Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1136
Few things could have delighted him more than to feel that the ranch was his - a hundred and sixty acres high in the skirts of the mountains and with the long summer before them. If his friends would not come, at least he had prepared a place for them, and paid for it! Here he could work off the benumbing and degrading influences of London. And work he did - 'like the devil'.
To help restore the log cabins, which were falling down, they got three Indians and a Mexican carpenter. But, as always, Lawrence did the work of two, inside and out, at the same time undertaking the direction of everything and everybody. In three weeks he and Frieda and Dorothy Brett had rebuilt the whole of the three-roomed house, except the chimney, making all the adobe bricks themselves. Then the roofs of all the cabins had to be re-shingled. The three-roomer was for Lawrence and Frieda, the two-roomer for Mabel when she cared to come, and the little one-roomer for Dorothy Brett. Besides these, there was a nice log hay-house and corral, and there were four horses. It was some three miles from the Del Monte ranch.
Now it is our own [he wrote in May], so we can invite you to come. I hope you'll scrape the money together and come for a whole summer, perhaps next year, and try it. Anyway, it would make a break, and there is something in looking out on to a new landscape altogether. I think we shall stay till October, then go down to Mexico, where I must work at my novel. At present I don't write - don't want to - don't care. Things are all far away. I haven't seen a newspaper for two months, and can't bear to think of one. The world is as it is. I am as I am. We don't fit very well. I never forget that fatal evening at the Café Royal. That is what coming home means to me. Never again, pray the Lord.
Down in the valley, where they often had to ride for necessaries, the spring was - ... so lovely, the wild plum everywhere white like snow, the cotton-wood trees all tender plumy green, like happy ghosts, and the alfalfa fields a heavy dense green. Such a change, in two weeks. The apple orchards suddenly in bloom. Only the grey desert the same. - One doesn't talk any more about being happy - that is child's talk. But I do like having the big unbroken spaces round me. There is something savage unbreakable in the spirit of place out here. The Indians drumming and yelling at our campfire at evening. But they'll be wiped out too, I expect - schools and education will finish them. But not before the world falls.
Remember me to Don. Save up - and enjoy your cottage meanwhile.
Lawrence, of course, did not stop writing for so long as he thought he would. In August he went down to the Hopi land in Arizona and wrote his marvellous account of the Snake Dances which appeared four months later in the Adelphi. He wrote also the short novel, St Mawr, and the two novelettes, The Woman Who Rode Away and The Princess - 'all sad', as he told me, but 'after all, they're true to what is'.
In October, with the coming of the first snows, he was ready to go down to Mexico and revise The Plumed Serpent. Brett would go with them, but not to share the same house if they took one. 'Not be too close ... It's so much easier that way.'
He now knew the worst as well as the best of life at the ranch. Probably he had never felt so well anywhere, but the altitude made the place intolerable to his lungs for longer than five, or at the utmost six months of the year. Already by October his bronchials felt 'raw'. Also it was 'very hard living up against these savage Rockies. The savage things are a bit gruesome, and they try to down one.' These things he recognised. At the same time, 'better, far better they than the white disintegration'. In April he hoped to be back, and he wondered if I would be able to get over.
For anybody who wishes to know about Lawrence's life it will be necessary to compare his own letters and actions at this, as at other times, with the account given in Murry's Reminiscences. And it is to be remembered that it was impossible for Lawrence to remain at 8,600 feet once the snows came. But he fully intended to return in April after that fruitful and economical summer, and he adhered to his plan. In his October letter he hoped I might be able to get over by the following spring.
For the winter in Mexico he had saved 2,000 dollars. The Boy in the Bush and the introduction to Magnus's Memoirs had just appeared in England. But of his American publisher he wrote, 'He still hovers on the brink of bankruptcy and keeps me on the edge of the same.'
His bronchials felt better at Oaxaca at a height of 5,000 feet, but 'he took it out of himself' over the final revision of The Plumed Serpent, so that Frieda was afraid for him, and when the book was finished he fell dangerously ill. He was very near death, and himself believed for a time that he must die. But Frieda kept her head, and he came round - very slowly. The doctor poured quinine down his throat, but his own treatment - which Frieda carried out - was to surround himself with bags of hot sand. Once, at a critical moment, he told her that she must have him buried in the little local cemetery. He would have her make things as easy for herself as possible. But, stifling her fear, she rallied him by refusing. It was much too ugly a place to be buried in, she protested, and he really must not put that upon her! Frieda was brave, and she had a marvellous power of putting strength into Lawrence when he was ill - this, though in the ordinary sense she was a bad nurse, as both she and Lawrence freely admitted.
In describing his malady to me he called it 'malaria, 'flu and tropical fever'. But though any or all of these may have set the thing going (as it would seem from the huge doses of quinine which permanently increased his deafness) the true danger lay in the active presence of tubercle. The doctor told Frieda so, privately but plainly; and she knew from what he said that Lawrence would never be the same man again.
The letter of 'pure denunciation' which Murry received from Lawrence must have been written during the short interim between the completion of The Plumed Serpent and this illness. At a loose end for the moment, he had become acquainted with a group of people - tired Europeans and sophisticated Americans - of whom he was soon weary. He then saw Mexico at its worst - the town and tourist and political sides, the horrors of which engendered homesickness. Because he admitted this, Murry concluded that he was 'done with America', Mexico, New Mexico and all.
But this was not the case. Hateful as the modern aspect of Mexico appeared, so that by the side of it the virtues of Europe shone out like the lights of home, the trend of thought exemplified by the Adelphi was yet more hateful. Lawrence could just tolerate Murry on Keats. Murry on God or Jesus or Humanity or Katherine Mansfield he could not stomach. At the same time he had still some hope that Murry might be brought to understand. Was not the drift of his Indian Dances clear enough to one who was so intelligent, given a good will? And about himself, as usual, he was perfectly open. His problem was still how to live. He would return to the ranch for the summer. But what when October came again? Perhaps he ought always to cross the Atlantic for the winter. His illness had shaken him. He must keep in touch with any at home who called themselves friends. Lawrence needed to go to America, and in America he met with much friendliness, which he returned; but I doubt if he ever made a friend there. For a friend he needed one of his own blood.
That April, still weak, staying at Orizaba, he certainly was tempted to come home. But he thought better of it, carried out his original plan and struggled up to the ranch. After ten weeks there he was 'beginning to be himself again'. That was to say he was milking his black cow night and morning, riding his black horse Aaron on the more tiresome errands in the valley, sowing pansy seeds, and irrigating without help a twenty-acre field to which the water had to be brought from two miles off. Frieda's nephew, a boy still in his teens, had arrived from Germany to be with them. For other help they now had only a Mexican boy, who came up occasionally for two dollars a day.
My description of our Bucks cherry trees in bloom made him a little homesick. They Were 'lovely to think of, he said. 'Here the country is too savage, somehow, for such softness.' But he would come to Europe in the autumn, he wrote. He hoped to find 'a warm place for the winter'.
In August he wrote to say he would be seeing us 'in one place or another in early October'. There was no hint in this of anything melodramatic such as a 'final farewell to America'. The melodrama is of Murry's imparting. Lawrence was never dramatic, much less melodramatic, though he was usually emphatic. 'We are running to the end of our stay here,' he put it to me:
. . . leave about September 10th. I suppose we shall be in England in early October... Frieda talks of staying some time in England, seeing her children. But I dread the tightness and stuffiness of England - feel I shan't be able to breathe. But I may like it better this time. I expect I shall suffer a bit anyhow, being shut up in houses and towns, after being so free here. I am as well as ever I was - but malaria comes back in very hot sun or any malaria conditions.
Part Five
AET. 40-41
PROSE
The Virgin and the Gypsy
Etruscan Places (in part)
The Man Who Died (first part)
* * *
'For now I am fully a man, and free above all from my own self-importance.'
1
The Lawrences arrived as planned, and went first to Garland's Hotel for a couple of days. Coming up for a half-day from the country, I saw them there, and arranged that they should have the loan of my younger brother's flat - then unoccupied - in Gower Street. Leaving their luggage at the flat, they would pay a visit to the Midlands, and would return to see a few friends before going to Italy by November. Lawrence did not speak of his health, and, as usual, there was nothing of the invalid about him; but under his big-brimmed Mexican hat his face looked pinched and small, and one easily guessed that he could not face a London winter. Neither could he yet afford the sort of comfortable house somewhere on the South Coast where he might have stayed safely if there had been enough interest or friendship to make England attractive to him. On this occasion he seemed very solitary in London.
This particular solitude was of his own making, as he had told only a few people of his arrival. He came alone, however, to spend the first weekend with us in the country. He said he would spend a day and night with us.
We both met him at High Wycombe station and travelled uphill in the country bus. Why he was by himself I don't remember. Either Frieda had gone before him to the Midlands or - more likely - she was visiting alone elsewhere. But here he was, and not in a cheerful mood, though as always well-disposed towards me. I was not, just then, very cheerful myself. Things had not gone as well as we could wish, and we were poor and anxious.
He was disappointed with the look of the immediate country, which is not particularly attractive, and on Sunday we all four walked under grey skies in the beech woods, while I thought how poor and tame it must seem to him after the pine slopes at Taos. Then, as we sat over a log fire and were near getting to some real talk, unexpected visitors came from London and robbed the occasion of its intimacy.
What with these visitors, my own domestic cares (which just then were pressing), and the sadness I divined in Lawrence, I was in a distracted state, and only two incidents of the visit stand out clearly now in memory. One was pleasant, the other the reverse. While we stood by the garden gate to see the London people off, John Patrick, then aged seven, made some sudden and unsolicited gesture of love towards me, and as quickly broke away again to his play. We continued with our adieux, paying no attention to the child, but I noticed Lawrence looking keenly at him, and later he referred to the boy in a letter in a special way, which I took to be connected with that remembered glance. 'Wait and see,' he wrote, 'this will be ein seltsamer Mensch.'
By the other incident I felt wounded and taken aback. But, as it shows once more how scrupulously Lawrence insisted on paying his way through life, I give it also. As we sat round the tea-table he produced a five-pound note, and in a manner half shy, half careless, threw it across to John Patrick. The child had never seen such a thing before, and did not know what to make of it. Neither did I. I remembered unhappily that it was precisely the sum I had given to Frieda for a travelling coat once when they were leaving England and she badly needed such a thing. Possibly I was wrong, but I don't think so, when, with a pang, I felt that this symbolised the sort of squaring up of accounts that goes with a long farewell. True, we were now rather poorer than Lawrence and with less prospect of growing richer, which he knew. But equally well I knew that he had not any spare five-pound notes to throw across tea-tables. Though he was now fixed up with a new American publisher he was still mainly dependent upon what could be 'squeezed out of the first unlucky one. However, there was nothing for it but to take it, as he would have it so.
From Derbyshire he sent us one of the famous Midland pork pies, with apologies for its not being so big as Midland pies - according to him - ought to be.
2
He had intended to stay a week at home and then to go with his sisters to the Lincolnshire coast for a few weeks. But instead he remained ten days at home and fled again south. He would always be fond of Ada, and would feel kindly towards his 'own people'. He was pleased, he wrote me, to find them in 'comparative opulence - comparative, of course - judging by old home standards'. But he hated more than ever 'past things like one's home regions', and when I saw him soon after his arrival in London he told me how, especially on that visit, the horrors of his childhood had come up over him like a smothering flood. Glad he would have been if the place thereof 'were puffed off the face of the earth'. The weather too had been atrocious and continued so. He must get away or a 'cold' would lay him low.
On the eve of his departure to the Midlands - he went on the Wednesday following his visit to us - he had told Murry that he hoped to see him when he came south again. By the 17th or 18th he was back in London and installed with Frieda in Gower Street. But not until the 26th - when Frieda had left for Baden-Baden, whither he was to follow her on the 29th - did he write again to Murry suggesting he might come up from the country and spend the night of the 28th at the flat.
Murry has told how he went and how, after a dispute about his book on Jesus, which Lawrence disliked and condemned, he and Lawrence parted the next day. Murry congratulates himself on not having accompanied Lawrence to New Mexico. He 'could not help thinking in what a hopeless position he should have been at this moment if he had really gone'. This reflection made him feel that now at last, with regard to Lawrence, he had 'burned his boats'. Not that there was any actual quarrel. Lawrence asked if Murry and his wife would visit them in Italy. Murry said they would.
In the November number of the Adelphi appeared the article by Murry called 'A Simple Creed', by which he stands today, even as he stands by his review of Women in Love. Lawrence hated the article and wrote in vehement protest. Murry, on the other hand, held that Lawrence had missed the point of it. Those who are sufficiently interested can place Lawrence's commentary by the side of Murry's 'Simple Creed' and judge of the matter for themselves.
Having left what must have seemed to him like the ghosts of his old friends in London - and not glad ghosts at that - Lawrence reached Baden-Baden in the first days of November to find it almost as ghostly: '. . . unbelievably quiet and deserted - really deserted. Nobody comes any more: it's nothing but ghosts from the Turgenev period.' This is not an exaggerated description of the Baden-Baden I was to visit two summers later. A happy exception, however, was provided for Lawrence by his mother-in-law, who, though she belonged to the past, remained always fresh and alive for him, with a genuine sturdiness as well as a sensitive vitality - real, bright and alive to the last. In all his returns to this, his other home, Lawrence was more soothed and happy than in his dutiful visits to the Midlands - so long as Frieda's mother was alive. This time he wrote to tell me that she was 'looking older, slower, but still very lively, walks uphill to us in our hotel. She asks for news of you.'
After a fortnight there he and Frieda went on to Spotorno, where they hired a four-storeyed villa. It was not much to their liking, but would serve, especially as they hoped for visitors, beginning with Frieda's two daughters.
Frieda's long insistence had been rewarded. Already in Hampstead, two winters before, she had managed to break down in a great degree the reserve between Lawrence and her children. Her son still remained aloof and refused to see the man who had taken his mother away, but the two girls had often called and, having made his acquaintance, had found themselves vanquished. Now, as young women, they came to Spotorno of their own wish and for the first time lived under the same roof with their mother and Lawrence. The younger of the two, who was then seventeen or eighteen, became particularly attached to Lawrence, and he to her. Here at last was a new and pleasant relationship. These young people were not ghosts, and they felt the greatest admiration, liking and respect for Lawrence, both as man and as writer. The Virgin and the Gypsy belongs to this time at Spotorno in the four-decker villa.
It is nevertheless the case that Lawrence, in this houseful of women that yet was not his own, grew restive. Possibly too, while he had to accept it, he was irritated by the flaunting of Frieda in her role of mater triumphans. She had squared her circle, and was now having her cake and eating it with a relish that must have been overwhelming to witness. While allowing her achievement with a wry male smile, and even while taking her daughters to his heart, it may be that he felt the need of male support. According to the Reminiscences he wrote to Murry reminding him of his promised visit. Two might perhaps play at resuscitating ghosts from the dead past and finding them transformed into healthy flesh and blood. To a woman her children: to a man his comrade. Hope was slow of dying in the heart of Lawrence. In a moment he could brush aside all intellectual differences, all past lapses and disappointments, and look to the miraculous renewals of life. Murry claimed that in the past he had undergone profound spiritual changes. There was anyhow something mobile in him, and he might yet be moulded by experience to something nearer to Lawrence's heart's desire. Belief in impulsive life tends to weaken belief in the more static aspect of character.
