The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  * * *

  Continuous travel, at least, offered a respite from writing, the Verga translations apart. As they had sailed from Perth to Sydney, Lawrence wrote a friend that he was content to let his muse, “dear hussy, repent her ways.” He claimed to be relieved to be rid of her: “‘Get thee to a nunnery’ I said to her. Heaven knows if we shall ever see her face again, unveiled, uncoiffed.” But even as he dismissed his muse, in fact he longed to write fiction again, and the settled feelings he might confess to in a letter were definitive only until the next letter. As he traveled, his dissatisfaction with each place had as much to do with the work he was not doing as it did with the places themselves. Aboard ship it had been enough to do the translations. In Thirroul, he was back on land and must be back at work.

  But what would he write? He did not know when he arrived in Thirroul, even as the house itself posed the question, which may have been one of its devilish attractions. The man who built it at first called it “Idle Here” but it now was known as “Wyewurk,” renamed probably because its next-door neighbor was called “Wyewurrie.” “It is one of those places that fits its name as the hand fits into an old glove,” ran an advertisement for the house. “‘Why work’ indeed when one has a retreat like this to tempt from the turmoil of city life to its restful murmur of the beach?” For Lawrence, the question was more elemental—what work would he do—and it had been nagging at him since before he’d left Taormina. He did not want to idle there. The bungalow was spacious and comfortable, allowing Lawrence and Frieda plenty of room to be apart from each other as he tried to write, but they brought their own turmoil with them, and Lawrence was alternatively expansive and miserable, if only to contradict his wife.

  Frieda, for example, would say that she loved the sea. Lawrence did, too, and, savoring the privacy being so far from town allowed them, they took nude “bathes” every afternoon, and afterward would “stand under the shower-bath” to wash off the “very seaey water.” But rather than admit to sharing Frieda’s feeling, Lawrence instead told Frieda he wished for a wave fifty feet high to wipe out the whole coast of Australia.

  “You are so bad-tempered. Why don’t you see the lovely things?” Frieda asked.

  “I do,” Lawrence replied, though he admitted he saw them only “by contrast” with the darker things he usually concentrated on.

  It had the sound of an old argument, and an endless one—he was wear and tear—but daily life provoked him, and he did not wait for a mood to pass.

  The darkened skies of the Australian winter, and the proximity of the “boomingly crashingly noisy” ocean—there could be no “restful murmur” for Lawrence—brought to mind the landscape familiar from their time on the coast in Cornwall, which had seemed an escape at first but turned out to be far otherwise. Memories of wartime England, so far away in both distance and time, seemed nevertheless immediately present, for there was another reminder of that dark time, and of their persecution. Thirroul not only had its coal mines and its miners. That was surprise enough. During the war the Sydney suburbs had been ringed by internment camps for German nationals and even, in time, naturalized British subjects of German nationality, including, in some camps, women and children. The last of these, twenty miles from Sydney, had closed only in 1920. Arriving in the city, Lawrence sensed the animosity of this lingering xenophobia at once, and, as he and Frieda took their first walk, thought some of the working class around them suspected them on sight as “Fritzies, most likely,” even if Frieda and Lawrence “were talking English.” Despite her “pure Teutonic consciousness,” Frieda seemed unaware of these associations, or would not admit to any fear, which may have enraged Lawrence all the more. She wrote to Mrs. Jenkins in Perth, “I feel I have packed all old dull Europe in the old kit bag and thrown [it] into the sea.” She enjoyed “the domestic part after all our wanderings—I seem to cook with a zest that is worthy of higher things.”

  Frieda “housewifes,” Lawrence wrote Earl Brewster, though he, too, took pleasure in the quotidian tasks of homemaking, and in addition to his own tasks—lighting a fire in the morning, for instance—he joined Frieda in the baking of cakes and tarts that they ate, he added, “all ourselves,” the gluttony intertwined with loneliness (itself intermingled with relief) that they had no guests with whom to share them. But this was not the whole, or at least not the only, truth. Many years later, an old man who had been a delivery boy in Thirroul in 1922 told a different, perhaps apocryphal, story of the Lawrences’ time in the town. He remembered approaching the gate of Wyewurk and then quickly going away again, “frightened by the voices within.”

  But whatever contentment Lawrence and Frieda shared in Wyewurk, he was still not writing anything more than letters. He had banished his muse but had become impatient now that she had continued to stay away. By the end of May, with no other ideas in mind, he thought that the voices within the bungalow, his and Frieda’s, might make a novel of their own.

  * * *

  What a twelve months for writing it had now been for Lawrence. It had been almost exactly a year since he had written a single word of a new novel. After The Lost Girl was published, in 1920, he worked on a novel, Mr. Noon, but put it aside in January 1921 to resume the novel he had put aside before that, Aaron’s Rod, itself a book he had begun and abandoned in autumn 1917, and which he had then picked up again without much hope in Taormina. He worked at it fitfully and, in the late spring of 1921, had arrived in Baden-Baden with the incomplete manuscript in his luggage. It was a novel of the Midlands, “the last of my serious English novels—the end of The Rainbow, Women in Love line,” Lawrence thought. The title character, Aaron Sisson, is a union official and amateur flute player who abandons his wife and two children to pursue a musical career in Italy; it, too, was autobiographical, Lawrence and Frieda’s departure from England, and Frieda’s abandonment of her children, fractured into pieces reassigned and reassembled within various characters’ lives. Aaron, like Lawrence himself, pursued his art, but it was actually another figure, a devoted friend of Aaron’s, Rawdon Lilly, who is the Lawrence character, a writer who nurses Aaron when he becomes ill. Lawrence had written eleven chapters and then stopped.

  In Baden-Baden, Lawrence went out into the woods every morning and was able to finish the novel in a rush amid the “strange stimulus” of the forest, where he found that the trees were like “living company, they seem to give off something dynamic and secret, and anti human—or non-human.” But it was not just the forest itself. The inspiration was specific, he told a friend: “Especially fir-trees.” (A different tree was to provide the inspiration for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which Lawrence wrote in the wood near the Villa Mirenda, near Florence, where he and Frieda were living in 1927. Then it was an umbrella pine. He sat under it, “almost motionless except for his swift writing,” Frieda remembered, so still that lizards ran over him and birds came unusually close. Occasionally, a hunter would be startled by this silent figure in the forest.) He finished Aaron’s Rod on the first day of June.

  His difficulties with Mr. Noon and Aaron’s Rod were an anomaly in one way, but crippling for that very reason. All through 1920, and 1921, and into 1922, Lawrence had been writing, and almost any writer might have looked back on the years as enviably prolific. He had written stories; he had written essays; he had written his “little travel book” Sea and Sardinia, which attracted Mabel Sterne’s interest; he had written a number of poems; he had written articles; and he had worked on his translations. Seltzer and Secker had both been busy publishing his many books. Not the least reason behind his productivity was his need for money. The only income the Lawrences had was from the work he could sell.

  The need for money was, of course, real, as was his ability to write almost at will. But for Lawrence, the novel was the crucial thing. Stories and essays, and then the books they were collected into, were what he called “my interim,” written with a different effort. “The novels and poems come unwatched out of one’s pen,” he explained, flow
ing from “pure passionate experience.” What he wrote in the interim were “inferences made afterwards, from the experience” of the others. Novels and poems arose unwatched, expressions of the present; his other work was more consciously derived from experience that had quickly and inevitably become the past. Lawrence had been writing during the year, as Virginia Woolf had, but he had not been successful at writing the fiction that mattered to him. It was progress in writing a novel that defined Lawrence to himself, just as Virginia’s anxiety about her delay in finishing Jacob’s Room defined Woolf to herself. They shared, as Eliot did, the frustrating conundrum Forster had described but had for too long been unable to escape: always working, never creating.

  A new place to write a novel—that was what Lawrence had gone to Ceylon hoping to find, his exhaustion in Europe deepened by the fate of Women in Love. His friend John Middleton Murry not only wrote a scathing review of Women in Love when the Secker edition appeared in June 1921 but, four months later, in October, remarked in a review of another writer’s work that Lawrence was among those novelists who “appear to have passed their prime long before reaching it.” Lawrence would only have scoffed at Murry’s criticism. But the fact that he had become stuck while writing his two most recent novels, had ultimately finished only one of them, and was not working on a new one unfortunately gave him, as it had given the similarly stymied Woolf and Forster, the same idea.

  * * *

  In Thirroul, Lawrence now set himself a task. Perhaps he could write a novel as he had written his “interim” books, quickly, often in a month or less. Could he leave for America with a finished manuscript in his trunk?

  The book was not thought out, but in the experiment he might discover the new form he had envisioned at the start of the year. He had only its setting—it was “pitched” in Australia, as if it were a tent that could come down quickly if he needed to move on. He began work with one eye on the novel itself and another on the schedule of ships sailing to America from Sydney harbor. There were three ships departing at various points in July and August, one for any eventuality with the book, and he would stop, or keep on, writing, depending on what the schedule of boats imposed upon, or allowed, him.

  He did not go outside to write this time—he needed no tree. He sat at a large table facing the windows that offered an expansive view of the Pacific. He wrote from memory, but of events that had taken place only days before. It was less a novel, at the start, than a diary of what he and Frieda had just been doing and saying. His novels had always been filled with characters based on the people he knew, sometimes without any (or at least enough) alteration, as the Heseltine libel action in 1921 had suggested. People closer to him than Heseltine, including Ottoline Morrell, whom he’d depicted parodically as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love, were hurt, while others were content, at least in retrospect, to have served a genius in his work. Frieda was one of these.

  Lawrence started writing on June 3, almost precisely a year since he had finished Aaron’s Rod. The novel begins as Lawrence and Frieda began the latest leg of their travels east, with the arrival of two characters in Sydney. A writer and his wife have come to Australia. There are workmen lying on the grass in a park. “It was winter, the end of May,” as it had been for Frieda and Lawrence, and lying there in the sun the workmen had “that air of owning the city which belongs to a good Australian,” as Lawrence, who at that point had met very few, was very happy to generalize. The writer and his wife cross the park, in search of a taxi, observed by the workmen.

  “One was a mature, handsome, fresh-faced woman, who might have been Russian”—this was Harriet Somers, who might have been Russian if she had not been German, and a version of Frieda.

  “Her companion was a smallish man, pale-faced, with a dark beard,” in the novel Richard Lovat Somers, “a fanciful writer of poems and essays,” and in life, David, poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist, who at five foot nine was small only in comparison to the larger Frieda, who in turn appeared especially buxom (and mature) next to her rail-thin husband, a “comical-looking bloke,” only a “foreign-looking little stranger” who with his wife makes up a “pair of strangers.” This is what the workmen saw. But Somers—Lawrence had used the same initials, R. L., for his doppelgänger in Aaron’s Rod—looks back at a mechanic staring at him, and takes his own measure of himself, his bearing “so straight, so observant, and so indifferent.”

  This was Lawrence as he started to write his novel Kangaroo. He had abandoned Mr. Noon, a transparently autobiographical work, but despite that failure, he once again took his inspiration from his life with Frieda, and soon enough he was “suddenly writing again.” He and Frieda quickly found a routine, he at work in the morning, Frieda at the same time doing her sewing and other chores at home. Then they swam, “when the sun is very warm and the beach quite, quite lonely, only the waves.” Most afternoons, Lawrence wrote letters while Frieda slept, his prodigious correspondence, many letters written every day—to his friends, to his agents in the United States and England, to his publishers in New York and London—more evidence of the social nature of this man who professed to revel in isolation. Lawrence was rarely out of touch, and he often shared the same news and observations with many people, as if, by telephone, he had called a number of friends one after the other and told them each the same stories of what had happened to him in the days or weeks since they had last seen one another or spoken. On other afternoons, he would read to Frieda what he had written in the morning, as was their habit. Once Lawrence was at work on his novel, Frieda wrote, “the days slipped by like dreams, but real as dreams are when they come true.”

  If his writing of the novel “keeps on at the rate it is going,” Lawrence expected it would be ready by August, he told his agent on the ninth of June, only days after he had begun it. “But it is a rum sort of novel, that’ll probably bore you,” he warned him. It was braided from two halves that joined uneasily. One part is a record of his and Frieda’s daily life, their pleasures, and, more substantially and entertainingly, their disputes. The other is from the newspapers, a story of political unrest in Sydney fomented by a nascent fascist organization led by the apparently mythical (but ultimately quotidian) figure called “Kangaroo,” the nickname his followers give “Benjamin Cooley,” a Jewish lawyer of great charm. Somers, the Lawrence figure, becomes an unlikely admirer, wondering whether his destiny (that word again) is to put his literary art at the service of Kangaroo’s revolution—as Kangaroo spends a dramatically unconvincing amount of time urging him to do—or whether he might join the union men who oppose Kangaroo from the left.

  Kangaroo became the title almost as soon as he started work. Writing to Earl Brewster, he called it “a weird thing of a novel.” The part that is a largely accurate domestic diary of Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence includes a fantasy of instant friendship with a younger couple who are neighbors of Somers and his wife, for which there was no counterpart intimacy in reality. In the novel, Lawrence’s long-cherished and long-delayed Rananim was conveniently just across the garden, but just as conveniently without the demands made by the living people who usually got in the way of Lawrence’s fulfillment of his utopian plans. But Kangaroo was also an experiment. The friendship with the couple, the Callcotts, is the hinge of a second fantasy. Callcott introduces Somers to Kangaroo, and from that meeting, the Rananim next door leads the writer, as Lawrence had also dreamed, to revolution. Will he be at its center—or will he balk from revolution as he had balked at going to America? Kangaroo was also to be a political novel set in an Australia that might be a kind of social laboratory, a “weird unawakened country … with huge unfolding breakers and an everlastingly folded secret,” a place in which the “sustaining magic” of nature had given him the same impetus to write that the previous year he had found under the fir tree in Baden-Baden.

  Only three weeks later, he had written more than half of what he thought the novel would in the end be. Frieda wrote to Mrs. Jenkins in Perth that Lawrence “has wr
itten his head off—nearly written a novel in a month.” Lawrence told Thomas Seltzer, “the Lord alone knows what anybody will think of it: no love at all, and attempt at revolution.” This was much the same promise he usually made to his agents and his publishers—that his next novel would have “no sex and no problems.” This time it was largely true. Though there was love in it. R. L. Somers falls under the rapturous sway of Kangaroo just as in Aaron’s Rod the “R. L.” protagonist, Rawdon Lilly, fell under the sway of the title character of that novel. Lawrence describes the sexual energy of the surprising ideological attraction—“Richard’s hand was almost drawn in spite of himself to touch the other man’s body”—but Kangaroo was only about politics, Lawrence wrote to Seltzer, in part to reassure him and in part because he knew that politics were more alluring for Seltzer, a Socialist and the founder and former editor of the Masses.

  Lawrence worked on the book steadily through the Australian autumn, at the rate of at least thirty-five hundred words a day, or higher if he took any days off. His notebooks were as neat and nearly free of substantive revision as ever. The story—the part that was not political—became entertainingly and revealingly about him and Frieda, particularly engaging when it is the wife’s turn to pierce the arid (and frequent) theorizing of her husband. This is what Harriet does during one of Somers’s disquisitions that particularly bores and enrages her. “Mr Dionysos and Mr Hermes and Mr Thinks-himself-grand,” Harriet calls Somers, in a chapter Lawrence titled “Harriet and Lovat at Sea in Marriage.” “I’ve got one thing to tell you,” she says. “I’ve done enough containing and sustaining of you, my gentleman, in the years I’ve known you. It’s almost time you left off wanting so much mothering. You can’t live a moment without me.”