International D.H. Lawrence Conference: Lawrence and the Mediterranean

Call for Papers

 
“I am thinking of Lawrence here. He worshipped the sun. Light and tuberculosis: these are the two things Lawrence and Spinoza have in common” (Deleuze, Lectures on Spinoza at Vincennes)
 
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.
 
The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.
 
And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.
 
(The Ship of Death, D. H. Lawrence)
 
D. H. Lawrence, great lover of the sun, who finally succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 44, is undoubtedly one of the greatest English writers of the Twentieth Century, and this conference seeks to revisit the final months of his life (1885-1930) in the south of France, and in the Mediterranean in general—addressing the tensions of his life in Italy, Spain and Switzerland, his admiration for the work of Paul Cézanne, his interest in light and colours—and the debilitating effects of illness. We seek to work on his fiction, non-fiction, and poetry (particularly in these later years), and to reassess the not unambiguous impression made upon him and his writings by the Mediterranean.

In October 1928, Lawrence and Frieda had left Baden-Baden in Germany for the south of France and first stayed in Le Lavandou, a village east of Marseilles and Toulon, travelling to the island Port Cros before moving to Bandol and ultimately to Vence where he finally passed away in March 1930. The Mediterranean had of course been a source of enchantment and inspiration much earlier in Lawrence’s life, during his stays in Sicily, Sardinia and the north-western coast of Italy, but it seems to have held an even greater appeal during the last two years of his life in France, after cold weather and dull scenery had severely damaged his health and state of mind. On the 27th of September 1929 he wrote to Earl Brewster:
   
Lawrence sometimes seems to associate the natural with the sun and with life (the Mediterranean peoples), whereas ego-bound selves (from the north) are linked to death and unhealthiness. Previous collective volumes, Windows to the Sun (Ed. Ingersoll & Hyde), Lake Garda: Gateway to D. H. Lawrence’s Voyage to the Sun (Ed. Ceramella), looked at Lawrence’s lifelong fascination with the sun. We propose to build on these earlier contributions, looking in depth at the relationship between the sun and healthiness, or illness.

In his article ‘The Real Thing’ Lawrence wrote, shortly before his death from tuberculosis: ‘what makes life good to me is the sense that, even if I am sick and ill, I am alive, alive to the depths of my soul, and in touch somewhere, in touch with the vivid life of the cosmos. Somehow my life draws strength from the depths of the universe’ (LEA 310). Can the non-human world, in other words, be seen as a source of recovery? The great importance of the sun for Lawrence is obvious in his last pieces of writing such as the non-fictional ‘Apocalypse’, the critical review ‘Chaos in Poetry’, or short stories like ‘The Man who Died’ (1929), or ‘Sun’ (revised in 1928), in which the doctor says: ‘TAKE HER AWAY, into the sun’. Indeed, the sun always seems to stand for something far greater in Lawrence’s writings, particularly Lawrence’s later writings. In ‘Making Pictures’ he asserts that ‘the divine is not only good, it is all things’, and claims that the divine may be seen in natural objects (LEA 229).

On the other hand, one recurring complaint of Lawrence’s during his stays on the French Riviera was that the coast was being too built-up and becoming ‘artificial’ with the intrusive ‘human-all-too-human’ world repeatedly casting a shadow upon the magnificence of the Mediterranean: ‘They are just beginning to mess this coast up – but the messing seems to proceed rapidly, once it starts. Little villas “tout confort” – yes, my word. Very comforting to the eye!’ (Letters 7, 588). We also wish to look at this constant tension in Lawrence’s writings between the objectionable intrusiveness of modern man, and the cosmos as a source of renewal, or even as a force for healing from the unhealthy influences of the modern world. Other possible readings might pursue either the kind of psycho-geographic approach employed by Terry Gifford in his recent book D. H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (2023), in which he argues that Lawrence’s writing in Sea and Sardinia can be seen as an exploration of a more symbiotic, bidirectional relationship between writer and place, or it might draw on the developing field of the ‘Blue Humanities’, such as in Gifford’s article in the D. H. Lawrence Review (46.1.2) on the short story ‘The Flying Fish’, written shortly after Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

Finally, this conference will also look at Lawrence’s relationship with that famous denizen of Aix-en-Provence Cézanne, to whom Lawrence had unsurprisingly turned towards the end of 1928, discussing him (and other painters) in the remarkable ‘Introduction to these Paintings’. For Lawrence, unlike the Impressionist painters, this flight into light is merely illusory, meaningless, an escape ‘into the grand néant, the great nowhere’ (LEA 197), and the importance of the Mediterranean lies elsewhere. Lawrence suggests that Cézanne was engaged in a heroic struggle (LEA 204) between the ready-made clichés of the man-made world and a deeper ‘naïve Mediterranean sense’ of the truth or reality of the cosmos: ‘in him was the little flame of life where he felt things to be true’ (LEA 205).

 

Conference Theme

 
The conference theme seeks to explore these tensions in Lawrence’s earlier as well as later works, and invites papers on any aspect of Lawrence’s works that is concerned with the constant attention to life.
Possible themes may include the following, although these are not exhaustive, and we also welcome other approaches and any new work on Lawrence: 

• Lawrence and the Mediterranean
• Lawrence and the sun
• Lawrence, the South and the North
• Cultural crossings and translations
• Spirit of place
• Preparing for death, illness and creativity
• Vision, light, enlightenment
• Lawrence, touch and the haptic
• Lawrence, art, artists and the arts
• Lawrence and Fry’s ‘significant form’
• Lawrence and Cézanne
• Lawrence and the cosmos
• Lawrence, France and the French
• Last Poems and late writings
• Lawrence, travel and tourism
• Lawrence, modernism and modernity
• Lawrence and other writers in/on the Mediterranean
• Lawrence, history and the past

Individual paper submissions: Abstracts of about no more than 400 words together with a proposed title and a short biography should be sent to all three organizers by the 18th of December 2026
Panel proposals: We welcome suggestions for specific panels. A title, a list of contributors together with their affiliations (no more than 4), a list of proposed abstracts (400 words max), and short biographies should be sent to all three organizers by the 18th of December 2026