Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

by D. H. Lawrence

  In regard to Murry's proposed visit nothing is clear except that it never took place, that letters passed between the two men and that Lawrence was very angry. As usual, his anger passed, but the crisis that had been reached in their friendship remained, and Lawrence faced it. Early in the year he wrote repudiating the Adelphi once and for all. In view of its recent editorials it had become for him 'a sort of self-betrayal' to appear in its pages, and not again would he do so willingly. He gave Murry a final choice. Let him stand by the Adelphi or by Lawrence. It could not be both.

  Had it been truly the case, as Murry has told us, that the Adelphi was started on Lawrence's behalf, and that he acted therein 'simply' as Lawrence's lieutenant and locum tenens, there would seem to be nothing unwarrantable in such a request. It was, indeed, the same request that Lawrence had made on his arrival in London a year before, when Murry had acceded to it, without, however, acting upon it. But Murry now failed to see that he had any choice in the matter of the Adelphi. In his own phrase he 'accepted the inevitable'. (It is notable how many vague banalities occur when Murry writes of Lawrence - 'simply', 'curiously easy', 'strangely enough', 'irony of fate', 'bolt from the blue', 'out of his ken', 'accepting the inevitable', and the rest.) That is to say, he admitted no responsibility towards Lawrence. The Adelphi, as we have seen, had been designed - unconsciously perhaps at first - as the mouthpiece of his own egotism, and in a state of egotistic emotion he had found himself provided with an opening fanfare to the public by Lawrence's Fantasia. Even at the beginning Lawrence's strictures upon the tone of the paper had not been allowed to count; and as it took on ever more clearly the imprint of Murry it had become increasingly the enemy of Lawrence. Now, in the January issue, there had appeared an exposition of the aims of the paper, running to eleven pages, of a kind which was unthinkable for any publication sanctioned by Lawrence. In the February issue Murry undertook to discuss the outlooks of living novelists and poets, yet he made no reference to that 'most significant' one of heretofore. In the March issue Lawrence was found to be at his worst in his contribution to 'The Best Short Stories of 1925'; and not long afterwards The Plumed Serpent was dismissed in a few lines of facetious contempt. To round things off the July issue announced the Prologue to the Life of Jems.

  So Murry 'accepted the inevitable', and, with an 'acquiescence' that was 'curiously easy', told Lawrence that if private feelings were to be dragged in, future co-operation was certainly impossible. Lawrence too had now to accept the inevitable, although it was of a different order from Murry's and had about it no 'curious ease'. From that day until, when he was safely dead, the Adelphi rushed for the time into a new existence on his name, he ceased to contribute. Only a belated and brilliant review by him of Said the Fisherman (which must have been a hold-over) was printed in the January issue of 1927.

  Illness and a visit from Ada to Spotorno - Ada and Frieda having different, and to Lawrence equally obnoxious theories on the subject of sick-nursing, together with bedside technique - brought this unhappy winter to an end. After a short visit with Ada to Monte Carlo, which he hated very much, he fled south again to Capri. Here Dorothy Brett was. Also Millicent Beveridge and Mabel Harrison - another painter who was her friend - and with these two, whom he found pleasant travelling companions, he made the long-ago planned Etruscan tour. The trip lasted from March 22nd till April 2nd. They visited Ravello, Rome, Perugia and Assisi: then went by way of Pisa to Florence, where Lawrence chanced to hear of a country villa. On then to Ravenna, at which town he took ill, so that they had to wait a day or two in a place none of them liked. From there, on to Milan.

  3

  Now Lawrence was joined in Florence by Frieda and her daughters. Through his friend, Pino Orioli, he had found a house - the Villa Mirenda - at the familiar rent of ninety-five pounds a year. Frieda saw it and heartily approved. For a time the four stayed at the Lucchesi pension. Then the girls returned to England and the Lawrences moved in. By the middle of May - a May long remembered in France and Italy for the cold ferocity of its rains - they were established in the new house.

  At first the idea of the Mirenda, as described by Lawrence in his letters, was that it should serve as a pied à terre, so that they might come and go, and lend it (to us and others) when they were away. But in fact it became their much loved home till the summer of 1928, and they were there for a time as late as April, 1929. That it could not be the permanent, nor the all-the-year-round home for which Lawrence was then beginning to long, he knew fairly soon. The rooms which formed the upper part of an attractive old farm villa were fine and large in good weather but bare and cold and comfortless in bad. It stood in good country, lovely country in the spring, but it was a mile and a half from the tram terminus at Scandicci and then half an hour's journey by tram from the Duomo. It was a good place in which to write and paint - especially paint - but a bad place in which to be ill.

  And unhappily from this point onwards Lawrence's plans and movements were to be dictated more and more arbitrarily by illness. That he might bring to fruition the findings of his pilgrimage, he must bend himself to seize and seek every chance of health. He had the strongest hopes that he would be restored; but he had to admit that he was a fugitive, and he never ceased to face the fact that death might overtake him. When Murry identifies him with his own reading of Herman Melville - as a man with 'a long thin chain round his ankle' while he tries frantically to run away, he appropriates a tempting simile and conveys an easy half-truth. But he has omitted two essential elements in Lawrence's life, the elements of art and of illness. And surely he is confusing the needful pilgrimage across the world of a young and delicate, but comparatively sound man, to whose art and aims pilgrimage was a first necessity, with the later and different restlessness imposed upon an experienced man by the struggle for physical existence.

  Lawrence was the first to confess that his trip round the world and his visits to Mexico, New and Old, were 'a kind of running away'. But he needed absolutely to run from the world he knew and to see the world he did not know. It was his initial quest to see if the two ends of humanity might not be brought together - 'our own thin end, and the last dark strand from the previous, pre-white era' - for the beginning of a new life-mode. And to do this he had to see with his own eyes the Buddhist priest in his temple and to hear with his own ears the Indian drum-tap on the mesa. He must subject his own body to the 'boneless suavity' of the East, to the rawness of Australia, to the 'overriding of life' of America. If it was only that in his own person he was the representative of Europe in thus subjecting himself, he had to do it, discovering and condemning himself in the process.

  I've been a fool myself, saying Europe is finished for me. It wasn't Europe at all, it was myself, keeping a stranglehold on myself. And that stranglehold I carried over to America; as many a man, and woman worse still, has done before me.

  So he wrote in an article for America called 'Europe versus America', in April, 1926. It goes on:

  Now, back in Europe, I feel a real relief. The past is too big, and too intimate, for one generation of men to get a stranglehold on it. Europe is squeezing the life out of herself, with her mental education and her fixed ideas. But she hasn't got her hands round her own throat not half so far as America has hers; here the grip is already falling slack; and if the system collapses, it'll only be another system collapsed, of which there have been plenty. But in America, where men grip themselves so much more intensely and suicidally - the women worse - the system has its hold on the very sources of consciousness, so God knows what would happen if the system broke.

  This is confession, but it is also discovery, and it is the kind of discovery that comes only by pilgrimage, and by pilgrimage of the savage kind. It is far removed from the musings that emanate from editorial armchairs. It is indeed removed from any mere musings. In the making of such confessions and discoveries Lawrence fulfilled his paramount duty and his essential destiny.

  But there might, and there should have been more, ha
d he lived. There is every indication that, his pilgrimage fulfilled, Lawrence was not the man to live unsettled and rootless. He knew that every sane creature, man as well as bird or beast, is tied in the long run to a place or compelled to a rhythm by an invisible chain, be it long or short. He believed in natural phases, in the changing needs of age, and in vital progressions and recessions, as strongly as he disbelieved in evolution, as commonly understood. He was quick to know when youth was over, and to make ready for the different richness of age, which to youth can seem so poor and maimed a thing. Even as a boy it was the faded quietness of the married woman that moved him, and September was his favourite month.

  As surely as he had genius Lawrence had the capacity for serene and fruitful old age. In the best sense of two hackneyed but correct expressions, he was already mellowing into a true pontiff of life and letters, who could not have failed of widespread acknowledgement. This is not to say that he failed to do his work. Neither is it to suggest that his ultimate influence would have been increased by established acceptance. I do not think it would. The pontifical voice echoes less hauntingly and long than the voice of one crying in the wilderness. This is merely to say that the potentialities were there - the wisdom, the sanity, the fine incalculableness, the incorruptibility and the passion that is never all spent - in short the capacity to accept responsibility and to blossom afresh in bearing it. Like Mr George Moore, Lawrence would always have remained an artist, yet like Mr H. G. Wells he would always have realised that our age needs most of all a certain life activity in the artist which forbids his preoccupation with artistic perfection. Abundant evidence for these conclusions will be found in his latest works - in Assorted Articles, Etruscan Places, and the magnificently measured Apocalypse, with its profound understanding of Christianity, such an understanding as true repudiation requires. Also in his Last Poems. Not one of these works is marred by a trace of shrillness, decay or impatience. Thanks to his own valiant diligence he had won the recognition and the moderate financial prosperity that were needed for him to set and spread his roots. And he knew it. By 1927 at latest - more probably by 1926 - he was ready to stay quietly productive in some chosen home, or anyhow, as the swallows do, to obey some steady rhythm between two homes.

  By now he had seen what he wanted to see in the world, and he was home-loving by nature. Lawrence was far from being of that omnivorous tribe that must ever be fed with new travel by way of excitement. It might even be said of him that he was the most incurious of men. In the summer of 1926 he said to me - and I knew he spoke truly - that except for the inconvenience of being blind, he would not care now if he were to lose his sight. He had looked his fill, and now there was something other than looking to be done. Certainly he cared not a straw about his greatly increased deafness, which was doubtless the reason why one never thought of noticing it as an affliction. As often as not, one felt that with his outward ears he was hearing rather more than he wanted, and that some degree of deafness was to be desired as a protection against the wearisome chatter of the world. When Dorothy Brett would recharge her listening-machine, I have heard him laugh and ask if any human conversation was worth the three shillings needed for a fresh battery. He was, of course, nothing like so deaf as she, but, had he been past the aid of acousticons, it would not have mattered beyond the practical inconvenience. This will sound exaggerated only to those who did not know him. To those who did he conveyed - quite unconsciously - the strange conviction that if all five senses were to desert him (or anyhow all but the sense of touch) he would still be able both to apprehend and to express the life about him by some direct magic of the blood. The trouble was that in his very blood he now had to grapple with the enemy illness.

  4

  At the Mirenda in May, 1926, he was at first undecided and unwell, though not actually ill. Pressing invitations from Taos inclined, but did not persuade him to go there again for the summer. The effort was too great. It was too far. He could not forget how the altitude in October had torn at his bronchials. Also he was tired of 'straining with the world' - the United States world. He would come to England before the summer was out. For the first time he was chary of inviting me. 'If only the weather cleared up,' he wrote, 'you might come and see us: and if Frieda feels like having a visitor. We'll see later.'

  I thought I understood well enough. In any case I could not have come, as we were making a difficult experiment of our own. I was living in a French village on half a crown a day, with John Patrick at school there and Donald with friends in London. Lawrence, who approved of the move, wrote me encouraging and sympathetic letters, offered to do anything to help, and sent me an introduction I was glad of to Mabel Harrison in Paris. At Jouy-en-Josas (our village) I was for days on end without a soul to speak to.

  Although the years 1926 and 1927 were 'bad' and 'muddled' and 'unsatisfactory', largely because of illness, he went to the Villa Mirenda. He painted happily there, and in so doing developed the passion of his teens. The severe, but sensual and non-intellectual discipline of colour and canvas opened up a new field of activity and a different mode of expression. Not that he stopped writing. But he took writing more easily and watched the Tuscan seasons pass.

  At the Mirenda, however, he had bronchial haemorrhages; and, though he made light of them, the symptom was alarming. When we saw him in London that autumn, he said that the year had been spoiled for him by 'bad colds'. As usual he did not dwell on the subject of his health, but his thinness was distressing.

  This time we saw him only twice. When he and Frieda arrived at the end of July, after a fortnight at Baden-Baden, we were still in France, and we could not return until within a few days of their leaving. They had hired Millicent Beveridge's flat in Chelsea, and here they renewed an old acquaintance with Aldous Huxley. They had first met him as early as 1915, when Lawrence had wanted him to join the Florida group; and his wife Maria they had known before her marriage, when she lived at Garsington Manor with the Morrells. It was now, too, that Lawrence at last met and became on good terms with Frieda's son.

  But the Chelsea flat was chiefly for Frieda, as Lawrence himself wished to be in London as little as possible. So, leaving her there, he had gone first to Inverness-shire for some twelve days to visit the Beveridges, who were at Newtonmore for the summer; and then for over a fortnight to his sisters at Sutton-on-Sea and Mablethorpe, places where he had been on holiday four years before the death of his mother, when he was a youth of nineteen. Scotland, as he saw it at Newtonmore, made no appeal to him. He found in the typical North Highland scenery none of that touching or moving beauty which I believe he would have found either in the Hebrides or in Galloway. Perhaps, too, the weather was bad, though for this I cannot say. Again, though he was glad to see his family, with the children lively and growing, the Lincolnshire coast was too full of sad ghosts for careless enjoyment. When he came back to London in the middle of September the old weariness was upon him, and he was longing for the rich and glowing autumn of the Mirenda vineyards.

  This time they were in rooms in Hampstead, whither even then, we were returning, having taken a studio there. He came with Frieda to lunch, and I was so horrified by his delicate looks that I could think of little else. Our talk, however, so far as I can recall, was chiefly of money - the difficulty of making a living. He had always declared that Donald would never make any money, as money did not enter really into his scheme of things, and that therefore I must. 'You should go on a lecture tour in America,' he now said, scolding a little. 'Now, don't say you can't. That helpless air of yours would just be the very thing. You'd have all the Yanks scrambling about to do things for you.' I laughed, partly at this fancy picture and partly relishing his malice. But he insisted, and we argued. 'Well,' said I after a while, 'shall I go on tour and expound D. H. Lawrence and his works?'

  He thought this a good plan. Yes, this was what I must do. And immediately he mapped out my tour and gave me all sorts of practical hints about the Americans and how to treat them. Then I woul
d come home with bulging purse and we should all three be able to go and live near the Mirenda or at the ranch, or both. 'Have you never thought of lecturing yourself?' I asked. But this he seemed to regard as an unnecessary question. Excellent as Lawrence could be as a fireside or roadside expositor, it was certainly difficult to imagine him as a platform lecturer.

  He had brought me a typescript to read, saying that he much wanted to know how it struck me. This was a section of Mabel Dodge Luhan's autobiography, beginning with her earliest memories and carrying her well into adult life, which she had sent to Italy for Lawrence's advice about possibilities of publication. His own opinion, as I remember, seemed to be that publication would have to be deferred until after the deaths of all the people who appeared in the narrative.

  All autobiographies are interesting, and I found this one especially so. But it was so full of personalities and so unreserved that it struck me as unfit for publication for many years to come. When I told this to Lawrence he agreed. 'But I don't care,' he added with a grin, 'so long as she dies before she gets to Frieda and me!' When he had said a thing like this Lawrence would set his teeth in his lower lip, drop his head and look up at you sideways, his eyes dancing with a special kind of malice. Perhaps he was never more himself than just then, and if you did not like him thus you did not like him at all.

  That day, having some other engagement, they had to leave early. I went out to the street to say goodbye, and though I saw that Lawrence sped along as swiftly as ever - not like any town walker - with Frieda careering in full sail beside him, I looked after him with a sinking heart. It was a shivery afternoon. He had told me how depressing and void he found the faded eighteenth-century charm of Hampstead, even at its best. How long ago it seemed since in the summer of 1914 we had all gone for a picnic on the Heath! How far, far beyond our reckoning Lawrence had shot in experience and achievement! Now, by being still in NW3,I felt that somehow I had failed myself and him; that all the while he had sat talking so gently and stimulatingly by the studio fire, he had done so merely out of the kindness that was in him; that really he hated being there. And yet, when I had boasted that John Patrick was 'a good traveller', he had shaken his head and said, 'Nay, Catherine, but I want to hear of good stayers at home!' All of which contradictory things came with a truth of their own out of Lawrence's richness of spirit, and none of which things would have made my heart sink so badly but for Lawrence's dreadful thinness of body. He had alarmed me by mentioning for the first time that he had had a 'bronchial' haemorrhage. But immediately he had brushed my alarm aside. 'It's nothing serious,' he had assured me, 'not lungs, you know, only bronchials - tiresome enough, but nothing to worry about, except that I must try not to catch colds.'