrence’s contrasting of Etruscan and Roman civilisations. He also dealt with:

Lawrence’s travel book as the "tomb-womb" of an impressively humanistic esthetic, and as a kind of subjectivist or mystic thinking which Lawrence with empathic brilliance expounds and identifies with the psyche of pre-Greco-Roman peoples. (378)

22In contrast Billy T. Tracy’s 1978 essay, “D.H. Lawrence and the Travel Book Tradition,” surveyed all four of Lawrence’s travel books. With regards to Sketches of Etruscan Places, as a travel writer he saw Lawrence as among the ethnologists, in view of his interest in the local people he saw when his focus might just have been the archaeological remains he visited (275). Tracy examined at length Lawrence’s place in the travel book genre but singled out Sketches of Etruscan Places for special attention because of Lawrence’s attempt to “reconstruct a civilisation that lived very much as he himself would have liked to live” (283) and “endow daily activities and commonplace objects with a sense of wonder” (280). He concluded that “no one has had a greater influence on the way non-specialist readers think of Italy, New Mexico, and Etruria than D.H. Lawrence” (291). Finally, in the 1970s F.B. Pinion in his A D.H. Lawrence Companion (1978) devoted only a short section to Sketches of Etruscan Places, but usefully emphasised the significance of touch, later to be much written about. First he noted that for Lawrence “systematization of knowledge tends to destroy the ‘vital touch’” and secondly that he “finds a real sense of touch […] in the Etruscan figures” (264).

23In 1980 came the publication of L.D. Clark’s ground-breaking The Minoan Distance, his study of Lawrence’s travel symbolism. In the context of Sketches of Etruscan Places Clark found the travel symbolism there echoed Lawrence’s poem “The Ship of Death,” specifically the line “Nothing matters but the longest journey”:

In all these ways, then, the pilgrim in Etruscan Places sought out among the Etruscan ruins the great sense of journeying which alone could bring him through the final stages of his own journey and shape for him a form of immortality and afterlife adequate to his imaginative needs. (397)

through discovering his reactions to unfamiliar places to discover himself a “a new man”, and so to articulate his sense of the nature of the individual’s place – and potential – in the modern world. (13)

25This is clearly an ecocritical appreciation of the book. As other central themes, Janik rightly underplays the suggestion of a connection with the Rananim project (16), focusing instead on the conflict “between the vision of community fostered by the prophetic mind and the insistence upon the fundamental importance of the individual” (19). As he saw it, this conflict:

finds some measure of resolution in Lawrence’s later works, particularly Etruscan Places, where he envisions a type of community, very different from our modern democracies and dictatorships, in which the individual could take part without sacrificing his selfhood. (21)

26As you would expect in a type of ecocritical approach that searches for a regenerative and revitalising message, Janik looked for some realistic future benefit from the book. Referring to Lawrence’s exhortation in his first essay on Herman Melville in Studies in Classic American Literature that “We can’t go back to the savages […]. We can take a great curve in their direction, onwards” (22), Janik saw Sketches of Etruscan Places as a “tentative prescription” (23), Lawrence’s three earlier travel books being essentially diagnostic, for “resolving the quest for meaning first on a personal level, by putting aside modern mindfulness in order to recapture the spontaneous sense of wonder known to the American Indians and the ancient Etruscans” (23).

27Since Janik’s book there have been further appreciations of Sketches of Etruscan Places, but they do not take matters further. For example, Dolores LaChapelle’s 1996 ecocritical study of Lawrence’s work D.H. Lawrence: Future Primitive, although widely researched, one could argue has a tendency to generalise and simplify, leading to the excessive claim that Lawrence’s experience in the Etruscan tombs “became the focus of all his remaining work” (164).

28In the period of over ninety years since the Sketches of Etruscan Places essays first appeared their reception has been of two main types. The first was a series of studies with a main theme, for example Pallattino’s on the conflict between Etruscologists and writers, Kezich’s on the historical context and Tracy’s on the travel book genre. But there has also been a second, almost lineal, development of reception as critics have made increasingly bold statements about how much the book is connected to Lawrence’s later work with its themes of death, rebirth and of course touch. This has culminated in the ecocritical approach of Janik, who saw in the book a regenerative and revitalising message for the world. With ecocriticism now a more coherent movement, there is more work to be done on Sketches of Etruscan Places. The development of the book’s reception outlined in this essay demonstrates that there are areas for further ecocritical analysis.