Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1118
In the War he came to believe fully in the putrescence - worse because it was denied - of the Christian era. The only thing to do was to get out and away, if possible to some place where a newer growth or an older decay would save us from using up our energies in protestation, reaction or mere self-preservation.
In October I wrote telling Lawrence that I was going to be married. He was surprised. He wrote from Bucks:
How exciting your letter is! We are glad to hear you are going to marry Donald Carswell. Your life will run on a staple pivot then, and you will be much happier. After all, one has a complete right to be happy. I only want to know people who have the courage to live. The dying resigned sort only bore me now. We are glad to have your news - soon we'll come and see you.
They were to come one day in the following week and put up for the night at my house. Lawrence was in straits for money, having nothing but the grant from the Royal Literary Fund. (He and Frieda were actually trying to find a market for their painted boxes and embroideries, and we got as far as nervously taking some of these to a Hampstead shop, that was dubiously interested.) I have another letter of the same October in which he writes:
I have got about seventy pounds in the world now. Of this I owe a hundred and forty-five pounds to the divorce lawyers, for costs claimed against me. This I am never going to pay. I also owe about twenty pounds otherwise. So I have got some fifty pounds. If you think the other fund would give me any more - benissimo, I'll take it like a shot.
Oh, by the way [he adds in a postscript], I was seedy and have grown a beard. I think I look hideous, but it is so warm and complete, and such a clothing to one's nakedness, that I like it and shall keep it. So when you see me don't laugh.
I never quite believed and do not now, that Lawrence found his beard hideous. His saying so was one of the small and transparent affectations which - in the absence of all profounder deceits - made him so easy to approach and so impossible not to love. At the same time his warning was necessary, as it was something of a shock to see this new Lawrence with a beard quite different from the hair of his head, of a deep glowing red in the sun, and in the shade the colour of strong tea. And it marked a stage. The Lawrence with the moustache, the Lawrence of Sons and Lovers and tramps from Germany to Italy, had given place to the bearded, married Lawrence, the Lawrence of The Rainbow, and the War, and the long struggle with the woman and with the world that was begun and ended in solitude.
Donald was at this time on the staff of The Times, working in the same department with Mr F. S. Lowndes, husband of Mrs Belloc-Lowndes. Finding that Donald was acquainted with Lawrence, Mr Lowndes, a kindly man, expressed great interest and, on learning also that Lawrence was very hard up, great sympathy. He hinted that something further might be done out of a fund in which his wife had some say, and added that Mrs Belloc-Lowndes would be very glad to have an opportunity of meeting this remarkable young man. On hearing all this from Donald I at once invited Mrs Belloc-Lowndes to come to my house and meet Mr and Mrs D. H. Lawrence.
Mrs Belloc-Lowndes, whom none of us had ever set eyes on before, duly turned up. I remember how silent Lawrence sat as she told us (a) that she didn't know how on earth she was going to afford a necessary operation for one of her children, and (b) what splendid large sums she always got on account for her books, naming the amounts. Also, just as we were showing her out, we managed to disabuse her of her firm impression that Lawrence had eloped with the wife of the local butcher of his village, i.e., Frieda geb. von Richthofen, whom we had just left upstairs! But the literary fund which she was supposed to represent had melted in an explanatory haze. When we were left alone Lawrence indulged in some pithead language.
That night we talked - especially Lawrence. I was only beginning to know him. Often I disagreed with what he said or declared it to be exaggerated. But from the first I was sure that he was worth more than the lot of us. Also with Lawrence there was something that begot in the listener a kind of inward ear.
'Thank you so much for having us down. I like to stay with you - you are a perfect hostess. Please don't think me a fool or conceited for my tirade,' he wrote, enclosing a cheque for one pound which I must have lent him, with two shillings extra 'for the maid'. I was to go down soon to see them. He had pleased me very much by saying that mine was the only town-house in which he had ever felt it might be possible for him to live. I think, however, that this was chiefly because, though it was old, there was an unpretentious air of impermanency about it, so that we always expected it to fall down when the anti-aircraft gun went off. Lawrence disliked an air of everlastingness about a home. For him it must have something of the tent about it, though he liked everything to be seemly and clean, and he approved of a few household gods.
2
I went once to Bucks, but only, I think, for the day. There I met the Cannans, was taken over their windmill, and went a hilly walk. For some reason it was also a gloomy walk. The grass of the hills looked black and I wished I were at home. I felt a great unhappiness in Gilbert Cannan which Mary's chirpiness did not dispel. And Lawrence seemed to be holding on to himself against depression. On the return to England the links between Frieda and her children had reasserted themselves, and he found the complication hard to endure.
Donald and I were married early in January, and Lawrence sent me a little blue plate 'as a love token from us. That it is a dragon is a fitting symbol, but I shall paint you a phoenix on a box.' The phoenix, as I knew, was his most fitting 'badge and sign'. Being married, I had now one of the chief qualifications for inclusion in the Lawrence exodus. There were to be, if possible, no single males or females in the party - as with the denizens of the Ark - and Lawrence caused much amusement by his suggestions for the mating of those among the probable starters who were still unattached. He thought, for instance, that Dorothy Warren might marry the writer who is now known as Michael Arlen.
Lawrence was not happy in Bucks, and I never heard him speak of his stay there with any pleasure. To him that countryside was dreary. Literary prospects too, instead of improving, looked blacker. The Hardy book was turning out as 'rum' unsaleable stuff that would not fetch even the promised fifteen pounds. That good friend, Amy Lowell, who had met Lawrence in England and was now in New York, had not so far succeeded in eliciting the money owed by the New York publisher of Mrs Holroyd and Sons and Lovers. The new novel, of which a contemplated title was then The Wedding-Ring, was still undergoing final revision and wearisome typing by the author, with many of its pages queried by the publishers. The Prussian Officer came out, but Lawrence disliked the title, which had been chosen against his wish. 'What Prussian officer?' he asked. When the money from the Royal Literary Fund came to an end, what next?
After a 'long, slow, pernicious cold' in January he accepted an invitation from the Meynells at Greatham in Sussex to occupy the barn which had been newly-converted for Viola into a very attractive cottage. There were still finishing touches to be put to it - linoleums to be laid and so forth. Lawrence would undertake these and would give daily coaching to one of the Meynell grandchildren, who was kept from school owing to a serious accident. Viola, nobly if often disapprovingly, undertook to type the remainder of the novel.
Again I cannot recall any reference by Lawrence to his six months at Greatham which suggests enjoyment, as, for example, his references to Cornwall suggest enjoyment. But socially it was an eventful period - vide Women in Love. He met here for the first time people like Lady Ottoline Morrell and the Hon. Bertrand Russell (now Earl Russell), and he was at first deeply impressed by them besides being himself in his special way impressive.
The innocence of Lawrence has always to be kept in mind. It is this quality, with the force of his beliefs and the strength of his imaginative vision, that puts him humanly with Blake and with Shelley among the English poets. But because Lawrence was practical, with the realism of the English working man, his innocence is easily ignored. He had none of the charming foolishness in worldly affairs that distinguishes most of the poetic innocents. On the other hand circumstances had rendered him far less sophisticated in social matters. One result of this was that, upon finding himself mistaken about people, he would strike out with all his force.
Given any expression of natural sympathy Lawrence went forth at a first meeting blind to all discrepancies. It was only in the face of hostile assertiveness that he became either arrogant or reserved. He provided in general, as has been said, an immediate air of liberty, equality and fraternity such as I never breathed with any man of like gifts.
But though Lawrence practised the charity of culture and of his own nature - the charity that hopes all things, he definitely rejected the Christian petrifaction and prolongation of this - the charity that endureth all things. For here he saw a breeding-place of tyrants and of victims. He could hope a long time. But when he judged that the time for hope was past he no longer endured.
In this, as in so much else, his moderation was marked. He was always ready to revise a judgement and to start afresh without rancour or a backward glance. But he affirmed the right to judge, as he admitted the right of others to judge him. 'Judge not that ye be not judged!' I once heard him in conversation echo that sententiously uttered statement.
'But don't you see that if we live we must judge, for to live is to judge - and to be judged too at every turn, even as you are now judging me by bidding me not to judge!'
What Lawrence refused to do was to judge by any set principle. He began by taking the life attainment of others eagerly on trust. But he had no doubt as to the nature and extent of his own. And when discrepancies appeared, he measured the one against the other and lost no time in announcing the results. In the case of highly placed and highly gifted persons, being more astonished by the discrepancy, he was the more emphatic in underlining it.
Frieda apart, it was first and foremost on Murry that Lawrence relied - Murry, young, gifted and sympathetic. Before they had been three weeks at Greatham Murry had come to stay with them. He was lonely (Katherine had gone to Paris) and not well (after an attack of influenza) and just nearing the end of his first novel. So he went to Lawrence, and Lawrence nursed him beautifully. An intimacy sprang up, and Lawrence could not think or speak too highly of this friend. The more that Frieda was increasingly fretting about her children and fighting against Lawrence in the matter, Murry seemed a man sent from God. Lawrence included him in every plan, praised the manuscript of his first novel and expounded to him The Rainbow, which he counted upon Murry to review when it should appear in the face of a hostile, misunderstanding world. He even saw in Murry a colleague and successor who would build up the temple when he, Lawrence, had cut out the ground.
To Murry also he poured forth the philosophy which he was then beginning to write down. This had become all-important to him, so that he saw himself as putting forth one novel after The Rainbow and no more. After that his 'approach to the revolution of the conditions of life' - a revolution profoundly opposed to socialism, with which he had merely a shallow intellectual and emotional sympathy - was to take some more direct, active and human form. What form precisely he did not specify even to himself. But it involved a 'withdrawal from the world' and it called for support from at least a few people. From poor Murry among them!
There was some talk of the Lawrences occupying a cottage at Garsington Manor, the Oxfordshire home of the Morrells. At the mere thought of this Lawrence saw himself building a new Jerusalem within convenient distance of Oxford and Cambridge. But owing to practical difficulties nothing came of it.
Lawrence was sharply ill at Greatham and very weak afterwards. But besides much philosophy he wrote some short stories and the sketches for Twilight in Italy. He wrestled hard, too, with his publisher for the totality of The Rainbow and, though he yielded in the matter of some words and phrases, he refused to alter or omit any passage or paragraph. As well, he said, cut off your nose to make your face pleasant to people who say it is spoiled by that feature. He conjured his publisher, as he conjured Murry, to fight for the book, because it would both need and deserve fighting support. He knew it could not be popular, but he encouraged his publisher by the assurance that in years to come it would prove a sound financial speculation.
He also conjured for a further advance in money, his fear being that this, if delayed till the appearance of the book, would be claimed by the divorce lawyers before it reached him. Again J. B. Pinker rose to the occasion. Lawrence received ninety pounds. After this there would be only thirty-three pounds to come.
The question was urgent - what was to be their next home? The way to the Continent was barred by the War - though Lawrence thought the War would be over by the autumn and that the appearance of his Rainbow would coincide with peace and new beginnings. In the interim it did not much matter where he lived so long as he and Frieda were independent. She wished to be near her children, who were now in London. So, suddenly in July, they took the lower half of 2 Byron Villas in the Vale of Health at Hampstead. Having done this, he was for a time in a gay and careless mood. He asked us all for contributions - as small and cheap as possible - for the new home. I gave them an old-fashioned gilt mirror.
Lawrence loved making a home in a simple, transitory way; and, though he looked upon this one as more than usually transitory, he threw himself into the setting of it up with ardour. Proudly he showed me the new pots and pans which were to be kept clean, not merely on the inside, as the Christians use, but on the outside, as the Pharisees use. In the process he sang all day long - as often as not the evangelical hymns of his youth. His next-door neighbours wondered at the sound. Of all the stories told of Lawrence's boyhood by his sister Ada (in her book The Early Life of D. H. Lawrence) none is more characteristic than that of the youthful company who, under the threat of Lawrence's violence, stood up and sang in the empty Easter-gay church at Alfreton, and this though by then Lawrence had 'criticised and got over the Christian dogma'. When I heard him lift up his voice in 'Sun of my soul, Thou Saviour dear', I thought he would not be content to die without having written hymns of his own. We have his hymns in The Plumed Serpent.
One day I went with him and Frieda to hunt for secondhand furniture in Praed Street. None of it was cheap enough, and we trudged homeward through disagreeable weather late in the afternoon. Frieda begged that we might stop somewhere for a cup of tea, and I was all agreement. But Lawrence turned on us with fury. We should not have any tea! Were we not on the way home to our evening meal? Money and time and stomachs might not be so wasted. I was struck by Frieda's ungrumbling acceptance of this ruling as we pushed wearily on. It now seems to me that we walked home all the way from Camden Town. Even so, or rather just so, life in Lawrence's company was so great an adventure that the utmost weariness or disappointment was without boredom. He was the man in whose company to miss a last train; and this not primarily because he was sweet-tempered and entertaining. Frieda, though a rebellious creature, submitted from the first to Lawrence's practical direction, as she did at the last (after a long fight) to his profounder guidance. For one thing she had what, to me at least, is one of the most lovable qualities in a human being, a simple animal stoicism in the face of pain or discomfort. For another she recognised instinctively that in practical matters Lawrence was well-nigh infallible. Besides, in return for obedience of this kind, one got from Lawrence a lovely assurance. I have a letter, written by Frieda nearly a year after his death, in which she refers to 'the glamour he gave to everything', and says, 'with Lawrence it was always worth while even at the worst.' There has not been a truer word spoken of him. Of how many can it be said?
3
They stayed at Byron Villas till Christmas (1915) - five important months to Lawrence as a writer. The Rainbow appeared on September 30th, and on November 13th was condemned at Bow Street as 'obscene' within the meaning of the statute of 1857 therein made and provided.
Work was being steadily turned out. Early in October the Italian sketches were complete, and the book was accepted by Duckworth. Soon afterwards the collection of poems to be called Amores was ready. All the while, short stories were written in rapid succession, and some of the philosophy saw print in the Signature.
Though I was asked both to go to the premises of the Signature (to which I contributed a rug for the floor), and to write for it, I did neither. I never believed in it, and Lawrence's own feelings, as conveyed to me at the time, tallied perfectly with his later account given in the preface to Death of a Porcupine. In that account no doubt, as Murry says,' the details of fact are inaccurate, but not, I think, the content of feeling. To me Lawrence appeared deprecating, almost apologetic at the outset, and he was clearly disappointed in the performance. That it contained nothing of importance except his own contribution anybody may see who cares to look up the three issues. Lawrence said as much to me when he asked me, as a subscriber, if his essay on 'The Crown' conveyed anything to me. I had to admit, to his disappointment, that it didn't. One lives and learns. Today 'The Crown' is the only thing in the Signature that has meaning for me; and it has so much meaning that I well understand how Lawrence was bound to take any chance to see it in print.
From all this, however, there came scarcely any money. Lawrence was constrained to accept thirty pounds from the Morrells. He had not been well, and, dreading November in London, was still hoping to escape it by sailing away. He applied for passports to Spain. Then he had the offer of a cottage in Florida. Dr Eder, who examined him, warned him against New York in the winter. But he would rush through New York to warmer climes beyond. Certainly he felt that London was dangerous to him. Those appalling 'colds' that laid him low! That he might be in readiness to go, the noble Pinker brought the Morrells' thirty pounds up to a hundred pounds. Immediately Lawrence delivered work to many times that value, though not immediately saleable. Bernard Shaw, too, being appealed to by the Morrells, sent five pounds for Lawrence.
