One might have thought that such a letter was predictable. But to Murry it was 'a shock', and 'a bolt from the blue'. Recollect that the Adelphi now looked like being, all unexpectedly, a financial success.
Certainly here was a nice question, even a test one, though there were, in fact, as there generally are, more than two ways of meeting it - i.e., three. Murry might have referred his critics to Lawrence - in which case the Adelphi would most likely have gone out on its third issue in a blaze of significant defiance, but would possibly have reissued from its ashes at some later time. He might have referred them to the devil or - almost the same thing - ignored them, in which case he could never hope to recover the readers Lawrence had lost him. Or he might manage in such a way as to placate the 'circle' to which it was clear that his Adelphi personality appealed. While doing this he could stand on his dignity as an editor by appearing to stand by Lawrence, in which case, though readers might be temporarily lost they could later be rounded up again.
He chose the third course. In the third issue of the Adelphi (to which I was one of the smaller contributors) he told how the private letter from which I have quoted had 'deeply moved' him (as well as coming like a bolt from the blue) by its 'simple and exquisite sincerity'. At the same time (with Koteliansky sternly by his elbow) he made the utmost stand for Lawrence of which he was capable. He announced that in his opinion ''since Katherine Mansfield's death' (the italics are mine) D. H. Lawrence had 'become incomparably the most important English writer of his generation'.
If it had not been for that odd qualification 'since Katherine Mansfield's death' it was really not so ill-done. It saved Murry's dignity and it preserved the Adelphi to achieve good work of its kind and to publish, for a time at least, work by Lawrence. It is even doubtful if these ends could have been achieved by any other means.
But the inwardness of the matter lay in the fact that Murry was facing both ways and that Lawrence, perceiving this, lost most of the hope he had of identifying himself more closely with the Adelphi. The hands were the hands of Esau, but the voice was the voice of Jacob. If Murry could find a 'deeply moving' and 'simple and exquisite sincerity' in the sort of private letters from which he had quoted, and if he thought that only by reason of Katherine Mansfield's death Lawrence was become the most important English writer of his generation, he was far, very far, from possessing the capacity to act as 'lieutenant' to a man whose essential creed was contained in the words 'never adapt yourself'. To put it more mildly, the Adelphi was not a thing to rush home for. It could wait. As usual Murry had underrated both Lawrence's subtlety and his clear-sighted arrogance.
4
By August, as we have seen, Frieda was tired of being in Mexico and longed to be in England. For one thing she now had better prospects than ever before of seeing her children. She urged Lawrence to return, telling him among other ready half-truths that 'England was his place'. Like me she did not think so poorly of the Adelphi as Lawrence did. Like me she was even carried away by it, and what was more she could almost fancy a future in it for Lawrence. And almost he wanted to be persuaded. In August she got him as far as the quay at New York. But at that point the 'Balaam's ass in his belly' rebelled. He would not go. 'Find I just don't want to - not yet. Later.' So he wrote to me from New York after seeing Frieda off without him, and this though he had no definite plans otherwise.
I think I shall go to California, and either pack with a donkey in the mountains, or get some sailing ship to the islands - if the last is possible. Perhaps by the autumn I'll decide to come to England - who knows! At present I can't come.
On the quay Frieda and Lawrence had been through one of the worst quarrels - perhaps the very worst - of their life together. And when they parted it was in such anger that both of them felt it might be for always. Because, of course, if Lawrence felt that he must stay longer he wanted Frieda to stay with him. It was against his desire that she had persuaded him this far.
Frieda, however, presently calmed and cheered by the voyage, felt quite sure that the parting was not for always, and immediately upon her arrival in England she sent Lawrence a wifely cable. He must come to her because she needed him.
Lawrence did not come at once, though no doubt he was glad of the cable. He went to Buffalo, to Tepic, to Jalisco (which last he greatly liked), making a tour of some two months, which must have had a strong effect upon The Plumed Serpent when he came to rewrite the manuscript. In some at least of these places he had acquaintances, at others introductions.
Meanwhile, Frieda having paid her visit to her mother in Germany, was in London; and, thinking that she was preparing the way for Lawrence, was seeing much of Murry. She kept writing enthusiastic letters to Lawrence about him and the Adelphi. Yet Lawrence held back.
'Frieda says she likes England now, and it is my place, and I must come back. I wonder.' So he wrote to me from Guadalajara on October 17th, having heard that I had just read Kangaroo. The letter continues:
We rode two days down the mountains, and got to Eztadan. Mexico has a certain mystery of beauty for me, as if the gods were here. Now, in this October, the days are so pure and lovely, like an enchantment, as if some dark-faced gods were still young. I wish it could be that I could start a little centre - a ranch - where we could have our Little adobe houses and make a life, and you could come with Don and John Patrick. It is always what I work for. But it must come from the inside, not from the will. And when it will be it will be, I suppose. It is queer, all the way down the Pacific Coast, I kept thinking: Best go back to England. And then, once across the Barranca from Ixdan, it was here again, where the gods may sometimes be awful, but they are young, here in Mexico, in Jalisco, that I wanted to be. And there is room - room for all of us if it could but be. But let us watch: things, when they come, come suddenly. It may be my destiny is in Europe. Quien sabe? If it is, I'll come back Hasta el dial But by the middle of November Lawrence felt that he could, even that he must, come to England. He need not stay, but he must look after Frieda. And he could see for himself if there was anything in the Adelphi, as Frieda, unlike himself, was so sure that there was. For the moment there was nothing keeping him in America as there had been three months earlier. He had got what he then wanted. As Frieda insisted, now that Murry was a free man, and was of a mind to accept Lawrence's leading as soon as Lawrence should come upon the scene, they might carry out the old scheme of going forth together.
Eight days after writing to me he wrote to Murry:
Yes, I think I shall come back now. I think I shall be back by the beginning of December. Work awhile with you on the Adelphi. Then perhaps we'll set off to India. Quien sabe?
The promise went no further than this. Yet Murry would have us believe that in the matter of the Adelphi Lawrence had let him down. Anyhow his 'nascent confidence' in Lawrence as his leader 'had already begun to wither'. He is at pains to attribute Lawrence's return simply to his wish to rejoin Frieda.
Lawrence arrived in London at the beginning of December, and Murry went with Kot to the station to meet him. Murry has described the meeting - how ill Lawrence looked, with a face of 'greenish pallor', and how almost his first words were 'I can't bear it,' so that Murry 'supposes' he felt 'as though the nightmare were upon him again'.
Murry's supposition is correct. But this time it was a different nightmare. It arose from a conviction which had begun to form in Lawrence upon his arrival at Southampton, had hardened during the journey through the Southern Counties, and had been clinched as by a hammer-stroke when he was greeted by Frieda and the others on the London platform. This conviction was that he had made a mistake in coming - that he ought to have waited for Frieda to come to him. If he could have been back in America at that moment, there would have been nothing but a fierce little greenish tongue of flame for Frieda and Murry to fetch from Waterloo to Hampstead. Now that he had come, however, he must see it through. From all this the reader is requested to make no obvious deductions. Lawrence had an uncanny and instantaneous
way that was entirely his own, of 'sizing up' any situation. For him to see, for example, Murry and Frieda waiting for him so chummily together was enough to turn him greenish pale all over. 'Chumminess'... 'palliness' between people was anyhow detestable to him. Again, though Murry might be Lawrence's self-appointed lieutenant on a self-constituted Adelphi, Frieda was another matter. Here Murry would find himself up against the 'Unknown God' with a vengeance. In Lawrence's marriage there was no place for any lieutenancy, however platonic.
For some little time before Lawrence's arrival Frieda had already been living in the same house as ourselves - not our own house, but a large old one belonging to my brother who lived on the top floor. We had a lower part, and the Lawrences the flat above us. Murry had been Frieda's constant visitor and she was clearly prepared to back him up with all her strength (though why he should need her backing I could never understand) to Lawrence upon his arrival. 'After all,' she said to me one day, 'Murry is Somebody! And the Adelphi is Something!!' Her enthusiasm was childlike and infectious - at least it was childlike, and I should have found it infectious if I could have brought myself to believe in Murry. I respected his talent, and admired his capacity for eliciting emotion in others, but that was as far as I could get. Yet I could see, and can now, why it was that for so long he made a special appeal to Lawrence. He seemed made to subserve another's compelling genius.
Lawrence's immediate suggestion, says Murry - made perhaps on the way to Hampstead - was that the Adelphi 'should attack everything, everything; and explode in one blaze of denunciation'. Murry could see nothing for it but to treat this as a joke, whereupon Lawrence could see no alternative but for Murry to give the Adelphi up and go back to Mexico with him to 'begin the nucleus of a new society'. Lawrence's lingering belief that his own scale of values might have some practical bearing on Murry's should, one thinks, have been the real joke of the occasion for Murry, had Murry been able to regard the situation with detachment. But of course he could not, and we hardly blame him. Strange as it may seem, Lawrence was the only one detached enough to see the true irony of events.
That afternoon I was asked upstairs while Lawrence bustled about unpacking. I cannot understand Mabel Dodge Luhan's description of him at such times, or when travelling, as fussy or inefficient. He always appeared to me as a model of neatness and precision, neither wasting a movement nor permitting even a temporary disorder. Perhaps as an onlooker Mrs Luhan was upsetting. Some people are. And I have noticed that it is often the inefficient onlooker that most upsets the efficient worker.
On this occasion, while settling in, he talked with the greatest animation. And, although he was thin, I saw none of the 'greenish pallor' which struck Murry. Never had I seen him more energetic. So much so that Frieda asked him didn't he think after the journey he ought to 'rest for a bit'?
But he turned on her. 'Rest!' he snapped. 'When Frieda says England is "so restful!" it gives me the cold shudders. I don't want to rest nowadays. I feel full of energy!' And he went on producing things for me to see - his Indian belt of plaited horsehair, Frieda's snow-leopard skin, or a painted Mexican vase - fawn and pink and grey, with here and there a dab of light red or pale blue - all earth colours from a place where sun and earth were in close communion. He gave me one of these, after warning me that I must never put flowers in it, as even the eggshell glaze was porous to water. But first he drew from it his sewing and first-aid kit, and unscrewing a pot of boracic he produced from the lid an engraved disk of metal - bigger than an English half-crown, and heavy and shining - a coin of Mexican gold! Somehow, as he gave it to me to handle, it was as if he passed on to me the pristine magnificence of Mexico that had meant so much to him. By this he was to measure us in England and to find us wanting.
Already Frieda, who was great on making a place 'homelike', had hung pictures about the walls, which Mark Gertler or Dorothy Brett, or both, had lent or given for this purpose. Enthusiastically she drew his attention to them. Lawrence inspected them coolly. 'They want thinking about, I guess!' was his comment, uttered in that precise Nottingham speech of his that somehow agreed so well with his emphatic phrases; and Frieda subsided.
At the time I did what I wish I had done oftener. I noted down immediately what I could remember of Lawrence's conversation that first afternoon during his 'getting straight', as it ran on largely in the form of a monologue. I put it down now as it stands in my note.
'The spirits of everybody on board the boat just went right down into their boots when we first sighted the coast of Europe, at Corunna . . . The English are no longer flowering... we are the seed ... we should be scattered. We are the best-bred people on earth. But now we are caged and fearful.'
I asked him if he would rather have New York or London? 'New York,' he replied, without hesitating. 'London as a city - yes, I like it better, love it more. But it is locked away, out of touch. With New York one is in touch with the free outer world, and with the world of Mexico.' Of Mexico he spoke much, with loathing of many things about it, but saying that it had spoiled him, he feared, for Europe. 'Sicily?' he said. 'Never again!'
While he talked, he left all the letters that had collected for him in London unopened - did not even glance at them. He had liked it in Mexico, he said, that there had been no mail for him and no English newspapers. He described with delight how on the voyage home he had hung over the bows, watching a school of porpoises playing about the steamer in the translucent water. Then later the rain on the surface of black water . . . and the beauty of the flying fish. Then the shaking of the little English train - 'so light, so light, as if it would fall to pieces long before we reached London'.
Between Southampton and London he had been oppressed by the hedged fields - 'I feel I am a mouse - a net put over me - the network of the English hedged fields.'
Then suddenly, 'What do you think of the world these days?' he asked me.
I told him, what indeed I have always felt, that the world never seemed to come within my orbit. And that I was kept so busy endeavouring to keep a roof over our heads and food on our table that I never had much time to think about the world.
At this he laughed with a kind of mingled pleasure and disgust that it was so with me. It became a convention between us that I was attached to a little ship, which for me to leave would be infidelity. 'And how is the ship sailing?' he would ask, with a touch of mockery that I liked while I felt it was justified. Or again 'More bric-à-brac!' he would exclaim reproachfully, when I showed him some odd object newly-acquired for the house. I pointed out that he himself found it hard to resist bric-à-brac, though he might not call it so. What about the snow-leopard skin, and the Navajo rings he had been describing to me? And he shook his head laughing. All the same, he was in the right and I knew it, and he knew that I knew, though I fear he thought me incorrigible. He had ceased to collect things, and I had not.
It may have been Dorothy Brett - who now became as constant a visitor as Murry to the Lawrences' rooms - who introduced the craze for modelling small figures and beasts and flowers, which seized upon us that Christmas, and upon Lawrence in particular. He and Dorothy Brett were by far the best at it. Murry worked hard, but without conspicuous success, making all the while little jokes at his own expense. Frieda and Donald and Koteliansky stood resolutely aside as spectators, when they troubled to look at us at all. To a richly herbaceous garden of Eden, which owed its very red Adam to Lawrence and its paler Eve to Dorothy Brett, I remember I contributed several species of wildfowl, including a kiwi.
Again I recollect seeing Lawrence sitting by the table, his head on his hand, reading with astonishing intentness (which made the activity seem so much more than mere reading) Conrad's then latest novel, The Rover. Without once relaxing his concentrated attention he read it all through, then closed it and pushed it from him with the ejaculation that it was 'poor and sad stuff'. Conrad at his best in a sea-story, I gathered, he had never regarded as the equal of Herman Melville. As compared with the true sea literature o
f Moby Dick, Lawrence dismissed the storm in Typhoon as descriptive journalism. Still, Almayer's Folly was a fine book, and it was depressing to find the author of that declining into the author of The Rover.
It was at this time that I heard Lawrence take Murry to task in his role of propagandist of Katherine Mansfield. As I came in only for the end of the conversation I cannot tell what went before. The guess might be hazarded that Lawrence had not shrunk from denouncing the whole policy and atmosphere of the Adelphi in this particular matter, which I know he had found repugnant. On the other hand, it would be more characteristic if he let that be, and plunged straight to the quick of the subject. This was what he was doing when I entered. 'You are wrong about Katherine,' he was saying to Murry. 'She was not a great genius. She had a charming gift, and a finely cultivated one. But not more. And to try, as you do, to make it more is to do her no true service.' To this Murry made no reply, but turned away in a kind of obstinate mortification. Long before this, when I read her Prelude and praised it to Lawrence, he had said, 'Yes, yes, but prelude to what?' It was his opinion that the author of Prelude would come in time to find a certain essential falseness so closely entwined with the charm in her literary fabric that she would herself condemn even the charm and would write nothing further until she had disentangled herself from the falseness.
Looking back now I find it extraordinary that I could live for so many weeks in the same house and realise so little what a struggle was going on, chiefly between Lawrence and Murry, but also between Lawrence and all of us. In spite of what critics - usually hostile ones - have said about his morbid sensitiveness, Lawrence was not the man to wear his heart on his sleeve. And when he forced an issue he did so with a kind of delicacy that easily concealed the crisis from those concerned. It was the issue, never the person, that he forced.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1133