A Visit to the Villa Mirenda

Abstract

I only met Lawrence once, when he and his wife were living in Tuscany. I was staying near by and they asked my sister and myself to have tea with them; so we drove through the blossoming countryside—for it was high May—to his farmhouse. This square, blue-painted house stood among gentle hills, with rather Japanese pines springing from rocks and brown earth in the distance, and with the foreground sprinkled with bushes of cistus, flowering in huge yellow, white and purple paper roses. A few cypresses, the most slender of exclamation-marks—not robust, as they are further south—orchestrated the landscape. Lawrence opened the door to us, and it was the first time I had ever realised what a fragile and goatish little saint he was: a Pan and a Messiah; for in his flattish face, with its hollow, wan cheeks, and rather red beard, was to be discerned a curious but happy mingling of satyr and ascetic; qualities, too, which must really have belonged to him, since they are continually to be found in his work. It was, certainly, a remarkable appearance. Unlike the faces of most geniuses, it was the face of a genius.

From ‘Portrait of Lawrence’, Penny Foolish (London: Macmillan, 1935) pp. 296–7.