It was now that Lawrence severed his connection with the firm of J. B. Pinker. As early as November, 1918, there had been a threatened break. At that date, it will be recalled, Lawrence, hard-driven, had appealed through Pinker to Arnold Bennett for a job - unsuccessfully. He had suffered from a resultant nausea, which was not helped by the persistently miserable sums offered for his work in England, nor by his constant need to approach his agent for advances. It had even been a nice question as to whether it was worth while having a story like 'The Fox' typed, acceptance being so unlikely. But the situation had been tided over, partly perhaps by the client's inability to meet a settlement of the account. It had not grown more tolerable, however. Increasingly Lawrence had felt unhappy in the connection, conscious that he was a 'bother' and an 'unsatisfactory person' from Pinker's point of view, and that Pinker's faith in him as a business proposition had been over-tried. The strain had become so great that Lawrence dreaded either the writing or the receipt of a letter bearing the Arundel Street address. So in 1920, being at last enabled to square up by the receipt of Huebsch's cheque for the American Look! We Have Come Through! he seized the chance and made an end. By March everything was settled, even to the repayment of Bennett's twenty-five pounds ('Who is E. A. Bennett?' enquired Lawrence in some irritation!); and with full acknowledgements of all that Pinker had done for him throughout the past five years, this 'unpleasant handful' received his small parcel of agreements and his large parcel of unpublished manuscript into his own keeping. After all, he hoped soon to go to America where Pinker had not then, as he has now, an extensive connection, and Mountsier was already selling short stories by Lawrence at two hundred and fifty dollars apiece. Today one wonders if Lawrence's business affairs might not have prospered better had he been able to round his Cape Horn without a change of ships. Humanly speaking, too, when Pinker had done so much and had faced so many unprecedented difficulties, it was hard that his firm should not have reaped the benefit. Frieda especially regretted the termination. But it could not be helped, and no blame attached to either party, whereas the credit of the one and the honesty of the other stand high in any perusal of the correspondence. The determining factor was that, with all his kindness and generosity, Pinker had not much hope of Lawrence left. So Lawrence had to cut loose.
2
The cosmopolitan island life was amusing for a time - 'pleasant and bohemian. I wish you were both here' - and before he tired of its scandalous unreality he wrote home about it entertainingly, and not without malice. Of this order was his account of a New Year's Eve celebration in Morgano's Café. Primarily an Italian affair - given over to the barbaric performances in song, dance and recitation, of bands of young men - it became towards midnight, according to Lawrence, a mere background for the decorative figure of Mr Compton Mackenzie flanked by rich Americans and issuing commands for champagne. ' "Head of the realistic school of England, isn't he?" ' asks the Roumanian, with whom, in company with an aged Dutchman, Lawrence and Frieda were sipping a humble punch. Later, Lawrence was to become friendly with Mackenzie. For the present, though he has already lunched and dined sometimes with his confrère, he watches the rich English-American party with those shrewish, almost old-maidenly eyes of his. 'He is nice,' he records. 'But one feels the generations of actors behind him, and can't be quite serious. What a queer thing the theatre is, in its influence. He seems quite rich and does himself well and walks a sort of aesthetic figure ... walking in a pale blue suit to match his eyes, and a large woman's brown velour hat to match his hair.' Of the Americans, who with 'an excruciating self-conscious effort', were trying 'to look wine and womanish', he says, 'Oh, God, the wild rakishness of these young heroes! How conscious they are of the Italian crowd in the background. They never see the faint smile of the same crowd - such a smile. A glass of champagne is sent out to the old road-sweeper from the bounteous English Signore. It is the right thing to do. Meanwhile we sip our last drop of punch, and are the Poor Relations at the other end of the table - ignored - to our amusement.'
But in the same breath Lawrence finds that he is 'nearly as spiteful as the rest of Capri', and 'the English-speaking crowd are the uttermost uttermost limit for spiteful scandal. My dear Catherine, London is a prayer-meeting in comparison . . . We've got a long way to go, such mere people as us. It would be an interesting document, to set down this scandal verbatim. Suetonius would blush to his heels, and Tiberius would feel he'd been a flea-bite.'
He finds, too, that commodities are beyond his purse - 'butter twenty francs, wine three francs a litre the cheapest - sugar 8 francs a kilo, oil seven or eight francs a litre, carbone a franc for two kilos - a porter expects ten francs for bringing one's luggage from the sea - and so on. With the exchange at fifty, it is just possible, and only just.'
There came, however, an unexpected present of twenty pounds from America. I do not know who sent this, but it must have been one who could afford it, or Lawrence would not have taken it. As it was, he at once sent five pounds of it unasked to Magnus, guessing that he was hard pressed, and he was enabled toward the end of that January to make the strange, much-desired trip alone to the monastery of Monte Cassino. This meant an exhausting day's journey each way for a visit of only three nights. It was like Lawrence that he took with him only the smallest surplus of money over and above what was required for his bare necessities. The present had been for Frieda as much as for him, and he foresaw that Magnus would victimise him for all there might be of loose cash.
Again a peerless record is to be found in the Introduction. In it he combines the fullest admissions of a limited humanity with the limitless desire to remain faithful to that which is beyond humanity. It rises to its height in that part where Lawrence, looking down from the mountain top where St Thomas Aquinas was educated, as if from 'the last foothold of the old world', finds himself racked, as no other man of our time has been racked, between the 'bitter and barren' present in the plain below, and 'the poignancy of the not-quite-dead past' which lingered above in these old walls. To those who would comprehend Lawrence here is a passage of the utmost significance. On Monte Cassino, as on no other single occasion, he saw his temptation and his destiny, and he put the first from him and accepted the second open-eyed. To the lovely past, as worshipped by the monks behind him, he would not bow down, though it might bring peace. He must live in the hard and often loathsome present, an individual man's life, with all its needs, contradictions and errors proclaimed as it went along: and at the same time he must be an unswerving conduit from the very origins of life - so far back that they were lost - to the undiscovered future, in some way that transcended, while it never eliminated or absolved the individual. The conception, I believe, is new and it is potent. But a kind of sensitiveness akin to the sensitiveness of Lawrence, which is a thing far removed from emotionalism, has to be acquired before either the novelty or the potency becomes apparent. In Lawrence's own perception of it he felt that his heart was 'once more broken'. But it is characteristic that, when questioned by Magnus, he merely put it that he was 'too worldly' to think of becoming a monk. In conversation, at any rate, Lawrence habitually refrained from casting his pearls before swine. Neither did he ever wear his heart on his sleeve.
At the moment literary affairs were by no means satisfactory. The appearance of his History was still deferred, and he still awaited revised proofs for indexing. He had refused a first offer to publish The Rainbow with certain omissions and alterations on condition of the selling of all rights for two hundred pounds, and he was negotiating with another publisher for simple publication on the basis of 'a first royalty, which is all I want'. He hoped, this once settled, that the English publication of Women in Love might follow with the same publisher.
Again, the tiny hand-printed and illustrated book of poems called Bay had taken seventeen months in production, and except for the beautiful paper and print it was all that Lawrence wished it not to be. Poems and inscriptions which he had intended for inclusion were left out. He was
confident that some, at least, of the poems were 'really beautiful and rare'. Otherwise, in his judgement, this was 'a silly-looking little book...' with 'silly little woodcuts, so out of keeping with the poems'.
At about the same time there was printed the play Touch and Go, which Katherine Mansfield had not liked - that I well understood - but which she described as being 'black with miners', which I find hardly enlightening as a criticism of a play that concerns itself with miners. Lawrence had written the jarring but interesting seven page preface to this paper-covered book (issued by Daniel, Ltd, in 1920) while at Hermitage in June, 1919. The preface was intended by Lawrence as an announcement of and a plea for a 'People's Theatre'. This was a scheme originated by Mr Douglas Goldring, who was an enthusiast for Lawrence's work and had not long before written an appreciative essay which brought him into Lawrence's acquaintance. Mr Goldring's idea was twofold. There was first to be a 'People's Theatre Society' which would exist for the purpose of presenting plays of a kind suitable to come under that heading. Those who were interested enough to become members on payment of a guinea subscription - or it may have been two - would have the chance of submitting plays of their own, and it was held out as an inducement that one of the earliest productions would be a play by D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence was pleased by the whole idea and looked forward greatly to the possibility of having Touch and Go put on - perhaps at the Court Theatre with the interest and assistance of Mr J. B. Fagan. Secondly, there was to be a series of Plays for a People's Theatre published by C. W. Daniel, Ltd, under the general editorship of Mr Goldring.
Like many attractive and well-intentioned schemes of the sort 'The People's Theatre Society' came to little. Only one play - The Liberators by the Serbian dramatist Tucic - was ever performed, and its performance would seem to have exhausted the resources of the Society and ended its activities. Mr Goldring was still, however, general editor of Plays for a People's Theatre, which Lawrence in 1919 understood that he was to inaugurate, out of simple interest in the idea, with Touch and Go and its preface. Lawrence was accordingly angered when, in Italy in 1920, he learned that the first play to appear in the series was not his, but a play by the general editor entitled The Fight for Freedom with an inaugural preface attached, and his anger was not lessened by his finding himself in violent dissent from all that was expressed in both. Here was 'another fiasco', he wrote to me that February, and once more he found cause to 'curse the sly mongrel world'. After an interchange of letters Mr Goldring made an explanation which Lawrence accepted, and as usual he put the matter behind him. 'I know you don't like the play,' he wrote to me of Touch and Go in the same letter, 'but anyhow it's not base.'
It was indeed far from base, this dramatic effort, which escaped publicity so completely that to this day few readers of Lawrence seem to know of its existence. The scenes between the lovers, Gerald and Anabel, give one an odd foretaste of Noel Coward at his best, while the speechifying of the miners is both vivid and true to life. It was written while the successful 'theatre' of Galsworthy's Strife was fresh in mind ('Mr Galsworthy had a peep at the Strike situation,' says the preface, 'and sank down towards bathos') and in it Lawrence draws firmly the distinction between non-tragic disaster and that fate, agonising but veritably tragic and therefore fruitful, which follows the working out of some immediate passional problems within the soul of a man. In the true tragedy of 'creative crisis', Lawrence would say, the many 'still know some happiness, the very happiness of creative suffering'. And we have, he would urge, at least 'the moment of pure choice', in which each may decide whether he will 'go through with his fate, and not dodge it'; or by piling accident on accident 'tear the fabric of our existence fibre by fibre'. By the second - which is the method of 'a mechanico-material struggle', even if it brings disaster and death to millions - we get no more than an accidental 'crawl from under one cart wheel straight under another'. By the first, though the fighters themselves may die, death becomes only 'a climax in the progression towards new being'. For 'the whole business of life, at the great critical periods of mankind, is that men should accept and be one with their tragedy'. From this alone new life can come. And here, if nowhere else, we exercise free will in choosing or refusing.
Its intrinsic interest apart, Touch and Go is of use to readers of Lawrence in the elucidation of both Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover. In the character of Gerald, which is common to the first-named novel and the play, Lawrence records his sympathy with the gifted employer - the powerful and proud young man of aristocratic temper and keen intelligence, who has given of his disinterested best to an industry, and refuses to be bullied by hands who are no more than hands, however great may be their show of numbers. Gerald is essentially the man of organised achievement, to whom, as such, Lawrence pays hearty tribute. When, on reading the manuscript of Women in Love, I criticised his deferring of the disclosure of Gerald, he replied:
You meet a man. You get an impression of him. You find out afterwards what he has done. If 'you' have, in your arrogance, writ him down a nobody then there is a slap in the eye for you when you find he has done more than you have done. Voilà!
We get, too, in the play, the scales held evenly between the genuine Christian sweetness (so unavailing) of Gerald's father, and the honesty and pride (made crazy and of no avail by our modern life) of Gerald's mother. These two horribly cancel each other out. And we get the voice of a miner who is a genuine man, as well as the voices of miners who beat an unmanly retreat behind the fiction of a merely economic struggle.
Later in the same month - February, 1920 -1 received from Lawrence the announcement of a forthcoming production at Altrincham near Manchester of his first play, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. The performance was to be by a company of experienced amateurs, and Lawrence was anxious to know how it went. He wished me, if possible, to see it and to write a notice which would get into print. To this end he insisted upon sending me five pounds for my journey to Cheshire and back. But this, happily, I did not need, as I managed to obtain a commission from The Times.
He was now sick of 'this cat Cranford of Capri', this 'stew-pot of semi-literary cats'. It was too much for his nerves, he said. He had come to like Compton Mackenzie, but 'not his island nor his influence'. When I asked why he did not write a satire on the Capri society, he said no, satire 'just dries up one's bowels - and that I don't like'.
The manuscript of the half-written novel was stuck with the heavy luggage somewhere between Turin and Naples owing to a three weeks' railway strike. But with or without his possessions, Lawrence was determined to move to Sicily. To Sicily we too must come, travelling by sea and bringing John Patrick (now aged twenty months) for whom a Sicilian nurse would be found. This, before they were themselves assured of a foothold! But in the first week of March the invitation was renewed from Fontana Vecchia, Taormina. 'One should not take the world too seriously. I wish you could both come out here to Italy and vegetate - why should one always strive and struggle?' And then - 'such a lovely house and garden here'.
3
Lawrence had taken the house at Taormina for a year, at the rent of twenty-five pounds, or two thousand lire (the exchange being then at eighty). 'Heaven knows which way we shall be moving next,' he wrote in May. 'Depends which way the wind blows us. But one's instinct is to go south, south - and away, away from Europe. Here we are almost on the last tip - and my face still looks south, as if one must step off into space somewhere.'
In April he had visited Syracuse with new friends he had made in Sicily (probably Mr and Mrs Brewster) and it was soon after his return that the fugitive and penniless Magnus descended upon him.
The pamphlet written by Norman Douglas as a counterblast to Lawrence's narrative of Magnus is well known and will always hold its place in the archives of literary dispute. It is brilliant and creditable -I mean that it does credit to the writer's heart and head. Some of Lawrence's best friends have agreed with its finding that a poor wretch who had been driven to take his own life should no
t have been subjected, anyhow within the covers of his own book, to so searching an examination. While I respect and understand, I do not share this view. Having lately reread both productions, it seems to me that Lawrence, who, after all, was far less the friend than the victim of Magnus, has given his subject full human dues while nailing for good to the barn-door a particular kind of predatory fowl, which to have done is to have rendered a service to honest men in this naughty world. The man whom Douglas defends - naturally and properly as they were on a footing of tolerant affection - does not command the outside reader's sympathy in anything like the same degree as does the man whom Lawrence condemns. In the first case our tribute goes to Douglas; in the second it is compelled for Magnus. At the same time, the sentimentality of this age having run somewhat to the excusing of charming bullies and semi-artistic good-for-nothings, it is a relief to find the inherent nastiness of dishonesty made plain. This, quite apart from other values to be found in the Lawrence narrative. It is true, as Douglas says, that Lawrence gives himself away as much as he gives away Magnus. And that also is good. It contains one of the most vivid of his self-portraits and was never seriously regretted by him. The Lawrence production will stand as a creative, and the Douglas one as a pious effort.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1127