I looked at him in amazement. It was obvious that a new-born babe was as fit to paint pictures as he was. He knew technically all there was to know about pictures: all about two-dimensional and three- dimensional composition, also the colour-dimension and the dimension of values in that view of composition which exists apart from form: all about the value of planes, the value of the angle in planes, the different values of the same colour on different planes: all about edges, visible edges, tangible edges, intangible edges: all about the nodality of form- groups, the constellating of mass-centres: all about the relativity of mass, the gravitation and the centrifugal force of masses, the resultant of the complex impinging of masses, the isolation of a mass in the line of vision: all about pattern, line pattern, edge pattern, tone pattern, colour pattern, and the pattern of moving planes: all about texture, impasto, surface, and what happens at the edge of the canvas: also which is the aesthetic centre of the canvas, the dynamic centre, the effulgent centre, the kinetic centre, the mathematical centre and the Chinese centre: also the points of departure in the foreground, and the points of disappearance in the background, together with the various routes between these points, namely, as the crow flies, as the mind intoxicated with knowledge reels and gets there: all about spotting, what you spot, which spot, on the spot, how many spots, balance of spots, recedence of spots, spots on the explosive vision and spots on the co-ordinative vision: all about literary interest and how to hide it successfully from the policeman: all about photographic representation, and which heaven it belongs to and which hell: all about the sex appeal of a picture, and when you can be arrested for solicitation, when for indecency: all about the psychology of a picture, which section of the mind it appeals to, which mental state it is intended to represent, how to exclude the representation of all other states of mind from the one intended, or how, on the contrary, to give a hint of complementary states of mind fringing the state of mind portrayed: all about the chemistry of colours, when to use Windsor and Newton and when not, and the relative depth of contempt to display for Lefranc: on the history of colour, past and future, whether cadmium will really stand the march of ages, whether viridian will go black, blue, or merely greasy, and the effect on our great- great-grandsons of the flake white and zinc white and white lead we have so lavishly used: on the merits and demerits of leaving patches of bare, prepared canvas, and which preparation will bleach, which blacken: on the mediums to be used, the vice of linseed oil, the treachery of turps, the meanness of gums, the innocence or the unspeakable crime of varnish: on allowing your picture to be shiny, on insisting that it should be shiny, or weeping over the merest suspicion of gloss, and rubbing it with a raw potato: on brushes, and the conflicting length of the stem, the best of the hog, the length of bristle most to be desired on the many varying occasions, and whether to slash in one direction only : on the atmosphere of London, on the atmosphere of Glasgow, on the atmosphere of Rome, on the atmosphere of Paris, and the peculiar action of them all upon vermilion, cinnabar, pale cadmium yellow, mid-chrome, emerald green, Veronese green, linseed oil, turps, and Lyalls’ perfect medium : on quality, and the relation to light, and its ability to hold its own in so radical a change of light as that from Rome to London - all these things the young man knew - and out of it, God help him, he was going to make pictures.
Now, such innocence and such naivete, coupled with true modesty, must make us believe that we English have indeed, at least as far as paint goes, become again as little children : very little children : tiny children : babes : nay, babes unborn. And if we have really got back to the state of the unborn babe, we are perhaps almost ready to be born. The English may be born again, pictorially. Or, to tell the truth, they may begin for the first time to be born: since as painters of composition pictures they don’t really exist. They have reached the stage where their innocent egos are entirely and totally enclosed in pale-blue glass bottles of insulated inexperience. Perhaps now they must hatch out!
‘Do you think we may be on the brink of a Golden Age again in England?’ one of our most promising young writers asked me, with that same half-timorous innocence and naivete of the young painter. I looked at him - he was a sad young man - and my eyes nearly fell out of my head. A golden age! He looked so ungolden, and though he was twenty years my junior, he felt also like my grandfather. A golden age! in England! a golden age! now, when even money is paper! when the enclosure in the ego is final, when they are hermetically sealed and insulated from all experience, from any touch, from anything solid.
‘I suppose it’s up to row,’ said I.
And he quietly accepted it.
But such innocence, such naivete must be a prelude to something. It’s a ne plus ultra. So why shouldn’t it be a prelude to a golden age? If the innocence and naivete as regards artistic expression doesn’t become merely idiotic, why shouldn’t it become golden? The young might, out of a sheer sort of mental blankness, strike the oil of their live intuition, and get a gusher. Why not? A golden gush of artistic expression! ‘Now we know pretty well everything that can be known about the technical side of pictures.’ A golden age!
Baudot, 1929.
D. H. LAWRENCE
THE PLATES
On the road from Gargnano to San Gaudenzio, Lago di Garda. (April 1913)
New Mexico Landscape (1924)
Untitled (1925)
A Holy Family (November 1926)
Men Bathing (inspired by Cezanne)
Boccaccio Story (November-December 1926)
Red Willow Trees (January 1927)
Fight with an Amazon (December 1926)
Under The Hay-Stack (March 1928)
Flight Back Into Paradise (January 1927)
Throwing Back the Apple
Fauns and Nymphs (March 1927)
Resurrection (May 1927)
Contadini (August 1928)
Renascence of Men (March 1928)
The Lizard (March 1928)
Close-Up (Kiss) (September 1928)
Accident in a Mine (September 1928)
Dance-Sketch (before July 1928)
Leda
Summer Dawn (January)
Spring (1929)
Dandelions (March 1928)
North Sea (August 1928)
The Mango Tree (March 1928)
The Coal-black Smith (August 1928)
Family on a Verandah (April 1928)
The Rape of the Sabine Women (April 1928)
Inspired by Fra Angelico’s Flight into Egypt
The Finding Of Moses (1927- 1928)
Yawning (March 1928)
The man who had died and the Priestess of Isis in Search.
Singing of Swans (1929)
THE END
The Biographies
NOT I, BUT THE WIND... by Frieda Lawrence
Frieda Freiin von Richthofen (1879-1956) is best known for her marriage to D. H. Lawrence, although she was a distant relative of the famous Red Baron. In 1899, she married Ernest Weekley, a British philologist and professor of modern languages, with whom she had three children. They settled in Nottingham, where Ernest worked at the university and she worked on translating pieces of German literature into English.
In 1912 Frieda met Lawrence, who had previously been her husband’s student. They soon fell in love and eloped to Germany, leaving Frieda’s children behind. During their stay, Lawrence was arrested for spying and, after the intervention of Frieda's father, the couple travelled south into Italy. Following her divorce from Weekley, Frieda married Lawrence in 1914. They intended to return to the continent, but the outbreak of war kept them in England, where they endured official harassment and censorship, as well as Lawrence's already frail health.
Leaving post-war England at the earliest opportunity, they travelled widely, eventually settling at the Kiowa Ranch, near Taos, New Mexico and, in Lawrence's last years, at the Villa Mirenda, near Scandicci in Tuscany. After Lawrence’s death in Vence in 1930, Frieda returned to Taos to live with her third husband, Angelo Ravag
li.
In 1935 Frieda published this biography of her life and travels with the famous author.
Frieda, when Lawrence first met her
The first edition of the biography
CONTENTS
Foreword
We Meet
Going Away Together
Isartal
Walking to Italy
1913-1914
The War
Lawrence and My Mother
After the War
America
Going Back to Europe
The Nightingale
Nearing the End
Conclusion
Frieda in later years
Foreword
It was still cold last night, though it is the middle of May.
Here the ranch, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind it to the northeast, slopes to the desert. The big pine trees stand like dark sentinels in the night at the edge of the twenty-acre alfalfa field. Beyond them floats the desert. You can see far. A few lights twinkle at Ranchos de Taos. A shepherd's fire glows. All is covered by an enormous sky full of stars, stars that hang in the pine trees, in Lawrence's big tree with his phoenix on it that the Brett painted, stars that lean on the edge of the mountains, stars twinkling out of the Milky Way. It is so still. Only stars, nothing but stars.
This morning early there was still ice on the edge of the irrigation ditch from the Gallina Canyon. There is such a rush of water. The ice is melting high up in the mountains and the water sings through one's blood.
But now, about midday, it is warm. The desert below circles in rings of shadow and sunshine. The alfalfa field is green, during these last days of sunshine it has turned green.
I am in the little cabin that Lawrence built with the Indians. I sit in the chair that he made with the 'petit point' canvas that we bought in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and that I embroidered. It took me a long time, and when I got bored, he did a bit.
It is a nice chair, although a bit rough, carved as it was with only a penknife.
So I sit and try to write.
I did not want to write this book. I wanted to give Lawrence my silence. Would he have wanted me to write it? Would he have jeered at me as one of those intellectual females whom he disliked so much? Is it any use, my writing?
Do I want to blow my own trumpet? Yes, I do. But will it have a clear rousing sound or will it be a bit wheezy and out of tune? Can I hear the real song of our life, the motifs gay, bold, sad, terrible, or can't I?
After all, this is my book, that I am writing. Do I understand anything at all or am I recording unliving dull facts?
Is it a genuine necessity for me to write or has Lawrence said all a million times better than I could? Will this, that costs me so much, be of any use, any pleasure to anybody else? Will others who come after learn from our life, take from it the good and avoid our mistakes?... I wonder...
Anyhow, I will try to write as honestly as I can. Lies are all very well in their place but the truth seems to me so much more interesting and proud, but truth is not so easily conquered, there is always more of it, like a bottomless pit is truth. It was a long fight for Lawrence and me to get at some truth between us; it was a hard life with him, but a wonderful one. Stark and bare, without trimmings and frills. But a few realities remained, a lasting truth triumphed.
Whatever happened on the surface of everyday life, there blossomed the certainty of the unalterable bond between us, and of the ever-present wonder of all the world around us.
We had so many battles to fight out, so much to get rid of, so much to surpass. We were both good fighters.
There was the ordinary man-and-woman fight between us, to keep the balance, not to trespass, not to topple over. The balance in a human relationship was one of Lawrence's chief themes. He felt that each should keep intact his own integrity and isolation, yet at the same time preserve a mutual bond like the north and south poles which between them enclose the world.
Then there was the class war. We came from different worlds. We both had to reach beyond our class, to be reborn into the essence of our individual beings, the essence that is so much deeper than any class distinction.
Then beyond class there was the difference in race, to cross over to each other. He, the Englishman, Puritan, stern and uncompromising, so highly conscious and responsible; I, the German, with my vagueness and uncertainty, drifting along.
Only the fierce common desire to create a new kind of life, this was all that could make us truly meet.
As for pretending to understand Lawrence or to explain him, I am neither so impertinent nor such a fool. We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp. As Lawrence and I were adventurers by nature, we explored.
I only know that I felt the wonder of him always. Sometimes it overwhelmed me, it knocked out all my consciousness, as if a flame had burnt me up. I remained in awe and wonder.
Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather. Here's a spring day, glorious sunshine, what a joy! Then another day - alas! all is changed: it is chilly and it rains and I wish, how I wish, it were sunny again.
I learned that a genius contains the whole gamut of human emotions, from highest to lowest. I learned that a man must be himself, bad or good at any price.
Life and emotions change in us. We are not pictures, 'Patiences on monuments'; anyhow Lawrence wasn't, nor I either. Ours was not just a love affair, just as his writing was not just writing as a profession.
His love wiped out all my shames and inhibitions, the failure and the miseries of my past. He made me new and fresh, that I might live freely and lightly as a bird. He fought for the liberty of my being, and won. Just as in his writings he tried, with his fierce and responsible love for his fellowmen, to free them of the stale old past, and take the load of all the centuries of dead thought and feeling on himself.
Will the world gain from him as I did? I hope so, in the long run.
We Meet
As I look back now it surprises me that Lawrence could have loved me at first sight as he did. I hardly think I could have been a very lovable woman at the time. I was thirty-one and had three children. My marriage seemed a success. I had all a woman can reasonably ask. Yet there I was, all 'smockravelled,' to use one of Lawrence's phrases.
I had just met a remarkable disciple of Freud and was full of undigested theories. This friend did a lot for me. I was living like a somnambulist in a conventional set life and he awakened the consciousness of my own proper self.
Being born and reborn is no joke, and being born into your own intrinsic self, that separates and singles you out from all the rest - it's a painful process.
When people talk about sex, I don't know what they mean - as if sex hopped about by itself like a frog, as if it had no relation to the rest of living, one's growth, one's ripening. What people mean by sex will always remain incomprehensible to me, but I am thankful to say sex is a mystery to me.
Theories applied to life aren't any use. Fanatically I believed that if only sex were 'free' the world would straightaway turn into a paradise. I suffered and struggled at outs with society, and felt absolutely isolated. The process left me unbalanced. I felt alone. What could I do, when there were so many millions who thought differently from me? But I couldn't give in, I couldn't submit. It wasn't that I felt hostile, only different. I could not accept society. And then Lawrence came. It was an April day in 1912. He came for lunch, to see my husband about a lectureship at a German University. Lawrence was also at a critical period of his life just then. The death of his mother had shaken the foundations of his health for a second time. He had given up his post as a schoolmaster at Croydon. He had done with his past life.
I see him before me as he entered the house. A long thin figure, quick straight legs, light, sure movements. He seemed so obviously simpl
e. Yet he arrested my attention. There was something more than met the eye. What kind of a bird was this?
The half-hour before lunch the two of us talked in my room, French windows open, curtains fluttering in the spring wind, my children playing on the lawn.
He said he had finished with his attempts at knowing women. I was amazed at the way he fiercely denounced them. I had never before heard anything like it. I laughed, yet I could tell he had tried very hard, and had cared. We talked about Œdipus and understanding leaped through our words.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1095