BIOGRAPHY OF D. H. LAWRENCE

 1 : Background and youth: 1885-1908
 
   
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was born on 11 September 1885 in the small house which is now 8a Victoria Street, Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. Eastwood was a growing colliery village of around 5000 inhabitants: there were ten pits within easy walking distance, and a massive majority of the male population were colliers (Lawrence's father and all three paternal uncles worked down the pit). The district had grown and prospered because of the rewards offered by the industry; the very house where Lawrence was born had been built by the largest of the local colliery companies, Barber Walker & Co. But by the mid 1880s the great coal-boom was over; and though Eastwood continued to grow, the only future it seemed to offer was in the coal industry itself. A tight-knit community of men whose lives depended upon each other also supported wives few of whom had jobs, and children who mostly could not wait until they were - at fourteen - able themselves to start as colliers. It was not a promising background for a man who would make his life's work writing about the fulfilled relationships of men and women, and the crucial relationship between human beings and the natural world: although such things were remarkable in his background by their very absence.
      Lawrence was the fourth child of Arthur Lawrence (1846-1924) and Lydia Beardsall (1851-1910), and their first to have been born in Eastwood. Ever since their marriage in 1875, the couple had been on the move: Arthur's job as a miner had taken them where the best-paid work had been during the boom years of the 1870s, and they had lived in a succession of small and recently built grimy colliery villages all over Nottinghamshire. But when they moved to Eastwood in 1883, it was to a place where they would remain for the rest of their lives; the move seems to have marked a watershed in their early history.
For one thing, they were settling down: Arthur Lawrence would work at Brinsley colliery until he retired in 1909. For another, they now had three small children - George (1876-1967), Ernest (1878-1901) and Emily (1882-1962) - and Lydia may have wanted to give them the kind of continuity in schooling they had never previously had. It was also the case that, when they came to Eastwood, they took a house with a shop window, and Lydia ran a small clothes shop: presumably to supplement their income, but also perhaps because she felt she could do it in addition to raising their children. It seems possible that, getting on badly with her husband as she did, she imagined that further children were out of the question. Taking on the shop may have marked her own bid for independence.

She certainly needed to stand up for herself. Arthur's parents - John (1815-1901) and Louisa (1818-1898) and his brother George (1853-1929) lived less than a mile away, down in Brinsley, where his brother James (1851-1880) had been killed at work, three years earlier, while his youngest brother Walter (1856-1904) lived only 100 yards away from them in another company house, in Princes Street. When the family moved to Eastwood, Arthur Lawrence was coming back to his own family's center: one of the reasons, for sure, why they stayed there.
Lydia Lawrence probably felt, on the other hand, more as if she were digging in for a siege. Eastwood may have been home to Arthur Lawrence, but to Lydia it was just another grimy colliery village which she never liked very much and where she never felt either much at home or properly accepted. Her family originally came from Nottingham but she had been brought up in Sheerness, and her Kent accent doubtless made Midlands people feel that she put on airs. Her grandfather lived not far off, but the rest of her family were all still in Nottingham, twelve miles away. Her father George Beardsall (1825-1899) was a pensioned- off engine fitter who had been injured at work in Sheerness back in 1870, and who had never worked since. The family had come back to Nottingham and her mother Lydia (1830-1900) had somehow contrived that they should survive on his tiny pension, and on what the children of the family had been able to bring in. Lydia the daughter had originally had ambitions to be a teacher, was always bookish and interested in intellectual matters; but following her family's financial disaster, like her sisters she had had to fall back on the humiliations of lace- drawing - one of the sweated home-working jobs that Nottingham's lace industry created. George and Lydia Beardsall probably became a little better off, as their children grew up and married; but it also seems probable that their daughter Lydia's marriage to a collier in 1875 created a great deal of tension in the family. She married beneath her, her parents would have said. No matter their own poverty: Lydia had married, for love, a man who worked with his hands (and came home black) - and the Beardsalls had a cherished and legendary family history in which they had owned factories and had (once) even married into the aristocracy. They felt themselves to be gentlefolk even while everything about their circumstances ensured that they were not.

Arthur Lawrence was a butty - that is, a man responsible for the working of a small section of coal-face along with the team of workmen he organized - and it seems possible that when he married Lydia he had not told her that he himself worked underground. The loss of her own family, her disillusionment with her husband, and her anger at the ease with which - after early promises - he slipped back into the male world of evenings spent drinking with his mates, her dissatisfaction with her own roles as wife and mother in the succession of - to her - alien villages in which they had lived, had created in Lydia Lawrence both depression and a great deal of anger. Finding herself pregnant again in the early months of 1885 cannot have helped. The Victoria Street shop had not done well (Lydia was probably not an engaging saleswoman): and a new baby born in September 1885 - they called him Bert - she had to care for signalled, perhaps, the end of her attempt to be independent which the shop had marked. In 1887, shortly after the family had moved down into a larger company house in "The Breach" - and the Breach, if well-built, was notoriously common, even by Eastwood standards - she had another baby, Lettice Ada (1887-1948): another link in the chain she felt binding her down.

Home life for the Lawrence children became polarized between loyalty to their mother as she struggled to do her best for them, in scrimping and saving and encouraging them in taking their education seriously, and a rather troubled love for their father, who was increasingly treated by his wife as a drunken ne'er do well: and who drank to escape the tensions he (as a consequence) experienced at home. Lydia Lawrence consciously alienated the children from their father, and told them stories of her early married life (like, for example, the episode when Arthur locked her out of the house at night) which they never forgot, or forgave their father for. All the children apart from the eldest son George grew up with an abiding love for their mother and various kinds of dislike for their father. Arthur Lawrence, for his part, unhappy at the lack of respect and love shown him and the way in which his male privilege as head of the household was constantly being breached, reacted by drinking and deliberately irritating and alienating his family. It seems quite likely that, for long periods of their childhood, his drinking and staying out in the evenings, until his tipsy return would lead to a row, effectively dominated the children's experience. His behaviour - and his spending of a portion of the family income on drink - caused all the major quarrels between the parents, divided the children's loves and loyalties, and left Bert with a profound hatred of his father and an anxious, sympathetic love for his mother. The young Paul Morel lying in bed at night praying "Let him be killed at pit" (Sons & Lovers 85) is probably a true memory of the young Bert Lawrence, lying in bed waiting for his father's return home at night.

It is as well to keep this matter in perspective. Arthur Lawrence never left his family (though he may have threatened to): he never seems to have had to miss work because of his drinking: his earnings were never so diverted into drink as to leave his family seriously hard- up: he was rarely if ever violent; and it is probably wrong to think of him simply as an alcoholic. And, as always, the problems with the marriage did not stem from the behavior of only one of the partners. Lydia Lawrence certainly played her part in alienating the children from their father and in setting the agenda for their behavior. They were not to look forward to becoming colliers, like their uncles and their father, and like the vast majority of their contemporaries at school. They would take the teetotal pledge; they would treat school and its possibilities very seriously; they would go to Sunday school and chapel; they would become clerks and teachers; they would not grow up believing that men should boss women about; they would have ambitions to rise, if possible, into the middle-classes. All this, of course, still further alienated and angered Arthur Lawrence. But, in short, the Lawrence children would conform to the Beardsall family's image of itself rather than to Arthur Lawrence's; and they would grow up to do the things, and take the chances, she herself would have liked to have done and taken.

For - without her children - all Lydia Lawrence had to look forward to, in the long- term, was the growth of her children, and especially her sons, into manhood and independence. Both literally and metaphorically she always seems to have looked forward to some kind of painful struggle back up the hill into respectability. In 1891, the family managed the literal move when they moved up to a bay-windowed house in Walker Street commanding a magnificent view over the valley and beyond; and, the same year, the eldest son George left school and started work. Her favorite child, however, was her second son Ernest, who was the cleverest of all her children at school (Bert was delicate in health and missed too much school when young to do particularly well). Ernest left Beauvale school in 1893, and quickly found work as a clerk; and his mother's hopes became bound up with his success. George was always rather a problem to his mother: he ran away to join the army in 1895 and his mother had to buy him out: and then, in 1897, he had to marry his pregnant girl-friend Ada Wilson (1876-1938). Altogether he probably seemed (to his mother and to his siblings) rather too much like his father, whom he always thought very highly of. But Ernest went from strength to strength, through a succession of relatively well-paid jobs. As well as working, he studied in the evenings, read widely, taught shorthand at the local night school and also gave private lessons. He ended up, at the age of 21, getting a job in London at £120 a year. Arthur Lawrence, even in a good year, would not have earned as much as that, and would normally have earned considerably less.

The family dynamics changed with George and Ernest leaving home. The eldest daughter, Emily, was not especially good at school and had always done a great deal of caring for her younger siblings (they never forgot the stories she would tell them); she would remain living at home until her marriage to a local man, Sam King (1880-1965) in 1904. Bert was, however, starting to florish: a sickly child, who had been bullied as "mard-arsed" - soft - when young and who had preferred the company of girls to boys and of books to either: cardinal sins in a male-dominated society. But he was doing better and better at school: he won a scholarship to Nottingham High School in 1898, his last year at the Board School in Beauvale he had been attending since he was seven: the County Council was sponsoring the children of the poor to allow them access to such institutions. Bert Lawrence was only the second miner's son ever to go to the High School in Nottingham. Having never been a normal, games-playing and colliery-directed Eastwood boy, he was now going to be a distinctly abnormal one, with his high collar and dark suit, and the books under his arm.

His performance at Nottingham, however, was only briefly distinguished, and bottomed out badly at the end of his second year. He turned out to be even more of a fish out of water in an almost completely middle-class school than he had been in Eastwood. Events in March 1900 must have contributed to making things worse still. His uncle Walter Lawrence (now living in Ilkeston, three miles away, just over the border into Derbyshire) was arrested for killing his son by throwing the carving steel at him during a row, and committed for trial at the Derby assizes. The story was splashed over the local newspapers: and Bert Lawrence's performance at school that summer was his worst yet. He left at the age of 16, in the summer of 1901, with almost nothing to show for his three years there: years which (in spite of the scholarship) had cost the family a good deal of money.

It was now imperative that he get a job. Although his Nottingham High School training had equipped him to start as a pupil-teacher in a local school - if he could get a place - it seemed more important that he should start earning than that his long-term future should be considered. Accordingly, in the early autumn, like his brother Ernest, he started work as a clerk. He acquired a position in a Nottingham surgical goods factory and warehouse: at last doing something to offset the railway fares and the cost of the clothes he was now fast growing out of. Having always been a small child, he was now getting lanky.

It was while he was at work in Nottingham, at Haywoods, that the great tragedy of the family occurred. Ernest was still working in London, and had recently become engaged to a London stenographer. Louisa "Gipsy" Dennis. He had been home for the traditional October Nottinghamshire holiday, known as the Wakes; but had fallen ill with erysipelas on his return to his south London lodgings. His landlady sent a telegram to Eastwood, and Lydia Lawrence braved the trains and the suburbs to go and nurse him. She found him unconscious and dangerously ill when she arrived; doctors could do nothing (the disease commonly led very quickly to blood-poisoning, high fever and pneumonia); and he died within a day of her arrival.
Of all the possible disasters in Lydia's disappointed life, this must have been the worst. She took little interest in her family that autumn; and when Bert himself fell ill, just before Christmas, it came only as a dull shock to his mother. But the work in the factory, the strain of the long day (twelve hours at work, and two more hours travelling), combined doubtless with the fact that his mother was effectively ignoring him, weakened him, and Bert went down with double pneumonia. And his mother nearly lost him too. Release from the emotional traumas of the autumn, and Bert's recovery, led her to identify her hopes and emotions with her youngest son to an extent which she had never done before; he came back to a new and very significant kind of intimacy with his mother. He would now be carrying the weight of her hopes and expectations - and of her love: a love to which he instinctively responded, and never forgot.

Something else Lawrence came back to after his illness - he never returned to Haywoods - was a new awareness of the country around his home. For all its griminess and ugliness, Eastwood was set in a surprisingly rural landscape; Arthur Lawrence could gather mushrooms on his morning's walk across the fields, and at work would chew grass-stems picked on the same walk. Lawrence's new relationship with the countryside was largely gleaned from visits to the Haggs farm, two miles north of Eastwood. The Chambers family and the Lawrence family had gone to the same chapel in Eastwood, and Mrs Ann Chambers (1859-1937) - another stranger in Eastwood - had struck up a friendship with Lydia Lawrence. In 1898, the Chambers family had gone to live and work at the farm; and Bert Lawrence had first visited them there, with his mother, during his last summer at Nottingham High School. Now the walk to the farm, and the life he could share there, became an important part of his convalescence. We may suspect, too, that he found the tensions and outbursts of a very different family from his own more bearable than the sometimes stiflingly moralizing and emotionally constrained atmosphere of home. He became friends with the two younger boys first, and then with the eldest son Alan (1882-1946), three years older than himself. The elder daughter, May (1883-1955), was in the process of an adolescent extraction of herself from the family toils; but the younger daughter, Jessie (1887-1944), seems to have worshipped Lawrence from the start. And his relationship with her developed into the most significant of his young life.

For one thing, she was already fascinated by poetry and fiction; and in her Lawrence found the willing companion in reading and discussing who was so significantly lacking at home. Lydia Lawrence always read a good deal - but only novels; and although at times she wrote poetry, she regarded such things as merely the diversions of a busy life lived to other and more significant ends. But Jessie and the young Lawrence - who had always read a good deal, the natural occupation of a rather withdrawn but clever child - now devoured books, lived through them, lost themselves in them. And Lawrence found that, in their discussions, he could express himself to Jessie as to no-one else.

During the spring and early summer, he got better; he had a month's convalescence at Skegness, at a boarding house run by his maternal aunt Nellie (1855-1908). He had to work too: his aptitude for maths got him a job doing the accounts for a local Pork butcher in the evenings. But that autumn, too, he embarked on a new career. A place had been found for him at last as a pupil-teacher in the British Schools in Eastwood; he received his own lessons from the headmaster, George Holderness, for an hour before school started; then spent most of the rest of his time teaching the collier lads who only a couple of years earlier would have jeered at him for being a softy. But being a pupil-teacher was the natural way forward to gaining (in the end) a teacher's certificate, and to becoming the teacher that both Lawrence and his mother now recognized as his natural vocation. The work was taxing, but Lawrence impressed Holderness with his dedication and his intelligence. The pupil-teachers also spent some time each week at a pupil-teacher center in Ilkeston, rather to their Headmaster's annoyance, because he lost valuable teachers while they were away; and here Lawrence met with a whole group of other men and women in his situation (he also thoroughly impressed the head). Jessie Chambers started to attend the center the year after Lawrence began, for example; so did Lawrence's younger sister Ada.

After two years as a pupil-teacher in Eastwood, paying visits to the new center in Ilkeston, furiously reading, going out to the Haggs farm and talking to Jessie, Lawrence sat the competitive King's Scholarship examination in December 1904. And now for the first time he emerged as a real star. He was placed in the first class of the first division; his name was printed in the local papers, he had to send an account of himself and his working methods (and a photograph) to the magazine The Schoolmaster. Remained the question of how he would actually study for his teacher's certificate. This could be done either full-time at an institution, and sitting final examinations, or by fitting the study into your spare time and taking the examinations externally. It was decided that Bert Lawrence would go to College: to Nottingham University College. This would be yet another strain on the family finances to which Lawrence had, as yet, contributed almost nothing; it was decided that he would spend a year (this time, in full-time teaching) at the British Schools, earning £50, before going.

The interval between taking the King's Scholarship Examination and going to college in September 1906 proved to be perhaps the most significant period of Lawrence's life so far. In the first place, in the spring of 1905, he started to write. It was, perhaps, the most natural outcome of the years he had spent reading and discussing literature; yet he began writing with a strong sense of the oddity of his ambition. "What will the others say? That I'm a fool. A collier's son a poet!" he remarked, scathingly, to Jessie Chambers. It was poetry that he began with. "I remember the slightly self-conscious Sunday afternoon, when ... I þcomposed' my first two "poems." One was to Guelder-roses, and one to Campions, and most young ladies would have done better: at least I hope so. But I thought the effusions very nice, and so did Miriam." (Worthen 1991: 130-31) For perhaps a year it was poetry which he wrote. And then, at Easter 1906, he started the greatest experiment of his early life: he began to write a novel which he called Laetitia, the first version of The White Peacock.

But other feelings also came to a head at Easter 1906. For four years he and Jessie had accompanied each other's intellectual and literary development; they had progressed from the delighted sharing of novels to the serious work of reading Carlyle, Schopenhauer and Emerson. Lawrence had helped answer her need for intense involvement in matters apart from the everyday life of the farm girl. And Jessie had been not only the audience for all of Lawrence's fledgling work but in many ways its nurse, too: fiercely possessive of it, demanding its creation, loving it when she saw it. She and Lawrence had continued to see all they could of each other. But to other people - in particular to Lawrence's mother Lydia and his sisters Emily and Ada - the relationship with Jessie must have seemed to have been growing positively unhealthy. Lawrence was out at all hours with her, walking and talking and reading; to a loving and possessive mother confronting his college career, and all that depended on it, the time he spent with Jessie, like his writing, must have seemed a dangerous waste. Emily - now a married woman - thought her brother and Jessie must be lovers, and wanted them to behave more respectably. And even Ada resented the way Jessie monopolized her brother. Lawrence was confronted with an ultimatum from his family. He should either become formally engaged to Jessie, or he should stop seeing so much of her. It was explained to him that he was damaging her chances of getting to know other men: spoiling her chances of marriage.

Lawrence gauchely went and told Jessie what he felt he must; that he did not love her enough to want to marry her; and that he must see less of her. She was horribly hurt: especially as her own feelings for him had grown more and more like love, over the years. They agreed to see less of each other, and if possible only when a third person was there. But it was a savage blow to Jessie: the ending of her first, implicit, unexpressed belief that she and Lawrence were destined to spend their lives together. The Lawrence family, however, must have felt that they had seen off a dangerous and distracting influence in Jessie.

That September, Lawrence brought his teaching in Eastwood to an end with some regrets. Holderness, a tough disciplinarian, had clearly valued him and protected him against the toughest of his pupils, while the pupils seem to have liked him as much as he liked them. But Lawrence had to start at college in Nottingham: another break with the old days. He acquired a new group of friends, among them a girl from Cossall he had first met at the Ilkeston Center, Louie Burrows (1888-1962); and moved into new worlds intellectually, eventually spending a good deal of his time with socialist and free-thinking companions. Emily recalled "a psychological set at the University, who ridiculed religion" (Worthen 1991: 178). He also spent a lot of time writing; for example, he finished the first draft of his novel toward the end of his first year in College, and wrote a second draft during his second year. This seems to have been his main achievement at Nottingham; he found the course stultifying and the teachers too often patronizing toward students working only for teachers' certificates rather than for degrees. His mother seems to have been keen on the idea of his transferring to a degree course, or continuing studying part-time for a degree after he had obtained his teacher's certificate; but Lawrence seems to have done what he had to do, and no more. In spite of this, he came out with the best marks of any of the men in his final year, 1908.

But the two years at Nottingham which he later felt had been largely wasted (he strongly advised Jessie Chambers to take her certificate as an external student) were actually another crucial opportunity for his development. He had more time for his writing than ever before. Not only did he continue to write Laetitia, he worked hard at his poetry, and in the autumn of 1907 started to write short stories. This was originally because Jessie and Alan Chambers had challenged him to enter the annual Nottinghamshire Guardian competition, which had three categories for stories with a local setting. Lawrence determined to enter all three categories: he employed Jessie and Louie Burrows to submit entries for him, and himself entered the story he thought had the best chance - an early version of "A Fragment of Stained Glass." As it turned out, the sentimental story entered by Jessie, "A Prelude" - containing recreations of the Haggs and her family - won the category for the best story of a Happy Christmas and was printed in the Nottinghamshire Guardian. Jessie's father Edmund (1863-1946) cashed the £3 cheque for Lawrence. He rewrote both the other stories eventually (Louie's being an early version of "The White Stocking"), and wrote at least one other story ("The Vicar's Garden") around the same time. He also submitted some work - probably an essay - to the essayist and novelist G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) at the Daily News, but to his irritation had it returned and (according to Jessie) resolved to "try no more" (Worthen 1991: 191). He may well have sent a version of the essay "Art and the Individual" which he wrote to deliver at a debating society at the house of Willie (1862-1951) and Sallie (1867- 1922) Hopkin (noted socialists both, who would stay his friends for years) in Eastwood, in the spring of 1908. Socialism mattered to him a lot, at the time: he joined a "Society for the Study of Social Problems" at College.

That last fact suggests, once again, his development during College away from his adolescent acceptance of the values of his mother and her world. In the first place, although he continued to live at home during his College years, he moved further away from the conditioning and expectations of home than he had ever done before. Although he was training to work as a teacher, his writing, reading and thinking became increasingly important to him. He started to rebel against chapel; his friends were astonished one night in 1908 when, walking home to the Haggs with the Chambers family, he launched into a savage denunciation of the minister, the Reverend Robert Reid (1865-1955). Only the previous year, he had engaged in a scholarly dispute with Reid over contemporary objections to Christianity (Letters I: 36-7, 39-41), and Reid had chosen to deliver a series of sermons in the Eastwood Congregational Chapel specifically aimed at Lawrence and his increasingly free-thinking friends. Lawrence had been reading Schopenhauer, Haeckel and William James since before going to college, but now moved decisively against Christianity, and eventually (under the influence of one of his teachers at College) declared himself to be a Pragmatist of the William James sort: agnostic, not atheist.
But his immediate problem, after the exams that concluded his college career, was getting a job. Some of his College friends quickly assumed teaching posts (Louie Burrows, for example, had begun teaching in Leicester as soon as her College exams were over, probably to help pay for the expense of her years of study). But Lawrence was determined to hold out for a decent salary, and to move out of Nottinghamshire if possible, and his family was obviously able to support him. He spent the summer helping with work on the Haggs farm, writing and reading, and applying for jobs; eventually being interviewed at the end of September in Stockport but failing to get the job. But he was interviewed in the south London suburb of Croydon a few days later and was offered a post as Assistant Master at the Davidson Road Boys' School, starting on 12th October. He was twenty-three years and one month old: a committed poet and prose writer who had only been published once: a man steeped in the life and characters of his particular background and who (in one sense) would never leave the place he had grown up in, but whose taste for literature, contemporary thought, art and music marked him out as an oddity and exception in it. His move to London would, however, be decisive in his career: and after numerous farewells to old Nottinghamshire friends, he travelled down to Croydon on Sunday 11th October, to start work the following day.




 
 2: London and first publication: 1908-1912
 

Lawrence found Croydon in October 1908 quite a shock. For the first time in his life (apart from holidays) he was away from home, in lodgings; he was a long way from family and friends, and missed them badly; he was living in a fast-developing and rather squalid suburb of a suburb; and he was teaching full-time in a school very different (and much tougher) from any he had so far experienced. He wrote a letter "like a howl of terror" (Letters I: 82) to Jessie Chambers on his second day in Croydon: all his life, he later confessed, he had found new places and experiences upsetting - "Very rarely have I been able to enjoy the first weeks of anything, even a holiday" (Letters I: 106) - and Croydon took a great deal of getting used to, especially as he found himself working under a headmaster, Philip Smith (1866-1961), who was not (like George Holderness) concerned to protect him. The sons of colliers in Nottinghamshire, however rude they had been to the snuffly-nosed mard-arsed kid young Bert Lawrence, had been (by Eastwood standards) not badly off. But now Lawrence was teaching boys from institutions, and from the really poor and deprived. He had very bad discipline problems; the account of Ursula's horrendous experiences at school in The Rainbow probably stemmed from Lawrence's own problems in his first weeks in Croydon, and - like Ursula's - his problems seemed only to have been solved by the eventual, self-brutalizing use of the cane.

What living in Croydon did offer, however, was a new set of landscapes (he explored far and wide on his bicycle); and, in London itself, he went to plays and operas and explored art galleries and second hand book shops. But he found little intellectual stimulus in Croydon itself; and its lack of diversion offered him time to write. During his first year in Croydon, his social life was probably confined to occasional visits to pubs with his landlord, John William Jones (1868-1956): his evenings were spent marking or writing, or helping Mrs Marie Jones (1869-1950) with the children. He signalled the end of his mother's idea that he should study for a degree by symbolically turning two partly-used Nottingham University College notebooks into storehouses for completed poems and poem drafts; as late as 1918 he would be still drawing upon drafts of poems first written down there. During his first year in Croydon, too, he managed a complete revision of Laetitia: "I am astonished to find how maudlin is the latter. It needed to come out here to toughen me off a bit; I am a fearful, sickly sentimentalist" (Letters I: 106). His reading broadened to include French poets like Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) and Paul Verlaine (1844-96); he was also lucky in having a sympathetic colleague at school - Arthur McLeod (1885-1956) - with a love of books and an extensive library.

It was his poetry that led to his first significant break into print. He had continued sending
all his writing to Jessie Chambers for her to read and comment on; and in June 1909 she sent some of his poems to the editor of the English Review, the critic and novelist Ford Madox Hueffer (1873-1939). She and Lawrence had both admired the magazine when it started publication at the end of 1908; it had quickly established itself as one of the major journals. Hueffer was at the heart of the London literary scene: he had worked with Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), corresponded with Henry James (1843-1916), knew W. B. Yeats (1865- 1939) and H. G. Wells (1866-1946) and (of the new generation of writers) Ezra Pound (1885- 1972). And he was struck by Lawrence and his poetry: by the facts of Lawrence's upbringing, perhaps, as much as by the poetry itself. The English Review saw itself as a radical journal with left-wing sympathies, and "a collier's son a poet" must have seemed heaven-sent. At all events, while the Lawrences were away on a family holiday on the Isle of Wight at the start of August 1909, Hueffer not only wrote to Jessie saying that he had decided to print some of the poems, but asked to see Lawrence and - even more to the point - "says he will be glad to read any of the work I like to send him" (Letters I: 138). In order to produce a clean draft of Laetitia to replace the patched together and rewritten draft of 1908-09, as soon as he was back in Croydon Lawrence commandeered his friends to help him: a rather older fellow teacher at Davidson School, Agnes Mason (1871-1950), and a new, younger schoolteacher acquaintance, Agnes Holt (1883-1971), whom he found very attractive. His poems came out in the November number of the English Review, and Agnes Holt made a fair copy of them into his second poetry notebook: to celebrate his success, to mark the start of the second notebook, and - doubtless - to show her own response to the successful young schoolteacher to whom she too was drawn. Success followed success; by the start of November, with the help of his friends, Lawrence had also got the new, clean manuscript of Laetitia into Hueffer's hands; and, during December, made his first appearances in London literary society, introduced by Hueffer and his mistress Violet Hunt (1866-1942). He visited Wells, met Yeats and stayed with Pound: all the time conscious of his socially unpresentable boots and shabby schoolmaster's suit.

At a stroke, he had been catapulted into the heart of contemporary literary intellectual circles. And yet in 1909, just as he would for the rest of his life, Lawrence felt distinctly uncomfortable. He did not fit easily in that world - "I am no Society man - it bores me" (Letters I: 156): was too aware of its pretensions, of its self-conscious artistry, of his own kinds of difference. He never became a popular author, nor an author much involved in contemporary writers' circles. A good deal of his life, he lived and worked a long way from the metropolis; cast himself in the role of an outsider, and remained on the outside. He would become closer, in London, to practising psychoanalysts than to literary folk; visited a small circle of friends and relatively rarely moved beyond it.

It can hardly be an accident, however, that Lawrence's writing about his own background in the mining community started at exactly the time when Hueffer was a great influence upon him. He had completed his play A Collier's Friday Night by the end of November 1909, had a draft of "Odour of Chrysanthemums" finished by December, and would write the first version of his play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd early in the spring of 1910: all three of them probably responses to Hueffer's suggestion that he should write about "þthe other half' - though we might as well have said the other ninety-nine hundredths" (Worthen 1991: 216) of which he had such intimate knowledge. Although Lawrence later described A Collier's Friday Night as "most horribly green," it remains eminently actable, negotiating as it does the difficult waters of the Sons and Lovers family situation without the aid of a pilot-narrator; the audience's sympathies are beautifully controlled as they swing from mother to son to father.

It was, however, his major fiction that Lawrence still thought most highly of - as he was right to do, if he was thinking of making a career of his writing. With a letter from Hueffer recommending it, he placed the manuscript of his novel Laetitia in the hands of the publisher William Heinemann (1863-1920) in mid-December. Heinemann took just a month to accept it, returning the manuscript in mid-January with requests for cuts and some changes, all of which Lawrence was happy to make. He worked on it during the early spring with a new friend, Helen Corke (1882-1978), a teacher in another Croydon school whom he had met through his fellow-teacher Agnes Mason. Helen Corke was still recovering from an appalling experience suffered the previous summer. On the Isle of Wight (by coincidence, at the same time as but never meeting the Lawrence family party) she had gone through five days of extraordinarily mixed feelings of love, liking, sexual repulsion, admiration and astonished response to the natural world, in the company of a married music-teacher and violinist in his late thirties, Herbert Macartney (1870-1909), who had persuaded her to go on holiday with him. On their return to south London, her lover - after two days back with his family - had killed himself. Helen herself was still coming to terms with what had happened, and part of her therapy for herself was a long diary letter to her dead lover; she had also written a diary of her five days on the island. Lawrence became closely involved with her; listened to, sympathized with and analyzed her experiences, found himself intensely imagining the man's own version of events; and began to work out his own version of the story. Doing this while revising Laetitia, he accidentally incorporated one of the names belonging to the other story in his first novel, thus betraying the power of the new story on his imagination; and as soon as he had finished the revision of Laetitia (now to be called The White Peacock) he turned to writing a novel based on Helen Corke's story. The White Peacock had, up to this point, taken him over four years to write: the new novel he wrote between March and August 1910. He called it The Saga of Siegmund - Siegmund being the Wagnerian name given by Helen Corke to her lover (he called her Sieglinde). It suited Lawrence, too, and the tragic kind of novel he himself was writing, with its use of motifs and its full-blown Wagnerian ambience.

His experiences in Croydon during the autumn of 1909, followed by his growing involvement with Helen Corke, seem to have triggered off his attempts at establishing a new kind of relationship, too. He had thought of an engagement to Agnes Holt - but had broken off from her when she resisted his attempts to make the relationship sexual. A week or so later, at Christmas 1909, he had ended his eight years or so of purely intellectual companionship with Jessie Chambers by suggesting that they should become lovers. Jessie, who had loved him for years, agreed that they would - later. Back in Croydon, increasingly attracted to Helen Corke, Lawrence finished his revision of The White Peacock (about the tragedy of a man who marries the wrong woman) and sketched out in The Saga of Siegmund what happens to a man in love with a woman who does not respond to him sexually; and then, in the Whitsun holidays, after getting a good way into the writing of The Saga, started his affair with Jessie. It seems to have been desperately unhappy and unsuccessful from the start: as Jessie wrote, later, "The times of our coming together, under conditions both difficult and irksome, and with Lawrence's earnest injunction to me not to try to hold him, would not exhaust the fingers of one hand" (Worthen 1991: 251). Lawrence finished the final revisions of The White Peacock, and went on working at The Saga, with a sense that he was in danger of badly messing up his life, as well as Jessie's life. Come August 1910, and within a week of finishing the novel, he resolved on a complete break with Jessie; perhaps the cruellest thing of all the cruel things he ever did to her.

His family would, however, have been both pleased and relieved; a few months later Lawrence confessed that his mother "hated J. - and would have risen from the grave to prevent my marrying her" (Letters I: 197). It must have been with an extraordinary sense of the way in which her own influence had worked on her son, that - only a fortnight after Lawrence had told her of his break with Jessie - Lydia Lawrence, on holiday in Leicester, herself collapsed from the cancer that was going to kill her. It was as if her guard had finally dropped. Lawrence, too, seems to have been struck by the coincidence. Within a month he was at work on an autobiographical novel which was going to go deep into the nature of his parents' marriage and the influences which had been at work on him; the novel would, too, investigate what had happened to its hero's relationships with women, and with a woman drawn closely from Jessie Chambers in particular. Lawrence had the unerring sense, as an artist, that what troubled him most deeply in his own life was also the substance of much contemporary anxiety, and that the divisions from which he suffered could become the central subject of major works of fiction.

All that autumn, with his mother slowly dying and in increasing pain, and Lawrence making regular (though exhausting) weekend visits, he tried to work on the novel; but he only managed to write 100 pages or so. Cut off from Jessie, he was increasingly lonely, and it was with relief that he started to see more of his old friend Louie Burrows, who was still living near Leicester and who was also doing her best to care for Lydia Lawrence. Un- intellectual, un-neurotic, undamaged by experience, but warm and generous-hearted, and always fond of Lawrence without ever knowing him very well, Louie was a good companion at such a time: "Someone to rest with - you perhaps don't know what a deep longing that may be," he told her (Letters I: 198). At the start of December, Lawrence proposed to her: marriage to Louie suddenly seemed a brilliant answer to his problems. He had already discussed the idea with his mother, as if the news might comfort her and her fears for him: and Lydia had a little grudgingly accepted the idea. Louie accepted at once. The day before proposing to Louie, he had put into his mother's hands the first, specially bound copy of The White Peacock; but she had hardly responded (Letters I: 194). The book symbolized the side of her son she associated with Jessie, and with his potential abandonment of a proper professional career, as well as with his independence - intellectual and moral - of her.

On 9th December, Lydia Lawrence died; they buried her on the 12th, and Lawrence went back to Croydon to work - he described it as "The desert of Sahara" (Letters I: 202). But now he had the thought of Louie helping to sustain him; writing her a letter from school as it grew dark one December afternoon, he remarked "I've had the gas lighted. I wish I might light myself at your abundant life" (Letters I: 202). Family Christmas back in Eastwood was an unbearably gloomy prospect; Lawrence and Ada went to Brighton to get away.

It is too easy to dismiss Lawrence's engagement to Louie as an aberration. It was clearly exceedingly important to him at the time; a break with the past and with the gloomy emotional ties binding him to his mother and (in a different way) to Jessie. Though he ended up very critical of Louie - there was so much of his life which she, a more conventional person than he was, could not share - he always retained a good feeling for her and for the support she gave him in the winter of 1910-1911 and through into the spring. But the year 1911 was, all the same, a very difficult one for him. The White Peacock came out in January, and should have been an occasion for great cheerfulness; but its links with his dying mother inhibited any such celebration. The conflict between the demands of school, the demands of the engagement, and Lawrence's desire to build upon his early success in order to become a full-time writer, grew increasingly problematic. He wanted to write and to be published: and did not have the time he really needed to concentrate and work. Ford Madox Hueffer had, too, been damning about The Saga of Siegmund; and its links with the life of Helen Corke made it, anyway, a dubious prospect for publication. The matter was effectively settled by the attitude of the publisher of The White Peacock, Heinemann, who found Lawrence's second novel tedious and not very good.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 1911 Lawrence accordingly struggled with his third novel, Paul Morel: this was the book which would have to cement his reputation. But it went very slowly; and he ended up in July with it only just over half written, and no desire to go on with it. He had continued to write poems, and produced a number of short stories, and the English Review continued to print small quantities of his work; but he had no sense of a breakthrough. And, all the time, his renewed attraction to Helen Corke meant that he felt guilty about Louie. Helen, however, refused to sleep with him, so that he felt frustrated and hurt as well as guilty: and he soon lost the companionship and shared intellectual life which Helen offered. It seems likely that, at around this point, he started an affair with a married woman, Alice Dax (1878-1959), an old Eastwood friend now living in Shirebrook, who had loved him for years; but he could only see her rarely (she seems to have visited London once). In the summer, Louie went on holiday with him and Ada, but the holiday seems to have been an unhappy affair; and return to school for the autumn term did not lift his spirits. Only a new contact with a literary mentor - the publisher's reader Edward Garnett (1868-1937) - seemed to hold out any prospects of future publishing success. A chance meeting with Jessie Chambers in October led, however, to his doing what he had always done in the old days: sending her the whole unfinished manuscript of Paul Morel for her comments. And she offered to write what she remembered of their early days: so perhaps he would be able to get the novel back on track.

But the relationship with Louie now did little more than weigh on him and his sense of guilt, while offering him no relief and no sense of a future; and the whole of the autumn seems to have followed the pattern of a complex slide into depression and bad health, unrelieved by a new determination to re-start Paul Morel in November. When he finally collapsed with pneumonia later that month, after getting wet at Garnett's and not changing his clothes, it seemed an almost inevitable outcome to the year since his mother's death.

He was very seriously ill, and nearly died. Ada went down to Croydon to nurse him; Louie was kept away, at his earnest request. After almost a month lying on his back, he began to struggle back to life (and to writing) in mid-December. Helen and Jessie both paid him visits; and it was after seeing the latter that he wrote an anguished, nostalgic account of his break with her and with the Haggs Farm, the story which eventually became "The Shades of Spring." Louie finally joined the Croydon party for Christmas - Ada had her Eastwood fianc‚ Eddie Clark (1889-1964) with her, too; but early in January, Lawrence had to go to Bournemouth for a month's convalescence. What for many people would have been a month relieved of all thoughts of work was, for Lawrence, a heaven-sent opportunity to take firm hold of the literary career which was now being forced upon him; he had been advised not to go back to work as a teacher. Edward Garnett had cheered him immensely by saying that The Saga of Siegmund was nowhere near as bad as Hueffer or Heinemann had suggested, and that Lawrence only needed to knock it into shape to get it published; Garnett supplied notes and Lawrence took the manuscript with him to Bournemouth, to help re-build his literary career.

And during January, in the intervals of going for lengthy walks and eating enormous meals, to build up his strength, he rewrote a good deal of it and revised the rest. It may have been good for his recovery and his career to do this (it gave him a novel to follow up the relative success of The White Peacock, and Garnett's firm of Duckworth would take it); but thinking about the tragedy of Siegmund was nothing but a disaster for his relationship with Louie. He ended the month knowing that he would have to break his engagement to her; and this he did at the start of February, greatly to her distress. She believed that there must be another woman in his life, and there was, of course, more than one, though that was not the reason for his break with her.

On 9 February 1912, Lawrence returned to Eastwood, feeling he had unexpectedly been given (and had grasped at) a whole new set of chances. He had left home in 1908 to start work as a professional man, and had almost settled down to conventional marriage of the kind of which his mother would certainly have approved; he now returned to start a new kind of life, in which he would have to live by his writing. He no longer needed to placate the two women (Lydia Lawrence and Louie Burrows) for whose sake he had stuck at working to earn a decent salary; but his prospects were fairly bleak, all the same. He thought of going abroad; but knew that first he must finish that third novel, Paul Morel, due to Heinemann for more than a year now.
Jessie Chambers had made the notes she had promised to make; and she read the new draft of the novel as he wrote it, very fast. It was one of the turning points of his career, this creation of the revised Paul Morel in the Eastwood house he was sharing with his sisters and his father, while showing the manuscript to Jessie, the representative of his past life. He was surrounded by the past, but for the first time was trying to get it into real perspective, and to understand what had really happened between his parents, and to himself when young. He was also looking with profound skepticism at his relationship with Jessie Chambers; the fictional arena gave him a chance to work out what kind of a self-conscious and ruthless prig he had been, but also how incapable she too had been of a balanced relationship. He wrote the novel at white heat, and to her lasting terror and distress. She would later blame his continuing love for Lydia Lawrence for the way in which he dismissed both the fictional Miriam and the real-life Jessie; but the resolution of the novel seems, rather, to have been one of those breakthroughs into understanding and hard, intellectual clarity of which Lawrence was capable: often to his own dismay, certainly to that of his friends. By the end of March, the novel was done, all but a last revision; but another symbolic miracle had occurred. He had been writing to free himself of the past, and had now discovered something of his future: he had met Frieda Weekley.



3: Frieda and the escape abroad: 1912-1914
 

Emma Maria Frieda Johanna Weekley (1879-1956) was the thirty-three-year-old wife of Ernest Weekley (1865-1959), Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Nottingham. Daughter of Anna (1851-1930) and Baron Friedrich von Richthofen (1845- 1915), minor German aristocrats, she had grown up in Metz, where her father had a desk job in the Prussian army of occupation; at the age of nineteen she had married Weekley, and since 1899 had lived the life of a professor's wife in a sequence of superior Nottingham suburbs. It seems possible that Lawrence had seen her before, either when he was going to his brother George's Nottingham house for lunch while a student at the High School (George lived in the street opposite the Weekleys at that time) or while at University College, when he was taught French by Weekley: the professor's handsome young wife may well have been pointed out to him. The Weekleys had three children, Monty (1900-82), aged almost twelve, Elsa (1902-85) aged nine and Barby (b.1904) aged seven.

But now in March 1912 (probably on the 3rd: Worthen 1991: 562-3) Lawrence went to lunch at the Weekleys; he wanted advice from Weekley about the chance of getting a teaching job abroad; he had cousins in Germany and was contemplating a visit to them later in the spring. He and Frieda talked briefly before lunch, however, and found themselves strongly attracted to each other. Extramarital relationships were something Frieda specialized in; we know of at least three men in Germany and one in England she had had affairs with, over the previous six years (she had the habit of making lengthy visits to Germany most summers to see her family). She probably thought of Lawrence simply as another man she very much liked and wanted, and imagined that an affair with him would (as usual) do nothing to upset her life as a wife and mother. Lawrence was struck rather differently. "You are the most wonderful woman in all England," he wrote to her within a few days (Letters I: 376). Over the next eight weeks they saw each other fairly often; they went to the theatre in Nottingham, and Frieda had the excuse of taking her children out; they visited the farm run by Jessie Chambers' sister May (1883-1955) and her husband Will Holbrook (b.1884), for example. The differences between Lawrence and Frieda also became very obvious; Lawrence was shocked when he arrived at the Weekley house for an afternoon with Frieda when the maid had been given the afternoon off, and found that she didn't even know how to light the gas to make tea. But her beauty, her directness, her foreignness, her spontaneity and carelessness fascinated him. For her part, she quickly became a reader of Paul Morel; she was deeply impressed by Lawrence's background and the way it fed into his work as a writer - and by his insistence that she was throwing away her life in her comfortable Nottingham surroundings.

As a consequence of meeting her, Lawrence broke off from his affair with Alice Dax, and devoted himself to creating as much of a relationship with Frieda as he could manage. He went to London in April and she was able to go with him; Edward Garnett was happy to take the illicit couple into his house in Kent for a couple of days. By now even Frieda was getting disturbingly involved with Lawrence; but she still failed to do the one thing Lawrence was urging her to do, which was tell Weekley that she was leaving him. What was possible, however, was Frieda was going to see her family. Again Lawrence insisted that Frieda tell Weekley about him; again Frieda failed to do so, though she did tell Weekley about two earlier affairs just before she left, leaving him in a state of great alarm about her. She left her children with her parents-in-law in London, as usual when she went away; and on Friday 3rd May 1912 Frieda and Lawrence met in London to catch the boat train; they arrived in Metz just after 6 o'clock on the Saturday morning.
But what might have looked like their best chance yet of enjoying their affair turned out very differently. Over the next three days they hardly saw each other. Lawrence was briefly introduced to Frieda's mother and her sisters, but could not be allowed to meet her father, who - in spite of having an illegitimate son of his own - believed strongly in morality and respectability. Lawrence found lodgings in a strict, religious hotel which cost more than he could afford, while Frieda was staying with her parents about a mile away. They saw each other briefly on the Sunday, and then not at all on the Monday apart from a glimpse in a crowded fair: Frieda's father had enjoyed fifty years service in the Prussian army, and celebrations public and private dominated the day. Lawrence spent his time exploring Metz and its environs: and growing angry with Frieda for continuing to pretend that he was just an English visitor whom she knew slightly. By the Tuesday he was desperate: "Now I can't stand it any longer, I cant ... I've tried so hard to work - but I cant ... But no, I won't utter or act or willingly let you utter or act, another single lie in the business." (Letters I: 392-3) Weekley had sent a telegram saying that he suspected Frieda of having a man with her; he also apparently wrote wildly to her father about her. Frieda, on the advice of her mother and sisters, temporized with Weekley, saying that she would write. She was obviously trying to retain her chances of going back to him, and of keeping her children; her family was totally opposed to her abandoning her marriage and her children for the love of a penniless writer. But Lawrence loved her and was determined not to let her take the compromizing way out. On Tuesday 7th he drafted a letter for her to send to Weekley, explaining what was happening. She failed to send it, so on the Wednesday he himself wrote to Weekley: "I love your wife and she loves me ... " (Letters I: 392). Weekley got the letter on Friday 10th, and immediately wrote to Frieda asking her to agree to a divorce; there was no doubt in his mind that she should never be allowed to see her children again. In Metz, meanwhile, events had taken a comic turn; on the Wednesday, at last spending a few hours together and carelessly wandering into a military area, Lawrence and Frieda had got themselves questioned by a military policeman, and their names taken: Lawrence was suspected of spying. Frieda's father was able to get Lawrence out of trouble, but demanded to meet him; that afternoon they saw each other for the first and only time. The Baron clearly had his suspicions, and it was suggested to Lawrence that he had better leave Metz; he took the train to Trier, eighty miles away and further from Frieda than ever. But this time, he knew that his letter was winging its way to Weekley and that Frieda would no longer be able to back away from commitment to him. And, anyway, Trier was far more attractive than the garrison town of Metz, where there had been soldiers on every street corner. Frieda came to visit him in Trier on the Friday. albeit for only half a day (her father demanded her return to Metz that night), bringing with her a telegram from Weekley. Lawrence ensured that she sent a direct answer. On the Saturday, he had to go on to his cousins in the Rhineland; but at last he felt secure of Frieda, and on the journey wrote one of his most beautiful love poems to her, "Bei Hennef": "At last I know my love for you is here ... " (Comp Poems 203).

His relations lived in what was then a remote village, and he spent the next fortnight peacefully going on trips around Waldbr”l, his cousin Hannah Krenkow (b. 1881) apparently starting to fall in love with him, while he applied himself to learning German and doing a final revision of Paul Morel: he would in future have to support himself and Frieda with what he could earn. But all the time he was hearing from Frieda how wretched her life in Metz now was, as her parents accused her of behaving stupidly and as they tried to repair the damage with Weekley. Frieda appealed to Lawrence to come and rescue her, but he insisted that they must only come together again when they were really ready for each other; he wanted to leave behind the emotional crevasses of Metz, and now saw their relationship as, in effect, a marriage. In desperation, she fled to Munich, to her sister Else Jaffe (1874-1973), who knew exactly what it was to have escaped from a marriage but to have kept her children: for some years, although remaining married to a University Professor, Edgar Jaffe (1866- 1921), she had been having an affair with the economist Alfred Weber (1868-1958). The marriages of all three von Richthofen daughters, including that of Johanna (1882-1971) with Max von Schreibershofen (1864-1944), had proved failures; Frieda's was only the most recent to do so. And it was to Munich that Lawrence at last travelled, at the end of May; he and Frieda had a marvellous week together in an old inn in Beuerberg, and then took up the flat in Icking which Weber rented; they could have this until August, rent-free, important to them now that they were living on Lawrence's meagre literary earnings. It was in the Icking flat that the final revisions to Paul Morel were done, and Lawrence triumphantly posted it off to Heinemann on 8th June. It was that novel - begun as his mother was dying, linked with the unhappy engagement to Louie, marked by the final break with Jessie Chambers - which he now hoped would support Frieda and him.
To his distress, the novel came back from Heinemann almost immediately: it was too overtly sexual, the degradation of Mrs Morel through living in the working-class was impossible, it was badly structured: Heinemann were turning it down flat. Lawrence was only lucky in having Edward Garnett and the firm of Duckworth waiting in the wings; Garnett read the manuscript, recommended its acceptance, and made many suggestions for one final revision. Lawrence does not seem to have been too upset: he may have recognized that he now really wanted to include in it something of his new experience with Frieda.

At the start of August, they had to give Weber his flat back. Else had suggested that - while England was effectively barred to them - they go to Italy, where living was cheap. They set off, with all their belongings sent ahead in trunks, before dawn on Monday 5th August, on what turned out to be one of the great memorable adventures of their lives. A combination of walking and train took them through the rain and past the wayside crucifixes to Bad T”lz on the first evening; the second day saw them walking all day and getting high up into the border country between Bavaria and Austria; a short cut went both disastrously wrong and marvellously right, as they ended up at nightfall with a choice to make between a hay-hut and a tiny wooden chapel to sleep in. Lawrence fancied the chapel, with its candles and its dry wooden floor; but Frieda had always wanted to sleep in a hay-hut. So they did: and tossed and turned all night; and in the morning found that the snow had almost come down to their level. A tiny breakfast of a single roll and another five miles walking and scrambling brought them down to a main road and a house where they took a room, dried their clothes, and got some sleep until mid afternoon (and Lawrence apparently began to write his account of the journey). Pouring rain persuaded them to take a horse-drawn post-omnibus across the Austrian border and on to the Achensee, under dark mountains, where their tramp- like appearance barred them from the hotel but not from a farmhouse. On the Thursday, they set out to recover their trunks from the customs at Kufstein, fifteen miles up the Inn valley; here, again, a train journey helped. They slept a night in Kufstein, having raided their trunks for fresh clothes, and sent on the trunks again to Mayrhofen, where a further day's walk and train got them by the Friday night. Here they took a room for a fortnight, and spent their time walking and exploring. Lawrence wrote, they recovered.
After a week, they were joined by English friends, Garnett's son David (1892-1981) and a friend of his, Harold Hobson (1891-1974). Trunks were eventually again despatched, to Bozen, and the group of four set out over the Pfitscherjoch pass. One night in a hayhut (now under the tutelage of the outdoor expert Garnett) and a night at the Dominicushütte mountain hut brought them on the third day over the pass and down the far side into the Pfitscher valley to an inn. These days of walking had been especially exhausting, and on the fourth day Lawrence and Frieda ambled down to Sterzing, while Garnett and Hobson hurried on to catch a train back to the north.
Things never recovered their joy after this. Their days in Sterzing were boring; and Lawrence miscalculated how long it would take them to walk up to the next pass, the Jaufen. They ended up exhausted, with night falling, a bitter wind, and with great steep slopes still to climb - and then Frieda told Lawrence that she had slept with Hobson two days ago, at the Dominicushütte. It was the first time Frieda had been unfaithful to Lawrence, and doubtless had something to do with her assertion to him (and to herself) that she was not giving up her independence even if she had decided to cross the Alps with him and thus give up her marriage and her children for him. But it would not be the last time she had an affair; and if Lawrence wanted her to stay with him, then he would simply have to accept that she would by no means always stay faithful as well.
They struggled on up, at last found the mountain hut; and spent the whole of the next day walking, believing that they were finally on the road down to Meran. In fact they were taking the direct road back to Sterzing; and only realized it at four in the afternoon. For all their shortness of money, they took a train that night to Bozen. But they didn't much like it, and went on to Trento; where attempts to find a place to stay led to filthy rooms and doors slammed in their faces. Near despair was overcome by taking a final train down to Riva on the shores of Lake Garda (they had seen a poster at the station).

And this was the warm south they had been looking for. In spite of their even more bedraggled appearance, they got a room, and waited for their trunks to arrive, so that they could appear presentable; they remained desperately short of money until £50 for - of all novels - The Trespasser arrived. Lawrence started to work again, on Paul Morel: always a sign of settled living. They only stayed in Riva a fortnight - it was a little expensive - but further down the lake they found a room in Villa, next to Gargnano, just over the Italian border. And there they would stay until the spring: the money would carry them that far. And now, with Frieda criticizing and making suggestions, in two months Lawrence rewrote Paul Morel into the Sons and Lovers we know, in one of those great bursts of creative energy typical of him. He only took one break - and in those three days contrived to write a play about Frieda's marital status called The Fight for Barbara. The novel was finished in mid- November and sent off to Garnett; and another part of their joint future seemed thus financed, as Lawrence's own past was symbolically put behind him. Garnett's insistence that the book was still far too long and that he would cut it - he did, by one tenth - made Lawrence (he told Garnett) "wither up" (Letters I: 481): but the important thing was that the novel was done.

Lawrence now cast around for his next subject; experience of the money for The Trespasser suggested that novels were by far his best bet for financing his career. He started at least two (getting 200 pages into one before breaking off) - and dashed off another play, The Daughter-in-Law, his best, wholly in the dialect he had left so far behind him - before settling to write a novel he called The Sisters. This really would incorporate his experience of Frieda in it; it began as a light, easy-to-write book but over the next three years it turned into both The Rainbow and Women in Love. He was starting to write about marriage: his main subject for the immediate future. After writing a first draft of the novel, he and Frieda set out for a visit first to Germany (where Lawrence wrote the marvellous story which became known as "The Prussian Officer") and then back to England; Frieda was desperate to see her children, one way or another, and Lawrence wanted to attend his sister Ada's wedding in August. They arrived three weeks after Sons and Lovers had been published, and in the glory of the excellent reviews it got: but were, of course, homeless. Lawrence could not introduce the not-even-divorced, let alone unmarried, Frieda to his family. Garnett - responsible for so much that sustained them at this time - again came to their rescue and put them up until they could find lodgings in Kingsgate, on the Kent coast. Lawrence was able to revise and get typed some of the short stories he had been compiling over the past two years - Garnett was still advising him on his career, on what to try and publish and where. Here, too, for the first time they could see friends. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) and John Middleton Murry(1889-1957), both leading the literary life in London and also unmarried, whom they had got to know the previous month, came down on a visit; a friendship grew between the four of them. Frieda enlisted Katherine's help in trying to waylay and see her children on their way to school, and (alone) she also attempted an entry into the house in Chiswick where the children now lived with Weekley's parents Charles (1834-1918) and Agnes (1840-1926); a court order was threatened in consequence, and Frieda did not get to see her children legally for another 2« years. The literary patron Edward Marsh (1872-1953) had got to know them, via Murry, and introduced them to the Asquith family (also on holiday in Kent): Cynthia Asquith (1887-1960), daughter-in-law to the prime minister, was the first genuine aristocrat Lawrence had ever met and he and Frieda both got on well with her. Lawrence went to see his sister married at the start of August - without Frieda, of course - and then, after a reasonably productive seven weeks, they returned to Germany, on the way back to Italy, and here Lawrence wrote the first hundred pages of a revised second version of The Sisters before they set off for Italy. This time they went where Else's husband Edgar Jaffe (1866-1921) used to go with a mistress, the north west coast, on the gulf of Spezia. A cottage in the fishing hamlet of Fiascherino was quickly found; and they settled to their second year abroad.

Lawrence's first job before going on with The Sisters was to prepare for publication his play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd: Garnett had got it accepted by the American publisher Mitchell Kennerley (1878-1950). Lawrence revised it heavily, in accord with his new thinking about marriage. "It seems to me that the chief thing about a woman - who is much of a woman - is that in the long run she is not to be had" (Letters II: 94), he remarked in a letter he wrote in October; that idea of independence probably also suggests the direction of The Sisters, which in the autumn 1913 writing grew long and complex as it charted the emotional and sexual relationships of Ella and Gudrun Brangwen; he only finished its first half (now called The Wedding Ring, which suggests that the point of marriage was being reached) in January 1914 and sent it to Garnett. Garnett was however severely critical, finding some episodes badly handled and the central character incoherent; he also apparently remarked that the artistic side was "in the background." A second letter was even more critical. Lawrence tended to agree with the criticisms though not with Garnett's (to him) rather patronizing attitude and his apparently fundamental objection to the book's method. Shortly afterwards Lawrence embarked on yet another rewriting, which went far faster and this time (to him) more satisfactorily.
But the novel's future at this point starts to be affected by the fact that Lawrence, in the aftermath of Sons and Lovers, was for the first time in his life being wooed by publishers and (in particular) by the agent J. B. Pinker (1863-1922), who was signing up novelists for lucrative three volume contracts with the publisher Methuen. Lawrence was strongly attracted by the thought of financial security: and Garnett's attitude to his recent work did not help. He had the new draft of The Wedding Ring typed in two copies while he was still writing it; a sign of his confidence with it before Garnett read it, and probably suggesting that he thought of placing it in the hands of publishers other than Duckworth for their consideration. And, crucially, Garnett turned out to object strongly to this new version, too, saying that it was "shaky" and that the "psychology was wrong" (Letters II: 182-3). Lawrence must have felt he had got to the end of the road of Garnett's helpfulness; when he arrived back in England at the end of June, he was determined to try and get the novel away from Duckworth, unless the latter was prepared to make an offer as high as Methuen's. And it turned out that Duckworth either would not or could not match Methuen's £300; so on 30th June 1914 Lawrence (in his own words) "went to Pinker, and signed his agreement, and took his cheque, and opened an acc. with the London County and Westminster Bank - et me voil…" (Letters II: 189): he acquired £135 just for signing the contract (Letters II: 211). For the moment he seemed set up as a promising young author, living in London and making acquaintances among the intelligentsia; they were sharing a house with Murry and Katherine Mansfield, and Lawrence shortly afterwards made the acquaintance of the writer and reviewer Catherine Jackson, later Carswell (1879-1946), and a whole group of intellectuals (including Freudians) in Hampstead, while at the end of July he would meet for the first time the Russian translator S. S. Koteliansky (1882-1955), who remained his friend all his life.
Also in July came a symbolic moment for the author of The Wedding Ring. Frieda's divorce had been completed at the end of April, and Lawrence - "with neuralgia in my left eye and my heart in my boots" (Letters II: 196) - married her in a south London registry office on 14th July 1914. The two year exile was at an end and they could live where and how they wanted to - but that probably meant back in Italy, which they both loved.
The summer's changes had effectively marked the end of Lawrence's working relationship with Edward Garnett, though Duckworth would bring out one more book of his - a volume of short stories - which he revised during July but which would, much to his annoyance, be called (by Garnett) The Prussian Officer when it came out. However, that - only five months later - would be another world away: a world at war, with Lawrence and Frieda's life irrevocably changed once more.



4: War: 1914-1919


The Lawrences (as they can now be called) did not return to Italy until 1919. Lawrence was on a walking tour in Westmoreland with three men friends (including Koteliansky) at the start of August when they  came down to Barrow on Furness, and saw that war was declared ... and in all the tram cars þWar'. - Messrs Vickers Maxim call in their workmen - and the great notices on Vickers' gateways - and the thousands of men streaming over the bridge ... and the amazing, vivid, visionary beauty of everything, heightened by the immense pain everywhere. (Letters II: 268).

Lawrence later declared that "The War finished me: it was the spear through the side of all sorrows and hopes" (Letters II: 268). Not just of his hopes of returning to Italy, or of living happily with Frieda, or having his novel published - though all these things were indeed affected by the War: but, more profoundly, the making certain that his belief in the potential progress (in sorrows and hopes) of civilization was dead and finished. Ever since 1908 he had nursed a Whitmanesque belief that the great procession is marching, on the whole, in the right direction ... you must be earnestly certain of the wonder of this eternal progression ... I think there is a great purpose ... I am sure I can help the march if I like. It is a valuable assurance.(Letters I: 57).
His early writing had been based on the unspoken assumption that what he wrote was a "help" because it addressed the deepest needs of people: as he wrote early in 1913, "I think, do you know, I have inside me a sort of answer to the want of today: to the real, deep want of the English people" (Letters I: 511). Every now and then he would articulate this feeling: as in 1912, when he angrily remarked of his countrymen that "I should like to bludgeon them into realizing their own selves" (Letters I: 424), or in 1913 when, more blithely, he remarked "I do write because I want folk - English folk - to alter, and have more sense" (Letters I: 544). What the War took away was his confidence that this was possible. At a stroke, the country's energies re-directed themselves into barbarous opposition, hatred and a relapse into communal - not individual - emotion; and the writer who believed in the progress and development of "the great racial or human consciousness, a little of which is in me" and who wanted people to read his fictions and "be made alert and active" (Letters II: 302), to alter their relationships, to realize their own hearts and desires, felt himself utterly displaced. "The war is just hell for me. I don't see why I should be so disturbed - but I am." (Letters II: 211).

There were other, more practical, consequences for him as well. In August, Methuen returned him the manuscript of The Wedding Ring. There was some doubt about the explicit nature of some of its sexual scenes, which he was asked to tone down; and (anyway) the War meant an immediate cut-back in what they would publish. He was asked to resubmit the book, revised, in six months time: but was thus deprived of the money which, due on its publication, he was relying on. Returning to what was now their home in Italy also became impossible, and the cheapness (and happiness) of living they had found there, especially in Fiascherino, was denied them. "What is going to become of us?" Lawrence wrote to Pinker (Letters II: 206). All they could do was rent as cheap a place as they could find, near friends like Murry and Katherine Mansfield, in the country outside London: and wait.

Lawrence had one small project to be going on with: a 15,000 word book on the novelist Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) in a series "Writers of the Day" which had been commissioned from him in July. Down in Chesham in a tiny cottage, twenty miles from London, and helped enormously by a wedding present from Edward Marsh of a complete set of Hardy's books, he spent the autumn working on it; though his current state of mind led to his turning it into an expression of his own personal philosophy, "a sort of Confessions of my Heart" (Letters II: 235). It was "supposed to be about Thomas Hardy, but ... seems to be about anything else in the world than that" (Letters II: 220). It was never published in the series; it seems doubtful whether Lawrence even submitted it. But it did give Lawrence a new understanding of abiding human dualities which he would employ directly in his revision of The Wedding Ring for Methuen.
And this final rewriting, between November 1914 and March 1915, changed both the novel, and Lawrence's career, irrevocably. For one thing, the novel split: the material which had been accumulating round the original Sisters of the title had become too long for one volume. The new novel - to be called The Rainbow - would consist of the story of the sisters' grandparents, Tom and Lydia Brangwen, their parents, Will and Anna Brangwen, and the early life of one of the sisters (now called Ursula), including her first - and unsuccessful - love affair. The second book would show the subsequent relationships of both Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and how those relationships finally worked out: Ursula's successfully, Gudrun's unhappily. But The Rainbow also apparently became even more sexually overt in this revision, not less so; and the things which Methuen had been troubled by in the summer of 1914 became still more worrying. This would have unimaginable consequences.

For the moment, Lawrence was simply happy to have a new novel to be involved with, and to take his mind off the War. He was also starting to meet people who impressed him, and whom he impressed. The old friendship with David Garnett had brought him, during the winter of 1914, to meet Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), a great hostess for artists, writers and other intelligentsia; and dining with Ottoline had brought him into contact with both the novelist E. M. Forster (1879-1970) and the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). He also got to know the young painters Mark Gertler (1892- 1939) and Dorothy Brett (1883-1977), and kept their friendship; while his meeting with Cynthia Asquith in 1913 had also developed into a steady friendship, in spite of the pressures of the War on her (her husband was already on active service). Many of these friends came to see Lawrence and Frieda in Sussex in the spring of 1915; they had moved down there in January, overcome by the cold and damp of the Chesham cottage. Lawrence felt himself taken seriously by all of them, while Frieda seems to have relished the fact that she was now moving in the higher echelons of English intellectual society, and was the friend of two titled ladies. For his part, Bertrand Russell was at first enormously impressed, seeing Lawrence as "infallible. He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet ... he sees everything and is always right" (Ottoline 1963: 273): though the two men quarrelled later in the summer, and their plans for a joint lecture course (Russell on Society, Lawrence on Eternity) never materialized. But Lawrence's letters of the winter of 1914 and the spring of 1915 are among the most remarkable he ever wrote. They chart his developing ideas about how to understand and symbolize the historical development of human consciousness, society and self- responsibility: how it came to be the fact that "one is not only a little individual living a little individual life, but that is in oneself the whole of mankind, and ones fate is the whole of mankind, and ones charge is the whole of mankind" (Letters II: 302). This philosophy was something which grew to be at the heart of The Rainbow. He finished the novel, triumphantly, on 2 March: "bended it and set it firm. Now off and away to find the pots of gold at its feet" (Letters II: 299): and immediately turned back to the re-writing into a new form of the philosophy which had taken over his Hardy book.

He had not, however, finally finished with The Rainbow; the typescript needed (he found) extensive revision; and the proofs, later in the summer, further work still. In between work on the novel, he wrote away at his philosophy, with occasional breaks - as for the first version of his story "England, My England," which he wrote in June, and which summed up his sense of why men were so eager to fight. Its central character, a failure in his marriage, gives up on "love and the creative side of life ... He had a right to his own satisfaction. He was a destructive spirit entering into destruction" (EmyE 225). In such ways Lawrence expressed his fundamental opposition to the War, and to the spirit of War.

It was with a sense, however, of being too much on the fringes of life (and also perhaps so that Frieda could resume her attempts to see her children) that in August Frieda and he moved back to London, to Hampstead, where they had a circle of friends: the imminent publication of The Rainbow meant that he would at last be paid his final advance. He had other plans, too: a small magazine, which he and Murry would edit and which would say the kinds of thing he thought needed saying to the public at large, in Wartime; and a series of small public meetings, advertized in the magazine, which might perhaps draw together a body of sympathetic people. It was characteristic of Lawrence at this stage of his career that he should be doing so much to make contact with people and to change their ideas: through his writing, his magazine and the meetings. He was, in spite of the War, still a believer in his own capacity to make people "alert and active," as he had put it in March (Letters II: 302).

But the autumn of 1915 turned out to be a sequence of failures and disasters. First, the magazine (called The Signature) failed to pay its way, in spite of Murry and Lawrence sending subscription forms to all their friends, old and new: they only managed to produce three numbers rather than the six they had originally planned for, so that only three parts of Lawrence's new philosophical writing     The Crown got into print. The public meetings, too, turned out to be a complete failure: only two, apparently, were ever held. But by far the worst blow was the fate of The Rainbow. It was savagely attacked by nearly all its reviewers on publication, and at least two called for it to be suppressed. It was not adopted by the public libraries or bookstalls: and early in November, the police moved in on it, collecting all the undistributed copies from Methuen. On 13th November 1915 the Bow Street Magistrates heard a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which Methuen failed to defend, saying instead that "they regretted having published it" (Rainbow l): the book was ordered to be destroyed. All Lawrence could do was sit on the sidelines and watch as the book he was so proud of, together with his reputation, and also his earning power as a professional writer, were destroyed. Having the matter raised in Parliament by Ottoline Morrell's MP husband Philip (1870-1943) got nowhere, and none of Lawrence's literary friends was (it turned out) prepared to argue for the book, only against the idea of censorship: even friends as close as Murry and Katherine Mansfield thoroughly disliked the book itself.

During October - following the failure of The Signature, and even before the suppression order - Lawrence had been thinking of trying to go abroad. America, still out of the War but a place where an English writer could publish, seemed the obvious place: for two months Lawrence and Frieda tried to get passports, and to encourage their friends to come with them and form a kind of colony in Florida (a move which seemed even more urgent after the novel's suppression). But matters came to a head on 12th December when Lawrence - in order to get a passport - had to stand in line to "attest": that is, to enrol himself as ready for military service when called up, something in which he absolutely did not believe. None the less, he went down to Battersea Town Hall, over the river from Westminster and Parliament, to do it. But I hated it so much, after waiting nearly two hours, that I came away. And yet, waiting there in the queue, I felt the men were very decent, and that the slumbering lion was going to wake up in them: not against the Germans either, but against the great lie of this life ... In the long run I have the victory: for all those men in the queue, for those spectral, hazy, sunny towers hovering beyond the river, for the world that is to be. (Letters II: 474) Such optimism came only at moments. If they could not go to America, Lawrence and Frieda would do the next best thing, and go down to Cornwall, as far from War-mongering London as possible. The novelist J. D. Beresford (1873-1947), a friend of Murry, had a cottage in Cornwall which he was prepared to lend; after a Christmas visit to the Midlands, on the penultimate day of the old year Lawrence and Frieda travelled down to Porthcothan, on the Cornish north coast, not knowing any more what they would live on or what they would do in the long run: but, Lawrence felt, it was "like being at the window and looking out of England to the beyond. This is my first move outwards, to a new life" (Letters II: 491).

He had, fortunately, one more book on the stocks, its publication arranged before The Rainbow had been suppressed; his Italian essays, heavily revised, some of them first drafted beside the Lago di Garda in 1913, were being published as Twilight in Italy. That brought in a little money. Duckworth was also prepared to publish a volume of his poems, and in the early months of 1916 he worked at his old University College notebooks, digging out and rewriting poetry. He also wrote a story, this time nothing to do with the War; an early version of  The Horse-Dealer's Daughter. He developed a plan for the private publication of The Rainbow, by subscription. And he was ill in bed a good deal of the time. But he and Frieda both liked Cornwall; the rocks, the sea, the sense of being almost out of England. And it became their plan to bring down congenial friends. They had visitors during January, including the musician Philip Heseltine (1894-1930), his mistress Minnie Channing (b. 1894) and his friend the writer Dikran Kouyoumdjian (1895-1956); but in the long term, the idea of living together with Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield remained the dominant one. At the start of March the Lawrences went down to Zennor, in the far west of Cornwall, and found there two houses side by side, "just under the moors, on the edge of the few rough stony fields that go to the sea" (Letters II. 563), which they decided immediately were meant for the Murries and for themselves. The rent was very little; they decorated, moved in, began to buy second-hand furniture, and waited for their friends. Frieda wrote to them that "we are friends and we wont bother anymore about the deep things, they are all right, just let's live like the lilies in the field" (Letters II: 571). It was an impossible dream; Katherine hated the place, Frieda felt herself squeezed out by the literary talk of the other three, Lawrence found Murry oppressive, at times Murry found Lawrence dangerously unstable. They lived in adjacent cottages for only about eight weeks, until mid-June.
There had remained for Lawrence, of course, the problem of what he was going to do as a novelist: because he was a novelist - a magistrate's decision could not alter that, and purely commercial considerations did not have much to do with his desire to go on recreating and re-interpreting the society and the consciousness of the contemporary human being which fascinated him. His mind had at first gone back to those 200 pages of manuscript, left in Germany in 1913 when he had abandoned that particular novel to write The Sisters. Could he do something with them? But getting the manuscript out of Germany in Wartime proved an insuperable problem; and sometime in April he went back to the material left over from The Sisters when he had carved out The Rainbow the previous year; and between April and July created his most extraordinary work yet, the novel which became Women in Love. The tensions of life with the Murries, something of the sense of small, brightly colored figures moving against a large landscape, the details of house furnishing, Lawrence's profound desire to work out a way of life away from the industrial and cosmopolitan centers, his tragic sense of a society and individuals driven by (and riven by) the passions of War - all these got into it. He went on working on it for months: first typing the first half out himself, revising it as he went, and then in the early autumn writing it out by hand; on 31st October he sent the last of it to Pinker. "It is a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel. You will hate it and nobody will publish it. But there, these things are beyond us." (Letters II: 669) He proceeded to revise it massively in the typescript copies: so that when it finally began to make the rounds of publishers in December, one asked if it really was complete.
It met with universal rejection: he was obliged by the terms of his contract to offer it first to Methuen, and (naturally) they refused it; but even the faithful Duckworth turned it down, along with three or four other publishers to whom Pinker offered it. Another novel by the author of The Rainbow was commercially quite unacceptable. It was no more than Lawrence had feared; but it was, still, a nasty indication of his potential future as a writer. The circulation of one of the two typescript copies among his friends had also led to the end of his friendship with Ottoline Morrell, who detected in the character of Hermione a portrait of herself. Lawrence vehemently rejected the connection: but it meant the loss of a good, supportive friend. His thoughts turned again to the possibility of leaving for America, "that far-off retreat, which is the future to me" (Letters III: 75); a dream encouraged by a new friendship with two young Americans, Esther Andrews and Robert Mountsier (1888-1972). "I must go soon," he wrote to his agent: "One's psychic health is more important than the physical" (Letters III: 75). But this plan, too, came to nothing; his application for passports was refused. All he and Frieda could do was sit tight in Cornwall; and Lawrence could research and flesh-out his American dream by starting to write the essays which became Studies in Classic American Literature, a pioneering study. They also became something he could publish, in these barren years, along with yet another version of his philosophy, this time called (in direct opposition to the War) "The Reality of Peace." The English Review continued to support him, printing both the American essays and part of the philosophy; but, that apart, his publishing had almost come to a standstill. Almost all he could do was grow vegetables in his garden ("It looks like a triumph of life in itself" - Letters III: 125), help in the neighboring farm, read, and occasionally add revisions to the typescript of Women in Love. His only publishing in 1917 was a small volume of poems, Look! We Have Come Through!: the old sequence of poems written 1912-1917, centered on his relationship with Frieda, now wholly revised and made coherent.

The year 1917 passed like 1916, with Lawrence making just one brief journey away from Cornwall, up to see his relatives in the Midlands; but this time with the possibility of military conscription just a little closer. He had been rejected on health grounds in June 1916 and then again in June 1917; but some local people were clearly not happy with having this odd, anti-war individual with a German wife in their midst. The usual war-time rumors developed: there was a stock of petrol for German submarines at the bottom of the cliffs near the Lawrences' cottage: the patterns on the Lawrence's chimney were a signal for patrolling submarines (the main Atlantic convoy route lay along the nearby coast). Individuals clearly spied on them, and heard the singing of German songs in the cottage. They were stopped on one occasion by a military patrol and their shopping searched (a square loaf of bread was seized on as a camera). Things were made worse by the presence on the same coast of other non-conscripted artistic individuals. Heseltine had a house nearby, and the musician Cecil Gray (1895-1951) also lived in the neighborhood; he and Lawrence discussed the nature of a Revolution in the state, much as Lawrence had discussed it with Russell in 1915, and all three of them (doubtless also overheard) sang the Hebridean songs which were a recent musical discovery. In September, Gray was summoned for letting a light show in his house after dark in a seaward facing window, and was fined punitively. In the end, it was easier for the authorities to act than to spend time finding out whether there was anything in the rumors; in spite of the fact that, as Lawrence wrote, "We are as innocent even of pacifist activities, let alone spying of any sort, as the rabbits of the field outside" (Letters III: 168). Their cottage was searched while they were out one afternoon, and some papers taken away (probably the texts of Hebridean songs: clearly coded messages). The following day, they were served with a military exclusion order, forbidding them to reside in Cornwall; they had to be out within three days.

It was a financial disaster, as well as a moral blow; the cottage was cheap and the rent paid, and they had no money to rent other accommodation. They were taken in by friends in London, and moved from room to room for a couple of months: the poet H.D. (1886-1961) was especially helpful, and Cecil Gray's mother also provided them with a room. Look! We Have Come Through! came out at the end of November: an ironical reminder of those prewar days in Icking and beside the Lago di Garda, when the building of a new relationship was the most important thing in the world. Lawrence now published those poems as a salute to the past, and perhaps also as an acknowledgement that it was over; as a thinker and writer, Lawrence was now less interested in mutual love and marriage than in what happens within a loving relationship, and in how the male struggles to escape what he now called "the devouring mother ... I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man, and he must take this precedence. I do think men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for permission or approval from their women." Frieda disagreed with him, "says I am antediluvian in my positive attitude" (Letters III: 302): and it was around this time that she probably had a brief affair with Gray, as if to prove her point.
But it was in this new spirit that, in London in the autumn of 1917, Lawrence started yet another novel: always a sign in him that his new thinking had to meet the test of experience and actuality. But the new book about a man who walks out on his destructive relationship with his wife, to find a new life - one day to be Aaron's Rod - did not get very far; shifting from one friend's property to another was hardly conducive to the writing of large-scale fiction. They were finally rescued by their friend the poet Dolly Radford (1864- 1920), who let them have a cottage in Berkshire when she wasn't using it; this became one of their two main homes during the next two years. The only writing Lawrence could do was yet another version of the American essays, which had become both a new version of his philosophy and pioneering essays of literary criticism; and yet another small collection of poems, to be called Bay. Fiction from him was no longer acceptable; essays and poetry were all he could expect to be published.

By February 1918 they were desperately hard up: "in another fortnight I shall not have a penny to buy bread and margarine" Lawrence told his agent (Letters III: 211). Pinker helped out with a loan, as did other friends; and Lawrence's sister Ada assisted by renting a house for them, for a year, back in the Midlands, at Middleton-by-Wirksworth. They moved up there at the start of May, feeling "queer and lost and exiled" with Lawrence "queer and desolate in my soul - like Ovid in Thrace" (Letters III; 242). They saw more of his family and of old Eastwood friends than for years; "We live practically on my sister - and that is very painful, too" (Letters III: 251). He finished his American essays, he put together yet another little book of poems out of the old notebooks, misleadingly called New Poems; this time for a new young publisher, Martin Secker (1882-1978), who would one day become very important to his career. But there was no change to his prospects, as a man or a writer; he confessed that "I am very tired of it, and irritated by it - terribly irritated. And it is not the slightest use my trying to write selling stuff, in this state of affairs" (Letters III: 251). The war went on, in spite of rumors of its ending; visitors came and went; and Lawrence grew steadily more desperate: "I look at the months and know there must be a change" (Letters III: 283).
There was. On 11th September, his 33rd birthday, he received his third notice of medical examination for call-up; by this stage of the war, almost no-one was rejected. He was classed as Grade 3 ("conscripted for light non-military duties"). The decision maddened him: "from this day I take a new line. I've done with society and humanity - Labour and Military can alike go to hell. Henceforth it is for myself, my own life, I live" (Letters III: 288). This was perhaps the culmination of his long redirection of his energies away from a belief in society and its well-being, to a concentration on the life of the individual. As it turned out, he was never actually called-up for service. But his ejection from Cornwall and this final attempt to conscript him were perhaps his breaking-points. Some of the profound problems of his work during the rest of his career derived from the peculiar kind of isolation to which he deliberately subjected himself, from 1918 onwards.

His next pieces of writing summed up the problems of his career. He wrote, very quickly, a play in November 1918: Touch and Go, drawing in part upon still unpublished Women in Love material, but concentrating upon the current industrial unrest which living in the Midlands had given him an insight into. Yet it was most unlikely to be published or performed, and in spite of some dramatic moments of confrontation it suffers from a kind of slackness of construction very unusual in his writing: it needed a revision which it never got. The other piece of writing, which he did with gritted teeth, marked the only time in his whole career when he did a piece of work almost entirely for money: he wrote a brief history for schools, entitled Movements in European History. In one way it fitted rather well into reading he had already done earlier in 1918, when he had gone through Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire thinking of the parallels with modern times. He took the school- history job seriously, and did quite a lot of reading for it; but apart from a few moments of pleasure as he grasped "the thread of the developing significance," mostly he hated it "like poison" (Letters III: 322, 309). The only things he was able to put his heart into were some short stories he wrote in November including The Blind Man and Tickets, Please and the first version of his short novel The Fox; "I hope we shall sell them, for I can't live" (Letters III: 299). For the moment, Pinker was only able to place the weakest of them, Tickets, Please

As a culmination of his desperation, and in a kind of response to the "vile sick winter," in February 1919 he went down with influenza, during the wave of illness which swept Europe that spring. He was seriously ill for six weeks: for two days, he told Koteliansky, the doctor "feared I should not pull through" (Letters III: 347, 337). Friends rallied round with presents of wine and decent food: but the spring never seemed to come, with snow still lying round the cottage late in March: "I stare out of the window like a sick and dazed monkey" (Letters III: 340). The year in Derbyshire, which on almost all counts had been a depressing failure, was coming to an end, rather to his relief. At the end of April he first finished the history book - rejoicing "I am a free man" (Letters III: 352) - and then he and Frieda travelled back down to Berkshire, to Dolly Radford's cottage. He had to do something to re-establish himself as a writer; the only book he would publish during 1919 was the tiny book of poems Bay. Pinker suggested that short stories might be sold to an American magazine, and - like a proper professional writer - Lawrence promised to write nothing but short stories for six weeks, "if the short stories will come" (Letters III: 355). They did, of course: Fannie and Annie, Monkey Nuts, Hadrian (published as You Touched Me). But the best news, in July, was that The Fox had been accepted for publication; Lawrence's reputation was, little by little, being rebuilt; while a publisher also decided to take the play Touch and Go.
But Lawrence himself had made the contact which led to the latter success; and he was increasingly wondering whether it was sensible for him to continue with Pinker as his agent. He had certainly never made his agent much money. He had once previously broached the idea of leaving Pinker, back in November 1918; but now, in the latter half of 1919, he became increasingly disillusioned with what Pinker was doing for him, especially in the American market. Things came to a head with the publication of Women in Love. It turned out that Pinker had never even sent Benjamin Huebsch (1876-1964), who had published all Lawrence's works in America since 1914, a copy of the typescript of the novel; Lawrence only discovered this when he had arranged (again, without Pinker's assistance) for the American publisher Thomas Seltzer (1875-1943) to take the novel. American publication particularly appealed to him: "I would like the book to come first in America. I shall never forgive England The Rainbow" (Letters III: 391). He revised the novel slightly in September for Seltzer and wrote it a Preface, while - in England - Martin Secker had expressed interest in it.

During the summer, spent in Berkshire, Lawrence and Frieda made friends with Rosalind Baynes (1891-1973), among others: she was recently separated from her husband the psychoanalyst Godwin Baynes (1882-1943), and also longed to get away to Italy. Lawrence and Frieda were now both itching to get away from the England they had felt trapped in for the past five years: "The thing to do is to get on the move" (Letters III: 412), Lawrence remarked. Frieda wanted to see her German family - her father had died in 1915, but she had of course not been able to go across; Lawrence wanted to go back to Italy, and would actually go to prospect a house in the Abruzzi which Rosalind Baynes knew about and was considering for herself and her children. They had to wait till October for passports to come, but Frieda then left as soon as she had got hers, on the 15th. Lawrence stayed a month longer, arranging his affairs with magazines and publishers, not wanting to go to Germany "so soon after the war" (Frieda 1935: 91). At last, on 14th November 1919, he sailed for the continent. At least twice, he reproduced in fictional form his feelings on leaving behind the white cliffs of Dover: the version in his novel The Lost Girl contains a vision of England haunting in its power:
" ... there behind, behind all the sunshine, was England. England, beyond the water, rising with ash-grey, corpse-grey cliffs, and streaks of snow on the downs above. England, like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging. She [Alvina Houghton] watched it, fascinated and terrified. It seemed to repudiate the sunshine, to remain unilluminated, long and ash-grey and dead, with streaks of snow like cerements. That was England! (Lost Girl 294).
The War years had brought Lawrence to a deliberate exile which would, in one form or another, last for the rest of his life.



5: Exile: 1919-1922

Lawrence had left England for a Continent where he was once again a stranger, and (once again) a poor one; this time he had £9 in his pocket, rather than the £11 he had had in 1912. He stopped in Turin for a couple of nights on the way, using a contact he had made in England; his host, the diplomat Sir Walter Becker (1855-1927), later remembered the arrival at the door of "a homespun-clad figure, carrying some sort of travelling bag." Gentlemen don't carry their own bags, of course, or have shabby overcoats: but Lawrence wasn't a gentleman. Becker also recalled having "a good deal of conversation with him ... we appeared to be on terms of friendship and sympathy" (Nehls 1958: 12). But Lawrence had never found the rich English abroad very sympathetic, and remembered "a sincere half- mocking argument, he for security and bank-balance and power, I for naked liberty" (Letters III: 417). Sir Walter would later find a lengthy recreation of his house and the conversations there in Lawrence's novel Aaron's Rod, and strongly objected to them. But it was also characteristic of Lawrence to find his material as a novelist in such a place, and to have no scruple in using it: it had long been his practice to take what he wanted of real-life situations and people, and to recreate them in whatever form he wanted. What he could create as his art mattered more to him than the sensibilities of those who got caught up in the process, or his liking for them. Frieda once remarked that "I like people more than he does ... " (Bynner 1951: 62) while he commented in 1920 that "I don't like people - truly I don't" (Letters III: 491); in consequence, perhaps, he was prepared to be quite ruthless in using in fiction the "secrets of my heart" which Faith (1888-1960), the wife of the novelist Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), for example, regretted ever allowing him access to (Nehls 1959: 35).
He made, however, no attempt to go back and recover the experience of living in the Italian places he had known before the war. All he did was spend one night in Spezia, near the place Frieda and he had left five years earlier: and that, perhaps, only because his train went that way. He was going on to somewhere new, even if he did not know exactly where it was yet; but he knew he was pausing in Florence, to meet Frieda. In Florence, his raffish old acquaintance the novelist and essayist Norman Douglas (1868-1952) turned out to be a good deal more sympathetic than inhabitants of the house in Turin had been, and Lawrence also met there Douglas's friend the minor American writer Maurice Magnus (1876-1920), who would become the subject of one of Lawrence's greatest pieces of writing, the "Introduction" to Magnus's Memoirs of the Foreign Legion. But for the moment, Lawrence simply enjoyed being out of England in the company of congenial people, even if money were scarce. Italy remained a magical place, and Florence was "so nice: its genuine culture still creating a certain perfection in the town" (Letters III: 450). When Frieda arrived in Florence, he met her train at four o'clock in the morning, and immediately took her for a drive: "þI must show you this town'. We went in an open carriage, I saw the pale crouching Duomo and in the thick moonmist the Giotto tower disappearing at the top into the sky." (Frieda 1935: 92) But they stayed only briefly; they were headed for the wildest part of the Abruzzi mountains, where Rosalind Baynes had her potential house, and where they would stay to see what it was like.
It turned out to be an extraordinary journey into the wilds, which (again) Lawrence recreated at length in The Lost Girl, the novel he would shortly write. After hours of travelling, they arrived well after dark in a house with "one tea-spoon - one saucer - two cups - one plate - two glasses - the whole supply of crockery. Everything must be cooked gipsy- fashion in the chimney over a wood fire. The chickens wander in, the ass is tied to the doorpost and makes his droppings on the doorstep, and brays his head off" (Letters III: 432). The Lawrences could rough it when required, but this was "a bit staggeringly primitive," even for them; after ten days there, nearly getting snowed in just before Christmas, Lawrence sent a strong recommendation to Rosalind never to bring the children there - she would have had to bath them "in a big copper boiling-pan in which they cook the pigs' food" - the Lawrences escaped back over the mountains to Capri, where Compton Mackenzie - whom they had known since before the war - had promised to find them a room if ever they needed it.
Yet another new Italy awaited them: this time an expatriate colony, "the uttermost uttermost limit for spiteful scandal" (Letters III: 444), which Lawrence observed with as much relish as he observed everything else: "All the world's a stage etc." (Letters III: 447). But Frieda didn't like it, and it was not a good place for writing; and Lawrence was further hampered by the Italian postal strike, which stopped him getting hold of the 200 page 1913 novel fragment The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, which he had tried to recover in 1916 and which he still wanted to work on again. He desperately needed to write and publish, to recover from the war-time slump in his work's reputation, and to re-establish himself. Without an English agent - he had broken with Pinker at the end of 1919 - he entered negotiations with the publisher Secker for the publication of Women in Love (and perhaps the republication of The Rainbow) in England; while Seltzer would be bringing Women in Love out in America before the end of the year, and Robert Mountsier had agreed to act as Lawrence's American agent for the future.
But all he wrote in Capri at this stage was the first draft of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious. Finally, the old novel manuscript arrived, and Lawrence set to work. Yet - although he may have taken from it the starting date and the central character's situation - typically he rewrote and re-conceived it completely. During February, Frieda and he started house-hunting seriously; this time, almost as far south in Europe as they could go, in Taormina in Sicily, where Lawrence discovered the Fontana Vecchia, a house standing away from the town, by itself among fields and gardens, looking over the Ionian sea: "High on the top floor we live, and it feels like a fortress ... Here one feels as if one had lived for a hundred thousand years" - yet it was still "The world's morning" (Letters III: 497-8). Just as in 1912, they had at last found the southern place where they could live happily and cheaply, away from the threat of the north, "with one's back on Europe forever" (Letters III: 491); and now had to remain until Lawrence had earned enough for them to travel on again. But it was also a place they came to love deeply: where Lawrence felt at home "in the garden and up the hills among the goats" (Letters III: 491), and where he wrote some of his best poems about the natural world, including Snake.

Through the spring and early summer, Lawrence worked energetically away at The Lost Girl, which was what the old 1913 manuscript had turned into; and almost as soon as he had finished it, he started another novel, Mr Noon, the first part also set in a recreated English Midlands, but this time using his own early history with Frieda as the basis for its continuation. It was, however, a sign of how far he had moved as a novelist, a partner and a thinker that the experience of delighted partnership and love of eight years earlier should now be subjected to such wicked sarcasm and detached irony. But just as he used the experience of others, so he would use his own experience as a way of going beyond it: something in which he always believed. As he would shortly write in his Magnus "Introduction," "We have got to realize. And then we can surpass" (Phoenix II 358). Not only did he have Mr Noon underway from the summer of 1920, he also went back to Aaron's Rod, though not yet to finish it. Together with The Lost Girl, the three novels comprize a kind of comic trilogy of disillusionment with English society, with marriage, with love itself: a process also sharply defined in a number of poems written in the sequence Birds, Beasts and Flowers around this time, such as many of the Fruits poems, and the Tortoise sequence.
And it was perhaps as part of this process of change that in the summer of 1920, while staying in Florence again in the summer, away from the heat of the Sicilian summer, and while Frieda was in Germany, Lawrence had a brief affair with Rosalind Baynes, who had moved to a villa just outside Florence. In no way does the relationship seem to have deflected him from his commitment to his marriage, any more than the relationship of Aaron with the Marchesa in Aaron's Rod deflects his sense of being married: "women will only have lovers now, and never a husband. Well, I am a husband, if I am anything. And I shall never be a lover again, not while I live" (Aaron's Rod 266). The affair seems, though, to have been a confirmation of his own independence within marriage of Frieda; in the words of "Medlars and Sorb-Apples," written at just this time, "Each soul departing with its own isolation, / Strangest of all strange companions, / And best." He does not seem to have seen Rosalind Baynes again, but some of the writing about Constance Chatterley in Lady Chatterley's Lover six years later drew on her background and her appearance.

He and Frieda met up in Venice, and were back in Sicily by mid-October; and shortly copies of The Lost Girl arrived, along with proofs of the English edition of Women in Love. But then, characteristically, things went wrong with his publications in England; the libraries refused to take The Lost Girl as it stood, and Secker wrote imploring for changes. Lawrence made one big one, and Secker added three others of his own. And then Secker asked for changes in Women in Love: and warned Lawrence that he would only be getting an advance of £75 on the book, Secker was so sure it would not be taken by the libraries. These things naturally combined with Lawrence's existing sense of the pusillanimity of England and of the literary establishment in general, and got into his attack on critics in Mr Noon, which he was still working on:
So, darling, don't look at the nasty book any more: don't you then: there, there, don't cry, my pretty. No one really takes more trouble soothing and patting his critics on the back than I. But alas, all my critics are troubled with wind. (Mr Noon 142).
He and Frieda spent the winter of 1920 and the first quarter of 1921 in a very similar way to the year before; securely at home, with Lawrence doing a great deal of writing: only interrupted by a flying visit to Sardinia in January 1921, partly with the idea of looking for a house there, and partly so that Lawrence could get a travel book out of it. The latter he succeeded in doing; a whole book was finished by the start of March, and - with illustrations by the artist Jan Juta (b. 1897) - came out as Sea and Sardinia in 1923. At this point, Lawrence decided to ask the agent Curtis Brown (1866-1945) to act for him in England: the effort of doing all his own work in the placing of his books had, with his new productivity (and the interest taken in his work), become too much for him: and much as he liked the idea of working as a kind of independent spirit, there were practical drawbacks.

In mid-April 1921 he and Frieda left Sicily to go north, this year before the heat really struck; in Capri they met an American couple, Earl (1878-1957) and Achsah (1878-1945) Brewster, who would be good friends to them for the rest of the decade. And in Germany, where he had gone with Frieda on her visit to her mother, writing away in the woods, Lawrence at last managed to finish Aaron's Rod, the novel he had been struggling with since the winter of 1917. It became, like all his novels, the final statement (for the moment) of how he saw relationship and marriage. The individual must stand apart, married or unmarried: must only admit subordination to a being he or she knows to be superior. It was not a position Lawrence would remain with; but it was what he believed, for the moment. It was a position which he further developed in the second of his Psychoanalysis books, Fantasia of the Unconscious, which he also drafted in the woods in Germany that summer: the theory growing (as he always said it did) out of the passional experience of fiction, both a confirmation of it and a development away from it.
After their time in Germany, he and Frieda went to visit her sister Johanna in Austria, where she was with her children and the banker - Emil von Krug (1870-1944) - who would be her new husband. This was a visit that provided the background for the second part of Lawrence's short novel The Captain's Doll, another work concerned with a marriage abandoned and a new relationship, without love, attempted. Back in Florence, Lawrence wrote poems, including Bat and Man and Bat, before he and Frieda travelled on to Sicily, and Lawrence experienced a renewed onrush of love for the place: "But how lovely it is here! ... the great window of the eastern sky, seaward, I like it much the best of any place in Italy" (Letters IV: 90). But Europe itself continued to annoy him: "my heart - and my soul are broken, in Europe. It's no use, the threads are broken." He found, for example, that Secker, the English publisher of Women in Love, which had come out in June, had capitulated to threats of a libel action from Philip Heseltine, and needed the descriptions of Halliday and the Pussum in the novel altered. With a very bad grace, Lawrence made the changes he was asked to: and the novel went back on sale. But such things confirmed his prejudice that his novels would never do very well in England; and he was well aware that "Nowadays I depend almost entirely on America for my living" (Letters IV: 114). Once again, he was convinced that America was his land of the future. He was "tired of Europe. There seems no hope in it" (Letters IV: 141). During the autumn and winter of 1921 he made continual enquiries about places to live in America; and a letter from the American society hostess and patron of the arts Mabel Dodge Sterne (1879-1962), inviting him to Taos in New Mexico, effectively settled the matter. That was where he would go first, at any rate.
But committing himself to America - something he had been trying to do for six or seven years - was not as easy as it had looked: he had a strong sense that America would be barbaric and that he would hate it. Even Taos had a colony of artists - "Evil everywhere. But I want to go - to try" (Letters IV: 151). During the winter of 1921-22, he wavered between going to Taos, and following his friends the Brewsters to Ceylon, where Earl would be studying at a Buddhist temple. He finally resolved the dilemma by deciding to do both; to go first to Ceylon, and thence to America. For a long time Sicily had seemed like the last of Europe: "it all seems so far off, here in Sicily - like another world. The windows look east over the Ionian sea: somehow I don't care what happens behind me, in the north west" (Letters III: 486).
He was very conscious of the significance, and the pain of leaving Europe: "the wrench of breaking off" (Letters IV: 191). To leave Europe was, in a way, finally to demonstrate the abandonment of his belief in things - in society's progress, and especially in himself as a writer who could make some significant difference to his society. "But I want to go." He readied himself by getting all the short pieces he could finish into a final state, and posted off to Curtis Brown; out of this burst of work came the final version of Fantasia of the Unconscious, his book of short stories England, My England and the short novel collection The Fox, The Ladybird and The Captain's Doll.

With his European work behind him, he could leave. He was thirty-six-and-a-half; a moderately successful writer, but fundamentally disillusioned with the literary world; and eager for experience of what lay outside the Europe he had written about for so long. Writing for him was inevitably linked with his sense of place, of what a particular place could bring him, what it was like to live in, and of how it might be seen to symbolise the lives of the human beings who inhabited it. He was going away to write, not just to travel: to find the place which was satisfying to live in, as a writer. But he was also going to see if he could find a place where he wanted to live; where he could find a way of living which would satisfy his complex nature and needs. Frieda and he sailed away from Europe, for Ceylon, on 26th February 1922: a symbolic move, if ever they made one.




 6: Round the world and back again: Ceylon, Australia, America, Mexico, Europe, America: 1922-1924

The journey to Ceylon - and Ceylon itself - were, however, to play almost no part in Lawrence's subsequent writing. The journey, he and Frieda loved: a letter written in the course of it is amongst his most beautiful, as it describes their passage through Egypt and the Suez canal (Letters IV: 208-12). They made friends with some Australian people on the boat; but, ever the professional writer, Lawrence was still working, even if only at translating a novel - Mastro-Don Gesualdo - by the Italian author Giovanni Verga (1840-1922). Almost as soon as they arrived in Ceylon, they watched the Pera-Hera, when Edward Prince of Wales (1894-1972) visited Kandy and there was - at night - a procession of dancers, chiefs and elephants. This remained marvellously memorable: Lawrence described it in a number of letters, as well as in his poem Elephant.
But although Kandy was "lovely to look at," they were overwhelmed by "the terrific sun that makes like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you" (Letters IV: 214, 227) - and by a continual unease. The Brewsters' bungalow was right on the edge of the forest, and Lawrence unhappily described "the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sense of palms and the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night." They slept badly, what with the noise and the heat: "even at night you sweat if you walk a few yards" (Letters IV: 225, 216). The Brewsters were kind and helpful, but Lawrence remained feeling "not quite sure where I am: sort of look round for myself among all this different world" (Letters IV: 216). He also picked up a stomach bug early on, and remained sick his whole time in Ceylon: this certainly colored and narrowed his responses. "I don't like the silly dark people or their swarming billions or their hideous little Buddha temples, like decked up pigsties - nor anything." He did some more Verga translation, but (apart from the poem) no creative work at all, which was thoroughly unusual for him in a new place. "I don't believe I shall ever work here" (Letters IV: 221, 217), he remarked. Ceylon was thus most certainly not a place in which to stop for long, on an extremely expensive journey which depended in part upon Lawrence earning money as he travelled. After only six weeks, he and Frieda moved on - but still not yet to America. They headed first toward Australia, to take up invitations received from ship-board acquaintances on the journey out to Colombo, but not with any particular expectation: "one may as well move on, once one has started. I feel I dont care what becomes of me" (Letters IV: 220). Having cut loose, loose he would now remain.
They landed in Perth on 4th May 1922 but only stayed in Western Australia a fortnight before taking the next boat on to Sydney. They were a little overwhelmed by the hospitality of their friends, though the place and the atmosphere of a late Australian autumn were a great relief after Ceylon: "Air beautiful and pure and sky fresh, high" (Letters IV: 235). The best thing in Western Australia was the bush, "hoary and unending, no noise, still, and the white trunks of the gum trees all a bit burnt ... somewhat like a dream, a twilight forest that has not yet seen a day" (Letters IV: 238): the contrast with Ceylon's noisy forest could not have been clearer. Lawrence's most significant meeting was with the writer Mollie Skinner (1878-1955): it was her manuscript which, the following year, he would transform into The Boy in the Bush.
But their tickets took them on to Sydney; and, on 18th May, they were off again. Frieda was starting to want to stay somewhere a few months, and Lawrence was prepared to try New South Wales, to see if he liked it and could write there. Sydney itself turned out too expensive, however; they retreated down the coast forty miles to Thirroul, and took a house for a month: "a very nice bungalow with the Pacific in the garden" (Letters IV: 253). They knew no-one, and their neighbors (unlike neighbors in Italy, for example) did not cross- question them, much to Lawrence's relief: "I suppose there have been too many questionable people here in the past" (Letters IV: 263). And, for all Lawrence's forebodings, he started a novel; and found himself able to write at something over 3000 words a day for six weeks, with only one serious lapse in the middle. Ceylon should have been marvellous - but he had written nothing. They had expected little of Australia: but here Lawrence was, writing furiously.
The novel, Kangaroo, was in effect a progress report from a European in the middle of his travels; it took the European problems which had always interested Lawrence (how society can be changed, and who is to rule it: how individuals can both remain themselves and have relationships like marriage) and explored them in a context which allowed Lawrence to make them both usefully diagrammatic., Socialism could be set politically against authoritarianism: love against separateness - and, as in any novel, they could be sustained (and subverted) fictively. The invented figure of Kangaroo himself, the lawyer Ben Cooley, the representative of the idea of love, is far more than a cardboard figure. His appeals to Richard, his emotionalism, his rhetorical power, are the kinds of thing which only a man - and a writer - who had been deeply committed to such things at one stage of his life could now create (and reject). To that extent, Lawrence was once again re-visiting his own past: and rejecting it, at a cost he was all too well aware of. The central character, Richard Lovat Somers, ends up feeling that the past is a mere "decomposed body ... whirling and choking us, language, love and meaning" (Kangaroo 374): a depressing enough conclusion for a writer. Lawrence also used the socialists and fascists he had seen in Italy and the ideas of socialism which he had brought forward from his youth in Eastwood; he set them in the haunting, new/old world of Australia, where every issue seemed clearer. The marriage of Richard and Harriett is even less of a loving partnership than the marriage of Tanny and Lilly in Aaron's Rod had been; the marriage exists in continual flux, between the possibilities of love, of lordship, of companionship.
Through Kangaroo goes the small figure of Richard Lovat Somers, pulled in all directions, but finally - for all the claims of the past, with all its old ideas of rootedness in love, in marriage and with mankind - coming down on the side of lonely individualism, even within marriage: and asserting a belief in the non-human world as a crucial context for human beings' sense of themselves. Australia offered a superb context for this way of thinking: "The soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the pale, white unwritten atmosphere of Australia. Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf... without a mark, without a record" (Kangaroo 372). Lawrence had found "a great fascination in Australia. But for the remains of a fighting conscience, I would stay" (Letters IV: 275).

He seems to have done very little in Australia apart from think, look and write; but the novel was a real achievement, and remains one of the crucial twentieth century perceptions of the country. As soon as he realized he could finish it, however, he and Frieda booked their tickets for leaving; and Lawrence posted his manuscript ahead to his American agent Mountsier, as soon as he had finished it. On 11th August 1922, Frieda's forty-third birthday, they sailed for San Francisco: the moment for going to America could no longer be put off, even though Lawrence had so managed things that at least he would not be arriving in the North American industrial heartland.

They stopped briefly in New Zealand on the way, as well as at a number of the Pacific islands, and on 4th September 1922 landed in San Francisco - which Lawrence found noisy and expensive. They took the train to Santa Fe and then on to Lamy junction, where Mabel Sterne met them, took them by car to Taos, and installed them in a new adobe house.
And now Lawrence could genuinely experience the America he had been thinking of for so long. Everyone was extremely kind, he found - in Santa Fe he met the poet Witter Bynner (1881-1968) and the journalist Willard Johnson (1897-1968): in Taos they met two Danish painters, Kai Götzsche (b. 1886) and Knud Merrild (1894-1954) whom they liked very much. Tony Luhan (d. 1963), Mabel Sterne's Indian lover, was a more difficult person to get on with; but Mabel herself exerted every effort to give her new guests an interesting time. And, more than anything else, the place was marvellously, compellingly beautiful. Lawrence celebrated it famously in an essay on New Mexico he wrote six years later: "I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had ... the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend": he wrote how the person who lives there "above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day" (Phoenix 142-3). A new world it was, where (too) he experienced for the first time an old-world religion in the Red Indians both in Taos and in reservations and dances in Arizona, where Mabel took her guests only three days after they reached Taos.

Lawrence was also at last able to do some sustained work: he added a new last chapter to Kangaroo and revised the whole novel, as well as writing some poems and some essays and journalism about New Mexico. Most significantly, however, he turned again to his old essays on American Literature and started to give them a thorough-going revision, in a new, hard-hitting style which he seems to have considered peculiarly North American. They were his first work for America: a sign of his new relationship with it. The England where he had first created them seemed very far away, though he was poignantly reminded of it with the death of his old Eastwood friend Sallie Hopkin; he wrote a touching and loving letter to Hopkin when he heard the news.
Sallie had a fine adventurous life of the spirit, a fine adventurous life. And it's the adventure counts, not the success ... the rest of the journey she goes with us like a passenger now, instead of a straining traveller ... There will be another grave in that cemetery now, down Church Street. It makes me feel I am growing old. Never mind, one must strike camp, and pack up the things, and go on. With love, that belongs to the old life ... England seems full of graves to me. (Letters IV: 327).

And he wrote a poem, Spirits Summoned West, starting from the last phrase of the letter, which explicitly linked the death of his mother with the death of Sallie Hopkin.

Life with Mabel and in Taos had its disadvantages however: the Eden of the high American desert contained the usual snakes. Having invited Lawrence to New Mexico, Mabel wanted him to write for her, to advise her on her own novel, to show him off, to talk to her for hours, to fit in with her plans and imaginings. "I don't think I can bear to be here very long," Lawrence confessed to his agent after six weeks: "too much on Mabel Sterne's ground, she arranges one too much as if one were a retainer or protégé of hers." They solved the problem by moving out of Taos, up to a ranch on nearby Lobo mountain where they could be "really free, far more than here" (Letters IV: 330, 333). Here, with the two Danish painters as companions (very necessary on a ranch 8000 feet up in winter), they lived till the spring. And Lawrence was able to work hard again: he finished the revision of the American essays, giving them the proud declaration Lobo at the end, he revised some of his Verga translations, and he wrote a number of poems, bringing them together and revising them for the volume he would publish as Birds, Beasts and Flowers later in 1923. His American publisher Seltzer and his agent Mountsier both came to visit in December; Mountsier stayed on in Taos, but his relations with Lawrence became progressively more strained. Mountsier had not liked Aaron's Rod and had also objected to Kangaroo; Lawrence was finding him awkward as an agent, particularly in his relations with Seltzer, upon whom Lawrence was depending more and more for his publication (and income) in North America. He finally broke with Mountsier in February 1923, and put his American business (like his English) in the hands of the Curtis Brown agency.
With the spring, toward the end of his first six months in America, Lawrence decided to go down to Mexico; he had been wondering about writing a novel in America, but nothing (apart from an abortive effort to help with Mabel's novel) had so far suggested itself. The American novel would have to become a Mexican novel. Lawrence and Frieda travelled down to Mexico in March and there met Bynner and Johnson, whom they had suggested might make the trip too. After a month based in Mexico City, visiting outlying places, the party moved to Chapala: Lawrence had prospected for a place for them all to live, and had telegraphed back "Chapala paradise. Take evening train ... " (Letters IV: 435). And here, beside the lake, he was once more able to write a novel, as he had written Sons and Lovers beside the Lago di Garda, The Sisters beside the sea in Fiascherino, Women in Love high above the ocean in Cornwall, The Lost Girl and Mr Noon overlooking the sea in Taormina and Kangaroo beside the sea in Australia. The habit of living and writing somewhere above, looking out and over, was one he retained all his life (Worthen 1991: 460). The novel he now wrote he called Quetzalcoatl and formed the first version of The Plumed Serpent: "It interests me, means more to me than any other novel of mine. This is my real novel of America" (Letters IV: 457). It was a real fantasy novel, in which an English woman visiting Mexico experiences, at first hand, a religious revolution there, in which a new structure of society is created: one based on a revival of old Mexican religion, a structure of non-human belief which finally evades and supersedes the Christian context. The novel thus attempted to answer the despairs about the individual and society into which Kangaroo had led him: it was characteristic of Lawrence's writing that one novel should address the problems the previous novel had thrown up. But he also knew that what he was writing was only a first draft; for the first time since 1914, the novel he was writing would have to be radically recast before he would want to publish it. He could now, however, afford this luxury; Seltzer was bringing out a string of books and (for the first time since 1914) making him a good income. He could thus afford the luxury of prolonged revision and re-thinking.

He finished the novel - or at last reached a suitable resting point - in Chapala at the end of June; and he and Frieda re-entered the USA and travelled slowly up to New York, where Seltzer had offered to find them somewhere to live (and where Lawrence could work - mostly on his proofs) before they went back to Europe. Although they both wanted to return to the ranch in Taos, in the long run, they were not keen on spending another winter at altitude; Frieda had been away from her German family for nearly two years, and wanted to go back; her son Monty and daughter Elsa were both now twenty-one and could make up their own minds about seeing their mother. Middleton Murry was also starting a new magazine (the Adelphi) in England, and wanted Lawrence's contributions and help.
But, a fortnight before the boat left, Lawrence refused to sail; he and Frieda seem to have had a massive and wounding quarrel, and effectively separated, with Frieda going to London (and thence to Germany) and Lawrence returning to travel through America, across to Chicago and thence to the West Coast, and finally back down to Mexico. He seems to have accused Frieda of wanting to go back (in every sense): of "chasing ... those Weekley children" (something he felt "I can't stomach"); while he himself, when it came to it, could not bear the thought of "England and home and my people" - or even of the Fontana Vecchia, which he had loved so much. He felt caught between "the old world which I loved" (but now used the past tense about) and the new world, "which means nothing to me"; the situation of Richard Lovat Somers had become very real to him, and simply returning to Europe was not going to change that.

There followed a few fairly miserable months of travel for Lawrence, some of it once again in the company of the Danish painters: he felt at one point "as if I should wander over the brink of existence" (Letters IV: 507). He was, in fact, to begin with expecting Frieda to come back at any time. But she didn't. What he succeeded in writing (and also turning into the next stage of his thinking about relationships) was a completely new version of Molly Skinner's Australian novel: he gradually turned it into The Boy in the Bush and developed the idea of a hero refusing ties and obligations but going his own way, doing what he wants. Jack marries but feels that, if he wants two wives, he should have them: he also believes that his wife "knows she can't get past me. Therefore, in one corner of her, she hates me, like a scorpion lurking" (Boy in Bush 334). And Jack also fantasizes about turning into a kind of patriarch, with wives and cattle and land. Molly Skinner was astonished (and hurt) to see what Lawrence had made of her book; but it was what he currently wanted to write and to work his thinking through.

He ended up in Mexico in November with Kai G”tzsche, finishing the novel, and with a sense that his marriage was probably at an end; he wrote to Frieda making an offer of "a regular arrangement for you to have an income, if you wish" (Letters IV: 529). But Frieda kept asking him to go back, as did other friends: and it was not as if his experience of the months spent travelling on his own had been very satisfying. On 21st November, after almost exactly three months on his own, he went back: "I don't want much to go to England - but I suppose it is the next move in the battle which never ends and in which I never win" (Letters IV: 541). He was committed to struggle, in writing and in living: made both a point of principle. But in this case he was prepared to see if he and Frieda were able to journey on together. He could not simply give up all ties to the old life. G”tzsche and he sailed from Vera Cruz: in his unfinished novel The Flying Fish, Lawrence recreated the voyage and his experience of watching flying fish and porpoises from the bows - and it was again the mesmerizing power of the non-human world he watched in the speeding, playful fish:
"This is sheer joy - and men have lost it, or never accomplished it. The cleverest sportsmen in the world are owls beside these fish. And the togetherness of love is nothing to the spinning unison of dolphins playing under-sea. It would be wonderful to know joy as these fish know it. The life of the deep waters is ahead of us, it contains sheer togetherness and sheer joy. We have never got there - " (St. Mawr 221-2).

England could hardly have been more of a contrast. His first reaction, after four years away, was to "loathe London - hate England - feel like an animal in a trap. It all seems so dead and dark and buried" (Letters IV: 542). He went down with a cold and retreated to bed: "I don't belong over here any more. It's like being among the dead of one's previous existence" (Letters IV: 545). He wrote some essays for Murry's Adelphi (including the caustic "On Coming Home," which proved too caustic for Murry) and visited his Midlands family for a few days over New Year; but as soon as he could decently manage it, he laid plans for going back to the ranch for the summer. But, this time, it was with a strong sense of saying goodbye to England for ever; and he would have liked to keep certain people with him, if he were giving up England. Now had come the moment for him to appeal to people to do what he had fantasized about for ten years, but now had found a place for. He proposed getting a group of people to live together, dedicated to earning little and living sensibly; above all they would live away from the industrial world he hated so much. Accordingly, at a dinner arranged for many of his London friends at the Café Royal - Catherine Carswell and her husband Donald (1882-1940), Mary Cannan (1867-1950), Murry, Koteliansky, and the painters Dorothy Brett and Mark Gertler - he publicly asked which of them would come to New Mexico. Various excuses were made and various reasons given; only Dorothy Brett absolutely committed herself to coming. Murry, in spite of his frequent professions of friendship and love, said that he would come, clearly meaning not to. He had, however, recently ended an affair with Dorothy Brett (which Lawrence did not know about), and Frieda had - before Lawrence returned to England - invited Murry to become her lover: both strong reasons inhibiting him from making up such a foursome. He would also be getting married again the following May. Koteliansky made a speech of love and devotion to Lawrence, breaking glasses to celebrate every sentence end; but he would not leave the London which was now his home. What Lawrence drank made him violently sick over the table-cloth; the evening turned out a disaster, and its outcome - Brett coming back to the ranch with them - perhaps unexpected. But Brett, always willing to give her devotion as she had given it to Murry, and would now give it to Lawrence, was a surprizingly independent person who would paint, and could also type, and would (Lawrence hoped) not only give Frieda some company but might act as a buffer in the marriage relationship. Her deafness (she used an ear trumpet they called Toby) might not be altogether a disadvantage. They would have to find out.

In the New Year, Lawrence and Frieda stayed in London, Lawrence writing journalism and starting some stories - Murry would figure comically in a number of them, such as Jimmy and the Desperate Woman, The Last Laugh and The Border Line - before they went to Germany to see Frieda's mother. They also spent some time in Paris, where Lawrence wrote his extraordinarily prescient Letter from Germany about the breakdown of the old values and the rise of a new commitment to destruction, with "queer gangs of Young Socialists": a country "Whirling to the ghost of the old Middle Ages of Europe" (Phoenix 109-10). Back briefly in London to collect Dorothy Brett and her painting things, the three of them set sail for America on 5th March 1924.

After months of silence which had started to worry Lawrence, Thomas Seltzer met them in New York and was as friendly as ever; but there was no disguising the fact that his business was in serious trouble. (It would in fact shortly collapse, taking with it the bulk of Lawrence's American earnings; but that was still a few months away.) After a fortnight of snow and sun, they took the train south, to have a second attempt at living in Mabel's orbit in Taos - the balance of relationships changed, anyway, by the presence of Brett. Lawrence set to work, this time on his essays Indians and Entertainment and The Dance of the Sprouting Corn: both of them attempts to say what it was about Indian culture which was so important, both of them ways of thinking through what he would want in the end to say in his novel.
But this time, after only a few days of relative harmony, Mabel - now Mabel Luhan, having married Tony the previous year - presented Frieda with a ranch on Lobo about two miles further up from the Del Monte ranch where they had lived with the Danes: and they started making plans to go back up to it. Lawrence, hating the obligation of a gift, insisted in giving Mabel something in return, and wrote to Europe for the original manuscript of Sons and Lovers, which he in turn presented to her: a gift whose value certainly outweighed what he and Frieda had received. After having some preliminary work on the buildings done, on 5th May they moved up to the three-cabin ranch for the summer, Lawrence and Frieda sharing one cabin and Brett taking a smaller one nearby.
This would be Lawrence's most creative and fulfilled summer for some while: it is worth taking some time to look at his life on the ranch, in the first half of the next chapter, and to examine how his fiction emerged out of the isolation of his life there.




 7: Ranch life: and the return to Mexico: 1924-1925

Work on repairing and rebuilding the ranch went on for five weeks, throughout May and into June; the big three-room cabin had to be repaired, its chimney rebuilt with adobe bricks, and all three cabins restored and re-roofed. Lawrence worked with three Indian laborers and a Mexican carpenter; he made no difference between the amount of heavy or difficult work he expected them to do and what he did himself. When it came to someone having to crawl along inside the main cabin's tin roof on a hot day, with a wet handkerchief over mouth and nose, to clear out the old rats' nests, then he did it. Brett, too, "was amazing for the hard work she would do" (Frieda 1935: 137). Mabel and Tony stayed up at the ranch for some of the time, sleeping in a big tepee up on the hillside, as the Indians did; at night, they would eat together, the Indians would sing, plans for the next day's work would be made. Lawrence did almost no writing, though he does seem to have finished his essay Pan in America, but "naturally I don't write when I slave building the house" (Letters IV: 45). The old tensions between Lawrence, Frieda and Mabel seem to have continued, with (now) the added complication of Brett; but for a good deal of May there was no time for quarrelling: just the day to day work. They took just a couple of trips away: in the course of a journey back to Taos on horseback, for example, Mabel and Tony took them to the cave at Arroyo Seco which Lawrence would use as the setting for his story The Woman Who Rode Away the following month.
But what was Lawrence doing, spending five weeks rebuilding a run-down ranch on which he would (in the end) only spend five months, in the summer of 1924, and five months the following year, and in a country where he would never live more than seven months at a time? Although he was a professional writer, his books never sold in very large numbers, so that he depended upon publishing a great deal - and so on writing a great deal too. The place was punishingly remote and (what is more) could never be inhabited in winter; and, as he told Witter Bynner when the latter was about to visit, "you'll have more or less to camp, help with the chores and all that. You won't be particularly comfortable" (Letters V: 65).
But there was, to begin with, the huge pleasure for Lawrence and Frieda of having their own place at last. Frieda had been pining for a farm, or something equivalent, since Australia in May 1922: and at the back of Lawrence's mind was the memory of his days at the Haggs farm between 1902 and 1908. The ranch (first called Lobo, later Kiowa) was the first place they had ever inhabited where they could really do what they wanted: which they were not beholden to others for, or paying rent for, or looking after for someone else. Lawrence had always strongly resisted owning property (which was why he now insisted that it was Frieda's ranch, not his.) But now they had acquired it, in the most extraordinary of all the places which he and Frieda had visited since 1912. Lawrence threw himself into the work of it; it offered him a new challenge, a wholly new field to explore and master.
And it was the most beautiful, and also the most soul-destroyingly difficult and destructive place, too, where they had ever lived. "One doesn't talk any more about being happy - that is child's talk. But I do like having the big unbroken spaces round me" (Letters V: 47), Lawrence wrote to Catherine Carswell. But he told Murry very early on how "Often, too, it is trying - one has to bear up hard against it." The animal life (rats in particular) could nearly defeat human occupation, gnawing through and eating almost anything left unattended. Furniture had to be slung up to the ceiling on ropes when they went away, for example; rats bounced on the roofs at nights "like hippopotamuses" (St. Mawr 148), black ants swarmed into the kitchen. Everyday life was always hard, with water having to be carried from the spring (they only got the water flowing through pipes the following year), horses which needed to be fed and cared for, wood which had to be chopped; and every evening there was milk and mail (and sometimes butter and eggs) to be ridden for, two miles down to the Del Monte Ranch, where the Hawke family lived and worked, and back just before dark. And always, unremitting hard physical work, even when the main work of restoration was done: "I make shelves and cupboards, and mend fences, bake bread in the Indian oven outside, and catch the horses" (Letters V: 75): Frieda knitted, cooked, made butter and (in 1925) looked after the chickens. There was always wood to be chopped, water to be carried, fences to mend: animals would fall ill: there was "the underlying rat-dirt, the everlasting bristling tussle of the wild life" (St. Mawr 150). The nearest shop for provisions or supplies was half a day's journey away, 17 miles down in Taos.
And yet the place was quite extraordinary. "The landscape lived, and lived as the world of the gods, unsullied and unconcerned. The great circling landscape lived its own life, sumptuous and uncaring," Lawrence would write in St Mawr (St. Mawr 146). They could see down to the desert 1000 feet below, the houses of a Pueblo looking like crystals, and away for 30 miles to where the Rio Grande canyon wound its way; and then beyond that to the distant mountains, "like icebergs showing up from an outer sea." Lawrence wrote to his German mother-in-law how
Here, where one is alone with trees and mountains and chipmunks and desert, one gets something out of the air: something wild and untamed, cruel and proud, beautiful and sometimes evil, that really is America. But not the America of the whites.(Letters V: 63)
Unlike Mexico, which had offered him a human world that was different, the Kiowa ranch gave him a life with nature almost untrammelled: "something savage unbreakable in the spirit of place out here" (Letters V: 47). It was not just beautiful: "it's really a hard country, not a soft flowery country" (Letters V: 114). And that brought out for him, always, a strong sense of what human beings really needed in their lives. "I myself find a good deal of satisfaction living like this in the unbroken country, which still retains its aboriginal quality" (Letters V: 75). It was this very special quality of the ranch which Lawrence celebrated in his short novel St. Mawr, which starts in England, but ends up in a recreation of the ranch itself. He wrote this over the summer, between June and August: it was his second novel of North America. Over and over again we can see how it conveyed something of his own feeling for the place; as when, for example, the fictional "Lou" of the story first sees it.
In an instant, her heart sprang to it. The instant the car stopped, and she saw the two cabins inside the rickety fence, the rather broken corral beyond, and behind all, tall, blue balsam pines, the round hills, the solid uprise of the mountain flank: and getting down, she looked across the purple and gold of the clearing ... "This is the place," she said to herself. (St. Mawr 140)
More than anything else, the Kiowa ranch offered the chance to "live, circumstantially, from day to day, with the hills and the trees" (Letters V: 79). It was the ideal ordinariness of the place, as a context for human lives, which mattered as much as its spectacular views. Human beings could struggle, work, get tired, live simply, do what they wanted: and always in the eye of nature. "It was very beautiful up here. We worked hard, and spent very little money. And we had the place all to ourselves, and our horses the same. It was good to be alone and responsible. But also it is very hard living up against these savage Rockies." (Letters V: 148)

Lawrence had prefaced writing St. Mawr with another north American story which he had perhaps been thinking about during the three weeks since Arroyo Seco, The Woman Who Rode Away. He wrote this very fast, and showed it to Mabel Luhan down in Taos at the end of June. These were his first two North American fictions: both, strikingly, about the danger, the destructiveness for twentieth century white consciousness, of America; both attempts to suggest that the challenge of another kind of consciousness is what can and should confront modern men and women. The Woman Who Rode Away describes a white woman who unthinkingly decides to see Indians, and blindly gives herself up to them; the story conveyed something of what Lawrence must have felt as he saw Mabel marrying herself to Tony, the Pueblo Indian. But whereas Tony was something of an outcast from the Pueblo for what he had done, the woman of Lawrence's story is seized upon as a sacrifice by the Indians; the story reveals just how opposed to white civilization Lawrence felt Indians were, how much they hated it and would do it down if they could. And yet they reminded him of what the white races lack, too; it is a story (like St. Mawr) which is thoroughly ambivalent about the opposition of cultures it reveals.
Being sent a copy of A Passage to India by E. M. Forster in July must have added to his sense of the efforts which other writers, too, were making to confront their European characters with alien worlds: "The day of our white dominance is over, and no new day can come till this of ours has passed into night" (Letters V: 77). But it was now possible to live quietly from day to day - and the writing of St. Mawr flowed through the summer, though "this isn't a good place to write in - one does too many other things" (Letters V: 86). He finally ended it around the middle of August: "it took it out of me," "a corker. It's much better if I'm not popular" (Letters V: 122, 91).

A disturbing moment had come, however, early in August. Lawrence had been remarkably well for months; but the ranch was at 8,600 feet, and around 2nd August, going down with a cold, he began to spit blood. He was actually (as he admitted eighteen months later) suffering a bronchial haemorrhage. To his rage, Frieda had a doctor come up to the ranch to see him; but the doctor declared that it was simply a bit of bronchial trouble, to be dealt with by mustard plasters. This treatment seems to have worked, in the short run; but the attack may also have marked the first real onset of the tuberculosis which would in some ways dominate the last five years of his life.

For the moment he was well enough to be up and about in a few days, to finish St. Mawr and to prepare for a visit with Mabel and Tony (but without Brett) to Santa Fe and thence to Hotevilla to see the Hopi Indians' Snake Dance. His reactions are beautifully set out in the two quite different pieces he wrote about it. One, which thoroughly annoyed Mabel Luhan - "I had not taken him to the Snake Dance to have him describe it in this fashion" (Luhan 1934: 268) - called Just Back from the Snake Dance - Tired Out, and written four days after the dance, views the whole occasion as a white man's opportunity for a bit of a show: "The south-west is the great playground of the white America" (Letters 1932: 609). The other, The Hopi Snake Dance, written eight days after the dance, is one of the profoundest of all Lawrence's writings about America. The jeering, satirical and the philosophical sides of his nature could hardly be better illustrated than by these essays.

They only had a month left at the ranch before leaving for the winter: Lawrence had long planned to go back to Mexico to write the final version of his Quetzalcoatl novel. And then, out of the blue, came news from England he had not expected: his father had died, very suddenly, at the age of seventy-eight. "It is better to be gone than lingering on half helpless and half alive," he wrote to his sister Emily, doubtless thinking of the protracted dying of his mother during the autumn of 1910; "But it upsets one, nevertheless: makes a strange break" (Letters V: 124). He wrote more elegiacally in a letter to Murry three weeks later, linking the death with the coming of autumn.
The country here is very lovely at the moment, aspens high on the mountains like a fleece of gold. Ubi ist ille Jason? The scrub oak is dark red, and the wild birds are coming down to the desert. It is time to go south. - Did I tell you my father died on Sept. 10th, the day before my birthday [he was 39]. - The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn't crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce.(Letters V: 143)

The autumn breaking into colors doubtless also linked in his mind with the autumn of his mother dying, back in 1910.
He wrote just one more highly significant piece, to complete his major writings of this summer: the short story The Princess, in which a white woman again goes out to explore the American southwest, but in which her peculiar reluctance in the face of experience is brutally challenged. He would not have written it, perhaps, without knowing Brett, though in no sense is the central character a portrait of her: but the essential experience described in it is also his own.
He looked back at the summer as one when he had written relatively little: but it had been extraordinarily creative in many ways, if a little ominous too. He had, however, successfully answered the question he had been asking since 1913: he had found where he wanted to live, at least in the summer. But now it was time to go. On 11th October, Brett, Frieda and he went to Taos; by 23rd October they were in Mexico City.

It is significant that Lawrence felt he wanted to be in Mexico in order to rewrite Quetzalcoatl. He had not felt he had needed to be in Australia to write a new last chapter for Kangaroo or to write any of The Boy in the Bush: he had written Sons and Lovers, The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod and Mr Noon while out of England. But The Plumed Serpent - as it would now become - was to be instilled with a social atmosphere and with a cast of characters which he had to create especially for the novel, and he clearly wanted day-to-day and first-hand experience of Mexico to do it. But he did not go back to Chapala. He wanted somewhere less touristy, more real, he said (Letters V: 163); and Oaxaca, where the British Consul had a brother - a priest, Edward Rickards (1979-1941) - and which he recommended as "very nice," with "a perfect climate," sounded ideal. After a fortnight in Mexico City, Lawrence, Frieda and Brett travelled south; and after a short while in a hotel, the Lawrences moving in to a wing of Rickards's house, Brett staying in a nearby hotel.
And on 19th November Lawrence started to work on his novel again. He had the experience of the three white women heroines of the three pieces of fiction he had written during the summer to use as a background for the character of Kate Leslie; while the place he was now living in (a far more indigenous place than Chapala had been) felt politically even more unsure than Chapala had been in 1923. He was working on a book about political and religious revolution and change; although he was thoroughly unsure about America as a place to live and work, he recognised the opportunities Mexico would give him for his vision of a new society. He worked almost unremittingly from mid-November to the end of January, with only a break in mid-December to write four pieces about life in Oaxaca which later formed the central part of Mornings in Mexico. The novel proved exhausting to conceive and to write: much of it went against the grain. Just before starting, he felt "a bit sick of the American continent," "put out by the vibration of this rather malevolent continent" (Letters V: 174, 170): early in January, he remarked that "It's so queer here, never free, never quite safe, always a feel of being hemmed in, and shut down. I get sick of it myself: feel I shall bust" (Letters V: 191). Oaxaca turned out almost tropical in climate and vegetation, and in some ways reminiscent of Ceylon: "at this moment the patio is reeking with the scent of some sweet tropical flower. Damn tropical flowers, anyhow" (Letters V: 192). In spite of such feelings, he went on working tremendously hard: "wrote at home and got run down" (Frieda 1935: 140). The novel grew enormously, ending up almost twice as long as Quetzalcoatl: Lawrence noted that "It is good, but scares me a bit, also." (Letters V: 196) He was following through the ambivalent logic of his own feelings suggested in a story like The Woman Who Rode Away: the sacrifice of the prisoners of Quetzalcoatl is, for example, one of the most unpleasant pieces of writing he ever did, and it would be natural for him to be scared by it. He quoted Macbeth at a friend: "I dare do all that may become a man, said somebody. It's the becoming" (Letters V: 199). To add to the problems, Frieda had finally get fed up with Brett, who "came every day and I thought she was becoming too much part of our lives and I resented it." She told Lawrence, and they quarrelled about it: Lawrence "said I was a jealous fool" (Frieda 1935: 140). But things got more and more tense; finally Lawrence told Brett that she would have to leave. Obediently, she did, going back to the Hawkes' Del Monte Ranch, leaving Lawrence with a final ten days work on the novel still to do.
It cannot have been a coincidence that, when he stopped, he suffered an extraordinary collapse into illness. It was as if the onset had been delayed by the fevered excitement of the writing and his total involvement with it, and through the pressure of the quarrel with Frieda. On 29th January he finished the book. A week later, he was almost dead, with a combination of typhoid, malaria and influenza; his tuberculosis took a great leap forward; and then there was an earthquake. He was moved back into the hotel; and toward the end of February, he and Frieda travelled back to Mexico City, with the plan of sailing from Vera Cruz for Europe, as he had done with Götzsche in 1923. But he suffered a relapse, and was unable to travel further for almost another month. It was during this bout of illness that a doctor said straight out that Lawrence was suffering from tuberculosis, and advised Frieda to take him back to the ranch; he was given a year or two at most to live.
It was during this second bout of illness, too, that he started the unfinished novel The Flying Fish and dictated its first few pages to Frieda (something unique in his writing career: he must very badly have wanted it written). It started with its central figure ill in Mexico: it used material from the 1923 trip with Götzsche: it created, most beautifully, the sense of a "greater day" surrounding the human being. But, too, it was haunted by a sense of return to England. It had been a long time since Lawrence had used the English Midlands in his fiction. But now - like Gethin Day himself - "Now he was sick from the soul outwards, and the common day had cracked for him, and the uncommon day was showing him its immensity, he felt that home was the place" (St. Mawr 210).
But all their plans to return to Europe were blown to atoms by the advice of the doctor to go back to the ranch. In spite of a "lurking hankering for Europe" (Letters V: 229) they put off the journey till the end of the summer. Lawrence gradually recovered a semblance of health during March, and at the end of the month they travelled north again. But they had terrible troubles at the border at El Paso, as the American doctor initially refused Lawrence permission to enter the USA (presumably observing in him the symptoms of tuberculosis). They finally were allowed in, with Lawrence permitted to stay for just six months in the country (Nehls 1959: 150); they struggled up to Santa Fe, where the actress Ida Rauh (1877- 1970) - whom they had got to know in 1924 - took care of them; and early in April, they got back up to the Del Monte ranch, where Brett was waiting for them.
It had not been the return they had been expecting. Lawrence was still desperately weak and ill; but as soon as possible they went up the final two miles to their own Kiowa ranch (this time leaving Brett down at Del Monte); and Lawrence, sleeping much of the time, began to recover his strength. It says a good deal for their belief in the recuperative powers of the place that they should have struggled back up to it; a place such as the ranch was hardly for a convalescent. But for a while they had a young Indian couple, Trinidad and Ruffina, to look after them, and Frieda clearly did more household work than usual, announcing that she was "developping [sic] into a 'chef'" (Letters V: 233).
And, amazingly, Lawrence got well again; and typically celebrated his recovery by starting to write. At last he created the play he had been promising Ida Rauh and tinkering with for months; he wrote David - a play in which modern man develops out of the ruins of the pre-flood consciousness and religious self. He himself - David Herbert - was both David, articulate and intelligent, and Saul, the representative of the older world which he was trying, in work after work now, to recreate or perhaps, with the help of myth and legend, to create as a kind of alternative myth to the version of human progress and development which had so dominated his early thinking.

By early May, the play was done; and life at the ranch continued its old pattern. The differences this year were that they managed to get the running water working, to irrigate the field; and that early in June, they acquired chickens (which Frieda cared for) and a cow, Susan, Lawrence's responsibility. This saved them the daily journeys for milk down to Del Monte, where Brett continued to live and to type for Lawrence; though Lawrence then had to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing his cow, to milk her. They had relatively few visitors, seeing even less of Mabel this year than the last, though Frieda's German nephew Friedel Jaffe (b. 1903) came and stayed for a couple of months, and was able to help with the everyday chores. Ida Rauh came, to hear Lawrence read the whole of David out loud: Lawrence compiled a book of essays, using some old material (including a much revised version of The Crown from 1915), which became Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. Brett typed and came up occasionally: Frieda continued her war against her. And Lawrence was sent the typescript of The Plumed Serpent, but could hardly bear to look at it - "I think of Mexico with a sort of nausea" (Letters V: 254). When he finally went through it and corrected it, he felt about it as he had about The Trespasser and Women in Love: "I hate giving it out to be published. It is different from my other books: and to me, the one that means most to me" (Letters V: 260).

The months meandered away - "We've just sat tight and considered the lily all summer" (Letters V: 291) - the only excitements being the perpetual looking for Susan, and rides in the buggy down to San Cristobal, when Lawrence remembered the remark made by the magazine editor Austin Harrison (1873-1928) in a letter to Lydia Lawrence back in 1910:
"By the time he is forty, he will be riding in his carriage" ... And sitting in my corduroy trousers and blue shirt calling: "Get up Aaron! Ambrose!" then I thought of Austin Harrison's prophecy ... "Get up, Ambrose!" Bump! went the buggy over a rock, and the pine-needles slashed my face! See him driving in his carriage, at forty! - driving it pretty badly too! Put the brake on! (Phoenix II 260-1)
He points the irony beautifully between the kind of prosperous professional writer he might have become - it is natural to think of the novelist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) - and the outsider and maverick, just about making his living, but writing exactly what he wanted to, which he had actually become. He was actually forty on 11th September 1925, just after they left the ranch: "lovely autumn, pity to go" (Letters V: 296). But the six months allowed to him were up. He and Frieda travelled via Denver to New York, and by 21st September were on the S. S. Resolute bound for Europe.
It was as symbolic a journey as when they had left for Ceylon in 1922. Their American adventure was over. Lawrence had always wanted to come; he had written extensively about it and explored through his writing what it meant to be there, as well as finding an extraordinary place to live. But it took too much out of him: and his illness meant that he would probably never again be able to live there for as long as he would have liked. At forty, he was coming back to Europe: as it turned out, for good. He never saw America again.



8: Europe once more: 1925-1928
 

They had come back to Europe for very different reasons than those which had brought them back in 1923. Then, Frieda had wanted to see her family, Lawrence had come most reluctantly to join her and had gone for as short a time to the Midlands as possible. This time, obliged to leave the USA, it was Lawrence who wanted to come as much as Frieda: and it was England he wanted to see - "one's native land has a sort of hopeless attraction, when one is away" (Letters V: 312). He had not been back since his father had died, and he wanted to see his sisters. Frieda's youngest daughter Barby was now also 21 and could choose to see her mother. After a week in a London hotel, Lawrence and Frieda spent nearly a fortnight in the Midlands (with Barby coming to visit them there), and then another week in London, before travelling on to see Frieda's mother. Both England and the Midlands, however, depressed him thoroughly - he was in bed with a cold as soon as he reached Nottingham, complaining how "the weather's awful and we simply hate it up here" (Letters V: 316). Their original plan of staying for a month or so, so that Frieda could see her children, quickly turned into a decision to go south: first to Germany, and then back to Italy. Martin Secker's wife Rina (1896-1969) had her family living in Spotorno, and that was where they would head. Before they left the Midlands, however, the weather improved and they toured around a bit; but even that was painful. "I can't look at the body of my past, the spirit seems to have flown" - "England just depresses me, like a long funeral" (Letters V: 318, 322). All he was writing were a few book reviews.

They stayed a fortnight in Baden-Baden, Lawrence "playing whist with old Baronesses, Countesses and Excellencies, and behaving like the sweetest house-spaniel" (Letters V: 331). He also wrote a couple of essays on books: and Frieda had her hair fashionably bobbed. But he was happy to move on to Spotorno: where, within three days, they had rented the Villa Bernarda for four months. And once again they had a view, "just above the village and the sea. The sun shines, the eternal Mediterranean is blue and young, the last leaves are falling from the vines in the garden" (Letters V: 337). It became the setting for one of his first three post-America piece of fiction - his first prose fiction since finishing The Plumed Serpent in Oaxaca, in fact. One was the tiny short story Smile, a tailpiece to his three anti-Murry stories of 1923-4; one (Glad Ghosts) was a commissioned ghost story for Cynthia Asquith. But "Sun" grew straight out of the situation in Spotorno, where a woman suffering from nerves and with a small child goes to live and to take sun baths - until her grey-suited husband comes out to her. Secker's wife Rina, nervous and with an eighteen-month-old son, was waiting for her publisher husband to come out from England; and Lawrence used that situation in a recreation of the situation of the Fontana Vecchia in Sicily, in another of those stories exploring the relationship between the human being and the circumambient universe: but this time a story in which they eventually get into a better and more creative relationship. In one way it seems extraordinary that Lawrence should have written so directly and so closely about a situation in front of him as he wrote (Martin/Maurice arrived early in December, and Lawrence sent the story off for typing on the 12th) - but it was what he had always done. And the creation of the experience of the sun paved the way for the writing, in these last years of his creativity, of that theme of the relationship between person, sun and universe over and over again; it is in The Escaped Cock, in Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Another significant event was in their meeting their landlord: a married officer in the Italian Bersaglieri, Angelo Ravagli (1891-1976), a striking figure in uniform and a cheerful, immensely practical one when out of it: and Frieda made sure he was out of it fairly soon. She started an affair with him that continued at intervals over the next four years. He took English lessons from Lawrence, and also helped Lawrence fix a smoking chimney; Lawrence remarked to Frieda afterwards "That is a man who would be useful to have at the Kiowa ranch" (Nehls 1959: 18). In 1931, Angelo would leave his wife and family and accompany Frieda back to the ranch and would live with her there until her death in 1956.

For the moment, it was simply one of those affairs Frieda had, all her life. Lawrence certainly knew about them - it seems possible that Frieda actually told him about them, as she had told him about Hobson in 1912 and had also discussed Gray with him in 1917. Her affairs seem to have made no difference to her dependence upon Lawrence or to her fundamental belief in him as the extraordinary man in her life, one whose sheer understanding of her and of the world surpassed that of anyone else she knew. The worst quarrels of their lives did not occur over her affairs (or his, for that matter) but over other people altogether: people he insisted on bringing into their lives, like Ottoline, or Mabel, or Brett, or - at other times - his sister Ada: or over Frieda's daughters: or (at times) almost anyone with whom one of the two felt the other was siding with, against them. It was those who invaded their living space that mattered, not those who briefly occupied their beds. His friends were the people she tended to hate, because when they were present (and being singled out for special attention) she felt ignored or slighted. She seems in fact to have been far more jealous of his non-sexual relationships than he was of her sexual ones; but, then, she had reason to be alarmed. As a writer he was financially independent: could live where and how he wished. He might conceivably leave her: not (probably) for another woman, but just leave her, as had nearly happened in August 1923, to go his own way. But she could not leave him, as she pointed out, for purely practical reasons: "how could I earn a living? I was never taught anything which might earn me a living ... I am helpless. I am caught" (Bynner 1951: 62). But, crucially, she also did not want to leave him: "I wish to be caught. We love each other" (Bynner 1951: 62). She certainly loved him. For his part, Lawrence may well have regarded her affairs as the price he had to pay for so often going his own way regardless, in ideas and relationships (though not in sexual ones), as well as for her opposition to him, and his opposition to her. This was something marvellously important and useful to him; and this she knew very well. She told Bynner that "he quotes me and often what he quotes from me is attacking what he himself says and in the book he lets me have the best of it ... He knows that I'm useful. He likes to have me oppose him in ideas, even while he scolds me for it" (Bynner 1951: 62).

The relationship with Angelo Ravagli did nothing to come between them. Frieda's children, of whom Lawrence often disapproved, were another matter: as was Lawrence's sister Ada. Barby was staying in Alassio, quite near, during the winter 1925-26 and they all saw a good deal of each other. And this led to the usual quarrels, with Frieda telling Lawrence that (according to Barby) "now I was with her at last, he was to keep out of our relationship and not interfere" (Nehls 1959: 21). Anyone who came between Lawrence and Frieda and their complex need of each other (and need for space between them too) was likely to become a focus for quarrels.

Things grew calmer for a while when Elsa Weekley also came, and Barby remembered that "Unlike me, she hated "rows." At the Bernarda she lectured Frieda about them, being concerned to see, after one of their quarrels, that Lawrence had tears in his eyes ... a rare thing for him" (Nehls 1959: 26). Lawrence talked to both girls about their upbringing, especially about their father, and about life with their father's clergyman brother in Essex, and their aunt and grandmother, and these conversations were the direct source of the short novel he almost immediately began to write, The Virgin and the Gypsy. This gave him the chance to bring together a good deal of his hatred of the strength of the female will (such as he had seen in a woman like Mabel Luhan) with the real-life situation of the Weekley girls, and his own recent observations of the Midlands; the story used some of the landscapes he had seen in October 1925. When he had finished it, however, he decided not to publish it, feeling that it would be unfair to the girls and their father. (After he died, Frieda had no such compunction and published it at once.)

It was in her new role as mother, however, that - early this spring - Frieda also briefly became the author of the household; she translated Lawrence's play David into German, and "loves it, and has become the authoress. I the cook and the captain bold, and housemaid of the Villa B.-" (Letters V: 388) Early in February Lawrence, however, suffered another bronchial haemorrhage "like at the ranch, only worse" (Letters V: 390); an ominous prelude to an intensely disturbed period following. Lawrence's sister Ada (together with a friend) was coming to stay with them abroad for the first time in their marriage - and Frieda would have her daughters staying in a nearby hotel; the weather was dreadful, and everyone seems to have got on the others' nerves. Lawrence declared that he felt "absolutely swamped out, must go away by myself for a bit, or I shall give up the ghost"; there had been "another rumpus," a "bust-up" (Letters V: 394, 392, 401) and Frieda had gone to stay in the hotel. The casual words conceal quite how savage and serious the quarrel had been; Lawrence went to Nice and Monte Carlo with Ada, and when she left he didn't return to Spotorno but went to see the Brewsters and Brett, all of whom were now in Capri. Again there seemed to have been a real possibility that Lawrence and Frieda would not get together again; and it can hardly have been a coincidence that it was at this juncture that Lawrence twice went to bed (rather unhappily and unsuccessfully) with Brett (Brett 1974: II-IV). But nothing came of that; and after about a month, Frieda wrote to Lawrence "much more quietly and humanly - she says, we must live more with other people ... not cut ourselves off" (Letters V: 406). Her daughters had been giving her good advice, doubtless. It was certainly the case that the Lawrences' most serious rows always seemed to be provoked by the presence (or threat) of other people intruding into their relationship; if they could find a way of living less exclusively for and with each other, so that the "other people" did not divide their loyalties so violently, that would have been all to the good.

That, at least, is what they tried. Lawrence went back to Spotorno after being away for seven weeks, to find "the three females very glad to see me," though he confessed to having "a bit of anger still working in my inside" (Letters V: 413-14). After a brief time back together in Spotorno (the term of their house rent was almost up), they all went to Florence for a while; and then the girls went back to London, leaving Lawrence and Frieda to find somewhere to live. Lawrence opted for Tuscany, and very quickly found an old villa where they could rent the top floor very cheaply. The moment for taking a decision about America had come, and gone. Brett, indeed, had gone back to her cabin at the Del Monte Ranch, having successfully applied for immigrant status, and doubtless hoping that Lawrence would be back soon; but Lawrence decided not to go. It was a crucial moment. He was not going to apply to live in America for good, so would only probably be allowed six months there, as before - and would then have to travel on. There was, too, the enormous journey which, in his run-down state, he could not easily face; but, too, "even the ranch is a sort of effort, a strain - and for the moment I don't want to make any efforts" (Letters V: 429). He was a man consciously starting to conserve his energy: and this is a clear indication of it. He concluded that "I really don't want to go to America: and am getting weary, and wearier, of the outside world. I want the world from the inside, not from the outside ... I don't want to go west" (Letters V: 437). It was probably with an equally strong sense of his own condition that he wrote this; the ranch demanded more physical effort (as well as the "strain" of combating the place) than he could afford. There was also the unspoken problem of his health, which had almost prevented his re-admission to the USA at El Paso in March 1925: there remained a possibility that he would, humiliatingly, actually be refused entry. But there was a signal, too, of the kind of writing which he would be engaged with during the final years of his writing career: "the world from the inside, not from the outside."

The Villa Mirenda was 10 miles out from Florence, "a big heavy old villa," and - of course - like all the Lawrences' houses, "perched on a hill and looking far out over the valley of the Arno" (Letters V: 448). An English family, the Wilkinsons, lived nearby; but the Villa was the centre of a whole peasant community too, and the Lawrences got to know their neighbors well. This was doubtless following their decision to "live more with other people ... not cut ourselves off" (Letters V: 406). And, unlike the ranch, the Villa Mirenda not only had no responsibilities, it was rented "with service" (Nehls 1959: 59): they had a local woman, Giulia Pini, as housekeeper. The Mirenda would be the Lawrences' base for just over two years.
But always "base" or "pied-à-terre," not home. It was very barely furnished, and they didn't spend much money on it; and they were away a good deal. They spent just a couple of months there now, apart from a visit to the English aristocrats Sir George (1860-1943) and Lady Ida Sitwell at their castle outside Florence (they had probably met in Florence). Lawrence was now properly back at work, typing out Frieda's translation of David, writing essays about Florence, and producing two pieces of work provoked by conversation - in Capri back in March - with Compton Mackenzie's wife Faith (1888-1960), "another who loves her husband but can't live with him" (Letters V: 403). "Two Blue Birds" was a skit and no more, but "The Man Who Loved Islands" was one of Lawrence's great works: a profound and tragic study of the temperament which - like his own - seeks out isolation from the world and lives to itself if possible. Lawrence was also planning a book on the Etruscans and doing a lot of preliminary reading for it (something he had started back in the spring).

But by the end of June it was getting hot: on 12th July, they left for Baden-Baden, spent a fortnight there, and by the end of the month were in London, in a borrowed flat. Lawrence wanted to see the early rehearsals of his play David, which the Stage Society was supposed to be putting on, while Frieda wanted to see her children. Lawrence very soon made a visit to Scotland, to see Millicent Beveridge (1871-1955): a Scottish woman painter he had got to know in Sicily in 1921 and who had then painted his portrait, and whom he had met again in Capri in the spring: "One of Lorenzo's old maids," Frieda would doubtless have said, knowing his "weakness for these English spinsters" (Nehls 1959: 278).

On the way back from Scotland, Lawrence visited his family on the coast in Lincolnshire; and this stay beside the sea in the Midlands again turned out to bring him unexpected pleasure. He recalled 1901, "where I first knew the sea, so I feel at home" (Letters V: 522): he found it "very bracing and tonicky - picks me up like a shot" and felt "I've got quite into touch with my native land again, here - and feel at home" (Letters V: 518, 534). After he had spent a week with his family, Frieda joined him; and they stayed together there for another fortnight, waiting for the Stage Society to sort out their plans for David, with Lawrence (by himself) visiting his sister Ada in Ripley. Here, however, he was depressed by the effects of the continuing miners' strike: "there is a lot of misery - families living on bread and margarine and potatoes - nothing more" (Letters V: 536). He wrote about it shortly afterwards in the essay later entitled Return to Bestwood. Back in London, it turned out that there was in fact no point in waiting for the play, which had been postponed; so after lunching with the intended director, and now anxious to be back at the Mirenda for the harvest, Lawrence and Frieda left on 28th September and were back at the Mirenda by 4th October. Although they had enjoyed it, it had been a tiring and rather expensive trip; Lawrence was becoming very aware of how little he was currently earning, with the drying-up of the money which Seltzer had made for him in America, and his own failure to write very much over the previous couple of years (he had not started a new novel since April 1923, but his experience in finishing The Plumed Serpent certainly inhibited him from beginning another). He told his sister-in-law Else on 18th October: "I feel I'll never write another novel" (Letters V: 559). In spite of this - and with his new sense of England as a place he could feel at home in, and might write about again - around 22nd October he started a new work of fiction, a long short story. And this had altogether unexpected consequences: for it became Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The Lady Chatterley's Lover novels would occupy Lawrence from October 1926 to the publication of the third version in the summer of 1928 - and beyond, as he would go to Paris primarily to arrange the publication of a cheap edition in the spring of 1929. The book was one which changed his career, and has in many ways completely altered his reputation. From being the author of a number of books, not particularly well known, he became - for the next 60 years - primarily the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover. It made him more money than he had made in his life, and this (as it turned out) came just when he needed it: when his own strength did not allow him to write very much, when he was ill and needed doctors and a sanatorium, and when Frieda would have to live on without him, but supported by his earnings.

The book began as a long short story, however, of the kind he had frequently written during the past three years, but it grew to around 95,000 words: almost half as long again as St. Mawr had been. It used an idea which lay behind the as yet unpublished Virgin and the Gypsy - the middle- or upper-class woman awakening into a new life because of a relationship with an outsider, a man from outside even the working-class. But whereas the Virgin and the Gypsy and even the first version of Lady Chatterley's Lover are aware enough of the constrictions of class not to show the relationship turning into a marriage, by the time Lawrence wrote the third version of the novel he was being idealistic enough (with some adjustments to the character of the gamekeeper) to make this possible.

But the book changed enormously while being written. Two years after starting it, Lawrence made a remark to the writer Brigit Patmore (1882-1965) which suggests one of the motivations which lay behind its development from a short story about class to a novel about sex. He remarked to her of the sadness he felt "When you think you have something in your life which makes up for everything, and then find you haven't got it .... Two years ago I found this out" (Nehls 1959: 258). The novel which did more than anything else to seal Lawrence's reputation as an erotic writer was written by a man deeply nostalgic about the life of the body which - for him - had always culminated in sexual desire. He wrote a number of poems about this: for example, After all the tragedies are over:
When love is gone, and desire is dead, and tragedy has left the heart
then grief and pain go too, withdrawing
from the heart and leaving strange cold stretches of sand ...
Yet even waste, grey foreshores, sand, and sorry, far-out clay
are sea-bed still, through their hour of bare denuding.
It is the moon that turns the tides.
The beaches can do nothing about it. (Comp Poems 509)

But what he could do was write; and after finishing the novel's first version probably in late November, he started the second; and this one would become the first sexually explicit book he had ever written. It took him much longer; he was still working on it early in March 1927, and found it "good, I think, but a little too deep in bits - sort of bottomless pools" (Letters V: 605). His other new occupation this first winter at the Mirenda was painting. He had always painted; had made innumerable copies as a boy; had continued making copies of paintings and done occasional originals, all his life. But in November 1926, Maria Huxley (1898-1955) - he had met her and her husband the writer Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in London in August and they began a lasting friendship in Italy in the autumn - had presented him with four blank canvases. And he had started to produce a series of paintings - all originals, this time - and many of them also sexual. Coincidentally with the end of the first Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, he had created his Boccaccio Story, with its half- naked gardener and bevy of startled nuns. He created a series of striking images, not very skillfully handled but frequently symbolic and oddly powerful.
In the spring of 1927 he finished the second Lady Chatterley's Lover - "verbally terribly improper" (Letters V: 655) - and did not know what to do with it: it was quite unpublishable as it stood. All he could do was let it stand. He badly needed to publish, however; the cheapness of the Mirenda did not make up for a lack of earnings, and he had spent the winter writing the novel drafts and - apart from that - only writing book reviews and some poems. With the novel out of the way, however, he wrote at least one short story - The Lovely Lady- and went back to his idea of a book about the Etruscans; this would allow him to pursue his interest in an older civilization which could speak to the 20th century, but in a form which would not plunge him into the morasses of The Plumed Serpent. He had not been particularly well that winter, but together with Earl Brewster, he toured Etruscan sites in April, and during the next three months wrote a number of essays about the Etruscans, some of which were taken by magazines; but he never finished the book, the fragments of which were only published posthumously. It took up, nevertheless, a good deal of his time and energy in research which he wanted to do for it and in obtaining pictures for it. And it gave him the chance which for several years he had been looking for, to recreate a primitive society which would model some of the things which he felt the modern world had lost. He had tried this, to some extent, in The Plumed Serpent and again in the play fragment Noah's Flood written shortly afterwards, and then again at length in David. But this was his best chance yet; and he wanted to reach a wide audience with it, telling Secker that "I want this book - which will be a bit expensive to you, owing to illustrations - to be as popular as I can make it" (Letters VI: 93).

An equally significant thing which he started, however, was a new story, at this stage a short work called The Escaped Cock. Just as Lady Chatterley's Lover had broken sexual taboos, this would infringe religious ones, as it described Jesus, after the resurrection, coming back not as the son of God. nor to his mission as a teacher or healer, nor to ascension (in the Biblical sense) but to the life of the body; it was another of these works exploring the sense of the individual's relationship not with society, or even with another person, but with the marvellous and extraordinary phenomenon of being alive in the body - and thus inhabiting not just the inner world of everyday experience but, like Gethin Day, possessing a strong sense of the Greater Day too: of his version of Wordsworth's "active universe."

This, he was able to publish, even though its publication caused something of a storm for the magazine involved, the Forum. During the early summer, he kept busy with short essays and some new short stories, None of That! and Things, drawing on acquaintance as diverse as Mabel Luhan, the painter Dora Carrington (1893-1932) and the Brewsters; but (having not felt well for some days) on 11th July suffered his third and then a series of bronchial haemorrhages - the most serious yet; it took him three weeks or so to get back on his feet. It was clearly time he started going to places purely for his health's sake; the weather was going to be uncomfortably hot at the Mirenda from now onwards. As soon as he could comfortably travel, he and Frieda went to stay with her sister Johanna at Villach in Austria; and "I feel a different creature here in the cool" - "It is such a mercy to be able to breathe and move" (Letters VI: 119, 120). He was doing almost no writing, just some further translations of Verga, which always seem to have been his regular stand-by when he did not feel he could concentrate properly on his writing. After Austria, he and Frieda went on to their long-planned return to Bavaria, to stay in Else's (once Edgar Jaffe's) house in Irschenhausen, which they had last inhabited in 1913, and where Lawrence had written The Prussian Officer: a little wooden house of the kind Lawrence always liked living in, "with forest behind, looking across a wide valley at the blue mountains." "I like it very much - there is no time, and no event - only the sun shines with that pleasant hotness of autumn, and in the shadow it is chill" (Letters VI: 154, 139). Again, he did very little writing apart from his translations - "I am glad when I don't work - I have worked too much" (Letters VI: 151); but they had a good, quiet, social life, being visited by all kinds of friends, including their 1912 Icking landlady. And Lawrence was fairly well, even allowing himself to be examined by the poet-doctor Hans Carossa (1878-1956), who specialized in tuberculosis, and who commented afterwards to a friend: "An average man with those lungs would have died long ago. But with a real artist no normal prognosis is ever sure. There are other forces involved." (Nehls 1959: 160)
In many ways, Lawrence would have liked to have stayed in Bavaria; but Frieda wanted to go back to Italy; so, via Baden-Baden, they went, with Lawrence taking an inhalation cure in passing. Once at the Mirenda, Lawrence set to work on two projects: a new volume of short stories and a collection of his poems, which Secker had asked for - "means typing them out and arranging and doing" (Letters VI: 195). But in Florence, after talking with the bookseller Guiseppe "Pino" Orioli (1884-1942), with Norman Douglas, and with the successful popular novelist Michael Arlen (the transformed Dikran Kouyoumdjian), he realized that there was - after all - a way, if a slightly risky way, of publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover: privately, printed in Florence, and distributed by himself. The enterprise filled him with enthusiasm; it is not overstating the case to say that it probably added months, if not years, to his life. The first thing he did was to re-write the novel - an astonishing feat in itself, for someone who had been as run down as he had been. He wrote up to 4000 words a day for a period of about six weeks, between late November 1927 and early January 1928, and transformed a novel which had been about class barriers and the hopelessness of England to one in which the gamekeeper can, shockingly, become an appropriate future partner for Constance Chatterley. The sexual explicitness remained (was indeed slightly enhanced), but the novel acquired a new, simpler, hard-hitting quality which went with its new task: that of asserting its outrageousness in public. Clifford became a far less sympathetic character, for one thing: he was now treated with the kinds of savage irony and satire which Lawrence had used about a character like Rico in St. Mawr. And the novel acquired an exemplary tone: this is how to live and to love, it says.

With the book finished, Lawrence embarked on the fascinating business of publishing and distributing it himself. It was already being typed, though one typist cried off because of the explicitness of the book: part of the manuscript had to be sent to London for typing, and it seemed an age before Lawrence had it all back: Maria Huxley also lent a hand. There was a printer to find, and a binder: and publicity leaflets to print and distribute: "D. H. Lawrence / Will publish in unexpurgated form his new novel / LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER / OR / JOHN THOMAS and LADY JANE / limited edition of 1000 copies, numbered and signed / at £2.0.0. net (of which 500 copies for America / at $10 net). / Ready May 15th 1928." Lawrence thought he had better tell the printer, who had no English, what it was he was handling: the printer apparently smiled broadly and said "But we do it every day!" It was a small printing shop; they only had enough type to set up half the book at a time. The first half was printed, proof read, and 1200 copies printed (1000 for the first edition, 200 in reserve); the type was then distributed, and the same done to the second half. Advance orders started to come in; it became clear that Lawrence was not going to lose on the venture.

But the specially-ordered hand-made paper was late in coming, and thus the printing was delayed; the book was still at the printers during the previously announced date of publication; and not until 28 June did Lawrence have a copy in his hands, by which time he had escaped the summer heat of Florence and was up in the mountains in Switzerland. Orioli was left in charge of receiving the subscriptions and posting the copies.

While in Switzerland waiting for the book to come out, Lawrence - in a most unusual way for him - wrote a second part to his previously finished and published story The Escaped Cock, to make it a fitting partner to the enterprise of the novel; the man who had died is now not only a man who has given up his mission to live within the Greater Day, but one who finds a new relationship with a woman too: Christ is also Osiris, restored, made whole, revivified, resurrected to the Father in sexual desire. "I think it's lovely," he wrote of it: but "somehow I don't want to let it go out of my hands" (Letters VI: 469). In so many ways it now mirrored his sense of all that, bodily, he was not (and could no longer be) himself. He always tended to think of his illness as corresponding to his state of mind: "that's why I too am ill. The hurts, and the bitternesses sink in, however much one may reject them with one's spirit" (Letters VI: 409). But the writer of fiction could still make a world which the person could no longer inhabit. As he had written in 1925, "And that again is what I think about writing a novel: one can live so intensely with one's characters and the experience, one creates or records, it is a life in itself, far better than the vulgar thing people call life" (Letters V: 293).



9: Last years: 1928-1930

"Here I am, forty-two, with rather bad health: and a wife who is by no means the soul of patience ... a stray individual with not much health and not much money" (Letters VI: 419). Thus Lawrence characterized himself and Frieda in June 1928 to an American acquaintance threatening a visit. The only thing that would actually change for the better was the money. While his formal English publication was down to a trickle - his only prose books in the last three years had been David in 1926, Mornings in Mexico in 1927 and The Woman Who Rode Away in 1928, hardly enough to make his living - Lady Chatterley's Lover would earn him more than he had ever made in his life. It would also make him a household name, and he found that popular newspapers and magazines were now happy to commission topical articles from him. He rather enjoyed writing these, finding that he could write them out in a single morning, and earn more from them than a long and serious story would ever bring in. As a result, although the novel was (much to his annoyance) widely pirated, his last two years were to an extent cushioned by his ability to work as much or as little as he chose, to live in hotels as often as he liked, where he liked, and to pay for medical treatment.

But, in early June 1928, he still did not know how successful the novel would be. For the summer, his only plan was to go somewhere reasonably cheap, cool and at altitude, where he believed he would feel better (as at the ranch): for the first time, the places where he and Frieda would live were being dictated almost entirely by his state of health. There were problems, none the less. One hotel in Switzerland turned him out "because I coughed. They said they didn't have anybody who coughed" (Letters VI: 428). They ended up in the village of Gsteig by Gstaad, and took a small chalet, "quite high up, 4000 ft. and more - the upper world, rather lovely - has a bit of the Greater Day atmosphere" (Letters VI: 452), he told the Brewsters, to whom he had read The Flying Fish. But Lawrence was condemned to the chalet and the area immediately around it because the extreme steepness of the nearby hills made walking practically impossible for him. He nevertheless spent three months there, believing it was doing him good. He was doing quite a lot of painting - and was actually starting to think of exhibiting his paintings; but he was also writing essays, reviews, a short story (The Blue Moccasins) and doing his best via a voluminous correspondence to ensure that copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover got distributed safely, in spite of increasing action against the book by bookshops, the police and the customs.

At the end of August, his sister Emily and niece Margaret (b. 1909) came to stay; the first time he had seen any of his family since his 1926 trip to England. For once, the visit seems to have caused hardly any tensions between him and Frieda - but Frieda would not have found Emily as possessive as Ada had been, and Lawrence himself was forcibly struck by the distance which had opened up between him and his family. He felt how far they were "from my active life ... And I have to hide Lady C. like a skeleton in my cupboard" (Letters VI: 533). After spending the summer in Switzerland, he and Frieda went to stay in Baden- Baden for ten days, and while there they finally decided to give up the Villa Mirenda. Although they had enjoyed living there, it had only been a flat, with annoying neighbors downstairs: they wanted more space for themselves, and Florence was distant from the friends whom they now depended on a great deal; in particular Earl and Achsah Brewster, and Maria and Aldous Huxley. The Mirenda was also linked in Lawrence's mind with the last of his dreadful haemorrhages. Frieda went back to see to the packing up of their things, and also seems to have taken the chance to spend some time with Angelo Ravagli: Lawrence ended up in Toulon, waiting for her to accompany him across to the island of Port Cros, where Richard Aldington, his mistress Arabella Yorke (b. 1892) and - as it would turn out - his new mistress Brigit Patmore had invited them to stay, in a borrowed house at the top of the island; another place with the most extraordinary view. Once again, when they got there, although Lawrence liked the place, and liked the people, his health meant that he could not do very much: could not accompany the others when they went out or went swimming, for example. And Frieda had come back from Italy with a cold, which (of course) he instantly caught. He spent a good deal of time in bed in the mornings, writing; he was starting to compose clusters of the new, short satirical poems which he called Pensées and which would become the collection Pansies: "he was intensely happy and proud of the Pansies; he would read out the newest ones with delight" (Nehls 1959: 274), and he was also doing a new translation from the Italian, of the Renaissance writer Lasca's The Story of Dr Manente.

His chronic health, in one sense, dominated him during the last eighteen months of his life - and yet, all the same, it would be wrong to make too much of it. He lived, so far as he could, as if illness was simply a necessary but relatively unimportant part of his existence.
I feel so strongly as if my illness weren't really me - I feel perfectly well and all right, in myself. Yet there is this beastly torturing chest superimposed on me, and it's as if there was a demon lived there, triumphing, and extraneous to me. (Letters VII: 546)
This was his attitude partly because he believed strongly in not being ill: he had advised his Eastwood friend and exact contemporary Gertrude Cooper (1885-1942), just after she had been admitted to a sanatorium in 1926, "The great thing is to have the courage of life. Have the courage to live, and live well" (Letters V: 545). His pride and independence hated the subjection of illness: "He did so hate admitting he was ill," (Nehls 1959: 206) noted a visitor to Florence when Lawrence had to take a rest in the middle of the day. But it was also because being ill had always been a particular problem in his relationship with Frieda. People often said she was a bad nurse (the Huxleys were especially shocked during his last illness in 1930), and in a conventional sense that was true. Yet it was also the case that she could in the most extraordinary way revive and arouse him when he was really ill and depressed; more than one person noticed her talent for this (Hilton 1993: 53-4), and she consciously exercised it: "I roused him into the determination to accept the challenge of my virility, he was not going to succumb" (Crotch 1975: 7). The real trouble was, as she herself knew, that "When Lorenzo feels ill, it infuriates him to have me well" (Bynner 1951: 61). Her radiant vitality could easily become a kind of living reproach to him: in the winter of 1929-30, he told her daughter Barby how "Your mother is repelled by the death in me" (Nehls 1959: 428). He regularly made a point, in his letters, of noting when Frieda (for a change) was ill, and his periods of illness always tended to increase the tension between them. It had been after his influenza attack in the spring of 1919 that Lawrence had written one of his nastiest denunciations of her:
I am not going to be left to Frieda's tender mercies until I am well again. She really is a devil - and I feel as if I would part from her for ever ... For it is true, I have been bullied by her long enough. I really could leave her now, without a pang, I believe ... If this illness hasn't been a lesson to her, it has to me. (Letters III: 337)
His illness always gave her a kind of effortless upper hand over him - and that he could not bear. This was certainly one of the reasons for his refusal to admit to serious illness during his last years, or (in a normal sense) to be a patient. There was clearly some complicity with Frieda in this: Frieda, towards the end of her life, for example actually remarked that "I never heard him complain about his health" (Frieda 1971: 11). He went on working and writing when in bed, "propped up ... with many pillows, knees bent up with a writing pad on the uplifted legs, allowing him to write" (Hilton 1993: 53). His friends all collaborated in the fiction of his not really being ill; Brigit Patmore recalled how, at Port Cros in the autumn of 1928, "it was against the rules to suggest that anything was wrong" (Nehls 1959: 255). There was also a great deal of courage in his behaviour, as he nursed his ailing body: "he knew so well what was good for him, what he needed, by an unfailing instinct, or he would have died many years ago ..." (Frieda 1935: 271).

And yet there can easily be another point of view on the matter. There exists an agonized letter from Aldous Huxley about what he saw as Lawrence's total irresponsibility in refusing to face up to the fact of his tuberculosis, or to consult a proper doctor (Letters VII: 9). Yet Huxley was perhaps too sanguine about the possibilities of treatment. We know that at least one specialist doctor who examined Lawrence, Hans Carossa, believed as early as 1927 that "no medical treatment can really save him" (Nehls 1959: 160): and Frieda's sister, Else Jaffe, a highly intelligent woman, believed that "he and my sister had come to a rational way of dealing with his illness - everyone must live and die according to his own precept" (Nehls 1959: 426). Lawrence had known extremely well, from childhood on, what happened to the diagnosed tubercular patient who submitted to treatment: restricted months in a sanatorium, perhaps surgery (Gertrude Cooper had had a lung removed in 1926) that did no real good: and never any certainty of cure: perhaps just of a slower decline. Lawrence was not going to let that happen to him: he intended to work as he wanted and to lead his own life, terribly diminished though that eventually came to be. "Somewhere I am not ill," he wrote wistfully in December 1929 (Letters VII: 595). He knew the crucial role played by the attitude and feelings of the ill person, and insisted that his illness was as much chagrin as anything else - "The body has a strange will of its own, and nurses its own chagrin" (Letters VII: 623). And at times he still lived vividly: his writing of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the winter of 1927-28 was almost miraculous. But even if he could no longer be nursed back to health, staying self-responsible and his own person, in an active relationship with Frieda, was far more important to Lawrence than putting himself into the hands of doctors. Noli me tangere, indeed.

After Port Cros, it seemed sensible for the Lawrences to stay on the Mediterranean coast for the winter, where they could think about where they really wanted to live - a question to which there was really no answer, so long as Lawrence was ill. Frieda would actually have liked to go back to the ranch but, for Lawrence, travelling there and probably having to come back after six months was really not a possibility. All the same, "it seems like losing one's youth and glamour of freedom, to part with Lobo" (Letters VII: 288): they didn't want to give it up completely. It turned out that Bandol was small, warm and attractive; the hotel Beau- Rivage was nice, the food good, Lawrence felt able to work at his Pansies and at the newspaper articles that were currently providing him with a decent small income, and - as usual - because his health was not actually any worse, they stayed. Having expected to spend a fortnight there, they stayed the next five months.
Lawrence had no major project on his hands except for the still-unfinished Etruscan book, which Secker wanted as his next "Lawrence book" for autumn 1929; one possibility was to go back to Italy to finish it.But friends came to Bandol to stay; Rhys Davies (1903- 78), the young Welsh writer, came; even Lawrence's sister Ada came, without (this time) any kind of row or repercussions. The weeks went by, "it's sunny here all the time, and quiet and very pleasant: the people are all very nice: why should one hurry away to something worse! ... When it comes to the point of going to Florence, I find I don't want to go." (Letters VII: 41) The money from Lady Chatterley's Lover meant that he did not have to bother about a new book, even if Secker wanted one. The only problem was that - as usual - Frieda wanted a place of her own: while staying in a hotel she had, unlike Lawrence, nothing to do. They had had the idea of trying Spain for a couple of years now, and decided to go to Majorca in the spring; but before that, Lawrence wanted to go to Paris, to arrange for the re- publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover there in a cheap edition, to under-cut the pirates. He could stay with the Huxleys, who were currently living nearby, which made the whole enterprise easier; and Frieda joined him there. Having made the arrangements for the book's publication, he and Frieda set off for Majorca, where they would spend two generally happy months.

For Majorca was "a bit reminiscent of Sicily, but not nearly so beautiful as Taormina, just much quieter, the quietest place I've ever known, seems rather boring, but I like it and it certainly is good for my health" (Letters VII: 253-4). He wasn't sure he could work much while there; but the success of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover had probably already given him the idea for his next project; an unexpurgated edition of his volume of poems Pansies, which Secker would be bringing out in the normal way that summer (but with a number of poems missing). The fact that, back in January, a copy of the typescript had been seized by the police in London made him still more determined to put the whole book before the public. A London publisher and friend, Charles Lahr (1885-1971), would take care of the unexpurgated Pansies. Lawrence also wrote the second of his articles about censorship, Pornography and Obscenity (he had written a brief introduction on the subject for the Paris Lady Chatterley's Lover earlier in the year), and he continued to write poems along the lines of the Pansies collection. But probably the main excitement of life was the edition of his paintings which was currently being photographed - the volume to be published around the time of an exhibition of the paintings put on in London in the summer.

He and Frieda left Majorca just as it was getting hot, in mid-June, Frieda to travel to England to see the paintings exhibition, Lawrence to stay first with the Huxleys in Italy and then with Orioli in Florence where (once again) he was rather ill. While Frieda was in London, however, the Warren gallery (where Lawrence's paintings were exhibited) was raided by the police, and thirteen pictures - all those showing pubic hair, or traces of it - removed; a case was heard at Bow Street Magistrates court as to why they should not be destroyed. By promising that they would not again be exhibited in England, the gallery was able to prevent their destruction,. But the episode left Lawrence feeling newly outraged; he wrote a whole new series of poems (to be called Nettles - stinging plants, this time) about it: "Virginal, pure policemen came / and hid their faces for very shame" (Comp Poems 579). Frieda came back to Italy when she heard how ill Lawrence was; but after a few days they both went to Baden-Baden for the seventy-seventh birthday of Frieda's mother.

Lawrence's previous visits to Baden-Baden had been happy ones; but, this time, his increasing debility and illness led to new tensions. He found the Baroness unbearable, the climate bad for him, the place horrible, the holiday-makers dreadful; and a stay at the Kurhaus Plättig (at a higher altitude) no better: "though it's supposed to be good for me, I really hate it" (Letters VII: 393). "I am neither writing nor painting, but letting the clock go round" (Letters VII: 395). A return down to Baden-Baden made things better; but he was happy to leave. They had very much liked being back in Bavaria in the autumn of 1927, and Lawrence had felt well there; they had accepted an invitation from the German doctor-writer Max Mohr (1891-1944) to stay in Rottach-am-Tegernsee, up among the mountains, from the end of August. But here, unfortunately, Lawrence felt that the altitude was wrong for him, and the medical advice he took while there did him no good at all: one doctor told him that "in a few weeks, with diet and a bit of breathing, I ought to be well" (Letters VII: 466), and another prescribed him arsenic and phosphorous. The Lawrences decided to go back south again, probably to Italy: "I feel I am really fed up with moving about, and would be glad to have a place of my own" (Letters VII: 473-4). He could not forget having been relatively well at Bandol the previous winter; whereas previously in his life he had been reluctant to revisit places once he had left them and had always preferred to travel on to a new place, they returned to Bandol and after a few days at the old hotel rented a villa, and so - especially to Frieda's relief - were in their own place for the first time for more than a year.

Lawrence had not written much for months except some more Pansies and Nettles (and would in fact write no more fiction, in spite of hoping to do so); but although he continued to write poems - the bulk of his Last Poems date from this second period in Bandol, and he prepared Nettles for publication - in Bandol he also began to write concentratedly once again, doing another couple of articles, and turning his first introduction to the French Lady Chatterley's Lover into the essay A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Most significant of all, he began reading for what would be his last book, Apocalypse. The artist and astrologer Frederick Carter (1883-1967) - whom he had first met early in 1924 - had written a book about primitive religious symbolism, and Lawrence, having promised only an introduction for Carter's book, found it turning into a work in its own right; he wrote Carter a separate introduction, and followed his own work through to its conclusion. It took him from late October to the end of December, and began with a renewal of his old excitement at a vision of the "pre-Christian heavens," of the old world which he had sketched in his Etruscan essays. What he wanted to do was make this "old, pagan vision" something which modern man would recognize as lacking in his own experience; Lawrence's would be a book offering modern man a kind of psychic recovery of his connections with the old world:
“...my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.
What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections ... and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and the earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen”.(Apocalypse 149).

He wrote this beside the sea, in the sun of Bandol, where he could still go for short walks; he watched the first new flowers coming out, early in December. But he was spending an increasing amount of time in bed; and the English tuberculosis specialist Andrew Morland (1896-1957) - who had been asked by Gertler and Koteliansky to go and see Lawrence - advised him to go into a sanatorium. Failing that, Morland insisted that he give up work of all kinds for two months, and see nobody; simply lie and rest.

This, Lawrence tried: and felt worse than ever. "The weather is sunny, the almond trees are all in blossom, but I am not allowed any more to go out and see them" (Letters VII: 633). Not being allowed to work was perhaps the most difficult - and the most damaging - part of the treatment, though it seems that he did in fact keep working at some things: Achsah Brewster saw him at the start of February "propped up in bed, galley sheets piled thick about him, correcting proofs of his Nettles" (Nehls 1959: 429). But he was not getting any better. In despair, he agreed to try a sanatorium. On 6th February 1930 he was admitted into one with the ominous name Ad Astra, in Vence: and that, it turned out, was the beginning of the end.

Mollie Skinner's brother Jack (one of the inspirations for The Boy in the Bush) had died at the age of forty-four in 1925. When he heard about the death - a few months after learning of his own tuberculosis - Lawrence wrote Mollie a note of sympathy:
And after all, he lived his life, and had his mates wherever he went. What more does a man want. So many old bourgeois people live on and on, and can't die, because they have never been in life at all. Death's not sad, when one has lived. (Letters V: 292-3)
A poem like Nothing to Save in Last Poems suggests a little of what it was like for Lawrence during the last months of his life, feeling almost given up to illness and death - and yet, somewhere, still miraculously alive. That was what living meant, to him:
There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.
(Comp Poems 658)
He could not bear the kind of living in the fear of death and struggling for health he believed he had observed in Frieda's mother the previous year in Baden-Baden, when he had exclaimed "May god preserve me from ever sinking so low. I never felt so cruelly humiliated" (Letters VII: 398). He could not bear to humiliate himself: he would live every moment he could. A friend commented: "he kept his work and his life free from morbidity, from any sort of unhealthy resentment. He never accepted defeat. He proved to be fort comme la mort, strong as death - or even strong as life. He lived and died as a real man." (Nehls 1959: 161) We can, for example, observe him offering marvellously compassionate advice only a month before his own death to Caresse Crosby, following her husband's dreadful joint suicide with a mistress: "Oh yes, don't you try to recover yourself too soon - it is much better to be a little blind and stunned for a time longer, and not make efforts to see or to feel. Work is the best, and a certain numbness, a merciful numbness. It was too dreadful a blow - and it was wrong." (Letters VII: 634).

Finally, he had tried to follow his own extraordinary advice, given to Mabel Luhan in January 1930: "Lie still and gradually let your body come to its own life, free at last of your own will" (Letters VII: 625). But he was too ill for that to happen again, as it had happened at the ranch in the spring of 1925. At the Ad Astra he continued to lose weight, and for the first time in the whole wretched illness grew deeply unhappy. His response was characteristic. He would move on, as he had always moved on. He discharged himself from the sanatorium; he would live (or die) on his own terms, where he chose, in yet another rented house. Frieda found the Villa Robermond in Vence, and a nurse; on Saturday 1st March he was taken by taxi to the new house. On the Sunday, as usual he "got up, washed and brushed his teeth" (Nehls 1959: 435); he had lunch, he sat up in bed and read a biography of Columbus. But in the afternoon, he began to suffer dreadfully and admitted that he needed morphia. A doctor was found who gave it to him; but he died that evening, in the company of Frieda, Barby, and Maria Huxley. Frieda's account of these last weeks and days is, quite simply, the most moving thing she ever wrote, and it would not do to emulate it: I simply quote its ending.
Then we buried him, very simply, like a bird we put him away, a few of us who loved him. We put flowers into his grave and all I said was: "Good-bye, Lorenzo," as his friends and I put lots and lots of mimosa on his coffin. Then he was covered over with earth while the sun came out on to his small grave in the little cemetery of Vence which looks over the Mediterranean that he cared for so much.(Frieda 1935: 276).



10: Versions of Lawrence: 1885-1993

The difficulty of creating a reliable biography of Lawrence can be illustrated simply by considering what he looked like. This would seem to be an uncontroversial matter: but experience shows that it is not. We need do no more than compare the drawing Lawrence did of himself in Majorca in June 1929 with two studio photographs taken of him the same month. The photographs show a man whose pale, narrow face is calm, gentle, almost ethereal: his collar and tie (because he has grown so thin) hang loosely on him. The drawing shows a man with a broad, intense, angry face, and wild, staring eyes; the same collar and tie fit him perfectly. Lawrence remarked that the drawing was "basically like me. But my wife thinks it is awful - chiefly because she doesn't understand." (Letters VII: 333) Which might be said to be the "real" Lawrence? It depends upon what one understands by "real."
If, however, we draw simply upon memoirs written of Lawrence by people who knew him, some extraordinary divergences can be observed. His Croydon headmaster, who met him in 1908, remembered him as having "a shock of dark hair" (Nehls 1957: 85), and at least one other person who knew him when young referred to him as "dark-haired" (Worthen 1991: 95). Helen Corke, however, who first saw him in 1909, recalled "fair hair," as did Ford Madox Hueffer and Violet Hunt, first seeing him late in 1909, who remembered "sunshot tawny hair" and "yellow hair" (Nehls 1957: 95, 111, 127). In 1917, Esther Andrews noted "ash-coloured hair" while a Berkshire friend Cecily Lambert, the following year, saw "mousey blonde hair" (Nehls 1957: 416, 463). In 1923, Dorothy Brett saw "dark, gold hair" (Nehls 1958: 304); three years later, Montague Weekley thought Lawrence "sandy-haired" (Nehls 1957: 161). David Garnett, however, who met him in 1912, recalled his hair tint as "bright mud-colour, with a streak of red in it": Catherine Carswell remembered "thick dust-coloured hair" in 1914, and Richard Aldington, who also met him in 1914, remembered his "bright red hair" (Nehls 1957: 173, 227, 236). Ottoline Morrell (from 1915) remembered a "mass of red hair" though the writer Douglas Goldring (1887-1960) recalled only "a reddish "quiff'"; but Compton Mackenzie (who saw him in 1914 and again in 1920) thought he had "wavy reddish hair" (Nehls 1957: 271, 490, 248) and Rebecca West (1892-1983) described his hair in 1921 as "pale luminous red" (Nehls 1958: 63). Lawrence himself once remarked that his hair had "got no particular colour at all" (Phoenix II 310), but he also responded to someone who remarked that - with red hair like his - of course he would have a temper, "announcing that his hair was not red, that it used to be pure yellow gold and now was brown; his beard might be red, but his hair was golden brown!" (Nehls 1959: 44).
His hair probably got browner as he got older. He never dyed it, though at least one person thought he did: "one day [Maurice Magnus] said to me at table: "How lovely your hair is - such a lovely colour! What do you dye it with?'" (Phoenix II 310). But in those descriptions we can, over and over again, observe people seeing in Lawrence what they wanted to see. In each case, the person describing Lawrence is actually describing the power and significance of their own reaction to him. The spectrum of colors indicates how striking and unusual people thought Lawrence was, and suggests how they attempted, in their recollections of him, to ensure that the extraordinariness of knowing him might somehow be conveyed. Those who saw him as red haired, in particular, were likely to be thinking of him as some kind of an outsider: as hot-tempered, badly-behaved, and very probably as working- class. This was exactly how he struck middle-class person after middle-class person: "He was the weedy runt you find in every gang of workmen: the one who keeps the other men laughing all the time": "a man sitting in the corner of a third-class compartment ... that sort of working man, you know" (Nehls 1957: 173, 217): "I found standing at the gate a man something between a reddish-bearded, able-bodied seaman and a handy man at the back door!" (Nehls 1958: 133). And others who remembered Lawrence as strikingly red-haired tended themselves to be middle- or upper-class: and were clearly more struck by the color of his beard (which everyone agrees was red) than by the color of his hair.
With this kind of disagreement about something that might seem incontrovertible, it is not surprising that we should find people disagreeing even more comprehensively about what Lawrence was like as a person. He was, according to Willie Hopkin's daughter Enid Hilton (1896-1991), a "kind, fun-loving man" (Hilton 1993: 65) and David Garnett never forgot how his "courage, his high spirits, his perpetual nagging mockery, kept us all gay" (Nehls 1957: 177). On the contrary, the American poet Jean Untermeyer (1886-1970) "was left feeling overwhelmed by a type of arrogance that I was unable to deal with" (Nehls 1959: 104), while William Gerhardi (1895-1977) wrote how there was "something superfluous, something gawky and left-handed about Lawrence. His humour was defective. Yet, like so many people whose humour is poor, he prided himself on his tremendous sense of fun" (Nehls 1959: 14). For Norman Douglas, too, Lawrence - "being inwardly consumed and tormented" - "had neither poise nor reserve. Nor had he a trace of humour" (Nehls 1958: 14). Yet Thomas Seltzer actually singled him out for "extraordinary poise" (Nehls 1958: 210), and Earl Brewster recalled how "gay and free ... were our hours together" (Nehls 1959: 135). Catherine Carswell thought him "an overwhelmingly attractive human being" (Carswell 1932: 213) but the American author Carleton Beals (b. 1893) remarked that "As did most persons - except neurotic females seeking restless freedom - I soon detested him personally" (Nehls 1958: 288). Esther Andrews described him as "the gentlest, kindest person in all human relations that anyone could be on this earth" and Dollie Radford described him as "a sweet man, so simple and kind" (Nehls 1957: 417, 292). On the other hand, Witter Bynner thought he was "a bad baby masquerading as a good Mephistopheles" (Bynner 1951: 2), Cecil Gray described him as "in the r“le of lover or friend or anything else ... a lamentable failure" (Nehls 1957: 437) and Faith Compton Mackenzie wrote how "He did great harm to the people who adored him. I suppose no genius has left such a trail of malice in the hearts of those who professed to love him" (Nehls 1959: 35).
What can a biographer do? Which is the real Lawrence? Or - to be exact - is there a real Lawrence, rather than a perpetually recreated version of him, mysteriously colored by the needs and desires of the particular observer? A biographer cannot simply amalgamate accounts as different as those given above, which is one reason why Edward Nehls's three- volume work D. H. Lawrence: A Composite Biography, published in the late 1950s, was such an intelligent way of creating a biography of Lawrence. Nehls did not have to choose between the details of conflicting accounts; he presented all of them, cheek by jowl, and excluded his own commentating voice except in the end-notes. This means that his work is still very much alive nearly forty years after it was done, while other biographies from the 1950s - like Richard Aldington's Portrait of an Artist, But ... of 1950 and Harry T. Moore's two biographies The Life and Works of D. H. Lawrence (1951) and The Intelligent Heart (1955) - are today interesting only for representing the fashions of the period to students of Lawrence biography.

There remains, however, the question as to why Lawrence gave rise to such a conflict of versions of himself. To a considerable extent, the version of Lawrence we possess today was created in the early 1930s by a significant succession of publications: and most of the memoirs so far cited were actually written in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, rather than in Lawrence's lifetime. Toward the end of Lawrence's life critical assessments of his writings had started to appear, beginning with Herbert J. Seligmann's D. H. Lawrence, An American Interpretation in 1924, Aldington's pamphlet of 1927 and Stephen Potter's book of 1930. But - with its contract signed in September 1930 - Murry's Son of Woman, which came out in April 1931, only thirteen months after Lawrence's death, was a new kind of book: one which, although outwardly a critical book, was also an attempt at a kind of spiritual biography. It purported to explain what was fundamentally wrong with Lawrence the person, not just what was wrong with his books. (Only Rebecca West's 1930 pamphlet about Lawrence could have been called strictly biographical, up to that point.)

At the start of 1932 the real biographical books began to come out, the first, published in Florence in January 1932, being Ada Lawrence's Young Lorenzo (published in England the following November), which contained a brief memoir of Lawrence's family and early life, and some letters and postcards from throughout his career. In February 1932 came Mabel Luhan's Lorenzo in Taos - which dealt only with two of Lawrence's three periods in the American southwest, 1922-23 and 1924. And in June 1922 was published Catherine Carswell's The Savage Pilgrimage, a kind of answer to the reminiscences of Lawrence which Murry had been publishing in the New Adelphi from 1931 onwards, and the first attempt at a full-length biography drawing on material from outside the writer's actually knowledge of her subject. The Savage Pilgrimage had, however, to be withdrawn after threats of legal action from Murry, who objected to the way he himself was presented; the book was re-issued by another publisher in December 1932. Frederick Carter's book D. H. Lawrence and the Body Mystical and Anaïs Nin's D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study (neither of them primarily biographical) also came out in 1932: but probably the most significant of all the publications was Huxley's edition of Lawrence's Letters, which came out at the end of September 1932. Then, in January 1933, hard on the heels of the re-issued Savage Pilgrimage came Murry's own collected Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, his response to Catherine Carswell's book: it dealt only with the period during which Murry had known Lawrence, between 1913 and 1924, but also contained a collection of the reviews of Lawrence's work Murry had written over the years. Later in 1933 came Dorothy Brett's Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship, which dealt (again) only with the periods during which Brett had known Lawrence (1915, and then 1923-26); the same year came two more primarily non-biographical books, Helen Corke's Lawrence and Apocalypse and Horace Gregory's Pilgrim of the Apocalypse. Three more major biographical works were to come: Earl and Achsah Brewster's D. H. Lawrence, Reminiscences and Correspondence in February 1934, Frieda Lawrence's Not I,But The Wind...  in July 1934 (1935 in England), and Jessie Chambers's D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record in May 1935. The Brewsters' memoirs were tactful, respectful and non-controversial, and described Lawrence between 1921 and 1930; Frieda's book described his life from 1912 to 1930; Jessie Chambers was only concerned with the period up to 1912.

Only the first and last books in this sequence - Ada Lawrence and Jessie Chambers - described much of Lawrence's life before the 1920s; even Catherine Carswell and Murry only knew him from just before the first world war. The overwhelming picture given was inevitably that of a man wandering the world in the company of quarrelling, possessive and adoring women. It was also clear that the books by Carswell, Murry, Luhan, Brett and Chambers were all in their different ways attempt to re-possess Lawrence: attempts to be the book written by the one true friend who understood him where none of the other friends (or partners) did. Coming out when it did, even Frieda's book took on the appearance of a slightly sanctimonious book, designed to re-possess him: it tended to play down the painful extremes of his life. A friend heard her giving a very different account of life with him in the autumn of 1930, and observed that the person who came to write Not I, But the Wind ... "was not the same Frieda I knew ... but someone who must have been þborn again'" (Crotch 1975: 6).
The end result of this sequence of memoirs was that Lawrence seemed caught emotionally between friends, sexual partners and lovers; the vacillations in his loyalty to one or the other of them apparently being of a piece with the wide range and apparent randomness of his travels. To those who had known Lawrence, the stream of books - all claiming to offer the real truth about him - was a painful and rather shameful experience. How he would have hated it! But it became the standard by which he would be judged. Faith Compton Mackenzie, writing at the end of the decade in 1940, summed up: "For Lawrence to allow himself to be surrounded by a corps of infatuated women was perfectly natural. It is the sport of genius; their antics have a tonic effect, and even the exasperation to which Lawrence was occasionally driven, and of which we read in the copious reminiscences that his death produced, was stimulating enough to be worthwhile .... " (Nehls 1959: 34).

The idea that there might be a rather tough, fiercely private, lonely, very self-reliant, determined and highly intellectual man behind the vacillating and almost wholly emotional being created by these biographies was almost impossible to conceive. Instead, the tone was set for the appreciation of Lawrence as a weak, muddled and emotional man incapable of choosing his friends well, and wholly the victim of his instincts. A final book from the 1930s, this time a critical one, William York Tindall's D. H. Lawrence and Susan his Cow of 1939, took advantage of the previously created portrait of a confused man to mount a satirical demolition of the work as well, concentrating on what Tindall significantly described as "Lawrence's vague transcendentalism and inner confusion" (Tindall 1939: 205).

The 1930s version of Lawrence to some extent remains current to this day; the publicity surrounding the publication in America and England of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1959 and 1960 tending to confirm once again the portrait of Lawrence as a man helplessly enslaved to the writing of instinctive truths about bodily experience, and never thinking about such things carefully or seeing beyond them. The title The Priest of Love which Harry T. Moore gave as late as 1974 to his reissued biography of Lawrence added its own confirmation of the idea of Lawrence as a man who had made a religion out of his emotions; and in 1990 Jeffrey Meyers's biography D. H. Lawrence, in spite of a wealth of new material unavailable to Moore, was happy to maintain the overall picture of Lawrence as a man obsessed with following the dictates of his instincts: his account of Women in Love, for example, reads the novel simply as its author's exercise in anal homoerotics (Meyers 1990: 216-21). The present writer's first volume of the Cambridge biography of Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 was, the first attempt to do justice to Lawrence as a man with an intellectual history; it presented him as an exceptionally thoughtful, coolly judging and reflective individual, whose concern with the instinctive and the physical was to some extent an attempt to overcome serious tendencies toward ratiocination and spirituality within himself.

The 1930 versions of Lawrence were, however, not altogether supported by Huxley's first collection of his letters, which gave to those who liked Lawrence a chance to point out just how different he was from the person contemporary memoirs and biographies made him - even if Huxley's Introduction was, in its own way, just as possessive of its own version of Lawrence as any of the other books. (Huxley's Lawrence was the extraordinary, natural savant, the man who instinctively and always knew what was true and right, who never revised his books but got them right first time, every time.) But at least Huxley's edition of the letters allowed Lawrence to speak in his own voice; and that voice turned out to be alluringly sensitive, thoughtful, understanding and witty, if at times desperate.
   
This was the more so because, of course, Huxley had to exert a certain degree of censorship over what he printed; many of the people who had known Lawrence and to whom he referred were still alive. Accordingly, the version of Lawrence's correspondence which Huxley's collection created was distinctly biased toward the sweet-tempered and the appreciative; and, to this extent, collaborated with what was in general Lawrence's own extremely controlled written relationships. Only occasionally would the conflicting evidence of a surviving letter and an unwitting memoir reveal how polite (or two-faced), kindly (or hypocritical) a letter from Lawrence could be, given what he obviously actually thought of the person to whom he was writing. This became clearer in the subsequent, uncensored publications of his letters. But it should also make us aware of how controlled Lawrence's letters are. They are not the simple outpourings of genius; they are deliberate, carefully aimed missives, saying things which Lawrence thinks a particular person needs to hear. It is natural that this should be so; they are the work of a major writer. But one must not be misled into thinking that they simply reveal the man behind them. They do so only in complicated ways.

What links this habit of Lawrence as a writer with the oddly varied accounts of him which have survived is, of course, the fact that he always presented himself in strikingly different ways to different people. Jan Juta found it impossible to paint him in 1921 - not because he was difficult to paint, but because "I could not make up my mind which of the facets of his personality I felt most representative." It was, Juta went on, "this complexity which baffled so many" (Nehls 1958: 85). Added to that innate complexity and contradictoriness was the fact that he was to some extent both an actor and an impersonator, in life and in his writing. His skill at mimicry is well-known: David Garnett, for example, said that Lawrence was the only great mimic I have ever known; he had a genius for "taking people off" and could reproduce voice and manner exactly. He told you that he had once seen Yeats or Ezra Pound for half an hour in a drawing-room, and straightway Yeats or Pound appeared before you. (Garnett 1953: 245).

All his life, Lawrence not only imitated people: he also presented polished and at times complex comic turns to his friends: report after report of such occasions survives in the biographical record. As late as 1927, he was still doing his turn of Florence Farr reciting W. B. Yeats to the minimal music of the psaltery (Nehls 1959: 138) which David Garnett had seen back in 1912 , and which Lawrence had probably first witnessed - and performed - in 1909.
But David Garnett also noticed of the mimicry and the charades that "the person whom Lawrence most constantly made fun of was himself."

He mimicked himself ruthlessly and continually and, as he told a story, acted ridiculous versions of a shy and gawky Lawrence being patronized by literary lions, of a winsome Lawrence charming his landlady, of a bad-tempered whining Lawrence picking a quarrel with Frieda over nothing. There was more than a little of Charlie Chaplin in his acting: but bitterer, less sentimental. (Garnett 1953: 245).

Lawrence knew very well how many people he himself was. And to some extent - and nearly always in his letters - he controlled the version of himself that he presented and by which he would be remembered. He was clearly a radically different person to (say) Catherine Carswell than the person he was to someone like Norman Douglas. Hence, in part, the utter divergence of opinion of him seen in the writing of people like Catherine Carswell and Norman Douglas quoted above.

It is also easier to see in his Letters than in memoirs of him the charming, outgoing person he was: because that is the sense of self he so often projected in his letters. Frieda knew this, too, telling Witter Bynner that
“I like people more than he does and he doesn't want me to like them more than he does. He does things for people, Hal, because he's soft in some ways. He writes interesting letters all the time to people he doesn't really like, which is not what I would do”. (Bynner 1951: 62).

Lawrence regularly seems to have created relationships, and then to have continued them in his correspondence, from which he also wanted to escape. This is especially visible in his lengthy correspondences with Dorothy Brett and Mabel Luhan in the middle and late 1920s. We can observe, at times, a deliberate (and perhaps necessary) forcing of himself into sympathy with other people, which he carried through in his letter-writing, and which frequently makes his letters so attractive: but we can understand this as, to some extent, making up for the rather colder feelings he had in reality. It is possible to obtain an unreasonably attractive notion of Lawrence from his letters. Mostly, they do not reproduce the kinds of anger and bitterness to which he subjected, at some time or other, almost all those to whom he was close, and which almost every person who met him reported. The written version is nearly always milder than what he would say when actually face to face with people: would say, that is, unless they were sensitive souls like Catherine Carswell, who never got more than a warning knock of the paw in everyday relationships.

Just occasionally, however, the underlying asperity of so many of his relationships breaks through into his correspondence. The letter about Frieda written after influenza in 1919, and quoted above (p. 97), is an example; and in 1920 he wrote savage letters to Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry, one of which (that to Murry) survives. Murry had returned some articles Lawrence had written for Murry's magazine The Athenaeum, and Lawrence was furious:
I have no doubt you "didn't like them" - just as you didn't like the things you had from Derbyshire. But as a matter of fact, what it amounts to is that you are a dirty little worm, and you take the ways of a dirty little worm. But now let me tell you at last that I know it - not that it's anything new: and let it be plainly understood between you and me, that I consider you a dirty little worm: and so, deposit your dirty bit of venom where you like; at any rate we know what to expect. (Letters III: 467-8).

Associating Katherine Mansfield with what Murry had done, he wrote something equally savage to her around the same time, remarking (in her own memory of the letter) "I loathe you, you revolt me stewing in your consumption ... The Italians were quite right to have nothing to do with you" (Letters III: 470). In those letters, just for once, we hear what Lawrence's speaking voice and manner were probably like when he was really angry. As Frieda remembered, "he made no concession to the ordinary conventions, and that's what upset people" (Frieda 1971: 12). He would, according to a number of people, say the most extraordinarily bitter and vicious things when irritated, though especially and most often to Frieda; and even Frieda, late in life, when she was doing her very best to recreate an image of Lawrence as a marvellously intelligent, warm and understanding person, could not help confessing that "he had a very nasty temper" (Frieda 1971: 12), and that he was "bad tempered and never sorry" (Bynner 1951: 62).

If it is true that his letters in general reveal a rather more kindly person than he probably was, day to day, then that perhaps helps explain why he wrote to Koteliansky about Frieda as he did. and to the Murries so very savagely about themselves. Just for a moment, thoroughly angry with people he knew very well, his guard was down; he was normally more in control of himself when he wrote - letters, or anything else - than he generally chose to be, or probably thought it healthy to be, person to person: he once remarked that he believed in self-discipline but not in self-control. But in those three letters we find, just for once, the uncensored version of life with Lawrence. That might also help explain why both Murries forgave him for what he had written, too: and how he went on living with Frieda. Lawrence's friends knew this tone, this language. It wasn't as final or unforgivable as it would have been from someone else. He did not hold or bear a grudge; he was regularly forgiven and in his turn forgave.

But there is all the same a great deal of evidence that, in everyday life, Lawrence could be extremely aggravating: questioning, demanding, unrelenting, contradicting - though never so much as toward himself. He clearly gave himself a very hard time. Illness, of course, preyed on him; late in life, he remarked irritably "I have had bronchitis since I was a fortnight old" (Worthen 1991: 6). But he drove himself frighteningly hard, for a man as ill as he was. And, always, he questioned. One of our earliest memories of him comes from his first headmaster: "young Bert was a note of interrogation - he was always wanting to know why" (Nehls 1957: 74). Frieda recalled that when she disagreed with him about his writing, "he worried me about the why. I wouldn't always know the why, but he insisted, and I didn't like so much insistence" (Frieda 1971: 12). It was Lawrence's profoundest need to question, to explore, to understand, to know; and that drove him into extraordinary demands and at times into extreme assertiveness. Frieda once confessed that "Lawrence wasn't a comfortable person to be with ... He worried things out in his own soul. þYou're like a dog with a bone,' I would tell him. But once he had worried a question out to his own satisfaction he stuck to the result." (Frieda 1961: 133) Another friend remarked of a particular problem that "He challenged it as he challenged everything" and that "he had the sense of strife always upon his thought" (Nehls 1958: 316, 318).

Oppositions were, then, both natural to him, and a conscious choice. He once remarked, about his choice of Frieda as a partner, that "She is the one possible woman for me, for I must have opposition - something to fight"; in contrast, he knew he could never have married Jessie Chambers, for "It would have been a fatal step, I should have had too easy a life, nearly everything my own way" (Nehls 1957: 71). A habit of conscious opposition, though, made every day life exhausting. "When Lorenzo feels ill, it infuriates him to have me feel well. When his nerves are carrying him too fast, he cannot bear to have me feel tired" (Bynner 1951: 61). And Frieda herself doubted whether "if any other woman would live with him ... I sometimes wonder if I myself can live with him" (Bynner 1951: 62).

But the habit of never being simple or single, but of being fascinated, and more often than not opposed, means that Lawrence offers us many more biographical riddles than most people: and often, it is only the conflicting versions of him and of his thinking that confront us. A biography should not endeavor to iron these out: only to clarify them. A habit of mind rooted in opposition accounts for some, at least, of his physical restlessness and rootlessness. Frieda commented about it in Chapala in 1923: "He does not dislike it here or the people. He just thinks some other place or some other people might be better. It's all inside him. And I wish it weren't. Ach, how I'd like to settle down somewhere, to stop this wandering. I want a home." (Bynner 1951: 63) She never had that until Lawrence died. But to be awkward, to be contrary, to keep hammering away at problems, to keep questioning, never to be satisfied because "it's all inside him," and to keep travelling on, even when the place he had found was wonderful - he once "tried to explain his wanderings by saying that he intensely longed to visit remote lands and there to live and recreate himself anew" (Nehls 1958: 134) - this was Lawrence as a man and as a writer. The fact of his writing itself was rooted in opposition; he once remarked to a friend that "If there weren't so many lies in the world ... I wouldn't write at all" (Nehls 1959: 293).

Frieda was the only person who accepted all of this in him, though it made her life very difficult at times. But when desperately ill at one of the extremes they had reached, Oaxaca in 1925, he said to her "remember ... whatever happens, nothing has mattered but you" (Frieda 1971: 11-12); and when he was dying in 1930, he told her - after yet another quarrel - "Don't mind, you know I want nothing but you, but sometimes something is stronger in me" (Nehls 1959: 442) She was the one person to whom he was absolutely committed. Although "at times they loathed each other" (Crotch 1975: 6), he knew from 1913 that life with her was "the best I have known, or ever shall know" (Letters I: 553). The French painter Edgar Degas (1834-1917) remarked that one can either love, or one can have a life's work, but that one only has one heart. Lawrence seems to contradict that, as he contradicted so much; in forty-four years he managed an extraordinary life, an extraordinary love, and an extraordinary life's work.

Taken from:
© "Biography of D H Lawrence", John Worthen, 1997


   

                                           
     
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