Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  It had the effect of loosening at least some of the mute tongues about the table, though none of us women was perceptibly elevated. Lawrence began to talk in Spanish (which he had learned in Mexico). Donald, who prided himself on knowing a bit of Spanish (enough to read Don Quixote and to reply to simple questions), endeavoured to engage in Spanish conversation with Lawrence. This, for some reason, infuriated Kot to such a degree that he looked like taking the unwary Donald's life had not Murry tactfully placed somebody between them. Kot's idea seemed to be that the Spanish language was Lawrence's special perquisite. Gertler drank, or refrained from drinking, in silence, looking on, always looking on from a cold afar. Both he and Mary Cannan left early.

  But not before this strange incident. It began with a speech by Kot in praise and love of Lawrence, the speech being punctuated by his deliberate smashing of a wineglass at the close of each period. As - 'Lawrence is a great man.' (Bang! down came Kot's strong fist enclosing the stem of a glass, so that its bottom came in shivering contact with the table.) 'Nobody here realises how great he is.' (Crash! another good wineglass gone.) 'Especially no woman here or anywhere can possibly realise the greatness of Lawrence.' (Smash and tinkle!) 'Frieda does not count. Frieda is different. I understand and don't include her. But no other woman here or anywhere can understand anything about Lawrence or what kind of being he is.'

  We women were silent. We felt, I think, very sympathetic to Kot. Anyhow I did. Sympathetic to his jealous, dark and overpowering affection - even inclined to agree with what he said.

  Lawrence looked pale and frightfully ill, but his eyes were starry to an extraordinary degree. It occurred to me then - and I have since had no reason to change my reading, which was revealed as by the appearance of clear writing on the wall - that the deep hold of the Last Supper on the imagination of the world is not unconnected with the mystery of Bacchus. Given a man of genius; more especially given a man whose genius runs to expression by means of symbol, his essential utterance may well be achieved only when his genius is acted upon at a crisis by the magic of the fermented grape.

  Anyhow, Lawrence who, like the others present, was habitually temperate, revealed that night at the Café Royal his deepest desire to all of us simply and unforgettably. And in doing so he brought about some other revelations, as will be seen.

  Without making anything approaching a speech, he caught our attention by the quiet urgency of his request. What he said, in effect, was that we were his friends here, each and all of us people he had been very fond of. He could not stay in England. He must go back to New Mexico. Would we, would any of us, go with him? He asked each of us in turn. Would we go with him? Implicit in this question was the other. Did the search, the adventure, the pilgrimage for which he stood, mean enough to us for us to give up our own way of life and our own separate struggle with the world? Though his way of life must involve also a struggle with the world, this was not - as we well knew - its main objective. Rather was it a withdrawal of one's essential being from that struggle, and a turning of what strength one had into a new channel.

  Essentially the appeal was not a personal one. Though it was to his friends, it was not for his sake or the sake of friendship that he made it. It was because of something in himself which we all acknowledged. But it had never before become so near being a personal appeal. It certainly had a personal element that told of his overwhelming loneliness. It was far less 'follow me' than 'come with me'. It was even - to my thinking at least - 'come for a time, and support me by your presence, as the undertaking is too much for me alone, yet I must not stay here with you'. I give my own reading, but I think something very like it was in the minds of all the others.

  Remember we had just supped, and our glasses had been replenished with port, and, as I have said, we were all normally very abstemious people.

  Mary Carman was the only one to return a flat negative to Lawrence's question. It was as plump and plain as she herself was slender and pretty. 'No,' said she hardily. 'I like you, Lawrence, but not so much as all that, and I think you are asking what no human being has a right to ask of another.'

  Lawrence accepted this without cavil or offence. It was a clear, hard, honest answer.

  What Gerder said, I can't remember. I rather think it was a humouring but dry affirmative, which we all understood to mean nothing. Kot and Donald both said they would go, less drily, but so that any listener guessed they were speaking from goodwill rather than from deep intention. Dorothy Brett said quickly that she would go, and I, knowing that she would, envied her. Murry promised emotionally that he would, and one felt that he wouldn't. I said yes, I would go. And I meant it, though I didn't see how on earth it could be, anyhow for a long time. Unlike Mary and Dorothy Brett I had neither money of my own nor freedom from responsibility. Dorothy Brett, who loved to serve, was always coming to a loose end. I, who did not particularly like serving, was always having fresh responsibilities put upon me by life. Mary, disappointed with her 'freedom', had yet got used to its little self-indulgences and could not give them up. All the same I felt that Lawrence had somehow the right to ask me to go. And I feel today equally the impossibility of my going and the wish that I had gone.

  As for the supper, what I next remember is Murry going up to Lawrence and kissing him with a kind of effusiveness which afflicted me. He must have been sensible to my feeling, because he turned to me.

  'Women can't understand this,' he said. 'This is an affair between men. Women can have no part or place in it.'

  'Maybe,' said I. 'But anyhow it wasn't a woman who betrayed Jesus with a kiss.'

  At this Murry again embraced Lawrence, who sat perfectly still and unresponsive, with a dead-white face in which the eyes alone were alive.

  'I have betrayed you, old chap, I confess it,' continued Murry. 'In the past I have betrayed you. But never again. I call you all to witness, never again.'

  Throughout all this Frieda remained aloof and scornful - excluded. Her innings would be later. She reminded me of King David's wife looking down in derision from an upper window. One could not but admire her.

  It must have been almost immediately after the strange episode with Murry, that Lawrence, without uttering a sound, fell forward with his head on the table, was deadly sick, and became at once unconscious. The combination of the port (which, when he had said he could not abide, he said truly) and the cruel loneliness which was brought home to him by the responses he had elicited from us, his friends, was too much for him.

  In his sickness Lawrence was more like a child than a man. There was nothing disgusting about him. Frieda, however, remained stonily detached, while Dorothy Brett and I ministered to him as best we could - she especially, who did not want me to help.

  It must have been now that Mary and Gerder left us. What with the glasses broken by Kot, and Lawrence's sickness, I was sorry for the waiters who would have to clear up. But they behaved as if they had noticed nothing out of the way. Donald, as the soberest man, was handed money to pay for the wine and the damage. The bill, he tells me, struck him as wonderfully moderate.

  We left in two taxi-cabs, Lawrence being still unconscious so that it was difficult getting him down in the lift. But Kot, even in liquor, was powerful. I recall that his legs seemed to fill the cab in which I was. I had been given all the hats of the party to hold, and I lost my own - a little real Russian cap of black astrakhan, which I liked better than any head covering I ever had, though I gave only three shillings for it in an antique shop, and it had a bullet-hole through it.

  Arrived at Hampstead the problem was how to get Lawrence up to the first floor. Kot and Murry had to carry him. But in their enthusiasm they went on with their burden, up and up, till my brother, asleep on the top storey, was awakened by the trampling, stumbling sound, and ran out in alarm to the little landing. He told me afterwards that when he saw clearly before him St John and St Peter (or maybe St Thomas) bearing between them the limp figure of their Master, he could hardly believe he was not drea
ming. However, he conducted the party downstairs again.

  Next morning soon after breakfast - certainly not later than 9.30 a.m. - I was passing the open door of the Lawrences' sitting-room, when Lawrence hailed me and bade me enter. He was fresh and serene. 'Well, Catherine,' he said, 'I made a fool of myself last night. We must all of us fall at times. It does no harm so long as we first admit and then forget it.'

  At such times he was an overwhelmingly attractive human being. That fight and easy, yet not flippant manner of his for dealing with such an incident, bespoke an underlying steadiness that begot trust in the onlooker and was - it seems to me - incompatible with any neurotic condition. Although the fullness of his admissions, and the sensitiveness of his abandon to the impulses of life might give to the superficial observer the impression that he was a sufferer from a neurosis, Lawrence was emphatically no neurotic. Of this I am convinced. If I add that he hated neurotics, even while he had the misfortune to find in them more immediately than in others a kind of response which sprang from superficial understanding, I suppose I shall call forth the gibe of the analyst - 'Thou sayest it!' 'The real neurotic is half a devil,' said Lawrence, 'the cured one' with his 'perfect automatic control', is 'a perfect devil'. And again, 'Spit on every neurotic and wipe your feet on his face if he tries to drag you down.' Yet I know that what I say is true. Lawrence hated, he feared, he fought and he was obliged to consort with neurotics. But he was himself untainted.

  When I told him that I had lost my astrakhan cap he insisted on giving me two pounds to buy myself a hat. Unfortunately he did not like the one I bought, though he was too kind to say so. He liked a hat to be a hat, and to have a proper brim. This small black felt was brimless. He gave it a single glance and looked away. 'Quite saucy!' he said. I felt crushed.

  6

  Before returning to New Mexico the Lawrences were going to Baden-Baden, and there was some talk of my meeting them in Paris. But from Paris he wrote to say he did not think it would be worth the effort and the money I should have to expend to get there. One of these days he would give me, he said 'a real holiday in place of this'. He advised me to do as he was doing - to 'lie low' and to 'save oneself up for something better, something real later on'.

  I understood that he did not really wish me to come - bringing with me the reminders of his unsatisfactory visit to London. Besides, as things were, he was right: it was hardly worth while. In less than a week he was going on to Baden-Baden, and was in the mood of wanting to get it all over so that he could get back to New Mexico. In London he had felt more ill than he said to any of us.

  It was, I realised, his first visit to Paris, and he had arrived 'almost stupefied from London' to find - after one rather lovely day of sunshine and frost - something of the unreality of a museum; a museum, moreover, under rain and dark skies. He admitted the beauty, but found less life than in London (not that he liked the life there was in London), and when in the Louvre he kept wondering whether the museum was more inside than outside. Somewhere he has written an amusing and characteristic essay on either the Louvre or the Tuileries, in which Frieda saw herself living in peacock state, a desire from which he dissociated himself with the utmost violence. His own notion was for a life of rough and austere and simple beauty.

  Meanwhile, said he, he wanted only 'to sleep a good bit, and let the days go by'. In fact, however, refreshed immensely by two days' rest alone with Frieda, he was 'trying to amuse himself by writing stories'. It was like him that on a first short visit to the famous capital he should feel compelled to fall back upon short-story writing from sheer lack of amusement. I imagine that the story in question must have been 'Jimmy and the Desperate Woman', which certainly gives us Lawrence at his most amusing, though the Adelphi selected it later in a review as a demonstration of Lawrence at his worst.

  From among the letters and packages which I had to forward, Lawrence told me to keep back and read the manuscript of his introduction to Magnus's Memoirs, after which I was to hand it to Koteliansky. I have said already what I thought of this. Koteliansky, however, disapproved of it, and bluntly told Lawrence so. Lawrence was angry and hurt, the more so because, during his stay in London, both Dorothy Brett and Murry had made the situation between him and Koteliansky a difficult one, and Koteliansky had felt obliged to withdraw essentially from them both, while he remained devoted to Lawrence. He withdrew himself also from the Adelphi into a special and respectable kind of solitude. As an honest man he could see no other way open to him. He was definitely unable to accept or approve of Frieda, and so it was useless for him to think of going to New Mexico, as Lawrence well knew. His great love for Lawrence, however, remained always. He was a critical unbeliever in Lawrence as a 'philosopher' but a profound believer in Lawrence as a man and an artist.

  Among those who were drawn to Lawrence he was the doubting Thomas. I question if any suffered more from being Lawrence's friend.

  After a day at Strasburg, and less than a fortnight at Baden-Baden, Lawrence wrote asking me to find him a quiet hotel in London, as he was coming on February 26th to stay for one week before sailing for New York There was still no word from his New York publisher, and no money, so that the sooner he saw to his affairs out there in person the better. I was to tell nobody that he was coming, as he didn't want 'to see people'. On the way back he wasted five days in Paris hoping to get a reply to his cables from New York. None came.

  For six days he stayed at Garland's Hotel, Pall Mall. He liked this place because of its quiet, old-fashioned, very English ways. Then, with Dorothy Brett to make a third, he and Frieda sailed. After a good journey (which, however, he hated) they reached New York on March 11th in 'a sort of blizzard' that presently gave way to 'strong American sunshine'. In New York they found that, owing to heavy losses, his publisher there could only with difficulty scrape together the few hundred dollars needed to take them west at the end of a week. In spite of the large sales of Women in Love and the respectable sales of other books, there was now no money at all in the bank. Lawrence had spent - for him - a large sum in London and on the Continent. So here he was, actually poorer than on his arrival from Australia. England did not read his books, and the United States did not pay for them. Friendly relations, however, had been preserved: and Lawrence's agent would collect the money that was due 'bit by bit'. All this in his letter to me from New York, where he was doing his best to avoid 'people'. As a place it was 'of course no better than London', but the climate suited him better - 'even the cold wind gives one one's energy back again. It's just that.'

  Travelling down through Kent to Southampton on what happened to be a lovely spring day, he had deeply felt the beauty of England, and he was anxious to hear all about our venture in the country. He knew we had thoughts of a small farm. He would let us know what it was like in Taos when he got there again. It seemed anyhow that there were 'plenty of houses going begging there'.

  Our farm idea dissolved into a very small cottage in Bucks where we reckoned we could live better than in town. When I next heard from Lawrence - towards the end of April - we were shortly going there. He wrote from Santé Fé, to which place he had come down for a day or two to see the Indian dances. This must have been when he saw the 'Dance of the Sprouting Corn', of which he wrote for the Adelphi, although the article did not appear there until August, and was, in fact, the first Lawrence contribution, except for two translations of Verga, since the excerpts from the Fantasia.

  During the first weeks of May he was very happy. To begin with, he was deeply affected and cheered by the sight of the Indian dances; also by himself joining in at times (not in one of the great ritual dances, of course, but in the casual smaller affairs) with some two dozen Indians. It was the first dancing he had ever in his life enjoyed, for he hated ballroom efforts. It was further the first time he had ever felt in physical touch with men who had a traditional religion that still meant something to them. There can be no doubt of this. Though 'superficially' he admitted that he did not like the Indian
s; though he knew that there was no breaking down the barrier of alien blood; though here was only the faintest shadow of what he might have felt had he been able to dance with men of his own blood under an English moon (remote consummation of life for Lawrence!) - yet here was the nearest he was ever to get to 'the dragon's den of the cosmos', and the farthest (save in spirit and in solitude) from the outworn and now accursed ideal of a primal, perfect godhead and a lost perfect paradise. In New Mexico, and for the first time, he found physical relief from the 'cheerful, triumphant success' which was killing the white races with ennui. He became a partaker as well as a spectator. Not by the abnegation of the Christian saint or the Oriental fakir, not by the psychic powers of the yogi, not by the short cut by which a modern world contemplate? the conquest of the cosmos by science, not by any victory over matter by either the spirit or the intellect did Lawrence see the possibility of our salvation from boredom and sterility. We were all starving in the midst of plenty. Nothing was needed but for us to perceive religiously that the cosmos itself was. alive, and to enter into the richness of that perception. In wrestling with a live cosmos men would immediately become themselves gods of a kind - fallible still, but potent with cosmic energy. Then, and only then, could man properly solve his great problems. But to do so we had to 'destroy our own conception', our accustomed consciousness. Because 'a man can belong to one great way of consciousness only'

  It was when Lawrence was thus soothed and restored, that Mabel Luhan gave him a small ranch for himself - the Kiowa. Strictly speaking, it was to Frieda she gave it; but that was because she thought it the best, perhaps the only way of conveying it to Lawrence. Lawrence joyfully accepted it, and at once set about paying for it - with the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. Even at that time this was said to have a high market value, and Mabel could afford, as Lawrence knew, to hold on to it. She was in no need of ready cash. He gave her many other presents and did her substantial services. As usual, Lawrence insisted upon paying his way.