That May, when Lawrence was bailing Magnus out, his own funds were low enough, and I wanted very much to give him fifty pounds. After long and vain travelling from one publisher to another (one firm would have accepted it if I would have cut it down by two-thirds) my novel had won a 'First Novel' prize of two hundred and fifty pounds. So I had this, and I thought it only fair that Lawrence should have a slice. From the first, however, he would consent only to 'hold it' for me in case I could come out there that summer. He had at last signed an agreement for Women in Love and The Rainbow (one hundred pounds to be received on publication on account of royalties for the first, and later the same sum for The Rainbow with the cautious proviso that this should not be paid until three months after publication, and even so, that it should be subject to deduction by any charges of legal proceedings that might arise). He expected 'pretty soon' to have the money for Women in Love. But the typing of The Lost Girl in Rome cost a thousand lire, and immediate supplies were short.
Unlike the Athenaeum Lawrence found The Lost Girl 'quite amusing: and quite moral'. 'She's not morally lost, poor darling,' he added, ' . . . marries an Italian.' He wished to serialise this book, but did not succeed in doing so. It brought him a good new friend, however, and a Scottish one - the painter, Miss Millicent Beveridge. She had greatly admired this, the first of his books she had read, and soon afterwards was interested to meet the author. She has told me how that meeting took place at a party in Sicily where she found Lawrence in a rage because, not made aware beforehand that it was a party and that he was to be lionised, he had turned up barefoot with sandals and in his 'pottering about' clothes. In this respect Lawrence was no bohemian. He believed in suiting the occasion. Miss Beveridge, amused and astonished as much as she was charmed, became sincerely attached to him, and the friendship remained firm till his death. May was very hot in Sicily.
Do you know what it is to be in a dry southern country - dry, like Africa? I never knew before. But I like it. The sun is a bit overwhelming. Nearly all foreigners have left here already. Today we are going down to the sea to bathe. But it is a good half-hour down, and one hour up. Mary Cannan has a studio here - nice - for three more months. She is dying to go to Malta - the boat runs from Syracuse. But she can't go alone. So she wants us to go if she pays our ship fare - it's only an eight-hour crossing. It might be amusing, for four or five days. But Malta isn't wildly attractive, and I am doubtful if I want to spend the money.
But Mary Cannan had set her mind on it, and the Lawrences went with her. Norman Douglas has quoted an extract from a letter in which Magnus describes with malicious veracity the boredom of Lawrence in Malta. Back in Taormina on May 28th, he wrote to me:
... we were to stay only two days - then a steam boat strike, and we only got back tonight, after some eleven days. Oh, and it was so expensive, and I feel so displeased. Malta is a strange place - a dry bath brick island that glares and sets your teeth on edge and is so dry that one expects oneself to begin to crackle. Valetta Harbour is wonderful: beautiful. But I get set on edge by the British regime. It is very decent, I believe, but it sort of stops life, it prevents the human reactions from taking full swing, there is always a kind of half-measure, half-length, 'not quite' feeling about, which simply arrests my digestion.
Upon his return he had found my cheque waiting for him, and again he gave me to understand that he would not use it but would keep it for me in his bank. A day or so later, however, he suddenly decided otherwise. From America had come two thousand lire for stories. 'I have enough money. And why should I hold any of yours in fee. So I accept the gift all the same: and have burned your cheque.' Again, 'what you do want is money, so you must get it.' Once he started, he felt confident that he could make money. 'Then we'll share mine. It won't be long. You see if it is.'
I had by then been to Altrincham to see Mrs Holroyd, and I confess that on my way there the undertaking began to assume the nature of a penance. Lawrence had betrayed that he was eager, even nervous, as to the results. 'I have a dreadful feeling that it may be a fiasco,' he had written. So too had I.
The presentation, however, was creditable, if no more. It compared favourably with the performance given in London by the '300 Club' in December, 1926, which also I saw. To do justice to the Altrincham players and the Altrincham audience, no sniggering was elicited by the scene where the dead miner's body is washed by his women. All the same I felt that in a play so realistically written and produced a body-washing scene was theatrically unacceptable. Either it must be done 'off' with only the voices and the footsteps of the women to give it reality, or the stage must be darkened to a firelight glow and the whole production lifted into a plane beyond realism with movements that are classically simplified. To read the scene is simple and tragic. Outside the Irish People's Plays I reckon we can hardly match it in English with any other scene of dramatic dialogue having working folk as the protagonists. And the play holds its own against the Irish plays. Yet, as things are, it does not quite 'do', and I believe the reason lies in the fact that the theatre itself was antipathetic to Lawrence, so much so that even when writing for it he maintained his antipathy. 'Here is drama,' one imagines him to say - 'here is prose drama as authentic as any the English theatre can show. It is not "good theatre!" Then the English theatre must change itself to accommodate a living contemporary English play.' The first scenes of Mrs Holroyd, like the first scenes in Touch and Go, prove that Lawrence had the art of crisp and pregnant stage dialogue. The action, besides, the exits and the entrances, are finely devised, and the conflict is real. It is not surprising to find that in his youth Lawrence contemplated the production of a volume of plays, nor that he could not resist occasional returns to the dramatic form. But the theatre is a task-mistress who demands not only obedience but enslavement. And Lawrence would not bow the head to such a muse. We find, accordingly, that though his plays are far from being mere literary dramatisations, and are most genuinely plays, they are not truly adapted to the mechanics of our stage.
Of contemporary productions, opera, with its light-hearted formality and transparent artifice, was probably most to his taste. He was not interested in 'problems', effective situations, or any of the sophisticated trickery of the modern theatre. I question indeed if he ever found enjoyment in witnessing a play, unless it might be one of the older classics. Once, and only once, I was so ill advised as to book seats for him and myself to see - what he thought might be interesting - the translation of Tolstoy's Living Corpse at the St James's Theatre, with Henry Ainley and my friend Athene Seyler in the leading parts. And how he hated it and everything about it, so far as the theatre was concerned! The more the germ of the thing appealed to him, the more he was appalled by what he considered to be the falsity and ineptitude of its stage appeal. It made him so unhappy, that before the performance was half through he found himself unable to endure it longer, even with his face buried in his hands. 'Do you mind, Catherine? I just can't bear it any longer!' he whispered. There was nothing for it but to squeeze our way out from our upper circle seats (particularly narrow in that theatre) earning, as we did so, black looks from a long row of earnest Russophile playgoers. Immediately afterwards he was apologetic and charming. 'All that good money of yours!' he mourned. 'But no, it was too much to expect us to see it through!'
My only other theatrical experience in the Lawrence connection was when, on the day the War began, I took Frieda to hear Marie Lloyd. It was, I think, Frieda's first chance of listening to one of England's idols of the comic sort. From her childish wonderment, not unmixed with a delight that was a trifle timid of itself (as though Lawrence might suddenly appear and wag his head reprovingly) I suspect that this was her first visit to a London music-hall. Frieda would not have been Frieda had she been able to resist Marie Lloyd. But when we got home and recounted our enjoyment to Lawrence (who had been otherwise engaged) she was cautious and - in her half-defensive, half-belligerent way - noncommittal. 'Yes, yes. I do think she is a great artist! I did enjo
y her, and I believe, Lorenzo, that you would have liked her real vulgarity.' But though Lawrence was glad we had enjoyed ourselves, he shook his head a little over Frieda, as some fond but austere Victorian parent might shake his head upon catching his child poring over the pages of Ally Sloper — without, however, reproving the child or removing the periodical. Though he loved abandon, and could be the gayest of the gay or the funniest of the funny, it was not in Lawrence either to be frivolous or to contemplate frivolity with pleasure. One felt that while he would make the fullest admission of Marie Lloyd's artistry, he would still feel that this was rather a silly way of spending the evening.
Lawrence was disappointed by the general indifference to Mrs Holroyd, and I doubt not, though he never mentioned it, disappointed in particular by The Times notice.
In my anxiety I had made a bad mistake. Instead of keeping myself within five hundred words, in which the praise would not have been amenable to scissors, I had run to nearly a thousand words. I was accordingly disgusted to find that in the printed version all my warmest commendations were omitted. What remained was not even good criticism. .... am afraid Mrs Holroyd was altogether a bit of a bore and that you were miserable. Am sorry,' Lawrence wrote. Today it is interesting to learn that after receiving accounts of the 1926 production, Lawrence said, 'I think, if it were being done again, I should alter the end, and make it more cheerful. Myself, I hate miserable endings now.'
4
That summer it was difficult, and therefore easily appeared impossible, for me to get to Italy either with my family or alone. Lawrence, finding Sicily too hot, went for a time with Frieda to Baden-Baden, to return alone to Florence. It was during his solitude of a fortnight there that he wrote Tortoises. He then went on to friends in Venice, where he was joined by Frieda, and together they went back in October to Taormina.
Till the end of the year he was writing hard - the introduction to Magnus's Memoirs, most of the poems for Birds, Beasts and Flowers and the second half of Aaron's Rod. I had very few letters from him, only an occasional greeting, or a book, or the announcement that he was 'unbearably tired of Europe'.
America seems to you looney? Well, I don't care, perhaps there's more sense in lunacy than in our national mechanism. God knows what one will do. I am thinking of next spring. I shan't stay in Taormina, I think - perhaps go to Germany for the summer, perhaps to Sardinia, he had written from Venice in October. And round about Christmas - when he was ill in bed with a cold - 'We really want to sail away to New Mexico in January or February.'
But in January, instead of going farther, he and Frieda made the trip to Sardinia, which he has described in Sea and Sardinia. He wrote that book rapidly in the early spring, when he worked further upon Birds, Beasts and Flowers, as well as upon a 'first vol. of a funny novel: but a tiny first vol. Quite a lot. Yet not much.' This refers to a light novel or novelette, that was never completed. It was about the Midlands, and was to be called Mr Noon.
At last that March the History had come out, and he sent me a copy - 'Some of the chapters I think are good: first worst. Don't read it if it bores you.' After a year of managing his own affairs, Lawrence had now taken Curtis Brown as his agent. But as usual, after a hard working spell, books had become comparatively unimportant to him, and the need to live was everything. 'If only I had money I should buy a Mediterranean sailing ship that was offered me: so beautiful. Then you'd cruise with me.'
In the gloomy and tearful picture of Lawrence given us in Son of Woman there is a singular omission. It is forgotten that after all Lawrence was an artist, and that he stood in need of the delight and the fresh interest, which, for his greater productiveness, it is the artist's nature to seek. Fury, as we know, was Lawrence's in plenty - that dark, coiled-up child in his 'bowels', begotten of the Midlands, to which he must give birth. But he needed also a careless joie de vivre, which was as native to him as his anger, and of which he was starved in England, though England found the means to feed his anger in abundance. The stimulus of anger, as Lawrence knew, can easily be overdone. It heads a man toward bitterness, and what is worse, solemnity. 'A man must keep his earnestness nimble to escape ridicule,' as he said of Baron Corvo. England had seemed to him 'worn on the nerves'. And though 'Sicily indeed is cross and swindles one . . . somehow it doesn't affect one: annoys and amuses one: which is different.' Besides there was the loveliness - 'the orange blossom is passing, northern trees, apple and pear and May blossom are out: the wood is tall and green, the mornings are fine. I feel I do not care a bit about the trials and troubles of the world. Suppose they'll be coming down on my head just now to make me care: but even so I cannot trouble beforehand.' This too was needed. And where another would have been held in one place by habit or fear or sloth, Lawrence followed his desire. In Touch and Go he makes the sculptress Anabel incapable of modelling more birds and animals, though she possesses genius, simply because she has lost that joy of life which had once enabled her to render in stone the thistledown lightness of a kitten. Until her joy returns, she will produce nothing lively. Lawrence knew so well what it was to feel inspired that he could not fail to recognise the lack of inspiration in himself or in others. England had inspired him, but England refused recognition of the fruits of her own inspiration; and though he had continued to produce under the hard pressure of poverty, neglect and obloquy, he was aware that pressure can be borne too long and all in vain. For the artist escape may become necessary for survival. Imperatively he must seek both fresh inspiration and the support given by recognition in the most natural way open to him - by moving away from places where these things have failed him. It is easy to call this a morbid restlessness, or to describe it as a symptom of illness. But may it not with quite as much justice be called sanity and courage? Both are certainly needed for it, and no artist ever needed or evinced more of these virtues than Lawrence. If the stages of his pilgrimage may be put down to the restlessness of failure, we must bear in mind that the pilgrimage itself was undertaken by deliberate and difficult choice. Ultimately it must be judged by results. Belonging to this period in Italy - a period of little more than two years - we find The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, the introduction to Magnus's Memoirs, Sea and Sardinia, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Tortoises, and 'Evangelistic Beasts' - besides which the new novel already mentioned began its existence, and several long short stories or novelettes were given their final form for publication in America. Accompanying all this was continual letter-writing, always by hand, and travelling of the most economical kind, which was exhausting when not actually adventurous. It is not a bad record for an admittedly delicate man, of whom at home it was busily alleged that he suffered from 'decaying' gifts, disintegrating spirit, and general decline in creative power.
These expressions are taken from Murry's long review of Women in Love printed three months after the book's appearance in the Nation that August - 'The Nostalgia of Mr D. H. Lawrence' - 'nostalgia', be it understood, 'for the slime'. After its five-year wait the novel had appeared, not, as Murry says, a year, but only six months after The Lost Girl. This, if he had looked into the matter, might have thrown fight on the chronological order of the two books upon which he partly based his attack. As things are, he stretches in reminiscence the six months to a vague twelve; and, while refusing to regret the nature of the attack, offers the partial excuse that it was 'by the irony of fate' that he announced the end of Lawrence, just as Lawrence was engaged upon the books which Murry was later to announce as his finest. We all make mistakes, especially where Lawrence is concerned; and this review - with that other, 'The Decay of Mr D. H. Lawrence' - might be allowed to blush unseen, were it not that Murry has himself dragged it out to say that 'strangely enough' there is little in it he would withdraw today. It is, therefore, necessary to repeat his verdict therein, which is that Lawrence is no longer an artist, that he has sacrificed his art to a vain philosophy (i.e., not Murry's philosophy) and that he is a 'writhing' and 'obscene' and ridiculous failure, with no command over himself or
his characters. Murry ignores the wonderful, the touching, the interesting and the new things in the book, which one thinks that a friend might wish to bring into prominence even while failing to understand or agree with the book's intention; and he displays unconvincing hilarity over passages that are most easily liable to misunderstanding by the vulgar. Certainly Murry allows that Lawrence believes in his own vision. But even Lockhart did not accuse Keats of dishonesty, merely of ineptitude. Nor had Lockhart ever been Keats's friend.
It would more truly seem to be 'by the irony of fate', that Keats himself once had a friend named George Felton Mathew, and that it has been left to Murry to tell us of this friendship, which in certain vital respects is the parallel to his own friendship with Lawrence. Mathew had been one of the very first to praise the immature Keats. But Mathew disliked and misprized the mature Keats, finding him 'in danger of becoming "a proud egotist of diseased feelings and perverted principles'"; and after thirty years he still tried to justify a review in which he feared that the poet might contaminate purity and inoculate degeneracy and corruption - a review which Murry recognises to have been actuated by 'ill-concealed antagonism'. It is difficult not to fancy that some Murry of the future - a critic of emotional gifts who can be trusted only in his dealings with writers who have been dead for fifty years or more - will discover and elucidate for us the Murry-Lawrence affair in a similar manner. Even today it is impossible to turn over the phrases of Murry's Lost Girl review - 'sub human', 'esoteric language', 'quack terminology', 'mysteriously degraded', 'corrupt mysticism', 'slime', 'loss of creative vigour', 'paralysis', and 'decline', without at least the suspicion (shared by him in the similar case of Mathew) that the writer of these 'simply insufferable terms' is 'resentful about something', and that here is 'ill-concealed antagonism'. As for the 'this hurts me more than it hurts you' assurance, which is provided as a sort of ground bass in Murry's reviews, every schoolboy knows the significance of that. How much more truly 'simple' had Murry summed up his 'great man' in the classic manner - 'I hate him, he's a liar, he can't dance, his feet stink, and he doesn't love Jesus.'
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1128