'Character' for Lawrence belonged to the dead past - to a way of life that he strove to transcend. Character, of course, was amusing and interesting, and would, of course, persist. But the interest in it was a literary interest and, so for as life goes, was static. Character - which Lawrence savoured as well as anybody - had been used as a demonstration of life until it had become stereotyped - a made, instead of a spontaneous thing. At the best it had now come to provide the merely sensational or merely intellectual excitement (and Lawrence found the modern division into sensationalism and intellectualism a division into two equal stalenesses) of working out a psychological problem. Given a, b and c acting upon each other and being acted upon by circumstances, what will be the result? All of which seems to have a lot to do with life, all of which is, indeed, so much the appearance of life that it is easy to mistake it for life itself. But it is not life.
The best writers have known by instinct that it is not. A writer like Hardy, as Lawrence well reveals in his exposition (everywhere rejected at the time and only recently published in part), passes through the surface of human character to the deeper interest of life with its crisscross currents beneath. He shows his people in their relation to the moor and the sky. In our memory of their almost accidental conflicts with each other, we see rocks and trees and storms as equally, if not more truly, as the protagonists.
One might continue showing at what points many of the most objective of our major novelists, including Dickens, make the necessary diving escape from character into the life flow. Lawrence went a stride further in consciousness and in practice than any before him. He repudiated 'character' entirely, and retained only the merest crust of outward form sufficient for the telling of a story. He knew so well how to tell a story, and his feeling for physical and outward appearances was so delicate and intense, that at first the repudiation is not noticed as such. It gives, however, the peculiar flavour to his books, which at first makes them so distasteful and so puzzling to many readers.
What is even more baffling than his repudiation of the old-fashioned, classic 'character', is his refusal of the whole modern machinery of psychology. This, indeed, has been a greater stumbling-block than the other.
After Sons and Lovers he had been, naturally, pounced upon by the psychoanalysts; and for a short time he looked with interest, even fascination, into this new realm. But it was for a short time only. Quickly he saw in it merely another attempt at mechanisation which, by the time it was finished with us would have finished us as living beings. 'They can only help you more competently to make your own feelings. They can never let you have any real feelings,' as he said of one famous psychologist. And real feelings - a real self without any self-importance - was one of the things Lawrence thought worth fighting for.
So he turned not only from the old, but from the modern, the contemporaneous, the 'latest'. And he was lonely, which he found hard to bear.
Murry has made the frank confession that, much as he and Katherine Mansfield delighted in Lawrence as a man and a talent, they were 'against him' in his aims from as early as 1915. But Murry goes on to say that all Lawrence's friends were against him. This is overstating the case. There was always a minority that believed enough in Lawrence throughout to believe also that his aim must be right.
I, for one, admitted that I did not comprehend his philosophy or see what he was driving at. But I knew that Lawrence was no madman, and I was convinced that his combination of qualities was not to be found in association with a mistaken man. Besides this, though each new book, as a book, came to me as a disappointment, there was not only a curious cumulative effect, but there was in each book that which had the power to enter into the texture of one's life and to work there like a leaven. Who else was writing books which even partially possessed this power? So far as I could see, nobody. I was therefore prepared to take Lawrence on trust as somebody who must be essentially right or he would not possess either this power or this persistence. I began to understand how far from his aims was the production of 'masterpieces'.
Knowing this of me, Lawrence forgave my intellectual shortcomings. I would grow up, he said, and he was ready to love anybody who would grow up. 'But the hideous wasters who will only rot in the bud, how I hate them!' And again - 'They don't want to understand, that's what is wrong.' So our friendship remained. But I was a very small drop of sweet water in his bucket. At times even Frieda feared that he was mad, declared that she would have to leave him, and shouted at him that she 'hated' all his writings now.
This, of course, was said in anger, but it had enough in it to present itself as a ready weapon when there came the desire to wound. Lawrence knew how to take it. He was sure, as he had a right to be, of Frieda's fundamental sympathy, co-operation and courage. But he knew also, that being a woman and in untried circumstances, Frieda might at any time go back upon him momentarily. I, being a woman, should no doubt have done the same in her place, if in my different way. But I was not in her place, and faith was easy for me. In Frieda Lawrence reckoned on such brief defections and, at the expense of a bit of rage, discounted them. They were not of the same order as the intellectual defections of those cleverer friends who were guilty of emotional stupidity.
7
I was present at many 'rows' between Lawrence and Frieda, some of them violent and exhausting enough. But I never felt any one of them to be of that deadly 'painful' nature which is of frequent occurrence between many couples who all the while protest their love with endearments and never get within arm's length of violence. It was indeed the thing about Lawrence which I understood best at this time, and it made me see in him a courage that I never saw in any other man in the same degree. Nor had I read of it, for it was something utterly remote from what is usually understood as the subjection of a woman by a man, in that it was free from egoism on the man's part, free too from bullying or any reliance on tradition. Lawrence asserted himself on the strength of his power. And he asserted the male principle, which he believed was destined to lead. But there was no egoism in it, and it left Frieda the utmost liberty of her female assertion, so long as she did not try to 'put across' mere female egoism. On his male egoism, should it appear, she was welcome to jump with all her weight. She did. Since then I have come across a similar spirit in some of Gaudier-Brzeska's letters. Most other men - a notable instance occurs to me in Robert Louis Stevenson - seem always to have shirked the true marriage issue, and so played false with disastrous effect both to their women and to their own manhood. But Lawrence was no shirker, just as he was no seeker of conquest over another human being for the sake of conquest. '. . . if we break, or conquer anyone . .. it's like breaking the floor joists, you're sure to go through into the cellar, and cripple yourself.' He succeeded in making Frieda pay the required tribute and become, in doing so, the most triumphant woman in the world.
He had chosen (after shattering misadventures for which he largely laid the blame upon himself) a woman from whom he felt he could win the special submission he demanded without thereby defeating her in her womanhood. Sometimes it seemed to us that he had chosen rather a force of nature - a female force - than an individual woman. Frieda was to Lawrence by turns a buffeting and a laughing breeze, a healing rain or a maddening tempest of stupidity, a cheering sun or a stroke of indiscriminate lightning. She was mindless Womanhood, wilful, defiant, disrespectful, argumentative, assertive, vengeful, sly, illogical, treacherous, unscrupulous and self-seeking. At times she hated Lawrence and he her. There were things she jeered at in him and things in her that maddened him - things that neither would consent to subdue. But partly for that very reason - how he admired her! And to be ardently admired by Lawrence was something of a rarity, and it meant that the admired one was somebody rare. In Frieda Lawrence found a magnificent female probity of being, as well as of physical well-being. She could bear the pressure of his male probity - his 'demon' - as no other woman could have borne it. Sure in herself, she could accept anything and recover from anything. She wa
s the 'freest' woman he had ever met, and if not mild she was by Lawrence teachable. She had this rare virtue - teachableness without mildness. Much will be written - something has already been written - about Frieda! For myself, I find that in her own very different way Frieda is a person as remarkable as Lawrence, and that Lawrence knew it. Two things are certain: that in all his journeyings he never saw another woman whom he would or could have put in her place: also, that Lawrence cannot be accepted without acceptance of his wife. Recently, in a popular daily newspaper as a result of an English home-to-home domestic enquiry, I saw some such heading as this: 'The Old Loyalties Gone, Husband and Wife now Simply Good Pals.' Lawrence and Frieda had dispensed with most of the 'old loyalties'. Each was capable of bitter complaints against the other uttered behind the other's back to a third party. But they kept the most ancient loyalty of all, and they never descended into being 'good pals'. Lawrence with Frieda was the man who does not shirk woman in any of her aspects. In return for her profound submission as wife to husband, he offered her fidelity and richness of life. She was a long time in coming to it. But the exchange, as I believe, was made. In passing it may be said - or rather circumstances compel that it should be said - that if Lawrence had not been potent in body as well as in spirit he would never have had Frieda to wife, or having her he would not have kept her. The suggestion has been made, though vaguely, that because the marriage was without issue Lawrence was impotent. To accept that would be to make both Lawrence and Frieda and all the circumstances of their life together a lie. But the untruth lies elsewhere. This is not the place in which to discuss or expose it. It must, however, be mentioned and denied.
I have said I was present at many rows between these two extraordinary people, the one so richly endowed with physical life, the other subtly and magnificently endowed with mind, responding with natural delight to the minds of others, yet bending all the force of his own to break the dominance of mind in our modern ways, and to destroy 'ideal' reactions in favour of true reactions out of which life would come trembling and renewed.
When I first arrived in Cornwall they told me in concert of a quarrel that had taken place shortly before. I don't remember what it was about - probably Frieda's children - but it had been fought out to what Lawrence took to be a finish, and he had gone into the scullery at the back to wash up. While he was thus engaged, with his back to the living-room door, singing quietly to himself (Lawrence was slightly deaf) and working with a bit of a clatter at the enamel wash bowl, Frieda came in from the living-room carrying one of the stone dinner plates. His unconcerned roundelay after what had just passed (I only wish I knew which song, sacred or profane, Lawrence chose on this occasion) so wrought upon her that her wrath boiled up afresh. Down on the singer's head she brought the dinner plate.
It hurt him very much and might, of course, have injured him seriously. But he was as far from bearing Frieda a grudge as from turning the other cheek. 'That was like a woman!' said he, turning on her viciously, but on this occasion too much astonished to strike back. 'No man could have done such a thing when the quarrel was over, and from behind too! But as you are a woman,' he added ruefully, 'you were right to do as you felt. It was only lucky you didn't kill me. You might have. These plates are hard and heavy.'
No, Lawrence was no pacifist, though he could make peace; and he was far from believing that emotional differences could be settled by arbitration. Rather, he would say, the more we recognise essential differences the nearer we are to true peace. Also, the more we deny or elude that physical violence which is inherent in life, the more we deny to one another and ourselves those precious renewals of the vital flow which are to be had in no other way. By our denial of them we are driven to indulge in the perverse or apologetic violence of sensationalism in its many forms. Weekdays and Sundays we cannot have too many murders to read about, and the slow ideal deaths we undergo are in the end worse than those of either the real murderer or his victim. Being ourselves poverty-stricken in fear, in rage, in magic, in physical response, we crave for these things more than for bread. Go into the first cinema theatre and see how we devour the husks that swine would refuse. We do not even know in what our need consists. It is our illusion, the great illusion of civilisation, that we have outgrown the simple magic of touch, and of wonder, which is a kind of touch. Just as we have put the moon into our pocket encyclopaedias, and when we weep with boredom do not realise that we are crying for the moon in our blood, so, poor in the magic of naturally enlivening reactions of the blood from which fresh life can issue constantly, we are driven to that false, mechanical, organised reaction which is modern warfare. The Great War came, Lawrence would have it, when we were individually too frightened to fight, too Christian to smite, too meek or indifferent to respond to insult with swift violence.
Danger apart, there was nothing terrible about Frieda's rages, though Lawrence's did make you sit up and look out. Even so, I never felt that sense of shame or of lasting misery so many human rages inspire. True, Lawrence never really raged at me. Frieda, baffled and afraid of his intensity, felt more than once that he was mad and that she would have to leave him. But the feeling soon passed. She knew well enough that even beyond his own conscious knowledge he was fighting her for something worth while in which she could share.
That I, too, knew it was one of the reasons Lawrence put up with me. On this same visit Frieda appealed to me - not so much asking counsel as relieving herself by declamation to another woman in Lawrence's presence - 'What would you do, Catherine, if you had a man like that to deal with?' And I recall how deeply pleased they both seemed when I said I would thank my stars that a man like Lawrence should think it worth while to fight things out with me and bear no grudge that I fought with him.
This may not be missed in speaking of Lawrence. What here and there a pure artist like Gaudier will half-practise for a time by instinct, and perhaps before long throw up in despair, Lawrence felt it his business to maintain as the first urgent condition for everybody's health and happiness. A revised relation between the man and the woman was needed, and that not chiefly for the artist's sake, as in Gaudier's case, but for the sake of any man and woman who would be really alive.
'It needs a man and a woman to create anything,' he wrote to me that autumn, '... there is nothing can be created save of two, a two-fold spirit.' He put from him as a devilish temptation the idea that in singleness there was strength. In singleness of aim, certainly; in severance from the world of conformity; even in renunciation of adherents - alas! this also, as it must be! But never in the sexual pride of singleness which he took to be a denial of life at its source.
It is those who are married who should live the life of contemplation together. In the world, there is the long day of destruction to go by. But let those who are single, man torn from woman, woman from man, men all together, women all together, separate violent and deathly fragments, each returning and adhering to its own kind, the body of life torn in two, let these finish the day of destruction, and those who have united go into the wilderness to know a new heaven and a new earth.
I hope I have made it clear that a miserable account of Lawrence at this time, or any other, would be a false and misleading account. He had far too magnificent a talent for enjoyment, far too fine a capacity for work, to be miserable in the true sense of misery, which is dreariness, regret, sterility and doubt. He had an aim worth struggling for to the utmost, and he felt himself growing strong in and for the struggle. One day you might hear him say he felt like never writing another line. And this he said, not so much in despair, as in the furious determination that life held better things than books. But within a week or so he would be sending you a volume of new poems in manuscript, or one of a series of essays that nobody would publish, or telling you that he was triumphantly typing the last chapter of a novel. At intervals he burned piles of manuscripts. Once he almost set the chimney on fire and revelled in its roaring. He enjoyed warming his hands at such fires of outgrown life. All
along, when no entirely new thing was clamouring to be written, there would be something lying by, which waited upon his mood for its last revision. I came to take it as a sign, when Lawrence wrote to say he was writing nothing, that even as I read his letter he would be deep in some new undertaking.
When not engaged on a book or a story, Lawrence would be working at something else with precisely the same ardour and economy and dislike of outgrown accumulations. Once he bought a gauze shawl of Paisley pattern for Frieda - cheaply, because it had the moth in it - and set himself to make it whole without delay by mending it himself. It took him two entire days, working well into the night, and allowing only the shortest intervals for his meals. When I say I never saw Lawrence idle, I do not mean that he was that wretched thing, a time-haunted man. He was that as little as he was the Shavian 'writing machine'. He did not seem to be 'driven', either by clocks or by conscience. He worked more as a bird works, eagerly and unceasingly till the job on hand was finished. But he certainly valued time as any good worker must, and he was shocked in a light passing way when he noticed other people dillydallying or spending their hours on trivialities or lying unduly long in bed of a morning. I have heard him say that he needed nine hours' sleep out of the twenty-four, and he observed this as a rule, being neither a late sitter-up nor an unduly early riser. But throughout his fifteen-hour day he was 'doing things' all the time.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1122