Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1120
At the beginning of March Lawrence and Frieda, finding Cornwall congenial, went to Zennor thinking to look for a furnished house - 'lovely pale hills, all gorse and heather, and an immense peacock sea spreading all below.'
They stayed at the inn, the Tinners' Arms, for a fortnight, then moved amid snow blizzards to an unfurnished cottage not far off - at Higher Tregerthen on the St Ives road. Here 'under the moor and above the sea' they would 'live in poverty and quiet'. They started collecting their scattered bits of things from London. On leaving Byron Villas they had distributed for storage, among their friends, anything they wished to keep. One of these things was my mirror.
But the great attraction of the place to Lawrence was that there were really two cottages, the one behind on the seaward side being an annexe to the one fronting the road. Both were the same size - 'two good rooms and a scullery' - and cost the same, five pounds a year. Might not this be the nucleus of that which had been Lawrence's dream? The thought filled him with new health. And of course it was spring. 'I am beginning to feel strong again,' he wrote, 'life coming in at the unseen sources,' though he was also 'so tired, so tired, so tired of the world' that he could have died there and then were it not that 'one must not die without having known a real good life, and a fulfilment, a happiness that is born of a new world from a new centre.'
I believe, if we cannot discover a terrestrial America there are new continents of the soul for us to land upon. Virgin soil. Only one must get away from this foul old world, one must have the strength to depart...
In the same letter he speaks of the Murrys coming to live at Tregerthen. 'It is always my idea, that a few people by being together should bring to pass a new earth and a new heaven.' Poor Murry! But in the next letter, though still cheerfully engaged in furnishing -
I have made a dresser, which is painted royal blue, and the walls are pale pink! Also a biggish cupboard for the food, which looks like a rabbit hutch in the back place. Here, doing one's own things in this queer outlandish Celtic country I feel fundamentally happy and free, beyond.
- he already knows that there can be no abiding place for him in Cornwall:
It is queer, how almost everything has gone out of me, all the world I have known, and the people, gone out like candles. When I think of —, or —, even perhaps the —s who are here, it is with a kind of weariness, as of trying to remember a light which is blown out. Somehow it is all gone, both I and my friends have ceased to be, and there is another country, where there are no people, and even I myself am unknown, to myself as well.
He continued to take an interest in us, sending kindly messages to Donald, asking for our news and encouraging me to write. He thought me culpably lazy about writing and too strenuous in other ways. That spring he wrote:
I am very glad to hear of the novel. I firmly believe in it. I think you are the only woman I have met, who is so intrinsically unattached, so essentially separate and isolated, as to be a real writer or artist or recorder. Your relations with other people are only excursions from yourself. And to want children, and common human fulfilments, is rather a falsity for you, I think. You were never made to 'meet and mingle', but to remain intact, essentially, whatever your experiences may be. Therefore I believe your book will be a real book, and a woman's book: one of the very few.
He himself was busy helping to settle the Murrys in the annexe. Murry has told' how, in response to Lawrence's urgent invitation, he and Katherine had left the French Riviera, where they were snatching a brief happiness under the nose of the War, and what a failure the Cornish experiment was 'right from the beginning'. His account shows how they each suffered in their different ways. Lawrence, in his account to me, was brief and to the point as usual.
The Murrys have gone over to the South side, about thirty miles away. The North side was too rugged for them and Murry and I are not really associates. How I deceive myself. I am a liar to myself about people. I was angry when you ran over a list of my 'friends' - whom you did not think much of. But it is true, they are not much, any of them. I give up having intimate friends at all. It is a self-deception. But I do wish somebody produced some real work I am very anxious to see your book.
If I am not conscripted, and Carswell isn't, I think we shall furnish a nice room in the Murrys' house, and if you would like to come and stay in it, we should be glad. Barbara Low has an old invitation for part of her summer holiday - she is our only prospect in the visitor way. I like her enough.
It is very fine here, foxgloves now everywhere between the rocks and ferns. There is some magic in the country. It gives me a strange satisfaction.
Many greetings from us both to you and Carswell.
After a visit from Murry Lawrence was always well disposed toward Donald. He felt relief in thinking of someone who was unable to beat up emotions. 'I must say I quite frequently sympathise with his point of view,' he wrote to me much later. It was the same with the few men friends whom he met through us from time to time. These did not greatly interest him, and to some he was definitely hostile. But 'at least from Donald's friends one gets a real reaction, a true, human response,' he once said grimly. It is significant that although Murry lived for weeks in the same house, he neither saw nor heard anything of the novel upon which Lawrence was working at the time.
In the same letter he was anxious about my health. I had been overtired. Earlier he had written:
I think you have been exhausting yourself. . . One has to withdraw into a very real solitude, and he there, hidden, to recover. Then the world gradually ceases to exist, and a new world is discovered, where there are as yet no people ... I hope you will be better. Don't talk about me with those others.
Now in the later letter he went on:
. . . also you said how you alternate between a feeling of strength and productiveness, and a feeling of utter hopelessness and ash. I think that is fairly well bound to be, because I think your process of life is chiefly exhaustive, not accumulative at all. It is like a tree which, feeling the ivy tightening upon it, forces itself into bursts of utterance, bursts of flower and fruition, using up itself, not taking in any stores at all, till at last it is spent. I have seen elm trees do this - covered, covered with thick flowering, making scarcely any leaves, taking any food.
But one has to live according to one's own being, and if your method is productive and exhaustive, then it is so. Better that than mere mechanical activity, housework, etc. Tell me how the novel has got on. I think that is very important.
5
This was in June, 1916. Though disappointed at his failure to form a 'group' of the kind he desired - a kind different in certain essentials from any of the groups imagined before by men of prophetic genius - Lawrence did not strike me as being unhappy. Rather he was angry, without depression. He was annoyed by 'the idiotic and false review' of Twilight in Italy, which appeared in The Times Literary Supplement for 19th June, and told its readers that Lawrence 'might have written a good book about Italy if he had been content to take things simply, and to see no more than he really saw' - which I take to mean no more than the reviewer thought he would have seen himself! But he was nearing the end of his novel, which he then thought to call The Sisters. 'It has come rushing out, and I feel very triumphant in it,' he wrote to me. And to Pinker in May he spoke of 'something quite new on the face of the earth', 'a terrible and horrible and wonderful novel. You will hate it and nobody will publish it. But there, these things are beyond us.' Again one is struck by the strangeness that Murry should have known nothing of this 'terrible and horrible and wonderful novel' until its English (and second) publication five years later. Until he wrote The Plumed Serpent Lawrence considered Women in Love his most important novel.
Ten days after his invitation to us he was going to Penzance to be examined for military service. 'If I must be a soldier, then I must - ta-rattatata! It's no use trying to dodge one's fate. It doesn't trouble me any more. I'd rather be a soldier than a schoolteacher, anyhow.'
His next letter, which he wrote to me some days after he had been examined and given exemption, is a useful commentary on the 'nightmare' passage in Kangaroo. It helps to distinguish the 'voice' in Lawrence from the individual man with his immediate reactions, both of which he fought to maintain in their differing integrities. 'Something makes me state my position when I write to you,' he says. ' ... It was experience enough for me, of soldiering. I am sure I should die in a week if they kept me. It is the annulling of all one stands for, this militarism, the nipping of the very germ of one's being.' He proceeds:
Yet I liked the men. They all seemed so decent. And yet they all seemed as if they had chosen wrong. It was the underlying sense of disaster that overwhelmed me. They are all so brave, to suffer, but none of them brave enough, to reject suffering. They are all so noble, to accept sorrow and hurt, but they can none of them demand happiness. Their manliness all lies in accepting calmly this death, this loss of their integrity. They must stand by their fellow-man: that is the motto.
This is what Christ's weeping over Jerusalem has brought us to, a whole Jerusalem offering itself to the Cross. To me, this is infinitely more terrifying than Pharisees and Publicans and Sinners, taking their way to death. This is what the love of our neighbour has brought us to, that, because one man dies, we all die.
This is the most terrible madness. And the worst of it all is that it is a madness of righteousness. These Cornish are most, most unwarlike, soft, peaceable, ancient. No men could suffer more than they at being conscripted - at any rate, those that were with me. Yet they accepted it all: they accepted it, as one of them said to me, with wonderful purity of spirit - I could howl my eyes up over him - because 'they believed first of all in their duty to their fellow-man'. There is no falsity about it; they believe in their duty to their fellow-man. And what duty is this, which makes us forfeit everything, because Germany invaded Belgium? Is there nothing beyond my fellow-man? If not, then there is nothing beyond myself, beyond my own throat, which may be cut, and my own purse, which may be slit: because I am the fellow-man of all the world, my neighbour is but myself in a mirror. So we toil in a circle of pure egoism.
This is what 'love thy neighbour as thyself' comes to. It needs only a little convulsion, to break the mirror, to turn over the coin, and there I have myself, my own purse, I, I, I, we, we, we - like the newspapers today: 'Capture the trade - unite the Empire - à bas les autres.'
There needs something else besides the love of the neighbour. If all my neighbours chose to go down the slope to Hell, that is no reason why I should go with them. I know in my own soul a truth, a right, and no amount of neighbours can weight it out of the balance. I know that for me the war is wrong. I know that if the Germans wanted my little house, I would rather give it them than fight for it: because my little house is not important enough to me. If another man must fight for his house, the more's the pity. But it is his affair. To fight for possessions, goods, is what my soul will not do. Therefore it will not fight for the neighbour who fights for his own goods.
All this war, this talk of nationality, to me is false. I feel no nationality, not fundamentally. I feel no passion for my own land, nor my own house, nor my own furniture, nor my own money. Therefore I won't pretend any. Neither will I take part in the scrimmage, to help my neighbour. It is his affair to go in or to stay out, as he wishes.
If they had compelled me to go in, I should have died, I am sure.
One is too raw, one fights too hard already, for the real integrity of one's being. That last straw of compulsion would have been too much, I think.
Christianity is based on the love of self, the love of property one degree removed. Why should I care for my neighbour's property, or my neighbour's life, if I do not care for my own? If the truth of my spirit is all that matters to me, in the last issue, then on behalf of my neighbour, all I care for is the truth of his spirit. And if his truth is his love of property, I refuse to stand by him, whether he be a poor man robbed of his cottage, his wife and children, or a rich man robbed of his merchandise. I have nothing to do with him, in that wise, and I don't care whether he keep or lose his throat, on behalf of his property. Property, and power - which is the same - is not the criterion. The criterion is the truth of my own intrinsic desire, clear of ulterior contamination.
Lawrence had now finished Women in Love all but the tide and epilogue chapter, and was starting to type it himself. 'It will be a labour - but we have no money. But I am asking Pinker for some.' And he had bought about a pound's worth of furniture (described in detail with prices) for the two rooms of the annexe.
It is such a pleasure, buying this furniture -I remember my sermon. But one doesn't really care. This cottage, that I like so much - and the new table, and the chairs - I could leave them all tomorrow, blithely. Meanwhile they are very nice.
What I wrote in answer to this, the longest letter I had yet had from Lawrence, I cannot wholly remember; but I certainly told him that he seemed in his attitude to property to admit something of the Christian spirit. This brought from him a letter twice as long as the last, and to me even more interesting. He began by saying I was right on 'nearly all' my points and that he wanted people 'to be more Christian rather than less: only for different reasons.'
Christianity is based on reaction, on negation really. It says 'renounce all worldly desires, and live for heaven'. Whereas I think people ought to fulfil sacredly their desires. And this means fulfilling the deepest desire, which is a desire to live unhampered by things which are extraneous, a desire for pure relationships and living truth. The Christian was hampered by property, because he must renounce it.
And to renounce a thing is to be subject to it. Reaction against any force is the complement of that force. So Christianity is based too much on reaction.
But Christianity is infinitely higher than the war, higher than nationalism or even than family love. I have been reading S. Bernard's Letters, and I realise that the greatest thing the world has seen is Christianity, and one must be endlessly thankful for it, and weep that the world has learned the lesson so badly.
But I count Christianity as one of the great historical factors, the has-been. That is why I am not a conscientious objector: I am not a Christian. Christianity is insufficient in me. I too believe man must fight.
But because a thing has been, therefore I will not fight for it. Because, in the cruder stage, a man's property is symbol for his manhood, I will not fight for the symbol. Because this is a falling back. Don't you see, all your appeal is to the testimony of the past. And we must break through the film which encloses us one with the past, and come out into the new. All those who stand one with the past, with our past, as a nation and a Christian people even (though Christian appeal in the war is based on property recognition - which was really the point of my last letter) must go to the war: but those who believe in a life better than what has been, they can view the war only with grief, as a great falling back.
I would say to my Cornishmen, 'Don't let your house and home be a symbol of your manhood.' Because it has been the symbol for so long, it has exhausted us, become a prison. So we fight, desperate and hopeless. 'Don't let your nation be a symbol of your manhood' - because a symbol is something static, petrified, turning towards what has been, and crystallised against that which shall be. Don't look to the past for justification. The Peloponnesian war was the death agony of Greece, really, not her life struggle. I am just reading Thucydides - when I can bear to - it is too horrible to see a people, adhering to traditions, fling itself down the abyss of the past, and disappear.
We must have the courage to cast off the old symbols, the old traditions: at least, put them aside, like a plant in growing surpasses its crowning leaves with higher leaves and buds. There is something beyond the past. The past is no justification. Unless from us the future takes place, we are death only. That is why I am not a conscientious objector. The great Christian tenet must be surpassed, there must be something new: neither the war, nor the turning the other cheek.
What we want is the fulfilment of our desires, down to the deepest and most spiritual desire. The body is immediate, the spirit is beyond: first the leaves and then the flower: but the plant is an integral whole: therefore every desire, to the very deepest. And I shall find my deepest desire to be a wish for pure, unadulterated relationship with the universe, for truth in being. My pure relationship with one woman is marriage, physical and spiritual: with another, is another form of happiness, according to our nature. And so on for ever.
It is this establishing of pure relationships which makes heaven, wherein we are immortal, like the angels, and mortal, like men, both. And the way to immortality is in the fulfilment of desire. I would never forbid any man to make war, or to go to war. Only I would say, 'Oh, if you don't spontaneously and perfectly want to go to war, then it is wrong to go - don't let any extraneous consideration influence you, nor any old tradition mechanically compel you. If you want to go to war, go, it is your righteousness.'
Because, you see, what intimation of immortality have we, save our spontaneous wishes? God works in me (if I use the term God) as my desire. He gives me the understanding to discriminate between my desires, to discern between greater and lesser desire: I can also frustrate or deny any desire: so much for me, I have a 'free will', in so far as I am an entity. But God in me is my desire. Suddenly, God moves afresh in me, a new motion. It is a new desire. So a plant unfolds leaf after leaf, and then buds, till it blossoms. So do we, under the unknown impulse of desires, which arrive in us from the unknown.
