Since I had crossed over from Ancona to Split earlier than I had thought I would be able to, and had planned to get to my Croatian hosts only the following week, I had as mentioned last week gone first to Dubrovnik. And then instead of heading back straight to Split I thought I would go for a day to Mostar in Bosnia, having hugely enjoyed the hotel I had stayed in on my previous visit there, in 2017.
It was called the Kriva Cuprija, the hotel of the crooked bridge, for it looked over a lovely little bridge a short distance away from the famous Mostar bridge which had been destroyed in the war, but rebuilt so that five years earlier I had seen boys dive from it to the river as they have done down the ages.
Not now though, for it was getting cold and in fact it started raining the day I travelled. Getting from the bus station to the hotel was a chore, even though I had a cap and a decent jacket, for the streets were cobbled, not ideal for trundling a suitcase along.
But getting to the hotel made it all worthwhile, for they also gave me a room with a balcony, and I could sit out for a few minutes when the rain ceased. But I was content then to read in the room, that afternoon and also next morning for the bus to Split left late. In between I had a delicious dinner, and at breakfast they let me sit on the covered part of the terrace so I could see the bridge which I had relished at dinner during my earlier stay.
After breakfast I finally finished the book by D H Lawrence which I had in fact started in Colombo, though it had been slow going so I had taken it with me, and read it little by little during my travels. This was a collection of two in theory travelogues, Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places, which had originally been published five years apart, the latter in 1932, two years after his death.
I had found the first part of the first essay good reading, describing the life Lawrence and his wife lived when they lived in Mexico. But then the writing got bogged down in one of Lawrence’s pet ideas, about the need to reaffirm the primacy of what he called the blood, and this he does here through convoluted accounts of Indian dances. Subsequently I found that those three sections were in fact written in New Mexico where he had also lived, and I fear that the American Indians he deals with rang to me false in comparison with the Mexican peasants he described in the earlier sections.
The essay is rounded off with reflections on Mexico written in Italy, in a whimsical and mercifully short piece. It was because I had found the middle section difficult that, without finished the book, I took it with me and read a chapter or so a day when exhausted by sightseeing.
But having finished that essay and moved on to the account of looking at tombs of the old Etruscan civilization, I was once again enthused, by what I can only described as more measured intensity. There was still much about what Lawrence was determined to claim was the Etruscan affirmation of life, and he contrasts them with the Romans who had given them a bad name. But his descriptions of the little villages he has to stay in to get to the tombs, the primitive transport he uses, the simplicity of the peasants who help him along, are all fascinating, as are his actual descriptions of the tombs he enters, in the faint light of candles.
His companion on these explorations was Earl Brewster, with whom he had stayed in Kandy, which added piquancy to my reading for Brewster figured too in the Cooper thriller I had also been reading on my travels. And unlike when I left Colombo, I was pleased when I finished the book to have read this aspect too of Lawrence’s writing. He had a compelling power with his pen, and though the canonization of Inian dancing was excessive, one had to register what seemed the heartening genuineness of his art, to use a noun he would have held in high esteem.
The pictures are I believe his own, reproduced in the Gutenberg Project republication of the book.