As Edith Durham, a noted authority on the Balkans, bitchily put it at the time, “The novelist Miss West has written an immense book on the strength of one pleasure trip to Yugoslavia, but with no previous knowledge of land or people.” For the record, Miss West had made three trips to Yugoslavia: the first, at the invitation of the British Council, to give lectures in the spring of 1936 a second with her husband, Henry Andrews, in the spring of 1937 the third in early summer of the following year. Indeed, relative to the size of the finished book, her experience of Yugoslavia was pretty skimpy. She had not yet made the first of the trips to Yugoslavia that would form the basis of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but the importance of this realisation on her own magnum opus is considerable. For this purpose “the city of Florence was as good a symbol as any other”. It was only after his death that she appreciated that he “was writing about the state of his own soul at that moment” and could only do so in symbolic terms. At the time West thought that Lawrence did not know enough about Florence “to make his views of real value”. To West this seemed “obviously a silly thing to do”, but Douglas was right: they turned up at Lawrence’s hotel to find him doing just that. When Rebecca West visited Norman Douglas in Florence in 1921 he joked that although Lawrence had been in town only a few hours he was probably already hammering out an article, “vehemently and exhaustively describing the temperament of the people”.
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