Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
Katharine Susannah Prichard/ nee Throssell (1883 –1969) was a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia and a key figure in Australian literary history although Lawrence was not aware of the three novels she’d had published when they corresponded on 3 July 1922. Lawrence was living in self imposed exile after he and his German wife experienced harassment in Cornwall during WWI – all of which provided material for the Nightmare chapter of his Australian novel, Kangaroo. Prichard would also experience persecution due to her political beliefs, with official surveillance files opened in 1919 and not closed until her death in 1969.
Prichard’s debut novel The Pioneers (1915) won the Hodder & Stoughton ‘All Empire Literature Prize’ for Australasia and is now part of the canon of Australian literature. It’s a 19th-century family saga following the lives, loves and losses of one pioneering family and two escaped convicts as they take possession of some land in Victoria, Australia. Like Lawrence’s earlier novels, its value is as a form of social history. In the forward to the 1963 edition, Pritchard writes: “Notes for The Pioneers were made in 1903 when I was twenty and living in South Gippsland. But it was not until 1913, in London, that I was able to take six months off earning my living as a journalist to write the story. It grew from the yarns and gossip I heard at Port Albert, Yarram, Taraville, and my wanderings in the lovely ranges beyond them. The Wirree river referred to may be recognised as the Tara, which was an escape route for convicts from Van Dieman’s Land [Tasmania] in the early days.”
Pritchard provided Lawrence with a set of novels, poems and plays during his brief sojourn in Australia which included the likes of Louis Esson (1879 – 1943) and Furnley Maurice (1881 – 1942) but Lawrence was unimpressed, complaining ‘they all make me feel desperately miserable’. But he was happy to accept a copy of The Black Opal which accompanied him on the Tahiti which set sail on 10 August 1922.
The Black Opal – the first of Prichard’s mining novels – is set in Fallen Star Ridge, a fictitious location in New South Wales and features the trials and tribulations of a mining community whose fortunes are dictated by how much opal they uncover. The promise of financial reward can lead to obsessive behaviour which has varying negative effects on individuals, and by implication, the community, all of which would have resonated with Lawrence given his Eastwood roots.
“Ridge miners find happiness in the sense of being free men. They are satisfied in their own minds that it is not good for a man to work all day at any mechanical toil; to use himself, or allow anyone else to use him, like a working bullock. A man must have to time to think, leisure to enjoy being alive, they say.”
The novel begins and ends with a funeral and features two main protagonists, Sophie Rouminof and Michael Brady.
“It was natural enough that Michael should have taken charge of Sophie Rouminof, and that he should have made all the arrangements for Mrs Rouminof’s funeral. If it had been left to Paul to bury his wife, people agreed, she would not have been buried at all; or, at least, not until the community insisted. And Michael would have done as much for any shiftless man. He was next-of-kin to all lonely and helpless men and women on the Ridge, Michael Brady.”
Michael Brady is an elder who is respected for his knowledge and ethics. Sophie Rouminof is a teenager who flees to America after being disappointed in love. Lawrence was on his way to America when he read the book, though he was not fleeing love. He was fleeing, among other things, his own race whose idea of progress had led to consumerism, industrialism and war: ‘I do hope I shall get from your Indians something that this wearily external white world can’t give’ he wrote to Mabel Dodge Sterne on 3 June 1922.
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
What role does D.H. Lawrence play in the life of a literary translator in Alison Moore’s novel about loss, memory and ghosts…
Following a family tragedy, Jessie Noon moved from the Fens to the Midlands and currently lives on the Scottish Borders with a cat, dog and – so she believes – a ghost. To compel matters, she hasn’t seen her son for years and is receiving mysterious messages stating, ‘I’m on my way home’. Perhaps her fortunes will change when she strikes up a relationship with Robert, a local outreach worker.
As a literary translator, Jessie is in a position of responsibility, consumed with finding the right words to ensure clear communication. She understands how structures and syntax create meaning. But her own life is harder to categorise and define – particularly when seemingly solid structures around her begin to disintegrate and crack. We learn that a child has gone missing, a boy is in a coma, and then there’s the unborn baby…
There are both implicit and explicit references to D.H. Lawrence in this short novel. Moore gives a nod to Lawrence when she used the line, ‘the wind muttered at the window and the trees shook off the last of their leaves’ which is taken from Lawrence’s poem ‘At the Window’. The most obvious reference, though, is having the main protagonist Jesse reading her third biography of Lawrence, despite knowing she will have to endure him die all over again. She informs us that Lawrence is always ‘poised between worlds’ – new and old, rural v industry and that characters from his books are always ‘torn between staying and leaving, torn between this world, this life, and another.’
Jesse Noon is also caught between places and stuck in a kind of emotional limbo given her personal circumstances. The novel is full of transient descriptions such as childhood memories of ‘crossing the invisible border between France and Germany’ and how writers are hidden behind agents and editors. We later discover that her husband Will, who walked out on her a year ago, left a goodbye message written in steam on the bathroom mirror, that would eventually disappear, like him. This is very different to a handwritten note which would give solidity to the facts and allow her to ponder the words. A recurring theme in Moore’s novel is being present yet absent.
Moore uses the biography of Lawrence as a narrative device to mirror events in Jesse Noon’s life. For example, when her husband leaves her, it’s at the point she’s reading about Lawrence eloping with Frieda. When she later has an affair with Robert she observes, ‘He had no curtains, just wooden blinds. He had no cushions. She supposed that the hard, bare surfaces were easier to keep clean’. She feels guilty because she has left her dog on its own and it needs feeding and so returns home. Later she reads her Lawrence biography: ‘She read a chapter, in which Lawrence mistreated a dog, and Jessie loved the book for its kindness, for how it tried to understand and forgive Lawrence for his flaws’.
There are implicit references to Lawrence as well. Moore is a writer of meticulous detail, much of which simmers below the surface, and so I don’t believe these are coincidental. She is too good a writer to leave anything to chance. Let’s start with Noon, the surname of the main protagonist. Is this a nod to Mr Noon, Lawrence’s unfinished novel published posthumously and if so, how does this add extra layers of meaning? Firstly, choosing to refer to an ‘unfinished’ novel fits with the uncanny and unresolved issues raised in Missing. Secondly, there are ethical questions around publishing ‘unfinished’ work. Finally, there is the issue of critics interpreting this work and imposing their own meaning on to it. Lawrence biographer Benda Maddox argues Mr Noon is a ‘factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations’. All of these ambiguities reinforce various themes raised in Moore’s novel, which is why I believe the title is a deliberate nod to Lawrence’s 1934 novel.
Jesse Noon is a translator, as was Lawrence. Lawrence had a superb command of language. He could speak German, French, Spanish and Italian and translated the works of Giovanni Verga. He even attempted Russian but found it too difficult and so had to collaborate with S.S. Koteliansky. Moore has made her main protagonist a translator not to echo Lawrence’s life but because of what the profession implies. Translation involves interpretation and communication (and miscommunication).
We learn that Jessie has three versions of The Outsider, each with a different translation of the opening line. Even something as solid and tangible as a book has a degree of uncertainty about it. Likewise, Ulysses was meddled with years after James Joyce’s death. There are multiple versions of books. Nothing is ever final. This allows Moore to make the sinister observation that ‘she would once have said death, death was final, but she was no longer sure about that’.
The opening to Missing sees Jesse attend a Halloween party dressed as someone who had died of TB – the disease that eventually took Lawrence’s life in 1930. It is such an odd choice of fancy dress, particularly given that TB is no longer the threat it once was, is this another intertextual reference?
Jessie grew up in the suburbs and longed to live in either the centre of London or on a farm, some kind of extreme, but she finds herself living in neither, still somewhere between. Lawrence lived a nomadic life and always seemed happiest when he was in a boat, neither here nor there, enjoying liminal space on his way to the next adventure.
Moore is clearly either a fan of Lawrence or knowledgeable about him as he is also mentioned in her 2016 novel He Wants. She is a nuanced author who ensures every sentence counts and so the implicit references, no matter how tangential, are worth considering. Readers are the ultimate interpreters – we bring our own history to the text and this, to some degree, informs how we perceive those squiggly patterns of ink on a page. The author provides structures and signposts to push us in a very particular direction so that we don’t get lost in ourselves.
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
Tim Hannigan is a travel writer in search of a genre. His journey takes him to various places across Europe where he interviews a broad range of travel writers who he hopes will help him define what exactly is travel writing. On the surface, this might seem pretty obvious – you head off somewhere and pen a picture for the reader. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. What about the writers who conveniently muddle up conversations to pepper up their journey? Why are so many of these books authored by white middle class Etonians? And why are the voices of locals or the ‘travellees’ either caricatured or completely missing from the narrative?
Hannigan’s is a principled journey that values both people and place. He is keen to make a distinction between fiction and nonfiction and wonders how and why this line gets blurred so often. He approaches this question as both a travel writer and academic – the book is based on his PhD. To help him, he visits the likes of Dervla Murphy (she of bicycle fame) as well as digging deep into the archives of deceased writers such as Wilfred Thesiger where he observes, “In Arabia and beyond, his preferred society seems always to have been a small group of young men and boys, possessed of some elite and initiated status, perfectly isolated from the great plurality of town and village.”
So, what has this got to do with D.H. Lawrence? Lawrence wrote four ‘travel’ books; Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927) with Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932) published posthumously. However, Lawrence only gets two mentions in Hannigan’s book, the most significant of which appears on pages 178-9 when Hannigan invites a group of readers to reflect on travel books they’ve read – this is important to Hannigan as he believes readers have been left out of debates about what constitutes travel writing.
One reader, Adam, cites Sea and Sardinia as appealing because ‘a lot of books that were written at the time were by wealthy people going on a European tour, and they didn’t bother about how much it cost’ whereas Lawrence is meticulous in his quotidian observations, detailing the costs of everything. Adam also found value in the book as a form of social history and found ‘out loads about unemployment, about politics, about what’s going on with jobs and people’. He would later revisit Sardinia with Lawrence’s book as a guide although Hannigan is cautious of ‘falling back on a text’.
Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia after a brief excursion to Sardinia in January 1921. There are clear issues with claiming to know a nation after spending just over a week in the country. Likewise, although Lawrence does give voice to the locals and includes them in the narrative – as Adam alludes to – they are never given equal weighting. They are observed and recorded rather than invited into the narrative.
One writer who does this very well is Samanth Subramanian who approaches his craft from a journalistic perspective. ‘Journalists’ he explains ‘talk to people about their lives and about their problems and about their views on the world’ thereby ensuring the travellee has a voice. Indeed, he illustrates this when he is challenged by a local in Sri Lanka who asks, ‘What good will this conversation do for me?’ Reversing this power balance is one way in which the genre can escape the exotic gaze and accusations of Orientalism.
Hannigan is from Cornwall and so has experienced many people representing his home in literature and film. He is currently working on a book about this called The Granite Kingdom – so expect Lawrence to be taken down a peg or two given his observations that Cornwall ‘belongs still to the days before Christianity, the days of Druids, or of desolate Celtic magic and conjuring’.
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
In Outline, Rachel Cusk sketches the life of a divorced creative writing tutor via her conversations with students and strangers. But what happens when D.H. Lawrence is mentioned in chapter nine….
Outline is the first in Rachel Cusk’s autofictional trilogy that feature the largely hidden narrator, Faye, who meets people and then listens to them. Her seemingly innocuous interactions with strangers – who speak volubly about their own fears, fantasies and anxieties – serves to create a portrait of the narrator by contrast whereby ‘she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank’.
There are numerous reasons why Cusk has opted for a reticent narrator who ‘did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything’. Not least because it allows her to write monologues – a literary device she excels in. In Outline, a novel in ten conversations, Faye is on a plane to Athens to teach a creative writing course. We find her swimming in the Ionian Sea, out to dinner, and, of course, listening to her aspiring writers discuss the inspiration behind their work. But what will interest readers of this blog is chapter nine.
The chapter opens with students asked to write a story involving animals, but not all of them complete it after spending the previous evening Lindy Hop dancing. Christos believes intellectuals have a duty to scrutinise powerful figures and intends to do this in his story whereas Maria disagrees as ‘it sometimes did more harm than good, she said, to try to force people to recognise unpleasant truths. One had to stay close to the line of things, close but separate, like a swallow swooping over the lineaments of the landscape, describing but never landing’.
Like Lawrence, Cusk’s autofiction has got her into trouble. First editions of her second memoir, The Last Supper, were pulped – at cost to Cusk – after someone threatened to sue. The case was settled out of court and the offending passage was removed. Cusk is also a bastion of ‘unpleasant truths’ – no matter what damage her observations may cause – leading her to claim, ‘society organises itself very efficiently to punish, silence or disown truth-tellers’ – sentiments Lawrence would no doubt approve of given the level of censorship he faced, though thepeople caricatured in their novels would understandably see such fiction as an abuse of trust. Not that this bothered Lawrence much: ‘away with anyone’s feelings – they won’t recognise themselves when they read it, so why worry?’
Lawrence’s biographer, John Worthen, believes that there was another reason for ‘remaking people in a new language’ and that ‘he seems to have experienced them and their needs and feelings more fully than he had previously been able to do’ once in self-imposed exile. Writing helps makes such absences present. For Cusk, who has shared details about her own marriage and motherhood, it could be a means of coping with grief and separation. In Outline, Faye tells us she has recently moved from the countryside to London with her two children.
One of the writing students in Outline, Sylvia, teaches English literature at a school in the suburbs of Athens. We learn she’s a big fan of Lawrence – as is Cusk – and sets her students an essay on Sons and Lovers, ‘the book that has inspired me more than anything else in my life’ but when she checks her emails she discovers ‘none of them had a single word to say about it’.
Sylvia, herself, is undergoing a bit of writer’s block and is unable to start the short story she’s been assigned. To find inspiration, she turns to her bookshelf and takes down a copy of short stories by Lawrence. She confides to Faye and the rest of the writing group that ‘even though he’s dead, in a way I think he is the person I love most in all the world’ and that she fantasises about being a character in one of his novels.
Things start to get more meta when she begins to read ‘The Wintery Peacock,’ an autobiographical story where Lawrence, when out on a walk, discovers a peacock trapped in the hillside and returns it to its owner, who is waiting for her husband to return from the war. But Sylvia is unable to finish the story because ‘I felt that Lawrence was going to fail to transport me out of my own life’. Whether it is the weather or the war, she is unable to pinpoint the exact reason why the story is not working for her other than ‘it had nothing to do with me, here in my modern flat in the heat of Athens’ and that she was no longer willing to be ‘the helpless passenger of his vision’.
The writing group discuss their respective animal stories until we are returned once more to the image of a peacock, when Marielle readies herself to share a traumatic story. The effect ‘was of a peacock bestirring its stiff feathers as it prepared to move the great fan of its tail’. She explains that she bought her son a puppy, but it was run over in front of him and that ‘his character was completely ruined by that experience’. Consequently, he is ‘now a cold and calculating man, concerned only with what he can get out of life’ and she has now put her trust in cats. Nobody is a helpless passenger in this visceral extract which subtly links themes from Lawrence’s story to the present – the cold, trauma and loss, returning of an animal/bird to the owner, parental anxiety.
Cusk’s latest novel, Second Place, is a more explicit nod to Lawrence as she transports aspects of his time in New Mexico with Mabel Dodge Luhan to a guesthouse on the English coast. Outline, to some extent, is a blueprint for this Booker-longlisted novel, continuing her exploration of the function of art forms and the role of the artist.
If this article interest you then you might want to join the D.H. Lawrence Society on Wednesday 9 February 2022 at 7pm to listen to Sean Matthews’s talk “Contemporary Fiction after Lawrence: Rachel Cusk, Alison MacLeod and the Lawrentian Imperative.” dhlawrencesociety.com
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an American Jewish author who published eight novels and four collections of short stories. His writing often explores the immigrant experience – his parents fled Tsarist Russia. In 1967 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer. But it is Dubin’s Lives, his seventh novel, that will interest readers of this blog. Started in February 1973, it was completed by August 1978. Early extracts appeared in The New Yorker and Playboy.
56-year-old William Dubin is a prize-winning biographer who lives in upstate New York with his wife Kitty. He is obsessive and meticulous with each of his biographical subjects as biography offers him a way of experiencing situations denied him by his own life. ‘One writes lives he can’t live’ he explains, ‘to live forever is a human hunger.’ Through a biography of Thoreau, he has experienced the joy of nature. The later years of Mark Twain offer a ‘schmalzy misery’. While writing Short Lives he learns ‘how intensely and creatively life can be lived’ even when that life is cut short. His latest topic is D.H. Lawrence, specifically, ‘The Passion of D.H. Lawrence’. This is unfinished, suggesting he still has much to learn…
The opening epigraphs to the book give us a clue as to what his latest subject will teach him. The first is from Thoreau and warns, ‘What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?’ The second, ‘Give me continence and chastity, but not yet’ is from Augustine. This sets the tone for the various moral dilemmas Dubin will face during his research of Lawrence, ‘a complex type with tormented inner life’.
Early on we see Dubin observing his wife in the garden. He is taken by her free-spiritedness, dancing around the garden. Then she bursts into the house and asks why he hasn’t helped her; a bee has made its way into her blouse! After helping her undress, the bee escapes and then stings him. It’s a wonderful scene, not just in terms of the comedy, but the subtle nod to Lawrence who nicknamed his wife Frieda, the Queen Bee.
While researching Lawrence, Dubin encounters a pretty drop-out, the aptly named Fanny. They embark on an affair that sees them travel to Venice, but it is not the romantic interlude Dubin had envisaged and soon Fanny is enamoured with a singing gondolier. She feels let down by Dubin, confessing, ‘I wanted somebody other than a shrink to advise me about my life’.
There are parallels here with the Lawrence’s. Frieda was notoriously liberal and had numerous affairs during their marriage; they eloped abroad during the early stages of their affair and Italy would become a future home. Lawrence explored sensual connections with the world through his notion of blood consciousness, though this was not a manifesto for promiscuity. Indeed, marriage was a sacred connection for Lawrence:
“When I take a woman, then the blood-percept is supreme, my blood-knowing is overwhelming. There is a transmission, I don’t know of what, between her blood and mine, in the act of connection. So that afterwards, even if she goes away, the blood-consciousness persists between us, when the mental consciousness is suspended; and I am formed by my blood-consciousness, not by my mind or nerves at all.” (2L 470)
Dubin is aware of this and later explains to a barman – who has no choice but to listen to his drunk customer – that ‘sex to (Lawrence), you understand, despite his ideology of blood-being, was a metaphor for a flowing life’.
Various themes from Lawrence’s life and works are cleverly woven into the story. Lawrence suffered from impotency towards the end of his life and when Dubin experiences this condition he wonders ‘if lying, or the habit of lying, could make a man impotent’. Whereas Lawrence refused to accept he was ever ill, Kitty is constantly convinced she has cancer. Nature is also ever present. Whereas Lawrence’s knowledge of flora and fauna was encyclopaedic, ‘Dubin, after a decade and a half in Center Campobello, could recognise and name about twenty trees, a half dozen bushes, fifteen wild flowers, a handful of birds’.
Lawrence travelled the globe in search of Rananim and never lived anywhere for more than two years. Dubin does his travelling via the page. So, what kind of impact has this choice of living had upon his perception of reality?
Kitty’s psychotherapist suggests Dubin’s research into Lawrence might be doing him in. ‘I’m no literary critic’ he declares ‘but I could never figure out why a man of your disposition and temperament would want to get so many years of his life involved with a tormented semi-narcissistic figure like D.H. Lawrence’. But there is also a hidden compliment here in that ‘what a ball-breaking strain it must be to have to identify with someone whose nature is so radically different from yours’.
Bookseller Rick Gekoski makes a similar observation in Tolkien’s Gown when he warns against meeting collectors of T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill as ‘their sense of self is fuelled by their association with a hero through whom they feel enlarged’. In Jungian terms this is known as ‘psychic inflation’.
Dubin is not after psychic inflation. Studying authors helps him view life from a different perspective, to see the good and bad in people. Lawrence may have been ‘engorged with the rage of a failed prophet’ but ‘I can’t say I’m much upset by his hatred of capitalism and outraged sense of the perversions of human life by technology’. In the end, ‘he lived in a vast consciousness of life’ and this is what attracts Dubin to biography, ‘you want to write about people who will make you strain to understand them’.
Further Reading
Halperin, Irving. The Theme of Responsibility in Bernard Malamud’s ‘The Mourners’. Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 36 (Fall), 1987. 460–465
Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. (2006)
Davis, Philip. Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. (2007)
A recent online exhibition celebrating the telephone in literature saw references from Mark Twain to Christopher Isherwoodsuggested by the public. We submitted a letter from Lawrence in 1928 concerning his fears over the publication of Lady Chatterley.
‘Hallo, hallo, hallo… I’m afraid not, we have a crossed line, please hang up… Hallo… You have a wrong number… Oh! Hallo…’ – Jean Cocteau, The Human Voice (1930)
‘From the receiver’s ‘black mouth’ in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931) to the ‘five hundred-quid worry bead’ in Will Self’s Phone (2017), telephones repeatedly ring, buzz and ping in modern and contemporary literature’ writes Sarah Jackson, in her introduction to Crossed Lines, which explores the ways that the telephone has been conceived by writers from the 19th century onwards. The exhibition was launched in November 2020 when the telephone took on added importance as one of the main ways of communicating while the government enforced a national lockdown.
Crossed Lines explores the positive and negative possibilities of the telephone within contemporary cultures and communities. Engaging writers, artists, musicians, scientists and members of the public, it incorporates a number of innovative activities including a mobile app, a sound installation in Nottingham, a nationwide student poetry competition, writing workshops and events at the Science Museum in London.
My favourite event was Calling Across Borders, a series of voicemail poems exploring community, loss, resilience, and hope. For this, young refugees left messages for friends and family they would most like to speak to again which was then turned into a short animation which you can watch by clicking this link. This had particular resonance for me as I’ve spent the last two years interviewing Syrian refuges for Whatever People Say I Am and witnessed how What’s App has become integral to families trying to stay connected, functioning as a virtual home.
Crossed Lines explores the implications of telephony from a range of global contexts, considering how literary telecommunications can help us to find new ways of talking and listening across cultures. The exhibition features eighty works spread over 130 years with submissions selected from an open callout.
The earliest example submitted is the aptly named The Telephone (1877) by the American transcendentalist poet Jones Very who can see the utopian possibilities of this new form of global communication: ‘Beneath the ocean soon man’s voice may reach/And a new power be given to human speech’. Less than a year before, Alexander Graham Bell had been awarded his patent. More recent uses include the humorous ‘fellytone’ reference in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999) to the more ominous fear of the phone as a surveillance device in Anna Burn’s Booker-winning Milkman (2018)- ‘phones weren’t trusted; indeed we only had one because it had been in the house when we moved in’.
Telephony as a form of surveillance was something Sarah Jackson uncovered at the BT Archives where she discovered two letters from Sylvia Pankhurst that revealed her concerns over ‘duplicate telephone lines’ – wiretapping – 70 years before the Government disclosed her secret surveillance by MI5 to the public.
One of my favourite entries is from Ulysses (1922) where Kinch (Stephen Dedalus) imagines the umbilicus as a telephone cord.
‘The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.’
One of the most poignant entries is the poem ‘Last Letter’ (2010) by Ted Hughes which was discovered in Hughes’s archives, twelve years after his death and includes the last lines of Hughes’s final ‘letter’ to Sylvia Plath.
I wasn’t expecting to find any kind of references to telephony in Lawrence’s writing because he was such a prolific letter writer. I just couldn’t imagine him embracing something so immediate, modern and vulgar as a telephone. But to my surprise, his letters revealed otherwise. I submitted the below entry which you can also read online. The submission format involved the relevant quote and then some brief context.
Sarah Jackson’s ‘Dial-a-Poem’ celebrates 50 years since John Giorno’s public art project launched in New York City. View the project at crossedlines.co.uk
‘My dear Enid
Now I’m in more trouble. A beastly firm of book-exporters ordered eighty copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover—now it turns out that they have a Wesleyan connection—they’ve read the book—and cancelled the order hastily—after Orioli has already posted to them seventy-two copies from Florence. Now unless we’re quick they’ll send the things back to Florence—may even refuse to accept them.—But I warn you, the book is shocking—though, course, perfectly honest and decent.
[…] If you feel like risking it, telephone the Jackson people and ask them if they have copies ready for you to fetch away: say Mr. D. H. Lawrence has asked me—[…] their telephone is Holborn 5824.’
________________________________________
This letter from D.H. Lawrence to Enid Hilton was sent on 29 July 1928 from Kesselmatter, Gstreig b. Gstaad (Bern) Switzerland. Lawrence would be dead a few years later and Lady Chatterley would be banned until 1960. Lawrence was sceptical of technology, particularly that which placed an artificial barrier between people, but here desperation overrides these sentiments. He is almost daring Enid Hilton to call William Jackson Books Ltd, but only if she follows his explicit instructions. Lawrence experienced censorship throughout his short life. This had financial and aesthetic repercussions. Therefore, the telephone has real significance. It represents immediacy, and an opportunity to salvage copies of his novel.
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
Over 20 essays, Rick Gekoski provides potted histories and interesting anecdotes of the great authors and rare books he’s encountered during his time as a bookseller. The focus of this blog is on his acquisition of Sons and Lovers, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of his personal Lawrence collection.
‘Collectors are an odd lot, both obsessional and compulsive, secretive and relentless’ writes bookseller Rick Gekoski, but be wary of those who collect T.E. Lawrence and Winston Churchill as ‘their sense of self is fuelled by their association with a hero through whom they feel enlarged’. In Jungian terms this is known as ‘psychic inflation’.
So, what kind of person collects D.H. Lawrence? Well, I’ve certainly met one or two with a messiah complex during my time at the D.H. Lawrence Society and belligerence seems to be a recurring trait too. But these aren’t traits I’d associate with Rick Gekoski, author of Tolkien’s Gown.
The book opens with a scathing attack on Dennis Wheatley, ‘thriller writer, Satanist, erotomane, and bore’. But he also has a first edition of Sons and Lovers in a dust wrapper. ‘One of the striking oddities of the trade in modern books’ he explains is ‘that the dustwrapper of the book is worth ten times – sometimes much more – than the book itself. Books without their wrappers are regarded as incomplete, which seems a little silly, as if they were Chippendale chairs, without legs.’
Lawrence would certainly frown at the commodification of his work. In the essay ‘Pictures on the Wall’ he argues that having the same picture hung on the wall for years produces a ‘staleness in the home’ which ‘is stifling and oppressive to the spirit’. As we change our taste in art changes. Just because something costs a lot of money doesn’t make it irreplaceable. Similar sentiments apply to books. In the 18th century books were expensive and became a form of property that overwhelmed ‘any sense of literary delight’. It was libraries that transformed our relationship with books as they ceased ‘to be looked on as lumps of real estate, and came to be regarded as something belonging to the mind and consciousness, a spiritual instead of a gross material property’.
Gekoski is clearly not in the trade just for ‘gross material property’, though money does help. Books are an integral part of his life, and like children who eventually leave home, he misses them when they move on. Therefore, he provides a sketch of each book he purchases, as well as providing context, analysis and nuggets of literary history.
The dust wrapper on his newly acquired purchase includes a brief notice which is believed to be by Lawrence and states:
‘Mr. D.H. Lawrence’s new novel covers a wide field: life in a colliery, on a farm, in a manufacturing centre. It is concerned with the contrasted outlook of two generations. The title, Sons and Lovers, indicates the conflicting claims of a young man’s mother and sweetheart for predominance’
Gekoski explains that Sons and Lovers is one of the earliest to ‘use psychoanalysis as an organizing principle’ as well as one of the first working class novels written by someone from the inside. In it, Lawrence plays out his inner conflict of being torn between the ‘fierce ambition’ of his mother and his first love, Jessie Chambers – who had helped his revive some of the text. The mother’s perspective would win out, much to Jessie’s disappointment. The betrayal was too much, and their friendship soured.
The unfinished novel accompanied Lawrence when he eloped with Frieda von Richthofen in 1912. He wrote to Edward Garnett with great enthusiasm, explaining that Paul Morel – it’s working title then – ‘has got form…It’s a great novel.’
Edward Garnett was also a novelist, but ‘a better editor than he was a writer’ and warned that Heinemann was nervous of publication as ‘the tyranny of libraries is such that a book far less outspoken would certainly be damned’. Lawrence’s responded with his infamous ‘Jelly-Boned Swines’ letter, of which an extract features in the video below. Lawrence’s rage, observes Gekoski, ‘makes Conrad’s Mr Kurtz seem a liberal spirit, doesn’t it?’
Frieda helped Lawrence rewrite some of the passages, something that has been raised more recently in Annabel Abbs’ Frieda and Frances Wilson’s experimental biography The Burning Man. This was an unwanted emotional burden for Frieda who complained, ‘I had to go deeply into the character of Miriam and all the others; and when he wrote his mother’s death he was ill with grief and his grief made me ill too’.
Garnet trimmed the novel down by around 10% and Lawrence complimented him on his pruning, writing, ‘I hope you’ll live a long time, and barber up my novels for me before they’re published.’
Gekoski observes that ‘the finished book is a mélange of the perfectly realized and the inappropriately generalized, like so much of Lawrence’s fiction. Lawrence is never better than when he has his eye firmly fixed on an object. But when he lifts his head to consider, and to generalize, the prose is unrelentingly dead, and false’.
Perhaps Lawrence could have done with 20% of pruning…
Another Lawrence who needed editing was T.E. Lawrence. Garnett offered to abridge his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book of such verbosity that E.M. Forster politely concluded it ‘imparts not colour but gumminess’. Verbosity was also a deterrent to some publishers due to the time it would take a typesetter to lay out a book. Author Virginia Woolf, a semi-professional printer who ran the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard, would have rejected publishing Ulysses not because of the content of the final chapter, but because she ‘estimated that it would have taken a professional typesetter two years just to set it’.
Editing out ‘gumminess’ is a vital part of publishing and entails many unsung heroes who have helped books become masterpieces. ‘Would Lord of the Flies have been so successful’ argues Gekoski ‘if editor Charles Monteith had not cut the first 12 pages describing a nuclear war and insisted deposited the boys directly on the island or the story?’
Sons and Lovers was published in 1913 by Duckworth. For Lawrence, ‘a novel was done when it went to the publishers’. But it was Garnett who requested Lawrence design the dust wrapper. These utilitarian objects were usually disposed of by bookshops on purchase and why dust wrappers before 1919 are so rare. Gekoski explains that Lawrence refused on the ground that it was difficult to illustrate a coalmine when he was living on a lakeside in Italy ‘with no coal mines within miles and miles’. Hence the typographic wrapper with Lawrence’s blurb on the front cover.
In ‘The Bad Side of Books’ Lawrence writes, ‘Books to me are incorporate things, voices in the air…What do I care for first or last editions? I have never reread one of my own published works. To me, no book has a date, no work has a binding’. In a later introduction to a bibliography of his work he wrote ‘A book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone. First editions or forty-first are only the husks of it.’
Gesoki confesses he is a man who loves the husks and laments selling his copy of Sons and Lovers in his first catalogue in 1982 for £1,850.
Rick Gekoski. 2004. Tolkien’s Gown and Other Great Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books. Constable. Hachette
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
Rick Gekoski’s Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare Peopleis an illuminating insight into his fifty years of experience buying and selling rare books.The opening chapter reveals how D.H. Lawrence kickstarted his habit…
Rick Gekoski published his first novel, Darke, at the age of 72. But he is perhaps best known for his half a century selling rare books. As the title of his memoir suggests, the treasure he seeks is scarce, carefully buried, and ferociously guarded. But is he himself a dragon, guarding rare books he’s accumulated, or a heroic slayer? It would seem the latter, because once you’ve got the treasure, you want to trade it in for more. His is a life very much focused on the journey rather than the destination.
A rare book dealer requires two basic skills: to know when a book is buyable and when to sell it for a higher price. The best way to accumulate this knowledge is to serve an apprenticeship in a bookshop. He didn’t. He entered the rare book world as an academic and a collector. Thus, he becomes frustrated at conferences when young collectors demand he pass down trade secrets. But there is no elixir. Knowledge can’t be passed down. All you can do is go slay your own dragons and see what happens.
This ethos of experience shapes his memoir. Over thirteen chapters we see him play ping pong with Salmon Rushdie, upset a Poet Laureate, and get dragged through the law courts on more than one occasion. But our interest at The Digital Pilgrimage is the opening chapter ‘On Sabbatical with D.H. Lawrence’.
It’s late 1974 and the Gekoski’s and their newborn baby are on a first-class plane to New York to see his ferocious mother who is dying of cancer. He’s taken a much-needed sabbatical and ‘wangled’ a contract with Methuen for a critical book on Lawrence. The problem is, he doesn’t have the energy for sustained academic research. What he enjoys more is collecting the first editions he’s been accumulating for the research he has no intention of finishing. It’s all very Dyeresque – something he alludes to.
Research, however, provides him with the excuse to leave his pickle-eating baby with his wife while he visits a secondhand bookseller called William Hauser. ‘Bill’ is nearing retirement and flogging off his books at bargain prices. He visits him five times and the books get cheaper on each visit. We learn that price is not just determined by the value of the object, there are other variables at play. He pays £41 for 12 books and sells most of them, over the coming years, for £333. This would make him a dealer. But as he invests this in more acquisitions, he is also a collector. The fact that he has the books shipped over to Blighty – so that his wife doesn’t find out what he’s been up to – suggests he is either a shrewd businessman or a bit deceitful.
In 1975 books were cheap but hard to find. For example, unable to procure his own copy of Warren Roberts’ Bibliography of D.H. Lawrence, he photocopies it from his university library and then annotates it with his acquisitions – who he bought from, who he sold on to. He explains that ‘unlike work on the putative critical book, which was glacially slow and unenthusiastic over these years, my collecting was focused, passionate and highly organized.’
He becomes obsessed with Lawrence, detailing all his books sold at auction. Later, he convinces his bank manager to allow his to go further into the red so that he can acquire a collection of Lawrence books from an antiques dealer in Wales that include some rarities, such as signed first editions of Lady Chatterley. The dealer insists on being paid in cash.
Allow me a quick digression. During lockdown, I went a year and a half without drawing out cash. Everything went on my card. Then I went to Yorkshire to visit some relatives. First a pizza take-away in Pateley Bridge refused to accept card and pointed to ‘machine across the road, mate’. Then the following evening, a Thai takeaway would only deliver if we had £42.32 in cash. As a sweetener, they threw in two free bottles of Singha beer and would deliver in 25 minutes.
Back to the dodgy dealer.
The dealer gives firm instructions to meet him at a train station at 12. He hangs up before checking if this is convenient. ‘He knew I was keen’ explains Gekoski ‘and may well have known that university lecturers have a lot of free time’. Of course, he can’t resist. But takes a friend along with him just in case. The meeting is fraught with danger, but it’s worth it as the dealer’s collection includes some proper treasure, such as Bay – A Book of Poems, published by The Beaumont Press in 1921 and sold in three issues: 500 copies, 50 signed copies, 25 signed copies bound in vellum.
It’s at this point, after he’s been bundled into the back of a car, that he confesses that writers, collectors, raconteurs make ‘our stories smoother, funnier, more revealing’ because it makes for a better story. He is guilty of ‘unconsciously constructing a faux narrative in which I braved dragons, confronted a dragon, returned safely from the hunt with my treasure: a hero, of a modest sort’.
Gekoski may be an unreliable narrator but he’s certainly a compelling one. I only intended to read the opening chapter to get my Lawrence fix but ended up devouring the entire book in one sitting. In doing this I’ve gone on to discover that John Fowles was anti-Semitic and that John Updike had to explain what a blowjob was to Victor Gollancz. All of which, to use an Alan Sillitoe quote, is ‘cheap gossip for retail later’. Wonderful stuff.
This book was kindly leant to me by David Belbin, Chair of Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. David is also a writer and a collector of first edition books.
Guarded by Dragons is available in HB for £18.99 from Constable at hachette.co.uk
Upside Down at the Bottom of the World was originally performed in 1980 and won David Allen the Australian Writers’ Guild Award for Best Play. Set in 1922, the play explores Lawrence’s brief time in Australia where he wrote Kangaroo. The controversial novel includes ‘The Nightmare’ chapter that details Lawrence’s experiences of living in Cornwall during World War One. The play has particular resonance for David Faulkner as he has played the part of Lawrence and is now directing the latest production at Lane Theatre, Newquay.
Tell us a little bit about yourself… When I was a kid my father introduced me to the world of theatre and film. Acting from the age of twelve the smell of the greasepaint has never left me. But like so many other aspiring actors I was persuaded to get ‘a proper job’ with greater security than treating the professional boards. Even so, I continued my theatrical course as an actor and later as a director in both amateur and semi-professional theatre.
Chichester Festival Theatre played an important role in helping develop your career, as did a relationship breakup… In Chichester I became involved with the Festival and made many helpful contacts that opened for me a number of otherwise closed doors, most importantly an agent. When my first wife and I parted company, I decided to fulfil my dream and ran away to the metaphorical circus so to speak.
David Faulkner. Photograph Carolyn Oakley
Frieda once said that what she loved most about Lawrence was his saying ‘yes’ to life, known as ‘Bejahung’ in German. You’ve taken some risks that have helped share your career… One day, while on the London tube, I happened to see an advert in Time Out which read, ‘English Speaking Actors wanted for the Cafe Theatre Frankfurt’. Rather than send my CV, photograph and covering letter, I bought a £17.50 Magic Bus Ticket, packed an overnight bag and the next thing I knew I was in Frankfurt looking for The Cafe Theatre. Probably due to bare faced cheek rather than my chosen audition pieces I was offered the job. Eighteen months later I was still working at the Cafe theatre as both an actor and director, doing three monthly rep.
It was here that you first encountered Davis Allen’s play… Whilst there I saw Upside Down at the Bottom of the World performed by ESTA (English Speaking Theatre of Amsterdam) and when they needed a replacement for the role of Lawrence, due to illness of the previous actor playing the role, I was fortunately their first choice. As director, I had just previewed Samuel Becket’s Happy Days, and was happy to leave the run in the capable hands of the stage manager, and made the trip to Amsterdam to take over the role of Lawrence. No time for research as I had just ten days to learn the lines and replicate the role in preparation for a continued three-month tour of Holland and Germany. I remember so little of that production but often returned to the script with the thought that one day I would revive it.
And now you’re directing the play at Lane Theatre… Now retired and living in Cornwall I run a small touring company as well as guest directing for several local community groups. In this role I have met many talented actors and when I discovered that two of these talented actors bore more than a passing resemblance to Lawrence and Frieda I decided the time was right to revive the play, this time with sufficient time to research the characters in depth and put my own spin on the text.
Lighting is very important in the play… The text specifies that there should be no elaborate sets and that the actors create the character roles with minimal costume changes and in full view of the audience. Flash back scenes to – Cornwall – Eastwood – Bavaria etc – are marked by lighting effects and projected images and pre-recorded voices. As a director this approach to staging a play has always fascinated me and the creativity of the acting/technical team allow us to take what is, after all, no more than words on a page to an exciting and thought- provoking piece of pure theatre.
You’ve introduced some fascinating extra detail, such as Lawrence knitting bloomers… Both Stuart Ellison and Jean Lenton who play Lawrence and Frieda respectively have done a great deal of homework in preparation for their roles and their research have identified aspects of the Lawrence’s relationship which is not found in the play yet together we have given a gentle nod in that direction. For example, Frieda liked wearing French knickers yet Lawrence preferred her to wear bloomers, which he often made for her. Therefore, at the beginning of the play we see Lawrence sewing a pair of bloomers which Frieda puts on in front of him. We see this sexual game playing is indeed a significant part of their relationship.
Photograph Carolyn Oakley
They had quite a turbulent relationship. Is this addressed in the play? The turbulence and violence between the Lawrence’s is a known fact, therefore, it forms an important aspect of the play. My attitude is that as it is historically true is must be approached as real as possible. Unfortunately, as we live in a nanny state, with so many subjects that are deemed too sensitive to explore, there will always be some audience members who will feel uncomfortable with certain subjects. Theatre has always been there to challenge the status quo and I like to challenge. I can’t be side tracked by what someone else might think. My job is to present the play as honestly and as truthfully as I can and if it upsets those with a sensitive bent then so be it.
Presumably your audience will be aware of Lawrence’s reputation… I am sure that the majority of people who come to see the play will be aware of Lawrence, whether in book or film, and will understand that it would be impossible to present a play about Lawrence without it dealing with sex, love and turbulent relationships.
Who else features in the play? Gary Smith plays not only Jack Calcott but also the Doctor who rejected Lawrence from active service, the Cornish policeman who gave them the order to leave the county and a German Policeman who caught Lawrence and Frieda bonking in the Bavarian woods and arrests Lawrence for spying. Rachel Bailey plays Victoria Calcott and Jessie Chambers. Rachel bears a striking resemblance to Jessie.
Do you address Lawrence’s sexual ambiguity in the play? There is no mention in the text to indicate Lawrence’s sexual ambiguity yet I have explored this aspect of Lawrence’s life in the scenes between Lawrence and Jack, during their political discussions. A look – A hand on a shoulder or knee – A long pause as they stare into each other’s eyes – directorial licence perhaps but I think it worth referencing in the play.
Cornwall had a profound effect on Lawrence, in particular the granite coastline which he wrote ‘had its own life force’. Was he on to something? There is indeed a something about Cornwall that seeps from rocks and very much felt by the blood-conscious and not necessarily by the mind-conscious. Whether Lawrence was ‘on to something’ I don’t know but Cornwall has in my experience always attracted free thinkers and aging hippies and those creative types are not necessarily adverse to expanding their minds in whatever forms take their fancy.
How important is Lawrence’s literary legacy to the South West? There is a DH Lawrence society in St Ives and Zennor and when we approached Zennor Hall with the idea of performing the play there they were very interested in everything connected with Lawrence in Cornwall and were able to give us lots of information about the couple when they lived there, and what they might have got up to. Sadly, Zennor Hall is too small for our production.
Why have you decided to stage the play now? Sometimes a play comes along that has particular relevance at a certain time. Upside Down at the Bottom of the World is one of those plays. The political turmoil of the Diggers, the right/left struggle, the influence of the Unions in conflict with the capitalists is almost a mirror to what we are experiencing here and now.
Would Lawrence have voted ‘leave’ or ‘remain’? Which way would Lawrence have voted in the referendum? Now that’s a hard one. Married to a German, he may have voted Remain. Then again having no truck with a capitalist world order, and being the son of a miner, perhaps, Leave. Now that would make a great play, haha.
Upside Down at the Bottom of the World is at Lane Theatre, Newquay, Cornwall, TR8 4PX from 14-16 March and 21 – 23 March 2019. Tickets £11 (£10 concessions)
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we get across Lawrence’s time spect in Cornwall and Australia? Is there room to show various plays that explore his life? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
Jack Gamble directs DH Lawrence’s The Daughter in Law at the Arcola Theatre. Set during the 1912 miner’s strike, the play explores conflict in the workplace and home. Ellie Nunn is electrifying as Minnie Gascoigne.
I’ve never seen The Daughter in Law performed before so it was with great eagerness that I headed to the Arcola theatre, Dalston after reading a glowing review in The Guardian that described it as ‘arguably the best account of working-class life in British drama’. Lawrence wrote eight plays during his brief lifetime, but only The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd made it to the stage where it was performed in 1916. It would shock middle class Edwardian critics with its ‘sordid picture of lower class life’.
Lawrence came from a family of coal miners. His father, Arthur, worked as a butty at Brinsley Colliery, which would take the life of his Uncle James in 1880. Industrialisation was also responsible for the destruction of the natural landscape, a theme that recurs throughout his work. Lawrence knew intimately about the world in which he was describing, enabling him to vividly and accurately capture life in mining communities from the inside.
The Daughter in Law is set during the 1912 strike when miners, along with Dockers, railway workers, and other labourers, fought for better pay. Miners pay was dictated by the market, meaning a lower wage packet when sales were low. Pit-clothes were no longer provided by the company, adding another additional cost. This had particular resonance for Lawrence as his paternal grandfather, John Lawrence, moved to Eastwood in the 1850s to be company tailor at Brinsley colliery, stocking huge rolls of flannel to clothe the workforce.
One million miners came out on strike in February 1912. They were partly vindicated with the passing of the Coal Mines Minimum Wage Act on 29 March 1912. Although it wasn’t as much as they had sought, it at least guaranteed a minimum of 6s 6d a day nationwide, although in Nottinghamshire it was slightly higher at 7s 6d.
All of these themes are drawn out in the play, which focusses on the two Gascoigne brothers, Luther (Harry Hepple) and Joe (Matthew Biddulph), Luther’s new wife, Minnie, and the domineering mother who rules over the family home. But where there should be unity, we instead see a series of conflicts. Blackleggers (workmen who refused to join the strike) infuriate the Gascoigne brothers because their selfish actions belittle the cause of other miners, echoing sentiments that would be drawn out a century later in the 1984 miner’s strike when Nottingham gained the unfortunate title of ‘Scab City’.
Lawrence frames this dispute in a way that thoughtfully balances out the perspectives of the affected characters. Minnie is frustrated because her husband is emotionally withdrawn, unable to turn to her for love and support, whereas Luther feels emasculated by his wife as she has substantial savings that could bail them out of the situation. In a fit of petulance, he threatens to draft in another housewife to do the chores so that Minnie can experience the humiliation of blacklegging in the domestic sphere. Minnie responds by blowing her entire savings on a shopping spree. It’s an act of independent defiance, but an indulgence that infuriates Luther so much that he burns some of her newly acquired possessions. As despicable as both of their actions are, it finally brings them together as they are now equal in their poverty.
Press picture from Arcola Theatre.
Minnie is the absolute star of the show, thanks to an electrifying performance by Ellie Nunn. She dominates the stage; screaming, shouting and shrieking her frustrations to spellbinding effect. Members of the audience around me jerked up in shock when she started laying into her husband, which was partly due to the intimate set design that positioned the audience closely around their candlelit front room.
One noticeable absence from the play was the father, killed previously by an accident down the pit. Therefore this is as much a play about the hardships of women, struggling on, as it is about the men. This enables Lawrence to explore the role of the matriarch. Mrs Gascoigne (Veronica Roberts) over coddles her sons, which is understandable given the loss of her husband. But in smothering her sons she inadvertently suffocates all around her. This acts as the climax to the play when Minnie confronts her mother in law with the plea “how is a woman to have a husband if all the men belong to their mothers?”
The Daughter in Law is written phonetically, capturing the harsh north Notts dialect that’s inflected by the Erewash Valley and Derbyshire. Lawrence uses dialect to convey a character’s social class, education, and intelligence. It’s notoriously difficult to pull off, something I explored recently in the BBC Radio 4 series Tongue and Talk. The cast generally did alright, especially with the hard northern Notts words (tode yer/told you) but at moments Mrs Purdy (Tessa Bell-Briggs) was slipping into Brum and Scottish. To the London audience this must have sounded very authentic, but I was wincing in places. But the rapid-fire dialogue and the intensity of the acting quickly dragged me back into the narrative.
1909 A Collier’s Friday Night First performed in 1939
1910-11 The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd First performed in 1916
1912 The Merry-go-Round First performed in 1973
1912 The Married Man First performed in 1997
1913 The Fight for Barbara First performed in 1967
1913 The Daughter in Law First performed in 1967
1918 Touch and Go First performed in 1973
1925 David First performed in 1927
Lawrence also wrote two incomplete plays Altitude (1924) and Noah’s Flood (1925)
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts. Is there a place for his plays and if so, how do we represent them? How do we explore the conflicts raised in The Daughter in Law or the inner conflicts that drove Lawrence into exile? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and submit ideas here.
Umbrellas (1917) by Dorothy Brett features Lady Ottoline Morrell and her court of followers at Garsington Manor. Can you spot D.H? This painting can be viewed at Manchester Art Gallery.
Our previous five blogs explored Lawrence’s time in New Mexico from the perspective of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Now it’s time to turn our attention to a very different memoir: Brett and Lawrence: A Friendship. The title pretty much sums up Brett’s feelings, though their friendship could have developed into something more but for acute shyness and clumsiness on both sides.
‘Friendship is as binding As the Marriage Vow – As important – as Eternal –‘
Born in1883, Dorothy Brett was the third of four siblings. Her grandfather was Queen Victoria’s Master of the Rolls as well as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals. Her French grandmother had a more challenging start to life, discovered as an abandoned baby on the battlefield at Waterloo, she was adopted by Colonel Gurwood, the personal assistant of Wellington. To complicate matters further, her great grandmother was rumoured to have been the mistress of Napoleon. On her maternal side, writes John Manchester in his prologue to Brett’s memoir, her Belgium grandfather was none other than Van de Weyer, who had helped put Leopold I on the throne, while her maternal grandmother was the daughter of a rich Boston banker. By all accounts she had a completely different social upbringing to Lawrence, yet the two would become very close friends. This is all lovingly shared in Brett’s memoir that is narrated directly to Lawrence, written two years (check) after his death.
The first time Brett met Lawrence was in 1915. They were invited to a gathering at the home of British artist Mark Gertler (1891-1939) in the Vale of Heath, London. Gertler, one of five children to Polish-Jewish immigrants, was a British painter specialising in figure subjects, portraits and still-life. From a young age it was clear that he had a unique talent for drawing but his path to success would be hampered by financial difficulties. Due to his family’s poverty, Gertler was forced to drop out of Regent Street Polytechnic in 1906 and take up employment. In 1908 he successfully applied for a scholarship from the Jewish Education Aid Society (JEAS) and enrolled at the Slade School of Art, London where he would become a contemporary of the likes of Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer. It was at Slade that he met Brett, who studied there from 1910 to 1916, introducing her to artistic and literary circles that included the Bloomsbury Group.
Brett’s description of Gertler ‘with his thick, dark, curly hair, cut like a Florentine boy, the delicate, clear-cut features, the long grey eyes, he was as beautiful as a Botticelli angel or a wild creature of some Keltic myth’ is beautifully evocative. John Manchester credits this due to her artistic background – ‘Brett writes as a painter – she sees it all before her inner eye as though it were happening right now’. Gertler would succumb to the same disease that also took the life of Katherine Mansfield and Lawrence. He would also be immortalised in fiction as the sculptor Herr Loerke in Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), Gombauld in Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) and his early life would inspire Gilbert Cannan’s novel Mendel (1916).
Mark Gertler by Mark Gertler (1891–1939) at wikimedia.
During their first encounter, Lawrence sat upright with his hands tucked under his thighs. He had an immediate impact on Brett ‘gently coaxing me out of my shyness’ as they sat around a fire in Gertler’s front room. She would have appreciated his attentiveness as her deafness was particularly problematic in crowds. In a letter to Bertrand Russell in 1918, Brett reveals her frustration at being surrounded by an arty community at Garsington Manor but being unable to join in: ‘Can you imagine what it means to see life revolving round you – see people talking and laughing, quite meaninglessly! Like looking through a shop window or a restaurant window. It is all so hideous I sometimes wonder how I can go on. I think if it were not for my painting I would end it all.’
When she discovered Lawrence was shortly off to Europe, Brett threw a party at her studio in Earl’s Court Road. It was attended by the usual suspects: Gertler, Kotiliansky, Murry, Mansfield and her friend Estelle Rice, Carrington, and Frieda. But it was ruined by a group of gate crashers and so another, more intimate gathering, was arranged two days later. In quieter surroundings they were able to play charades, with Lawrence ‘trotting round the room riding an imaginary bicycle, ringing the bell.’ She wouldn’t see him again until 1923.
In 1923 Brett had moved to Queen Anne House, Pond Street, Hampstead. The critic Middleton Murry, whose partner Katherine Mansfield had died in January, lived next door. Frieda arrived in the UK first, though she wasn’t entirely sure whether Lawrence would follow her from New Mexico. But he does, arriving six weeks later, and just in time for Christmas. He is immediately affronted by the smallness of Brett’s home, yet astonished she has a Rolls Royce parked outside. Pumped up from his savage pilgrimage across the globe, he immediately announces ‘Brett, I am not a man…I am MAN’ and immediately invites her to join him in Taormina or New Mexico. The same invitation is extended to the rest of their inner circle in the infamous dinner party that left Lawrence with a two day hangover. Only Brett would take him up on the offer.
The Fall of Adam and Eve as depicted on the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo – at wikimedia.
When Lawrence wasn’t insulting Brett about her humble dwellings, the two made flowers together out of clay and then painted them. Being creative enabled them to bond, which was far more preferable than being asked innumerable questions by people, which bored Lawrence. One evening, while Frieda sat knitting and sowing, Lawrence and Brett made a plasticine tree and an Adam and Eve. Murry contributed a snake. Lawrence took devilish pleasure in the ‘scandalised faces’ of his friends as they peered at his naked Adam ‘so with ironical glee you snip off his indecency, and then mourn for him his loss.’
Brett was immediately attracted by Lawrence’s ‘soft Midland voice’ yet notes his use of ‘thee’ and ‘tha’ – usually attributed to the Yorkshire dialect. She observes the way his mouth pulls down at one corner – ‘the ever ready, amused jeer is on your lips’. But it is his kindness that lures her to him, the way he probes ‘delicately into my life and ideas and feelings, sensitive to my sensitiveness.’ But he is less sensitive in his criticisms of her chosen profession, insisting paintings are dead and that there is no life in still lives. Knud Merrild, in his memoir A Poet and Two Painters, would recall similarly condescending conversations. Yet Lawrence, a man of wonderful contradictions, would find solace in art during his latter years, and, inevitably, his paintings would cause as much controversy as his novels. But for Brett, art had a more pragmatic function. It helped fund her trip to New Mexico.
The friends spent Christmas Day together, but only on condition that they ate goose. Lawrence had had enough of turkey. Always attentive with every task he undertook, he stuffed the goose with sage and onions, laying strips of bacon across the chest. To appease his growing homesickness for New Mexico, they take a trip to The Stand to see The Covered Wagon. During the performance Lawrence hums the song that’s the keynote to the story: ‘Oh, oh, Susanna, don’t you sigh for me, for I’m waiting here in Oregon with my banjo on my knee.’ Brett lovingly adapts these lyrics years later to ‘Oh, oh, Lorenzo, don’t you sigh for me, for I’m waiting here in Kiowa with your Timsy on my knee.’ Timsy being his cat.
When it’s time to finally leave, Lawrence is excited to be sailing on The Aquitania, as he’s never been on such a large ship before. Brett is equally excited, as she has only ever been on a Channel boat. Her servant, who knows her well, mourns Brett’s departure, rightly predicting she will never return, despite Brett’s assurance she’ll only be gone for six months. Her servant was right. Brett would only return back to England for two weeks in 1924. Once on the ship, Frieda retreats to her cabin, leaving Brett and Lawrence to excitedly wander the decks. Adventure and exploration will be a defining trait of their friendship across the Pond. As the two stand on deck watching England fade away, Lawrence remarks ‘I am always a bit sad at leaving England, and yet I am always glad to be gone.’
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts. How can we capture his love of charades? His voyage on the Aquitania? Or those small gatherings of arty folk in Hampstead? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and submit ideas here.
Programme cover for Lace Market Theatre production of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd.
Between 1911 and 1913 DH Lawrence wrote three plays that would be known as the Eastwood trilogy: A Collier’s Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law and The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd. In 2015 the three plays were combined and conflated in Ben Power’s Husbands and Sons. Although Emile Zola had previously written about coalminers in Germinal (1885) and Vincent Van Gogh moved to the Borinage in Belgium to live among the miners he painted, Lawrence was the first writer, indeed artist, to portray them from the inside.
When Lawrence grew up in Eastwood there were 10 local pits. His father would make the daily mile trek to Brinsley Colliery to help produce 500 tons of coal a day before stopping off for a skinful in the local. When he eventually returned home there would be blazing rows, with the children caught in the middle. Lawrence despised the dehumanising effects of industrialisation and the destruction of the natural landscape – all captured vividly in his early novels and plays. We may not always like the raw characters, but we understand their motivations. They are products of their environment.
Lawrence has taken some stick over the years for his views on women. Some of this has been worthy, some a bit unfair, and some down to simplistic interpretations of his work. Hopefully David Dunford’s direction of The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd goes some way to readdressing this balance. Set entirely in the domestic sphere, it highlights the awful predicament faced by women – mothers and wives – in coping with life in a rough mining community.
Mr Holroyd (Phillip Burn) is a loutish miner who spends as much time down the pub as he does down the pit. When he drunkenly stumbles home he brings misery to the tranquillity of the household, either through clattering home with floozies or mouthing off when he doesn’t get his own way. In this production he was cast as a bit of a buffoon, unable to take his shoes off when drunk, and just a bit hopeless. He threatens violence and gets in scrapes, but I didn’t find him intimidating.
Mrs Holroyd (Clare Choubey) is consoled by Blackmore (Malcolm Todd). Press picture from Lace Market Theatre.
Mrs. Holroyd (Clare Choubey) is excellent as the domestic goddess; patiently folding the ironing, looking after the children, and dreading the inevitable calamity about to unfold when her husband comes clattering through the door. But she’s not someone to feel sorry for. She can stand up for herself and gives as good as she takes. She has an interested suitor in Blackmore (Malcolm Todd), a sensitive individual who begs her to leave her no good hubby and elope to Spain with him. Being married to the wrong partner/or in the wrong relationship is a recurring theme in Lawrence’s work.
The two Holroyd children, Minnie (Georgia Feghali) and Jack (Henry Vervoorts), have a good dynamic on stage, bickering and playing. They would be more than happy to leave the misery of their home and set off on a new adventure with Blackmore. Discussions and plans are made, but escape seems unlikely. This is when the simplicity of the set design has its most powerful effect – all the characters are trapped in the front room, with the constant silhouette of the pit headstock looming over them in the distance.
Lawrence could waffle on a bit in his novels. His plays are a reminder of his sharp eye for dialogue, pitching different family members against one another. My favourite character was the Grandmother (Hazel Salisbury) whose entrance later on in the play exudes snobbery and condescension, as she fingers her daughter-in-law’s shelves for dust. She’s pragmatic, tough as nails, and stoic in how she deals with tragedy. The mother of three boys, she warns: ‘I used to thank God for my children, but they’re rods o’ trouble.’ It is only when the men are asleep or dead that the women can find any peace, or connection with each other.
Although the ending of this play is very well known and the title gives it away, I won’t go into detail. Let’s just say be careful what you wish for.
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 
