BACK IN BOSTON, Fletcher’s burst of enthusiasm for Lowell was rapidly waning. By the time Aldington had excised his most gushing and extravagant comments on her work in his article for the imagist issue, doubts had already set in. He was alternately mesmerised by her energy and drive, and terrified that he would be swept along in her wake and fail to make his mark. He resented the way she was achieving public success, and her charismatic performances made him all the more aware of his awkward diffidence. He was put out that the reviews of Irradiations: Sand and Spray, though more numerous than they would been because of the book’s simultaneous appearance with the anthology, read his poems as an extension of the imagist programme, while in fact he had written them before he first met Pound. Fletcher was intensely interested in producing rich musical effects (at the time he was writing a series of poems he described as ‘symphonies’) and exotic evocations of colour, but his poems had none of the chiselled directness espoused by the imagists. He had become friendly with Eliot’s Harvard acquaintance, Conrad Aiken, a Southern poet like himself, and now also back in Boston. When Aiken had attacked the imagists in May, he exempted Fletcher from his critique and gave warm praise to Irradiations, balm to Fletcher’s ever tormented soul, made even sweeter when Aiken followed his example in writing poetic ‘symphonies’. Together they went to concerts, and Aiken encouraged him in his deepening passion for Japanese and Chinese forms. In Chicago Fletcher had visited an exhibition of Japanese prints, an experience that led him to write a series of poems, not precisely haiku but influenced by the haiku’s clear imagery and minimalism; with typical impetuousity he wrote the first drafts of some fifty poems at the exhibition itself. He had been attracted to Far Eastern art since his time at Harvard, when he had visited the Oriental wing of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the collection that owed so much to Fenollosa; in London he had read some of Lafcadio Hearn’s writings on Japan, Giles’ A History of Chinese Literature, and Judith Gautier’s Le Livre de jade, but what had most immediately stimulated his interest again had been the present from Pound the previous year – before the bad blood – of an 1862 French translation of Chinese poetry. So the fact that Fletcher was working on these poems at the same time as Pound’s Cathay was going through the press was not coincidental. The poems themselves are taut and evocative, more disciplined than Irradiations, some hinting at a mood, others at a narrative. One, called ‘Scene from a Drama’, went:
The daimyo and the courtesan
Compliment each other.
He invites her to walk out through the maples,
She half refuses, hiding fear in her heart.
Far in the shadow
The daimyo’s attendant waits,
Nervously fingering his sword.113
What is the story? Has the courtesan been unfaithful, and is she facing summary punishment? Fletcher’s sense of sexuality as a dangerous punitive force is perhaps imaged there. These poems would be published in 1918 as a collection entitled Japanese Prints, although individual ones appeared earlier. Later Fletcher talked of there being two strands of imagists: those influenced by France and Japan, Pound, Lowell and himself, and those influenced more by Greece, such as the two Aldingtons. For Fletcher, the example of the Far Eastern forms encouraged a restraint and simplicity that usefully tempered his tendency, in Pound’s word, to ‘splutter’, and for a while he toyed with Zen Buddhism as a way of finding a calmer relation to his surrounding world, not something he would achieve for very long. Yet the Far East was not his only enthusiasm. Later in the year he made another visit to the south-west, where he was much moved by the Native American traditions he found there, though he appears to have had rather more interest in their past and their ancient ruins than in the present inhabitants. Yet he pared his verse to match the bareness of the landscape, and, though in a very different style from the Japanese poems, produced understated yet resonant poems, one of which, ‘Arizona’, he would include in the 1916 anthology. He returned to Boston later in the year and visited Sevenels regularly, where Lowell remained convinced he was her close poetic comrade, whilst behind her back he grumbled about her in person to Aiken, and in letters to Daisy, whose divorce was now a matter of time; the prospect of returning to marry her appears to have filled him with a mixture of dread and longing.
While in England, Fletcher had always treated the Aldingtons with suspicion, but from the other side of the Atlantic he was beginning to feel more sympathetic towards them. Slightly surprisingly, given his usual self-absorption, he was most distressed to hear about the stillborn baby and told Daisy he had tried to write them a letter of condolence, but that was the sort of thing he couldn’t manage, so they can have had no idea of his genuinely compassionate response. He exchanged letters with them occasionally, but Lowell was on the whole the one who maintained the transatlantic link. The imagist – or at any rate contributor to the imagist anthologies – with whom the Aldingtons’ acquaintance grew during the autumn of 1915 was Lawrence. On 4 August, exactly one year after the outbreak of war, the Lawrences moved from Sussex, where they had been living since January, to a flat in Hampstead at 1 Byron Villas, not far from the Aldingtons in Christchurch Place. Frieda’s children were living in London, and she desperately wanted to see them, though for the most part that only meant catching an occasional glimpse of them on the way to school. While living in Sussex she and Lawrence had been quarrelling bitterly, Frieda deeply unhappy at the separation from her children and resentful of her pariah status as a German in wartime England. Their relationship was always stormy, and the stress had told on them both; at one point Frieda threatened to move out. Lawrence continued to find the war nightmarish, writing in a letter that April: ‘hell is slow and creeping and viscous, and insect-teeming: as is this Europe now – this England’.114 Like H.D., he hated the jingoistic patriotism and febrile atmosphere; his health was bad, his spirits bitter, and he was desperately jealous of Frieda’s longing for her children. John Helforth, the non-combatant traumatised by the war in H.D.’s story ‘Kora and Ka’, also quarrels with the woman with whom he lives because she misses her children. Helforth is, perhaps, partly based on Lawrence. Lawrence shared Helforth’s loathing of papers like the ‘Daily Newsgraph’ and the ‘Evening Warscript’; and the violence of language that Helforth uses suggests Lawrence’s own wartime letters. Certainly the tormented state of mind described in that story was something both Lawrence and H.D. endured, even if the war would not produce in H.D. the overt extremities of anger and loathing that Lawrence directed against the world.
Now that he was unable to return to Italy, Lawrence’s hatred of England grew, or rather, hatred of what he felt England had become. Since the Aldingtons had last seen him the previous August, he had been taken up by a number of upper-class and well-known figures, but his relationships with them were for the most part uneasy, and tended to fuel his conviction that English society was corrupt and abhorrent. Class differences were too deeply ingrained at that period ever to be quite forgotten, and though Lawrence was drawn to cultured aristocrats, he nearly always felt, resentfully, if probably correctly, that he was the object of condescension, or, even worse, simply a pastime for them, an exotic, intriguing object of entertainment. In 1915 he and Frieda were in frequent contact with the hostess, Lady Ottoline Morrell, one of those he would turn against, though for now, whilst at times critical of her, he rather enjoyed the civilised ambience she created, and loved her sixteenth-century Garsington Manor. Frieda and Ottoline, however, were always enemies; Frieda resented Ottoline’s absorption in Lawrence and lack of interest in herself, and Ottoline would later blame Frieda for poisoning Lawrence against her, convinced that the egregious Hermione Roddice in Women in Love was really her creation. Eliot would also be taken up by Ottoline, but that would be a much smoother encounter.
Earlier in the year Lawrence had met another aristocrat and intellectual: Bertrand Russell, then in his early forties, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge and Ottoline’s lover. Lawrence and he were at first immensely taken with each other, but not for long. Lawrence, like Hulme, despised the Cambridge–Bloomsbury nexus he met through Russell, partly through class antagonism, but also because he was disgusted that so many were homosexual – ‘horrible little frowsty people, men lovers of men, they give me such a sense of corruption, almost putrescence, that I dream of beetles’.115 Lawrence’s hysterical homophobia, even more pronounced than Aldington’s, is sometimes ascribed to guilt about his own homoerotic desires, but whilst those undoubtedly existed, the extremity of his feelings may be linked with his fraught anxiety about his own manhood. Sickly, thin, a writer not a doer, lower class without any redeeming physical strength or manly occupation, Lawrence would always want to define himself against a woman, his alterity from her being his only sure claim to the elusive power of masculinity. Lawrence wrote to Russell about E. M. Forster, ‘Why can’t he take a woman and fight clear to his own basic, primal being?’116 That, Lawrence says, is what he himself does, but even the ‘ordinary [i.e. heterosexual] Englishman of the educated class goes to a woman now to masturbate himself,’ and then moves on to ‘Sodomy … a nearer form of masturbation’.117 Lawrence, the implication is, was much more truly masculine.
In spite of disliking Russell’s world, Lawrence continued to think for a while that the two of them could work together to transform society. They began to plan a lecture series, but by July the incompatibility of their views became apparent; Lawrence returned the lecture notes Russell had sent him covered with indignant ‘NOs’ and accompanied by a furious letter in which he said that Russell should drop democracy and relinquish his belief in ‘the people’, telling him that there ‘must be an aristocracy of people who have wisdom, and there must be a Ruler: a Kaiser: no Presidents and democracies’.118 There is a certain irony in the son of a coal-miner lecturing a future earl in those terms, but the idea of joint lectures was dropped. In September, relations broke down badly when Lawrence described Russell’s stand as a pacifist, for which he would eventually lose his Cambridge post and be sent to prison, as ‘perverted, mental blood-lust’. ‘What you want,’ he told him, ‘is to jab and strike, like a soldier with a bayonet, only you are sublimated into words’.119 Lawrence was totally against the war, and thought it should never have been started, but he despised conscientious objectors. Lawrence, who got over his rages swiftly, tried to start the friendship again, assuring Russell that his outbursts were ‘largely a quarrelling with something in myself’, but Russell was further alienated when Lawrence wrote to him in December, in great excitement over an idea he had gleaned from James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy – certainly not an idea that Frazer had meant to recommend – that there was something called ‘blood-consciousness’ as well as ‘mental consciousness’, telling Russell that ‘the tragedy of this our life, and of your life, is that the mental and nerve consciousness exerts a tyranny over the blood-consciousness, and that your will has gone completely over to the mental consciousness, and is engaged in the destruction of your blood-being or blood-consciousness’.120 Russell was appalled by what he saw as this embrace of irrationality, asserting in later life that Lawrence’s ‘mystical philosophy of blood-consciousness “led straight to Auschwitz”’.121
By September 1915, Russell had taken up Eliot: like Ottoline, he found him a more amenable protégé and moved him, along with Vivien, into his London flat. Russell can be forgiven for thinking from Lawrence’s tirades that he was simply a dangerous proto-Fascist, yet Lawrence was, for all his intemperate language, looking for a way of finding a holistic balance between the conscious and unconscious, the mind and the flesh, the individual human being and what he would call ‘the circumambient universe’. As he would later put it: ‘the whole life-effort of man was to get his life into direct contact with the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life, thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into immediately felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a dark sort of joy.’ He is close here to Pound’s wish in ‘Psychology and Troubadours’ to be in touch with the ‘universe of fluid force’ and ‘the germinal universe of wood alive, of stone alive’, as well as to the passionate, elemental, chthonic world of H.D.’s imagist poetry.122
Although Lawrence’s spirits rose briefly when he first arrived in London, and he enjoyed making their tiny flat home-like, buying secondhand furniture in the Caledonian Road and Camden High Street, he was soon even more wretched there than in the Sussex countryside. There were soldiers everywhere, recruits, as he recalled in Kangaroo, drilling in Parliament Hill Fields, wounded soldiers on Hampstead Heath, ‘bright blue soldiers with their red cotton neck-ties, sitting together like macaws, pale and different from other people’.123 Conscription had still not been brought in – the Liberals were resisting it to the last – but under Lloyd George’s increasing influence a new push was made in a propaganda offensive on recruitment. Posters were increasingly aimed at women: ‘Is your “best boy” wearing Khaki? … If your young man neglects his duty to his King and Country, the time may come when he will NEGLECT YOU!’124 Lawrence would later write:
It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915–1916 the spirit of old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.125
This ‘vortex of broken passions’ is a very different one from Pound’s, a whirlpool of despair, not creativity. John Bull, a viciously xenophobic publication, was edited by Horatio Bottomley, who was later imprisoned for fraud, though not for the fraudulent copy he was then regularly publishing on the government’s behalf. Lawrence had spent much of September and October trying to launch a journal called The Signature, which he worked on with his friends – though it was, as so often with Lawrence, an uneasy friendship – Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, who were then living in St John’s Wood. He had high hopes for this new venture, telling Lady Cynthia Asquith, the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law and one of the few of her class he did not come to distrust, that he would use it to preach ‘beliefs by which one can reconstruct the world’. ‘I think my papers are very beautiful and very good,’ he told her. ‘I feel if only people, decent people, would read them, somehow a new era might set in’.126 It was not to be, or at least not through the work of the Signature, which had to close after three issues, with Lawrence’s essay, ‘The Crown’, which he was publishing in it serially, only half-way through. That ‘very beautiful and very good’ message would not reach the world in full until 1925.127
The Rainbow, whose rewriting Lawrence had completed by March, was published on 30 September, shortly before he and the Aldingtons met up again in early October. Aldington reported to Amy that Lawrence now had ‘a vast red beard and is very cantankerous and anti-war … He is dying of consumption, of course. His last novel has created less stir than one would have thought, but the war is an awkward competitor.’128 He spoke too soon. The novel was about to cause a stir, but not the kind he meant. It had none of the widespread praise that Sons and Lovers had received, but it soon attracted almost universal and vociferous condemnation. The Sphere described it as an ‘orgy of sexiness’, and the Daily Mail as ‘a monstrous wilderness of phallicism’. The review in the Star was a stark example of the way the tide had turned against any kind of questioning of conventions: ‘Art,’ it said, ‘is a public thing. It is a dweller in the clean homes and swept streets of life. It must conform to the ordered laws that govern human society. If it refuse to do so, it must pay the penalty. The sanitary inspector of literature must notify it and call for its isolation.’129
Even Lawrence’s usual supporters disliked the novel: Edward Garnett, who had done so much to help Lawrence in the past, did not care for it, Edward Marsh found it distasteful, and Murry bewildering. The denunciations of the book often hinted at Lawrence’s German sympathies; he was known to have a German wife and to be against the war, and he had in addition defiantly dedicated the novel to Frieda’s sister Else. It might have proved even more problematic if he had been allowed to present the dedication in the way he had wanted to, as ‘zu Else’, printed in German Gothic script.130 The Star contrasted the Brangwen family with the soldiers at the front: ‘The young men who are dying for liberty are moral beings. They are the living repudiation of such impious denials of life as The Rainbow. The life they lay down is a lofty thing. It is not the thing that creeps and crawls in this.’131
In early November, an even bitterer blow than unsympathetic reviews fell on Lawrence. All copies of The Rainbow were seized on the grounds of obscenity, and burnt by the public hangman. The suppression embittered Lawrence still further towards the English and plunged him into poverty for the rest of the war. He not only lost his royalties on The Rainbow, but for the next few years found it difficult to publish any more fiction. Although he finished Women in Love in 1916, he would not be able to bring it out until 1921. Sir Philip Morrell, Ottoline’s husband, asked questions in the House, but to no avail; Eddie Marsh tried to use his influence, those people from Bloomsbury whom Lawrence despised so much tried to help, though only because of their dislike of censorship, not liking for the book.132 The irreproachable May Sinclair did admire it, writing that ‘the suppression of this book was a crime, the murder of a beautiful thing’, but failed to get her words into print.133 Protest was fruitless.
The Aldingtons were outraged by the seizure of the book, which Richard always maintained was because of Lawrence’s opposition to the war. They saw quite a bit of the Lawrences that autumn; both the Aldingtons thought highly of The Rainbow, and Lawrence must have been glad to find an oasis of support. H.D. told Lowell it was a ‘magnificent’ book: with her own turbulent psychic life, she was perhaps readier than some to appreciate Lawrence’s portrayal of his characters’ stormy, vital desires, and the character of Ursula, finding her own freedom, must have struck her forcefully; Lawrence had described the book the previous year as the story of a ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’, and the blurb on the original dust jacket (thought to be written by Lawrence) says the book ‘ends with Ursula, the leading-shoot of the restless, fearless family, waiting at the advance post of our time to blaze a path into the future.’134 Ursula was a woman who had struck out, and, unlike Joan of Arc or Margaret Cravens, had not been defeated.
Reports of The Rainbow’s suppression soon reached America; Lowell, a keen admirer of Sons and Lovers, was alarmed by the graphic denunciations she read, and wrote to ask if his presence would harm the anthology. Aldington replied bracingly that the reports about the book had been ‘exaggerated and distorted’ and that it had been suppressed under ‘some practically obsolete law which enables any puritanic clergyman or other damnable scoundrel to apply to a magistrate to have a book suppressed’.135 Aldington at that stage had hopes of the order being reversed in a higher court, which was not to happen, but he was horrified at the idea of leaving Lawrence out on such grounds. Now that Lawrence was being persecuted by the philistines, Aldington was fiercely determined to support him. The second Georgian Poetry, he told Amy, in which Lawrence had several poems, had come out a few days after the seizure of the book and had sold out on its first day, with Lawrence’s poems being ‘favourably noticed’. In any case, he argued, ‘the eroticism people make so much fuss about is no more than that of a dozen continental authors of world-wide reputation’. It was in fact, he warned, going to be hard to persuade Lawrence to come in for the second year, for he was rather cross with Amy because she had not yet sent him his share of the royalties. They must not lose ‘the fine artist that Lawrence is’; he ‘must be written to, cossetted, and not criticised’. Lawrence was, Aldington now insisted, only ‘petulant’ because he was ill.136
As it happened, this letter crossed with one from Amy, who had spoken to Ferris Greenslet. He had not ‘the faintest objection to having Lawrence, in spite of the public executioner’, and she was no longer anxious about his inclusion. On the question of the delayed royalties, she wrote back very contritely, having cabled them to Lawrence with a long and friendly message, regarding the expense as her punishment. She had been meaning to find a moment to send him a proper letter, and somehow it hadn’t come. Now, however, she had written ‘a long letter … of the most cossety kind I can think of’, asking him for poems, and begging Aldington to follow this up.137 There was no need, however. Lawrence wrote back at once with poems, though he told Amy they were not imagist poems, and he wouldn’t mind if she turned them down. Amy agreed that they were not imagist, she told Aldington, but felt she couldn’t turn them down with ‘this row about Lawrence in England’. In any case, they ‘have none of the objections his work sometimes has’, though they were, she thought, ‘a bit vague and cosmic’:138 Lawrence was much preoccupied at this time, no longer with a moral revolution in society in general, something of which he now despaired, but with the need for the elite few to go through some form of spiritual death and resurrection. Perhaps this notion of spiritual rebirth was what appeared cosmic vagueness to the down-to-earth Amy: Lawrence’s poem, ‘In Trouble and Shame’, which would appear in the next anthology, is on this theme, with vivid imagery, if perhaps not imagistic. In it Lawrence writes that he wants to go through the ‘swaling sunset’,
Through the red doors where I could put off
My shame like shoes in the porch
My pain like garments,
And leave my flesh discarded lying
Like luggage of some departed traveller
Gone one knows not whither.
Then, he says, he ‘would laugh with joy’.139 Lawrence’s plan now was to move to some remote spot to set up a community with a small chosen band of his most valued friends. He called this projected community Ranamin, from the Hebrew word ‘Ra’ananim’ meaning ‘green, fresh or flourishing’ that he had learnt from his Russian Jewish friend, S. S. Koteliansky.140 He and Frieda hoped that autumn to go with two friends to Florida, where they had been promised the use of a cottage. Under recent legislation, however, Lawrence had to gain military exemption in order to leave the country. H.D. reported to Amy, ‘Poor Lawrence waited for hours in a queue to get his “medically misfit”. – But it rained on him & hundreds of others for hours – literally – and he was so horribly unhappy about the whole thing – that he flew home without his “misfit” and has been in bed ever since!’141 Leaving the country was for the present impossible, and he and Frieda decided to go to Cornwall for a while. Yet now he was planning to form Ranamin, he had renewed hope; in September he had written to Lady Cynthia, ‘The sight of the people of London strikes me into a dumb fury. The persistent nothingness of the war makes me feel like a paralytic convulsed with rage.’ Now he told her: ‘We want to make a new life in common – not a thing just for ourselves, a new life in common, a new birth in a new spirit … I am going to be happy – really really happy – we all are’.142