Our time of holiday was nearly done, and we wished to go on to Rome before returning to London. Lawrence had seen neither Perugia nor Siena. I had associations with both places, and liked Perugia in particular. Lawrence specially wished to see Siena. So it was arranged that, if possible, we should meet him there on our way back. We talked about how much we should all enjoy ourselves. There would just be Frieda and Lawrence and Donald and I.
But somehow I did not believe it would happen, and it did not. We went by ourselves to Perugia, and we heard from Lawrence that on arriving in Siena he had hated it so much that he could not bear to stay on another day. What happened to make Siena so hateful to him I never learned. I agreed, however, with his finding that travelling was 'peculiarly disheartening' that year, when the débris of the War was still everywhere, and one was depressed 'not so much with inconveniences as by the kind of slow poison one breathes in every new atmosphere'. His restlessness, too, I guessed was at a height. He had felt that he must rush away to Capri to see the Brewsters off to Ceylon. This he wrote to us from Siena the day he was to leave, saying he was sorry to miss us but felt sure we should soon be coming to Italy to live. In case that note should not get us, he left another at the Bank in Florence, with a parcel of six stone plates which he begged us to take to England for Ada. My heart felt a bit like this parcel, but we got it triumphantly home and eventually to the Midlands without one of the plates being cracked, which was something. In this puzzling world it is always a comfort to be of some small practical service to those whom one honours most.
It was nearly a week later, on the last day of September, that we, still in Florence, heard again - this time from Sicily. The Brewsters had been seen off, and the Lawrences had reached Taormina on the night of the 29th in a whirlpool of rain -
.. . but so glad to come to rest, I can't tell you - still like this place best - the sea open to the east, to the heart of the east, away from Europe. I had your letter - it seemed only a moment we saw you - but the sympathy is there. You must come here ... Love.
From then till after the middle of February 1922, Lawrence stayed on at Taormina. He was still resolved to go to America, but shrank from the directly westward journey. Neither did he see his way financially clear enough to warrant it.
6
Meanwhile several disagreeable things had happened in England. The John Bull attack upon Women in Love, headed 'A Book the Police Should Ban', and with the subtitle, 'Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity - Misleading Youth to Unspeakable Disaster', had appeared on September 17th. The calm and cultured easily make light of John Bull attacks; yet we can understand - especially as in this case most of the aforesaid elected to side with John Bull - that Lawrence's publisher felt 'alarmed and upset', and wrote to say so. The assistant editor of John Bull, who in manly fashion signed his article, did 'not claim to be a literary critic', but he 'knew dirt when he smelt it', and here was dirt 'in heaps - festering, putrid heaps which smelt to high Heaven'. And, in phrases not in substance very different from those used a month earlier in the Nation by one who did claim to be a literary critic, he had gone on to protect the 'unsuspecting public' by calling the book an 'obscene study', a 'neurotic production', and a 'shameless study of sex depravity which in direct proportion to the skill of its literary execution becomes unmentionably vile'. He might almost have read Murry's article! He shares, it will be seen, with Murry, the virtue (for which Murry lays some claim to a monopoly of credit) of taking Lawrence seriously; but he differs from Murry in that he grants art and power to the book, and he refrains from the facetiousness which Murry was to permit himself in the process of relegating Mr Lawrence to the slime. It was left to a foreign critic ten years later - Professor Paul de Reul of Brussels University - to say of one such passage as Murry holds up to ridicule, 'Ne sourions pas de ce geste qui est pur et grave.'
At almost the same time Seeker had to inform Lawrence that Philip Heseltine, who was no longer friendly towards him, was threatening a libel action, alleging that the Halliday of the novel was a portrait of himself, which in fact it was, though Lawrence modified the character and altered the complexion for the English edition. In law, I believe, Heseltine's case was very dubious; but there was already trouble enough about the book, and for peace sake Seeker paid him fifty pounds as solatium for injury to feelings and reputation.
Towards the end of October Lawrence wrote from Taormina one of his long, characteristic letters in reply to one of mine in which I had said that my second novel had failed to please the publisher. He wrote affectionately, maliciously, lightly, damning his enemies - 'snotty little lot of people' - heartening up his friends, and describing his mood of the moment as one of not really giving 'a damn for any blooming thing' - usually a preliminary mood with him to caring ardently for some one thing in particular. He still thought that Sicily was 'probably better than any other place', and, though he could not get a 'little taste of canker out of his mouth', he admitted that perhaps it was his mouth that was to blame. As usual it was only man that was vile, or rather, at the moment, ludicrous.
Here, of course, it is like a continental Mad Hatter's teaparty. If you'll let it be, it is all teaparty - and you wonder who on earth is going head over heels into the teapot next. On Saturday we were summoned to a gathering of Britons to discuss the erection of an English church here, at the estimated cost of twenty-five thousand pounds sterling - signed Bronte: which means of course Alec Nelson-Hood, Duca di Bronte. I didn't go, fearing they might ask me for the twenty-five thousand pounds.
But he was not idle. In spite of the severe sirocco in November - 'hot billows of wet and clinging mist - and rain. Damn sirocco' - he was 'pottering with short stories' for a volume. One of these, which he had finished by November 15th, was 'The Captain's Doll'. Earlier, he had written to Donald to ask 'which regiment of Scots wears the tight tartan trews: the quite tight ones' and all about them. He was also pondering, with some kind of a book in view, over the fascinating lost Etruscans, and he was preparing to translate Giovanni Verga's Mastro Don Gesualdo and some of his shorter stories. This last, he thought, would be 'fun', as Verga's peculiar language was so fascinating. 'He exercises quite a fascination on me, and makes me feel quite sick at the end, but perhaps that is only if one knows Sicily.'
Lawrence has never had full credit as a translator. He had a similar gift to that of the late C. K Scott Moncrieff. He could enter into the meaning of a highly individual outlook on life that was other than his own and expressed in a difficult idiom. Had he not been novelist and poet in his own right, he might have earned good money, an easy fame and high ungrudging acknowledgement as a translator. He is of the first rank.
That month of November Seltzer was bringing out Sea and Sardinia and the illustrated chap-book of Tortoises. And there was word of Seltzer doing in chap-book form the poems 'Evangelistic Beasts', for which we were asked to look for a medieval cover design among the British Museum missals. Lawrence had received, as yet, no good word of the Aaron's Rod manuscript except from Seltzer, and though he took this as probably no more than 'a publisher's pat', it was anyhow 'better than a smack in the eye, such as one gets from England for anything'. Some of the worst smacks in the eye had come from the Athenaeum, where Murry in the previous December, with Katherine Mansfield behind him, had attacked The Lost Girl at length under what he has himself designated the 'characteristic' heading of 'The Decay of Mr D. H. Lawrence' (December 17th, 1920), an attack by which he still stands, though he is obliged to admit that his conclusions were based on a chronological error - an error greater by several years than he knew even when he made the admission. In the same letter Lawrence makes his forecast of Italian affairs -
I shouldn't wonder if before very long they effected a mild sort of revolution here, and turned out the king. It would be a clergy - industrial - socialist move - industrialists and clergy to rule in name of the people. Smart dodge, I think. If the exchange falls again they will effect it. Then they'll ally with Germany, Austria, and probab
ly France and make a European ring excluding England. That seems to be the idea.
He believed, however, that this would come from a victory for the Communists.
All the while he was watching the birds and longing to know when he could set off on his journey.
There are crowds of all sorts of new birds in the garden, suddenly come south. And the storks are passing in the night, whewwing softly and murmuring as they go overhead.
He was scraping up hard for his fares to sail farther away. Not only the full-blown hostility in England, but the growing sympathy in America, strengthened his conviction that there was his virgin soil. Already, as we have seen, Amy Lowell had stretched out a hand of practical helpfulness of a kind that could be taken without humiliation. Now came a letter from another rich and strange American - 'a woman called Mabel Dodge Sterne', offering them the loan of a furnished adobe house for themselves at Taos, New Mexico, and all they could want in addition if only they would go there.
She had told them, wrote Lawrence to me, that 'Taos is on a mountain - 7,000 feet up and 23 miles from a railway - and has a tribe of six hundred free Indians who she says are interesting, sun-worshippers, rain-makers, and unspoiled. It sounds rather fun.' He wanted to know if we knew 'anything about such a place as Taos?' And he made enquiries about tramp vessels to New Orleans or Galveston so that he might go direct, missing out 'that awful New York altogether'.
Till at least the end of December he was thinking of going off in this way. At Christmas, when he sent me an American novel, he said that he was 'unbearably tired of Europe'. For New Year he sent me a copy of Tortoises and the further assurance that he was 'seriously thinking of sailing to New Orleans and going to Taos in New Mexico, to try that' in January or February. But he had spent Christmas in bed with what he called an influenza, which was hardly shaken off by January 24th, and I could feel that he was most reasonably afraid of disobeying doctor's orders by going to America in midwinter. In Sicily, as it was, they were having 'vile ... really wicked ... weather' and he was trying to 'possess his soul in patience'. Of the influenza which had been epidemic in England again (I had just been down with it) he wrote me 'I believe it is partly an organic change in one's whole constitution - through the blood and psyche. We are at the end of our particular tether, and the breaking loose is an uncomfortable process.'
It was indeed uncomfortable for Lawrence. He had just heard that his sisters 'loftily disapproved' of Tortoises and that his English publisher did not care for Aaron's Rod.
That Rod I'm afraid it is gentian root or wormwood stem. But they've got to swallow it sooner or later: miserable tonic-less lot He hoped that my novel, then in proof, having found a new publisher, was bitter too, though he suggested that Gingerbread or Rose Hearted Camellia would have been titles more pleasing to publishers than The Camomile.
But the chief piece of news in this letter, written on January 24th, was that the Lawrences were leaving Europe. Having almost booked their passages to America however, it had suddenly 'come over' Lawrence that he must first go to Ceylon. His friend Brewster who was studying Pali and Buddhism at the Buddhist Monastery in Kandy, had written asking him to come and had offered hospitality. The Lawrences were to have to themselves a 'big old ramshackle bungalow there'. So they were going.
I have once more gone back on my plan. I shrink as yet from the States. Ultimately I shall go there, no doubt. But I want to go east before I go west: go west via the east... I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world, away towards the inner realities that are real: and return, maybe, to the world later, when one is quiet and sure. I am tired of the world, and want the peace like a river: not this whisky and soda, bad whisky too, of life so-called. I don't believe in Buddhistic inaction and meditation. But I believe the Buddhistic peace is the point to start from - not our strident fretting and squabbling.
Mabel Sterne (as she has told us) was projecting her strong American self-will - her will to use Lawrence for ends of her own - across the Atlantic to draw Lawrence to Taos, but her will was as nothing to what Lawrence called the 'Balaam's ass in his belly'. What he had always felt concerning the 'overriding of life' in America had taken concrete form in Mrs Sterne's letters. Americans would be better 'when the hand had fallen on them a bit heavier'. He would go there, but not until he had been 'fortified by a country with religion for one that had none'. To face America one must be strong. To be strong one must be 'cured' of sick Europe. So he would withdraw for a breathing-space, would try if 'the old, old East' would 'sweeten the gall in his blood'. He thought he might stay in the East for a year. Anyhow, he would go and see.
In the midst of his preparations for departure he found time to write at length to me about (and no doubt to give other help to) a middle-aged and very poor Finnish writer, once the captain of a tramp steamer, who was struggling to support his wife and child on a small and severely depreciated pension. This man had written short stories of seafaring life, which had already been translated into German, and Lawrence wanted me to read them with a view to making English translations and placing these in the English magazines. Unfortunately the stories, which I read as carefully as my inadequate German permitted, did not interest me; and in any case I knew I could not place them as I had no influence where any magazine was concerned. Lawrence had further admitted that they needed putting 'into proper literary shape'. This was no task for me. So I sent them back to the author with my regrets, hoping that the Englishwoman in Finland to whom he had also applied would be able to do better than I could. T. W. Nylander was the author's name. I never heard how he fared.
On February 18th came a postcard from Taormina to say that they were leaving 'on Monday for Palermo, en route for Naples', and that they would sail for Colombo from Naples on the 26th by SS Osterley, of the Orient line, the passage taking about fourteen days. Lawrence, in 'throes of packing', was feeling thrilled and glad. 'I want to go. One day you and Don will come. I dream'd of elephants.' A further postcard, dated the 25th, from Naples, told us that they were off next day, and begged us to write to Ceylon. No Columbus ever stood more in need of valour or was less informed as to what awaited him overseas. This may sound silly or exaggerated. It is strictly true.
Part Four
AET. 36-40
PROSE
Kangaroo
The Boy in the Bush (with M. L. Skinner)
The Plumed Serpent
Mornings in Mexico
The Woman who Rode Away, etc.
St Mawr, etc.
David (play)
* * *
'Rip the veil of the old vision across, and walk through the rent'
1
We are here and settling down - very hot at first - but one soon takes naturally to it - soon feels in a way at home - sort of root race home. We're in a nice spacious bungalow on the hill above Kandy in a sort of half jungle of a coconut palm estate - and cocoa - beautiful, and such sweet scents. The Prince of Wales was here on Thursday - looks worn out and nervy, poor thing. The Perahera in the evening with a hundred elephants was lovely. But I don't believe I shall ever work here.
This was Lawrence's first letter from Ceylon, written on March 25th, 1922. Already he was beginning to realise that the tropics, in spite of their interest and loveliness, were 'not really his line' - 'not active enough', a realisation that was sharpened by an attack of malaria - his first. The carelessness of Italy was one thing, but the immense not caring of the Orient was another. Though beautiful to look at, the East was 'queer - how it seems to bleed one's courage and make one indifferent to everything'. This was an indifference which the Englishman in Lawrence rejected. It belonged to an order with which he had neither blood contact nor other affinity, so he must get away from it. It was not what he sought - though he had to see it. Nauseous to him were the tropical scents and sounds, and the 'boneless suavity of the East' did not offer that 'last dark strand from the previous pre-white era' which by joining with 'our own thin end' would, Lawrence believed, establish a
new flow of life. He found that the dark Oriental was 'built round a gap - a hollow pit. In the middle of their eyes, instead of a man, a sort of bottomless pit.' As for the Buddhist monks, with their 'nasty faces' and 'little vulgar dens of temples', theirs was 'a very conceited, selfish show, a vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space'. Within a month of his arrival he had planned to go on to Australia. 'If I don't like Australia I shall go on to San Francisco. Now one is started, nothing like keeping going.'
In the course of that month he saw a good deal, including the celebrations for the Prince of Wales, who was just then on the tour during which he made his celebrated gesture towards the 'Untouchables'. Though I never heard Lawrence comment on this gesture, I can guess that it fitted well with his high notions of princeliness. But I did hear his critical comments on the Prince's visit, and I think they merit record. He would have had the King of England's son splendidly apparelled and dazzlingly escorted in such a way as to strike both worship and terror into his Indian subjects. The frail, sensitive, simple-mannered, well-meaning, but too often weary-looking boy would have gained a thousand-fold, thought Lawrence, by the very frailty and simplicity of his bearing, if he had been framed in a magnificence symbolic of England and England's throne. Here were millions of men and women who could understand glory and submit to it joyfully, but only if the glory was conveyed to them by the eye and ear, by the richness of material stuffs and sounds and odours. It is a sophisticated, moreover a Western imagination that can be moved to the perception of the greatest earthly glory by the figure of a slender, clean-shaven youth with a pale, gentle face, who wears the tailored jacket and creased trousers of Savile Row. The Prince's outfit for the hottest day in Canada ought, in Lawrence's opinion, to be fundamentally different from his outfit for a public appearance in Kandy. I would have backed Lawrence to stage-manage the public appearance of his own Prince to the best advantage for any given populace.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1130