Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence

by D. H. Lawrence

  But in the midst of these tastings and adventures there arrives by post for Lawrence a bottle of the latest London specific for souls. It is labelled Adelphi. Shake well. Contents to be swallowed monthly.

  3

  The story of the Adelphi and its connection with Lawrence has been told in the pages of that periodical by Murry himself with a running commentary. As he was the only begetter and the editor of the periodical we must accept his narrative, but we shall find that, extracted from his commentary, it appears in a different light.

  Time and again he is obliged to accuse his 'great' man of self-deception - self-deception alike in small matters and in great. So much so, indeed, that, unless we take his bare word for it, we fail to see any greatness in the Lawrence of his narrative, just as we fail to see on Murry's part any true response to greatness. For one thing self-deception is surely not an attribute of true greatness. What does appear in the very turn of Murry's phrases is something for which self-deception is the most charitable word.

  To go back a little. In spite of his ecstasy over Aaron's Rod as a 'fountain of life', Murry does not seem to have written to Lawrence to tell him how much he and Katherine thought of the book He left his review - his single favourable review, of a Lawrence novel, with the exception of a few lines commending St Mawr - to speak for itself. The first friendly gesture came, he tells us, from Lawrence. He found the card from New Zealand 'unexpected' - as well as 'sudden'. It was none the less the kind of thing one might expect from Lawrence. His affection for Katherine, whom he now knew to be very ill, had always been great, and seeing her homeland, he could not help remembering with tenderness his early hopeful association with Murry in her company.

  There was nothing 'sudden', however, about Murry's response. Not till the end of the year did he write suggesting, 'he supposes', that 'relations should be renewed'. One may infer an appeal from which hysteria was not absent. Lawrence replied that it would be as well to wait and see. 'Heaven knows what we all are, and how we should feel if we met, now that we are changed: we will have to meet and see.' A kindly wave of the hand from New Zealand had come naturally, but there was something which made Lawrence wary in this plea for a clasping of hands across the ocean.

  When Katherine Mansfield died in December, 1922, Lawrence sent a message that was kind, eloquent and wise and, as was usual with his messages, free from any trace of emotional collapse.

  'I wish it needn't all have been as it has been. I do wish it.' This, which was strictly true, was as far as he could go for the past. 'We will unite up again when I come to England.' This for a future hope. Lawrence was always willing to welcome a change for the better. As for Murry's present and his own, there was a frank warning but a steady affirmation of faith. 'We keep faith. I always feel death only strengthens that - the faith between those who have it.' Soon after this letter came a present of the Fantasia, published in America.

  One spring night in a lovely part of the country, solitary and wrought-up by that sort of ‘half convalescent' emotion which, in the case of some natures, so easily takes the form of spiritual self-abuse, Murry read the Fantasia. One may be pardoned for thinking that in this mood, and following the receipt of so moving a letter from Lawrence, Murry would have been in ecstasies almost equally over any new Lawrence book. A man of moods, this. Still, the Fantasia it was, and he has the benefit of the doubt. Its effect on him was twofold. It made him fall grovelling on his face before Lawrence, and it clinched his already 'half-formed' determination - a determination which in the first place had nothing to do with Lawrence - to found the Adelphi. So he has told us. Why not launch the new venture with sorrowing praise of Katherine Mansfield and some essential chapters of the Fantasia, which was still unknown in England?

  We can believe that he 'neither desired nor intended to remain editor' of the magazine, and that he was in his own eyes 'simply locum tenens, literally lieutenant, for Lawrence', only by guessing how far he was swept away by his own wrought-up condition. Except for a line of kindly encouragement from Lawrence (which could hardly have been refused, elicited as it was by prepaid cable) the whole thing existed merely 'in his own eyes'. In no real sense was Lawrence consulted. Distance and time made that impossible, for the first copy of the Adelphi appeared in June, 1923. Yet because he could infer from some remarks in Lawrence's letters that Lawrence 'was in the throes of a revulsion from America', he concluded that the revulsion from England had spent itself, and that he, Murry, had only to say the magic word 'Adelphi for Lawrence to rush back and wait upon the doorstep till such time as the founder and editor should vacate his place at the office table.

  To anyone with any knowledge of Lawrence it seems fantastic indeed to imagine him as the editor of a monthly magazine in England: still more fantastic, had he founded a magazine, that it should have resembled the Adelphi. No doubt he was willing, even pleased, to encourage Murry and to let him use the Fantasia. But in his very first letters after the cable he made it clear that he had no intention of hurrying to England. There were things, more urgent than any Adelphi, that would keep him in America yet awhile. Besides, 'ghastly' and 'empty' as was America, it was preferable to plausible and stuffy England that made him feel as if he had 'swallowed a lump of lead'. He would come - that very summer, if he could: Murry might be looking out for a quiet cottage for him. Meanwhile there was room for improvement in the Adelphi. He did not like the first numbers. They were too accommodating by half, and apart from the Fantasia, not to his taste. Murry must have patience and show his mettle. Lawrence, in spite of his American revulsion, 'mistrusted his country too much to identify himself with it any more'. He even felt 'a certain disgust'. 'Something must happen' before he could return or regain his confidence. The editor of the Athenaeum might, 'in his own eyes' be 'radically changed' by a spiritual experience in which the Fantasia had played a part. But how was Lawrence to be sure that such a radical change was necessarily for the better in his eyes (however convenient from a literary point of view) or even that it was not a case of 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'? There was nothing in the Adelphi as yet to make him sure. While he praised what he could (for Lawrence in such things was both kind and courteous) and hoped hard for its future, and while he would give Murry of his best without expecting more than the minimum of pay, it was not to be thought that he would risk everything on Murry's intimation of a new partisanship and a new integrity.

  If any reader has the patience today to read through those early numbers of the Adelphi he will see clearly what Lawrence must have thought of them - Lawrence who was without a touch of hysteria; Lawrence who was against precisely the kind of humble and emotional yet rationalised Christianity of which Murry now became the spokesman; Lawrence who, while recognising Katherine Mansfield's charming gifts, would never admit that she had genius or even that her work was important; Lawrence who disliked anything in the nature of exploitation; Lawrence who was finding amid the horrors of Mexico the relief afforded by a 'good natural feeling', and was ready to begin writing The Plumed Serpent.

  The reader, this is to say, will see what Lawrence must have felt about the Adelphi as a possible mouthpiece for his own thought, except in so far as he might be an outside contributor. Which is not, however, to say either (a), that he did not wish Murry well in any venture that would help him to think things out in his own way, or (b), that he did not hope Murry's thinking might bring him and his magazine round in time to something sufficiently harmonious with Lawrence's own to allow of true collaboration.

  Yet Murry was so 'perplexed' and 'bewildered' by Lawrence's letters, because they were doubtful and critical as well as encouraging, that he wrote to ask if Lawrence had really meant what he had said in Aaron's Rod and Fantasia, about wishing for another man's help in the attempt to create a new world! And when Lawrence decided that he must stay a while longer in America - this time in Old Mexico - Murry concluded either that he had misunderstood the Fantasia or that Lawrence had not meant what he said, or more probably b
oth.

  What Murry could not comprehend - or, what comprehending, drove him mad - was that Lawrence, with his passion and his perceptiveness, stood between two worlds, and not between economic worlds like those of capitalism and communism, but between worlds of the human spirit - the old world, rich and beloved but almost dead, which demanded that he be 'faithful and faithless together', and the new world which meant nothing to his aching heart yet claimed all his loyalty. But he would have no trumped-up newness, no rehash of the old, no fobbing off with economic makeshifts of the moment. The new had to be most delicately sought and perilously fought for. If England could hold out the veritable olive branch of Spring he would take it. Somehow the Adelphi olive branch did not meet his need. By the side of the bare but quivering twig of the diviner that he carried in his own hand it was suspect.

  That his own twig had not lied in leading him to Mexico was already proved. As he had written to me just then, in the letter quoted earlier, there was 'a novel simmering in him' - a novel of well over a hundred thousand words - which had taken him to Lake Chapala, first to see if he could write it, and then to hold him there till he should finish.

  This, then, and nothing more sinister is the explanation of Lawrence's 'strange instability'. That and the rest of the fatal sounding phrases mean no more than that an imaginative writer preferred the peaceful production of a new novel in fostering circumstances to throwing in his lot with a new magazine, of which he was doubtful, along with a man in whom he had no cause to believe.

  Murry will have it that Aaron's Rod was the peak of Lawrence's achievement in fiction. I am against peaks - as of an invalid chart - where Lawrence is concerned. I see him not as a waxing and waning but as a pulsing light, and his life rather as a pilgrimage than as a pattern. But, if there must be a pinnacle, surely, so far anyhow as fiction is concerned, it is reached in The Plumed Serpent. And surely here is the most ambitious and the most impressive novel of our generation. If any has been more faultless, which has possessed in the same degree the blazing virtue of potency? Only the pinions of faith could have carried home such a theme. And more than faith. For this tale Lawrence needed not only all his genius, but all his long discipline and all his savage pilgrimage. So far from showing 'disintegration' it creates. In it Lawrence's powers as a novelist are established and his thoughts as a man embodied to that extent that it would have assured him his place without further production. Indeed it may be said that all later works, such as Lady Chatterley and the latter part of The Man Who Died, are embroideries on themes contained in the Mexican novel.

  In relating how Lawrence delayed his coming Murry makes no mention of The Plumed Serpent. When, three years later, it was reviewed in the Adelphi, it was dismissed with facetious disparagement in a few lines as a 'disappointing' book that 'lets us down', so much so that 'we cannot help suspecting that Lawrence has lost faith in his own imagination . . . Alas! now that the miracle is here, we cannot grasp it either with our minds, our solar plexuses, or our tails.' Though, of course, there follows, 'need we say that the book contains lovely and memorable things'?

  While Lawrence was engaged in writing The Plumed Serpent Murry was 'giving himself away' in the magazine (which had been meant for Lawrence) to an extent that in his own words was 'past change, beyond all remedy'. In the editorial to his second number he quoted passages from two private 'letters to the editor'. One was from a woman who, all alone in Plymouth, 'in the throes of a great bereavement, having come straight from the deathbed in the accident ward of a public hospital of a greatly loved friend smitten down under tragic circumstances in the prime of life', had 'wandered into a public library where in an advertisement the arresting headline' of Murry's article in the Adelphi had caught her eye, and thrilled her so much that she spent a shilling and discovered 'that ideals and aspirations are indeed spiritual potencies that here and hereafter demand our loyalties'.

  As well as this Plymouth Sister, Murry produced a male testifier. The two would seem to be closely related, like sufferers from kidney trouble, whose epistolary style in describing the benefits of a curative pill they exactly reproduce.

  Somehow your advertisement had caught my soul - I was and am still, troubled by this terrible enigma - life. I had tried in my way to satisfy my soul; but alas! what is my way? It had made me more miserable and unhappy. On the 28th I wandered the whole afternoon from newsagent to newsagent to get a copy of the Adelphi - [he failed owing to some fault in distribution] .. . and with heavy heart wandered - wandered aimlessly.

  Though he knows not why, somehow or other the ideal of the Adelphi had got hold of him, and he 'was like a moth, determined to whirl round and round the candle till he had either burnt his wings or understood the nature of light'. Advertisers, reading this breathless narrative, must have been relieved to learn that the very next afternoon this most metaphysical moth procured a copy of the Adelphi and 'read it through from cover to cover including the advertisements', with effects that are expressed in phrases of a like vague ecstasy.

  It was not, naturally, to Lawrence's Fantasia that these testimonials applied, but to Murry's first editorial, 'The Cause of It All', in which Lawrence had no part, either alleged or conceivable. It was a very catchy piece of work, before which, I am ashamed to say, I momentarily went down myself, though Donald condemned it at once and out of hand; and Lawrence, when I first met him afterwards, had no printable words in which to describe it. It was in the emotional-facetious vein - essentially the same vein as we find in 'There was a little Man', Murry's contribution to the Signature in 1915, which showed us Murry, aged thirty-four, sitting on the top of a Camden Town bus and describing himself with overflowing sympathy for our benefit. He mentions his 'demon'. But it is not what Lawrence means by a demon. It is merely the common little devil of doubt that, when Murry comes to earth after a heavenward caper of special emotional attainment, whispers in his ear that he may not be able to 'justify the Adelphi, with the result that he feels impelled 'to write boldly, to unfurl and wave a flag'.

  'What flag?' I can hear Lawrence put this question, with dancing eyes.

  Murry unfurls his banner. It bears this device, 'The Adelphi is run for and by a belief in Life.'

  'So,' replies Lawrence, 'might the editor of John Bull truthfully declare. However, get on with it and good luck to you. I too believe in life. But it does not follow that our beliefs are not diametrically opposed, as indeed they have proved to be in the past. However, you may be getting by your own way to some plane where we can meet in agreement. You tell me that recent events have radically changed your outlook so that you enter into my position in Fantasia (notwithstanding that this book is a logical development from Women in Love and in perfect accord with The Lost Girl which you still hate). By all means get on with it. Possibly the nasty taste is only in my supersensitive mouth. Again, possibly not.'

  For the rest, in his opening number of the Adelphi Murry announced some taking features, named a small team of good men who were going to work for next to nothing for him under the banner of the idea, disclaimed the editorial chair for himself, and gave the usual journalistic 'send-off' by the good old stage-army band - Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, etc. In Murry's own words it was all 'the most frightful giveaway'.

  And it 'went with a bang'. So we learn in the second issue. But is Murry elated? Ah, no, my friends. He is humble. He fears only that he may not live up to his first number, or that he may 'fail' such people as his Plymouth Sister and the male moth in their all too human appeal. He disclaims all notion of financial success, only initiating a scheme by which every three readers (already four times in excess of the number he had modestly counted on) shall bring him one new reader between them.

  In this, his second number, he says nothing about vacating the editorial chair. He is indeed very much the editor, speaking in the first person, referring to his colleagues, his policy and his intended procedure, the two last named of which were as un-Lawrentian as can be. As between D. H. Lawrence and Mr Horatio
Bottomley they tended perceptibly, in regard to editorial flavour, towards the latter sage - wherein, no doubt, lay their appeal. Editorial matter apart, there was another long extract from the Fantasia-, there were extracts from Katherine Mansfield's journal of a personal nature, which exhibited her mourning over her dead brother in language a thought too childlike; there was a poem by her to her dead brother, which, on the other hand, did not seem intended for the public eye; and there was the reproduction of a drawing by her, meant for her brother's pleasure when he was alive. Into these intimacies Fantasia seemed to have strayed unawares.

  So thought the Adelphi readers, anyhow those of the type which Murry most feared to 'let down'. With Lawrence as even a single ingredient of this publication which was to have been all for him, there was going to be trouble. About the first extract nobody had felt impelled to write - not even the man who had read all the advertisements. But in the second Lawrence had stated - what Mr Bernard Shaw had already stated quite a long rime before - that Jesus was a failure.

  It was now put beyond doubt for what section of the public Murry's magazine had made its bid. It 'passed the comprehension' of the Westminster Catholic Association how the editor of 'a responsible review' could have allowed the Lawrence matter with its 'studied insult to the Christian religion' to appear. Mr Ellis Roberts in a letter took the same view. This was bad enough. But what really touched Murry to the quick was a protest from a private individual who, at the risk of being 'very old-fashioned and narrow', bewailed the admission into this 'most delightful magazine' of 'sneers at the Founder of the Christian religion'. The inclusion of one who thus 'spat in the face of Christ' would 'drive out from the circle' of Adelphi readers 'the thousands of people who are alienated by this sort of thing'.