We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp.
I believe the chief tie between Lawrence and me was always the wonder of living . . . every little or big thing that happened carried its glamour with it. (p.60)
D.H. Lawrence died of tuberculosis in Vence in the south of France on 2 March 1930. His wife and soul-mate Frieda Lawrence tells us that she initially meant to pay her husband the tribute of complete silence about their 18 turbulent years together. But someone obviously prevailed on her to write a memoir and this book was published in 1935.
I owe it to him and to myself to write the truth as well as I can.
Ceaseless travelling
It’s an odd, uneven, patchwork but compelling work. On the factual front, it is arranged in simple chronological order with a chapter apiece about each of the main eras of their marriage. In particular you learn a lot about the extraordinary number of places they lived in. They were tramps, hobos, perpetual itinerants. At two or three places they seem to have lived for a couple of years, maximum, but some of the chapters describe half a dozen places they moved between, and they are always moving, travelling. After the war to Florence, then Capri, then several different residences in Sicily, before they took up Mabel Luhan’s invitation to join her in Taos, New Mexico, which triggered their round the world journey by ship across the Mediterranean, to Ceylon, to Australia, where they stay at a place on the west coast, before a few days in Sydney, then moving to a cottage 50 k south. Even when they arrived in Toas they moved locations till Mabel kindly gifted them a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. But after a hard winter Lawrence took Frieda south to Mexico where, again, they never settled, staying in Mexico City, then to a place on Lake Chapara, then somewhere in Oaxaca.
Here it gets complicated because Frieda wanted to go back to Europe to see her mother, so they travelled together to New York, where she caught a ship for Europe (after a flaring argument on the quayside). After heading west to Chicago, then back to Taos, we suddenly find that Lawrence has taken ship for England, where he stays a bit in London, before heading south to France to a quiet place on the Italian border named Spotalino. They take a breather here, but only a few pages later are heading for Switzerland, then jaunts back to Germany to see her family.
What I found mind-boggling about all this is that they were poor, really poor, dirt poor, and yet could afford to up sticks and travel round the world and stay at a bewildering number of places, many if not most of which were in lovely settings. The world they moved through seems in this account to have been simpler and much, much, much cheaper than the world I grew up in fifty years later, and vastly more free and easy than the super-expensive Euro world we live in today.
Domesticity
What comes over is how, at every place they settled in, Lawrence and Frieda set about washing and cleaning and scrubbing, throwing out the awful old furniture and buying old native furniture or even making their own, painting the walls and crockery, turning every place they stayed into a home, no matter how transiently. Whether laying the pipes from a spring or carving a rocking chair, or making sure there were vases of flowers everywhere, the book is flavoured with a lovely sense of beautifying domesticity.
Arguments
Not that it was all sweetness and light. For feminist readers, or anyone looking for ammunition to attack Lawrence, Frieda gives plenty of examples of his temper tantrums, his bullying and abuse: he ridiculed her painting, mocked her in letters to her own mother, threw a glass of wine in her face at a dinner with her own family. He could be a very difficult man to live with. It’s not only ridiculous that such a weedy, frail specimen wrote so cockily about the need for men to be men, about the need for male culture and male struggle and so on – at some points it becomes creepy when he demands her submission to him.
Living intensely
But then, there are two things which redeem the situation. For all his demanding nature, Lawrence let Frieda live as no-one before or since had done. So when they kissed and made up, on the sunny days, she experienced a fullness of life, a richness in moment-to-moment living unlike anything else, wonderful incandescent.
Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being. (p.31)
Wherever Lawrence was, the surroundings came alive so intensely. (p.99)
Travelling with him was living new experiences vividly every minute. (p.101)
Living with a genius
The other thing she makes clear is that Lawrence was a genius and genius is difficult.
As for pretending to understand Lawrence or to explain him, I am neither so impertinent nor such a fool. We are so much more than we understand. Understanding is such a little part of us, there is so much in us of unexplored territory that understanding can never grasp. As Lawrence and I were adventurers by nature, we explored.
I only know that I felt the wonder of him always. Sometimes it overwhelmed me, it knocked out all my consciousness as if a flame had burnt me up. I remained in awe and wonder.
Sometimes I hated him and held him off as if he were the devil himself. At other times I took him as you take the weather. Here’s a spring day, glorious sunshine, what a joy!…
I learned that a genius contains the whole gamut of human emotions, from highest to lowest. I learned that a man must be himself, bad or good at any price.
Patchwork
I mentioned it being a bit of a patchwork. This is because it contains quite a few of Lawrence’s letters. A standard biography would consist mostly of the author’s text with selected quotations from the subject’s letters to demonstrate a point. But here Frieda gives you 6, 7, 8 pages describing the events of a particular period (their time in Cornwall during the Great War, say, or their stay in Australia) and then a block of 7, 8, 9, 10 letters from Lawrence in their entirety. There are so many letters, quoted in full, that it’s almost like reading two books, Frieda’s version of events, then Lawrence’s dashed-off letters, side by side.
And not just letters but poems, the text includes half a dozen or so poems which she associates with particular places and times. Towards the end she just includes an essay of Lawrence’s about nightingales. So it’s a sort of mosaic. Or maybe a scrapbook of memories.
Mother
If Frieda was by his side most of their lives who were these letters to? Her mother. Lawrence developed a close relationship with Frieda’s mother and wrote her long, considerate, informative and funny letters describing their latest adventures in Australia or New Mexico or Mexico. He regularly addresses her, jocularly, as die Schwiegermutter (German for mother-in-law). But there are also letters to Frieda’s older sister, Else. Most if not all of these he wrote in German and Frieda has translated.
At moments it almost feels like an edition of Lawrence’s letters with a little light commentary from Frieda. For example, the chapter called ‘Going away together’ has just 2 pages of Frieda and 21 pages of Lawrence’s letters and the ‘Back to Europe’ chapter includes an epic 70 pages of letters. But then again, other chapters are entirely Frieda with no letters at all. So it varies.
Lack of specificity about Lawrence’s writings
About Lawrence’s actual writing, Frieda is often quite vague. She mentions particular works which were written at particular places but rarely goes into any detail, about characters, plot or meaning. Here’s a typical example:
We spent some weeks at Zell-am-See with Nusch, her husband and children at her villa. We bathed and boated and Lawrence wrote his ‘Captain’s Doll’ there. (p.84)
Or:
He wrote ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ at Fontana Vecchia, and also ‘The Lost Girl’. ‘Sea and Sardinia’ he wrote straightaway when we came back from Sardinia in about six weeks. And I don’t think he altered a word of it. (p.100)
Anybody looking for insight into particular works will be disappointed. I was particularly disappointed that there was no detail about the three big legal controversies: the banning of ‘Women in Love’, the banning of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’, and the shutting down of the exhibition of his paintings in London.
She does the general psychological impact rather than the details. So in several places she comments on Lawrence’s ability to utterly focus.
Then he would sit in a corner, so quietly and absorbedly, to write. The words seemed to pour out of his hand onto the paper, unconsciously, naturally and without effort, as flowers bloom and birds fly past. His was a strange concentration, he seemed transferred into another world, the world of creation. (p.38)
And, later:
Often before he conceived a new idea he was irritable and disagreeable, but when it had come, the new vision, he could go ahead, and was eager and absorbed. (p.173)
Chapters
- Foreword
- We Meet
- Going Away Together
- Isartal
- Walking to Italy
- 1913 to 1914
- The War
- Lawrence and My Mother
- After the War
- America
- Going Back to Europe
- Nearing the End
- Conclusion
1. Foreword
Frieda establishes the setting where she is writing the book. She is back on the ranch, the Kiowa Ranch, which Mabel Luhan gave to them, and where she, Lawrence and, later, the artist Brett, lived together, in 1924 and 1925. Many of the chapters start with her describing the peaceful rural scenery around her, before she starts describing the events of each chapter.
It was still cold last night, though it is the middle of May.
Here the ranch, with the Sangre de Cristo mountain range behind it to the northeast, slopes to the desert. The big pine trees stand like dark sentinels in the night at the edge of the twenty acre alfalfa field. Beyond them floats the desert. You can see far. A few lights twinkle at Ranches de Taos. A shepherd’s fire glows. All is covered by an enormous sky full of stars, stars that hang in the pine trees, in Lawrence’s big tree with his phœnix on it that the Brett painted, stars that lean on the edge of the mountains, stars twinkling out of the Milky Way. It is so still. Only stars, nothing but stars.
This morning early there was still ice on the edge of the irrigation ditch from the Gallina Canyon. There is such a rush of water. The ice is melting high up in the mountains and the water sings through one’s blood.
But now, about midday, it is warm. The desert below circles in rings of shadow and sunshine. The alfalfa field is green, during these last days of sunshine it has turned green.
I am in the little cabin that Lawrence built with the Indians. I sit in the chair that he made with the ‘petit point’ canvas that we bought in the Rue de la Paix in Paris and that I embroidered. It took me a long time, and when I got bored, he did a bit.
It is a nice chair, although a bit rough, carved as it was with only a penknife.
So here I sit and try to write.
2. We Meet
Three and a half pages. Frieda was 33 and had everything a woman was meant to hope for, a respectable marriage to a man successful in his field (the notable philologist Ernest Weekley), a nice home and three lovely children. But a friend had recently been teaching her the new theories of Sigmund Freud which had begun to make her think about the search for an authentic self. So the door was already ajar when Lawrence came to lunch with her husband. They had some time alone together chatting before the meal and found themselves on the same wavelength. Rather vaguely, Frieda describes three or four further meetings, often with the children. The following appears to be the crunch moment:
One day we met at a station in Derbyshire. My two small girls were with us. We went for a long walk through the early-spring woods and fields. The children were running here and there as young creatures will. We came to a small brook, a little stone bridge crossed it. Lawrence made the children some paper boats and put matches in them and let them float downstream under the bridge. Then he put daisies in the brook, and they floated down with their upturned faces. Crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely. Suddenly I knew I loved him. He had touched a new tenderness in me.
3. Going Away Together
Two pages of Frieda’s narrative, 21 pages of his letters to her. They meet at Charing Cross station, take ship across the Channel, travel to Metz. Lawrence met Frieda’s father just the once, and they sat in glowering silence, the hostile aristocrat facing the miner’s son.
4. Isartal
Isartal is a name given to the valley of the River Isar, near Munich, in Bavaria, south Germany. Here, after delays, they met up and started their life together, living cheaply in a little flat lent them by a friend.
This morning I found the wild red columbines that I had first found with him. There they were at my feet, in the hollow where the workmen have been cutting the logs for the new house. A delicate blaze of startling red and yellow, in front of me, the columbines, like gay small flags. A rabbit stood still behind an oak shrub and watched me. A humming-bird hummed at me in consternation, as startled at me as I was at him. These things are Lawrence to me…
When Lawrence first found a gentian, a big single blue one, I remember feeling as if he had a strange communion with it, as if the gentian yielded up its blueness, its very essence, to him. Everything he met had the newness of a creation just that moment come into being.
Lawrence talked about his embattled boyhood, whereas Frieda had a lovely childhood in the garrison town of Metz.
Lawrence’s thriftiness
One day I bathed in the Isar and a heel came off one of my shoes on the rough shore; so I took both shoes off and threw them into the Isar. Lawrence looked at me in amazement. ‘He’s shocked, as I must walk home barefoot, but it’s a lonely road, it doesn’t matter,’ I thought. But it wasn’t that; he was shocked at my wastefulness. He lectured me: ‘A pair of shoes takes a long time to make and you should respect the labour somebody’s put into those shoes.’ To which I answered: ‘Things are there for me and not I for them, so when they are a nuisance I throw them away.’
Frieda’s children
She is mortally wounded about having to abandon her children. Her husband vowed she’d never see them again. Her mourning irritated Lawrence. Selfishly, he wanted her to devote herself to him alone, and have no rivals for her love.
Lawrence’s changeableness
He’d have quick changes of mood and thought. This puzzled me. ‘But Lawrence, last week you said exactly the opposite of what you are saying now.’ ‘And why shouldn’t I? Last week I felt like that, now like this. Why shouldn’t I?’
5. Walking to Italy
In August 1913 they set off to walk from south Germany across the Alps into Italy. It was Lawrence’s birthday en route. It took about 6 weeks. Sometimes they slept in haylofts. They were tramps.
I remember Lawrence saying to me: ‘You always identify yourself with life, why do you?’ I answered: ‘Because I feel like it.’
They danced and sang with the peasants they met en route.
6. 1913 to 1914
Back in London their best friends are John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, a perfect friend. When they finally got married at a registry office, JMM and KM were the witnesses. Lawrence quickly bought a new wedding ring and Frieda gave her old one to Katherine, and it was buried with her when she died (wretchedly young, in 1923) (p.66). Cynthia and Herbert Asquith became friends and Cynthia stuck with them during the bad times of the war and legal prosecution.
They went back to Italy and found a cottage at Lerici and got to know the housekeeper and her family. Here he wrote The Rainbow, originally titled ‘The Sisters’. He was upset when his literary mentor, novelist, literary critic, editor and reviewer of the day, David Garnett, didn’t like it (p.61).
Rejection
When I think that nobody wanted Lawrence’s amazing genius, how he was jeered at, suppressed, turned into nothing, patronized at best, the stupidity of our civilization comes home to me. How necessary he was! How badly needed! Now that he is dead and his great love for his fellowmen is no longer there in the flesh, people sentimentalize over him. (p.63)
Frieda’s lack of social stuffiness
With the dangerous quality of his work he accepted his more than doubtful financial position and I think one of my merits in his eyes was my never being eager to be rich or to play a role in the social world. It was hardly merit on my part, I enjoyed being poor and I didn’t want to play a role in the world.
7. The War
War breaks out. They are in London. They meet Eddie Marsh and Rupert Brooke who already looks doomed. One night they see a zeppelin over Hampstead Heath. They take a cottage in Berkshire. They have a Christmas 1914 meal with guests Gordon Campbell, Koteliansky, the Murrys, the artist Mark Gertler and Gilbert and Mary Cannan.
He goes to meet Bertrand Russell and is introduced to Lady Ottoline Morrell and her clique at Garsington Manor. The Rainbow is published then prosecuted in an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on 13 November 1915. As a result 1,011 copies were seized and burnt. After this ban, it became unavailable in Britain for 11 years. Lawrence was very bitter indeed and took it out on Frieda and vowed not to write another book.
‘The Rainbow’ appeared and was suppressed. When it happened I felt as though a murder had been done, murder of a new, free utterance on the face of the earth. I thought the book would be hailed as a joyous relief from the ordinary dull stuff, as a way out into new and unknown regions. With his whole struggling soul Lawrence had written it. Then to have it condemned, nobody standing for it—the bitterness of it! He was sex-mad, they said. Little even now do people realize what men like Lawrence do for the body of life, what he did to rescue the fallen angel of sex. Sex had fallen in the gutter, it had to be pulled out. What agony it was to know the flame in him and see it quenched by his fellowmen! ‘I’ll never write another word I mean,’ he said in his bitterness; ‘they aren’t fit for it,’ and for a time the flame in him was quenched. (p.71)
They move to a cottage in Cornwall, along with the Murrys who come to live nearby. Charming details of domestic life. They plan a commune of like-minded artists. But they are spied on and suspected. Their house is repeatedly searched. These sorry events are chronicled in great detail in the famous Nightmare chapter of ‘Kangaroo’. Eventually the authorities gave them three days to pack their bags, and expelled them from Cornwall.
When we were turned out of Cornwall something changed in Lawrence for ever. (p.78)
They go to London to stay with the poet H.D. and Richard Aldington, who would edit so many of Lawrence’s writings and provide introductions to the Penguin editions of his works. Then they go to stay at a cottage in Berkshire which partly heals Lawrence, but even here they are surveilled and followed. Then the Armistice (11 November 1918).
8. Lawrence and My Mother
A short chapter detailing the close relationship between Lawrence and Frieda’s mother who was the much-loved matriarch of the Richthofen household, wonderful mother to her and her two sisters. How much Lawrence enjoyed the company of the three women.
9. After the War
Lawrence doesn’t want to visit Germany immediately after the war so he goes direct to Florence. Frieda meets him there. She arrives at 4am and he insists on taking her on a carriage ride tour of the city in the mist: ‘and ever since Florence is the most beautiful town to me, the lilytown, delicate and flowery’.
Frieda makes passing reference to what I think she implies is the community of gay Brits in Florence but Frieda wasn’t impressed by their ‘wickedness’.
The wickedness there seemed like old maids’ secret rejoicing in wickedness. Corruption is not interesting to me, nor does it frighten me: I find it dull.
They move on to Capri but Frieda didn’t like it.
From Florence we went to Capri. I didn’t like Capri; it was so small an island, it seemed hardly capable to contain all the gossip that flourished there. So Lawrence went to Sicily and took Fontana Vecchia for us, outside Taormina. Living in Sicily after the war years was like coming to life again.
Frieda gives half a dozen letters Lawrence wrote to her mother. One of them is interesting from a literary point of view:
I am not working at the present time. I wrote three long stories since we are here—that will make quite a nice book. I also collected my short stories ready for a book. So, for the moment I am free, I don’t want to begin anything else…
This is interesting because it confirms the sense you have, reading his works chronologically, that after ‘Women in Love’ was published, and the three novellas and the short stories arranged – there was a hiatus. There is a distinct pause and change of pace in Lawrence’s output. And when he resume writing novels they feel considerably different from the pre-war ones, with all three of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’ feeling below par, what Richard Aldington called improvisations.
Frieda briefly describes their travels and experiences in Sicily. She doesn’t explain any of the reasoning for why they decided to take up Mabel Luhan’s invitation to go and stay in her artists’ colony in Toas, New Mexico, and why Lawrence decided to travel there Eastwards, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, onto Ceylon and then stopping at Australia. Frieda gives us five of Lawrence’s letters to her mother and daughter, in which he gives wonderfully spooky descriptions of Australia’s uncanniness which haunt his novel ‘Kangaroo’.
Australia is a weird, big country. It feels so empty and untrodden. The minute the night begins to go down, even the towns, even Sydney, which is huge, begins to feel unreal, as if it were only a daytime imagination, and in the night it did not exist. That is a queer sensation: as if life here really had never entered in: as if it were just sprinkled over, and the land lay untouched. (p.115)
10. America
16 pages of text, 22 of letters.
A brisk account of settling at Taos and some of the friends they made. The chief point is the battle with Mabel Dodge for Lawrence’s soul. After just a few pages she’s whisked us off to Mexico.
Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There Lawrence began to write his ‘Plumed Serpent’. He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. (p.122)
After six months or so in Mexico, they went back to the States, going to New York where she caught a ship back to Europe, while Lawrence headed west then south, back to Taos. Then he was persuaded to go back to England. As so often, it descends into a bewildering list of destinations: London, then to Paris, to Strassburg and Baden-Baden, back by ship to America, New York then back to Taos.
Here they had an idyllic summer. Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield came to stay nearby. They laid pipes from the freshwater spring. they had a cow and chickens. In the autumn they went back to Mexico City. Brief anecdote about a lunch with Somerset Maugham who Frieda thought was an acid, unhappy man. Then they rented a house in Oaxaca where Lawrence quickly write ‘Mornings in Mexico’ and revised ‘The Plumed Serpent’. Interestingly, Lawrence later told Frieda he wished he’d ended the novel differently. Anthony Burgess doesn’t like its hanging, indeterminate ending, either. But I think it’s entirely appropriate to Lawrence characters’ endless vacillations.
Here he becomes ill and they go back to Mexico City where a specialist tells them Lawrence has tuberculosis and only a few years to live (p.133).
They had returned to New Mexico with Brett, the artist, and Frieda devotes a couple of pages to describing how unhappy she was at Brett’s slavish devotion to Lawrence so that it turned into a competition for his approval. Throw in Mabel Luhan, the American patron, and you had three women vying for Lawrence’s affections.
11. Going Back to Europe
Leaping over times and details, Frieda says Lawrence wanted to return to Europe and lo and behold they take a house in Spotorno which had been recommended to them by the published Martin Secker. Her grown-up daughter Barbara comes to stay and there is an almighty argument between the three of them with Lawrence throwing a glass of wine in Frieda’s face and Barbara telling Lawrence he doesn’t deserve Frieda. Compounded when Lawrence’s sister, Ada, turns up, and forms an anti-German alliance with her so that Lawrence for a while locks his bedroom door to Frieda.
That spring, they move again, this time to a villa outside Florence – the Villa Mirenda – and, for the first time, she thinks she gets the Italian feel for life. It’s here that he starts writing ‘Lady Chatterley’. This is everything she has to say about it.
Then he wrote ‘Lady Chatterley’. After breakfast – we had it at seven or so – he would take his book and pen and a cushion, followed by John the dog, and go into the woods behind the Mirenda and come back to lunch with what he had written. I read it day by day and wondered how his chapters were built up and how it all came to him. I wondered at his courage and daring to face and write these hidden things that people dare not write or say.
For two years ‘Lady Chatterley’ lay in an old chest that Lawrence had painted a greeny yellow with roses on it, and often when I passed that chest, I thought: ‘Will that book ever come out of there?’
Lawrence asked me: ‘Shall I publish it, or will it only bring me abuse and hatred again?’ I said: ‘You have written it, you believe in it, all right, then publish it.’ So one day we talked it all over with Orioli; we went to a little old-fashioned printer, with a little old printing shop where they had only enough type to do half the book — and ‘Lady Chatterley’ was printed. When it was done, stacks and stacks of ‘Lady C …’, or Our Lady, as we called it — were sitting on the floor of Orioli’s shop. There seemed such a terrific lot of them that I said in terror: ‘We shall never sell all these’. A great many were sold before there was a row; first some did not arrive at their destination in America, then there came abuse from England… but it was done… his last great effort.
He had done it… and future generations will benefit, his own race that he loved and his own class, that is less inhibited, for he spoke out of them and for them, there in Tuscany, where the different culture of another race gave the impetus to his work. (p.172)
Lawrence takes up painting, with absolutely no training. In one of the letters he says:
I seem to be losing my will-to-write altogether: in spite of the fact that I am working at an English novel – but so differently from the way I have written before! I spend much more time painting – have already done three, nearly four, fairly large pictures. I wonder what you’ll say to them when you’ll see them. Painting is more fun than writing, much more of a game, and costs the soul far, far less. (p.196)
Aldous and Maria Huxley come to stay nearby and become good friends. Huxley tried to teach Frieda how to ski but her legs got tangled up and she was always falling over.
But Lawrence gets tired of the country and wants the sea so he goes and finds a place to stay at Port Cros, an island off the south of France. He’s become friendly with Richard Aldington and Frieda tells us it was here that Aldington began his classic novel ‘Death of a Hero’. Then they move to Toulon and spend the winter in the Beau Rivage hotel. Here Lawrence wrote his series of poems titled ‘Pansies’ (p.175).
In the spring they went to Spain, to Barcelona then to Mallorca. See what I mean by their restless, endless travelling? She barely mentions the publication and legal proceedings against Lady Chatterley (‘…what with the abuse of Lady Chatterley and the disapproval of the paintings…’ is as much detail as we get). They both travel to London to see the exhibition of his paintings at the Warren Gallery. It’s not clear from her account whether they’re still there when the paintings were confiscated by the police.
Suddenly Lawrence is in Florence and falls ill again. So Frieda takes him north, to Germany, to the Tegernsee, where they stay in a rough peasant house. From now on it was all about tending to his ill health.
It’s here that Frieda inserts a seven-page essay about the nightingale, which is a sort of commentary on John Keats’s famous poem on the same subject, followed by a huge section of letters, 70 pages, 46 letters, in total! They contain lots and lots about travel arrangements, and all kinds of boring details about publishers and translations and fees and contracts. One of the most striking passages is in a letter to Else where Lawrence gives his response to prosecution brought against his paintings in London.
You hear the pictures are to be returned to me on condition that they are never shown again in England, but sent away to me on the Continent, that they may never pollute that island of lily-livered angels again. What hypocrisy and poltroonery, and how I detest and despise my England. I had rather be a German or anything than belong to such a nation of craven, cowardly hypocrites. My curse on them! They will burn my four picture books, will they? So it is decreed. But they shall burn through the thread of their own existence as a nation, at the same time. Delenda est Cartago – but she will destroy herself, amply. Che nuoia! (p.248)
12. Nearing the End
Moving and upsetting description of Lawrence’s steady decline in the villa Beau Soleil at Bandol, her pity for his painful coughing, the wearisome drawing of breath as his TB progressed, and their mutual forgiveness.
I can only think with awe of those last days of his, as of the rays of the setting sun . . . and the setting sun obliterates all the sordid details of a landscape. So the dreary passages in our lives were wiped out and he said to me: ‘Why, oh why did we quarrel so much?’ and I could see how it grieved him… our terrible quarrels… but I answered: ‘Such as we were, violent creatures, how could we help it?’
It was here, on his deathbed, that he wrote his final work, ‘Apocalypse’. A doctor sent by their friend Mark Gertler, advises he move to a higher altitude, and so he took the exhausting train journey from Toulon to Antibes and then by car up to Vence, to a sanatorium named ‘Ad Astra’ (Latin for ‘To the stars).
There’s no indication how long this all took, though time for lots of visitors, close friends bringing varieties of food to find something he could keep down. I was intrigued to learn he was visited by H.G. Wells. Sometimes he was cruel to her.
One day he said to my daughter: ‘Your mother does not care for me any more, the death in me is repellent to her.’ (p.262)
The fact that she sets this down suggests how much it hurt her. They took him out of the sanatorium to a villa, putting him to bed. Right at the end he was in such pain he cried out for morphine. Fascinating that Aldous and Maria Huxley were there in these last days and it was Aldous who went off to find a doctor to get the drug. He returns with a doctor who injected morphine, he grew calmer, his breathing slowed, became interrupted, then stopped. He was dead. Frieda’s account of her loss, the completeness of her loss, the extinction of someone so full of life, made me cry.
13. Conclusion
In its entirety, this last section consists of a disclaimer:
Now that I have told my story in such a condensed way, letting blow through my mind anything that wanted to blow, I know how little I have said – how much I could say that perhaps would be more interesting. But I wrote what rose up, and here it is.
So there you go.
Thoughts
As I’ve said, there are fascinating biographical titbits scattered throughout, such as Frieda freely admitting she was useless at housework and Lawrence did it all, the strong implication that he was really unpleasant to her during the war years, some upsetting accounts of his nastiness to her – then again, loads of descriptions of bucolic happiness at Taos or their various villas.
But what stands out head and shoulders above all that is their extraordinary freedom to travel. All the world seems to be their oyster. There are hundreds of descriptions of wonderful places that turn the reader quite green with envy.
We are on the top of the island, and look down on green pine-tops, down to the blue sea, and the other islands and the mainland. Since I came I have not been down to the sea again – and Frieda has bathed only once. But it is very pretty. And at night the lights flash at Toulon and Hyères and Lavandou.
Or:
I think of Bandol and our little villa ‘Beau Soleil’ on the sea, the big balcony windows looking toward the sea, another window at the side overlooking a field of yellow narcissus called ‘soleil’ and pine trees beyond and again the sea. I remember sunny days when the waves came flying along with white manes, they looked as if they might come flying right up the terrace into his room.
I wish I’d had even one holiday as fresh and scenic and lovely as Lawrence and Frieda seemed to enjoy on almost every day of their blessed existence.
Credit
‘Not I, But The Wind… by Frieda Lawrence was published in 1935 by William Heinemann. References are to the 1983 Granada paperback edition.
Books & Boots 