Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1106
England is so quiet: writes Frieda. Shame on you that you ask for peace today. I don't want peace. I go around the world fighting. Pfui! Pfui! In the grave Ifind my peace. First let me fight and win through. Yes, yes, mother-in-law, make me an oak-wreath and bring the town music under the window, when the half-hero returns.
D.H.L.
(Translated from the German)
But I think he was right; I should have gone to meet him in Mexico, he should not have come to Europe; these are the mistakes we make, sometimes irreparable.
Finally he came and I was glad. Just before Christmas he came and we had some parties and saw some friends, but we wanted to go back to America in the spring and live at the ranch that Mabel Luhan had given me. She had taken me to the little ranch near Taos and I said: 'This is the loveliest place I have ever seen.' And she told me: 'I give it you.' But Lawrence said: 'We can't accept such a present from anybody.' I had a letter from my sister that very morning telling me she had sent the manuscript of 'Sons and Lovers,' so I told Lawrence: 'I will give Mabel the MS. for the ranch.' So I did.
Murry was coming to America too. First we went to Paris, where we stayed as in our own home at the Hôtel de Versailles.
Lawrence wanted me to have some new clothes. Mabel Harrison, who had a large studio opposite the hotel, told us of a good tailor nearby. Lawrence went with me. The stout little tailor draped himself with the cape we bought to show me how to wear it. 'Voyez-vous, la ligne, Madame.' He made me some other clothes and Lawrence remarked with wonder: 'How is it possible that a man can throw all his enthusiasm into clothes for women?'
We went to Strassburg and Baden-Baden, a strange journey for me, going through French territory that had been German just a few years ago.
In the spring we went to America again and Dorothy Brett came with us. We only stayed a few days in New York and went on to Taos. We stayed with Mabel Luhan but, somehow, we didn't get on. I was longing to go to the ranch and live there. Lawrence was a bit afraid to tackle the forlorn little ranch. We had some ten or a dozen Indians to build up the tumble-down houses and corrals and everything. Then he loved it. We had to mend the irrigation ditch and we were impressed by the way Mr Murry dragged huge pipes through the woods, just over no road, to the mouth of the Gallina Canyon of which we had the water rights. And I cooked huge meals for everybody. We all worked so hard. Brett, as everybody called her, straight from her studio life, was amazing for the hard work she would do. One day we cleaned our spring and carried huge stones until we nearly dropped. The spring is in a hollow, and I loved watching the horses play when they came to drink there, shoving each other's noses away from the water level and then tearing up the bank. We did it all ourselves for very little money for we didn't have much. We got a cow and had four horses: Azul, Aaron, and two others; and then we got chickens, all white ones, Leghorns. The beautiful cockerel was called Moses and Susan was the cow's name.
Lawrence got up at five o'clock each morning. With the opera glasses my mother had given him, he looked for Susan, who was an independent creature and loved to hide in the woods. There he would stand, when at last he had found her, and shake his forefinger at her - to my delight - and scold her, the black cow.
I made our own butter in a little glass churn and the chickens flourished on the buttermilk, and so did we in this healthy life. We made our own bread in the Indian oven outside, black bread and white and cakes, and Lawrence was terribly fussy about the bread, which had to be perfect. He made cupboards and chairs and painted doors and windows. He wrote and irrigated and it seems amazing that one single man got so much done. We rode and people stayed with us, and he was always there for everybody as if he did nothing at all. He helped Brett with her pictures and me with my poor attempts.
It was a wonderful summer; there were wild strawberries, that year, and back in the canyon raspberries as big as garden ones, but I was afraid to get them because I had heard that bears love raspberries. Bears won't do you any harm except when they have young. There were bears in the canyon - that seemed indeed the end of the world! The Brett had a tiny shanty in which she lived. She adored Lawrence and slaved for him.
In the autumn we went again to Mexico City. It was fun and we saw several people. In Mexico you could still feel a little lordly and an individual; Mexico has not yet been made 'safe for democracy.'
An amusing thing happened: Lawrence had become a member of the PEN Club and they gave an evening in his honour. It was a men's affair and he put on his black clothes and set off in the evening, and I, knowing how unused he was to public functions and how he really shrank from being a public figure, wondered in the hotel room how the evening would go off. Soon after ten o'clock he appeared.
'How was it?'
'Well, they read to me bits of "The Plumed Serpent" in Spanish and I had to sit and listen and then they made a speech and I had to answer.'
'What did you say?'
'I said: here we are together, some of us English, some Mexicans and Americans, writers and painters and business men and so on, but before all and above all we are men together tonight. That was about what I said. But a young Mexican jumped up: "It's all very well for an Englishman to say I am a man first and foremost, but a Mexican cannot say so, he must be a Mexican above everything."'
So we laughed, the only speech that Lawrence ever made falling so completely flat. They had missed the whole point, as so often.
Just as it was said of him that he wasn't patriotic; he who seemed to me England itself, a flower sprung out of its most delicate, courageous tradition, not the little bourgeois England but the old England of Palmerston, whom he admired when men were still men and not mere social beings.
One day William Somerset Maugham was expected in Mexico City; so Lawrence wrote to him if they could meet. But Maugham's secretary answered for him, saying: 'I hear we are going out to a friend's to lunch together who lives rather far out; let's share a taxi.'
Lawrence was angry that Maugham had answered through his secretary and wrote back: 'No, I won't share a car.'
Brett came with us and she had a story from her sister, the Ranee of Sarawak, where Maugham had stayed and he and his secretary had nearly got drowned, shooting some rapids, I think. So there had been feeling there. And our hostess had a grudge against the secretary. Maugham sat next to me and I asked how he liked it here. He answered crossly: 'Do you want me to admire men in big hats?'
I said: 'I don't care what you admire.' And then the lunch was drowned in acidity all round. But after lunch I felt sorry for Maugham: he seemed to me an unhappy and acid man, who got no fun out of living. He seemed to me to have fallen between two stools as so many writers do. He wanted to have his cake and eat it. He could not accept the narrow social world and yet he didn't believe in a wider human one. Commentators and critics of life and nothing more.
When I met other writers, then I knew without knowing how different altogether Lawrence was. They may have been good writers, but Lawrence was a genius.
The inevitability of what he elementally was and had to say at any price, his knowledge and vision, came to him from deeper secret sources than it is given to others to draw from. When I read Aeschylus and Sophocles, then I know Lawrence is great, he is like these - greatest in his work, where human passions heave and sink and mingle and clash. The background of death is always there and the span of life is felt as fierce action. Life is life only when death is part of it. Not like the Christian conception that shuts death away from life and says death comes after: death is always there. I think the great gain of the war is a new reincorporation of death into our lives.
Then we went down to Oaxaca. We had again a house with a patio. There Lawrence wrote 'Mornings in Mexico,' with the parrots and Corasmin, the white dog, and the mozo. He rewrote and finished the 'Plumed Serpent' there. There was malaria in Oaxaca, it had come with the soldiers, and the climate didn't suit him.
I went to the market with the mozo and one day he showed me in the square, in one of the bookshops, an undeniable caricature of Lawrence, and he watched my face to see how I would take it. I was thrilled! To find in this wild place, with its Zapotec and undiluted Mexican tribes, anything so civilized as a caricature of Lawrence was fun. I loved the market and it was only distressing to see the boy with his basket so utterly miserable at my paying without bargaining: it was real pain to him. But the lovely flowers and everything seemed so cheap.
Meanwhile Lawrence wrote at home and got run down. The Brett came every day and I thought she was becoming too much part of our lives and I resented it. So I told Lawrence: 'I want the Brett to go away,' and he raved at me, said I was a jealous fool. But I insisted and so Brett went up to Mexico City. Then Lawrence finished 'The Plumed Serpent,' already very ill, and later on he told me he wished he had finished it differently. Then he was very ill. I had a local native doctor who was scared at having anything to do with a foreigner and he didn't come. Lawrence was very ill, much more ill than I knew, fortunately. I can never say enough of the handful of English and Americans there: how good they were to us. Helping in every way. I thought these mine-owners and engineers led plucky and terrible lives. Always fever, typhoid, malaria, danger from bandits, never feeling a bit safe with their lives. And so I was amazed at the 'Selbstverstàndlichkeit' with which they helped us. It was so much more than Christian, just natural: a fellow-Englishman in distress: let's help him. Lawrence himself thought he would die.
'You'll bury me in this cemetery here,' he would say, grimly.
'No, no,' I laughed, 'it's such an ugly cemetery, don't you think of it.'
And that night he said to me: 'But if I die, nothing has mattered but you, nothing at all.' I was almost scared to hear him say it, that, with all his genius, I should have mattered so much. It seemed incredible.
I got him better by putting hot sandbags on him, that seemed to comfort his tortured inside.
One day we had met a missionary and his wife, who lived right in the hills with the most uncivilized tribe of Indians. He didn't look like a missionary but like a soldier. He told me he had been an airman, and there far away in Oaxaca he told me how he was there when Manfred Richthofen was brought down behind the trenches and in the evening at mess one of the officers rose and said: 'Let's drink to our noble and generous enemy.'
For me to be told of this noble gesture made in that awful war was a great thing.
Then I remember the wife appeared with a very good bowl of soup when Lawrence was at his worst, and then prayed for him by his bedside in that big bare room. I was half afraid and wondered how Lawrence would feel. But he took it gently and I was half laughing, half crying over the soup and the prayer.
While he was so ill an earthquake happened into the bargain, a thunderstorm first, and the air made you gasp. I felt ill and feverish and Lawrence so ill in the next room - dogs howled and asses and horses and cats were scared in the night - and to my horror I saw the beams of my roof move in and out of their sheaves.
'Let's get under the bed if the roof falls!' I cried.
At last, slowly, slowly, he got a little better. I packed up to go to Mexico City. This was a crucifixion of a journey for me. We travelled through the tropics. Lawrence in the heat so weak and ill and then the night we stayed half-way to Mexico City in a hotel. There, after the great strain of his illness, something broke in me. 'He will never be quite well again, he is ill, he is doomed. All my love, all my strength, will never make him whole again.' I cried like a maniac the whole night. And he disliked me for it. But we arrived in Mexico City. I had Dr Uhlfelder come and see him. One morning I had gone out and when I came back the analyst doctor was there and said, rather brutally, when I came into Lawrence's room: 'Mr Lawrence has tuberculosis.' And Lawrence looked at me with such unforgettable eyes.
'What will she say and feel?' And I said: 'Now we know, we can tackle it. That's nothing. Lots of people have that.' And he got slowly better and could go to lunch with friends. But they, the doctors, told me:
'Take him to the ranch; it's his only chance. He has T.B. in the third degree. A year or two at the most.'
With this bitter knowledge in my heart I had to be cheerful and strong. Then we travelled back to the ranch and were tortured by immigration officials, who made all the difficulties in the ugliest fashion to prevent us from entering the States. If the American Embassy in Mexico hadn't helped we would not have been able to go to the ranch that was going to do Lawrence so much good.
Slowly at the ranch he got better. The high clear air, short sunbaths, our watching and care, and the spring brought life back into him. As he got better he began writing his play 'David,' lying outside his little room on the porch in the sun.
I think in that play he worked oif his struggle for life. Old Saul and the young David — old Samuel's prayer is peculiarly moving in its hopeless love for Saul - so many different motifs, giant motifs, in that play.
Mabel took us to a cave along the road near Arroyo Seco and he used it for his story 'The Woman Who Rode Away.'
Brett was always with us. I liked her in many ways; she was so much her own self.
I said to her: 'Brett, I'll give you half a crown if you contradict Lawrence,' but she never did. Her blind adoration for him, her hero-worship for him was touching, but naturally it was balanced by a preconceived critical attitude towards me. He was perfect and I always wrong, in her eyes.
When the Brett came with us Lawrence said to me: 'You know, it will be good for us to have the Brett with us, she will stand between us and people and the world.' I did not really want her with us, and had a suspicion that she might not want to stand between us and the world, but between him and me. But no, I thought, I won't be so narrow-gutted, one of Lawrence's words, I will try.
So I looked after Brett and was grateful for her actual help. She did her share of the work. I yelled down her ear-trumpet, her Toby, when people were there, that she should not feel out of it. But as time went on she seemed always to be there, my privacy that I cherished so much was gone. Like the eye of the Lord, she was; when I washed, when I lay under a bush with a book, her eyes seemed to be there, only I hope the eye of the Lord looks on me more kindly. Then I detested her, poor Brett, when she seemed deaf and dumb and blind to everything quick and alive. Her adoration for Lawrence seemed a silly old habit. 'Brett,' I said, 'I detest your adoration for Lawrence, only one thing I would detest more, and that is if you adored me.'
When I finally told Lawrence in Oaxaca: 'I don't want Brett such a part of our life, I just don't want her,' he was cross at first, but then greatly relieved.
How thrilling it was to feel the inrush of new vitality in him; it was like a living miracle. A wonder before one's eyes. How grateful he was inside him! 'I can do things again. I can live and do as I like, no longer held down by the devouring illness.' How he loved every minute of life at the ranch. The morning, the squirrels, every flower that came in its turn, the big trees, chopping the wood, the chickens, making bread, all our hard work, and the people and all assumed the radiance of new life.
He worked hard as a relaxation and wrote for hard work.
Palace Hotel San Francisco, U.S.A. 5 September 1922
Dear Mother-in-Law:
We arrived yesterday, the journey good all the way. Now we sit in the Palace Hotel, the first hotel of San Francisco. It was first a hut with a corrugated iron roof, where the ox-wagons unhitched. Now a big building, with post and shops in it, like a small town in itself: is expensive, but for a day or two it doesn 't matter. We were twenty-five days at sea and are still landsick - the floor ought to go up and down, the room ought to tremble from the engines, the water ought to swish around but doesn't, so one is landsick. The solid ground almost hurts. We have many ship's friends here, are still a jolly company.
I think we shall go to Taos Tuesday or Friday: two days by train, a thousand miles by car. We have such nice letters and telegrams from Mabel Dodge and Mountsier. Mabel says: 'From San Francisco you are my guests, so I send you the railway tickets' - so American! Everybody is very nice. All is comfortable, comfortable, comfortable - I really hate this mechanical comfort.
I send you thirty dollars -1 have no English cheques - till I arrive in Taos. I will send you English money, with the rise of the valuta. Does Else need any money? I don't know how much I've got, but our life in Taos will cost little - rent free and wood free. Keep well, mother-in-law. I wait for news from you.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
Taos New Mexico U.S.A.
27 September 1922
My dear Else:
Well, here we are in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. But both freedom and bravery need defining. The Eros book came, and I shall read it as soon as we get breathing space. Even though we are in the desert, in the sleepy land of the Mexican, we gasp on the breath of hurry.
We have got a very charming adobe house on the edge of the Indian Reservation - very smartly famished with Indian village-made furniture and Mexican and Navajo rugs, and old European pottery. Behind runs a brook - in front the desert, a level little plain all grey, white-grey sage brush, in yellow flower-and from this plain rise the first Rocky Mountains, heavy and solid. We are seven thousand feet above the sea -in a light, clear air.
