Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1105
But I am busy doing a novel: with Australia for the setting: a queer show. It goes fairly quickly, so I hope to have it done by August. Then we shall sail via New Zealand and Tahiti for San Francisco, and probably spend the winter in Taos, New Mexico. That is what I think I want to do. Then the next spring come to Europe again. I feel I shall wander for the rest of my days. But I don't care.
I must say this new country has been a surprise to me. Flinders Petrie says new countries are no younger than their parent country. But they are older, more empty, and more devoid of religion or anything that makes for 'quality' in life.
I have got a copy of 'Aaron's Rod'for you, but am not sure whether I may post it from here or not. Trade relations with Germany don't start till August.
Write to me care of Robert Mountsier, 417 West 118th Street, New York. I wish I had good news for you. Frieda sleeps after her bath.
D. H. Lawrence
If a girl called Ruth Wheelock sends you a little note I gave her to introduce her to you, I think you'd like her. American, was in the consulate in Palermo - we knew her there and in Rome - both like her.
D. H. L.
She's not got any money, unless she earns some or her father gives her some.
We sailed from Sydney for San Francisco. It was a smallish boat with a stout jolly captain. We passed Raratonga and went on to Tahiti, always in perfect weather in the Pacific. Nothing but flying fish, porpoises, sky, the great sea, and our boat. Then Tahiti. It must have been so marvellous in the past, those gentle, too gentle handsome natives, with their huts, the perfection of the island in itself. But the joy of it was gone. The charming native women, who offered me old beads and flowers, made me sad in their clumsy Mother Hubbard garments. I know how European diseases were wiping the natives out, the contact with Europe fatal to them. In the evening we saw a cinema in a huge kind of barn; there was a native king, enormous; he was in a box near the stage with several handsome wives. We had travelled with a cinema crowd from Tahiti. Near our cabin two of the young stars had their cabin. They seemed to sleep all day and looked white and tired in the evening. Cases of empty champagne bottles stood outside their cabin in the morning. One of them I had seen flirt quite openly with a passenger but when we arrived in San Francisco I saw her trip so innocently into the arms of a young man who was waiting for her. I remember in San Francisco how the moon at night made such a poor show above all the lights of the town.
We went into a cafeteria and did not know how to behave; how to take our plates and food.
America
We travelled from San Francisco to Taos in great expectation. It was September and the journey through the inner American desert very hot. We got out at Lamy to be met by Mabel Dodge who had brought us here. And as we looked out we saw Mabel standing there in a turquoise blue dress with much of the silver-and-turquoise Indian jewellery and by her side a handsome Indian in a blanket with a large silver belt going across his chest. I looked at Mabel. 'She has eyes one can trust,' I said to myself. And afterwards I always kept to this: people are what they are, whatever they may occasionally do.
When we came to Santa Fe all the hotels were full, so Mabel asked Witter Bynner to take us in. He did: us, the trunks, Sicilian cart and all.
The next morning we drove up through the vast wonderful desert country, with its clear pure air, driving through the Rio Grande canyon deep down by the river and then coming up on to the Taos plateau. Coming out of the canyon to the mesa is an unforgettable experience, with all the deep mountains sitting mysteriously around in a ring, and so much sky.
Mabel had prepared us a house all to ourselves in her 'Mabel-town.' The house stood on Indian land and belonged to Tony. It was a charming adobe house, with Mexican blankets and Indian paintings of Indian dances and animals, clean and full of sun.
A new life for us - and we began it straightaway. Out from the pueblo to the east of us, a few miles away, came the feel of the Indians, so different from anything we had ever known. We neither of us wanted to stunt about it, but we were very happy. Tony went for two days with Lawrence to the Navajo country. I spent the days with Mabel and her friend Alice Corbin.
They asked me many questions, which I answered truthfully, giving the show away completely as usual. Then Mabel, with her great energy, took us all over the country: we saw the pueblo, we bathed in a hot radium spring by the Rio Grande. Mabel and Lawrence wanted to write a book together: about Mabel, it was going to be. I did not want this. I had always regarded Lawrence's genius as given to me. I felt deeply responsible for what he wrote. And there was a fight between us, Mabel and myself: I think it was a fair fight. One day Mabel came over and told me she didn't think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: 'Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.'
And I was miserable thinking that Lawrence had given her a right to talk like this to me. When Lawrence came in, he saw that I was unhappy, and somebody had told him that Mabel's son John Evans had said: 'My mother is tired of those Lawrences who sponge on her.' This may have been pure malice, but Lawrence was in a fury too; not for nothing was his beard red, and he said: 'I will pay the rent of the house and I'll leave as soon as I can.'
And then he would draw me in a flood of tenderness and love and we would be washed clean of all our apartness and be together again. And Lawrence would rave against Mabel as only he could rave. When I wanted to stick up for her I would get it: 'All women are alike, bossy, without any decency; it's your business to see that other women don't come too close to me.'
That's what he said. It was all very well, but I didn't know how to do it.
We had learned to ride: a long thin Don Quixote of a Mexican had taught us how in a few rides across the open desert. I was terribly happy, feeling the live horse under me. Later on, Azul, my horse, would go like the wind with me and he seemed always aware of me when I was a bit scared.
So we left Mabel's ambient and went to live at the Del Monte Ranch, under the mountains. We had a log house, and the Hawks lived at the big house and in the lower log cabin lived two Danish painters who had come to stay with us; they had come from New York in the most trying old Lizzie that ever went along the road.
She coughed and trembled at the tiniest hill, she stuck and had to be shoved: she was a trial.
It was a real mountain winter. So sharp, knifey cold at night; snow and ice, and the Danes and Lawrence had to chop lots of wood.
We rode into the Lobo Canyon over the logs under the trees and one had to look out for one's head and knees when the horses tore along under the trees. Lawrence would say later on: 'If you were only as nice with me as you are with Azul.'
The friendship and fight with Mabel went on, off and on. She was so admirable in her terrific energy, in her resources and intelligence, but e couldn't get on, somehow.
I remember riding along in the car, when Lawrence said to her: 'Frieda is the freest human being I know.' And I said to him, afterwards: 'You needn't say nice things about me, just to make other people mad.'
Tony would sing his Indian songs when driving. I had told him: 'In our country, Tony, one crow means bad luck and two good luck.' So he would watch for crows and say: Two crows, Frieda.'
In the spring we went to Mexico with Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson. After the hard winter, I clamoured for a known. We neither of us wanted to stunt about it, but we were very happy. Tony went for two days with Lawrence to the Navajo country. I spent the days with Mabel and her friend Alice Corbin.
They asked me many questions, which I answered truthfully, giving the show away completely as usual. Then Mabel, with her great energy, took us all over the country: j we saw the pueblo, we bathed in a hot radium spring by the Rio Grande. Mabel and Lawrence wanted to write a book together: about Mabel, it was going to be. I did not want this. I had always regarded Lawrence's genius as given to me. I felt deeply responsible for what he wrote. And there was a fight between us, Mabel and myself: I think it was a fair fight. One day Mabel came over and told me she didn't think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: 'Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.'
And I was miserable thinking that Lawrence had given her a right to talk like this to me. When Lawrence came in, | he saw that I was unhappy, and somebody had told him! that Mabel's son John Evans had said: 'My mother is tired of those Lawrences who sponge on her.' This may have j been pure malice, but Lawrence was in a fury too; not for j nothing was his beard red, and he said: 'I will pay the rent of the house and I'll leave as soon as I can.'
And then he would draw me in a flood of tenderness and love and we would be washed clean of all our apartness and be together again. And Lawrence would rave against Mabel as only he could rave. When I wanted to stick up for her I would get it: 'All women are alike, bossy, without any decency; it's your business to see that other women don't come too close to me.'
That's what he said. It was all very well, but I didn't know how to do it.
We had learned to ride: a long thin Don Quixote of a Mexican had taught us how in a few rides across the open desert. I was terribly happy, feeling the live horse under me. Later on, Azul, my horse, would go like the wind with me and he seemed always aware of me when I was a bit scared.
So we left Mabel's ambient and went to live at the Del Monte Ranch, under the mountains. We had a log house, and the Hawks lived at the big house and in the lower log cabin lived two Danish painters who had come to stay with us; they had come from New York in the most trying old Lizzie that ever went along the road.
She coughed and trembled at the tiniest hill, she stuck and had to be shoved: she was a trial.
It was a real mountain winter. So sharp, knifey cold at night; snow and ice, and the Danes and Lawrence had to chop lots of wood.
We rode into the Lobo Canyon over the logs under the trees and one had to look out for one's head and knees when the horses tore along under the trees. Lawrence would say later on: 'If you were only as nice with me as you are with Azul.'
The friendship and fight with Mabel went on, off and on. She was so admirable in her terrific energy, in her resources and intelligence, but we couldn't get on, somehow.
I remember riding along in the car, when Lawrence said to her: 'Frieda is the freest human being I know.' And I said to him, afterwards: 'You needn't say nice things about me, Just to make other people mad.'
Tony would sing his Indian songs when driving. I had t°ld him: 'In our country, Tony, one crow means bad luck and two good luck.' So he would watch for crows and say: Two crows, Frieda.'
In the spring we went to Mexico with Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson. After the hard winter, I clamoured for a first-rate hotel in Mexico City. But it wasn't a success, the first-rate hotel, after all, it seemed dull and a bit unclean; the ladies were so very painted and the men not attractive.
The journey across the lonely desert had been strange. The stations were only a few miserable houses and a big water tank and fine dust blew in at the window of the car, filling one's eyes and ears and nose, all one's pores with very fine sand.
Mexico City seemed like a would-be smart and grand lady to me, but she hadn't quite brought it off. The shabby parts were the most interesting. The Volador Market and all the fascinating baskets and ropes and saddles and belts, pots and dishes and leather jackets.
One day we were in the cathedral plaza of Mexico City, Bynner and Spud and I, when on the top of the church we saw a red flag being hoisted. A crowd collected, soldiers appeared. Bynner and Spud had dashed into the dark hole of the door of the church tower. It was crowding with people. I stayed in the plaza, watching the tower on which were Bynner and Spud, fearing for their fate. My relief when they appeared after an hour was great.
In the Museum we saw among the Aztec relics coiled snakes and other terrifying stone carvings, Maximilian's state carriage. That took me back to my childhood. One of the impressive figures of my childhood had been a Graf Geldern, long, lean, sad, and loosely built like a Mexican, in the uniform of a colonel of the 'Totenkopfhusaren.' He had been to Mexico with Maximilian. How he afterwards took Prussian service I don't know. When they shot Maximilian, they played 'La Paloma.' He had asked for it.
Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There Lawrence began to write his 'Plumed Serpent.' He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. The lake was curious' with its white water. My enthusiasm for bathing in it faded considerably when one morning a huge snake rose yards high, it seemed to me, only a few feet away. At the end of the patio we had the family that Lawrence describes in the 'Plumed Serpent,' and all the life of Chapala. I tried my one attempt at civilizing those Mexican children, but when they asked me one day: 'Do you have lice too, Nina,' I had enough and gave up in a rage. At night I was frightened of bandits and we had one of the sons of the cook sleeping outside our bedroom door with a loaded revolver, but he snored so fiercely that I wasn't sure whether the fear of bandits wasn't preferable. We quite sank into the patio life. Bynner and Spud came every afternoon, and I remember Bynner saying to me one day, while he was mixing a cocktail: 'If you and Lawrence quarrel, why don't you hit first?' I took the advice and the next time Lawrence was cross, I rose to the occasion and got out of my Mexican indifference and flew at him.
All that time in Mexico seems to me, now, as if I had dreamt it, dreamt it intensely.
We went across the pale Lake of Chapala to a native village where they made serapes; they dyed the wool and wove them on simple looms. Lawrence made some designs and had them woven, as in the 'Plumed Serpent.'
Lawrence could only write in places where one's imagination could have space and free play, where the door was not closed to the future, where one's vision could people it with new souls to be born, who would live a new life.
I remember the Pyramids at Teotihuacan, that we saw with Spud and Bynner, I hanging around behind. It was getting dusky and suddenly I came on a huge stone snake, coiling green with great turquoise eyes, round the foot of a temple. I ran after the others for all I was worth.? I got a glimpse of old Mexico then, the old sacrifices, hearts still quivering held up to the sun, for the sun to drink the blood: there it had all happened, on the pyramid of the Sun.
And that awful goddess, who, instead of a Raphael bambino, brings forth an obsidian knife. Fear of these people who don't mind killing and don't mind dying. And I had seen a huge black Christ, in a church, with a black beard and long woman's hair and he wore little white, frilly knickers. Death and sacrifice and cruel gods seemed to reign in Mexico under its sunshine and splendour of flowers and lots of birds and fruit and white volcano peaks.
We went into a huge old Noah's Ark of a boat, called 'Esmeralda,' on the Lake of Chapala, with two other friends and Spud. Three Mexicans looked after the boat. They had guitars and sang their melancholy or fierce songs at the end of the boat. In the evening we slowly drifted along the large lake, that was more like a white sea, and, one day, we had no more to eat. So we landed on the island of the scorpions, still crowned by a Mexican empty prison, and only fit for scorpions. There Lawrence bought a live goat, but when we had seen our Mexican boatmen practically tearing the poor beast to pieces, our appetites vanished and we did not want to eat any more.
Lawrence's visions which he wrote in the 'Plumed Serpent' seem so interwoven with everyday life. The everyday and the vision running on together day by day. That autumn we returned to America and spent some time in New Jersey. Lawrence remained in America and went again to Mexico. I went to Europe.
So I went to England alone and had a little flat in Hampstead to see something of my children. It was winter and I wasn't a bit happy alone there and Lawrence was always cross when I had this longing for the children upon me; but there it was, though now I know he was right: they didn't want me any more, they were living their own lives. I felt lost without him. Finally he came and wrote this cross and unjust letter to my mother:
Hotel Garcia Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico 10 November, 1923
My dear Mother-in-Law:
I had the two letters from Frieda at Baden, with the billet-doux from you. Yes, mother-in-law, I believe one has to be seventy before one is full of courage. The young are always half-hearted. Frieda also makes a long, sad nose and says she is writing to the moon - Guadalajara is no moon-town, and I am completely on the earth, with solid feet.
But I am coming back, am only waiting for a ship. I shall be in England in December. And in the spring, when the primroses are out, I shall be in Baden. Time goes by faster and faster. Frieda sent me Hartmann von Richthofen's letter. It was nice. But the women have more courage these days than the men - also a letter from Nusch, a little sad but lively. I hope to see her also in the spring. One must spit on one's hands and take firm hold. Don't you think so?
I was at the Barranca, a big, big ravine, and bathed in the hot springs - came home and found the whole of Germany in my room.
I like it here. I don't know how, but it gives me strength, this black country. It is full of man's strength, perhaps not woman's strength, but it is good, like the old German beer-for-the-heroes, for me. Oh, mother-in-law, you are nice and old, and understand, as the first maiden understood, that a man must be more than nice and good, and that heroes are worth more than saints. Frieda doesn't understand thai a man must be a hero these days and not only a husband: husband also but more. I must go up and down through the world, I must balance Germany against Mexico and Mexico against Germany. I do not come for peace. The devil, the holy devil, has peace round his neck. I know it well, the courageous old one understands me better than the young one, or at least something in me she understands better. Frieda must always think and write and say and ponder how she loves me. It is stupid. I am no Jesus that lies on his mother's lap. I go my way through the world, and if Frieda finds it such hard work to love me, then, dear God, let her love rest, give it holidays. Oh, mother-in-law, you understand, as my mother finally understood, that a man doesn't want, doesn 't ask for love from his wife, but for strength, strength, strength. To fight, to fight, to fight, and to fight again. And one needs courage and strength and weapons. And the stupid woman keeps on saying love, love, love, and writes of love. To the devil with love! Give me strength, battle-strength, weapon-strength, fighting-strength, give me this, you woman!
