Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated), page 1138
I next saw him a day or two later, on what I think was the night before he left for Italy. He had invited us and a few others to his lodgings. Koteliansky was there, and my brother from Gower Street, whose war-novel, The Natural Man, had greatly interested Lawrence. It was, for some reason, a harmonious evening with nothing much else to remember it by. Once more we talked of money. Koteliansky maintained that any unearned income must alienate the possessor hopelessly from the large portion of mankind who had to earn its bread. I still had fifty pounds a year, and it was discussed whether I was therefore alienated. Kot insisted that I was. Then my brother held forth on the advantages of great wealth, telling us what he would do if only he were 'really rich'. 'Will neither of you people ever face reality?' asked Lawrence, shaking his head over my brother and Koteliansky alike. 'Of course Catherine ought to have her fifty pounds, only it ought to be three hundred pounds instead. And of course Catherine's brother would do none of the things he thinks he would do if he were really rich. Because the moment he was really rich he would be a different person. A lot of money has an influence on the nature of a man that is not to be resisted. I feel myself that I, at least, should be able to resist it. But that's just how everybody feels, and I suppose I'd be not so different from the rest of mankind. Money, much money, has a really magical touch to make a man insensitive and so to make him wicked.'
I am glad we were all gay and friendly that night. Because I never saw Lawrence again.
Part Six
AET.41-44
PROSE
Etruscan Places
The Man Who Died (second part)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Apocalypse
VERSE
Pansies Nettles
Last Poems
* * *
'But never mind, the tragic is the most holding, the most vital thing in life and as I say, the lesson is to learn to live alone. '
1
In Tuscany they had a quiet and splendid autumn. The vintage, though not abundant, was unusually fine in quality. The white oxen plodded at their leisure with wagon-loads to fill the Mirenda cellars. After misty mornings the sun came hot, and throughout the cool nights the thick stone walls of the villa held the daytime warmth. The woods were dotted with the small wild cyclamen - the hovering yet downward-looking flowers that perhaps Lawrence loved best next to the open-faced rock-rose and the luminous white campion. Lawrence, who never minded not working for a time, took things easy, went for walks alone among the hills and pondered on the lost Etruscans. He seems even to have gone on another gentle little Etruscan tour, this time with Mr Brewster. For neighbours he had the Gair Wilkinsons - Mr Wilkinson of the puppet-show and the red beard, 'king of all the beavers', as Lawrence wrote to me - gentle and pleasant folk to drop in upon. It was his usual state before the inception of a new undertaking.
And of course the Lawrences had visitors. When did the Lawrences not have visitors? - except in Australia, and there only because they did not stay long enough. The Aldingtons came to stay. And towards the end of October, 'Aldous Huxley, a writer, and his wife came for the day, in their fine new car,' as he put it in a letter to Ada.
It was the beginning of an important friendship - emotionally important for Huxley, practically important for Lawrence. And it began with Huxley's offer of a car - the kind of car that is a friend's bargain, being both sound and cheap. Here was Lawrence in the very situation where to Huxley the owning of a car would seem to be a necessity. And he could just afford it. But Lawrence refused. 'I won't bother myself learning to drive, and struggling with a machine,' he wrote to Ada. 'I've no desire to scud about the face of the country myself. It is much pleasanter to go quietly into the pine woods and sit and do there what bit of work I do. Why rush from place to place?'
But in November, coming up the long road from Scandicci on foot and laden with provisions, Lawrence got wet through and had to take to his bed in consequence. There followed the kind of weather he most dreaded - everything 'steamy, soggy wet' with 'great pale brown floods out in the Arno valley' and nothing to do but to 'grin and abide'.
He would have liked well enough to have seen the '300 Club' production of Mrs Holroyd in December but did not feel equal to the journey - perhaps shrank, too, from the double trial of the theatre and the 'miserable ending' which belonged so much to his past.
For Christmas the Mirenda had rare celebrations which included the peasants of the podere and their families - twenty-seven souls. These all came in to see their first Christmas tree, decked by Lawrence and Frieda in best German style with candles and shining trinkets from Florence. And there were little toys and sweets and dates for the children, and wine and Tuscan cigars for the grown-ups.
Thus Lawrence all his life grasped every natural chance that offered for cheerfulness and peaceful gaiety. And he did so without a trace of fuss or spouting, sweet posing or exaggeration. His Christmas tree was without the too common adjuncts of vanity and frivolity, and so was a truly sacred symbol, a tiny fountain of life for all who could feel it. There was absolutely no nonsense, emotional or aesthetic, about him. He liked and respected the peasants, for example, and he envied them their physical strength; but he broke into no rhapsody of preference which would put their life above his. As he wrote to Ada:
Sometimes I think it would be good to be healthy and limited like the peasants. But then it seems to me they have so little in their lives, one had better just put up with one's own bad health and have one's own experiences. At least they are more vivid than anything these peasants know.
I have said that Lawrence that autumn was in the condition common with him as precedent to a new undertaking. After Christmas he wrote the first draft of the novel that was later to be known as Lady Chatterley's Lover. As usual, therefore, he was less idle than one would have guessed from his letters of the period. His constant productiveness, like his constant courage, fits badly with Murry's picture of dislocation and degeneration. From England during the early months of 1927 came nothing but news of strikes and troubles and illness, which he felt badly, yet he worked firmly on.
'Eh, one wishes things were different,' he wrote to an old friend in the Midlands, a woman who was faced with a serious operation. 'But there's no help for it. One can only do one's best, and then stay brave. Don't weaken or fret - while we live, we must be game. And when we come to die, we'll die game too.' In essentials Lawrence never weakened and never fretted, and though no man ever felt the trials of life more keenly than he, both for himself and others, he never either plumed himself upon his sensitiveness nor wasted his strength in a leaking 'sympathy'. For that he was too much alive and too shrewd a fighter for his own life. His sympathy was like a signal from the very heart of his own courage.
He needed it all too, if only for the repudiation of that sweet and suffering ideal of courage that has become associated with Christianity - the courage that is playful about symptoms of illness, or that vaunts itself as ready to die 'for a trick not worth an egg',' the courage that is not simple, the courage of the victim that is so easily reversed into what it demands for its existence, namely, the bullying of the persecutor. Because, what Murry finds to be Lawrence's failure, is precisely what emerges as his most victorious endeavour.
In practice [writes Murry] Lawrence's belief seemed to mean pretending a harmony between impulses which were verily contradictory; to mean denying the spiritual consciousness and asserting it, to mean loving the world and hating it at the same moment, to mean nailing the flag of the civilised consciousness to the mast and hauling it down in a single operation.
Precisely. But it should not be set down as a gibe or a regret. If for 'seemed to mean pretending' we substitute 'established', and for 'were' put 'hitherto have seemed', and if we continue, 'he has enabled us to deny the spiritual consciousness and to assert it in the same breath, to love the world and hate it at the same moment, to nail the flag of the civilised consciousness to the mast and to haul it down in a single operation', we have said one of the most important things about Lawrence that can be said. And if we can apprehend it, even a bit, we understand a lot about Lawrence. It is not, strictly speaking, an intellectual apprehension as yet, though it will become so in time. Then we can go on to something else.
As we have said, Lawrence needed all his courage. The spring came beautifully at the Mirenda, with sky-staring daisies and earth-gazing violets, with blonde narcissi and dark anemones, both air-trembling, and 'under the olives all the pale-gold bubbles of winter aconites'. But it brought also the tramontana. Colds went about, and Lawrence caught one by infection, which first drove him to bed, and then - with a change in the weather to damp heat - turned into an attack of malaria. This, by his own account. Whatever the cause, the effect was no doubt an active tubercular attack, and it was accompanied by bronchial haemorrhage. It seems not to have been so very bad, however, and upon becoming convalescent he might have gone in May to London to help with the Stage Society production of his play David - that is, if he had much wished to go. The first performance was to be given towards the end of May. But he was both doubtful of his strength and reluctant about the undertaking. His refusal caused, I understand, some natural resentment in London, where much hard voluntary work and a considerable sum of money was being expended on the production, and it was felt that Lawrence ought to make every effort to encourage and direct the enterprise. But Lawrence would not risk the strain and disappointment. Though he always had a half hope that one of his plays would succeed on the stage, I doubt if he had much belief in them as stage plays, or if he felt their failure acutely. So he held to the 'take-it-or-leave-it attitude'. Actually David - in theme and scope a far more ambitious play than either of the others published, and containing magnificent passages - was less successful as staged in 1927 than was Mrs Holroyd. The critics were not kind to either, and Lawrence was obliged to make the best, or the worst, of kindly reports from friends. He could only hope that it was 'really quite a success', knowing well enough what this meant. As I write now I hear that there may shortly be another production of David. Personally, had I the choice, I would rather see an experimental performance of Touch and Go than a repetition of the Biblical play, unless the production was transformed from that accorded to it in 1927.
In April, though summoned by letter and even cable, not to mention the invisible transatlantic summons of Mabel Dodge Luhan's 'will', Lawrence had refused to go to Taos for the summer. Taos was vastly more attractive than David. But Lawrence measured the effort and decided against it - as he had done also the previous spring. One day he would like to go again. For the present, the demands of life there were not equal to what he could get from it. The Plumed Serpent was written. He hoped one day to revisit the ranch. Never would he forget the beauty of his daily life. But I think he knew that now there could be no second blooming for him except in old Europe, in his real home, to which he had come back wise and enriched - assuaged.
Besides, he could not afford it. There was no new full-size book newly out or coming - nothing but the little Mornings in Mexico, which would not bring much money. Thus he was rather short for the moment. He could just hope to keep going with the help of the improved exchange in Italy. He therefore went quietly on with the Mirenda life, painting the 'Finding of Moses' and writing at intervals about the Etruscans. He was forty-two now - 'getting on', as he recognised. It was time to settle, if only he could get more 'solid' in health. 'Why can't one make oneself tough!' he sighed.
In vain. That same spring, as Millicent Beveridge has told me, although he did not consider himself as ill, he had to pause for breath every fifty yards or so when they walked out together. And in June, when the heat on those slopes became too fierce, he allowed Maria Huxley in the kindness of her heart to drive him down the hundred miles to Forte dei Marmi, bathed once in the sea, and came back to the Huxleys' house with severe congestion. In any case he was oppressed and enervated by the dead flat sea at Forte. So back to Florence again till he was able to travel to Austria, there to take an inhalation cure.
Lawrence resembled the Christian Scientists in one respect alone. He preferred not to name an illness precisely, disliking the jargon and finding it unhelpful in the fight for health. But he never denied the existence of the illness, nor ignored the nature of the fight. And though he fought and hoped to the last, he always admitted that he might be beaten.
'I'd rather be penniless and struggle, than not quite penniless and sick. Sporca miseria!' he wrote to me that autumn. And again, early in 1927, 'If only I could be really well. What a mercy! It's my one refrain.'
His one refrain it certainly was not. One is struck in his letters, even from now on, by the rarity of its occurrence. But it must have become the undertone, the tolling ground-bass of existence for him. And one of its effects was an unwillingness in him to return to any place where he had suffered from a severe attack. All he could do to live he must do. The scene of a defeat would only weaken his resistance. Accordingly, as time went on, the distant ranch grew more and more attractive. There he had never been really downed by illness, and he had felt full of lightness and energy.
But till he could grow stronger, the journey, the altitude, and the strictly seasonal nature of the spot, forbade it as Eden was forbidden to Adam by the flaming sword. Lawrence distrusted the verdicts of doctors as much as the scientific descriptions of illness. He was not rabid on the subject, but rather sceptical. Upon the very few regular practitioners whom he consulted from time to time he must have spent little of his hard-earned money. As to quacks and the great army of specialists, he was immune from their wiles. He could listen to good advice and put it patiently into practice, but this only when the doctor showed signs that he could collaborate with the undoubted, almost uncanny knowledge that Lawrence had of his own body. Such a doctor he found in Dr Giglioli at Florence, who, though he recognised the gravity of Lawrence's symptoms, was equally impressed by his patient's 'splendid healing power'. I believe the strictly medical verdict of those who had occasion to make a thorough examination at any time since 1914 is that by his own vitality and skilful courage Lawrence prolonged his life - a working, vivid life - by a good five years.
As Lawrence's less comprehending critics have been disposed to connect what they take to be his 'pathological' or 'morbid' or 'diseased' state of mind with the tuberculosis that was unhappily lodged in his flesh, it is necessary to dwell upon his illness with an emphasis that would otherwise be superfluous. Before long it will be realised, I believe, that as the mind of Lawrence was not morbid, not pathological and not diseased, but rather full of new health, nothing that is unpopular about him can be explained away by saying that he was ill. This will come about of itself. Meanwhile a clear distinction may and must be drawn. Lawrence is not explained by his illness. Yet in any examination of his life his illness is important because it was important. Though it did not cause his pilgrimage, it helped to make it savage.
In one truly helpful and illuminating statement Murry has disposed of the contamination-by-disease criticism. Here he speaks of what he knows. He says:
Tubercle does have strange effects. Chief among them is its tendency to make infinitely more intense the spiritual character of the person who suffers from it. Whatever he intimately is, he becomes to the nth degree.
Experience goes to prove that the victims of tuberculosis, so far from being temperamentally changed or intellectually undermined by the disease, are rendered the more intensely themselves. Keats was never more himself than when he wrote 'my heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense': Chekhov was never more himself than when he noted down his symptoms in medical detail: Katherine Mansfield was never more herself than when she dared to break her lovely and long-drawn fantasy and to seek her woman's honesty through submission to a male dominance external to her fantasy: Lawrence was never more himself than when he wrote Lady Chatterley's Lover, refused to seek the diagnosis of specialists and went on calling his attacks by the name of 'colds', and 'scratchy' or 'unhappy bronchials'. At the same time, to put Lawrence's illness out of the reckoning seems to me as grave an error as to account for the obnoxious in him by it. It was a force that he fought against in a special way as well as a force that made him the more himself. He differed from almost all the other famous consumptives in refusing to make any sort of 'copy' out of his illness. He proved his strength by never becoming an invalid. And - most valuable of all - the inherent consistency of his life was vindicated by his manner of dying. He wanted to five longer, but not to change his life beyond the changes imposed by age. Disease is not merely the revealer of a man: it may also be subdued by a man to his own likeness, and this in the moment of his defeat.
