In April 1924, the Klu Klux Clan shot 22 people in Lilly, Pennsylvania, Hitler was found guilty of treason and imprisoned for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch, and the BBC broadcasts its first educational radio program.
Lawrence is happily away from it all in Taos which ‘alternates between hot sun and birds singing, and deep snow and silence.’ But his main focus is sorting out the various loose threads of his writing.
Mollie Skinner sends through some last-minute adjustments for The Boy in the Bush, her cowritten book with Lawrence. ‘If there is time,’ he asks Martin Secker, ‘please make these little changes to please her.[i]’ Curtis Brown is sent three short stories and instructed to find them a home anywhere other than John Middleton Murry’s The Adelphi. The stories have a cathartic function for Lawrence, helping him ‘work off some of the depression of that Europe.[ii]’ Brown is also sent the essay ‘Indians and Entertainment’ which would be published in The New York Times Magazine before being collected in Mornings in Mexico (1927).
In 1921, Lawrence was forced to write the school textbook Movements in European History as he faced destitution. He used the pseudonym Lawrence H. Davidson, so as not to cause controversy, given he had been prosecuted for alleged eroticism with the publication of The Rainbow (1915). Now there were plans for new editions with illustrations.
Things seem to be going well with Mabel Dodge Luhan, but these are early days. Although Lawrence didn’t appreciate being ‘bullied by kindness,’ Luhan was incredibly supportive, giving Frieda ‘the ranch above Lobo[iii]’ which she had previously gifted to her son. Not one for accepting gifts, Lawrence would eventually give Luhan the original manuscript to Sons and Lovers in exchange[iv].
Ever conscious about money, Lawrence urges Willard Johnson to accept payment for typing out a story for him and insists on settling the finances of Maurice Magnus, who had recently committed suicide after getting into debt with Michael Borg. Martin Secker is less magnanimous, insisting on one third of royalties – given nobody else was interested in publishing Magnus’s memoir of life in the Foreign Legion.
Things seem to be going remarkably well. Even Dorthy Brett, who had accompanied the Lawrence’s to Taos, has settled into the pioneer life and ‘rides like an amazon in a cowboy hat, on a huge old brown mare. You never saw such a thrilled female.[v]’ What could possibly go wrong with three females – Frieda, Mabel and Brett – all vying for Lawrence’s attention…
Last month, I visited Royal Leamington Spa to give a talk to the Leamington Literary Society on you know who. The Society was formed in 1912 to encourage philosophical and literary debate among men but is now open to anyone with an interest in reading. The talk was a success as only one person fell asleep, though he had the grace not to snore.
I took literary heritage as my theme and from this, explored different elements of Lawrence’s life. We started off with a map of Eastwood and a potted history of his childhood via key locations and buildings – most of which have either been flattened, sold off, or left to rot. From this I put forward arguments as to how we should celebrate Lawrence’s life and introduced the D.H. LawrenceMemory Theatre project. We finished off with a close reading of his endlessly quotable letters.
Lawrence’s popularity has waxed and waned over the decades, for a variety of reasons. But he is enjoying a resurgence at the moment, inspiring novels by Alison MacLeod and Rachel Cusk, as well as a poetry collection by Isobel Dixon. Leamington had also been on a long period of decline, thanks in part of John Betjeman’s “Death in Leamington,” but over the last twenty years has had a bit of a renaissance, due to the opening of the M40, the proximity of Warwick University and Jaguar Landrover.
I’d never been to Leamington before, so on arrival headed straight to the church. Not to absolve sins, of which there are – I am pleased to report – many, but to grab food from the Ukrainian café inside and help support the young people who run it. This immediately got me thinking about exile.
Lawrence lived in self-imposed exile from 1919. Sick of censorship and modernity, he travelled the globe in search of Rananim whereas the Ukrainians are here out of necessity. Later on I picked up a copy The New European, and the Great Lives section featured Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) who during the 1920s and 30s was one of the most popular and widely translated authors in the world. Zweig was an Austrian Jew who fled his home in the 1930s after the rise of fascism and lived in various countries and continents. Unlike Lawrence, who compared returning to Britain in 1923 as ‘like a dog returning to its vomit,’ Zweig was desperate to get home. He committed suicide in Petropolis, a Brazilian town in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, on 22 February 1942. His suicide note read, ‘it would require immense strength to reconstruct my life, and my energy is exhausted by long years of peregrination as one without a country.’
These three stories of travel – Ukrainians trying to make a living from cooking which evokes memories of home, Zweig’s enforced exile on ideological grounds, and Lawrence’s search for Rananim, left me feeling less angry at the train service for the various strikes that day that made getting back to Nottingham quite the endurance test.
I’ve agreed to come back next year and do a talk on Sillitoe’s great anti-heroes of literature, Arthur Seaton and Colin Smith.
Leamington Literary Society website here and Facebook Group here.
Europe has become a ‘weariness’ to Lawrence, but will America lift the spirits of literature’s angriest writer? Think we all know the answer to that one…
‘Thank goodness we are getting out of Europe. It is a weariness to me. I prefer to be on the American continent,[i]’ Lawrence informs Bessie Freeman on the 1 March, a few days before he sets sail to New York to sort out his income tax and unpaid royalties from his publisher Thomas Seltzer. From there, he’s off to Taos, but it’s just a ‘jumping off place’ as he really wants to go back to Mexico because he has a novel he wants ‘to finish off there.[ii]’
Dorothy Brett is joining them on their trip. Lawrence gives a reductive outline of his fellow traveller: ‘She is deaf – and a painter -and daughter of Viscount Esher.[iii]’ But this is no jumping off spot for her. Taos will become Brett’s home for the rest of her life.
The final contractual agreements are made with Mollie Skinner and Lawrence is as thorough as ever in outlining how sales work: ‘Statements are made on June 30th and Decm. 31st. and payments are made on 1st Oct. and 1st May, each year. Curtis Brown is very strict in business, so you will be quite safe.[iv]’ His objective is for her to ‘get some money as well as fame.[v]’ The least he can do after rewriting her book.
The R.M.S Aquitania does about ‘580 – or 585 sea miles a day.’[vi] ‘The unending motion irritates’ Frieda but ‘I rather like it.[vii]’ Lawrence’s main problem seems to be with the size of the ship ‘rather too big – like living in a Town Hall[viii]’ and, of course, his fellow travellers. ‘Most people are unpleasant nowadays, particularly those going to America to make a fortune.[ix]’
Despite his aversion to wealth, he knows an opportunity when he sees one. Customers are issued with a Daily Mail each day and consume it cover to cover. But what if his friend, S.S. Koteliansky, were to publish ‘an ‘important’ daily on a liner’. ‘It would command attention’ and provide an ‘opportunity of making oneself heard![x]’ Koteliansky had been doing a stint at The Adelphi and was keen on setting up some form of publishing of his own. But to succeed, he must ‘go at it like a lion, serpent, and a condor.[xi]’
When they arrive at passport controls, Lawrence is disgusted by an official who mocks Dorothy Brett for travelling alone. ‘I got so mad,’ they soon ‘quieted up sharp.’ Then it’s time to face the winter. ‘We struggled up to 100th St buried in luggage, in a taxi, in half a blizzard, snow and rain on a gale of N E wind. New York looking vile.’
He is greeted by Thomas Seltzer, the publisher who had been ignoring his letters, only to discover his business ‘has gone very badly’ and he’s suffered ‘sleepless nights.[xii]’ Perhaps he should have heeded the advice of his former American agent Robert Mountsier, who warned him against Seltzer. But Lawrence fell out with him in February 1923.
To see previous video essays from 1924 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
The above video essay was the first draft for the journal ELLA which is themed ‘Literature and the Video Essay. Researching and Teaching Literature Through Moving Images.’ It explores the significance of Lawrence as a letter writer.
D.H. Lawrence was a prolific writer. During his short life he published novels, poetry, short stories, travel books, plays, translations, and a wide variety of non-fiction that ranged from literary criticism to psychoanalysis. Not bad considering his first publication was in 1911 and that he would be dead nineteen years later. It is partly due to this phenomenal output, and the broad range of subjects he addressed, that makes him so hard to define.
A series of memoirs was published in the decade after his death by close friends, which further added to his mythology. As Geoffrey Trease observed, “All those books, though they preserved a wealth of facts, were to some extent distorted by love, hatred, jealousy, resentment or revenge. It was sometimes hard to believe that they were describing the same person.” Lawrence was an enigma, leading Raymond Williams to observe “if there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war, to the point of caricature, it was Lawrence.”
But who was this Lawrence they so admired? If we pan across the decades after his death, we once more get multiple versions of the same person. The literary critic F.R. Leavis was explicit, answering this in his titular book: D.H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955). Lawrence deserved his place in the Canon, Leavis argued, because his novels The Rainbow and Women in Love provided incomparable social and cultural histories of Britain.
Kate Millett was less impressed, arguing in Sexual Politics (1969) that Lawrence’s male leads were domineering, bullying, and phallocentric and that his female characters were only happy once they had submitted to the male will.
Henry T. Moore countered this when he declared Lawrence a Priest of Love (1974) whereas Kevin Jackson, in the graphic novel series Dawn of the Unread, argued Priest of Loathe was more accurate, given Lawrence railed against the system, challenging our conceptions of family, love, work, religion, and how to live. This would lead to much of his work being banned, meaning he lived large chunks of his life in abject poverty.
Furious at the literati for daring to censor him, Lawrence left England in 1919 and embarked on a savage pilgrimage that would see him travel the globe in search of ‘rananim’ – a community of like-minded people – who would help create an alternative way of being, one free of the disruptive forces of modernity, industrialism and war. His intention was, as he described it, to ‘put a new peg in the world, a new navel, a new centre.’ But how could someone who lived his entire life on the margins, ever hope to find a centre.
This is evident in his letters, which I believe is where his true artistic value lies. He repeatedly uses biblical images, such as this description of the Cornish landscape as belonging “still to the days before Christianity, the days of Druids, or of desolate Celtic magic and conjuring.” As for the sea it is ‘incomprehensible under the black rock’ and ’not of this life’. There is ‘a strange, savage, unknown God in the foam.’
Lawrence was essentially searching for somewhere that didn’t exist, meaning he was destined to keep moving. This partly explains why he never lived in the same place for more than two years and refused to own property. He was, to quote Geoff Dyer, “nomadic to the point of frenzy.” Catherine Carswell, a close friend, suggested Lawrence “disliked an air of everlastingness about a home. For him it must have something of the tent about it”. Dyer would later observe that this created an amusing contradiction in that “while he may not have owned a house, the Lawrences’ constant moving obliged them to keep making home. It is typical of Lawrence that, on the one hand, he became more and more anxious about finding a place to settle and, on the other, achieved the ideal condition of being at home anywhere”.
I love Lawrence’s restlessness. His great skill was he never got too comfortable. To be happy, he had to be continually discontented, convincing himself he hated a place to propel himself forwards to the next destination. For example, on 2 January 1922 he wrote, ‘I am weary of Taormina, and have no desire to stay in Sicily or in Europe at all.’ In April 1922 he arrived in Ceylon and immediately ‘loathed the tropical fruits’ while acknowledging ‘I need this bitterness, apparently, to cure me of the illusion of other places.’ When he arrived in Perth, Australia, a month later, he declared, ‘I’ll see this damned world, if only to know I don’t want to see any more of it.’ And then at the end of May came full circle, feeling ‘a bitter burning nostalgia for Europe, for Sicily, for old civilisation and for real human understanding.’ This indecision and uncertainty is captured wonderfully in a letter to the poet Amy Lowell when Lawrence informs of his latest location, ‘I hesitate here.’
At one point, he was so unsettled he craved the sea: ‘I wish we were rich enough to buy a little ship. I feel like cruising the seas. I am bit tired of the solid world.’
Being in limbo, neither here nor there, was the ultimate Lawrencian state. It presented hope of what was to come, as well as relief at what had passed. This is summed up beautifully in a letter on the RSS Osterley in 1922.
‘Being at sea is so queer – it sort of dissolves for the time being all the connections with the land, and one feels a bit like a seabird must feel. It is my opinion that once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more that tension and pressure one suffers from in England.’
Recently, I have been paying homage to Lawrence through a digital pilgrimage. I do this through a monthly video essay called Locating Lawrence which is based on his letters, published one hundred years ago to the month. It takes time delving into the archives to find relevant images, as does researching the people and places he refers to. Doing this forces me to zoom in closer and pay careful attention, to ensure my representations are accurate, which in turn develops my knowledge and understanding of Lawrence.
It is like a weird form of symmetrical time travel. But I like the pace and rhythm this has introduced into my life, knowing he will accompany me until March 2030, the centenary of his death.
Reading his letters in ‘real time’ acts as an antidote to the immediate gratification of modern life. It provides the much-needed pauses that allow an idea to settle, and sink in. But I am aware of the contradictions of travelling digitally. We move rapidly across time and space while not moving from our seat. We are constantly connected to a device that provides answers to everything, meaning, there is no longer the need to go out and experience the world for ourselves.
This would infuriate Lawrence. He argued that technology creates a barrier between people and is a move into abstraction:
‘We don’t want to look at flesh and blood people – we want to watch their shadows on a screen. We don’t want to hear their actual voices: only transmitted through a machine.’
This feels particularly prescient today given the way our entire lives are mediated through screens, as we are doing so now.
In our data-driven world, which promises a precise and immediate answer to everything, I find it comforting that Lawrence continues to defy classification. That he means new things to each new generation. He is complex, contradictory, and human, oh so human. His defining mantra, for me, appeared in a poem towards the very end of his life when he wrote:
‘As we live, we are transmitters of life. And when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.’
To see Locating Lawrence videos from 1922, click here. To see Locating Lawrence videos from 1923, click here. To see Locating Lawrence videos from 1924, click here.
One hundred years ago this month, D.H. Lawrence waved goodbye to Europe and headed off to America to pay his tax.
February provides a whistle top tour of Europe, with visits to Paris, Frieda’s family in Baden Baden and then back to the UK. ‘Am quite ready to be on the move again[i]’ he informs S.S. Koteliansky.
‘Paris has been quite entertaining for the two weeks: good food and wine, and everything very cheap.’ But he is ‘about ready to go.[ii]’
Lawrence is remarkably upbeat and reasons, ‘what’s the good of gloom, anyhow![iii]’ echoing his previous declaration to Mabel Dodge Luhan that ‘the last days of life are for living, not for knowing or insisting.[iv]’
One thing determining Lawrence’s travel plans is an income tax bill that must be paid in New York in March. Having not heard from his publisher Thomas Seltzer in six weeks he becomes increasingly agitated. Seltzer is a ‘dog,[v]’ ‘hateful[vi]’ and someone who makes him ‘anxious.[vii]’
He doubts whether John Middleton Murry really wants to follow him to Taos and warns ‘a man like you, if he does anything in the name of or for the sake of (…) somebody else, is bound to turn like a crazy snake and bite himself and everybody, on account of it.[viii]’ In a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan a few days later he confesses he hopes Murry won’t come and that he doesn’t ‘trust him very well.[ix]’
You sense that he might be regretting his planned rematch with Mabel Dodge Luhan when she begins bombarding him with her latest theories regarding extroverts and introverts which she had gleaned from conversations with the anthropologist Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950). He dismisses her ‘long letter’ and purist ‘classifications’ and instead offers up some domestic advice, ‘wash just a few windows and dishes, till you can do it rhythmically and with grace. It’s good for you’ and to abstain the vice of ‘knowing’ because ‘there’s no end to it, like a bottomless pit: which swallows every human relation.[x]’
For Lawrence, the obsession with mental consciousness leads to imbalance which is a ‘sin’ and ‘unpardonable.[xi]’ But he puts up with her eccentricities, presumably, because he craves the pioneer life once more. ‘I would be very glad to be cutting down a tree and sawing it up, or cutting the ice in the stream.’
During his stay in Germany, he notes there is ‘terrible poverty[xii]’ and that Germany is ‘beginning to get her back up.[xiii]’ We all know how that turned out.
He returns to France but finds little comfort at Versailles. ‘It is stupid (…) much too large for the landscape. No, such a greatness – or size – is only like the puffed up, self puffed up frog, who wants to make himself larger than nature, and naturally he goes pop.[xiv]’
But the discontent, as always, has a purpose. It propels him to move on. Next stop is the Aquitania to New York.
To see previous video essays from 1924 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
References
[i] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 5 Feb 1924 (L3034) [ii] Letter to Dorothy Brett, 4 Feb 1924 (L3030) [iii] Letter to Dorothy Brett, 4 Feb 1924 (L3030) [iv] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 22 Jan 1924 (L3006) [v] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 12 Feb 1924 (L3050) [vi] Letter to Catherine Carswell, 12 Feb 1924 (L3051) [vii] Letter to John Middleton Murry, 13 Feb 1924 (L3053) [viii] Letter to John Middleton Murry, 7 Feb 1924 (L3040) [ix] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 9 Feb 1924 (L3045) [x] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 9 Feb 1924 (L3045) [xi] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 10 Feb 1924 (L3047) [xii] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 9 Feb 1924 (L3042) [xiii] Letter to Frederick Carter, 9 Feb 1924 (L3044) [xiv] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 23 Feb 1924 (L3070)
In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters.After a brief stint in England he heads to Paris. But the weather is rubbish…
On the 1 January 1924 Lawrence is in his hometown of Nottingham and planning a trip to Pontesbury to meet Frederick Carter. ‘Don’t bother meeting me’ he nonchalantly advises ‘unless you have something else to go to Shrewsbury for,’ and if he does meet him, ‘you will know me by my red beard.[i]’ This will result in Carter’s essay, ‘The Ancient Science of Astrology,’ being published in the April issue of The Adelphi.
Not for the first time in his life, one of Lawrence’s books – this time, Kangaroo – is dismissed as ‘a book no one should read[ii]’ but this is counterbalanced by a review in The TLS that there has ‘never been more of an artist in vision and word.[iii]’
No matter what our feelings on the content of Lawrence’s work, nobody can dispute his commitment to fellow writers, be that through reading manuscripts or equity in collaborations. He informs Mollie Skinner that he will cover ‘the preliminary expenses[iv]’ of typing out The Boy in the Bush and then splitting the royalties 50/50.
But an intermediary is required with Thomas Seltzer who he feels is ‘so frightfully busy, I can’t bear to worry you anymore.[v]’ Curtis Brown is given the task. Seltzer’s career was full of controversy, from his early editorship of the socialist monthly The Masses (1911 – 17) with its publication of radical politics to the two successive obscenity trials defending publication of Women in Love. Quite rightly, then, Lawrence reassures Seltzer that Curtis Brown will ‘comply’ with his demands.
England is as disappointing as he had imagined. ‘Still disliking it here[vi]’ he informs Willard Johnson who had sent him a copy of the December 1923 issue of The Laughing Horse which included Lawrence’s essay ‘Au Revoir, U.S.A.’ – another place he disliked but was planning to return to.
This time, strict rules of engagement are negotiated with Mabel Dodge Luhan to ensure there is no repeat of the ‘vileness of 1923.’ ‘You must learn not to care, not to think, and simply to laugh (…) I am sure seriousness is a disease, today (…) One has to put a new ripple in the ether.[vii]’ The plan is to bring John Middleton Murry and Dorothy Brett with him, though only the latter would make the trip across the pond.
He arrives in Paris towards the end of the month and writes a series of unconvincing letters on the 24th claiming that ‘Paris really is nicer than London[viii]’ then that it is ‘better[ix]’ and a day later it is ‘very like London. There really isn’t much point coming here. It’s the same thing with a small difference,’ he acknowledges that it ‘has great beauty’ but is ‘like a museum.[x]’
The reason for his discontent is the weather. ‘We had one sunny day,’ he laments ‘now it’s dark like London.[xi]’
To see previous video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
References
[i] Letter to Frederick Carter, 1 Jan 1924 (L2998)
In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters.He’s just returned to Blighty and feels like a ‘caged coyote.’ Christmas is going to be fun, then…
Lawrence is living in the leafy suburb of Hampstead. He’s glad to be reunited with Frieda but feels like a ‘caged coyote[i]’. England seems ‘dead and dark[ii]’ and he feels ‘buried alive, under the yellow air and vast inertia.’ He is so unhappy he would ‘rather be in New York, and I don’t like New York either.[iii]’
He goes on to describe England as a ‘tomb’ and that it is ‘like being among the dead of ones previous existence[iv].’ Clearly the ‘Day of the Dead’ fiestas he had recently experienced in Mexico were having an impact on him.
To make matters worse, he’s ‘in bed with a bad cold[v]’ and hasn’t received correspondence from his publisher Thomas Seltzer for over six weeks. In September 1922, the case against Seltzer for publishing salacious literature had been dropped. But the dogged Judge John Ford had revived the case in July 1923 and Seltzer was released on bail pending a new trial. He had a lot on his mind. Although Lawrence is concerned, this is not altruism as he realises ‘if something has gone wrong with him or his business (…) that would dish me in another direction.[vi]’
He saves all of his warmth for Mabel Dodge Luhan, offering to submit a story on her behalf[vii] to The Adelphi, but was this because he had his eye on returning to Taos in Spring, and what’s more, with a guest, Dorothy Brett ‘who paints, is deaf, forty, very nice, and daughter of Viscount Esher.[viii]’
But no matter what his mood, he always has time to help people and writes to Mabel Dodge Luhan and Witter Bynner to see if they could put up Curtis Brown’s son who has ‘lung trouble[ix].’
He would later acknowledge to Robert Mountsier that the reason ‘there seems to be a deadness everywhere, in the people, in everything’ and that he felt like he was living ‘under a paving-stone of sky’ was ‘probably’ down to ‘the change from brightness of Mexico.[x]’
To see other video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
References
[i] Letter to Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 14 December 1923 (L2975)
[ii] Letter to Thomas Seltzer, 14 December 1923 (L2977)
Lawrence’s opening correspondence in November is very upbeat. William Hawk, his former neighbour at the Del Monte ranch, is congratulated on the birth of a son and Knud Merrild is advised to ‘get someone to insure you against yourself[i]’ after recently setting himself on fire and quitting his job. Adele Seltzer is sent a ‘native Tlaquepaue’ vase, a bargain at four pesos and he shares his amusement of the fiesta days of Todos Santos and Todos Muertos where ‘they make All Souls Day a great feast: and sell toys of skeleton men on skeleton horses, skeletons in coffins (…) skeletons of marzipan – skeleton bull-fighters fighting skeleton bulls[ii]’
The tone changes when he writes to Mabel Dodge Luhan warning her she cannot save the Indians due to her ‘salvationist but poisonous white consciousness.’ He then reminds her that in terms of their own friendship ‘your will was evil masquerading as good’. And as if oblivious to the offence caused, signs off with ‘before very long I hope to come and see you again.[iii]’ Bet she can’t wait.
He has to return to England because Frieda ‘cables me I must go there.[iv]’Although eager to see her, he begrudges it somewhat and has a right moan to his schwiegermutterr. ‘You are nice and old and understand’ that ‘today a man needs to be a hero, and more than a husband.’ It his destiny to ‘go back and forth, through the world’ and so he ‘does not ask for love from his wife.’ Instead ‘one needs strength and courage and weapons.’ He then starts ranting about ‘battle-strength, weapon-strength, fighting-strength,’ before realising ‘I don’t know if my German can be understood.’
He finishes The Boy in the Bush on the 14 November[v] and sends it to Curtis Brown the next day to be typed up. Now all that’s left to do is book his place on the Toledo Hamburg-Amerika boat which leaves Vera Cruz towards the end of the month, though he is certain ‘Mexico will feel my tread once more – unless a bolshy bullet stops me.’
Now his affairs are in order, he treats himself to a serape ‘dark brown with big white stripes and boca – eleven pesos[vi]’ and in a letter to Bessie Freeman, even manages to pay Mabel Dodge Luhan a compliment, ‘I know there is something bigger in her than in most folks.[vii]’ Indeed, Luhan later receives a stroppy and uncharacteristically defeatist confession that ‘I don’t want much to go to England – but suppose it is the next move in the battle which never ends and in which I never win.[viii]’
To see other video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
References
[i] Letter to Knud Merrild, 3 November 1923 (L2952)
[ii] Letter to Thomas Seltzer, 3 November 1923 (L2953)
[iii] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 8 November 1923 (L2954)
[iv] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 8 November 1923 (L2954)
[v] Letter to Mollie Skinner, 15 November 1923 (L2957)
[vi] Letter to Willard Johnson, 19 November 1923 (L2965)
[vii] Letter to Bessie Freeman, 19 November 1923 (L2966)
[viii] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 20 November 1923 (L2972)
In Tenderness, a novel about a novel, Alison MacLeod explores how Lawrence’s most famous work, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, has come to mean so many things to so many people since it was privately published in 1928. Flipping across time periods, Macleod explores the creation of the novel, the banning of it, and how it continued to be used as a tool of suppression right up to the infamous obscenity trial of 1960 when Allen Lane risked imprisonment for freedom of expression. It touches on the lives of Jackie O, J Edgar Hoover, and Lawrence at pivotal moments of his short life.
On January 2, 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his candidacy for the presidency of America and launched his campaign nationwide. At his side was his glamorous and highly respected wife, Jackie O. J Edgar Hoover is convinced this liberal couple are a threat to American values of decency and so begins compiling evidence against them. Meanwhile at the Old Bailey, London, a week or so before the presidential elections are announced, Penguin books stands trial for obscenity.
MacLeod deftly weaves these facts and characters together to show how one book has come to be used as a tool of suppression for various causes. There’s a bit of fudging with the chronology of events and some artistic license with regards to conversations and meetings, but these are calculated imaginative risks that remain true to the essence of the events and people described.
MacLeod imagines Jackie O in the public gallery of the GPO in 1959, listening into the trial of Lawrence’s novel. There is no record of who was in attendance, but as Jackie O was a vociferous reader, it is likely she would have been very interested in the outcome. We are given insight into her fascination with literature through meetings with the esteemed literary critic Lionel Trilling, who, in real life, was a regular guest at The White House. Jackie O asks Trilling, “How can we as people come to love variousness and difficulty—in the way we do in literature and stories and poetry—when we are in love with modern conveniences” which mirrors sentiments espoused by Lawrence earlier in the novel when he says: “People now had more and more—bigger houses, proud water closets, stuffed furniture, new motor-cars—but they no longer knew how to feel alive in their lives.”
J Edgar Hoover was obsessed with the trial and was convinced the book would remain banned. He believes associating Jackie O with Lawrence will prove her immorality to the American public. We know from history that Hoover – who served under eight presidents – will stop at nothing in his quest for victory. His tactics include intimidation, blackmail, and illegal surveillance. MacLeod insinuates that Hoover’s moral crusades against perceived vice may have been due to a repressed homosexuality which adds another layer of complexity to the novel and the motivations of those affected by it.
Reading this in 2023 is uncanny. Hoover’s crusade against liberal democratic values lives on in the populist tirades of Donald Trump and the banning of books from schools in America that are deemed to promote sexual and gender pluralities. Last year there were requests to ban 2,571 books in libraries across America. It is a curt reminder that we need to be more tender than ever towards people who are different to us and avoid moral purity at all costs.
MacLeod interjects various aspects of Lawrence’s life into the novel, most admirable of which involves a key witness in the Lady C trial who shows tenderness by standing up for Lawrence despite being betrayed by him when he represented a deceased family member of theirs in a short story published in England, my Englandand Other Stories (1922). There’s also compelling evidence as to the true inspiration for Lady C.
But most impressive of all are the scenes from the 1960 trial. MacLeod plonks the reader right in the centre of the court to bear witness to the outrageous bias of the judge which left me momentarily doubting the evidence, despite knowing the outcome.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was accused of many things. Yet this perhaps tells us more about the prejudices of the reader than the author. Lawrence described the novel as being a bomb, hoping it would explode and create something new, something better than the mechanical modernity that was slowly dehumanising man. The novel was so important to him, that he wrote three versions. The middle version, Tenderness, was a tentative title suggested in a letter to Dorothy Brett, the artist who would relinquish her status as daughter of Viscount Esher and follow Lawrence to New Mexico in 1924 in search of Rananim.
In Lady C, Lawrence was attempting something far more radical than pornography. He was putting forth a philosophy of how to live against the backdrop of an illegitimate relationship that cut across the classes. Tenderness to Lawrence was about emerging from vulnerability and difficult experiences to forge a new existence. To some extent this was a continuation of sentiments raised in Look! We have come through! (1917) a kind of manifesto for enduring the good and bad times in a relationship knowing it will eventually ‘transcend into some kind of blessedness.[i]’
The Penguin trial ushered in the permissive society and greater sexual freedom. But this did not mean ‘blessedness’ for everyone. J.F. Kennedy would be murdered in 1963, a few years after his election victory. The only way to deal with people who are too alive, it would seem, is to kill them. Penguin may have won the Obscenity Trial, but Lawrence’s battle still goes on.
[i] D.H. Lawrence. Look! We have come through! 1917.
In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. It’s October 1923, and he’s heading down the West Coast of Mexico on a mule and stagecoach...
When Lawrence trundles down the West Coast into Navojoa, Mexixo, he resorts to familiar tropes that capture his intrigue. There are ‘lonely inhuman green hills’ it is ‘not quite of this earth’ and it has had ‘the door of life shut on it[i]’. If he’d described it as ‘pre-history’ we would have had a full house of signifiers that represent his desire not merely to travel but to travel back through time.
But there is great humour too, such as this wonderful description of Alamos: ‘A once lovely little town, lost, and slipping down the gulf in the mountains, forty miles up the awfullest road I’ve ever been bruised along. But somehow or other, you get there. And more wonderful, you get out again.[ii]’
There are two reasons for his discontent, though he may not be aware of it. Firstly, Frieda is not with him, and he doesn’t know where she is. His loneliness is compounded by going three weeks with ‘no letters[iii]’ since leaving Los Angeles. Secondly, as his companion Kai Gótzsche later observed, he is without purpose: ‘He needs, in a high degree, something else to think about, and something else to do besides his writings. I am absolutely sure that he would (…) live more happily if he could go out for a few hours a day, and have some work to do, milk a cow or plough a field.[iv]’
Although Mexico is occasionally ‘like living on Mars[v]’ he does find time to relax at Minas Nuevas where ‘we did nothing but drink beer and whisky cocktails.[vi]’ But this is no Grand Tour, more like an endurance contest as ‘there is no railroad in Tepic, so we shall have to go by stage and a day on mules, across the barranca, if we are to get to Guadalajara.[vii]’ They certainly won’t be as fast as the cockroaches in the dilapidated ‘half-built buildings’ who are ‘running on the floor full speed.[viii]’
When he arrives in Jalisco ‘it has a definite fascination[ix]’ for him and he begins selling Rananim to his friends. Earl Brewster is told ‘I should be happy if I could have a little ranch, and you and Achsah and the child a house two fields away[x]’ and Catherine Carswell may like his plans for ‘a little centre – a ranch – where we could have our little adobe houses and make a life.[xi]’
He even makes up with Mabel Dodge Luhan: ‘Yes, I was pretty angry. But now let us forget it.’ He even gives her a compliment for teaching him how to ride a horse which has recently come in handy. Then he offers her some advice on how to ‘let life slowly drift into you.[xii]’
When reviews are unfavourable, he tells his publisher Thomas Seltzer, ‘I’d much rather be printed in Vanity Fair than in these old high-brow weak-gutted Nations’ and thus his love affair with America begins to wane: ‘I don’t mind if America doesn’t like me, because I feel great disgust for America.[xiii]’ There is only one thing for it. ‘I suppose I shall go back to England. They all press me so hard. But I shan’t hurry.[xiv]’
However, this journeying across the globe has had an impact on his world view and in places he seems to echo sentiments we now associate with decolonising the canon. ‘Sometimes I am driven to hating the white-white world, with its whiteness like a leprosy. Murry declares England will again lead the world. But I myself know that England alone cannot. She must be juxtaposed with something that is in the dark volcanic blood of these people. One thing alone won’t work: nor one spirit alone. It needs a polarity of two.[xv]’
To see other video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
References
[i] Letter to Witter Bynner, 5 October 1923 (L2926)
[ii] Letter to Witter Bynner, 5 October 1923 (L2926)
[iii] Letter to Margaret King, 10 October 1923 (L2934)
[iv] Merrild, Knud. 1938. A Poet and Two Painters: A Memoir of D.H. Lawrence. (George Routledge & Sons, London). P.341.Taken from letter from Kai Gótzsche to Merrild, 10 Nov 1923.
[v] Letter to Knud Merrild, 5 October 1923 (L2928)
[vi] Letter to Knud Merrild, 5 October 1923 (L2928)
[vii] Letter to Adele Seltzer, 9 October 1923 (L2933)
[viii] Letter to Adele Seltzer, 9 October 1923 (L2933)
[ix] Letter to Earl Brewster, 17 October 1923 (L2937)
[x] Letter to Earl Brewster, 17 October 1923 (L2937)
[xi] Letter to Catherine Carswell, 17 October 1923 (L2938)
[xii] Letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, 17 October 1923 (L2939)
[xiii] Letter to Thomas Seltzer, 20 October 1923 (L2943)
[xiv] Letter to Adele Seltzer, 28 October 1923 (L2948)
[xv] Letter to Adele Seltzer, 28 October 1923 (L2948)
Lawrence is never happier than when in the middle of the sea, between journeys, with the excitement and expectation of what lies ahead fuelling his enthusiasm.
Out on the sea, Lawrence has time to inform friends of ‘our great plunge![i]’ A little exaggeration is required, though, to convince him he’s made the right decision. Taormina, he informs Norman Douglas, ‘would have been the death of me after a little while longer[ii].’
Lawrence loves the liminal state of the sea, observing that ‘time passes like a sleep’ creating ‘the curious sense that nothing is real except just this ship[iii]’ This is because they are travelling along the 88 miles of the Suez Canal at five miles an hour. He occasionally spots black porpoises ‘that run about like frolicsome little black pigs[iv]’ which is a more pleasing image than the one reserved for Mount Sinai which is ‘like a vengeful dagger that was dipped in blood many years ago.[v]’
He stops off for a few hours in Port Said and observes it’s ‘still just like Arabian Nights, with water-sellers and scribes in the streets, and Koran readers and a yelling crowd[vi].’ His description of female Muslims in veils as ‘black women parcels’ would offend modern sensibilities, so take some comfort in that ‘one of the women drew back her veils and spat at us’ which he believes is because ‘we were hateful Christians.[vii]’
He remains optimistic ‘that once beyond the Red Sea one does not feel any more the tension and pressure one feels in England.[viii]’ But when he arrives in Kandy on 13 March, it is so hot that ‘if one moves one sweats.[ix]’ This leads him to worry ‘I don’t believe I shall ever work here[x]’ and before you know it, the familiar doubt kicks in: ‘I do think, still more now I am out here, that we make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life (…) I really think that the most living clue of life is in us Englishmen in England.[xi]’
To see other video essays from 1922 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
References
[i] Letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 28 Feb 1922 (L2467)
[ii] Letter to Norman Douglas, 4 March 1922 (L2468)
[iii] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 7 March 1922 (L2469)
[iv] Letter Baroness Anna von Richthofen, 7 March (L2470)
[v] Letter to S.S. Koteliansky, 7 March 1922 (L2469)
On the 2 February James Joyce published his modernist masterpiece Ulysses. Meanwhile, Lawrence was preparing to set sail on the R.M.S Osterley for his slow detour to America.
After negotiating a 20% commission for signing copies of Women in Love[i], Lawrence realises his other books could be earning him a bit more and suggests a similar rate after the first 2000 copies of Sea and Sardinia ‘or at least after the first 3000.[ii]’
He reads the poems of Jean Starr Untermeyer (1886-1970) ‘most of them aloud to my wife.[iii]’ He seems impressed, suggesting ‘the greatest achievement is when pure speech goes straight into poetry, without having to put on Sunday clothes.[iv]’ These were both published by Benjamin W. Huebsch (1876 –1964) who was also the first American publisher of Sons and Lovers and James Joyce’s Dubliners.
Lawrence gets very excited about the arrival of a fountain pen from Mary Cannon, a ‘wildly expensive gift’ which he hopes will ‘stay with me all my life, and seal all my affairs of state and solemnity.[v]’
It will come in handy as he’s on the move again, departing from Naples on 26 Feb via the RMS Osterley. Although leaving ‘our home and the people of Sicily[vi]’ gives him ‘a sinking feeling[vii]’ he must ‘forget it’ and instead ‘only think of palms and elephants and apes and peacocks.[viii]’
He begins packing up stuff at Fontana Vecchia and getting his affairs in order. Curtis Brown is sent the manuscript of Studies in Classical American Literature and asked to confirm copyright law between England and America, given the recent passing of Giovanni Verga, the Sicilian author Lawrence is currently translating.[ix]
The Lawrence’s were relatively light travellers; their worldly possessions consisting of ‘four trunks, one household trunk, one book trunk, Frieda’s and mine – and then two valises, hat-box, and the two quite small pieces: just like Abraham faring forth into a new land.[x]’
The Osterley is ‘so comfortable’ and ‘quite perfect’ because ‘the people are so quiet and simple and nobody shows off.[xi]’ And then he gives a detailed breakdown of why: ‘Mornings, 7 o’clock, the steward comes with a cup of tea and inquires whether one wants to take his bath (…) At 8 o’clock breakfast is sounded: and such a menu: stewed pears, porridge, fish, bacon, eggs, fried sausages, beefsteak, kidneys, marmalade (…) eleven o’clock the steward comes with a cup of Bovril[xii]’ and on and on he goes. Not showing off at all.
Still, the food does sound more appetising than the ‘thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards,’ and ‘the inner organs of beasts and fowls[xiii]’ that Leopard Bloom ate with relish in James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, published on the 2 Feb 1922 by Sylvia Beach. Together, but in very different ways, the two writers would define modernist literature.
To see other video essays from 1922 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 