Lawrence has five horses and twelve bottles of smuggled whisky to keep him company in the Lobo Mountains.
Keeping the Lawrence’s company in the Lobo Mountains were two French bulldog pups[i] and five horses[ii] that acted like ‘devils,[iii]’ refusing to be tamed. The horses were vital to their survival, enabling Lawrence to fetch milk and butter, and on one occasion, ’12 bottles of smuggled whisky.[iv]’
Horses are a recurring theme throughout his letters in June. The Hawks family, who owned the Del Monte Ranch, ‘had three horses struck by lightning[v]’ that month. In gifting the ranch to Frieda, Mabel Dodge Luhan now had nowhere for her own horses to graze, which was a source of irritation to her husband Tony. As tensions mounted, horses become a symbol for Lawrence’s deteriorating relationship with Mabel Dodge Luhan: ‘Instead of being all wild like the horses. We’ll all chew the cud of contemplation in our little corrals, then trot out for a reunion.[vi]’
Luhan had a chair made for Lawrence. In her memoir she proudly details its creation: ‘I carved it a little and cut up a fine old blanket to upholster it, with shining brass nails. It was intended to become Lawrence’s very own chair. I fancied him always sitting in it and always writing in it…one of those dedicated pieces of furniture that would slowly become associated with him.’
She fancied it. Lawrence didn’t. He was happier writing under a tree than in a grandiose piece of furniture clearly designed with posterity in mind. He subsequently nicknamed it the Iron Maiden after the infamous torture cabinet. Then Luhan made the cardinal mistake of forcing him to dance at a social gathering. He was seething.
Lawrence was mentally exhausted after his latest excursion in Europe which was soured by memories of the war which ‘changed me forever.[vii]’ He was also physically exhausted renovating the ranch, as this letter from the 4th June indicates: ‘I’ve done one of the hardest days work in my life today – cleaning the well. All the foul mud of the Thames – and stank like hell. Now it’s excavated and built in with stone, and the pipe sunk two feet deeper – Lord, this is the week we promised ourselves rest. I’ve still got to go to the Hawks’ for milk – and it’s 7pm. Wish we had a cow.’
The renovations meant he hadn’t written for awhile and instead was enjoying the natural rhythms of evening treks through the mountains with Frieda and Brett. ‘I don’t know why,’ he confessed to his mother-in-law ‘but words and speech have become a bit boring to me. We understand so well, without saying anything (…) Here, where one is alone with trees and mountains and chipmunks and desert, one gets something out of the air: something wild and untamed, cruel and proud, beautiful and sometimes evil, that really is America.[viii]’
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] Jerome and Alfred were the pups of Bibbles, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s French bulldog who lived with the Lawrence’s in the Winter of 1923.
[ii] The horses were called Contentos, Cequa, Poppy, Azul and Bessie.
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)
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.
We are currently working on a new feature for the website which will help map out Lawrence’s travel as well as capture his initial observations on places.
I am often asked, what is creativity? And my answer is simple: creating problems and solving them. Or finding problems and solving them.
Another recurring question is, what is the point of creativity? And, again, my answer is simple: we have to fill our allotted three score years and ten doing something. Time is there to be filled and creativity adds a crackle and spark to the precarious clock hands.
Creativity leads to obsession as the desire to perfect a process becomes inevitable. This is pretty much what has happened with the Locating Lawrence feature in the Memory Theatre. These are a monthly video essay based on the letters of D.H. Lawrence, published one hundred years to the month.
Originally, I was looking for some quotes to use in the D.H. Lawrence bulletin that I edit. This then transformed into a monthly blog. Then it became a video essay on YouTube. The first Locating Lawrence started in April 1922 (published April 2022) and has been running ever since – and will do so until his death in 1930. This means I’ll be making them till 2030 whether you want them or not. It’s quite the commitment but inspired by Frank Delaney’s superb Re:Joyce podcasts which deconstruct Ulysses a sentence or paragraph per podcast!
I mention this as the official date for the start of the Memory Theatre project was 2019 – to mark the centenary since Lawrence began his self-imposed exile and embarked on his savage pilgrimage. Technically, I need to back-date the video essays till then but for now I have completed the 1922 ones. The January, February, and March videos will be published over the next month. This is important as I’ve created a playlist for each year and so they need to be filled.
The downside to this is I love reading Lawrence’s letters each month and published the video essay and blog exactly one hundred years on. Updating messes with the chronology as well as with my head.
Paul and I are now working on a map for the website that takes inspiration from the Indiana Jones films and will include the videos as well as quotes. This will eventually run in real time. My initial idea is to include polaroid type images to mark out the journey, such as the one at the top of this post, but we’ll have to see how this looks.
If you subscribe to this blog or follow our YouTube channel, please don’t think I’ve suddenly lost the plot if random years start appearing in your timeline. Think of it as a spring clean and an attempt to get things back in order, as well as an excuse to create more problems for myself with less time to solve them in…
In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. It’s August 1923 and Frieda is heading back to the UK without him, leaving Lawrence staring at the clenched fist of Liberty...
Morris Plains in New Jersey is ‘pretty,’ and ‘quite free.’ Their rented farm cottage even includes their ‘own fields – horse and buggy.’ But Lawrence, typically, is ‘not smitten with it.[i]’ While here he finds time to do a bit of schmoozing, lunching with John Macy (1877 – 1932), literary editor of The Nation. The left-leaning political weekly had reviewed The Captain’s Doll on 6 June, 1923 and would go on to review Studies in Classic American Literature in the 10 October edition – a topic which would have made for an interesting discussion given Macy had authored The Spirit of American Literature in 1913.
Frieda is set to sail from New York to Southampton on 18 August on the Orbita – Royal Mail Steam Packet Line. But without Lawrence. He explains to his Schwiegermutter ‘with the heart I should very much like to come: with feet too, and eyes. But with the soul I can’t.[ii]’ But to John Middleton Murry he is more honest: ‘F wants to see her children. And you know, wrong or not, I can’t stomach the chasing of those Weekley children[iii]’
Lawrence had been quite rude to Murry about his editorship of The Adelphi and explains that he doesn’t ‘hate’ it just because the ‘first number disappointed me’ and instead congratulates Murry for having ‘the faith to break an old faith[iv]’ by publishing C8 of Fantasia of the Unconscious. He even requests that he ‘look after F. a bit. You know what a vague creature she is.[v]’ Though some biographers have suggested Murry looked after Frieda a bit too intently…
Lawrence reads Witter Bynner’s The Beloved Stranger (1919) and encourages Catherine Carswell to ‘write a volume of criticism[vi]’ about Eleonara Duse (1858-1824) an Italian theatre actress renowned for her intense absorption of character on stage and the first woman to appear on the cover of Time magazine[vii]. He helps S.S. Koteliansky with his translation of Gorky’s Reminisces of Leonid Andreyev by ‘making the English correct – and a little more flexible[viii]’ so that it can be serialised in The Dial. Kot had started the project with Katherine Mansfield before she died on January 9th, 1923.
Frieda’s impending absence has a peculiar impact on Lawrence in that home suddenly becomes a liminal space: ‘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.[ix]’ Knud Merrild is even offered a starring role as ‘sailor’ with Lawrence ‘myself as cook[x]’.
Once Frieda has departed, a new adventure is required. But where to? ‘Now I’ve reached the Atlantic, and see Liberty clenching her fist in the harbour, I only want to go west.[xi]’
As much as he may dither or moan about where he’s at or where he’s going, Lawrence is ‘thankful’ ‘we are no longer poor, so that we can take our way across the world.[xii]’ Reading this 100 years later is particularly prescient, given one of Lawrence’s former family homes in Eastwood is being developed as a bedsit for multiple tenants[xiii]. There is no escaping poverty in 2023.
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.
D.H. Lawrence was full of contradictions, none more blatant perhaps than his disregard for the mind. Does he in fact have a point? Do we put too much importance on our intellect?Kai Northcott investigates…
“[…] if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it. Help us get rid of our bodies altogether.”[1]
This is a quote from Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel most known for its controversy, its explicitness, headlines that distract from the book’s most interesting ideas.
In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence isn’t just calling for a more open relationship with sex, he is calling for a more sensory approach to the world. This view has left him labelled by some as a ‘primitivist’, yet there is a more complex image at play.[2]
Lawrence was a peculiar contradiction as fellow author and good friend of Lawrence Aldous Huxley noted in an interview “I never understood his anti-intellectualism, more so because he was an intellectual.” [3]
This divide could well have begun with his parents, of which he wrote:
“My father hated books, hated the sight of anyone reading or writing. My mother hated the thought that any of her sons should be condemned to manual labour.”[4]
Despite his mother’s impression, it’s obvious he fought against intellectual idealism. In a letter to Bertrand Russell, who he had plans to lecture with, Lawrence professed, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.”[5] Whilst it sounds like a simple rejection of knowledge, and intellectualism, Lawrence’s works seems to point to something more.
He was afraid we were becoming disconnected from the world, ultimately disembodying ourselves. Again, in LadyChatterley’s Lover Lawrence puts it, “[…] the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.”[6] As with the first quote, he is concerned that we are to forget our bodies and consider them merely as vessels for a mind. Lawrence puts nature at the fore, likening us to trees, just parts of the landscape. Compelling as back to our roots. He perhaps see’s that our technological striving, and intellectual pursuits leave us stranded, abandoning our very origins, echoing his fears during world war one of mechanization.
Though, his problem with intellect stems from its disconnection from the everyday. In a somewhat tangential tirade in a review of Scarlett Letter, Lawrence criticised the American ideology, saying. “The cultured, highly-conscious person of today loathes any form of physical, ‘menial’ work: such as washing dishes or sweeping a floor or chopping wood.”[7][8]
It is the simple things, which Lawrence takes pleasure from. Even things which are ‘hard work’. Society is an immediate threat to these things, to itself, as Lawrence saw it. He later reconciled his views, saying “[…] man can’t live by instinct because he’s got a mind. Emotions by themselves become just a nuisance. The mind by itself becomes just a sterile thing. So, what’s to be done? You’ve got to marry the pair of them.”[9]
Lawrence’s concerns don’t seem so unfounded now, though perhaps not in the way he meant. We are stimulated at every moment intellectually; our lives are lived in phones and our thoughts are amplified around the world. Our identity is tied up with digital avatars. We often speak as if we have bodies, rather than being bodies. We reside inside them not as them. Lawrence’s work encourages us to reconnect with the physical. Whilst we might know that we are bodies, that we must move and feel, if anything civilization has done exactly as Lawrence wrote, it has sought to forget the body, to overcome it. As we look forward, it may be worth asking, what are we forgetting?
References
[1] D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Penguin, 2006) p.74
[2] Tindall, William York, ‘DH Lawrence and the Primitive’, The Sewanee Review, 45.2 (1937), pp. 198 – 211
In these monthly videos we are locating D.H. Lawrence 100 years ago via his letters. He is just about to leave Chapala and head to New Jersey to begin correcting the proofs of three books.
Great Britain doesn’t feel so great in 2023. Everyone worth their salt is on strike: Teachers, nurses, rail staff – the lot. No matter what our profession, we’re all united by our collective lack of money. If it’s any consolation, things weren’t so easy in 1923.
On 9 July, D.H. Lawrence was attempting to leave Chapala via the Gulf Coast of central eastern Mexico, but it was ‘doubtful’ if he’d be able to get out of Veracruz as it was ‘very Bolshevist there’ with a ‘strike imminent if not already on’ meaning they ‘won’t let ships leave[i]’. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
As always, he has money saving travel tips. Willard Johnson is advised that he can save three pesos by heading to the frontier town of Laredo, Texas where ‘they will vaccinate you…free of charge.’
Once jabbed, Lawrence heads onto New Orleans which he dismisses as a ‘steaming, heavy, rather dead town[ii]’ and as ‘a bit Martin Chuzzlewit[iii]’ the eponymous hero of the Dickens novel who bought land only to discover it was a swamp. As for the Mississippi, it’s ‘a vast and weary river that looks as if it had never wanted to start flowing[iv]’.
There is the usual attempt to lure Knud Merrild back to communal living, ‘if we were a few people we could make a life in Mexico[v]’. Lawrence had spent the winter of 1922 with Merrild in the Rio Grande Valley and was desperate to recreate Rananim. It was here that he was gifted a dog called Bibbles from Mabel Dodge Luhan, but the small French bulldog made the cardinal mistake of rejecting Lawrence and opting to stay in Merrild’s cabin. Lawrence never forgave her. Indeed, he dreamed about the dog on the 14 July and surmised ‘she was a false dog[vi]’.
He eventually settles in Union Hill on the Morris Plains of New Jersey in a ‘farm cottage’ rented for them by the Seltzers. It is ‘quiet’ and ‘pretty’ and ‘peaceful’ enough to allow him to focus on correcting proofs for Kangaroo, Birds Beasts and Flowers and his translation of Giovanni Verga’s Mastro-don Gestualdo.
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.
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 