IN 1935, WHEN I was twelve, during one of the rare times my father came to see me in my grandmother’s small apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens, where she and I then lived, I astonished him by quoting a few words from a poem by Witter Bynner, the title of which I’ve forgotten. The words were, “ready for wine? There’s a cup inside.”
My father had met the poet in Taxco, Mexico, he told me, when he and my mother traveled there on a brief vacation from Hollywood and the movie studio where he had worked as a screenwriter after their return from Europe the preceding year.
Bynner had been a close friend of D. H. Lawrence’s, and he would amuse my parents with his lively descriptions of the frequent battles between the writer and his wife, Frieda, when plates and glasses flew through the air, hurled, he implied, with savage delight by both of them.
One evening, Bynner attended an all-night party given for Lawrence in New York City. After most of the guests had left, Bynner went to the kitchen, where he sat alone at a wooden table, feeling stale and desolate in the gray dawn. Lawrence entered the room. Seeming not to notice Bynner, he went directly to the sink, which, along with both counters, was nearly hidden by dirty dishes, took an apron from a nearby hook, tied its strings around his waist, and, whispering to himself as though reciting, began to clean up the night’s excesses.
I have no idea why I memorized those few words and said them to my father. Perhaps I hoped to please him with a reference to his own heavy drinking. Perhaps not.
I had found the thin volume of Bynner’s poems on one of three shelves in my grandmother’s skimpy bookcase, nearly invisible among a set of The Books of Knowledge. I guessed it had been left there by Leopold, one of my grandmother’s four sons.
Three years later I was standing before a large bookcase in the living room of a Montreal boarding school where I had been sent by Mary, my father’s second wife. Behind me, two other students whispered about a third. But my attention was drawn again and again to a book, Sons and Lovers. I reached for it ardently, much as, I came to believe after I had read it, it had reached for me. The author was D. H. Lawrence. Many years later I read a short paragraph written by his widow, Frieda.
“His courage in facing the dark recesses of his own soul impressed me always, scared me sometimes.”
The sentence was from a book written by her, Not I but the Wind, which my father scornfully retitled, “Not I but the Windy Old Bastard.” By then I had realized how his bitterness and disappointment had deformed nearly everything in his life. Sons and Lovers remained for me a lighthouse of consciousness. But his mockery had recalled something to me, the story he had told me, related to him by Bynner, of Lawrence washing dishes the night of the Manhattan party. How much like Paul Morel that had been, how like his delight in helping his mother with household tasks in that novel.
Another ten years elapsed. I was half a mile from Taos, New Mexico, with Richard, whom I would marry in a few months. We had found a place to stay in the tack room of an unused stable owned by Mrs. Lois Holmes, a widow who rented cabins.
We had driven west from New York City with our cat, Edna. After a week of confinement in the car and hotels, she went wild with freedom and raced about the grounds of the Holmes property, pausing to dig shallow holes at the base of trees whose names I would learn later.
Richard had quit his job at a Manhattan public relations firm where I also worked. Our limited funds were not enough to afford a cabin. We told Mrs. Holmes that, and of our wish to spend several months in Taos. She suggested the tack room in the stable. After her husband’s death several years earlier, his racehorses had been sold at auction. We took the tack room gratefully.
The stable had been painted red at one time, but the color had faded and the building had a long-forsaken look. The tack room was divided into two large spaces and two cubicles, one a toilet, the other a rudimentary kitchen with a two-burner kerosene stove, a small tin basin with one tap, and a dust-laden shelf above it that held a few rusty pots and a small frying pan.
In one of the two big rooms, a post ran lengthwise from a wall, with a saddle on it that had slipped sideways, so that at first glance it appeared as if someone had just dismounted. Worn harness straps and a bridle with a corroded bit hung from two nails that had been hammered crookedly into a narrow rafter. Spider webs, the spiders long gone, hung slackly from ceilings, in the corners where walls met, and even over the dirty glass of a big window opposite the entrance, itself a wide plank with a two-foot-square opening covered by a wire screen.
Mrs. Holmes hired two Indian men to move a few furnishings from a cabin she rarely rented. It was too close to a shed that housed three toilets and a shower room for most travelers. We made an arrangement to store food in her refrigerator.
I observed the two Indians carrying from cabin to tack room two cots, two chairs, two small tables, and lamps, along with a few plates and a handful of cutlery. There was no expression I could name on their faces, but later I concluded that it had been a kind of implacability, a resolve to endure all the abasement that came their way as though it were a triumph of a sort.
I was in my early twenties, young enough to feel the enchantment of new places. Even the metal forks and knives and spoons were thrilling to hold in my hands. Richard’s divorce seemed to be taking an eternity, but divorce was a complicated process then. Our hope was to start a new life together. We both intended to write. I didn’t think, beyond the next month, where we would find the money to survive. Or that there was no such thing as a new life.
Richard, born in Oklahoma, had spent his childhood and youth in New Mexico. He had gone briefly to college in Albuquerque before getting a job as a cub reporter on a local newspaper. He had wanted for years to return to New Mexico, he told me, and his long-held wish and my deep conviction about the virtue and rewards of living far from cities had carried us all the way to Taos. That first dusk we sat outside in two chairs we had brought out, holding drinks in chipped cups and watching Edna play with a bit of tumbleweed blown here and there by a fitful breeze.
The desert twilight fell like gauze over us, the stable, the cabins we glimpsed near the road. The deep quiet stilled my excitement. My thoughts had the formless drift of wind-stirred clouds in an expanse of sky, a feeling I had not experienced since childhood.
After a while, in silence, we went to the tack room. I cooked something for supper, then we washed and dried the few dishes, unpacked our portable typewriters, and went to bed.
We worked in the mornings and took long drives in the afternoons. Three or four narrow roads led out from Taos. One day we took the north road and drove into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and found a sheep ranch where the herders were Basques from northern Spain.
I was fluent in Spanish, but I noted that two of the herders seemed reluctant to speak it, although they too were fluent. I didn’t know then that the Basques had their own language, only discovering this decades later when, with ignorant familiarity, I spoke Spanish to a Basque cook employed by friends. With barely concealed offense in her voice, she said to me in a heavily accented English, “We have our own language.”
We visited the ranch once more later on. The Basques were shearing the sheep. A few of the animals bleated loudly and plaintively. The large metal teeth of the shears moved in wavelike arcs, the wool fell in piles to the ground. Sometimes the shears nicked the pink flesh of a sheep, and it ran away hastily, pitiful in its nakedness. The herders laughed among themselves, but I thought I heard an underlying sympathy in their laughter. Later the wool would be washed in the large metal vats we had seen at the edge of the corral.
In the evenings we occasionally drove out to the valley a few miles east of Taos, where a gambling casino had been set up in a barn. The Taos sheriff, I noted, was in charge of the roulette wheel, and the Basque sheepherders were losing all their money at the crap table—money they had saved for months for their return to Spain, now gambled away in a desert in a far-away country.
Their melancholy stoicism about their own weakness, the ironic acceptance that underlay it, were not new to me: I had seen it in the faces of Uncle Leopold and my grandmother. I had imagined that it was only familial, but now I saw it anew, a Spanish way of responding to the self’s conflicting impulses. It overcame what I had grown used to in myself—the denial of such double consciousness and a hard intention to win even as one lost. That evening in the gambling hell I wanted to touch their faces, as though in that way I might acquire some of what I imagined as the peacefulness of their resignation to their own natures.
Driving home later, Richard turned off the narrow highway onto a dirt road. In the moonlike landscape of the desert, we bumped along until we arrived at a lengthy, deep crevice. We parked and walked to its edge. Hundreds of feet below us was the Rio Grande River.
It was a brutal-looking stream of rocks and eddies and deceptively still pools of black water. In the daytime, we had waded in it. The water’s force had toppled me. I went under, laughing, until fear and water stopped my mouth.
A wooden bridge built by one of the early inhabitants of Taos, John Donne, crossed the river a quarter of a mile farther on, looking, from where we stood, like a giant clothespin. I recall asking someone how his name was spelled. The answer was, just like the seventeenth-century poet’s.
A few days later, I drove to a large adobe house owned by a woman who employed Indian workers to make Navajo souvenirs, including the one-toed, heavy velvet foot coverings the Pueblo Indians wore. The employer had gone to Albuquerque for the day. On a circular staircase in the entrance hall I found her daughter. She might have been fifteen, a very fat girl with a moon face from which two small eyes, dark as raisins, stared down at me. Her plump left hand gripped the railing. She had heard me arrive.
The way she stood halfway down the stairs, the fear in her face, her right hand rising suddenly to point toward the work area, didn’t look convincing to me. Her voice quavered as she said, “He’s drunk!”
She whispered loudly then about “his” intentions toward her, sexual, the same intentions all male Indians had toward white girls.
I didn’t know what to say, so I left her there and walked to the work area. In a large room, two steps down, I found a handsome Indian youth at a workbench, very drunk indeed.
“I make you shoes,” he said in a slurred voice, smiling up at me, and held up in an unsteady hand the black velvet slippers I had ordered and paid for. I thanked him and took them. When I passed the stairs, the girl was gone.
On the way home, I passed the estate of Mabel Dodge Luhan, an heiress who had established a literary colony in Taos in 1919. Tony Luhan, her husband from the Pueblo, was standing before a cluster of the hundreds of wooden birdhouses he had made for her. His back was toward me and his long black braid hung straight down like an exclamation point.
We often drove past the Taos Pueblo a few miles from the town’s main square. Gaunt horses grazed in fields that adjoined the walls of the Pueblo. I sensed a multitude inside, moving about their lives. The place emitted a secret energy I hadn’t detected in the facial expressions of the Indians I had seen. It was a hidden country within a country. The horses were ill-nourished—there was hardly any sustenance to be gotten from the patchy ground. Pueblo Indians kept horses, I’d been told, because they symbolized wealth and power.
One afternoon, Richard and I went to the one movie house in town. It was showing a western to a few patrons, among whom, close to the screen in the front row, sat a few Indians. When the screen filled with light, it revealed them in outline wrapped in blue or pink Sears, Roebuck blankets, as they watched Indians on horseback being chased across a prairie by yippying cowboys.
Robin, a painter from England, and his wife, Peggy, came to stay in one of Mrs. Holmes’s cabins. He was visiting the United States with the intention of painting portraits of literary people and those connected with them. Inevitably, we met the couple. He told us he was working on a painting of D. H. Lawrence’s widow, Frieda, who lived a few miles from Taos.
I would never have guessed she was still alive, much less that I would find myself so near to her. I recalled my father’s astonishment when I quoted Witter Bynner’s words to him, and I wondered if my astonishment at Robin’s words were not the same as his had been at the poet’s.
The painter told us that Frieda was a German baronness who had married a Nottingham literature professor, Ernest Weekly. She had had three children with him, and when she had run off with Lawrence, she had, in Robin’s words, “abandoned her family.”
Several days later, as I sat staring down at my typewriter, a voice asked, “Vot are you doing in dere?”
“Trying to write,” I answered.
“Gut!” she said strongly, nodding at me before she disappeared from view. Later that day, Robin told me the woman was Frieda Lawrence. Of course I had already guessed it.
The next morning when I went to take a shower, I discovered a tiny snake coiled around the drain, asleep. I dressed hastily in the shirt and jeans I had just dropped on the floor and went to get Richard.
He picked up a withered tree limb from the ground, went into the shower room and killed the little snake with three blows. I noted tiny amber-colored rattles at the end of its tail. Richard said, “Its bite is as bad as the big ones.”
In the afternoon I sat on a folding chair in a horse stall watching Robin set up his easel and prepare his palette. For an hour or so he used me as a practice model. As I sat there breathing in the lingering smells of horse and dung mixed with linseed oil, I dreamed of ghost horses. I sat for him again, and later on, again, and the oil sketch became a portrait.
Later that week, Robin invited us to join him and Peg for tea at Frieda’s house. We drove out of Taos in their rented car. There was no traffic, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains loomed over us, the land seemed to move along with the car on low billows, and the sun bore down fiercely, a brilliant yellow dazzle that did away with the past and the future, leaving only the present. We came to two adobe ranch houses facing each other across the road. They looked as if they’d been drawn by a child.
As we drew closer, I saw an elderly woman moving clumsily about the veranda of one of the houses. An ear trumpet stuck out from beneath her Harpo Marx–like yellow hair. A graceful young man joined her, took her arm, and led her to a chair. Robin told us she was Dorothy Brett, a longtime friend of the writer’s. Actually, he added, she had been Lawrence’s acolyte.
I was the first up the path to Frieda’s house, passing a wooden out-building halfway there. Breathlessly, I pushed open the front door and felt a soft resistance, as though pillows were piled up behind it.
But it was Frieda Lawrence’s ample behind as she was bending at that same moment to open the stove door. I glimpsed burned crackers covered with melted cheese in a pan.
“At least,” she said to me as she straightened up holding the pan with a kitchen towel, “Lawrence isn’t here to scold me for my clumsiness with these—” and she nodded toward the cheese and crackers. She laughed then, a husky, amiable sound.
The others had caught up with me, and we followed her into the living room, where she set the pan down on a roughly carpentered table. I was startled by the large paintings that crowded the white plaster walls. “Lawrence’s,” she said.
I found them repellent. The subjects were naked women crawling on a stone floor, their breasts and buttocks enormous, their faces angry or as blank as balloons. The work was done in raw, brutal colors, full of energy and hysteria.
I sat down beside her on a serape-covered sofa while Richard spoke across the room with Robin and Peg. Frieda told me that a week earlier a young man from Boston had visited her to talk about Lawrence. She was hardly able to get a word in. The young man had overflowed with his worshipful paean to the novelist.
“And he had rented a horse in Albuquerque and ridden here, over seventy-five miles,” she said smiling. “For the effect, you see, to get my attention to his heroic effort in the cause of Lawrence.”
The burned crackers had a good taste despite their charred edges. Frieda rose at some point to fetch glasses of water. The conversation, widening like a stream, grew more general. Peg twittered away, nourishing herself, no doubt, with her own Englishness. We stayed for an hour.
As we walked silently down the slope—I was too bemused by Frieda’s reality, the power of her mystery for me, to speak—I saw a short, heavy man standing in the path with his back toward us. He turned when we reached him. Robin had whispered to me that he was Angelo Ravagli, brought from Italy by Lawrence. His expression was sad, defeated. When he spoke, his Italian accent was strong, as though he’d just debarked on Ellis Island. Later I heard that he had been the model for Mellors, the gamekeeper in Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Robin told us more about Angelo when we were in the car. He kept a potter’s wheel inside the shed, and when he wasn’t gambling in the barn casino he would throw pots. I never saw one, though we visited Frieda often.
At some point, I learned that Frieda and Angelo had been denied American citizenship because they were living together illicitly. In 1950 they married, and soon after were forgiven by the government and allowed to become American citizens.
After Robin and Peg left Taos, we heard about Dorothy Brett from Frieda. She had sailed to Australia with the Lawrences, and Frieda said, “One morning on the voyage, she began to follow Lawrence into the toilet. That’s when I had to put my foot down.” She laughed unrestrainedly, as she was apt to do about many things.
After the first few visits to her, I guessed why she had me sit next to her always, and why she stared at me so intensely. I resembled her daughter Barbara, she said.
I wondered whether she missed her children all the time, or only at intense moments. But Lawrence had taken up all her attention, she told us, smiling as though at someone who stood just behind us. I shivered.
Angelo was bitter, I felt, because he was lonely and wanted to live the rest of his life in his own country. He went often to the barn to gamble away Frieda’s money.
It was there at the gambling hell that I learned that a rich easterner had bought an old ranch to use as a second home. It was the first time I had heard those two fateful words, “second home.” It was the start of a community of second homes in New Mexico.
Richard and I frequently drove to a ranch where we would rent desert ponies for an afternoon ride. We would sit on a corral fence watching them move around, some boisterously kicking up their hind legs, most plumply calm.
After we’d chosen our mounts, we would ride into the trackless desert. Tumbleweed would blow suddenly across the sand. The wind would drop. Then it would start up again as though it had yet another word to say.
One time I caught sight of a sidewinder rattlesnake zig-zagging swiftly toward my pony. Richard had seen it at the same moment and rode to my side. These ponies, he told me, were used to snakes and knew how to dance out of their way. When I glanced back to where we had been, I saw no snake, only a corkscrew ridge in the sand.
Toward the end of our second month, I picked up our mail at the Taos post office. So far, there hadn’t been much mail for us. But today there was a long business envelope addressed to Richard. I opened it. It was from one of the heads of the agency where we had both worked in New York. I read the short paragraph.
A company vice-president had written it, saying that he hoped that Richard was enjoying his long vacation. He was looking forward to his return. There were a number of new accounts to be dealt with.
I returned to the tack room and silently held out the letter to Richard. After he had read it, I recall saying, “You told me you had quit for good.” He answered no, he had always expected to return to the agency. Where had I gotten the idea that he had left it permanently? When I think back to that moment, I still feel my wretched bewilderment.
Years later, after Richard and I had been parted for many years, I went to a dinner party in Manhattan. I heard Diana Trilling, whom I had just met that evening, claim that when it came to writing about nature, Norman Mailer had it all over D. H. Lawrence.
I groaned, I imagined, quietly. But Mrs. Trilling heard me. She rose from the dinner table and marched directly out of the apartment, the door slamming behind her.
The violence of her departure was mortifying. I blushed. The poet Stanley Kunitz, sitting next to me at the table, said, “That’s the second dinner party in ten days that I’ve seen her leave in a tantrum.” I knew he wanted to comfort me. But that humiliating explosion was the occasion for Stanley to tell a Lawrence story.
Years before, he had spent a summer on the outskirts of a small French village, Vence, with a group of other young people. Stanley, along with a few others, would walk to a post office a mile or so away to collect the group’s mail. One morning they passed a house on whose upper balcony sat a blanketed figure in a wheelchair, an attendant close by. Someone said, “That’s D. H. Lawrence.”
The next morning as they passed the house, Stanley threw a note he had written up onto the balcony. In it, he expressed his love and admiration for Lawrence’s work.
The attendant reached down, picked up the note and read it to Lawrence as Stanley and the others could see and hear.
When they returned with their mail and passed the house again, Stanley glanced up at the blanketed figure on the balcony. As he did so, the figure rose to its feet and bowed toward the poet.
Several weeks later when Stanley walked by the house, the man seated in the wheelchair was no longer there.
It was 1930. D. H. Lawrence died that summer of tuberculosis. He was forty-five years old.
He had left behind brilliant work, poems, translations of Italian writers (among them novels by Giovanni Verga), essays, short stories, and the luminous “Odour of Chrysanthemums,” a story that can stand, along with three of his novels—Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, and The Rainbow—among the most radiant and memorable writing of the past two hundred years.
But now his name is barely recognizable to most North American readers, and his reputation has suffered from attacks by groups who quarrel with this or that idea (some of them mad), which he always expressed with the provocation of a coal-miner’s son intruding upon the English literary world. An early prudery kept Lady Chatterley’s Lover out of print until 1959, not so very different an impulse in the government forces that would not permit American citizenship to be granted to Angelo Ravagli and Frieda Lawrence until they had married each other.