The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  As they parted it was evident to Morgan that the “collapse may come any minute,” he wrote Masood. He only hoped it would come without more suffering. Morgan had done all he could, and lamented to Florence, “Ah me—but everything is bearable, it is the betrayal from within that wears away one’s soul and I have been spared that.”

  * * *

  He would be home by March 3. His cabinmate was uninteresting, a man “who has been the usual 25 years of his life in India, and treats me, unasked, to the usual fine fruits of such an experience.” Eventually the man became tired of talking, or of Morgan’s lack of interest in India, “for now he is silent, having apparently no other topic of conversation.” The silence was a relief.

  To his aunt Laura he wrote, “We passengers are a dull company, or perhaps it is that each of us has his own thoughts: it is natural that he should, returning from the East in such times as this.” He was referring to the political situation, in India and in Egypt, but the phrase encompassed the other subject he privately dwelled upon. He had been buoyed on the voyage from Bombay to Egypt by the thought of Mohammed’s awaiting him. He had little to hope for as he got closer and closer to home and to his former life with Lily.

  “The public tragedy seems an extension of my private trouble,” he wrote to Masood. He was expert at encoding secrets, writing to his aunt Laura from the Delta that his month in Egypt had “passed very pleasantly, among old friends, but not altogether among old places.” He had spent the last fortnight, he told her, at Helouan, near Cairo, “with a friend who is ill—Mohammed el Adl is his name: I must not forget to mention it.”

  He felt obliged to name him, even if he could not tell his aunt or his mother why.

  * * *

  “The knack of a double life grows.”

  Morgan confided this to Florence Barger about real estate difficulties, whether, in 1924, he and his mother would move from their longtime home in Weybridge, as they eventually did, to West Hackhurst, the house in the village of Abinger Hammer inherited from Aunt Laura. At the moment they had both houses. “I am here alone for two nights, rather to mother’s distress,” Morgan wrote to Florence from West Hackhurst. “I thought I would like to feel what it is to be in my own house, for a minute, and I cannot do that while she is in command!” The question of what to do preoccupied Lily in particular. His own consolation, Morgan wrote, was “that as soon as I leave either of our abodes my mind becomes perfectly free; the knack of a double life grows.”

  It had been growing for a long time. An uncle of Morgan’s, Willie Forster, had noticed around the time of Morgan’s twenty-first birthday that Lily treated her son “as if still a child.” He thought it spelled trouble that Morgan was “invariably” the only man around, “and if there were any they wd. be quite as bad as the women.” Morgan needed “country air and pursuits with genial pals,” Willie advised, rather than living in the closed domestic world of women “swapping lies and making mischief.” It was having an emasculating effect on him: “His descriptions of the teas are very nice, being always in Jane Austin [sic] fashion.”

  Not quite a year after Howards End had been published, Morgan wrote in his diary, “Depressing & enervating surroundings. My life’s work, if I have any, is to live with a person who thinks nothing worth while.”

  He had gone to India to see whether he might finish another novel. He had failed. Nostalgic and melancholy for a career he was powerless to resume, he returned instead to his “life’s work” in Weybridge.

  Chapter 4

  “SOMEWHERE AWAY BY MYSELF”

  As a boy he was Bert, and was always Bert to his family, including the older brother and two sisters, George, Emily, and Lettice Ada, who outlived David Herbert Lawrence by several decades. When his mother, Lydia, was dying, in December 1910, she hoped to live long enough to see “our Bert’s first book.” He sent “message after message, telegrams to the publishers” for an early copy of The White Peacock, which was to be published in 1911, that he could give to her. Lawrence’s first novel was put into her hands on her deathbed, but it was no use—“no sign was given that she knew what it was.” The publication of almost every one of his novels would be accompanied by similar disappointment, and difficulties, legal and otherwise.

  As a boy, Bert had “a genius for inventing games,” his sister Ada remembered. He hated football and cricket, and played mainly indoors. Outdoors to him meant gathering “the girls together to go blackberrying” and talking to the flowers that filled the meadows beyond yards paved with red brick that were the landscape of Eastwood, where he was born on September 11, 1885, a place filled with “hundreds of niggardly houses” that covered the valleys of Nottinghamshire. Bert’s face was white as chalk, and the red of his ginger hair only made his skin seem paler in comparison. The contrasts only intensified with age: seen in bathing trunks, at a hot springs near Taos, New Mexico, where he arrived in 1922, his body “was as white as lard,” the skin translucent over his shoulder blades, ribs, and even the striations of the thin muscles.

  Mabel Dodge, who invited him to Taos, wrote in her memoirs of the startling impact of the sight of Lawrence with his “tousled head and red beard and eyes like blue stars.” They were disappointed with each other almost immediately upon actual acquaintance, but Mabel paid posthumous tribute to Lawrence’s startling physical presence, his body “indomitable, with a will to endure as ivory endures.” D. H. Lawrence, she wrote, had stood out from the contemporary landscape of humanity like a work of art or an allegory, “a fleshly Word” that she and the rest of the world had not understood.

  He had been misunderstood since childhood. In Eastwood, he was called “Bertie,” which he hated, and teased for his clinging and babyish ways. He was effeminate, and his squeaky voice “girlish.” And because all of his friends were girls, the boys would crowd around him singing, “Dicky Dicky Denches plays with the Wenches.” He may have played with girls, but “he had not much use for the Plain Janes.” His playmates were only the town’s good-looking and vivacious girls.

  As a child, his voice would rise in pitch when he was even the least excited. It was the same when he grew up. An unkind witness remembered that Lawrence “perpetually squeaked or squealed in a ridiculous manner, like a eunuch.” He seemed to people either childlike, exultant in his reaction to the world, or childish in the extreme, moody and given to tantrums.

  There was very little about Lawrence that wasn’t irritating to someone. Edmund Wilson, meeting him in New York in 1923, at a tea given for Lawrence by Thomas Seltzer, his publisher, thought him “ill-bred and hysterical,” and wrote in his diary that Lawrence’s appearance was disconcerting. He was lean, and his head “disproportionately small,” Wilson wrote. “One saw that he belonged to an inferior caste—some bred-down unripening race of the collieries. Against this inferiority—fundamental and physical—he must have had to fight all his life: his passionate spirit had made up for it by exaggerated self-assertion.” Wilson, seemingly unaware that Lawrence might have intuited this reaction and been fighting against it that very afternoon, added that when the conversation veered away from whatever it was that Lawrence himself was interested in, he “burst out in childish rudeness, and in a high-pitched screaming voice with something like: ‘I’m not enjoying this! Why are we sitting here having tea? I don’t want your tea! I don’t want to be doing this!’”

  Lawrence had faced condescension all his life and, in large and small ways, had all his life resisted doing what he did not want to do. His conversation, like his work, was a rebellion against mere gentility. What Wilson might scorn as childish rudeness, Lawrence saw, self-righteously, in grander terms, as a resistance to the way others said the world, or he, must be. The teas that found him chatting with Wilson and others like him, whether in New York, or in London, or in Eastwood or Nottingham, where only the scale was different, were no more interesting to him than football or cricket had been to him years before. He did not care when others thought him—or his work—rude, or at least d
id not when their judgment, literary or personal, arose, as Wilson’s did, from a more elemental disdain that riled Lawrence in pride and anger.

  Lawrence did not like the world of people as he found it and, as a child and as a man, preferred to immerse himself in nature or in worlds of his own creation. This was one reason he so frequently wrote outdoors, off for the morning in a forest, in whatever place he happened to be, under a particular tree that, once discovered, seemed to him the unique and necessary shelter for whichever thing, a poem or novel or article, he was working on at the time. This was also one reason so much of his writing, his poetry and his travel essays in particular, forms a vast and exultant celebration of the natural world, which man did not make; and why, in his novels, poems, and stories, he reimagined man, and the totality of the world of human relationships that man did make, as defiantly, as sincerely, and with as much genius as he had invented games in childhood. He could not waste self-discipline at a tea party. It was reserved for his work alone.

  “It seemed inevitable that Bert should spend his life creating things,” his sister Ada remembered after Lawrence’s death. “We had to create our own happiness,” she recalled of their childhood. “There was little ready made about us.”

  * * *

  Bert turned thirty-six on September 11, 1921. He was also Lorenzo, was also Lawrence, was also David, was also Lawr, known by different acquaintances and friends by different names. On September 19, he renewed his passport at the consulate in Florence. Soon to come to an end was an unusually lengthy era, for him, of stability. He lived at Fontana Vecchia, his house in Taormina, Sicily, for more than two years, as long as he would live in any one place after eloping with the already married Frieda Weekley, née von Richtofen, in 1912, whom he married in 1914. He was ready for 1922. The new year would bring an end to an interregnum of relative permanence in more than a decade of nomadic travel until he died, in 1930. Every flight, all his life, was a bid for happiness. In every place he found happiness only briefly.

  The consular official’s handwritten description in the passport records that D. H. Lawrence was an “Author” from “Eastwood, Notts,” short for Nottingham. Here was a fact, as was his height, which was five feet nine inches. But recollections of what he really looked like are as various as the nicknames by which he was known. Officially he had blue-gray eyes and light brown hair. It was left to friends to redeem the mundane and to recall the hypnotic power of Lawrence’s eyes and the dark red of his beard and hair that glowed “like flames from the intensity of his life.” The official saw nothing of this posthumous glamour. In the space under the heading “Special peculiarities” there is only the word “None.” An earlier more elaborate passport, issued in London by the Foreign Office in September 1919, included a more detailed physical description of the Lawrence then identified as “Novelist.” His height, eye color, and hair color were all the same. His forehead and mouth were “normal”; his nose “short”; his face “long”; his complexion “pale.” His chin was “normal,” too, the passport records, or perhaps it was as one friend recalled, a chin “out of proportion” to Lawrence’s slender face, a defect Lawrence had artfully concealed by the “dainty decoration” of his beard.

  The official photograph does not capture Lawrence’s frequently “sardonic” smile, which was endearing and charming, or the “funny little cackle of a laugh” that with a “rising inflection” was “like a little scream.”

  * * *

  For Lawrence and Frieda, the year 1922 began with a fantasy he had in the fall of 1921. “I wish I could find a ship that would carry me round the world and land me somewhere in the West—New Mexico or California—and I could have a little house and two goats, somewhere away by myself in the Rocky Mountains,” Lawrence wrote to his publisher, Thomas Seltzer.

  Lawrence was vague on geography—the Rockies do not extend as far west as California—and what he wanted, then as always, was as contradictory as it was temporary. But now he had reached a crisis, one punctuated by the expiry of his and Frieda’s passports and the sense this gave that time had run out. Three years after the end of the war, he had still found no mental peace.

  The Lawrences had spent the spring and summer traveling, nearly three months in Germany, a month in Florence, Siena, Rome, and Capri. Visiting his mother-in-law in Germany, he felt that the country, and the continent for which it became a symbol, was “so empty—as if uninhabited.” It did not matter that in a nation devastated by war, every house might be crowded from the coal cellars to the attics. It felt empty—“life-empty; no young men,” Lawrence wrote.

  In Taormina, on the eastern shore of Sicily, at his house on an idyllic hilltop, he could stand looking through “the great window of the eastern sky, seaward,” away from the scars of the war still visible on the continent behind him. He and Frieda had come here in self-exile, driven out of England in 1917, suspected as spies, but also dangerous because he was a writer of supposedly obscene books. He had come to Sicily in search of what he called “naked liberty”—to write, but also, simply, to live. He was almost as far south from the “bog” that was England as one could go and still be in Europe at all.

  D. H. Lawrence’s fifth novel, Women in Love, was published in England in June 1921. The reviews were very negative, led by an attack in the Times. The book did not sell well. That it was published in England at all was in large part a miracle. His earlier novel, The Rainbow, to which the new novel was a sequel, had been published in 1915 and was almost immediately withdrawn by its publisher after it was banned under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Lawrence, who had conceived Women in Love before The Rainbow, wrote the new novel in defiance. “You will hate it and nobody will publish it. But there, these things are beyond us,” he wrote his literary agent. The reception of Women in Love was predictable. As was the stubborn drive to write what he must, as he had always had to create his own happiness. Lawrence had the self-possession that book by book fortified him to court, and to face, critical and personal enmity. And yet he was naive enough, and optimistic enough, that when the enmity, in its many forms, came he was outraged, disappointed, and hurt. Then his childlike enthusiasm, a combination of hopefulness and curiosity, turned to childish rage.

  The reviews of Women in Love were only one problem. The threat of a libel action, brought by Philip Heseltine, an acquaintance of Lawrence’s, was a further nuisance. Lawrence had caricatured Heseltine, a composer, but thought he had covered his portrait in enough veils—including changing the character’s profession to painter—to distract attention. Heseltine was no more than “a half imbecile fool” who only wanted publicity, and Lawrence advised his publisher that resistance was the surest way to defuse the threat.

  But news of the libel suit was only part of the problem that awaited him when he returned to Taormina. In addition to a copy of Women in Love marked with the passages Heseltine objected to, Martin Secker, his publisher, had sent Lawrence a copy of the reactionary newspaper John Bull that included a denunciation of Women in Love under the headline “A Book the Police Should Ban.”

  To the editor of John Bull, Lawrence’s Women in Love—the story of the sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen and the men with whom they are involved—was not a novel at all but was, rather, a “neurotic production exposed for sale on the bookstalls as a ‘novel’ … an analytic study of sexual depravity, the more repulsive from the fact that he seems to gloat over its production.… It is ugly, repellent, vile.” On the one hand, Lawrence was used to the vituperation, and even welcomed it, taking John Bull as calmly as he did Heseltine’s threat of prosecution. As the attack reminded people, Lawrence was “an old offender,” suspect as both citizen and writer. Lawrence professed amusement, at least from afar, because “to disapprove of me … is so unoriginal.” The John Bull publicity could not even improve sales. To satisfy Heseltine’s solicitors, Secker had already suspended the circulation of the book “at considerable pecuniary loss” to both himself and Lawrence.

  But Law
rence’s indifference to the legal problems and the bad reviews actually cloaked the “rare, pure innocence” with which he had trusted that his work would find an audience. Women in Love was “the best of my books,” he thought, and this new repudiation aggravated the displacement he had felt in Germany. He had “come loose from all moorings.” He saw as if with new eyes that Taormina had become crowded with the postwar wealth of English and American people drawn to what was now like a “continual Mad-Hatters tea-party.” Everybody had at least £500 a year, and “it feels so empty,” as “life-empty” as Germany, but in a new, more festive form, perhaps more insidious and soul-killing. “What isn’t empty,” he wondered, “as far as the world of man goes.”

  * * *

  He’d had the same fantasy for years—an escape from that bog of England, to a new world. During the war, he had had visions of establishing himself in Florida, on a farm, a commune to be called Rananim. He was “a Columbus who can see a shadowy America before him,” but for lack of followers with devotion enough, among other more practical reasons, Rananim had never come to pass. There were never followers devoted enough. All his “companion adventurers” failed him, recalled one, who counted herself among those who had disappointed him, and regretted it. He needed friends, she thought, “if only to leave behind.” Only Frieda never fell away.

  Lawrence was an amalgam of such extreme contradictions that the truest thing about him was that the opposite was also true. His fantasy of America was as long-standing as his horror of it. “America, being so much worse, falser, further gone than England, is nearer to freedom,” he had written to his friend the novelist Catherine Carswell in 1916. The fate of nations had its own logic, perceptible to Lawrence and perhaps no others. America, as corroded as it was new, as hospitable as it was hostile to this new Columbus, was fertile ground for his communitarian vision because its commercialism and its imperialistic tendencies had already left it “dryrotted to a point where the final seed of the new is almost left ready to sprout.”