The first snow has fallen, it’s a still, black and white world. All the gold of the autumn has gone. On the mountains it was green-gold where the aspens turned, and the oakbrush was red-gold and there was yellow-gold in the tall sunflowers all along the road to Taos. The sage brush bloomed pale yellow and the fields and openings of the woods were yellow with small sunflowers. The mountains looked like tigers with their stripes of gold and dark pine trees. And the golden autumn sun lit it all. Now it has gone, this golden world: the frost and the snow have taken it away. I am writing in the sun on the snowy hill behind the cabins, where the Indians had their camp; where Lawrence and I slept in the summer, years ago, and again a grey squirrel scolded me for intruding; I wonder if it is the same grey squirrel. The snow drips from the cedar trees that are alive with birds; it is melting fast; in the desert below it has gone. The pinto ponies look bright like painted wooden toys against the snow. The black and white pigs follow me grunting and the black cats look shiny and black on the whiteness, delicately trotting after me. I have seen tracks of wild turkeys, of deer and bears, in the Gallina. I am now leaving that English autumn there in Berkshire, with its blackberry hedges and mushroom fields and pale sunsets behind a filigree of trees.
I am leaving Lawrence behind, who doesn’t want to come to Germany so soon after the war. I go on my journey, a nightmare of muddle, my trunks stolen. I arrive in Baden, so glad to see my sisters and my mother, but, oh, so many, many dead that had been our life and our youth. A sad, different Germany.
We had suffered so much, all of us, lost so much. And money was scarce.
Meanwhile Lawrence had gone to Florence and I went to join him. I arrived at four o’clock in the morning. ‘You must come for a drive with me,’ he said, ‘I must show you this town.’ We went in an open carriage, I saw the pale crouching Duomo and in the thick moonmist the Giotto tower disappeared at the top into the sky. The Palazzo Vecchio with Michelangelo’s David and all the statues of men, we passed. ‘This is a men’s town,’ I said, ‘not like Paris, where all statues are women.’ We went along the Lungarno, we passed the Ponte Vecchio, in that moonlight night, and ever since Florence is the most beautiful town to me, the lily town, delicate and flowery.
Lawrence was staying at a pensione on the Lungarno with Norman Douglas and Magnus.
The English there in Florence had still a sense of true hospitality, in the grand manner. And yet it struck me all as being like ‘Cranford,’ only it was a man’s ‘Cranford.’ And the wickedness there seemed like old maids’ secret rejoicing in wickedness. Corruption is not interesting to me, nor does it frighten me: I find it dull.
Nobody knows Norman Douglas that doesn’t know him in German. When he talks German you know something about him that you don’t know if you only know him in English. I was thrilled at the fireworks of wit that went off between Lawrence and Douglas. They never quarrelled. I understood that Douglas had to stand up for his friend Magnus and to Lawrence’s logical puritanical mind Magnus presented a problem of human relations. When we had gone to Capri and Magnus was in trouble at Montecassino, Lawrence went there and lent him some money, and yet we had so very little then.
Later Magnus appeared at our Fontana Vecchia at Taormina, having fled from Montecassino. He came almost taking for granted that we would be responsible for him, that it was our duty to keep him. This disturbed Lawrence.
‘Is it my duty to look after this man?’ he asked me.
To me it was no problem. Had I been fond of Magnus, had he had any meaning, or purpose - but no, he seemed only anti-social, a poor devil without any pride, and he didn’t seem to matter anyhow. With the money Lawrence had lent him, he stayed at the best hotel in Taormina, to my great resentment, we who could not afford to stay even in a second-rate hotel. I felt he made a fool of Lawrence, and afterwards, when we went to Malta, crossing second class from Palermo, whom should I discover gaily swanking and talking to an English Navy officer but Magnus on the first-class deck! The cheek of the man! He had written to Lawrence: ‘I am sweating blood till I am out of Italy.’ I knew his sort, people always sweating blood and always going to shoot themselves. But Magnus, anyhow, did commit suicide at the end. It was a shock, but there was nothing else for him to do. It seemed to me he had put his money on the wrong horse. He thought the splendour of life lay in drinking champagne, having brocade dressing gowns, and that kind of thing. But Lawrence felt deeply disturbed by Magnus and did feel a responsibility for him.
There is a letter from Douglas to Lawrence in which Douglas says: ‘Go ahead, my boy, do as you like with Magnus’s work.’ Lawrence wanted to pay the Maltese young men who had helped Magnus, hence the publication of Magnus’s memoirs with Lawrence’s introduction.
From Florence we went to Capri. I didn’t like Capri; it was so small an island, it seemed hardly capable to contain all the gossip that flourished there. So Lawrence went to Sicily and took Fontana Vecchia for us, outside Taormina.
Living in Sicily after the war was like coming to life again. Fontana Vecchia was a very simple but big-roomed Here are letters of Lawrence to my mother:
Fontana Vecchia Taormina Sicilia 16 March Meine liebe Schwiegermutter:
Your post card came this morning. I do hope you will be feeling better. Frieda is in Rome, doing her passport. I hope by the time you have this card she will be with you. It will make her happy to nurse you and get you better. Soon you must be about walking - and then I will come to Germany and perhaps we can all go away into the Schwarzwald and have a good time. Meanwhile I sit in Fontana Vecchia, and feel the house very empty without F. Don’t like it at all: but don’t mind so long as you will be better.
I am having my portrait painted: hope that today will be the last sitting, as I am tired. I look quite a sweet young man, so you will feel quite pleasant when I send you a photograph. The weather is once more sunny and beautiful, the sea so blue, and the flowers falling from the creeper.
I have no news as yet from Rome, but hope she is managing everything easily. I am all right in Taormina: people invite me to tea and dinner all the time. But I don’t want to go very badly. I am correcting the MS. of my diary of a Trip to Sardinia, which I think will amuse you. Give my love to Else. Tell me if there is anything I can send: and do get better soon.
Fontana Vecchia Taormina, Sicily
Sunday, Dec. 10
Dear Mother-in-Law:
I am glad you got the cheque. But don’t trouble about being grateful. The money is there, all right, and enough said.
Frieda does not want any. We had a piece of luck. The professor of English Literature in Edinburgh gave me a prize: a hundred pounds for ‘The Lost Girl. ‘ That is a piece of luck. I hope to have the money next week. A hundred pounds is a nice little sum.
Please, mother-in-law, send 500 marks to Hadu and the rest. We don’t send any Christmas parcels, the post is so difficult here in Italy. But when the book arrives I will send it to you. I am so glad that you are feeling well. But go carefully before Xmas. Go on still, small feet and don’t get overbearing and drunk.
D. H. L.
A thousand white horses on the hard blue sea and the sailing ships run anxiously with half a wing.
Frieda has made a hundred good ‘Seckerle, ‘ very good - made them this morning.
(Translated from the German)
Fontana Vecchia
I am not working at the present time. I wrote three long stories since we are here - that will make quite a nice book. I also collected my short stories ready for a book. So, for the moment I am free, I don’t want to begin anything else, only perhaps translate a grey Sicilian novel ‘Maestro Don Gesualdo’ by Giovanni Verga. It is pure Sicilian and you can see in it how heavy and black and hopeless are these Sicilians inside. Outside so beautiful, inside horror and money. No, mother-in-law, here out of Europe nothing new can come forth. They can only go on chewing the same old strings. The Banca di Sconto, perhaps the biggest bank in Italy, has failed, does not pay and such a black cloud over the people here. Money is the blood of an Italian. He says it himself: ‘Vuole il sangue mio - he wants my blood,’ if he has to pay. But it is also cruel. Very likely the Government will come and help the people...
(Translated from the German)
Fontana Vecchia Taormina, Sicily
Dear Mother-in-Law:
We must find a good ship. Maybe we’ll leave next month, but not for sure. And if we go to America and I can earn some money, we can easily return to Germany and see you. If one only has the dollars, then America is no further from Baden than Taormina, perhaps not as far. You know it well.
I have had a little influenza, it. was very cold, the snow came nearer and nearer down the mountains. Monte Venere was white, also our own Monte Riretto. But right near to us the snow could not reach, the sea said no, and now, thank God, it is warm as summer, the snow has flown away, the sea is blue, and the almonds are busy flowering. Many thousands of birds came down with the cold - goldfinches, blackbirds, redbreasts, redtails, so gay and coloured, and thank goodness, cartridges are so dear that the Italians can’t buy them.
Frieda also wants to write a word. We sit in the salotto, warm and still, with the lamp on the table. Outside, through the door, I see like twilight, the moonlit sea; and the moon through the begonia leaves of our terrace; and all is quite still, except from time to time the stove crackles. If I think that we are going away I feel melancholy. But inside I feel sure, that I must go. This is a beautiful end, but better a difficult beginning than only an end.
Greet all. Tell Else I had all the letters: and Friedel writes English so well. He’ll think little of my German. I am so glad you have Annie with you and are not alone these long winter evenings.
Keep well always. I’ll write again soon. Make a bow for me to all the ladies of the Stift in my name.
Your son-in-law,
D. H. Lawrence (Translated from the German)
Fontana Vecchia Taormina Sicily Sunday
My dear Mother-in-Law:
We sit waiting to depart - 4 trunks - one household trunk, 1 book trunk, Frieda’s and mine, two small valises, a hatbox, and two very small bags: just like Abraham going to a new land. My heart is trembling now, mostly with pain - the going away from home, and the people and Sicily. But I will forget it and only think of palms and elephants and monkeys and peacocks. Tomorrow at 10.34 we leave here: eat at Messina, where we must change, arrive at 8:30 at Palermo, then to the Hotel Panormus where our friend lives. Thursday to Naples by boat, there at the Hotel Santa Lucia. Then on the S.S. ‘Osterley,’ Orient Line to Ceylon. The ship goes on to Australia. You have the address - Ardnarce, Lake View Estate, Kandy, Ceylon. Think, it is only 14 days from Naples. We can always return quickly when we’ve had enough. Perhaps Else is right and we shall return to our Fontana. I don’t say no: I don’t say anything for certain. Today I go, tomorrow I return. So things go. I’ll write again from Palermo if there’s time. I think of you.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
R.M.S. ‘Osterley’ Tuesday, 28 February
My dear Mother-in-Law:
We have been gone for two days. We left Naples Sunday evening, 8 o’clock. Monday morning at 8 o’clock we came through the Straits of Messina and then for hours we saw our Etna like a white queen or a white witch there standing in the sky so magic-lovely. She said to me, ‘You come back here,’ but I only said, ‘No,’ but I wept inside with grief grief of separation. The weather is wonderful - blue sky, blue sea, still. Today we see no land, only the long thin white clouds where Greece lies. Later on we shall see Crete (Candia). We arrive on Thursday at Port Said. There this letter goes on land. We also for a few hours. Then we go through the Suez Canal and so into the Red Sea. This ship is splendid, so comfortable, so much room and not many passengers. The berths are not half taken. It is just like a real luxury hotel. In the morning at seven o’clock comes the steward with a cup of tea. - If you want to take a bath and if cold or hot or how. At 8 o’clock the breakfast gong rings and such a menu - cooked pears, porridge, fish, bacon, eggs, fried sausages, beefsteak, kidneys, marmalade, all there. Then afterwards one sits about, flirts or plays croquet. Eleven o’clock comes the steward with a cup of Bovril. One o’clock lunch - soup, fish, chicken or turkey, meat, entrées, always much too much. Four o’clock tea, 7 o’clock dinner. Ah no, one eats all the time. But you also have an appetite at sea, when it is still and so heavenly like now. I find it strange that it is so still, so quiet, so civilized. The people all so still and so easy and such a cleanliness, all so comfortable. Yes, it is better than Italy. The Italians are not good now, everything becomes base. Frieda caught a cold in Naples, and you ought to see how good the steward and stewardess are with her as she lies in bed. They come so quickly with tea or soda water or what she wants and always such gentle manners. After Italy it is extraordinary. Yes, civilization is a beautiful and fine thing if it only remains alive and does not become ennui. I can write to you again from Aden and then not again before Ceylon. Now I must go down and see if Frieda has got up. Her cold is better today.
I am sorry you were not there to see us go on board at Naples, with trunks and bits and pieces - baskets of apples and oranges (gifts) and a long board that is a piece of a Sicilian wagon painted very gaily with two scenes out of the life of Marco Visconte. Else knows how beautiful are these Sicilian carts and the facchini are always crying: ‘Ecco la Sicilia - Ecco la Sicilia in viaggio per I’India!’ For the moment a rivederci.
Frieda also ought to write a word.
D. H. L.
The whole afternoon we have seen Crete with snow on the mountains-so big the island. Also another little island, all yellow and desert with great ravines. Now the sun is down, the rim of the sky red, the sea inky blue and the littlest, finest, sharpest moon that I ever saw. It is already quite warm.
Wednesday Today only warm and still. Seen no land - seagulls and two ships. Tomorrow morning we arrive at Port Said - letters must be posted tonight before 10 o’clock.
D. H. L.
R.M.S. ‘Osterley’ Tuesday, 7 March Arabian Sea Dear Mother-in-Law:
Perhaps I can post this letter at Aden this evening, but we do not stop. We have come so far and so lovely. We stopped three hours in Port Said, and it was quite like the Thousand and One Nights. It was 9 o’clock in the morning, and the ladies of Port Said were all abroad shopping. Little black waddling heaps of black crêpe and two houri eyes between veil and mantle. Comic is the little peg that stands above the nose and keeps veil and headcloth together. There came a charabanc with twenty black women parcels. Then one of the women threw back her veil and spat at us because we are ugly Christians. But you still see everything - beggars, water carriers, the scribe who sits with his little table, and writes letters, the old one who reads the Koran, the men who smoke their ‘chibouks’ in the open café and on the pavement - and what people! Beautiful Turks, Negroes, Greeks, Levantines, Fellaheen, three Bedouins out of the desert like animals, Arabs, wonderful. We have taken coal on board, and then at midday off again into the Suez Canal, and that is very interesting. The Canal is eighty-eight miles long, and you can only travel five miles an hour. There you sit on this great ship and you feel really on land, slowly travelling on a still land ship. The shores are quite near, you can surely throw an orange at the Arabs that work on the shores. Then you see beautifully, wonderfully, the Sahara Wüste, or desert - which do you say? The waterway goes narrow and alone through red-yellow sands. From time to time Arabs with camels work on the shores and keep on shouting ‘Hallo, Hallo’ when the big ship passes so slowly, in the distance little sharp sand hills so red and pink-gold and sharp and the horizon sharp like a knife edge so clear. Then a few lonely Palms, lonely and lost in the strong light, small, like people that have not grown very tall.
Then again only sand, gold-pink and sharp little sand hills, so sharp and defined and clear, not like reality but a dream. Solemn evening came, and we so still, one thought we did not seem to move any more. Seagulls flew about like a sandstorm, and a great black bird of prey alone and cruel, so black between thousands of white screaming, quick-flying sea birds. Then we came to the Dead Sea, flat seas that extend very far, and slowly the sun sank behind the desert with marvellous colours, and as the sun had set, then such a sky like a sword burning green and pink. Beautiful it was, I have never seen anything so superhuman. One felt near to the doors of the old Paradise, I do not know how, but something only half human, something of a heaven with grey-browed, overbearing and cruel angels. The palm trees looked so little the angels should be much bigger and every one with a sword. Yes, it is a frontier country.
Next morning we were in the Red Sea. There stands Mount Sinai, red like old dried blood, naked like a knife and so sharp, so unnaturally sharp, like a dagger that has been dipped in blood and has dried long ago and is a bit rusty and is always there like something dreadful between man and his lost Paradise. All is Semitic and cruel, naked, sharp. No tree, no leaf, no life: the murderous will and the iron of the idea and ideal - iron will and ideal. So they stand, these dreadful shores of this Red Sea that is hot like an oven without air. It is a strange exit through this Red Sea - bitter. Behind lie finally Jerusalem, Greece, Rome, and Europe, fulfilled and past - a great dreadful dream. It began with Jews and with Jews it ends. You should have seen Sinai, then you could know it. The ideal has been wicked against men and Jehovah is father of the ideal and Zeus and Jupiter and Christ are only sons. And God be praised Sinai and the Red Sea are past and consummated.
Yesterday morning we came through the Straits of Babel-Mandeb, again into the open. I am so glad that we came this way. Yesterday we always saw land - Arabia naked and desert but not so red and sharp and like dried blood. Today we see no land but later on we shall pass Cape Socotra. This ship has gained fifteen hours. We are fifteen hours before time. Perhaps we arrive in Colombo on Sunday evening instead of Monday. It is very warm, but there is always air. The sea is covered with little white sea-horses, but the ship is still and sure. We have not had one single bad moment. All here on board so friendly and so good and comfortable. I work on the translation of ‘Maestro Don Gesualdo ‘ and I let my inkpot fall on the deck. The ‘Osterley’ shall wear my black sign for ever. At 11 o’clock in the morning we do not get Bovril any more, but ice cream. The women all wear colourful summer frocks. In the evening we dance. We see now the little flying fish. They are all silver and they fly like butterflies, so wee. There are also little black dolphins that run about like little black pigs.
Benediciti,
D. H. Lawrence
Fontana Vecchia had a large podere to it. Great ‘vasche’ were on the rocky slope toward the sea, pools of green water to feed the lemon and orange trees. The early almond blossoms pink and white, the asphodels, the wild narcissi and anemones, all these we found during our walks, nothing new would escape Lawrence and we never got tired finding new treasures.
We went on a jolly expedition to Syracuse with Renée and John Juta and Insole. Trains had their own sweet way in Italy then and arrived when they felt like it. I remember being much impressed by how Renée Hansard, with the experience of a true colonial, was fortified with a hamper of food and a spirit lamp so we could have tea at any time.
She pulled out her embroidery with its wools from a neat little bag. She turned the railway car into a live little temporary home. The quarries of Syracuse impressed me much. Here at Syracuse the flower of the Athenian youth had been defeated; in these quarries the Greek men had been put to starve while the ladies of Syracuse took their walks along the top of the quarries to see them slowly die. A sinister dread impression it left in me. I doubt whether centuries can clean a place of such inhumanity, the place will retain and remember such horrors. Syracuse and its splendour have gone. Man is more cruel than nature but whenever he has been so he pays for it.
Of our winter excursion to Sardinia Lawrence has described every minute, it seems to me, with extraordinary accuracy.
Garibaldi, the picturesque, had begun his campaign here in Sicily with his thousand, with his Anita and his South American experience.
Along our rocky road the peasants rode past into the hills on their donkeys, singing loudly, the shepherds drove their goats along, playing their reed pipes as in the days of the Greeks. We had an old Greek temple in the garden; there was the beautiful Greek theatre at Taormina, facing the Etna; what a marvellous stage for a play, not a modern play, alas, but how I longed to see one of the old giants like Sophocles there. How I longed for the old splendour of life to come back to us in those shabby after-the-war days.
‘Give me a little splendour, O Lord,’ would be my prayer.
There in Taormina, in the whole of Sicily, one could feel the touch of the hands of many civilizations: Greek and Moorish and Norman and beyond into the dim past.
Old Grazia did our shopping and I loved watching Lawrence doing the accounts with her, her sly old Sicilian face spying his, how much she could rook him.
‘She can rook me a little, but not too much,’ he would say, and he kept a firm hand on her.
The sun rose straight on our beds in the morning, we had roses all winter and we lived the rhythm of a simple life, getting up early, he writing or helping in the house or getting the tangerines from the round little trees in the garden or looking at the goat’s new kids. Eating, washing up, cleaning the floor and getting water from the trough near the wall, where the large yellow snake came to drink and drew itself into its hole in the wall again.
Wherever Lawrence was, the surroundings came alive so intensely. At the Fontana Vecchia we mostly cooked on charcoal fires, but on Sundays he lit the big kitchen stove for me, and I, who had become quite a good cook by now, made cakes and tarts, big and little, sweet pies and meat pies and put them on the side-board in the dining room and called them Mrs Beeton’s show.
Once we had lunch with three friends at their villa. It was a jolly lunch. We had some white wine that seemed innocent, but it was not. When we left, going home, I felt its effects but soon got over it.
‘We must hurry, because those two English ladies are coming to tea.’
So we hurried home and unfortunately the white Sicilian wine affected Lawrence later. The very English ladies came and Lawrence was terribly jovial and friendly with them. I tried to pull his sleeve and whispered: ‘Go away,’ but it was no use.
‘What are you telling me to go away for?’ he said.
I could see the two visitors being very uneasy and wanting to leave.
‘No, no, you must have some mimosa, I’ll get you some,’ Lawrence insisted. So he went with them through the garden, tried to climb a small mimosa tree and fell.
The ladies hurried away.
Next day Lawrence was chagrined and he met one of the ladies and tried to apologize to her, but she was very stiff with him, so he said: ‘Let her go to blazes.’
I think from this incident arose the story that Lawrence was a drunkard. Poor Lawrence, he who could not afford wine and didn’t want it, who was so naturally abstemious. I have seen him drunk only twice in all my life with him.
We stayed at Taormina in the heat and I remember when the mulberries were ripe and delicious and he climbed a big mulberry tree in his bathing suit. The mulberries were so juicy and red and they ran down his body so that he looked like one of those very realistic Christs we had seen on our walk across the Alps years ago.
He wrote ‘Birds, Beasts and Flowers’ and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ at Fontana Vecchia, and also ‘The Lost Girl.’ Sea and Sardinia’ he wrote straight away when we came back from Sardinia in about six weeks. And I don’t think he altered a word of it. His other works, especially the novels, he wrote many times, parts of them anyhow. Sometimes I liked the first draft best, but he had his own idea and knew the form he wanted it to take.
One day I found the manuscript of ‘Sea and Sardinia’ in the W.C. at Fontana Vecchia. So I told him: ‘But why did you put it there, it’s such a pity, it’s so nicely written and tidy.’ I had then no idea it might have any value, only regretted the evenly written pages having this ignominious end. But no, he had a passion for destroying his own writing. He hated the personal touch.
‘I would like to burn all my writing. Print is different. They-can have it in print, my stuff.’
Just as he wanted Lawrence, the private person, separate from Lawrence the writer, the public man. He guarded his privacy ferociously. He liked best to meet people who knew nothing about him. He really disliked talking about his writing. ‘They don’t like it, anyhow,’ he would say. But I read every day what he had written; his writing was the outcome of our daily life.
I had to take in what he had written and had to like it. Then he was satisfied and did not care for the approval of the rest of the world. What he wrote he had lived and was sure of. Travelling with him was living new experiences vividly every minute.
Then from Fontana Vecchia, we were really leaving Europe for the first time.
We did so much with the little money we had, making homes and unmaking them.
We unmade our beloved Fontana Vecchia and went to Palermo where the ‘facchini’ were so wild and threw themselves on our luggage; I can see Lawrence struggling amongst a great crowd of them, waving his umbrella about, equally wild. It was midnight and I was terrified.
An American friend gave me the side of a Sicilian cart I had always longed for. It had a joust painted on one panel, on the other St Genevieve. It was very gay and hard in colour. I loved it. Lawrence said: ‘You don’t mean to travel to Ceylon with this object?’
‘Let me, let me,’ I implored. So he let me. And off we set for Naples. There we were bounced in the harbour into our P. & O. boat. We arrived nearly too late, the gang-plank was pulled up immediately the minute we got on board. How we enjoyed that trip! Everybody feeling so free and detached, no responsibility for the moment, people going to meet husbands or wives, people going to Australia full of the wonders that were coming to them, and Lawrence being so interested and feeling so well. How tenderly one loves people on boats! They seem to become bosom friends for life. And then we went through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, Arabia Deserta on one side, so very deserta, so terrifying. Then one morning I woke up and I was sure I could smell cinnamon; the ship stopped and we were in Colombo. It struck me: ‘I know it all, I know it all.’ It was just as I expected it. The tropics, so marvellous these black people, this violent quick growth and yet a little terrifying, a little repulsive, as Lawrence would say. We stayed with the Brewsters in a huge bungalow with all those black servants in the background. In the morning the sun rose and we got up and I always felt terrified at the day and its heat. The sun rose higher and the heat would rise. We went for a walk and I saw a large thing coming towards us, large like a house, an elephant holding a large tree with its trunk! Its guide made him salaam to us, the great animal - young natives would come and pay visits to us and the Brewsters, who were interested in Buddhism. Lawrence became so terribly English and snubbed them mostly. Some young Cingalese said I had the face of a saint! Didn’t I make the most of it and didn’t Lawrence get this saint rubbed into him! Then we had the fantastic experience of a Pera-Hera given in honour of the Prince of Wales. Such a contrast was the elegant figure of the Prince sitting on the balcony of the Temple of the Tooth amongst the black seething tropical mass of men. The smell of the torches and the oily scent of dark men. Great elephants at midnight, and the heat in the dark. The noise of the tom-toms that goes right through some dark corner in one’s soul. The night falls so quickly and the tom-toms begin and we could see the native fires on the hills all around. Noises from the jungle; those primeval cries and howls and the brainfever bird and the sliding noises on the roof and the jumps in the darkness outside. How could one rest under such a darkness that was so terribly alive!
I The climate didn’t suit Lawrence and we had to leave. Lawrence was not well and happy in Ceylon. The tropics didn’t suit him.
I was so enthralled with the life around us, it was like living in a fairy-tale. We would go to Casa Lebbes, a little jewelshop at Number 1 Trincomalee Street in Kandy, and look at his jewels. He would pull out a soft leather bundle, undo it, and put before our eyes coloured wonders of sapphires, blue and lovely yellow ones, and rubies and emeralds. Lawrence bought me six blue sapphires and a yellow one: they were round in order to make a brooch in the form of a flower. The yellow one was the centre and the blue petal-shaped ones formed a flower round it. Also he bought me a cinnamon stone and a little box of moonstones. The blue sapphire flower I have lost, as I have lost so many things in my life, and the moonstones have disappeared, only the cinnamon stone remains. I wanted to go to Australia; it attracted me. Off we set again, trunks, Sicilian cart, and all, and went to Perth. Only Englishmen and Australians on the boat and it really felt as if one was going to the end of the earth.
We stayed only a little while near Perth and went a long way into that strange vague bush, everything so vague and dim, as before the days of Creation. It wasn’t born yet. Vague, remote, and unborn it made one feel oneself. There we stayed with Miss Skinner, whose manuscript Lawrence was looking over: ‘The Boy in the Bush.’ Later on, as I look back, it’s all vague to me. Then, after a few weeks, we went on to Sydney.
We arrived in Sydney Harbour - nice it was not knowing a soul.
A young officer on the boat had told me: ‘The rain on the tin roofs over the trenches always made me think of home.’ Sydney.
And there they were, the tin roofs of Sydney and the beautiful harbour and the lovely Pacific Coast, the air so new and clean. We stayed a day or two in Sydney, two lonely birds resting a little. And then we took a train with all our trunks and said: ‘We’ll look out of the window and where it looks nice we’ll get out.’ It looked very attractive along the coast but also depressing. We were passing deserted homesteads: both in America and Australia, these human abandoned efforts make one very sad. Then we came to Thirroul, we got out at four and by six o’clock we were settled in a beautiful bungalow right on the sea. Lined with jarra the rooms were, and there were great tanks for rain water and a stretch of grass going right down to the Pacific, melting away into a pale-blue and lucid, delicately tinted sky.
But what a state the bungalow was in! A family of twelve children had stayed there before us: beds and dusty rugs all over the place, torn sailing canvases on the porches, paper all over the garden, the beautiful jarra floors grey with dust and sand, the carpet with no colour at all, just a mess, a sordid mess the whole thing. So we set to and cleaned, cleaned and cleaned as we had done so many times before in our many temporary homes! Floors polished, the carpet taken in the garden and scrubbed, the torn canvases removed. But the paper in the garden was the worst; for days and days we kept gathering paper.
But I was happy: only Lawrence and I in this world. He always made a great big world for me, he gave it me whenever it was possible; whenever there was wonder left, we took it, and revelled in it.
The mornings, those sunrises over the Pacific had all the wonder of newness, of an uncreated world. Lawrence began to write ‘Kangaroo’ and the days slipped by like dreams, but real as dreams are when they come true. The everyday life was so easy, the food brought to the house, especially the fish cart was a thrill: it let down a flap at the back and like pearls and jewels inside the cart lay the shiny fishes, all colours, all shapes, and we had to try them all.
We took long walks along the coast, lonely and remote and unborn. The weather was mild and full of life, we never got tired of the shore, finding shells for hours that the Pacific had rolled gently on to the sand. I Lawrence religiously read the ‘Sydney Bulletin.’ He loved it for all its stories of wild animals and people’s living experiences. The only papers Lawrence ever read were the ‘Corriere della Sera,’ in the past, and the ‘Sydney Bulletin.’ I wonder whether this latter has retained the same character it had then; I haven’t seen it since that time. It was our only mental food during that time.
I remember being amazed at the generosity of the people at the farms where we got butter, milk, and eggs; you asked for a pound of butter and you were given a big chunk that Was nearly two pounds; you asked for two pints of milk and they gave you three; everything was lavish, like the sky and the sea and the land. We had no human contacts all these months: a strange experience: nobody bothered about us, I think.
At the library, strangely enough, in that little library of Thirroul we found several editions of Lawrence’s condemned ‘Rainbow.’ We bought a copy - the librarian never knew that it was Lawrence’s own book. Australia is like the ‘Hinterland der Seele.’
Like a fantasy seemed the Pacific, pellucid and radiant, melting into the sky, so fresh and new always; then this primal radiance was gone one day and another primeval sea appeared. A storm was throwing the waves high into the air, they rose on the abrupt shore, high as in an enormous window. I could see strange sea-creatures thrown up from the deep: sword-fish and fantastic phenomena of undreamt deep-sea beasts I saw in those waves, frightening and never to be forgotten.
And then driving out of the tidy little town into the bush with the little pony cart. Into golden woods of mimosa we drove, or wattle, as the Australians call it. Mostly red flowers and yellow mimosa, many varieties, red and gold, met the eye, strange fern trees, delicately leaved. We came to a wide river and followed it. It became a wide waterfall and then it disappeared into the earth. Disappeared and left us gaping. Why should it have disappeared, where had it gone?
Lawrence went on with ‘Kangaroo’ and wove his deep underneath impressions of Australia into this novel. Thirroul itself was a new little bungalow town and the most elegant thing in it was a German gun that glistened steely and out of place there near the Pacific.
I would have liked to stay in Australia and lose myself, as it were, in this unborn country but Lawrence wanted to go to America. Mabel Dodge had written us that Lawrence must come to Taos in New Mexico, that he must know the pueblo Indians, that the Indians say that the heart of the world beats there in New Mexico.
This gave us a definite aim, and we began to get ready for America, in a few weeks.
Darlington West Australia 15 May 1922
My dear Mother-in-Law:
So the new Jews must wander on. Frieda is very disappointed. She had hoped to find a new England or new Germany here, with much space and gayer people.
The land is here, sky high and blue and new as if you ‘d never taken a breath out of it: and the air is new, new, strong, fresh as silver. And the country is terribly big and empty, still uninhabited. The bush is grey and without end. No noise - quiet - and the white trunks of the gum trees, all a little burnt: a wood and a prewood, not a jungle: something like a dream, a twilight wood that has not seen the day yet. It needs hundreds of years before it can live. This is the land where the unborn souls, strange and unknown, that will be born in five hundred years, live. A grey, strange, spirit, and the people that are here are not really here: only like ducks that swim on the surface of a lake. But the country has a fourth dimension and the white people float like shadows on the surface. And they are not new people: very nervous, neurotic, they don’t sleep well, as if they always felt a ghost near. I say, a new country is like sharp wine in which floats like a pearl the soul of an incoming people, till this soul is melted or dissolved. But this is stupid.
Thursday we go on by the P & 0 boat ‘Malwa’ to Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney. We stay at Adelaide a day, sleep a night at Melbourne, and arrive at Sydney on the twenty-seventh: nine days from Fremantle. That will be interesting. We have our tickets from Colombo to Sydney. It does please me to go on further. I think from Sydney we may go on to San Francisco, and stay a few weeks at Tahiti. And so round the world.
Oh, mother-in-law, it must be so! It is my destiny, this wandering. But the world is round and will bring us back to Baden.
Be well.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
‘Wyewurk’ Thirroul New South Wales Australia 28 May 1922
Meine liebe Schwiegermutter:
Diesmal schreibe dir auf Englisch, ich muss schnell sein. We got to Sydney on Saturday, after a fine journey. I like the P & 0 boats, with the dark servants. But that was a frightful wreck of the ‘Egypt’ in the Bay of Biscay. We heard of it in Adelaide. Our captain of the ‘Malwa ‘ changed from the ‘Egypt ‘ only this very voyage. He was very upset - so was everybody. They say the Lascar servants are so bad in a wreck - rushing for the boats. But I don’t believe all of it.
Anyway, here we are safe and sound. Sydney is a great fine town, half like London, half like America. The harbour is wonderful - a narrow gateway between two cliffs - then one sails through and is in another little sea, with many bays and gulfs. The big ferry steamers go all the time threading across the blue water, and hundreds of people always travelling.
But Sydney town costs too much, so we came down into the country-We are about fifty kilometres south of Sydney, on the coast. We have got a lovely little house on the edge of the low cliff just above the Pacific Ocean. - Der grosse oder stille Ozean, says Frieda. But it is by no means still. The heavy waves break with a great roar all the time: and it is so near. We have only our little grassy garden - then the low cliff-and then the great white rollers breaking, and the surf seeming to rush right under our feet as we sit at table. Here it is winter, but not cold. But today the sky is dark, and it makes me think of Cornwall. We have a coal fire going, and are very comfortable-Things go so quietly in Australia. It will not cost much to live here, food is quite cheap. Good meat is only fivepence or sixpence a pound - 50 Pfg. ein Pfund.
But it is a queer, grey, sad country - empty, and as if it would never be filled. Miles and miles of bush -forlorn and lost. It all feels like that. Yet Sydney is a huge modern city.
I don’t really like it, it is so raw - so crude. The people are so crude in their feelings - and they only want to be up-to-date in the ‘conveniences ‘ - electric light and tramways and things like that. The aristocrats are the people who own big shops - and there is no respect for anything else. The working people very discontented - always threaten more strikes - always more socialism.
I shall cable to America for money, and sail in July across the Pacific to San Francisco - via Wellington, New Zealand, Raratonga, Tahiti, Honolulu - then to our Taos. And that is the way home - coming back. Next spring we will come to Germany. I’ve got a Heimweh for Europe: Sicily, England, Germany.
Auf Wiedersehen.
D. H. L.
I must hurry to catch the mail which leaves here tonight - leaves Sydney tomorrow, for Europe. Write to me:
care of Robert Mountsier 417 West 118 Street New York City I shall get your letters in America. Frieda ist so gliicklich mit ihrem neuen Hans - macht allés so schon.
Thirroul, N.S.W. Australia 9 June 1922
My dear Mother-in-Law:
We had two letters today - Anita’s wedding letter, also the news that Nusch wants to leave Max. Oh, God! Revolution and earthquake. From your letters you seem to be a little angry. Are you angry that we wandered farther away, we wandering Jews? I tell you again, the world is round and brings the rolling stone home again. And I must go on till I find something that gives me peace. Last year I found it at Ebersteinburg. There I finished ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and my ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious. ‘ And now ‘Aaron’ has appeared and this month the ‘Fantasia’ will appear in New York. And I, I am in Australia, and suddenly I write again, a mad novel of Australia. That’s how it goes. I hope I can finish it by August. Then, mother-in-law, again to the sea. We want to take the ship ‘Tahiti, ‘ that leaves Sydney on the tenth of August, and arrives on the sixteenth in Wellington, New Zealand; then to Raratonga and Papeete, capital of Tahiti, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and then, September fourth, we arrive at San Francisco, California. From San Francisco to Taos, New Mexico. And I believe, in the spring, you will see us again in Baden-Baden. I’ve only just enough money to take us to Taos. And then nothing. But it always comes.
It is nice here. You’d like this house very much: the large room with open fireplace and beautiful windows with red curtains, and large verandas, and the grass and the sea, always big and noisy at our feet. We bathe at midday when the sun is very hot and the shores quite lonely, quite, quite lonely. Only the waves. The village is new and crude. The streets are not built, it is all sand and loam. It’s interesting. The people are all very kind and yet strange to me. Postman and newspaper boy come riding on horses and whistle on a policeman’s whistle when they have thrown in the letters or newspaper.
Meat is so cheap. Two good sheep’s tongues ten cents, and a huge piece of beef enough for twelve people forty cents. We also have lovely fruit - apples, pears, passion-fruit, persimmons - and marvellous butter and milk.
And heaven and earth so new as if no man had ever breathed in it, no foot ever trodden on it. The great weight of the spirit that lies so heavily on Europe doesn’t exist here. You feel a little like a child that has no real cares. It is interesting - a new experience.
It is your birthday in a little while. I send you a few cents, you can still have teas with old women. Greet all. Poor Else! I’m writing to her.
Leb wohl,
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
‘Wyewurk’ Thirroul South Coast, N.S.W. Australia 13 June 1922
Dear Else:
I have been wanting to write to you. The Schweigermutter says that Friedel is ill with jaundice. I am so sorry, and do hope it is better by now.
I often think of you here, and wonder what you would think of this. We’re in a very nice place: have got a delightful bungalow here about forty miles south of Sydney, right on the shore. We live mostly with the sea - not much with the land - and not at all with the people. I don’t present any letters of introduction, we don’t know a soul on this side of the continent: which is almost a triumph in itself. For the first time in my life I feel how lovely it is to know nobody in the whole country: and nobody can come to the door, except the tradesmen who bring the bread and meat and so on, and who are very unobtrusive. One nice thing about these countries is that nobody asks questions. I suppose there have been too many questionable people here in the past. But it’s nice not to have to start explaining oneself, as one does in Italy.
The people here are awfully nice, casually: thank heaven I need go no further. The township is just a scatter of bungalows, mostly of wood with corrugated iron roofs, and with some quite good shops: ‘stores. ‘ It lies back from the sea. Nobody wants to be too near the sea here: only we are on the brink. About two miles inland there is a great long hill like a wall, facing the sea and running all down the coast. This is dark greyish with gum-trees, and it has little coal-mines worked into it. The men are mostly coal-miners, so I feel quite at home. The township itself - they never say village here - is all haphazard and new, the streets unpaved, the church built of wood. That part is pleasant - the newness. It feels so free. And though it is midwinter, and the shortest day next week, still every day is as sunny as our own summer, and the sun is almost as hot as our June. But the nights are cold.
Australia is a weird, big country. It feels so empty and untrodden. The minute the night begins to go down, even the towns, even Sydney, which is huge, begins to feel unreal, as if it were only a daytime imagination, and in the night it did not exist. That is a queer sensation: as if life here really had never entered in: as if it were just sprinkled over, and the land lay untouched. They are terribly afraid of the Japanese. Practically all Australians, and especially Sydney, feel that once there was a fall in England, so that the Powers could not interfere, Japan would at once walk in and occupy the place. They seriously believe this: say it is even the most obvious thing for Japan to do, as a business proposition. Of course Australia would never be able to defend herself. It is queer to find these bogies wherever one goes. But I suppose they may materialize. I Labour is very strong and very stupid. Everything except meat is exorbitantly expensive, many things twice as much as in England. And Australian apples are just as cheap in London as in Australia, and sometimes cheaper. It is all very irritating.
This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric light and water closets, and nothing else. You never knew anything so nothing, nichts, nullus, niente, as the life here. They have good wages, they wear smart boots, and the girls all have silk stockings; they fly around on ponies and in buggies - sort of low one-horse traps - and in motor-cars. They are always vaguely and meaninglessly on the go. And it all seems so empty, so nothing, it almost makes you sick. They are healthy, and to my thinking almost imbecile. That’s what the life in a new country does to you: it makes you so material, so outward, that your real inner life and your inner self die out, and you clatter round like so many mechanical animals. It is very like the Wells story - the fantastic stories. I feel if I lived in Australia for ever I should never open my mouth once to say one word that meant anything. Yet they are very trustful and kind and quite competent in their jobs. There’s no need to lock your doors, nobody will come and steal. All the outside life is so easy. But there it ends. There’s nothing else. The best society in the country are the shopkeepers - nobody is any better than anybody else, and it really is democratic. But it all feels so slovenly, slipshod, rootless, and empty, it is like a kind of dream. Yet the weird, unawakened country is wonderful and if one could have a dozen people, perhaps, and a big piece of land of one’s own - But there, one can’t.
There is this for it, that here one doesn’t feel the depression and the tension of Europe. Everything is happy-go-lucky, and one couldn’t fret about anything if one tried. One just doesn’t care. And they are all like that. Au fond they don’t care a straw about anything: except just their little egos. Nothing really matters. But they let the little things matter sufficiently to keep the whole show going. In a way it’s a relief-a relief from the moral and mental and nervous tension of Europe. But to say the least, it’s surprising. I never felt such a foreigner to any people in all my life as I do to these. An absolute foreigner, and I haven’t one single thing to say to them.
But I am busy doing a novel: with Australia for the setting: a queer show. It goes fairly quickly, so I hope to have it done by August. Then we shall sail via New Zealand and Tahiti for San Francisco, and probably spend the winter in Taos, New Mexico. That is what I think I want to do. Then the next spring come to Europe again. I feel I shall wander for the rest of my days. But I don’t care.
I must say this new country has been a surprise to me. Flinders Petrie says new countries are no younger than their parent country. But they are older, more empty, and more devoid of religion or anything that makes for ‘quality’ in life.
I have got a copy of ‘Aaron’s Rod’ for you, but am not sure whether I may post it from here or not. Trade relations with Germany don’t start till August.
Write to me care of Robert Mountsier, 417 West 118th Street, New York. I wish I had good news for you. Frieda sleeps after her bath.
D. H. Lawrence
If a girl called Ruth Wheelock sends you a little note I gave her to introduce her to you, I think you’d like her. American, was in the consulate in Palermo - we knew her there and in Rome - both like her.
D. H. L.
She’s not got any money, unless she earns some or her father gives her some.
We sailed from Sydney for San Francisco. It was a smallish boat with a stout jolly captain. We passed Raratonga and went on to Tahiti, always in perfect weather in the Pacific. Nothing but flying fish, porpoises, sky, the great sea, and our boat. Then Tahiti. It must have been so marvellous in the past, those gentle, too gentle handsome natives, with their huts, the perfection of the island in itself. But the joy of it was gone. The charming native women, who offered me old beads and flowers, made me sad in their clumsy Mother Hubbard garments. I know how European diseases were wiping the natives out, the contact with Europe fatal to them. In the evening we saw a cinema in a huge kind of barn; there was a native king, enormous; he was in a box near the stage with several handsome wives. We had travelled with a cinema crowd from Tahiti. Near our cabin two of the young stars had their cabin. They seemed to sleep all day and looked white and tired in the evening. Cases of empty champagne bottles stood outside their cabin in the morning. One of them I had seen flirt quite openly with a passenger but when we arrived in San Francisco I saw her trip so innocently into the arms of a young man who was waiting for her. I remember in San Francisco how the moon at night made such a poor show above all the lights of the town.
We went into a cafeteria and did not know how to behave; how to take our plates and food.