WILLIAM HEINEMANN, LTD
PUBLISHERS.
LONDON
MELBOURNE & TORONTO.

Directors:

A. S. FRERE, C.B.E., CHAIRMAN.
B. F. OLIVER.
H. L. HALL.
A. DWYE EVANS.
Miss L. CALLENDER.

Telegraphic Address:
"SUNLOCKS, LONDON."

Telephone:
MUSEUM 3946 (4 LINES)

99 GREAT RUSSELL STREET,
LONDON, W. C. 1.

October 4th, 1948.

My dear Norman,

We are having prepared, and propose to publish
some time in the future, an outline biography of
D.H. Lawrence and some account of his books. For this
purpose, it may be necessary to quote from your book
D.H. LAWRENCE AND MAURICE MAGNUS, though the book does
not propose to enter these matters very deeply or in
detail. I trust you will allow us to do this.

I trust also that you are very well and
flourishing.

Norman Douglas, Esq.,
c/o Messrs. Chatto & Windus,
40-42 William IV Street,
W.C.2.

52, Darrick Wood Road,
Orpington,
Kent.

3.February, 1947.

Dear Mr. Douglas,

I last wrote to you in 1930, from Brazil, when I purchased a few of your privately printed books and subscribed to the "Materials for a Description of Capri". This time I write after reading "Late Harvest".

During the war I spent 18 months in Naples and used to spend a good deal of my spare time exploring Siren Land, which I knew from your books but which I had never before had an opportunity of visiting. I have now walked pretty well all over it, from the top of Monte Sant'Angelo to the Punta Campanella. It may amuse you to learn how I stumbled upon your tracks

It was rarely possible for me to get away from Naples for more than a day, and in order to give myself more time I conceived the idea of spending a night at St.Agata and returning the next morning. On the way up the zig-zags behind Sorrento, on the day when I first determined to put this plan into execution, I inquired of a small boy whether there was anywhere in Sant'Agata where I could get accommodation for the night. He led me to the Pensione Petagna. Having made friends with the inhabitants I was in the kitchen asking about various places I wished to locate - the Casa degli Spiriti was one - and pulled out of my pocket a copy of "Siren Land", in the Secker edition with your photograph as a frontispiece. The result was extraordinary. The place fairly echoed with exstatic cries of "Signor Dooglas! Signor Dooglas!" Everybody talked at once; the old woman was dragged out from some back premises and it was explained that she was getting a bit weak in the head - an allegation, however, which she strenuously denied. It was my impression that I was actually introduced to her as your son, the real circumstances of my visit being considered far too complicated for her poor old brain to grasp. Crowds of children, who

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cannot have been born when you were last in Sant'Agata, kept up meanwhile
a constant chorus in the background: "Signor Dooglas, Signor Doooglas!"
I learned that they had not seen you for the past seven years, but that
you had previously spent a month in the spring there every year for
twenty years, that everyone in the village knew you and that you used to
come there often with your son, who was of giant proportions.

Such was my introduction to the Pensione Petagna. I called there
often afterwards, but only slept there twice. On the first occasion I
killed 17 bugs. On the second occasion 12 mosquitos and 8 bugs. My first
night was not spent in the Pensione itself, but in a neighbouring
building. The second, however, in the place itself. If you ever go there
again ask them about the man who complained of bugs, and was looking for
the "Casa degli Spiriti". They told me _no-one_ had ever been attacked by
anything of the sort there before. It was "a day of shame" for the
proprietess.

During the war there were two soldiers from the north who got left
behind as the fighting line crawled northwards and who, very sensibly
decided to sit the war out in Sant'Agata. They were employed about the
house and as waiters in the Pensione. One of them eventually married the
red-headed niece of the proprietess. During a last hilarious
investigation of the Great Bed Bug Mystery she tried to pin me down as to
where exactly it was that I had, on that previous occasion, encountered
these horrors. "Just along the corridor here - first room on the left."
"That's _my_ bedroom." Collapse and screams of laughter.

About the Casa degli Spiriti I had an amusing conversation with a boy
on the beach at Cantone. He pointed it out to me and asked why I was
interested. I told him that an English writer lived there. "Who was that -
Shaspeare? Very nice poet, Shas Shakespeare."

While Sorrento was always full of troops - all the hotels were

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used as convalescent homes, rest-camps, etc. - few got as far as Sant' Agata. Three dubious-looking Americans turned up in the Pensione P. once, with yet more dubious-looking girl friends, and I gained the impression, sad to relate, that the proprietess was not above letting out rooms to all and sundry, without inquiring too closely into the uses to which they were put. Perhaps that was the source of my bugs.

On the whole Siren Land was not much troubled during the war. A few blown bridges, an unexploded bomb near the path from Crapolla to Torca, some gun sites on the Tore - nothing much more. Of course, they all suffered from the shortages and inflation, and I'm afraid are suffering much more now. An old friend of mine, who lives in the penultimate house on the path that leads to Punta Campanella, beyond Termini, used to ask: "Are we a dependency of America, or of England, or are we free?" and "What sort of money (Allied Military Currency, Dollars, Pounds, Lire) will be any use to us after the war?" I hope he found the right answer.

There have been further changes, of course, and generally for the worse. On the beach at Recomone there is a sort of sea wall and some sort of habitation. Someone - a film actress, I was told, - has built a villa on the islet of Isca. The old farm-house at Sant'Elia, when I visited it, was no longer uninhabited. There was a swarm of very dirty children in and about the place. I remember there was some sort of seabird nailed over the doorway. The wolves are all extinct, of course, long ago, but there was a revival of brigandage (deserters), during the war. I was told that there was a band of 150, armed with machine-guns, controlling the road that runs across the base of the peninsular, to reach the coast beyond Amalfi.

Luckily for me - according to the boy with whom I got into conversation on this road - they made the mistake of shooting the brother of the chief of the local carabinieri, with the result that he made serious efforts to combat them, so they moved on to another district.

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What is that human skull doing in the little chapel on Monte San
Gostanzo?

Your new book opens in the Villa Politi, Syracuse. I stayed there for some months in the winter of 1943-44. It became the transit hotel and officer's club. A curious fact is that one could buy in the town picture postcards of the hotel, and in these photographic reproductions a whole extra storey, which does not exist in reality, has been added to the building. We are accustomed to misleading photographs taken with a wide angle lens, but faking on this scale is new in my experience.

The place was being managed by an incredible old brigand when we were there.

I hope these jottings will not be unwelcome to you. It must, at any rate, give you pleasure to think that your name is not forgotten in Siren Land.

With kindest regards,

Yours sincerely