Last night I looked into the flames that leap in the big adobe fireplace that Lawrence built with the Indians, here at the ranch, in my room. He found an iron hoop to make the large curve of the fireplace. I don’t know how he did it but the chimney draws well, the big logs burn fast. Those leaping flames seemed he himself flickering in the night. 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.
I shrink from remembering and putting down that almost too great intensity of our life together. I resent committing to paper for others to read what was so magic and new, our first being together. I wanted to keep it secret, all to myself, secretly I wanted to exult in the riches he gave me of himself and me and all the world.
But I owe it to him and myself to write the truth as well as I can. I laugh at the claims of others that he might have loved them and that he didn’t care for me at all. He cared only too much. I laugh when they write of him as a lonely genius dying alone. It is all my eye. The absolute, simple truth is so very simple.
I laugh when they want to make him out a brutal, ridiculous figure, he who was so tender and generous and fierce.
What does it amount to that he hit out at me in a rage, when I exasperated him, or mostly when the life around him drove him to the end of his patience? I didn’t care very much. I hit back or waited till the storm in him subsided. We fought our battles outright to the bitter end. Then there was peace, such peace.
I preferred it that way. Battles must be. If he had sulked or borne me a grudge, how tedious!
What happened, happened out of the deep necessity of our natures. We were out for more than the obvious or ‘a little grey home in the West.’ Let them jeer at him, those superior people, it will not take away a scrap of his greatness or his genuineness or his love. To understand what happened between us, one must have had the experiences we had, thrown away as much as we did and gained as much, and have known this fulfilment of body and soul. It is not likely that many did.
But here I am far from the little top floor in the Bavarian peasant-house in the Isartal.
Lawrence had met me in Munich.
He had given up the idea of a lectureship at a German University and from now on he lived by his writing. A new phase of life was beginning for both of us. But on me lay still heavily the children I had left behind and could not forget. But we were together, Lawrence and I. A friend had lent us the little top flat with its balcony, three rooms and a little kitchen. The Alps floated above us in palest blue in the early morning. The Isar rushed its glacier waters and hurried the rafts along in the valley below. The great beechwoods stretched for hours behind us, to the Tegernsee.
Here we began our life together. And what a life! We had very little money, about fifteen shillings a week. We lived on black bread that Lawrence loved, fresh eggs, and ‘ripple’; later we found strawberries, raspberries, and ‘Heidelbeeren.’
We had lost all ordinary sense of time and place. Those flowers that came new to Lawrence, the fireflies at night and the glow-worms, the first beech leaves spreading on the trees like a delicate veil overhead, and our feet buried in last year’s brown beech leaves, these were our time and our events.
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.
I didn’t want people, I didn’t want anything, I only wanted to revel in this new world Lawrence had given me. I had found what I needed, I could now flourish like a trout in a stream or a daisy in the sun. His generosity in giving himself: ‘Take all you want of me, everything, I am yours’; and I took and gave equally, without thought.
When I asked him: ‘What do I give you, that you didn’t get from others?’ he answered: ‘You make me sure of myself, whole.’
And he would say: ‘You are so young, so young!’ When I remonstrated: ‘But I am older than you.’ - ‘Ah, it isn’t years, it’s something else. You don’t understand.’
Anyhow I knew he loved the essence of me as he loved the blueness of the gentians, whatever faults I had. It was life to me.
‘You have a genius for living,’ he told me.
‘Maybe, but you brought it out in me.’
But there were awful nights when he was still ill and feverish and delirious and I was frightened. Death seemed close. But the shadow of sickness soon vanished in the healthy, happy life we lived. He became strong, and full of energy and hope.
He would do nearly all the work of the small flat, bring the breakfast to me with a bunch of flowers that Frau Leitner had left on the milk jug in the early morning.
Frau Leitner had a shop underneath, with shoestrings and sweets, and bacon and brooms and everything under the sun. She gave Lawrence, whom she called ‘Herr Doktor,’ tastes of her ‘Heidelbeerschnapps,’ talking to him in her Bavarian dialect, while I, in a dream of wellbeing, would let time slip by. When I spilt coffee on the pillow I would only turn the pillow over. Nothing mattered except feeling myself live, and him. We talked and argued about everything. Vividly he would present to me all the people he had known in his youth, Walker Street with all its inhabitants, the close intimate life of what, for a better word, I called the common people; his mother, such a queen in her little house, and his father, down at the pit, sharing his lunch with the pit-pony. It all seemed romantic to me. And the colliers being drunk on Friday nights and battles going on inevitably, it seemed, every Friday night in nearly all the houses, like a weekly hysteria. I listened enchanted by the hour. But poverty in his home was grievous. Lawrence would never have been so desperately ill if his mother could have given him all the care he needed and the food she could not afford to buy for him with the little money she had.
Bitter it was to him, when a friend at the high school who took him home to tea, refused to continue the friendship as soon as he heard Lawrence was a miner’s son. Then I would tell him about my early life in Lorraine. Mine had been a happy childhood. We had a lovely house and gardens outside Metz. I lived through the flowers, as they came: snowdrops, scyllae and crocuses, the enormous oriental poppies in their vivid green leaves so overwhelmingly near one’s small face, the delicate male irises. My father would pick the first asparagus and I would trot behind his bent back. Later in the summer I lived on the fruit trees: cherry, pear, apple, plum, peach trees. I would even go to sleep on them and fall off, sometimes, trying to do my lessons up in them. I did not like school.
First I went to a convent, where I did not learn very much. ‘Toujours doucement, ma petite Frieda,’ they would say to me as I came dashing into class with my Hessian boots. But it was no use; I was a wild child and they could not tame me, those gentle nuns. I was happiest with the soldiers, who had temporary barracks outside our house for years. They invited my sister Johanna and me to their big Christmas tree hung with sausages, cigars, ‘hearts of gingerbread,’ packages from home, and little dolls they had carved for us. And they sang for us accompanied by their mournful harmonicas:
‘Wenn ich zu meinem Kinde geh.’
Once my father’s old regiment acted the occasion on which he had received his iron cross in the Franco-Prussian War. It was on the Kaiser’s birthday. After the ceremony the soldiers lifted my father on their shoulders and carried him through the hall. My heart beat to bursting: ‘What a hero my father is!’
But a few days after one of my special friends, a corporal, told me how he hated being a soldier, how bullied you were, how unjust and stupid it all was, that military life. He stood there talking to me in the garden path, in his bright blue uniform, while he tied some roses. He had a mark over his bed for each day he had still to serve, he told me. A hundred and nineteen more there were, he said. I looked up at him and understood his suffering. After that the flags of the dragoons and the splendid bands of the regiments had no longer the same glamour as they passed along the end of the garden to the Exerzierplatz. When the regiments were filing past, Johanna and I sat on the garden wall, very grandly. Then we would throw pears and apples into the ranks. Great confusion would arise. An irate major turned toward his men and yelled, we popped quickly out of sight behind the wall, only to reappear and begin anew.
What I loved most of all was playing with my boy friends in the fortifications around Metz, among the huts and trenches the soldiers had built. I always liked being with the boys and men. Only they gave me the kind of interest I wanted. Women and girls frightened me. My adolescence and youth puzzled me. Pleasure and social stuff left me unsatisfied. There was something more I wanted, I wanted so much. Where would I get it, and from whom? With Lawrence I found what I wanted. All the exuberance of my childhood came back to me.
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.’
I was very untidy and careless, so he took great pains to make me more orderly. ‘Look, put your woollen things in this drawer, in this one your silk clothes, and here your cotton ones.’
It sounded amusing, so I did it.
When I said: ‘But I like to be like the lilies in the field, who do not spin.’
‘What! Don’t they just work hard, those lilies,’ was his reply. ‘They have to bring up their sap, produce their leaves, flowers and seeds!’ That was that. Later on he aroused my self-respect. ‘You can’t even make a decent cup of coffee. Any common woman can do lots of things that you can’t do.’
‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘I’ll show him if I can’t.’ But that was later on.
One day, in Munich, seeing all the elegant people in the streets I had an aristocratic fit. I bought some handkerchiefs with an F and a little crown on them. When I brought them home he said: ‘Now I’ll draw my coat-of-arms.’ He drew a pickaxe, a school-board, a fountain pen with two lions rampant. ‘When they make me a Lord, which they never will,’ he said. Then, half jokingly, but I took it seriously: ‘Would you like me to become King of England?’ I was distressed. ‘Isn’t he satisfied, the whole universe is ours, does he want to be so dull a thing as a king?’ But I never doubted that he might have been a king if he wanted to. Then he would write poems for me, poems I took a little anxiously, seeing he knew me so well.
He would go for walks by himself, and his quick, light feet coming home told me in their footfall how he had enjoyed his adventure.
He would have a large, heroic bunch of flowers, or a tight little posy for me or a bright bird’s feather.
Then the story of his adventure, a deer peeping at him inquisitively from the underbrush, a handsome Bavarian peasant he had spoken to, how raspberries were just coming out, soldiers marching along the road.
Then again we would be thrown out of our paradisial state. Letters would come. The harm we had done; my grief for my children would return red hot.
But Lawrence would console me and say: ‘Don’t be sad, I’ll make a new heaven and earth for them, don’t cry, you see if I don’t.’ I would be consoled yet he was furious when I went on. ‘You don’t care a damn about those brats really, and they don’t care about you.’ I cried and we quarrelled.
‘What kind of an unnatural woman would I be if I could forget my children?’ Yet my agony over them was my worst crime in his eyes. He seemed to make that agony more acute in me than it need have been. Perhaps he, who had loved his mother so much, felt, somewhere, it was almost impossible for a mother to leave her children. But I was so sure: ‘This bond is for ever, nothing in heaven or earth can break it. I must wait, I must wait!’
My father had written: ‘You travel about the world like a barmaid.’ It was a grief to him, who loved me, that I was so poor, and socially impossible.
I only felt wonderfully free, ‘vogelfrei’ indeed. To Lawrence fell the brunt of the fight, and he protected me. ‘You don’t know how I stand between you and the world,’ he said, later on. If I supported him with all my might, the wings of his sure spirit made a shelter for me always.
Now I lie writing by the stream, where it makes a little pool. The bushes all around form an enclosed shelter for bathing, while in front stretches the alfalfa field, then the trees, then the desert, so vast and changing with sun and shadow. Curtains of rain, floating clouds, grey, delicate, thin but to the west today white, large, round, billowing.
It is the end of June. I wonder if the strawberries are ripe, in the hollow by the aqueduct, or if the wild roses are out, the very pink ones, along the stream by the Gallina. Shall I see a wild turkey, if I walk along the path Lawrence took so often, I running behind, to the mouth of the Gallina?
He and Mr Murry laid the big pipes on pillars of wood to bring the water along. Where tall aspens stand and the Gallina waters come tearing down. Often the pipes had to be fixed, after a cloudburst had broken the whole thing down.
Here at the ranch we are alive and busy, but Lawrence will see it no more.
Last night the coyotes have torn to pieces a young sheep, on the ranch. Poor thing, that looked at me with scared sheep’s eyes, when I drew near. How hateful coyotes are. Mr Murry tells me they even play with lambs, whisking their tails among them, to get them away more easily. Nature sweet and pure!
This is one of the perfect moments here. The days are swinging their serene hours across the immense skies, the sun sets splendidly, then a star comes, and the young moon in the old moon’s arms. The water sings louder than in the daytime. More and more stars come as the light fades out of the western sky.
But then, in the silence of the beautiful night, the coyotes, a few yards from the house, tore the lamb to pieces. How I wish someone would shoot them all, but they are hard to shoot.
Here I am in the present again, when I want to write of the past. I will go back to Icking, our village in the Isartal, and that young Lawrence who was beginning to spread his wings.
I think of my going into a chapel, in a village near Beuerberg. I looked at the Madonna on the altar; she wasn’t a mater dolorosa, nor of the spiritual sort, she was of the placid peasant type, and I said to her: ‘Yes, you have a halo round your head, but I feel as if I had a halo around the whole of me, that’s how he makes me feel. You have nothing but a dead son. It doesn’t seem good enough for me. Give me a live man.’
Sitting on a little landing pier, once, by the Kochelsee, dangling our feet in the clear water of the lake, Lawrence was putting the rings of my fingers on my toes to see how they looked in the clear water. Suddenly a shower overtook us. There was a bunch of trees behind, and a road going in both directions. We ran for shelter and must have run in opposite ways. I looked all around but Lawrence was not there. A great fear came over me, I had lost him, perhaps he was drowned, slipped into the lake. I called, I went to look, somehow he had dissolved into the air, I should never see him again. There was always this ‘not of the earth’ quality about him.
By the time I saw him coming down the road, an hour later, I was almost in hysterics. ‘Brother Moonshine’ I called him, as in the German fairytale. He didn’t like that.
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.
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?’
We talked about style in writing, about the new style Americans had evolved - cinematographic, he called it.
All this idea of style and form puzzled Lawrence.
For my part, I felt certain that a genuine creation would take its own form inevitably, the way every living thing does.
All those phrases ‘Art for art’s sake,’ ‘Le style c’est l’homme,’ are all very well but they aren’t creation. But Lawrence had to be quite sure in everything.
On some evenings he would be so gay and act a whole revival meeting for me, as in the chapel of his home town.
There was the revivalist parson. He would work his ngregation up to a frenzy; then, licking his finger to turn the imaginary pages of the book of Judgment and suddenly darting a finger at some sinner in the congregation: ‘Isyour name written in the book?’ he would shout.
A collier’s wife in a little sailor straw hat, in a frenzy of repentance, would clatter down the aisle, throw herself on her knees in front of the altar, and pray: ‘Oh Lord, our Henry, he would ‘ave come too, only he dursn’t, O Lord, so I come as well for him, O Lord!’ It was a marvellous scene! First as the parson then as the collier’s wife Lawrence made me shake with laughter. He told me how desperately ill he had been at sixteen, with inflammation of the lungs, how he was almost dead but fought his way back to life with the fierce courage and vitality that was his. It made me long to make him strong and healthy.
Healthy in soul he always was. He may have been cross and irritable sometimes but he was never sorry for himself and all he suffered.
This poem was written in the Isartal:
SONG OF A MAN WHO IS LOVED
Between her breasts is my home, between her breasts.
Three sides set on me space and fear, but the fourth side rests,
Warm in a city of strength, between her breasts.
All day long I am busy and happy at my work
I need not glance over my shoulder in fear of the terrors that lurk
Behind. I am fortified, I am glad at my work.
I need not look after my soul; beguile my fear
With prayer, I need only come home each night to find the dear
Door on the latch, and shut myself in, shut out fear.
I need only come home each night and lay
My face between her breasts;
And what of good I have given the day, my peace attests.
And what I have failed in, what I have wronged
Comes up unnamed from her body and surely
Silent tongued I am ashamed.
And I hope to spend eternity
With my face down-buried between her breasts
And my still heart full of security
And my still hands full of her breasts.