POUND, MEANWHILE, UNLIKE the solitary Fletcher, continued to make new literary acquaintances. In September 1909 he had been delighted finally to meet Arthur Symons, the most famous of the living Rhymers after Yeats, now much recovered from the mental breakdown by which Yeats had been so distressed. Their second meeting was at tea at the Shakespears’, to which Symons came with an American friend, Alice Tobin, and when Symons presented Olivia with a single red rose, Alice, not to be outdone, promptly presented Pound with a turquoise ear-ring, which he would delight in wearing pour épater la bourgeoisie. (If Pound had read The Symbolist Movement in Literature, he would have come across – but would probably have ignored – Symons’ observation that ‘Nothing, not even conventional virtue, is so provincial as conventional vice; and the desire “to bewilder the middle-classes” is itself middleclass.’)88 There are numerous accounts of Pound with his ear-ring. As an attention-seeking device it certainly worked.
Arthur Symons was another figure from the glorious past to add to Pound’s tally, but he was also meeting some of the young artists who like himself would emerge shortly as central figures in the revolution in literature that broke out before the First World War. In November he was introduced to D. H. Lawrence. Pound’s relationship with Lawrence was not to be an untroubled one; they would become increasingly cool towards each other, though they began on the friendliest of terms. There was no particular point at which they fell out, but as Pound was apt to patronise, and Lawrence bitterly to resent patronage, the early warmth of their relationship turned to mutual irritation. Pound later helped to publish and publicise Lawrence’s poetry and stories; he recognised that Lawrence’s writing was important, but had no real liking for it. Even in the years when he claimed to champion artistic freedom, he remained disturbed by its erotic charge. Lawrence was to become much more friendly with Richard Aldington and H.D. than he ever was with Pound – though Lawrence’s friendships in general were rarely straightforward or easy, and those friendships were no exception.
In 1909, however, Pound’s similarity in age, his relative poverty and the fact that he was also an outsider in London society, even if culturally rather than in class terms, may have made him appear potentially an ally in the new world Lawrence met that autumn. D.H. Lawrence, though a collier’s son and in 1909 still a teacher in a Croydon elementary school, was, like Pound, meeting many of the figures who were to launch him on his career through a series of expansive invitations. When his ex-girlfriend and still loyal friend, Jessie Chambers, sent the English Review some of his poems, Ford not only accepted them for publication in that November, but asked Lawrence to visit. Lawrence described the visit to an old college friend, later for a while, his fiancée, Louie Burrows: ‘Last Sunday I went up to lunch with Ford Madox Hueffer, and with Violet Hunt, who is rich, and a fairly well-known novelist. They were both delightful’. Ford took him on to tea at Ernest Rhys’ (‘very nice indeed’), and then to call on H.G. Wells, (‘a funny little chap’).89 Two days later, Violet Hunt invited Lawrence to an ‘At Home’ at the Reform Club at which Pound was also a guest. Lawrence told Louie that Pound was ‘a well-known American poet – a good one’ and ‘jolly nice’. Pound took him out to supper and back to his room – ‘He lives in an attic, like a traditional poet – but the attic is a comfortable well furnished one’. He was impressed by Pound’s MA and the fact he was lecturing at the Polytechnic, and commented that ‘He is rather remarkable – a good bit of a genius, and with not the least self consciousness.’90
Pound asked Lawrence back to London the next weekend, taking him out to meet friends who did not demand evening dress – an important issue for them both. The friends in question were probably the Crawfords, Pound having conveyed the impression to Grace – who had heard about Lawrence at a visit to South Lodge, and was intrigued to meet this miner’s son become poet – that he knew Lawrence rather better than he did. At the same time, Pound wasted no time in letting Lawrence know how extensive his acquaintanceship was in the literary world. ‘He knows W.B. Yeats and all the Swells,’ Lawrence told Louie: at this stage, Lawrence was as delighted with his London reception as Pound had been. ‘Aren’t the folks kind to me,’ he wrote, ‘it is really wonderful. Hueffer is splendid: I have met a gentleman indeed in him, and an artist.’91 By 1913, although still ready to accept Ford and Pound’s well-meaning if somewhat de haut en bas help in placing his stories and poems, he had become much more cynical, telling Edward Garnett: ‘the Hueffer–Pound faction seems inclined to lead me round a little as one of their show dogs’.92 In his late autobiographical sketches, however, Lawrence reiterates his sense of Ford’s early kindness. He recounts the story of Ford’s reading the manuscript of his first novel, which Ford declared had ‘every fault that the English novel can have’, and, as Lawrence knew well, Ford considered the number of faults the English novel – as opposed to the French or Russian – could contain to be legion:
‘But’ shouted Hueffer in the bus, ‘you’ve got GENIUS.’
That made me want to laugh, it sounded so comical. In the early days they were always telling me I had got genius, as if to console me for not having their own incomparable advantages.
But Hueffer didn’t mean that. I always thought he had a bit of genius himself.93
Towards Pound he was less respectful in his recollections. He told Glenn Hughes in 1929 that ‘in the old London days Pound wasn’t so literary as he is now. He was more of a mountebank then.’ But, he added, Pound ‘was always amusing’.94
Pound asked Lawrence to visit him again three weeks after that first invitation, having promised to introduce him to a ‘crowd of other literary folk’, perhaps the Tour Eiffel poets. Jessie Chambers, however, reports an incident that might have had something to do with the souring of this early friendship. Lawrence had asked her down to London soon after he had first visited South Lodge, and insisted that she went with him for lunch there. Jessie had been reluctant, for, as she said, she ‘dreaded meeting strangers’, particularly no doubt rich strangers, but she was immensely taken with Ford’s ‘genial warmth’. ‘I suppose,’ she wrote, ‘never before or since has anyone talked to me with quite such charm, making me feel in the most delicate way that what I said was of interest’. His pleasantness to the maid ‘confirmed [her] impression of genuine kindliness’. She liked Violet Hunt, but Ezra Pound, to whom she refers simply as ‘an American poet’, was another matter. He startled her ‘by springing to his feet and bowing from the waist with the stiff precision of a mechanical toy’, and by constantly flinging out ‘observations in an abrupt way’, which, she noted perceptively, was oddly reminiscent of the form his poetry took. What really disturbed her, however, was when Ezra Pound, who, as Ford said à propos this very incident, ‘had a genius for inappropriate interpolations’, asked Ford: ‘How would you speak to a working man? … Would you speak to him just the same as to any other man, or would you make a difference?’ Ford, a natural diplomat himself, unless he chose not to be, was taken aback, but answered after a moment’s hesitation that he ‘should speak to a working man in exactly the same way that I should speak to any other man, because I don’t think there is any difference’, thus retrieving the situation.95 Of course, even by the standards of those more snobbish than Ford, Lawrence was not strictly a working man. His post at an elementary school put him on the middle-class ladder, albeit near the foot. But he was the son of a working man, and the working class was too near to both Jessie and himself for it to be anything other than a horribly embarrassing moment. Lawrence himself never appears to have mentioned it, but it must have entered his super-sensitive soul.
The tension between Lawrence and Pound, however, was not entirely Pound’s fault; it was partly the product of Lawrence’s situation and temperament. As Helen Corke observed (she was the schoolteacher friend from Croydon whose experiences, and own novel, Neutral Ground, provided the plot for Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser): ‘The patronage of the London literati hurt Lawrence’s pride, and he became conscious of the gulf between the artist who is a working schoolmaster, and the young artists who, often penniless themselves, lived within a charmed circle of influence and wealth. After a London literary party he would savagely satirise to me its personnel.’96 She goes on to mention specifically Ezra Pound, one of the chief victims, though the most famous of Lawrence’s cruel imitations was that of Florence Farr at her ‘ping-wanging’, as he called her performances to the psaltery.97 Pound and Lawrence saw each other again at South Lodge and at the gatherings at Ernest Rhys’ house several times before Pound left for Italy the following March, but the invitations appear to have ceased.
Before his appearance in the English Review, Lawrence’s only publication had been a short story submitted under Jessie Chambers’ name to a Nottingham Guardian Christmas competition, when he was still at Nottingham University College. He had since written many poems, short stories, at least one play and the novel that was to become The White Peacock, but unlike Pound, with his relentless drive to achieve publication, sales and fame, Lawrence had been reluctant to expose himself to failure. As his biographer John Worthen suggests, perhaps the very unimaginability of an Eastwood miner’s son becoming a writer blocked him. His poems had, after all, only appeared in the English Review because Jessie Chambers sent them. She recalls in her memoirs an incident when Lawrence finally announced to her that he was going to be a poet. She only had time to express her delighted support when he immediately took it back, saying incredulously, ‘A collier’s son a poet!’98
The warmth of response that Lawrence had from Ford changed all that. By late November, he had given Ford his novel (the one with every fault the English novel could have) to read and appraise. On 15 December Ford wrote to Lawrence that he should approach a publisher with the novel, telling him, both encouragingly and shrewdly, ‘I certainly think you have in you the makings of a very considerable novelist, and I should not have the least hesitation in prophesying for you a great future, did I not know how much a matter of sheer luck one’s career is.’99 Lawrence sent off a copy of the letter that very day to Heinemann, the firm Ford had recommended. Lawrence never forgot Ford’s support at that time, though John Worthen suggests that Ford, who was thrilled to have discovered a writer of genuinely working-class origins, had been rather disappointed that the examples of Lawrence’s writing he first met portrayed so little of his origins. The poems in the English Review were based on his life in Croydon; there were references to his teaching and his landlord’s baby, so at least Ford could feel that he was dealing with modern life, but nothing overtly tied him down to the working class. His first novel, ‘Nethermere’, as the draft of The White Peacock was then called, did not deal in any way with his mining-village background, and although the stance of the narrator/observer Cyril is to some extent autobiographical, he is given no occupation or class position. It was Ford, it appears, who encouraged Lawrence to write about the world in which he had grown up. In doing so, he could be accused of trying to make Lawrence fit his own stereotypes, but whatever caveats one might have about the reasons for Ford’s advice, it was good for Lawrence’s writing. By the time of Jessie’s visit to Croydon, Lawrence had already written the short story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and the play, A Collier’s Friday Night, two powerful pieces that drew directly on his own family life. Significantly, when Ford recounted the story of his discovery of Lawrence, he claimed that ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ was the first thing he read: it was clearly what he wanted to remember. And Ford was not alone. When Ernest Rhys described a visit by Lawrence to one of his poetry evenings – an account whose accuracy is questionable on a number of grounds – he recalls Lawrence reading a large number of dialect poems, though at that date Lawrence had only written one, and published none. Lawrence also recalls Edward Garnett, to whom Ford introduced him in 1911, and who did much to place his work, encouraging his writing of dialect poems. This was the working-class author they wanted. All Lawrence’s major works were to be autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and if Ford were responsible for casting him back on an examination of his own experience of the world, he owed him thanks. On the other hand, his life was not to remain within the purlieus of Eastwood and he was to range widely in life and art. Few now would insist his dialect poems are his best.
Pound, Philadelphian bourgeois, and Lawrence, collier’s son, came from very different worlds, but although their backgrounds and style were in stark contrast, it was their likenesses that drove them apart as much as their differences. They were both sensitive but tactless, insecure but at the same time certain they were right. Both were driven, ardent, passionate in their beliefs, and would develop into angry prophets as much as artists. Whilst their missions were very different, their crusading zeal was surely not unconnected with the fact they both grew up immersed in Nonconformist Christianity. Both of them had striking looks, with flaming red hair: in any group of which either formed part, they would be the centre of energy, the magnetic force. No wonder they soon stopped inhabiting the same groups: like poles repel.
What they also had in common was the experience of finding themselves fêted in London literary circles, when for much of their previous lives they had felt looked down on and rebuffed. Lawrence had been mocked by the other boys at his elementary school, being too delicate and sickly to play games; in addition, his mother, it was felt, had taught the family to think themselves better than their neighbours, and that did not go down well. When Lawrence went to Nottingham High School as a scholarship boy, an exceptional achievement for a miner’s son (only three attended the school in the eighteen years from 1882 to 1899), he was a working-class outsider. He passed the entrance examination to college to study for a teaching certificate, but although he made some friends there, including Louie Burrows, he was bitterly disappointed by the lecturers, who were much less intellectually questioning than he was; he felt alienated once more. Coming to Croydon to teach was a bold move for a Midlander. He came, not because he wanted to move south, but because his pride would not let him teach for less than the £90 a year that his father had earned when he started at the pit, as he would have done at a Nottinghamshire school. Davidson Road School was much rougher than anything he had been used to, and teaching was a struggle, not the pleasure it had largely been at home. His first months there had been full of intense loneliness and despair, though by late 1909 he had made some friends, mainly, as so often with Lawrence, women, but without any clear view of his future; teaching these slovenly, dispirited proletarian children, writing constantly in his free time, he was lost and uncertain. Suddenly to become the darling of London literary circles was briefly immensely pleasurable. Lawrence, however, became disillusioned more rapidly than Pound was to do. He was irritated by the way Pound threw himself into playing the extravagant poetic role that his audience so much appreciated, and was much shrewder than Pound in realising how much of his welcome was a fashionable fad that might not last, though no less bitter than Pound would be when he was rejected once more.
Both Pound and Lawrence had devoured books in their youth, but what they read had been very different. Pound’s knowledge of languages, particularly classical and medieval languages, outstripped Lawrence’s – not that Pound’s knowledge was as good as he thought, and he caused many raised eyebrows in London circles with his confident claims, so often let down by errors – or conscious and often creative liberties – in translation. ‘Those were the days,’ Wyndham Lewis later pointed out, ‘when a man going on a long train journey would be apt to slip in his pocket a copy of the Iliad in the Greek text: and there was after all Lionel Johnson’s definition of a gentleman – a man who knows Greek and Latin.’100 But if Pound’s Latin and Greek were suspect, Lawrence’s were non-existent. Lawrence had been unable to take a degree as he had not studied Latin, having to content himself with a two-year teacher’s certificate. He had, however, learnt modern French and German at school, and did well at them. Yet as far as anything later than medieval or early Renaissance literature was concerned, Pound’s reading up till 1909 seems to have largely centered on English poetry, or writings about poetry, Wilde, Pater and the handful of mystical texts that he had met through Kitty Heyman. He had officially taken a course on the nineteenth-century novel at the University of Pennsylvania, but it appears to have been one of those for which he did very little work. He had, of course, been introduced to Ibsen and Shaw, though once they were no longer useful as weapons against his professors, his interest in them waned. Lawrence’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reading, as well as his knowledge of the philosophical concerns of the day, was much wider.
Significantly enough, however, much of Lawrence’s important intellectual growth and literary knowledge, like Pound’s, had been gained outside his educational establishments. Lawrence’s equivalent to Pound’s visit to Upper Darby with ‘literally armfuls of books’ had been his visits to Jessie Chambers’ home at Haggs Farm, about three miles across the fields from Eastwood. Jessie was two years younger than Lawrence, in rebellion against domesticity and passionate about reading. Haggs Farm was in Lawrence’s memory an idyllic spot, frequently depicted in his later fiction, a haven where his passionate love of the natural world could be satisfied as well as his intellectual hunger. Even the father, Edmund, who did a milk round as well as work on the farm, cared for literature. Jessie remembered that as a little girl she had heard him reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles (daringly serialised in the Nottingham Guardian) to her mother. All the children – there were seven of them – grew up loving books. The family adored Lawrence, who was with them the life and soul of every occasion, very unlike the inhibited scholarship boy he was at Nottingham High School, where he was still a pupil when he first met the Chambers family. By the time his friendship with Jessie really began to flourish, they had both become pupil-teachers. Jessie’s family were unable to give her the chance that Lawrence had of going to college, but both of them probably learnt more together than Lawrence did from his teachers there. In the years between 1901 and 1908, when he moved to Croydon, his happiest hours were spent at Haggs Farm. Jessie and he would borrow books together from the Mechanics’ Institute library in Eastwood, and carry them back to the farm. They read the nineteenth-century novelists, Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot (a particular favourite with Lawrence), Thackeray, Charles Reade and Stevenson, poets like Blake and Swinburne, daring European writers such as Maupassant, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Verlaine (Violet Hunt said Lawrence knew more decadent poetry than she did), the disreputable Whitman, as well as the sages and prophets, Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and Carlyle, whose denunciations of Victorian capitalism and belief in great men made a lasting impression on Lawrence. During his years at college, Lawrence discussed with Jessie the philosophers and scientific thinkers that he learnt of there, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Haeckel and William James. Like H.D., Jessie found meeting this cornucopia of books an experience of heady excitement and imaginative expansion, an entry into a more spacious universe. ‘To say we read the books gives no adequate idea of what really happened,’ she wrote later. ‘It was the entering into possession of a new world, a widening and enlargement of life.’101
Jessie’s mother, like Lawrence’s, regularly attended the Congregational chapel; indeed that was how the families knew each other, but her religious scruples rarely led to any censorship of their reading. The Congregationalists put great emphasis on self-improvement and education, and she was happy to encourage their explorations. The Congregational Chapel in Eastwood ran its own Literary Society, and the Sunday evening sermons were more like lengthy lectures, followed by discussion. While entirely orthodox, they promoted a habit of intellectual curiosity and rigour that could lead the young to very different conclusions from those of the minister; it has always been the bane of Nonconformity that it breeds yet further nonconformity in its children. Ford has a wonderful, fantastical account in Return to Yesterday of a visit to Nottingham to see Lawrence and his friends, a visit that almost certainly never took place, and definitely not like this:
I have never anywhere found so educated a society. Those young people knew the things that my generation in the great English schools hardly even chattered about. Lawrence, the father, came in from the mine of a Saturday evening. He threw a great number of coins on the kitchen table and counted them out to his visiting mates. All the while the young people were talking about Nietzsche and Wagner and Leopardi and Flaubert and Karl Marx and Darwin and occasionally the father would stop his counting to contradict them. And they would discuss the French Impressionists and the primitive Italians and play Chopin or Debussy on the piano. I went with them on the Sunday to a Nonconformist place of worship … The sermon renewed my astonishment. It was almost entirely about – Nietzsche, Wagner, Leopardi, Flaubert, Karl Marx, Darwin, the French Impressionists and the primitive Italians. I asked one of Lawrence’s friends if that was not an unusual sort of sermon. He looked at me with a sort of grim incredulity.
‘What do you suppose?’ he said. ‘Do you think we would sit under that fellow if he could not preach like that for fifty-two Sundays a year. He would lose his job.’102
Eastwood Congregational sermons might tackle heavy subjects like ‘Religion and Science’, but they were not like this. Yet, as John Worthen says, ‘even allowing for [Ford’s] exaggeration and invention, the account is not simply ridiculous’.103 By the time Ford met Lawrence, Lawrence was certainly acquainted with this cultural world, and although some of the figures mentioned here – Nietzsche and Wagner, for example – he only discovered when he reached Croydon, that he led an intellectually rich life in Nottingham was absolutely true. Ford is simply dramatising the amazement he felt at Lawrence’s account of his home culture, and the depth of his early engagement with ideas and the arts. Ford constructs himself as the southern English gentleman, astonished to discover this thriving northern intellectual milieu, which had a vitality and urgency that cultural life often lacked among his more genteel companions in the south. For the young intellectuals around Nottingham ‘advanced thinking’, as it was called, was their life-blood. It gave them weapons with which to fight the sense of inferiority to Ford’s class that their official education strove to inculcate in them.
Yet something that Pound shared with Lawrence was the experience of growing up labelled effeminate, almost inevitable then for slightly built, bookish boys. In fact, one of the factors in common between Lawrence and Pound was that, while an English middle- or upper-class boy might just get away with an interest in the arts or poetry without being branded girlish (many of course did not), that was impossible in the English working class or in any class in the United States. Both grew up identifying more with their socially superior and cultured mothers than with their fathers, though that early identification with the mother was to become increasingly problematic, both personally and artistically. Both had in different ways to battle for personal emotional independence, developing ideas of masculine superiority that they would defend with hysterical vehemence. Pound had of course already begun his self-reinvention in the series of dashing devil-may-care male personae in his poetry. Lawrence was not to make the break from his mother’s influence until her death in 1911 and his meeting with Frieda in 1912. Not that the masculinity either of them espoused was an entirely conventional one. Lawrence, who had happily helped with cooking as a boy, continued to do so, and had none of the traditional miner’s insistence that he be waited on by the women in his life. Douglas Goldring remarked after the First World War on what an agreeable visitor Lawrence was to a servantless household, as he would always help set the table and wash up. There are no reports of Pound’s feats in the kitchen as a boy, but certainly in London he would cook for friends, and do so rather well. Neither Frieda Lawrence nor Dorothy Shakespear was willing to cook, so perhaps Lawrence and Pound’s culinary skills were a fortunate accomplishment.
Pound does not appear to have been particularly struck by Lawrence’s poems when they were first published, though Grace Crawford maintained that Lawrence and Pound when she knew them ‘liked and respected each other’s work’. The three poems that Ford had accepted for the English Review are uneven, but there are fresh, directly observed lines which do hint at a new kind of voice in English poetry. By January 1910, The White Peacock, Lawrence’s first novel, recommended by Ford to Heinemann’s, had been accepted for publication, and would be published in early 1911. Lawrence was launched. The Observer had noted of Pound the previous December that ‘few poets have so quickly become known to literary London’, but Lawrence’s acceptance was perhaps equally rapid.104
Lawrence appears to have unwittingly precipitated the end of Grace Crawford’s friendship with Pound. Pound had told Grace that Lawrence would dislike her because of her privileged background, but perhaps he really feared that she would like Lawrence too much. It was not that Grace and Lawrence ever developed anything similar to the easygoing close friendship that she and Pound had. They always remained Miss Crawford and Mr Lawrence, but they very much took to each other, and Pound felt cut out. When Lawrence asked Grace to give him some Italian lessons, Pound turned up at the first one, trying to interrupt and distract Grace’s attention, behaving like a child angry at his displacement by a sibling rival. Grace soon decided it was better to see them on separate occasions. Pound and Lawrence’s friendship was, she thought, an ‘odd and uneasy’ one. ‘Ezra,’ she noted, ‘was sometimes inclined to be patronising to Lawrence but this was always a failure for Lawrence would seem quite unaware until the moment came when he would insert a neat and unexpected barb into Ezra’s ego.’ Pound continued to resent the interest Grace took in Lawrence, and became increasingly obstreperous and badly behaved. When Grace’s father, who ‘where young men were concerned … was inclined to be more conventional than Mama’, returned from America in December, Grace alleges that Pound took ‘a wounding delight in trying to bait and annoy Papa out of sheer wanton mischievousness’. Grace’s father at first put up with Pound’s ‘deliberate flamboyance of manner and apparel’ and ‘provocative flippancy of … conversation’, but when Pound appeared with the addition of his turquoise ear-ring, her father was incandescent, telling her later that she really ought to see Pound less and that ‘if the ear-ring was to be a permanent feature of his dress I had better drop him entirely. I was angry with Ezra but did my best to soothe Papa; but on the whole [Pound’s] departure for America came as a relief.’105 Grace does not suggest Pound’s behaviour was due to jealousy of Lawrence; indeed, his constant, noisy needling of Mr Crawford and hence of Grace does not suggest adult sexual jealousy so much as once more the naughtiness of a petted child no longer the centre of his mother’s attention, but perhaps there is always something of that in adult jealousy. Phyllis Bottome, who met Pound a couple of years later, commented that ‘Ezra had, as a human being, all the failings of a beloved, an only, and a spoilt child.’106
Pound did not of course assume the ear-ring solely to annoy Mr Crawford. He wished to provoke generally, and succeeded. He had written to Dorothy on 8 January that ‘Mrs Fowler is in an azure rage on the subject of azure ear-rings’.107 Eva Fowler was the American hostess at whose house he had first met Olivia Shakespear, and it may be significant that the two people recorded as being outraged rather than amused by the ear-ring were both Americans. The English could tolerate such eccentricities in an outsider; to the Americans he was unforgivably one of their own. Though Mr Crawford was in many ways indulgent to his daughter’s artistic leanings, he was not ready to go so far as to let her marry an unsuitable artist. A little later he was to put a damper on Grace’s friendship with Lawrence, whom he liked much better than Pound but still did not wish to have as a son-in-law. Lawrence’s clothes also gave the wrong signals, though for very different reasons. When Grace first met Lawrence, the first thing she noticed was his ‘heavy, clumpy boots’; his inability to afford better at that time caused Lawrence agonies of self-consciousness, and he knew they marked him as of an inferior class.108 Grace did, a little later, marry an artist who passed muster, Lovat Fraser, a stage designer and an Englishman of the right background, with whom she was very happy, she says, until his tragic early death. Her last contact with Lawrence was in late 1911.