Mediterranean Travel Writing: From Etruscan Places to Under the Tuscan Sun

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2004 by Folks, Jeffrey J

To compare Francis Mayes with D. H Lawrence seems pretty unfair, and I would not inflict the comparison except that I think it reveals something about the way in which western culture has changed for the worse since Lawrence's time, for Mayes's writing is rooted in exactly the sort of "poisonous" materialism that Lawrence detested and that he knew was taking over Europe and America. Published in 1996, Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy was praised in a wide range of reviews. USA Today called it a "beautifully written memoir about taking chances, living in Italy, loving a house and, always, the pleasures of food." Booklist described it as "armchair travel at its most enticing." The Houston Chronicle called it "a model for the open, curious mind and the questing soul," while the Boston Globe, considerably more circumspect, referred to it as "a report from our dream Italy." As these reviews suggest, Mayes's books have gained a large popular audience, and they will certainly gain an even larger audience following the late 2003 release of the Disney/Touchstone film loosely based on Under the Tuscan Sun.

What makes Mayes different from those of us who have only dreamed of moving to Italy or another land of our dreams is that she did actually purchase a country estate in Tuscany and, at least during breaks from teaching in San Francisco, supervise the remodeling of her villa. The true subject, however, of Under the Tuscan Sun and her less competent sequel, Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy, is not remodeling, and certainly not "taking chances" or approaching the subject with "an open, curious mind," as Mayes's publishers and critics would have it. Rather, it is the way in which these books so accurately reflect the bourgeois dream of self-fulfillment, in this case the fantasy of escaping to a dream-world of charming expatriate experience-dinners on the veranda, shopping for local crafts, encounters with warm-hearted locals. Mayes's dream of Italy, like those of so many Roman Holiday admirers, evokes a con temporary myth of privilege, of "all the places MasterCard will take you," as the advertisement has it. It is about finding a place to live so far away that we don't have to face the monster of daily life. The sentimental treatment of the peasantry, hand-crafts, and ancient ruins masks the unresolved discontent of a consumer culture that nonetheless does not intend to forego its material advantages. At its heart, the relationship of Mayes's narrator to her subject is inauthentic because the speaker always has one eye cocked toward her potential audience, always with the suggestion that hers is the most enviable of possible experiences. In this sense, expatriation itself is a consumable intended for conspicuous display. How different it is with D. H. Lawrence, Rebecca West, and Lawrence Durrell-all of whom took on the Mediterranean for real, risking something of themselves in the course of doing so.

The acquisition and renovation of an Italian villa is the framework on which Mayes's flimsy tale is assembled, but the egoistic compulsion to acquire forms its compelling motive. Unlike Lawrence, whose gaze is outwardly directed toward the living culture of Italy, and unlike Durrell, whose interest is both scholarly and social, Mayes's persona is on a sort of raiding expedition-the countryside is the site of forays in search of gourmet foods, wines, crafts, and decorative items to buttress her sense of personal gratification. This complacent dream is all the more insidious because of its pretense of a valorizing, nonjudgemental acceptance of cultural "others," all the while ruthlessly exploiting its own economic advantages.

Interspersing recipes in the narrative confirms the extent to which consumption underlies Mayes's writing. Food is a fixation here, as it is in bourgeois culture in general, because it is an easily manipulated projection of narcissistic ego. It is the one thing in Mayes's world that can be controlled. Focused on the table, the sensual quest takes on an almost religious quality. At a "feast for the extra virgin oil of the Cortona hills," Mayes exclaims, "the oils, like ours, are profoundly fresh with a vigorous element to the taste that makes me want to smack my lips" (Tuscan Sun 245-46). I'm afraid there is altogether too much lip-smacking in this narrative, even if the undertone of the book conveys a sense of bleak emptiness, the purposelessness of a conception of life in which enticing recipes and home decor are substitutes for more meaningful forms of commitment. At times, Mayes's narrator actually seems to be aware of the aimless quality of her life, though not of its implications. "Odd that we are all here," she exclaims. "We were given one country and we've set ourselves up in another" (Tuscan Sun 147).

What separates D. H Lawrence's three books about Italy from that of lesser travel writers such as Mayes is that they are not controlled by the Mediterranean myth-the reified Tuscan sun that shimmers throughout Mayes's books and that, at the same time, is rendered pointless by her narcissistic treatment. They possess not merely intellectual capacity but a profound understanding of life's purposes and are thus capable of responding to the mythic subject with an appreciation earned by selfless attention. They bring their own sensibility and culture to the task of responding to and interpreting what they experience, but at the same time they do experience and are changed by what they see. Their relationship to the subject is mediating: neither surrender to the myth nor merely the bringing of one's own personality to it. The remarkable selflessness of Lawrence is utterly unlike the typical Year in Provence narrative of the sort popularized by Peter Mayle with its "fascinating" accounts of property renovations, gastronomic adventures, negotiations with peasant laborers, and market-day discoveries. With Lawrence, the subject is not an extension of the self but the meeting of self and place. The place visited is respected for what it is, a place that is different and yet the same, a place to be encountered not as a quaint consummation of one's dream but as a constituent of common humanity.