Eventually she put a little joke about Joyce into the novel that grew from “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” One of her characters is sitting in the park, thinking about how much London has changed in the five years since he has been there.
“These five years—from 1918 to 1923 had been, he suspected, somehow very important. People looked different. Newspapers seemed different. Now, for instance, there was a man writing quite openly in one of the respectable weeklies about water closets. That you couldn’t have done ten years ago—written quite openly about water closets in a respectable weekly.”
Chapter 8
“ENGLISH IN THE TEETH OF ALL THE WORLD”
By spring, Lawrence’s circuitous, improvised route out of Sicily would take him and Frieda ten thousand miles from Eastwood, each stop farther away from England, from his childhood home, and from the nearby town, Nottingham, where as a young teacher he had met Frieda. Their 1922 journey to Ceylon, and next to Australia, was a remarkably timed reenactment of the hasty escape that had marked the start of their relationship exactly a decade before. Lawrence met Frieda the first week of March 1912, when he visited her husband, Ernest Weekley, a professor of philology at the University of Nottingham, with whom he had studied. Within weeks, in May 1912, they eloped for Metz, the start of what would be more than a year away, in Germany, Austria, and Italy, before they returned, for a brief six weeks, to England. After another year traveling in Europe, they were married in London in July 1914. Ten years later, another spring, Frieda and “Lawr” were again on the move.
Whatever their other disagreements and battles, the Lawrences had in common a feeling of perpetual displacement, exacerbated in Frieda’s case by the fact that in 1912 she had left her three children behind her and had chosen Lawrence over them. Their search for a peace forever elsewhere was a permanent condition of their marriage, and of their lives. They settled first in England, but then the war made the unlikely pairing of the older—and German-born—Frieda and the younger David dangerous rather than eccentric. They had been driven from Cornwall as suspected spies during the war. Another five years on and their search for a sanctuary was impelled from within. They arrived in Ceylon, and Lawrence was just as disappointed in it as he had expected to be when Brewster had first invited him. He had changed his mind about going, but as with so many other places to which he would travel in coming years, the perfection it promised proved illusory as soon as he got there.
The mosquitoes and the humidity made Ceylon inhospitable, but, more fundamentally, Lawrence was convinced he would never be able to work there. The six weeks he spent there proved him correct, though at the start of 1922 he had been relieved not to be writing—it had been a respite “for a bit, thank God. I am sick of the sight and thought of manuscripts.” As a distraction, he had undertaken translations of the Italian writer Giovanni Verga, author, most famously, of “Cavalleria Rusticana.” The translations had been a lark, a way to clear his mind on the ship east from Italy. He was a writer at luxurious rest, and even traveling second class at an extravagant price, £140 for both of them, was like living in a deluxe hotel, with the decided social advantage over first class that “the people are so quiet and simple and nobody shows off at all.” Their steward came at seven a.m., serving tea and offering to draw a bath. The only decisions the days required were how hot the Lawrences would like the water to be and what they would like to eat. The vast menu for breakfast, at eight a.m., included stewed pears, porridge, fish, bacon, eggs, fried sausages, beefsteak, kidneys, and marmalade. Lunch, at one p.m., tea at four, dinner at seven were equally elaborate, “always much too much.” On their way east, they stopped for a few hours in Port Said, their short jaunt ashore the delightful respite it had also been for Forster in 1921, when he’d had his four-hour reunion with Mohammed. The Lawrences wandered among sights that Forster, in Mohammed’s thrall, had not cared to notice: the water carriers and the scribes, amid Koran readers and a “yelling crowd” of “handsome Turks, Niggers, Greeks, Levantines, fellaheen, three bedouins from the desert, like animals, Arabs—wonderful.” The brief adventure was like an immersion in the Arabian Nights, and their being spat upon as “hateful Christians” only added to the exoticism of the interlude. Later the same day, they passed through the eighty-eight miles of the Suez Canal in eighteen hours, and Lawrence loved the way the slow movement of the ship through the narrow channel—at only five miles an hour it felt to him more like walking than sailing—allowed a lingering view of the red-yellow Sahara, and of the Arabs and their camels on the banks, so near “one can easily throw an orange.”
Yet for all the luxury and beauty of the trip, it became no more clear for what purpose he had been recouping his energies than why he had come to Ceylon in the first place. He had made “a strange exit” from the West, on his way, he hoped, to recovering a “lost Paradise.” But he was as much “on thorns, can’t settle” as ever, and this was as true of what he might write as of where he might live. Ceylon was too hot and sticky, it made him irritable, but as much as he wanted to leave, he was still repulsed by the thought of America. More fundamentally, he quickly discovered what he had already known, though he had tried to persuade himself otherwise: the Buddhistic teachings were not for him. Camaraderie with the Brewsters would not be enough to make Ceylon his home for the year he had told Mabel they would stay there.
The Brewsters had taken a large bungalow, high on a hill and isolated on sixty acres of forest. The house had a wide veranda, where, despite the weather, and his mood, Lawrence continued the translations of Verga, “curled up with a school-boy’s copy book in his hand, writing away” in his neat, small hand, “as legible as print.” This kept him occupied while he complained about the weather, and the fact that he was not writing any fiction, always the gauge in his mind of his creativity, no matter how productively he might write anything else. One friend, the Scot writer Catherine Carswell, would later say that Lawrence’s continual complaints that he wasn’t writing were usually the best indication that he was working—but in Ceylon he really wasn’t.
Lawrence looked at his physical discomfort and creative discontent in typically grand terms. This was true anywhere, but the challenges of acclimation he found in Ceylon gave vivid life to one of his long-held theories. He had always believed that racial differences were based in the very makeup of the blood, which in his estimation “affected consciousness.” Transplanted to another hemisphere and climate, Lawrence now elevated his own difficulties into a racial truth. He admired the beauty and industriousness of the “good-looking, more-or-less naked, dark bluet-brown natives,” but the white man, Lawrence said, was not suited to the region, which was for those with dark skin, “whose flow of blood consciousness is vitally attuned to these different rays of the sun.” Lawrence could not admit that his own constitution was not necessarily representative of anything larger than himself, conveniently overlooking the contradiction that Earl Brewster, his American host, was perfectly happy in the Ceylon forest. For Brewster, Ceylon felt like home and even looked like it, the hills covered in exotic flowers that, for all their differences, he thought were as “colourful as a New England autumnal wood.” To Brewster it seemed natural that, when walking with Lawrence on the narrow paths, they saw monkeys hiding in the trees, and they often had to step aside so that the tall, dark elephants they encountered could pass. Lawrence enjoyed little of it, though again, typically, once he had moved on, he missed the “glamour” of Ceylon and wrote to Brewster with a kind of longing for what he’d left behind there.
Lawrence’s time in Ceylon coincided with a visit by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII and then the Duke of Windsor, on a tour of Asia. It was a show of imperial power and grandeur intended also to make silent amends for the violence of a colonial past that was actually still very much alive, and which the tour did its own work to extend. Lawrence observed the ceremonial procession arranged in the prince’s honor, a perahera, in which dozens of elephants paraded over white cloth laid down so th
e feet of the sacred animals “need never tread the earth,” accompanied by fireworks, “strange, pulsating” music, and “devil dancers,” some on stilts.
The festival made Lawrence unusually sentimental. At the center of it he saw the prince “sad and forlorn,” marooned as the guest of honor and as “the butt of everybody, white and black alike,” and perhaps even of the elephants, which Lawrence saw as salaaming before the prince in veneration—or mockery—of his royal state. The bruised dignity that the prince must bear silently aroused Lawrence’s sympathy for a lonely man on display, hated by all, “for being a prince … and he knows it,” as if he, like Lawrence, had also been driven out of England for his virtues and was also being punished amid the heat and the flies. Now Lawrence became misty-eyed about England, wondering whether he had made a mistake “forsaking” a country he now became homesick for. In the prince, isolated amid the chaos of the perahera, Lawrence saw an Englishman akin to himself, an exile. Had he moved too precipitously out “into the periphery of life,” first in Taormina and now in Ceylon? What about the even more dramatic departure for America he had contemplated? It unexpectedly occurred to him that “the most living clue of life” might actually be found among Englishmen in England, where he had not lived in nearly three years. If he were to return, he might be among those who, uniting together, would carry “the vital spark through.” That was what he had hoped to do, all along, with his novels. Must he go back? Yet this patriotic fantasy was just that, a revelation that could not be sustained against what he inevitably remembered of his experience of the war, of the last five years, and even the anger he had felt the previous summer at the condemnation of Women in Love. Soon enough reawakened to the difficulty of earning a living in England, where his sales were negligible and his prospects worse, he came to his senses about what life, and a professional life, in England would be, even as he remained, as a matter of pride and defiance, “English in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England.”
Ceylon, however, was poisonous, too, and could not be a solution. Once again had come the urge to move, the desire to go incontrovertible, even if, once again, the where was harder to pinpoint. America loomed, but he still rejected it for the present. The next ship out would take him to Australia, and so he decided they must go. “Heaven knows why: because it will be cooler, and the sea is wide,” he wrote a friend. What would he do there? He didn’t care. “I think Frieda feels like me, a bit dazed and indifferent—reckless.”
It was ten days’ journey from Ceylon to Western Australia, and they arrived, on May 4, as aimless as they were reckless; he might think Frieda felt like him, but in fact he rarely minded what she did feel they ought to do, where they ought to go, or where they ought to settle, her own aim to follow him, given that his was not a rational choice of destination or even subject to discussion. In Western Australia they were taken under the wing of Anna Jenkins, a kind, elderly woman whom they’d met on the voyage to Ceylon, and who found them accommodations in a guesthouse sixteen miles outside of Perth, the capital of Western Australia, “bush all around … strange, vast empty country … with a pre-primeval ghost in it.” A land to lose oneself in, “if one wanted to withdraw from the world,” Lawrence thought. But the scale of the emptiness was too great for Lawrence to fathom or to chart. It terrified him. He had wanted to be away from people, from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party of Taormina, but apparently, once true isolation presented itself, not as far from them as he had claimed to wish. He always dreaded too much of a social life, he said, but in fact he thrived on it, if only for the conflict the contact inevitably provoked, whether with friends, who were used to his mercurial shifts and outbursts, or strangers, who were not. Perth itself seemed to him only a “raw hole” amid the scrub, and so he was surprised to see some of his own books for sale at the Booklovers’ Library. He and Frieda took pleasure in buying a rare copy of the withdrawn Rainbow of 1915 that had made its way there, and gave no hint that he was the author. He was safely incognito anyway. Most of the residents of “unhewn” Western Australia, one was later to recall, rarely read novels and had never heard of D. H. Lawrence, only Lawrence of Arabia.
* * *
Lawrence had hurried from Ceylon, and he was soon to hurry from Perth, having so far found no answer to the question he posed to himself about Australia: “Why had he come? Why, oh why? What was he looking for?” Within days he decided they must leave again, “but—but—BUT—well, it’s always an anticlimax of buts. I just don’t want to stay.” There was a boat in two weeks to Sydney, which hardly seemed soon enough. He would have to be relatively patient, against his will.
The Lawrences had now spent as much time at sea as on land since leaving Italy, and Lawrence had discovered that aboard ship he could feel the pleasure of being “an outsider … off the map.” But questions about the future could be suspended only temporarily. And might never be resolved if, as was the case with Lawrence, questions led only to paradoxes rather than answers. They were moving east in order to go west, for example, though in doing so, and in putting off a decision about America, he and Frieda were also going farther and farther south, south, in Lawrence’s formulation, being the direction to go in order “to be one step removed.” Once removed, however, loneliness came over him, and he quickly became unhappy. He did not want to be with people, and he did not want to be away from them.
Once again at sea, they sailed the southern route, through the Great Australian Bight, past Melbourne, past Tasmania, up to the Coral Sea, arriving in Sydney harbor, which he found as awe-inspiring as his first sight of a new place usually was. A day or two in “Sydney town” dashed his illusions of its suitability, however, and proved that the city was too expensive to live in. They had only £50, which would not go far in a country where many living costs were almost equal to those in England, Lawrence was disappointed to discover. Meat, however, “is so cheap,” he wrote his mother-in-law, and “you get huge joints thrown at you.”
Houses would be affordable only far from town, and in search of where to live they went by train another forty miles south, to Thirroul, which had been established as a seaside resort for Sydney industrialists in the twilight of the Victorian era. It was now a faded spot, population 2,587 in the 1921 census, though local newspapers continued, unavailingly, to do what they could to promote the seaside dancing pavilion, “Thirroul’s Gay Arena,” which had opened in 1919 to stave off further decline. But there would be no seaside dancing for the Lawrences. Spring had come to London, but they arrived in Thirroul just as the Australian autumn was to become winter.
Having traveled so far, Frieda and Lawrence were not quite so removed as they might have anticipated. Thirroul, small and remote as it was, was the third-largest town in the coal-mining region of Illawarra. The wealthy and the tourists had largely disappeared, and though the town still attracted some artists and intellectuals, the district was populated by coal miners and factory workers, so that two very different classes of people were living “under the brooding, rock-capped coastal range.” Heritage and temperament might link Lawrence to both groups—he wrote cheerily to his sister-in-law, “the men here are mostly coalminers, so I feel quite at home!”—but his confession to a friend was probably nearer the truth. “I feel awfully foreign with the people,” he wrote, “although they are all English by origin. It is rather like the Midlands of England, the life, very familiar and rough—and I just shrink away from it.” Not that he was intrigued into any kind of acquaintance. The working people, he decided, were “very discontented—always threaten more strikes—always more socialism,” and on the other end of the spectrum, the Australian gentry, made up of those who owned large stores, and who cared only for commerce, repulsed him. That he had no interest in the artists and so-called intellectuals he need hardly waste a breath in proclaiming. It is not clear that he and Frieda actually met many people; they certainly spent little time with any they did meet. What he knew of the people and of Australian life and politics he likely learn
ed from the newspaper, which he read every day.
The houses in Thirroul were as uncongenial as the people, “indescribably weary and dreary,” and no more than “so many forlorn chicken-houses.” The to-let advertisements in the Sydney Morning Herald had included one offering, “Sup. Acc. for visitors”—the superior accommodations of a beachfront house—available at a lower winter rate. The house was a three-bedroom brick bungalow as far as possible from the cheap development of the petered-out resort, an architectural showplace built in 1910 by a wealthy engineer who gave the commission to his architect son. The “holiday cottage,” the first Australian house to show the influence of the Californian bungalow style, was covered by red roof tiles that, together with the brick facade, stood out in panoramic views of the town. There was a distinctively wide veranda for shade, as well as a lawn spreading out from the house to a cliff overlooking the Pacific. In a town where nobody wanted to live too near the ocean, this was not an obvious advantage, and Lawrence wrote his sister-in-law that “only we are on the brink,” a remark encompassing more than geography.
Living so far from town, Lawrence did all he could to disappear. In Thirroul, those who saw him most frequently did not even know a writer had been among them until after he had left. The barber, whom he visited every week for a trim of his beard, remembered Lawrence as a “morose-looking fellow” who “ignored the normal give-and-take of conversation” and whose only unusual characteristic was that he seemed preternaturally curious. (“It doesn’t pay to ignore the barber’s chit-chat, even if you’re D. H. Lawrence,” an Australian journalist later wrote.) When Frieda and David left Australia, months later, the estate agent who had arranged their rental of the bungalow paid a visit to the house and found a number of discarded English magazines left behind. She noticed that some pages had been torn out. Glancing at the indexes she saw that D. H. Lawrence was listed as the author of the missing pages and only then realized he was a writer.
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