In October 1921, he knew only that he wanted to go “really away.” If he were to leave Europe, as he knew he must, could America be the right next place?
Where he would go, and how soon, also depended on money. He had only “forty-odd pounds in the bank,” and his English money was “at the last crumbs.” There was a larger balance in American accounts—he awaited an accounting from his American agent, Robert Mountsier—but because he had misplaced the checks Mountsier had sent him, he could not use the American money he might have.
He began to look into ships. A tramp steamer was more in his budget than a passenger ship, and it did not seem to matter what the destination was. His friends Earl and Achsah Brewster were soon moving to Ceylon, from Capri, where Earl was to study Buddhism. The proposal to join them was attractive, the camaraderie it offered a bit like the Rananim of old at last come to fruition. But the meditative life seemed only more emptiness, as worn as the Old World itself, and “without new possibilities” for him. Buddha was vollendet, he wrote, “consummated.”
The news from England, his indecision, and the slow drain of his bank accounts left him “in a hell of a temper” all through the autumn. He did no writing, avoided all visitors, and was so disagreeable a presence that their maid, he thought, did her work “as if a dagger was at her neck.” At the beginning of November he wrote Brewster that he was again considering Ceylon. It seemed as good a place as any, if only because the people there were as likely to be as “beshitten” as they were everywhere else on “this slippery ball of quick-silver of a dissolving world.”
Then, three days later, a letter from a stranger arrived. To a writer preoccupied by destiny, the invitation it brought seemed providential. Lawrence answered it the same evening.
* * *
It was a little over half a mile, no more than a twenty-minute walk, from Fontana Vecchia to the Ufficio Postale di Taormina, where Lawrence picked up his mail. When, and if, it arrived. The Italian post was as beshitten as everything else, though the stories about it at least still had a rough charm. One train had recently fallen into a river in Calabria, he wrote a friend that autumn. All the luggage, and all the mail, had been lost, “stolen, of course.” Strikes then paralyzed the railways all through November. The fascists under Mussolini were fighting in the streets.
An American woman he didn’t know, Mabel Dodge Sterne, had written to invite him to live in Taos, New Mexico. She had read an excerpt from Sea and Sardinia, his forthcoming travel book about Italy, in the October issue of the Dial magazine, and sensing the “queer way” in which he uniquely gave “the feel and touch and smell of places,” she hoped Lawrence would want to write about Taos in the same spirit and with the same sure hand.
She had a house for him, an adobe cottage, to live in while he did it. There was a tribe of Indians in Taos, “there since the Flood.”
Her letter was not a letter but rather a strange missive “so long that it was rolled like papyrus,” one she had worked hard to endow with magical powers of allurement, personal and spiritual. She put in with her scroll a few leaves of desachey, “the perfume the Indians say makes the heart light,” and also a bit of osha, a medicinal root. Lawrence was as enchanted as she’d hoped and read it on his way home, unfurling the letter to its full length as he walked the Corso Umberto. He was entranced by the “Indian scent” Mrs. Sterne had effectively wafted in his direction, and decided, “There is glamour and magic for me. Not Buddha.” Taos was six thousand feet up on a mountain in the desert, and twenty-five miles from the nearest railway. He had “nibbled” at the osha, which tasted like licorice root, and it had transported him far from the Corso, which, like Europe in microcosm, was “just one long arcade of junk shops now.” Taos, not Ceylon, now seemed his fate.
Lawrence rarely saved his correspondence. The papyrus is lost. But the force and beauty of Mabel Dodge Sterne’s prose are evident in her memoirs, and the incantatory potency of the glimpse she gave of Taos was irresistible to Lawrence. Whatever she proposed, what she said of Taos, the future she envisioned—his, hers, the prospect for humanity itself, she blended it all—touched him. She had tried to “tell him every single thing I could think of that I felt would draw him—simple things as well as strange ones.” The land she described was “full of time and ease,” and his house was at one with it, newly built in the old way, with furniture “carpentered right there in the house,” and spacious enough, at five rooms, for the children she didn’t seem to know he didn’t have.
His immediate yes was an impulsive response, full of hope and trust and his instinctual curiosity.
“I believe what you say—one must somehow bring together the two ends of humanity, our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era. I verily believe that.” It would be quite feasible, he told her. There were logistical details to work out, but nothing seemed to be standing in his way. In Sea and Sardinia he had called Frieda the “Queen Bee.” Now he wrote Mabel in the same convivial spirit. “Truly, the q-b and I would like to come to Taos—there are no little bees,” he told her. Whether it was desirable to travel halfway around the world at the behest of a stranger he did not seem to consider at all.
But neither Mabel Dodge Sterne nor D. H. Lawrence was as she or he appeared.
He acted impulsively but was, paradoxically, practical: he and his wife, “the q-b and I,” were, he told Mabel, “very practical, do all our own work, even the washing, cooking, floor-cleaning and everything.” But the Lawrence Mabel Dodge wrote to in the fall of 1921 was the Lawrence she thought she knew from his writing, not that one. When the parts of Sea and Sardinia were published in the Dial, Lawrence complained to his agent that the book had been unfortunately “very much cut up” and pieced together again in an unrepresentative way. “Damn them for that.” Lawrence might have cursed himself as well as the Dial editors for the idea that Sea and Sardinia gave to Mabel Dodge Sterne. The whole of it is not representative of the “real” Lawrence, either. His ingratiating and fanciful self-portrait transforms Frieda and Lawrence into comic characters. What in life was “annoying and uncomfortable” about them was dramatized in the book into “vivacity, or made material for comedy.” Mabel later wrote of Lawrence that he was a “mass of contradictions and shocks.” She didn’t yet know—but would learn—that one of the crucial contradictions was that he portrayed himself and Frieda far more realistically in the conflicts of his novels than in his nonfiction accounts of their actual travels. It did not help that Lawrence continued the jocular tone about himself in his first letter to her. He had been summoned as the Lawrence of Sea and Sardinia, and he was writing as that character.
Lawrence decided important things first—“he made a fetish of spontaneity and used it as an excuse for yielding to any impulse which came to him”—and to his (and often everyone else’s) regret learned the facts of the matter, and the real character of a person, only later. Like Mabel, he saw the world selectively. Mabel was wealthy enough to afford (or indulge) this failing. Lawrence, in contrast, paid a high price for this tendency to errors of judgment. In this he made Anna Brangwen, the heroine of his novel The Rainbow, like himself: “Still she thought the people she did not know were wonderful. Those she knew seemed always to be limiting her, tying her up in little falsities that irritated her beyond bearing.” This could be hard on friends, family, a wife, one’s patron. And oneself.
* * *
Mabel had a commission in mind and hoped that Lawrence, in a book about Taos, would “give a voice to this speechless land.” But what she hoped he would do might be impossible for a white writer in any case, a fact she did not consider. Taos was not like Italy, the Indians in New Mexico were not like the Italians, and Lawrence could not be the same among them. Mabel excluded herself and Lawrence from the general sanction offered by Tony Luhan, the Pueblo man who was her lover and would become her fourth husband: “The white people like Taos and call it ‘climate.’ Do they know what climate is? Do they know why the sun is bette
r in Taos and why they feel happy in it?” She knew, she thought, and Lawrence, whom she believed to have “more consciousness than anyone alive,” would also know what climate is.
But, in fact, he didn’t. Mabel, dreaming of a Lawrence who existed only in the Dial’s potpourri from Sea and Sardinia, had not understood the Lawrence of the novels, if she had read them carefully (which it seems she had not, though she sent a copy of Sons and Lovers to her former psychiatrist, in New York, who diagnosed Lawrence has having a “severe homosexual fixation” for which he was trying to compensate). She did not seem disturbed by Lawrence’s first, mundane, and very practical questions—which were about the climate. “Are there any trees? Is there any water?—stream, river, lake?” he asked. “How warm must the clothing be? How cold, and how hot is Taos?”
He wanted to leave Europe, Lawrence wrote her. “I want to take the next step. Shall it be Taos?—I like the word. It’s a bit like Taormina.” As a move it was a long leap, but there was a symbolic continuity in the sound of the two names that he took as another sign of destiny. He had heard of Taos, he thought, from Leo Stein, in 1919. It was vague in his mind, but all the more alluring for that. That was enough for him.
At least one significant unknown remained, and even a writer, who survives by words, is liable to be led astray by the sound and promise of a word seductively spoken. Charmed by Mabel and the Indian scent of her scroll, he wondered in a postscript where he might really be going. “How far are you from El Paso or from Santa Fe. I don’t see Taos on the map.”
* * *
But Lawrence’s next step was more an escape than it was a journey. He was, as always, in search of the perennially elsewhere, as in a 1917 poem he originally called “Terranova” and published as “New Heaven and Earth.” “I was so weary of this world, / I was so sick of it, / everything was tainted with myself, / skies, trees, flowers, birds, water, / people, houses, streets, vehicles, machines, / nations, armies, war, peace-talking, / work, recreation, governing, anarchy, / it was all tainted with myself.”
Such a place was, of course, impossible to find, and it was one of Lawrence’s most admirable—and frustrating—characteristics that he all his life lighted out with the “secret and absurd hope” that one day he would find himself landing in the Garden of Eden. This desire peeked out in all his writing. But in Taos there was another significant unknown, not of where but of whom.
He wrote to his New York agent the next day and asked a question he might more wisely have waited to have answered. “I had a letter yesterday from Mabel Dodge Sterne—do you know who she is?—from Taos, New Mexico: do you know anything about that? She says she can give us a house there, and everything we need. And I think it is there I should like to go.”
* * *
Mabel talked of consciousness but her income was $14,000 a year, much of it in the form of an allowance from her mother. Her life with Tony was a lazy one. They had no need “to earn our bread & meat. And I am not so rightly energized that I move without having to,” she wrote. She was bored doing nothing in Taos, bored by “having to do nothing,” and this was one reason she had invited Lawrence, and why she had sought to lure other artists and writers to New Mexico. “A round of unimpeded pleasure ceases to be amusing.”
Her patronage was founded in an awe of artists, but it was compromised by an envy that became a desire for control and regard. She could be the only “q-b” in her world. Surrounding herself with artists and writers gave her purpose and engagement. Writing of an artist she knew, she exclaimed, “I envy Mary Austin her ambition & her economic pressure!” This was envy as only the rich could feel it.
Mabel was inordinately wealthy and generously philanthropic. But the royal, eccentrically peremptory, summons of her scrolling papyrus was an ornamentally masked financial transaction. She had sought her latest idol on a whim, and because her art was charm, it seemed to her that her noblesse came without oblige on his part. But Lawrence knew the value of money, having had so little of it. Mabel had described the house she had for him, a house in which the roof was supported by twisted columns, the ceiling supported by glistening beams. She had repeated the word too often, and Lawrence immediately understood that in this house that Mabel offered as a gift he would be supported by her. From a strictly financial point of view, Lawrence needed a patron. He was too proud and practical to accept one.
Her own house on the property was the Big House. The Lawrences would live in the Pink House. It would be dependency and ruin if he were to live there without paying his way. Lawrence had from childhood known “the terrible indignity” of poverty and had learned to see life, and his life as a writer, as the business it was. He kept track of his productivity carefully and kept more detailed accounts of money owed or owing than his agent or his publishers ever would.
Lawrence’s response to Mabel’s grand gesture represented continuity in another, unspoken way. He was attracted to her as he had always, from early on, been drawn into the orbit of older women of position. Frieda had been the first, and before Mabel there had been Ottoline Morrell and Cynthia Asquith. The first had really been his high school sweetheart Jessie Chambers, the “Miriam” of Sons and Lovers, and before her there had hung over the family the lost dream of his mother Lydia’s elegance, literally dirtied by the roughness of his coal miner father and by the waste of his father’s alcoholism. All the entanglements followed the same course of attraction and disappointment, usually followed by rapprochement, and often then by a later break. Of course this was also true of his friendships with men, and, as Mabel would write with only some exaggeration, “he threw everyone over sooner or later, and not once, but as often as they rejoined his turbulent and intractable spirit.” The only possible permanent reconciliation with Lawrence was a posthumous one.
* * *
He had told Mabel, “I want to take the next step.” The next step, though, was not only a place but a step forward into new writing. He had finished a novel, Aaron’s Rod, in early June 1921. He had written nothing other than two poems all summer. He had reached the end of something, he thought, with Aaron’s Rod, about an English musician who abandons his wife and children to pursue his art in Italy. A new place to write would mean new things to write, new ways of writing, that he could not achieve “till I have crossed another border,” he told Mabel.
The New World was a place where a new form might be found, just as he had imagined for years that Rananim could be built there. Almost a decade before, he had sent his editor Edward Garnett the typescript of Sons and Lovers. It is a great novel, Lawrence told him with confidence. But its greatness could be found in the fact that “it has got form—form.” Frieda, in a postscript of her own to Garnett, seconded Lawrence and added, “any new thing must find a new shape, then afterwards one can call it ‘art.’”
She had written that in 1912. It was true for Lawrence nine years later, in Taormina. He was in search of a new shape. As a writer he must evolve, book by book, poem by poem, story by story—continent by continent, too, if necessary—completely away from what he had formerly been.
Sons and Lovers had been published in 1913, when Lawrence was twenty-seven. It was his third and most highly praised novel. It had brought him literary renown and had shaped the expectations, and corresponding disappointments, that had marked Lawrence’s career since then. An American journalist, Henry James Forman, met Lawrence through mutual friends in Taormina in the winter of 1921–22. He expressed his admiration for Sons and Lovers and asked, “Why don’t you write more books like that one?”
It was the question nearly everyone asked him, Lawrence replied with a smile that was probably more impatient than his overawed American interlocutor could perceive. He didn’t want to write more books like that, Lawrence told Forman. He wrote his books three times, not just “copying and revising as I go along, but literally.” He wrote a first draft, put it aside, wrote a second draft, and then put that aside, too. He published the third draft. The first draft was generally somewhat
like Sons and Lovers, he said. Forman, whom Lawrence thought “dull but nice,” then advised him, “Very well, then in the next novel write one draft only and see how your sales will mount.”
This was not new advice. Lawrence “murmured half to himself” that he didn’t want to be rich. “But I do want to be able to do absolutely as I please.”
To do as he pleased. He did not want to write another book like Sons and Lovers, and he did not want to make small talk with Edmund Wilson at a publisher’s tea party. Yet how and where to do it all in his own way? Lawrence was a traveler between destinations, an artist between forms. As 1922 began he was looking again for an answer to the question one of his characters posed in Women in Love, “For where was life to be found?” This had been the central question for him even in childhood. “What do you think life is?” a childhood friend recalled his asking. She retained a sense “he had been waiting anxiously to ask it.” He was happiest far away from wherever he had most recently been. The lure of Taos was that it was twenty-five miles from any railroad. Writing to friends about his decision to go to Taos, he repeated that magical distance in letter after letter, giving the altitude of the town variously as either six thousand or seven thousand feet. Inaccessibility was vital. The only road to Fontana Vecchia was a mule track. The claustrophobia of a house crowded with children, and of a town like Eastwood, haunted him. All his life he was drawn to people and yet just as quickly resisted the trap of “all this intimacy and neighbouring” that left one “caught like a fly on a flypaper, in one mess with all the other buzzers. How I hate it!” He could not be happy with a life made up of the “common emotion like treacle” that seemed to satisfy most people, including Frieda, who to his frustration sometimes seemed content to settle anywhere. But where was the life of uncommon emotion, and the new form of art that would arise from it, to be found? He was as anxious as ever to discover the answer. Maybe Taos would reveal it.
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