Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1116
I believe that there not only may, but must be, a new way of life, and that Lawrence was on the track of it. In his own words, he wanted 'to put something through' by means of 'a long, slow, dark, almost invisible fight', with a victory that would come 'little by little' and that could be interrupted only by death. It was so interrupted sadly, but not as will appear, fatally. Because of its undertaking, readers who find in themselves some answering spark and are content to wait without prejudice for fuller comprehension, will find nothing concerning Lawrence to be irrelevant. His immediate appeal is that of potent innocence which has met with a grave miscarriage of judgement. Here is a man who lived from a pure source and steadfastly refused to break faith with that source. And so we have another fountain for the heart, another proof that pure and living sources still exist and always will exist. Upon Byron's death Scott said it was as if the sun had gone out. With Lawrence it is the other way. With his going he has given to the sun, as to the water, an added splendour. Readers who never saw him will see sky and earth, bird, beast and flower differently because of him, and he will find a place like a friend's place in the lives of men who knew nothing of him until after his death.
While my own memories are fresh, I have set myself to put down all I can recall about Lawrence. Without attempting to write anything like a biography I have tried to give a narrative - in his own words when possible - of this non-Christian saint, this hero who repudiated heroism, this Innocent the First of our modern world. I shall show him as I see him - a man upon a dangerous but fascinating pilgrimage, who set forth from his City of Destruction in the English industrial Midlands, passed through the London and cosmopolitan Vanity Fair and traversed the physical and intellectual world, carrying a load of bitterness in his bowels and a talisman of purity in his hand, until such time as he died quietly and bravely with his work unfinished but with victory nearly enough in sight to place him as far beyond failure as he was beyond his fellows, because of the greater risks he ran. If I have not been as adequate as I should wish, at least I have tried to refrain from approaching the least solemn of men with graveyard graces.
For my first assembling of material I must renew my acknowledgements to several friends of Lawrence whose names appear in the text. During the original writing I had not access to the now published Letters. But with some two hundred of my own, and a good number which have been shown to me by their possessors or have come upon the market, together with those already published by Mr Murry, Mrs Clarke (Ada Lawrence) and Mrs Luhan, I was able to give a fairly detailed account of Lawrence's movements. This was aided by a scheme of dates and addresses kindly provided by Mr and Mrs Laurence Hilton from the collection of the letters with which they were entrusted for the formidable task of transcription. From Messrs Pinker I had the substantial benefit of reading the letters from Lawrence to their father, the late J. B. Pinker. By the courtesy of Messrs Heinemann and with the approval of Mrs Lawrence, I was able to quote freely from Lawrence's letters to me.
C. C.
Hampstead, November 1932
Part One
AET. 2I-29
PROSE
The White Peacock
The Trespasser
Sons and Lovers
The Lost Girl (early parts)
The Prussian Officer, etc. (short stories)
The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd (play in 3 acts)
Love among the Haystacks
The Rainbow VERSE
Love Poems and Others
Amores
Look! We Have Come Through! (in part)
'There is nothing to do -with life but to let it run, and it's a very bitter thing, but it's also wonderful, for -we never know what'll happen next.'
1
In the spring of 1914 Henry James contributed to The Times Literary Supplement two long and characteristically sibylline articles on 'The Younger Generation'. At that date it was still possible to include in the category of 'younger' Mr Joseph Conrad, Mr Maurice Hewlett, Mr Galsworthy, Mr H. G. Wells, and Mr Arnold Bennett, though, as the veteran admitted, these had 'not quite, perhaps, the early bloom of Mr Hugh Walpole, Mr Gilbert Cannan and Mr D. H. Lawrence'.
Proceeding, by way of mixed metaphor, we learn that Mr Wells and Mr Bennett have 'practically launched the boat in which we admire the fresh play of oar of the author of The Duchess of Wrexe and the documented aspect exhibited successively by Carnival and Sinister Street and even by Sons and Lovers, however much we may find Mr Lawrence, we confess, hang in the dusty rear'.
That last phrase sounds ungracious, but was perhaps not so ungraciously meant. It was hardly in character for Henry James to back anybody as a winner, even while he might set himself to describe the field in its order as viewed through the prism of his Jamesian binoculars. Still less was it in character for him to back the dark horse of the field. But we may give him this credit at least. He perceived that there was a dark horse. The figure he employs would further lead us to conclude that by his admission he found it difficult to report on the contours of that entrant.
There were, however, some onlookers, younger, less cautious and not at all burdened with responsibility, who felt that in this case there was a duty of more definite prophecy upon anyone professing to be a judge of form. In 1911 these had read The White Peacock, in 1912 The Trespasser, and in 1913 Love Poems and Others and Sons and Lovers - especially Sons and Lovers. They had also read 'Goose Fair' and 'Odour of Chrysanthemums' in The English Review, and the poems under the same signature appearing from time to time there and in the Saturday Westminster Gazette. After Sons and Lovers it appeared to them - as indeed it had already appeared to several persons more powerfully placed - that no other writer was producing work of a like importance. Of a small group of these I was a comparatively passive member. One who was more impetuous, however - Ivy Low (now the wife of Commissar Litvinoff) - was moved to repudiate the Jamesian pronouncement in the person of 'The Younger Generation'. She wrote to Lawrence through his publisher, and Lawrence answered. Lawrence always answered. His first letter, short but friendly, was triumphantly read aloud to me. I remember nothing about it now except that it was written from Fiascherino, near Lerici, upon coroneted notepaper; that the coronet had been crossed through with a pen stroke; and that beside it Lawrence had written the words, 'My wife's father was a baron.' Even this I might not now remember were it not that precisely the same thing was repeated on the second letter - which made us smile. We wondered how large the store of notepaper might be, and if Lawrence felt bound to repeat the formula every time he wrote a letter. This we were unable to test, however, as I don't think there was any third letter, but merely postcards, which confirmed the invitation extended to our representative in the second letter and gave travelling directions. Ivy Low accepted the invitation at once. Ivy always accepted invitations. She spent what money remained from her own initial literary efforts (this being all she had) on a return ticket to Fiascherino, was rigged out for the journey in my only tailor-made ('so as to make a neat impression if possible') and seen off by me with best wishes. She returned after about a month, very full of her visit, which we gathered had been of memorable but mixed quality. Not long afterwards Latence and Frieda arrived in London and almost at once called on me in Hampstead. Ivy was there, and Viola Meynell, who was a friend of Ivy's and a warm admirer of Sons and Lovers, came to meet him.
By then I knew in outline what Lawrence's history had been. A miner's son, born on September 11th, 1885, in the village of Eastwood in Nottinghamshire, he had described his early life clearly enough in his three novels. And in the poems there had been the deeper, briefer expression of his youthful experience. More precisely, I knew that he had won a scholarship at Nottingham High School at twelve, at sixteen had worked for a short time as a clerk in a manufacturer's office at thirteen shillings a week, and after being seriously ill with pneumonia had become a pupil teacher at Eastwood. I did not know till recently that, when he left the Eastwood school a year later and went to Nottingham University College, he had passed first in all England and Wales in the Uncertificated Teachers' Examination. He remained for two years at college, after which he went as a certificated master to the Davidson Road Elementary School at Croydon.
He was still at Croydon when his mother died. That was at the end of 1910. The White Peacock appeared immediately after, in January, 1911. He had been able to place an advance copy in her hand, but she was too ill to read it. Off and on he had been engaged on it for over four years.
It was not Lawrence's mother, but the girl he was in love with - the Miriam of Sons and Lovers - that had encouraged his writing. Over a year before, in the autumn of 1909, she had sent on her own initiative the poems 'A Still Afternoon', 'Dreams Old and Nascent', 'Discipline', and the two 'Baby Movements' to the English Review. All Lawrence's future is contained in these five poems. Ford Madox Hueffer, who was then editor, accepted them and got into correspondence with Lawrence. It was to Hueffer that Lawrence sent the manuscript of The White Peacock, and Hueffer got it accepted by Heinemann. When the book appeared Violet Hunt wrote a glowing review in the Chronicle and invited the author to her literary club. It was a succès d'estime. To Lawrence's amusement his work was taken for a woman's in several quarters.
This interest, and the appearance at intervals of poems in periodicals, had brought him the acquaintance of Edward Garnett. Garnett's well-meaning hand was stretched out with those of the Hueffers, and Lawrence grasped it gladly. Here, without his seeking, was an opening from an existence which had grown ever less tolerable. But he had none of the conventional notions of a literary career. It signified much to him that his dying mother had been unable to read his book. Books to him would never mean what they do to most writers. They would mean both much more and much less. He never read one of his own published works. 'Books to me,' he wrote much later, 'are incorporate things, voices in the air, that do not disturb the haze of autumn, and visions that don't blot out the sunflowers.'
After his mother's death he continued for another year at Croydon, but after a second attack of pneumonia he decided to leave school-mastering for good. He had been at the Davidson Road School for five years, and his work was highly spoken of. After a visit to Garnett he spent three months at home.
2
Eight years earlier, while at college in Nottingham, he had become acquainted with Professor Ernest Weekley. The Professor had helped him with the French necessary for his certificate, and had noted his intelligence, but had not then asked him to his house. Now, however, that he was spoken of as a poet, Lawrence was bidden there. Upon his very first meeting with the Professor's wife his course was determined. During the last year there had been a love affair with a married woman older than himself in his home district. But it was an affair in which the woman had set the course and marked the end. When Lawrence met Frieda Weekley he was free, and this time he would lead. Never again would he be mothered by any woman. He would even put behind him that first mothering that had meant more than anything else to his youth.
After the provincial women he had known, this daughter of a Continental aristocracy was a revelation to him. He lost no time in committing himself. Early in May he and Frieda Weekley were both in Germany, though not together. She was with her people, he wandering and waiting about with the unfinished manuscript of Sons and Lovers.
It was over a year since he had written The Trespasser, and there had been a long-drawn debate about it between him and his publisher, Heinemann. For the first and last time in his career Lawrence was definitely unwilling and a publisher eager to print. The book recorded an incident of which he was ashamed. But suddenly in the spring of 1912 all this was in the past and did not matter - not at least to Lawrence. Though he disliked the incident and did not much like the book, the first was true and the second was his honest account at the time. Vogue la galère! The wide and terrifying prospect which he now faced was everything. Courage to proceed entailed the courage that lets the dead past bury its dead. Some money too was absolutely necessary. At the end of twelve months there was nothing left of the fifty pounds from The White Peacock, and he had no savings, for at Croydon he had earned but a bare living. This new book would not bring much, but it was honesty earned. Weighing the old importance against the new, Lawrence made his choice. He paid his fare to Germany in May, 1912, with money from The Trespasser.
Lawrence was sure of himself but not yet sure of Frieda. As for Frieda, she was sure neither of herself nor of Lawrence. How should she be? She was several years older than he, and vastly more 'experienced' in every worldly sense of the term. A daughter of Baron von Richthofen, who had been Governor of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war, she was socially confident. In the midst of a gay and eventful girlhood she had married before she was twenty, and when Lawrence met her she had three children, a boy and two girls, the younger girl being only three years old. She was not unhappy, had never known unhappiness. Merely she lived in a placid dream, which was variegated at times by love affairs that were almost equally unreal. This made a rich tapestried background that satisfied her well enough so long as nobody woke her up and made her aware that it was no more. And until Lawrence came nobody had. Lawrence, incredibly raw and really innocent, felt the glamour deeply. But he refused to be intimidated. He held by his own experience, that was limited but intense. With Frieda added to him and dominated by him he could start in and live.
Frieda did not see it so. There were other things besides pure life for her to consider. And there were her children, who were certainly a large part of life to her. She was carelessly generous of herself, as no provincial woman could have been generous. There was nothing of bargaining here, nor of coquetry. This in itself was dazzlingly attractive to the many times wounded Lawrence. But all the more, and in its accompanying contempt for 'faithfulness', it made him suffer. From first to last Lawrence was for fidelity in marriage. While he admired this woman's 'freedom' it was torture to him. At the same time he would hold his own and not be at her mercy. I have been allowed to see some of these early letters written by him from different parts of Germany. They are unlike any others I know in the range of poets' love-letters. They rarely mention love, yet love-letters they are, and they are exquisite as they are extraordinary.
He spent the early summer going from place to place alone, suffering intensely, seeing the Rhine, and little German places like Trier and Mayrhofen, with the clarity of suffering; getting on immediate human terms with the humble hosts and hostesses at his various lodgings; working on Sons and Lovers (which already belonged wholly to the past); and every day sending off letters of an explosive quality, that was contained in quietness, to a wayward and uncertain and beautiful woman with features like those of a handsome creature of the wilds. It was as when a friend once introduced Lawrence to a tame fox that was his pet. Lawrence would not rest till he had found some touch that made the pet forget its tameness. Frieda has a nose like a puss fox, so fine and tremulous about the nostrils, and her eyes might be the eyes of a lioness into lady. It was not for nothing that Lawrence's mind often ran upon poachers - and gamekeepers.
By midsummer Frieda had thrown in her lot with his. It would not be true to say that she had found her master. Rather she expected to rule but could not resist this man who had discovered the secret of her wildness and was so insistent on his own power. Or perhaps it was the challenge more than the man that she found irresistible. Anyhow it was no conclusion, but only a beginning, when she and Lawrence set out one day in August on foot together to cross Tirol into Italy. They had almost no money. Frieda was entirely courageous.
That autumn and winter and the following early spring they stayed at Lake Garda, moving only once from one place to another. In February Love Poems and Others came out with Duckworth in London. In the same year that publisher issued Sons and Lovers, which Heinemann had refused, giving as his verdict - or endorsing the verdict of his reader - that it was 'one of the dirtiest books he had ever read'. The reviews were mostly favourable. Some were enthusiastic.
