The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Frieda may have been pleased with Lawrence’s sardonic start, but it was not a vein in which Lawrence could write for very long. He was not a satirist, and Mabel—so ripe for satire, as he had known she would be—enraged him too much once they’d met. She “hates the white world, and loves the Indians out of hate,” Lawrence wrote his mother-in-law. Instead of pursuing the “M. Sterne novel of here,” he revised Kangaroo so that Seltzer could publish it in 1923, and he left in “The Nightmare” as he told Mountsier he must.

  * * *

  Two months of Mabel-town turned out to be all Lawrence could stand. This was longer than he had survived the heat and mosquitoes of Ceylon, and the haven he now found, a nearby ranch, higher in the mountains, promised the isolation they had found alongside the Pacific in Australia. As usual with Lawrence, the move he contemplated could not be made simply. He must make the move a manifesto, and just as at the start of 1922 he had heralded the new year to Earl Brewster as a “new incarnation,” he wrote to Mabel at the end of the first week of November to tell her of his decision. It was as intolerable in mind as in body to live on Mabel Sterne’s ground, and he would not do it, he announced in a letter, including ten itemized points, he wrote in response to a lost letter of hers that perhaps made new demands he could not countenance.

  He, too, he told her, would “put it in black and white” and began with the item, “I don’t believe in the ‘Knowing’ woman you are.” Mabel may have provoked him, but his response was a condemnation of the modern world, more revealing of Lawrence than of Mabel.

  She was “bullying and Sadish”—for sadistic—against Tony as well as himself and Frieda, not to mention the others in her orbit, and despite (or because of) her three marriages and her affair with Tony, she was “antagonistic to the living relation of man and wife.” In what might be the most poignant thing he ever wrote or said about Frieda, Lawrence told Mabel, “I believe that, at its best, the central relation between Frieda and me is the best thing in my life, and, as far as I go, the best thing in life.” And the letter went on.

  It gives one a sense of Lawrence to know that after having written this letter—however correct he was in his bill of particulars against her—he could still believe, as he wrote to Seltzer, “Of course there is no breach with Mabel Sterne.”

  At first it seemed he and Frieda might be able to move to a ranch owned by Mabel’s son. But it needed too many repairs, which could not be done before winter set in, and in any case was still too much on “Mabel Sterne’s territory.”

  The new ranch, Del Monte, was set in a triangle with the house of the rancher from whom they rented it. There was also another house on the property, a smaller house in which, once again reaching for Rananim, he put up two young Danish artists he had met, his own generosity as padrone very different in spirit from Mabel’s and a plain rebuke to her. Their little Lawrence-town made him glad to be “on free territory once more.”

  In the mountains, the snow was deep and coyotes could be heard howling by the gate to the property. As if to revel in their freedom, he and Frieda went riding, both of them fully American at least on the outside, in cowboy hats and boots.

  But Lawrence would not have been himself if, however happy he was, he were not also equally unhappy. Just as he had loved swimming in the Pacific but then complained about how crashingly noisy it was, at Del Monte he exulted in the landscape but qualified it, loving the land “in bits.” The pureness of the air and the clearness of the sky, the beauty of the clouds and the stunning sunsets, these were glorious. But then the expanses became shadowed for him, albeit in white: the snow-covered mountains above the ranch, and the flat table of the deserts below, combined to weigh on his mind and spirit and felt to him “so heavy and empty.… It is very depressing.”

  One of the Danes, the painter Knud Merrild, was to recall that Lawrence conjured Del Monte as an endangered Eden delicately poised so near to Mabel-town, but his own territory free of the “cobra.” Merrild recollected Lawrence’s conversation as perhaps more lyrical and apocalyptic than it was, but he captured what was then, and always, at stake for Lawrence. The world must be remade, and it had gone wrong at the start, at the very birth of man—and woman. Mabel was the Queen Cobra in a coterie filled with snakes, their fangs “full and surcharged with insult,” and ready to bite him at the slightest bending toward them. This was more of the “beshitten” world he had wanted to flee when he first proposed leaving Taormina in the autumn of 1921, a year before.

  “God in Heaven, no, they shall not bite me,” he cried, “I must make my own world,” he told Merrild, away from “beastly humans,” in search, as he had been a year before, of that place, “somewhere away by myself,” that he had not yet found.

  The mountains themselves and the desert were tainted by the simple fact that they were American. For beyond Del Monte was the rapacious United States that with its country of materialism and hypocritical egalitarianism had killed the Indian magic he had dreamed of finding in the ancient West. His experience of America confirmed in him the idea with which he had arrived, that it was a country with, as he put it now, “no inside to life: all outside.”

  He recalled a conversation in Taormina with a Mrs. Ashley, an American. “In my country,” he had heard her say to the sister of an Italian duke, “we’re all Kings and Queens.” This was the problem. “And by Jove they are—of their own muck-heaps, of money if nothing else.”

  * * *

  Eventually Seltzer had been able to find a copy of Ulysses for Lawrence. It arrived in Taos on November 6, together in a package with copies of three of his own books, Fantasia of the Unconscious; England, My England; and the trade edition of Women in Love, “all very nice, but a terrible wrapper on Women in Love,” Lawrence thought, put off by the head of a woman with streaming hair it depicted.

  Seltzer had procured the copy of Ulysses from an acquaintance, “F. Wubbenhorst,” a New Yorker, otherwise unidentified. Believing that Seltzer had only borrowed it from Mr. Wubbenhorst, Lawrence promised to read it within about a week and return it. Seltzer, though, had actually bought it, at his own expense, as a gift. When Lawrence later learned this, and that the price might have been $25 or more, he was grateful but adamant, perhaps even more on his guard living as he still was on Mabel’s “ground.” “I do not want you to pay for books for me. Please charge them to me, or I feel uneasy.”

  Lawrence was no more impressed by Ulysses than he had thought he would be. No Ulyssean he. When Lawrence sent the book back to Wubbenhorst on November 14, he was thankful for the loan but glad to be rid of it. “I am sorry, but I am one of the people who can’t read Ulysses. Only bits,” which was not far from Virginia’s reaction, though he did not persevere as she had done, having only barely cut the pages before he’d had enough to plant his own stick in the ground. Perhaps with Murry’s review of Aaron’s Rod in mind, he wrote to Wubbenhorst, “I am glad I have seen the book, since in Europe they usually mention us together—James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence—and I feel I ought to know in what company I creep to immortality.”

  He expected that Joyce “would look as much askance on me as I on him” (Joyce, in fact, had less regard for Lawrence and felt less need to know in what company he was creeping to immortality). But Lawrence was good-natured about the true kinship he had with Joyce, as a victim of Sumner, and of the fury of John Bull. “We make a choice of Paolo and Francesca floating down the winds of hell,” he wrote Wubbenhorst, invoking characters of Dante’s Inferno who inhabit the second circle with other sinners condemned for illicit sexual activity, the buffeting of the winds an external counterpart to the internal passions Paolo and Francesca had succumbed to and that Lawrence and Joyce had gone their separate ways to depict.

  Lawrence had read his Dante, but he would read no more of Ulysses, though he continued, as Virginia Woolf had done in August, to fabricate his own case “for & against.” It was more against, and he resisted when Seltzer suggested that his offhand commentary to Wubbenhorst be published.
“Do you really want to publish my James Joyce remarks,” he wrote as they were planning a trip the Seltzers were to make to Taos for Christmas. “No, I don’t think it’s quite fair to him.”

  Both Lawrence and Woolf might have been pleased to have read John Quinn’s October 1922 letter to Harriet Weaver, Joyce’s publisher at the Egoist Press. Thanking her for some clippings she had sent him, he told her Joyce’s novel was a “great thing, a unique thing, and will probably remain unique.” But the intensity of people’s reactions, on either side, was overwrought, and the jousting of critics one against the other in personal terms was ridiculous, Quinn thought. “It is no proof that a man is a fool because he does not admire Ulysses,” he told Weaver, and no proof, either, that someone was a genius for admiring it. “If everyone admired it or if it was generally admired, I should doubt the soundness of my feeling that it was a great work of art,” he wrote.

  “It is absurd for people to get angry at Ulysses or at Joyce. But it is equally absurd for people who like and admire Ulysses to get angry at those who get angry at Ulysses.”

  * * *

  In America, as elsewhere, Lawrence felt like a foreigner in exile. But the one bright side to America was that the trial of Women in Love had led to tremendous sales. “Why do they read me?” he wondered to Catherine Carswell about his American audience. “But anyhow, they do read me—which is more than England does.”

  Seltzer’s trade edition of Women in Love appeared nearly simultaneously with an originally scheduled collection of stories published as England, My England. Lawrence sent copies of both books to friends around the world as Christmas presents. The title that had seemed an elegy for a lost land, the England he had left five years before, had become a greeting, a herald of homecoming, a wish for this Englishman in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England, to make it his own again, somehow.

  * * *

  Earlier in the year Seltzer had thought he might travel west to meet Lawrence’s boat when it docked in San Francisco. The seizure and the subsequent trial, as well as the press of other business, had made that impossible. Now, to celebrate “Victory” and flush, at last, and for the only time, with unanticipated revenue from Women in Love, he and his wife would come to Taos for Christmas. Writing to Adele Seltzer about the visit, Frieda warned, “You will find it a different sort of life after New York—Bring warm clothes and old clothes and riding things if you like riding—It’s primitive to say the least of it—but plenty of wood and cream and chickens.”

  Last year, in Taormina, Lawrence had had the flu and been glad of it. He hated Christmas. This year, he was more happily settled and ready to celebrate the holiday with the Seltzers and the Danes. Together they decorated an outdoor Christmas tree, under which, in warmer weather, he might have been writing.

  Chapter 16

  “MRS DALLOWAY HAS BRANCHED INTO A BOOK”

  “Well—what remains to be written after that?” Virginia had wondered to Roger Fry, returning to the sublime world of Proust she had sacrificed for Ulysses. At Hogarth House she began to see that what remained to be written was her own new book.

  Leonard and Virginia returned to Paradise Road on Thursday, October 5. She was ready for autumn to begin and for the publication of Jacob’s Room. Just before they left Rodmell, Virginia heard from Donald Brace, “my first testimony from an impartial person,” who thought Jacob’s Room “an extraordinarily distinguished & beautiful book … or words to that effect” and praised her “own method,” as Leonard had done. Brace’s letter left her feeling “a little uppish … & self assertive,” ready to follow the plan she had laid out in the spring, “two books running side by side,” fiction and once again her book on reading. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and her chapter on Chaucer, for the other book, were done. She had read five books of the Odyssey and Ulysses, was returning to Proust, and after that would undertake an ambitious course of “reading with a purpose”: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, a Plato dialogue, and more.

  In January she had started her diary in the “odd leaves at the end of poor dear Jacob,” at least in part because of parsimony. Now she did something similar, taking up the third notebook she had used to write Jacob’s Room to make some detailed notes. “Thoughts upon beginning a book to be called, perhaps, At Home: or The Party,” she wrote. She saw the book whole, and almost all at once, her idea for it growing out of challenges of form and characterization she felt she’d left unresolved in Jacob’s Room.

  “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” she decided, was to be the first in a series of perhaps eight stories she would write at roughly the rate of one a month, each “complete separately” but with “some sort of fusion,” which was, of course, the element missing in Ulysses and The Waste Land. Seeing the new book whole was the key. Her relief when she read Donald Brace’s letter had been a certainty that what she had seen as the disconnected rhapsodies of Jacob’s Room would at least “make some impression, as a whole,” upon readers; that it “cannot be wholly frigid fireworks.” Now she made a list of chapters: “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” then “The Prime Minister,” which she had thought about at Rodmell and began to write on the same day she wrote out her notes, October 6. Then there were to be six more, she projected. Important details were to change—the title of the book, for one; the names of the chapters she planned and then whether there would even be chapters—but in the more than two years’ work that were to follow from these notes, Virginia honed, but did not veer from, her initial conception.

  The sequence, she outlined for herself, “must converge upon the party at the end,” as if in laying out this challenge she aimed to correct the only lapse Leonard had identified in Jacob: the party in that book. She had been thinking since the spring about how a party might draw together a disparate group of people and as a scene-setting device make them, and the story in which they appear, a coherent whole. She had written the dinner party scene in “Byron and Mr. Briggs” that had ended when Clarissa Dalloway told her friends it was time to go to Clara Durrant’s party. That had led to “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” and in writing this party she must get it right this time. She acknowledged how the threads of one had led her to the others in the label she pasted on her notebook: “Book of scraps of J’s R. & first version of The Hours,” one of the several titles she would give the book while working on it.

  In the six weeks between October 6 and November 19, Woolf made four substantive sets of notes, two in October and two in November, in each month setting them down ten days apart, as if the intervals were pauses designed to spare mental reserves between sprints. But she was not resting. The intervals of time were like her afternoon walks: she was working through what she was to write, foreseeing it all while seeming to be engaged in another task entirely. She periodically urged herself on in her diary—“I must get on with my reading…”; “I want to think out Mrs Dalloway”—while she also ruminated on the reviews of Jacob’s Room and reluctantly attended to problems at the Hogarth Press and other quotidian details. But all the while she was thinking out Mrs. Dalloway, the building of her structural and thematic plan work she was then able to commit to paper quickly and virtually without a single crossing out, in short lines that run down the pages of her notebooks like poetry.

  Mrs. Dalloway “ushers in a host of others, I begin to perceive,” and though she was not sure who these other characters would be, her notes were a tool, like binoculars, to bring these characters far off on the horizon into better focus. These as-yet-unknown figures must be depicted “much in relief,” she wrote, the challenge for her to present them from the outside in a way that would join those sections seamlessly with the depiction of Clarissa from within that had been her breakthrough in “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” Perhaps there could be “interludes of thought, or reflection, or short digressions.” But then how would these sections “be related, logically, to the rest”? How could she keep it “all compact, yet not jerked”? She didn’t know yet. The stori
es must be drawn together into a story. The characters must converge on the party. She must fuse the sculpture of the external view with Clarissa’s internal view that was like an X-ray. She would later call this technique of revealing the character’s mind and past, “tunneling.”

  In the end, Woolf drafted most of the stories, which were published posthumously. “The Prime Minister” did indeed become the next chapter of “Mrs. D.,” and Virginia began it exactly where “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” left off. The sound from the street heard in the glove shop was heard again, by others, at the start of the second story, which solved one mystery: “the violent explosion” from the street was the backfiring of a car. The scene drafted in the story was eventually “fused” to its predecessor in a new way when Virginia jettisoned the idea of chapters as too great a break in the texture of the book.

  * * *

  Jacob’s Room was published on October 27, in an edition of one thousand copies. It turned out that Virginia could write, and contentedly enough, while being read, the mixed reviews—the Times’s “long, a little tepid”; “Pall Mall [Gazette] passes me over as negligible”; the Daily Mail called her “an elderly sensualist”—a contrast to the letters that satisfied her, from Morgan (“the letter I’ve liked best of all”), and Ottoline, and from Lytton, who “prophecies immortality for it as poetry,” though his letter praised the book “too highly for it to give me exquisite pleasure.” She was either “a great writer or a nincompoop,” but the lack of the public “splash” didn’t bother her when weighed against private enthusiasm that was the “most whole hearted” she had ever had.