You were very sad when I saw you: and there seemed nothing that could be said. Things must work themselves out. It is a great weariness. I felt, that as far as peace work, or any work for betterment goes, it is useless. One can only gather the single flower of one's own intrinsic happiness, apart and separate. It is the only faithful fulfilment. I feel that people choose the war, somehow, even those who hate it, choose it, choose the state of war and in their souls provoke more war, even in hating war. So the only thing that can be done is to leave them to it, and to bring forth the flower of one's own happiness, single and apart.
It is so lovely here, now, my seeds have come up, there is a strange joyfulness in the air. For those of us who can become single and alone, all will become perfectly right.
You were queer and sad as the train went off at Leicester Square Station. But don't be sad. In the innermost soul there is happiness, apart from everything.
Come and stay here if ever you can, and if you feel like it.
The Lawrences had already a guest - a woman. She was unhappy, and in the strength of her unhappiness could not resist attaching herself to Lawrence and trying to match her strength against Frieda's - disastrously to herself. Yet she took away with her, when she left later that summer, an enduring admiration. And I dare say she would now assert that her visit to Cornwall was the least disastrous episode in her life. Where Lawrence and Frieda were, mishaps would occur. But Lawrence had a way of communicating something that flourished in separation, and so was lastingly precious.
That spring Frieda was ill. She had a week or two of internal trouble that made Lawrence anxious. And again at the beginning of August she was crippled with neuritis in the leg, which gave great pain and kept her in and out of bed for almost a month. Lawrence nursed her with devoted skill.
Not that either Lawrence or Frieda made much of illness. Lawrence, if one may so apply the expression, had a talent of his own for it. If others were ill he was a marvellous nurse. For himself, while hating to be treated in any professional way as an invalid, he was patient and skilful with a kind of innate philosophy that worked remarkably well. It was the only matter in which he was 'adaptable'.
Though the enemy seizes my body for a time, I shall subtly adjust myself so that he pinches me nowhere vitally, and when he is forced to release me again I am the stronger.
In one of my letters I had mentioned a neuralgia which had cursed me for some time, and he replied:
I have a great horror of pain, acute pain, where one keeps one's consciousness. I always thank my stars that I don't have those pains that scintillate in full consciousness. I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.
At the same time that Frieda was ill I was laid up at Bournemouth, where Donald and I had now gone while he was at a cadet school. On the top of that I met with a slight motoring accident which kept me a fortnight in bed, and Lawrence wrote scolding and giving me good advice. Again he was full of suggestions for titles for my novel, which was only now nearing an end of its rewriting.
But his real news was that he had been refused a passport for America 'in the interests of national service'. It was a blow, and he felt that he would die with this the one loophole closed. He saw himself as one condemned to 'die of foul inward poison', and England as emitting a stench that was fatal to him. England was his 'City of Destruction'. At all costs he must get out.
Again, though he was full of heartfelt curses for the country that could neither use him nor let him go, curses the more heartfelt in that he so loved his country, Lawrence behaved with remarkable common sense. That late summer, as he has recounted in the 'Nightmare' chapter of Kangaroo, he occupied himself as a farm-labourer, working as constantly and hard as any of the country labourers at harvesting. At the same time he made his own three gardens bloom. In addition to the tiny walled one which he had rented at a shilling a year with the cottage, he had acquired two more from the Hockings of Lower Tregerthen, the neighbouring farm, where the Higher Tregerthen folk bought their milk and sometimes got their pies and puddings baked. And he combined the successful production of flowers and vegetables with the writing of 'philosophy'.
The two combined well, and this was by no means a time without happiness for Lawrence, though for Frieda it was probably the most trying period of their life together. Lawrence was a fine and rejoicing gardener. Wherever he went he planted, and his plants came up. To work peacefully with the earth was the best antidote to the War and the next best thing to migration. 'I sit,' he wrote to me that summer, 'a very tender nursling on the knees of the gods.' Till he could leave England, Cornwall was the best place to be in. He loved it. It had a drugging effect on the hard mentality that he felt was a modern evil. Also working in the fields day after day with the dark-eyed young people of Lower Tregerthen, he believed for a time that he had found in one of the young men the 'blood brothership' which was as needful as a refreshed relationship between man and woman for the rich and complete life he sought. Murry had rejected the idea - so ancient that it shocked his modern mind - of a sacrament between men who would commit themselves in friendship. Any formal 'laying on of hands', outside of the Church, had seemed to him puerile and even revolting in its primitiveness. But a working man and a Celt, a man with a subtly pagan face, born in the shadow of these Druidical stones, yet English too, might, surely must, have some wordless understanding of one of the oldest of all human rites. I have heard Lawrence say that sexual perversion was for him 'the sin against the Holy Ghost', the hopeless sin. But he cherished the deep longing to see revived a communion between man and man which should not lack its physical symbols. He even held that our modern denial of this communion in all but idea was largely the cause of our modern perversions. To recover true potency, and before there could be health and happiness between man and woman, he believed that there must be a renewal of the sacredness between man and man.
But what he was to find later, to his deep delight, existing among the Mexican Indians - the occasional religious segregation of the male for the communal worship of something greater than himself, and so for the increase of his male power - he was excluded from by the barrier of race. Race was a barrier, he admitted. And among his own, he was to seek in vain for what he wanted and believed to be of fundamental importance. It is doubtful if the subtle, uncultured Cornishman understood much better than the subtle, cultured Londoner, or indeed than the simple German wife, who regarded any relegation of her man's emotions as a species of 'unfaithfulness'. It is even fairly certain that the Cornishman's mystification - as he was also given to talking - added to the cloud of suspicion that was now gathering over the cottage at Higher Tregerthen. It surely added greatly to the loneliness of Lawrence. Here was one of the closed doors of the hated modern system, which he must hereafter refrain from trying to shatter except with words. If he hurled at it his heart, that heart would be not merely bruised but branded. Lawrence, for all his innocence, was no fool. Loneliness was preferable to certain kinds of misunderstanding.
The cloud of war suspicion, which had begun to gather even before Christmas, was pretty thoroughly formed by August. Frieda was not only German but loudly provocative and indiscreet. In the spring Lawrence had committed the extravagance of buying for five guineas a worn cottage piano 'with an old red silk front and a nice old musty twang': and with its help he had set himself to increase his already considerable repertoire of songs. Some of these - especially as rendered in Frieda's loud, fresh voice - could not have been mistaken for anything but German. Others must have sounded equally bloodcurdling to the curious or the hostile, who took to lying beneath the garden wall to listen. Through Cecil Gray, Lawrence had recently become acquainted with the researches of Mrs Kennedy Fraser. And he had some Hebridean numbers which he howled in what he ingenuously supposed to be the Gaelic, at the same time endeavouring to imitate the noise made by a seal!
It was unfortunate
that there was a flat-roofed turret to the annexe commanding a seaward view, that submarines were busy in the Channel, and that a foreign coal-boat chose to be wrecked on the rocks below Tregerthen. We, who lived through the War, know how favourable such a combination could be for the development of war-spite against any individual who not only was not doing what the crowd was doing, but openly condemned such doings. In Lawrence's case, though he himself was never to discover it, I am credibly informed that a half-demented woman, not belonging to the neighbourhood, had set herself deliberately to spy within the cottage on the pretext of doing an occasional day's charing there. It was a time at which such a being could win a hearing of those who lacked her excuse for such behaviour. By August Lawrence letters were being held back and examined. I posted him one from Bournemouth on the 9th which did not reach him till the 13th. Nor was this a single occurrence.
It has been suggested that the Lawrences could have moved inland. In practice such a move was not so easy as it may now sound. The annexe was furnished and painted, the year's rent had been paid in advance, and Lawrence's gardens substantially helped their living. They rarely possessed so much money as would pay for a move. Besides, they loved their cottage. It suited them, and Lawrence, true born Englishman that he was, would never consent to being shifted from his home by mere bullying. As for ceasing to sing what songs he pleased and when he pleased, by his own fireside, that would have been an unthinkable submission.
One day when he was with the Hockings at market in Penzance, and Frieda was across the fields calling upon Cecil Gray (who was now their nearest cultured neighbour and almost equally under suspicion with themselves), their cottage was searched by the military. Frieda, returning alone, was frightened; Lawrence, arriving later, was shocked and furious. Henceforward he would be on his guard, trust nobody, be intimate with nobody. Though there had been nothing to betray, somebody had undoubtedly acted as an informer. Any specified suspicions he may have had were groundless, though natural and indeed inevitable. Other facts besides the searching of the cottage had made him aware that there was considerable and disseminated spite against him, largely on Frieda's account. But now some individual had taken the definite step of going to the authorities. He was not to know who had done this. He knew, however, that for him and Frieda it was a matter of waiting for further developments. On Friday morning, October 12th, a young officer with a search-warrant arrived with two plain-clothes detectives and a local police sergeant. The Lawrences were ordered to clear out of Cornwall within three days. No charges were made or explanations given. None, of course, were needed. Simply the Lawrences were undesirables. Lawrence was horror-stricken, but composed. Frieda was voluble, argumentative and defiant to rudeness. In being her champion Lawrence had to undertake the championship of her nation. This, without doubt, was unfortunate for Lawrence. It was also, without doubt, necessary. Frieda's insistence, combined with the ineptitude of the authorities, made it so.
They were at 'the fag end of poverty'. Thirteen pounds and ten shillings for several contributions in the English Review had come in belatedly in September. I doubt if Lawrence possessed five pounds in the world when he reached London the following Monday and took a taxi with his luggage to Hampstead to find refuge with his staunch little friend, Mrs Ernest Radford, at Well Walk. That day or the next he called round, hoping to find me. But I had gone to Edinburgh where Donald was ill in a military hospital. It was some days later before I heard from him what had happened.
When they had been a week at Well Walk, Hilda Aldington insisted upon their using her rooms in Mecklenburgh Square, or rather her one huge room, that had some kind of appendix by way of scullery. They accepted with gratitude, remained there about a month - of necessity and her kindness largely as her guests - and then went to a flat in Earl's Court Square offered by Cecil Gray's Scottish mother, whom I had seen on Lawrence's account when in Edinburgh.
Mrs Luhan is very far out when she asserts, on the alleged authority of Frieda, that Lawrence's English friends deserted him at this or any juncture. They were as shocked as Lawrence himself over the eviction, and as helpless. But, with a few notable exceptions, they quietly did what they could, distressed that it was so little, and the Lawrences were enabled to live without running into debt. Lawrence himself was the last man to forget any kindness. Frieda, no doubt unwittingly, gave Mrs Luhan an impression that laid itself open to jealous misconstruction, causing the kind of mistake that made Lawrence rage. Among his friends at this time were Dr and Mrs Eder, and with them Lawrence evolved a plan for migrating in spring to 'the eastern slopes of the Andes'. The Eders actually seem to have produced somebody who was going to produce a thousand pounds for the expedition.
10
While the Lawrences were still at Mecklenburgh Square we returned from Edinburgh and took two furnished rooms in Hampstead. Our own house was let until Easter, as also now the tiny rooms over the garage. (So we eked out our living.) Upon being discharged from hospital Donald was also discharged from the army. I was expecting a baby in the spring. Lawrence came by himself to see us. That same afternoon it happened we had another visitor, a young man who was anxious to meet Lawrence, but still more anxious to convince us that he had produced a literary masterpiece. Lawrence, therefore, sat silent, leaning his head on his hand and looking as if affected with sea-sickness. The last thing he was interested in was literary masterpieces as such, and anyhow he did not believe that this was one. When the young man had left, he uttered some expletives and became apparently cheerful. True, he hardly knew which way to turn next, or how to get the money to turn at all. But as usual he was full of plans, and did not give the effect of being distressed. Would we join the party in the spring and go to the eastern slopes of the Andes? He liked the idea of a baby in the party, but as this baby was not to arrive till the end of May, we did not see ourselves as possible starters. It was decided that he would let us know what the eastern slopes were like, and that we should follow if we could. Meanwhile he rather surprised us by wanting to return to the Cornish cottage for Christmas. His idea was apparently to face the thing out, and he was trying to get the Asquiths to help him with the authorities. But sympathetic as the Asquiths were, they were powerless in this and told him so. Were they not themselves the object of active popular suspicion? One just had to grin and bear it. Everybody declared that the War would end that winter.
It was about this time that George Moore read the manuscript of Women in Love, and 'says it is a great book and that I am a better writer than himself, as Lawrence wrote to me later, admitting that this was 'really astounding'. Who sent George Moore the manuscript I do not know. I am sure it was not Lawrence, though it was possibly Pinker at Lawrence's instigation. Nor do I know how the pleasing verdict was conveyed. It was certainly received and must, one thinks, have been given. But that it came direct from Ebury Street seems unlikely. Almost at the same time there was a suggestion that Bertrand Russell, 'who used to be a fairly intimate friend of mine, but whom I don't agree with', might be asked to write a letter recommending the novel to an Irish publisher.
Nothing came of either of these things, and the immediate situation remained very difficult. How was Lawrence to be helped? The only way we could think of was that he might write for The Times Educational Supplement. Donald knew the editor, Mr G. S. Freeman, to whom he made the most urgent representations, with the result that an interview took place, and Lawrence promised that he would do his best to turn out articles such as were wanted. Having heard his account of what was wanted, I had my doubts, but held my peace. He set to work, however, willingly and without delay.
Of one thing Lawrence was sure, he could not remain longer in London. Shortly before Christmas he arranged to pay Dolly Radford a small rent for her cottage at Hermitage in Berkshire. It was bitterly cold with a half-thaw. 'God knows,' he wrote, 'I am not in a good mood in any way whatsoever.' From there he went for New Year to the Midlands. To his sisters, at least, the War had brought added material prosperity.
It was not Lawrence's private friends, nearly all of them poor people, and like himself harried by the War, who failed him in practical matters. (That they failed in understanding was not to be wondered at.) Today, however, when one can view the question dispassionately, it is hard to forgive the literary leaders for their determined aloofness. Admitted that he was a difficult man to help, he was eminently eligible, and one thinks that with goodwill some way might have been found to ode over a rough passage that was largely due to the exigencies of the War. One is forced to the conclusion that the goodwill was lacking. He himself felt that he was deserving of the temporary financial support he so greatly needed. Though Murry has declared that the demand was merely for intellectual support by way of 'recognition', Lawrence's own letters show that he made a frank appeal for funds. He understood perfectly the futility of requiring understanding. But he felt justified, on the strength of his known achievement, in asking his fellow-writers to take his honesty and potency as an artist on trust. Early that February (1918), when he was ill with a severe sore throat which knocked him out for three weeks, he urged Pinker to tempt some money for him out of 'some rich good-natured author'. And he suggested that Arnold Bennett might give him some 'to get along with' till his day came, as he was certain it would.
Could anything be simpler or more direct? Lawrence drew the line only at going himself hat in hand. He would make the demand through his agent as his due. There was no use, he pointed out, in deluding himself that he could make a living under present conditions in England. But engaged as he was at that very moment on the final revision of his Studies in Classic American Literature, he was confident both in his future and in his immediate worth as a financial investment.
In an article written shortly after Lawrence's death Arnold Bennett has given his own account of this appeal. As Bennett was a very exact man there is no reason to doubt that his account, in its reserved way, is substantially correct. He saw the sense of the appeal. He was ready to contribute if others would join. But all the others refused. They asked themselves and each other why they need give a hand to Lawrence and they found no answer; which most certainly was what Lawrence expected and even, I surmise, desired to elicit. Exceptions there were. I know of two. Mr Alfred Sutro, hearing that the author of Sans and Lovers was in need, sent ten pounds, which later Lawrence repaid. Mr Montagu Shearman also sent ten pounds.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1124