But I have the power to choose between my desires. A man comes to me and says, 'Give me your house.' I ask myself, 'Which do I want more, my house, or to fight?' So I choose.
In nearly all men, now, the greater desire is not to fight for house and home. They will prove to themselves, by fighting, that their greater desire, on the whole, was not to fight for their nation, or sea-power, but to know a new value, to recognise a new, stronger desire in themselves, more spiritual and gladdening. Or else they will die. But many will die falsely. All Greece died. It must not be so again, we must have more sense. It is cruelly sad to see men caught in the clutches of the past, working automatically in the spell of an authorised desire that is a desire no longer. That should not be.
In the same letter he refers to his story England, My England! which he had written about a year before (though it had only recently appeared in the English Review) and had based on fact so clearly as to give pain to kind friends. He had made the man in the story die in the War. Now, after his story was public property, he learned that the real man had since been killed in France.
It upsets me very much to hear of P— L—. I did not know he was dead. I wish that story at the bottom of the sea, before ever it had been printed. Yet, it seems to me, man must find a new expression, give a new value to life, or his women will reject him, and he must die. I liked M— L—, the best of the M—s really. She was the one who was capable of honest love: she and M—. L— was, somehow, a spiritual coward. But who isn't? I ought never, never to have gone to live at —. Perhaps M— L— won't be hurt by that wretched story - that is all that matters. If it was a true story, it shouldn't really damage.
But in a postscript he adds, 'No, I don't wish I had never written that story. It should do good, at the long run.'
Such quotations contain useful examples of the bewildering thoroughness with which Lawrence preferred life before logic. It must be faced that he was consistent only in the faithfulness of his aim and the unconstraint of his expression. He can rejoice in his possessions yet part with them tomorrow, exalt Christianity yet forsake it, regret his pain-giving story yet abide by it.
In another passage from the same letter he treats of the deception - as he considered it - which lay in the procreation of children by those who have in themselves no other hope than this, to bring forth.
There are plenty of children, and no hope. If women can bring forth hope, they are mothers indeed. Meanwhile even the mice increase - they cannot help it. What is this highest, this procreation? It is a lapsing back to the primal origins, the brink of oblivion. It is a tracing back, when there is no going forward, a throwing life on to the bonfire of death and oblivion, an autumnal act, a consuming down. This is a winter. Children and child-bearing do not make spring. It is not in children the future lies. The Red Indian mothers bore many children, and yet there are no Red Indians. It is the truth, the new perceived hope, that makes spring. And let them bring forth that, who can: they are the creators of life. There are many enceinte widows, with a new crop of death in their wombs. What did the mothers of the dead soldiers bring forth, in childbed? - death or life? And of death you gather death: when you sow death, in this act of love which is pure reduction, you reap death, in a child born with an impulse towards the darkness, the origins, the oblivion of all.
Yet another passage speaks of that kind of 'disastrous act of love'
which is a pure thrill, is a kind of friction between opposites, interdestructive, an act of death. There is an extreme self-realisation, self-sensation, in this friction against the really hostile, opposite. But there must be an act of love which is a passing of the self into a pure relationship with the other, something new and creative in the coming together of the lovers, in their creative spirit, before a new child can be born: a new flower in us before there can be a new seed of a child.
Soon afterwards I was to have an argument with Lawrence about what then seemed to me his arbitrariness. He had said, I think, that he could foretell with absolute certainty from any given couple whether a child born of that couple would be in his sense of the word a 'living and lifegiving child or a deathly and retrogressive one'. But I pleaded that there was always an unknown element, and that this element had a way of upsetting the wisest calculations. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth' was my way of putting it, and I held that God or Nature had always an odd trick up the sleeve. Lawrence, however, would have none of this; anyhow, not then. Neither would he in such a case admit of chance.
6
Lack of money was again the difficulty: lack of money and Frieda's insistence that she must see her children in London when their autumn term began - for which again money was needed. Her only way of seeing them was to wait outside of their schools as they came out, so to walk along, have a word with them, give them some small gift, and keep herself fresh in their memories. Lawrence hated and disapproved of this. But Frieda stayed firm.
By the middle of July they had exactly six pounds left in the world, and Lawrence had not been well. The Smart Set, from which he had been able at times to get ten pounds for a poem, had changed hands and did not want his work. There was only a tentative offer from an American magazine, The Seven Arts, for stories at a cent a word. He had poems for sale, and stories, and four-fifths of Women in Love (which had now acquired this tide) in a pencil draft, which he jibbed at typing himself and could not afford to send out. As soon as it was finished, he would try to write only 'family' stories that would be immediately saleable in some such magazine as the Strand. He loathed alike debts and obligations. But meanwhile what? Nothing for it but to apply once more to Pinker.
Pinker, still hopeful of the financial future and always kindly, sent along fifty pounds on the strength of the unseen manuscript. Then - lovely and unexpected - came a letter from Amy Lowell in America, enclosing a present of sixty pounds. Being herself a poet, she knew how to give in such a way that acceptance by another poet was as little painful as possible. So Lawrence thanked her warmly. Prophets still are fed!
He foresaw, however, that Women in Love would be a difficult piece of goods to sell. And though he never once failed to deliver solid commodities for every advance by his agent, he chafed against this 'imminent dependence' on 'a sort of charity'. If only some publisher might see his way to subsidise him. Could not Pinker bring this about? In Cornwall he could live, he said, on one hundred and fifty pounds a year. With two hundred pounds a year he 'could send everybody to the devil'. Pinker said he would try. No doubt he did try. But nothing came of it.
At this juncture a young and admiring American journalist, Robert Mountsier, had come to England largely that he might make Lawrence's acquaintance. With him came a girl friend, Esther Andrews, who lived by drawings of a frankly journalistic sort for the magazines. These two went down to stay for a time in the annexe in Cornwall. Both were immediately and violently attracted by Lawrence, and Mountsier undertook to act, with Pinker's cognisance, as Lawrence's short-story agent in America.
Though living with the Murrys had been a failure, and they were away at Mylor near Falmouth, Lawrence kept in communication with them and even visited them twice. He did not easily give people up. Perhaps, he thought, it had been a mistake living quite so close together. People must have room to be themselves without knocking against each other at every turn.
In July he sent me Amoves, which had found a home with Duckworth and appeared that month with a dedication to Ottoline Morrell. Here were the last poems gathered from his youth. In August there was talk of his coming with Frieda to London and using our house in September, but he changed his mind and decided to let Frieda go by herself. 'I can't come to London - spiritually I cannot... I am much too terrified and horrified by people - the world - nowadays ... I had much rather be Daniel in the lion's den, than myself in London. I am really terrified.' He was even terrified by the idea of 'getting into a big train'. It was decided in the same letter that I should pay my long-promised visit to them in Cornwall, arriving on September
3rd. Donald was asked too, but he could not get away. Other visitors by the middle of August had come and gone - 'They make me feel how far off the world is - such stray, blown, sooty birds they seem. It is lovely to bathe and be alive now, in the strong, remote days.'
In the same letter he consults me about the title Women in Love. He does not feel at all sure of it. Lawrence often said he was 'no good at titles'. This did not prevent him from pouring forth suggestions for other people's books. Mine was to be The Wild Goose Chase. It is so nice and gay.'
Or The Rare Bird, or The Love Bird (very nice that), or just Cuckoo! (splendid). Do call it Cuckoo, or even the double Cuckoo! Cuckoo! I'm sure something bird-like is right. Cuckoo! is so nice, that if you don't like it, I think I must have it instead of Women in Love. Then Loosestrife is a nice name. Then Had is a good one. The Pelican in the Wilderness is lovely, but perhaps inappropriate: I don't know. The Lame Duck - I'm sure there is a suggestion in the bird kingdom - The Kingfisher, which I am sure is appropriate, or Ducks and Drakes. Write me a postcard which one you choose: only don V be too seriously tided.
We shall be very glad to see you and the Hon. Bird on the 3 rd September (historic day): The Hon. Bird is the book, which must be a bird: it isn't Carswell. I wish he were coming too.
In the letter of four days earlier:
I feel really eager about your novel. I feel it is coming under the same banner with mine. The 'us' will be books. There will be a fine wild little squadron soon, faring over the world. Nothing shall I welcome so much as books to ride with mine. Oh, to see them go, a gallant little company, like ships over an unknown sea, and Pisarro and his people breaking upon a new world, the books, now.
This, after a letter in between, replying to my own suggestion of a tide, Bird of Paradise, which referred to the legend that, being bereft of its feet, that bird can never alight.
We love the Bird of Paradise that is most beautiful and perfect a tide - do not budge a hair's breadth further - the Hon. Bird is christened; we all dance his name-feast. Do, somewhere in the book, put the story of the Bird of Paradise - quite tiny.
I have thought that the plight of the heavenly but footless bird must have struck Lawrence as having a similarity with his own.
My visit to Cornwall was all happiness - of the quietest kind. It was my first stay with the Lawrences. I was their only visitor, sleeping in the other cottage, which I 'made' myself each day. Nothing particular happened. Chiefly we talked - though even that not so very much. We also walked, but not so very much either, as the weather was not of the best. One of the reasons I got on with Lawrence was that I enjoyed 'doing' ordinary things.
I seem to recall that Lawrence spoke a good deal of Dostoevsky. Murry had written a book about him and had sent a copy to Lawrence. Lawrence perfectly disagreed with Murry's findings, and was incisive as well as eloquent on the subject. It would appear that Murry stands by that book today, although he finds it 'extravagant' as well as 'excessively intellectual' - two qualities that one might think hard to reconcile.
Lawrence's own view of Dostoevsky (by whom so many of us at the time were carried away) struck me then as difficult to follow. It now appears as remarkably level-headed, abounding in insight, and therefore surely, in the truest sense of the word, intellectual. It is, indeed, very much the view of the more advanced thinkers of today, with whom Dostoevsky as a thinker has somewhat lost his place. According to Murry, Lawrence was willing to admit in theory only 'that the "being" of man included his spiritual impulses also, and that these were just as profound and deep-rooted as his sensual impulses'; but that when it came to practice with Lawrence 'the spiritual and the sensual man were implacably opposed. In practice, therefore, he could only admit the one by denying the other. And it was the spiritual man who had to be denied, and if possible annihilated.'
Now, as Murry writes this passage with reference to Women in Love, I do not see how anything except theory - i.e., thought - comes into question. In any case one thing was clear to me even then, when I understood so little what Lawrence said or stood for, that alike in practice and in theory Lawrence wanted nothing more than equal power for the spiritual and the sensual. Were these implacably opposed in life? Perhaps. But so were the two bloodstreams within the human body - the pure one coming from the heart implacably opposed to the charged one returning to the heart. What Lawrence maintained was that now for too long the spiritual had been given a spurious, an ideal lordship over the sensual, as if the one bloodstream should be praised at the expense of the other. He saw in himself, as in all his generation, the disaster of a spiritual supremacy, which in the end makes men first sensually and then spiritually impotent. For spiritual supremacy at the cost of sensual abnegation was in his eyes inevitably followed by spiritual impotence. In restoring the just place and power of the sensual, the restorer must first appear to exalt it above the spiritual. But this is only in appearance and because the balance has been already destroyed. The theme of Women in Love is sensual impotence (not identical with sexual impotence) caused by the overweening lordly vanity of too long a reign of spiritual ideals. Hence it is intended to be what Murry was later to blame it for being, a 'deathly book' - deathly, but clearly displaying, for those who would see it, the hopeful seed of new human values. It was because Lawrence saw the restoration, the new adjustment, as so well worth fighting for, that he could neither enter into nor admire the point of view of Murry's soldier friend - that it was something fine 'to face death for a trick not worth an egg'. The trick for which Lawrence continually faced death and ultimately died was worth precisely an egg - the fertile egg of the future. And certainly the risking of death for anything worth less seemed to him either pose or folly. Still, Lawrence thought that Murry would perhaps come round. He was prepared to wait and to be friendly.
We carried on the daily work of the cottages without help from outside. With Lawrence one seemed, in such a case, to have enough time over for anything else one wanted. But the necessary daily jobs seemed so much a part of life that one did not fret to be done with them. Certain literary critics have found that in estimating Lawrence as a writer it is beside the point to note that even while washing up dishes he radiated life. But those who washed dishes with Lawrence know that it is not beside the point.
More than by his unceasing interest in my novel, which he had made me bring with me, I was pleased when he said that I 'fitted in' with their cottage life better than the Londoners did. Perhaps from his North Midland upbringing and origin, Lawrence had a warm feeling for Scottish people. 'I don't care if every English person is my enemy,' he wrote to me once later; 'if they wish it, so be it. I keep a reserve for the Scotch.' He had not a good word to say for the Irish character. He detested anything like professional 'charm'. There was prejudice here, of course, but it could be tracked down to a radical feeling. The inexpressiveness of the Northern temper, implying, as it does, a distrust of easy verbal expression, was congenial to him just as the so different Latin mentality with its subtle realism was congenial. In the facile intellectualising of emotion he found evidence of a certain poverty of nature. He saw this at its worst in the Irish and the Americans. Here, however, he was perhaps not more characteristic of the North than of the English working-class generally, whose experience it is to associate true warmth with verbal inexpressiveness. 'I think one understands best without explanations,' he said often. Or of those who talked and talked - 'they don't Want to understand.'
Another strongly 'working-class' trait in Lawrence was his extreme distaste of anything that could be regarded as indecent. It would indeed be easy to call him prudish. One night in Cornwall, after having just begun to undress for bed, I found I had left my book in the sitting-room, where Lawrence and Frieda still were, and I returned to fetch it. I had brought no dressing-gown with me, but there seemed to me no impropriety in my costume - an ankle-length petticoat topped by a long-sleeved woollen vest! Lawrence, however, rebuked me. He disapproved, he said, of people appearing in their underclothes.
No doubt, if I had not privately believed my négligé to be attractive as well as decent, I might neither have ventured to appear in it nor have felt so much abashed as I did by Lawrence's remark. So, essentially, Lawrence was right after all! How more than horrified he was - furious - when from his flat in Florence, looking across the Arno, he was compelled to overlook also a stretch of mud and shingle which the Florentine gamins found a convenient spot for the relief of nature. He hated the domestic dog on account of its too public habits. In such respects Lawrence was no advocate of what is often, but wrongly, called 'the natural'. Still less was he an apostle of the nude. I am sure that he put down all our civilised indecencies - our coquetries as well as our callousnesses, our sophisticated desire to shock as well as our prurience - to a departure from natural reticence. On first thoughts this may seem strange to those who have not considered the matter closely. On second thoughts it will be seen that such a man, and only such, could have become the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Lawrence's critics and friends at this time wanted another Sons and Lovers. But with The Rainbow he had turned definitely away from any such easy end.
Nobody who ever heard him describe the scenes and persons of his boyhood, or watched him re-create with uncanny mimicry the talk, the movements and the eccentricities of the men and women among whom he grew up, can doubt but that Lawrence, if he had liked, might have been a new kind of Dickens of the Midlands. Critics who contend that he was unable to create character or invent situations are confuted by the earlier scenes in The Lost Girl and by passage after passage from the short stories. We might have had from him a gallery of characters such as the housekeeper in Lady Chatterley, with all kinds of people - comic, touching or strange in their ordinary ways - if he had cared to try. Those who say, 'What a pity he did not care!' have a point of view with which it is difficult not to sympathise at times. With Lawrence, and perhaps with Lawrence alone, the dumb cottagers and inexpressive 'workers' of industrial England might for the first time have found a voice. Even as it is, we now see them because of Lawrence, as they have not been seen before. We are pierced with a passional knowledge of them never even suggested by any other writer. But he has given us, practically speaking, no characters.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1121