D. H. Lawrence
1913-1914
In the spring I went from the Villa Igea to Baden-Baden and saw my father for the last time; he was ill and broken. 'I don't understand the world any more,' he said.
Lawrence walked over the big St Bernard with a friend. We met in London after a fortnight to see my children and to arrange about the divorce. We stayed with the Garnetts. One morning I met my children on their way to their school. They danced around me in complete delight. 'Mama, you are back, when are you coming home?'
'I can't come back, you must come to me. We shall have to wait.'
How I suffered not to be able to take them with me! So much of my spontaneous living had gone to them and now this was cut off. When I tried to meet them another morning they had evidently been told that they must not speak to me and only little white faces looked at me as if I were an evil ghost. It was hard to bear, and Lawrence, in his helplessness, was in a rage.
We met Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry at that time. I think theirs was the only spontaneous and jolly friendship that we had. We had tea with Katherine in her flat in London. If I remember rightly her room had only cushions and pouffes and a large aquarium with goldfish and shells and plants.
I thought her so exquisite and complete, with her fine brown hair, delicate skin, and brown eyes which we later called her 'gu-gu' eyes. She was a perfect friend and tried best to help me with the children. She went to see them, talked to them and took letters from me. I loved her like a younger sister.
I fell for Katherine and Murry when I saw them quite unexpectedly on the top of a bus, making faces at each other and putting their tongues out.
We also met Cynthia and Herbert Asquith, at Margate. Cynthia seemed to me lovely as Botticelli's Venus. We also saw Eddie Marsh and Sir Walter Raleigh and Cynthia's relations at her house, which was an unusual one, made all of ship's timber. Cynthia was always a loyal friend, even through the war, when friends were rare.
But Lawrence wanted to go away from England, also because the divorce was not finished. Later we returned to Bavaria. There Lawrence wrote 'The Prussian Officer.' The strange struggle of those two opposite natures, the officer and his servant, seems to me particularly significant for Lawrence. He wrote it before the war but as if he had sensed it. The unhappy, conscious man, the superior in authority envying the other man his simple, satisfied nature. I felt as if he himself was both these people.
They seemed to represent the split in his soul, the split between the conscious and the unconscious man.
To grow into a complete whole out of the different elements that we are composed of is one of our most elemental tasks. It is a queer story and it frightened me at the time of the dark corners of Lawrence's soul, the human soul altogether. But his courage in facing the problems and horrors of life always impressed me. Often he was ill when his consciousness tried to penetrate into deeper strata, it was an interplay of body and soul and I in real agony would try to understand what was happening. He demanded so much of me and I had to be there for him so completely. Sometimes it was I who forced him to go deeper and roused his inner conflict. When I went away it was always terrible. He hated me for going away. 'You use me as a scientist his 'dissecting rabbit,' I am your "Versuchs Kaninchen,"' I told him.
We wanted to go to Italy again.
The next winter we found a little cottage, 'Fiascherino,' near Lerici - finding a new more southern Italy and settling down for a while like gypsies in their camp; always more adventure.
' We had a large piece of land with olive trees and vegetables running down to the little bay where we bathed and kept a flat-bottomed boat, on which Lawrence went out to sea through the surf. I was on the shore watching him like a hen who has hatched a duckling and yelled in a rage: 'If you can't be a real poet, you'll drown like one, anyhow.'
Shelley was drowned not so far away. I spent lazy days lying in a hammock watching the fishermen with their beautiful red-sailed boats underneath my high rock. I watched the submarines from Spezia bobbing up and down. We had a maid, Elide, who looked after us and loved us, and her mother Felice was mostly there too. 'Bocca di mosca!' she would shout at her daughter. They loved us quite ferociously; fought to buy things cheaply for us in the market and felt absolutely responsible for us. One of Elide's griefs was that Lawrence would go out in his old clothes; she would rush after him with another coat: 'Signor Lorenzo, Signor Lorenzo,' and force him to put it on, which is more than I could have done... When I took her along to Spezia for Christmas shopping she behaved as if she were attending the Queen of Italy at least, much to my chagrin. Nothing was too good for 'la mia Signora...'
We went once to visit the Waterfields at their lovely old castle, 'Aula,' near Sarzana. We slept there in such a terrifically large room that it overwhelmed us, the beds looked so tiny in the vast room that we brought them close together, to make a larger spot in the vastness... it was a beautiful place, high up above the Magra, wide river arms underneath... there were flowers growing on the wide fortress walls, a dantesque sunrise; we were impressed.
The cottage at Fiascherino had only three small rooms and a kitchen and I tried to make it look as cheerful as possible; it did not matter what I did with them, for we were out of doors most of the day; had our meals outdoors and took long walks, returning only when it grew dark, and built a fire in the downstairs room. I believe the chief tie between Lawrence and me was always the wonder of living... every little or big thing that happened carried its glamour with it.
But we also had sordid blows. A New York publisher had bought copies of one of Lawrence's books and sent a cheque for £25. As I had no money of my own, Lawrence said: 'You can spend that for yourself.' I took the cheque to the bank at La Spezia where they told me the date was altered, the cheque must go back to New York. It never returned. For that book Lawrence never got any money from America for about twelve years. Meanness made Lawrence always silently angry - it was something not to be thought of, but dismissed, nothing to be done, why waste your energy, then. But I, like a fool, talked furiously when I'd been disappointed. We had many such disappointments later on. With the dangerous quality of his work he accepted his more than doubtful financial position and I think one of my merits in his eyes was my never being eager to be rich or to play a role in the social world. It was hardly merit on my part. I enjoyed being poor and I didn't want to play a role in the world.
We had met many people who had villas round the bay of La Spezia, English and American. They were friendly, but I said to Lawrence: 'I don't want to be a fraud, let's tell them that we aren't married; perhaps they won't like us any more if they know how it is.'
One charming Miss Huntingdon, who had become a Catholic, was much distressed. 'I am fond of you both,' she wrote, 'and far be it from me to judge you, but I must tell you that I believe you are wrong, your life together is a mistake, a sin.' Her deep distress made me feel sorry for her, as if she had had to face the same problem and had chosen otherwise. But I was aware of the joyful acceptance and hope in me, that for my part I had chosen what was right. I don't understand, to this day, what social values really are and what meaning has the whole social game; social standards were never real to me, and the game didn't ever seem worth the candle. That winter in Fiascherino was a very happy one. He wrote 'The Rainbow' there, 'The Sisters' it was called at first. When Edward Garnett read it he didn't like it. This upset Lawrence, that Garnett did not follow his trend. But I said: 'You are fighting the old standards, and breaking new ground.' They said I ruined Lawrence's genius, but I know it is not so.
Lawrence was always busy, he taught me many songs, we sang by the hour in the evenings; he liked my strong voice. He sang with very little voice but, like a real artist that he was, he conveyed the music and the spirit of the song in a marvellous fashion.
We painted together, too. I can see him so absorbed and intent, licking the brush, putting it down on the paper with quick gestures, giving himself completely to everything he w
as doing and not understanding that I did it all so carelessly and for fun.
I remember the day the piano arrived from Spezia by sea in a little boat and we watched it bobbing around the corner of the foreland, with three Italians, very frightened, fearing to go to the bottom of the sea with it. We felt for them, for it really looked very dangerous. Then at last they pulled up on the shingly beach and it was brought up to our little cottage with terrific shouts of'Avanti, Italiani!'
Christmas came and we had Elide's relations, about a dozen peasants, in the evening and they sang to us, very much at home with us. Elide's old mother, Felice sang: 'Da quella parte dove si lev il sol,' and 'Di' a la Marcella che lui so far l'amor,' with old Pasquale, a duet. The beautiful Luigi was there, who looked so handsome picking olives from the trees; also the Maestro from Telaro, who was in love with Luigi; but she was of higher station and he, alas, wasn't in love with her. I don't know if they ever were married or not. But always the tragedy came up... it got me from time to time like an illness. We had trespassed the laws of men, if not of God, and you have to pay. Lawrence and I paid in full, and the others, on the contrary, had to pay for want of love and tenderness, and nobody likes to pay. Yet it's an eternal human law: too much happiness isn't allowed us mere mortals. And I and Lawrence seemed at times to surpass the measure of human bliss. He could be so deeply and richly happy, that young Lawrence that I have known, before the war crushed so much of his belief in human civilization... His deep natural love for his fellow-men... The deadness of them, the mechanicalness that triumphed in their souls.
I asked: 'What is civilization? What is it, this man-made world that I don't understand?'
And he said: 'It's like a tree that comes forth out of a race of men, and it grows and flowers, and then it must die.' And sometimes I think that Lawrence was the last green shoot on the tree of English civilization. Anyhow, whether English civilization is dead or not, and I hope it isn't, Lawrence is the last shoot of it that has grown ahead and pierced the air.
He was always so absolutely, undeniably, something. 'They can't ignore me in the long run,' he would say, with clenched teeth, 'they can't get past me, much as they'd like to.' And I think they can't.
Life rattles on so mechanically, there is less and less meaning in its motor-hoots and in all the noise, all meaning is drowned. Nobody has delicate courage enough to listen to the things that give us genuine vibrating life. Our feelers for life, just quick life, are atrophied.
When I think that nobody wanted Lawrence's amazing genius, how he was jeered at, suppressed, turned into nothing, patronized at best, the stupidity of our civilization comes home to me. How necessary he was! How badly needed! Now that he is dead and his great love for his fellowmen is no longer there in the flesh, people sentimentalize over him... Critics indeed! Had they been able to take instead of criticizing, how much richer their own lives might have been!
Those wonderful mornings in our little podere, getting up joyfully to that Mediterranean sun by the sea! And I'd walk through the olive trees to Telaro, for the post. It took me, the northerner, some time to see the beauty of these olive trees, so different at different times; the wind running up them turns them into quicksilver and sometimes they seem quite tired and still dark. During those early morning walks the sun threw delicate quivering shadows on the stony, mossy path. To my right was the sea. I wouldn't have been surprised meeting Christ and his disciples — it may be just as well that I didn't.
Lawrence could well teach people how to live, how to be grateful simply for life itself. He who was always so frail and so much nearer death at every moment than most people, how religiously he appreciated every good moment! Every big and little thing! I hadn't lived before I lived with Lawrence. It was drudgery, grey tired days with endless efforts, before. With him, being in love and ecstasy was only a small part of the whole, always the whole and we two balanced in it, the universe around us for us to take as much as we could, and we took a lot of it in those eighteen years together.
Of his short life didn't Lawrence make the most! It was his deep sense of the reality of living. He knew what feeds the life-flame in a creature, it isn't Rolls-Royces or first-class hotels and cinemas. He wasn't a high-brow and he wasn't a low-brow, but with a real genius he got out of the quick of living the abiding values and said so in his writing. It is always amazing to me how little people understand him. Misunderstand him, is more like it.
I suppose when you are inside the pale you see only the palings and think they are quite splendid, but once outside, you realize how big the world is and the palings are just palings to you. You look at them in surprise: all these insurmountable obstacles, it was only rather low palings to climb over after all. But for those who feel safe inside, let them, the palings don't care, neither does the bigger world.
He was quite aware of the hostility to him, but in those days, I don't think we either of us measured the depth of it. Also as he grew more and more, the antagonism grew. We were too busy living to take much notice. Our own world, so small and poor to others on the outside, what a strong unconquerable fortress it really was!
Another thing I understood: there was no 'God-Almightiness' about him, like the universal 'I-am-everlasting' feeling of Goethe, for instance. He knew 'I am D. H. Lawrence from my head to my toes, and there I begin and there I end and my soul lives inside me. All else is not me, but I can have a relationship with all that is not me in the world, and the more I realize the otherness of other things around me the richer I am.'
It makes me laugh when I think of that American doctor who 'looked at literature' who wrote about Lawrence and saw only a diseased prurient mind in him. I think all he wanted to see was disease. Because Ursula, and Birkin, in 'Women in Love,' have a good meal with beetroot and ham and venison pastry, he reads some horror into beetroot and ham and pastry. I think the horror was in the good doctor's mind for what horror is there in beetroot or ham or venison pastry? Good to eat they are, that's all. Lawrence was so direct, such a real puritan! He hated any 'haut-goût' or lewdness. Fine underclothing and all the apparatus of the seducing sort were just stupid to him. All tricks; why tricks? Passionate people don't need tricks.
In the spring of 1914 Lawrence and I went from Fiascher-ino to London. We stayed with a friend, Gordon Campbell, whose wife was in Ireland. The house was in Kensington. We saw a good deal of the Murrys and there were long discussions between us all. Katherine was young and yet old, like a precocious child. I never suspected so much sadness in her, then; her relation with Murry seemed so fresh and young.
We had a housekeeper, Mrs Conybear, who sang 'Angels ever bright and fair' from the basement.
Campbell was very much in love with Ireland, 'Areland' he called it. At breakfast always sad and cross, about 'Areland.'
I remember a ghastly Sunday afternoon when we wanted to amuse ourselves. We went on one of the Thames boats to Richmond — Campbell, Murry, Katherine, Lawrence and I — there were a few seedy people on the boat - a sad object of a man was playing 'Lead, Kindly Light' on a harmonium - we got more and more silent with the dreariness of that enjoyment. And then, further along, people threw sixpences from the boat into that centuries-old, awful-looking Thames mud and small boys dived for them - the Thames mud seemed to soak into our very souls and soon we could stand it no more and left the boat and got a bus to go home. Campbell, a dignified person, trod on the conductor's toe going on top and the conductor said: 'Hallo, clumsy,' to Katherine's and my joy.
Finally I and Lawrence got married at a registrar's office in Kensington. Campbell and Murry went with us. On the way there Lawrence dashed out of the cab into a goldsmith's to buy a new wedding ring. I gave my old one to Katherine and with it she now lies buried in Fontainebleau.
It was quite a simple and not undignified ceremony. I didn't care whether I was married or not, it didn't seem to make any difference, but I think Lawrence was glad that we were respectable married people.
On that first visit to London Lawre
nce's writings were already a little known and I thought: 'What fun it is going to be to know some amusing people.' But then, oh dear, we were asked to lunch by a few lion huntresses and the human being in me felt only insulted. You were fed more or less well, you sat next to somebody whose name had also been printed in the papers, the hostess didn't know who or what you were, thought you were somebody else, and wanted to shoo you away after you were fed like chickens that had become a nuisance, and that was all. So Lawrence and I hardly went anywhere. What fun people might have had with us they never realized; perhaps they had no fun in themselves. So Lawrence and I were mostly alone.
A friend asked me once: 'But wasn't it very difficult, Lawrence and you coming from a different class, wasn't the actual contact very difficult, wasn't your sensitiveness offended?'
I don't know whether it was the genius in Lawrence or the man from the people in him, but I certainly found him more delicately and sensitively aware of me than I ever imagined anybody would be.
Once I bumped my head against a shutter and was a little stunned and Lawrence was in such an agony of sympathy and tenderness over it. It astonished me; when I had bumped my head before or hurt myself nobody seemed to bother and I didn't see why they should have done so. To be so enveloped in tenderness was a miracle in itself to me.
The War
And then the war came, quite out of the blue for us both. Lawrence was on a walking tour in the Lakes with two friends and I was in London. After Lawrence came back, I remember our having lunch with Rupert Brooke and Eddie Marsh. I see Rupert Brooke's strange fair skin, he blushed so easily, the beauty of him was strangely sad. He was coming to stay with us. Even then I thought: 'He has had enough of life, it wearies him.' He wasn't a bit happy or fulfilled. I remember Eddie Marsh saying: 'There will be war, we fear, but it may be that the Foreign Office and Earl Grey have averted it today.'
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1100