We travelled from San Francisco to Taos in great expectation. It was September and the journey through the inner American desert very hot. We got out at Lamy to be met by Mabel Dodge who had brought us here. And as we looked out we saw Mabel standing there in a turquoise blue dress with much of the silver-and-turquoise Indian jewellery and by her side a handsome Indian in a blanket with a large silver belt going across his chest. I looked at Mabel. ‘She has eyes one can trust,’ I said to myself. And afterwards I always kept to this: people are what they are, whatever they may occasionally do.
When we came to Santa Fe all the hotels were full, so Mabel asked Witter Bynner to take us in. He did: us, the trunks, Sicilian cart and all.
The next morning we drove up through the vast wonderful desert country, with its clear pure air, driving through the Rio Grande canyon deep down by the river and then coming up on to the Taos plateau. Coming out of the canyon to the mesa is an unforgettable experience, with all the deep mountains sitting mysteriously around in a ring, and so much sky.
Mabel had prepared us a house all to ourselves in her ‘Mabel-town.’ The house stood on Indian land and belonged to Tony. It was a charming adobe house, with Mexican blankets and Indian paintings of Indian dances and animals, clean and full of sun.
A new life for us - and we began it straightaway. Out from the pueblo to the east of us, a few miles away, came the feel of the Indians, so different from anything we had ever known. We neither of us wanted to stunt about it, but we were very happy. Tony went for two days with Lawrence to the Navajo country. I spent the days with Mabel and her friend Alice Corbin.
They asked me many questions, which I answered truthfully, giving the show away completely as usual. Then Mabel, with her great energy, took us all over the country: we saw the pueblo, we bathed in a hot radium spring by the Rio Grande. Mabel and Lawrence wanted to write a book together: about Mabel, it was going to be. I did not want this. I had always regarded Lawrence’s genius as given to me. I felt deeply responsible for what he wrote. And there was a fight between us, Mabel and myself: I think it was a fair fight. One day Mabel came over and told me she didn’t think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: ‘Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.’
And I was miserable thinking that Lawrence had given her a right to talk like this to me. When Lawrence came in, he saw that I was unhappy, and somebody had told him that Mabel’s son John Evans had said: ‘My mother is tired of those Lawrences who sponge on her.’ This may have been pure malice, but Lawrence was in a fury too; not for nothing was his beard red, and he said: ‘I will pay the rent of the house and I’ll leave as soon as I can.’
And then he would draw me in a flood of tenderness and love and we would be washed clean of all our apartness and be together again. And Lawrence would rave against Mabel as only he could rave. When I wanted to stick up for her I would get it: ‘All women are alike, bossy, without any decency; it’s your business to see that other women don’t come too close to me.’
That’s what he said. It was all very well, but I didn’t know how to do it.
We had learned to ride: a long thin Don Quixote of a Mexican had taught us how in a few rides across the open desert. I was terribly happy, feeling the live horse under me. Later on, Azul, my horse, would go like the wind with me and he seemed always aware of me when I was a bit scared.
So we left Mabel’s ambient and went to live at the Del Monte Ranch, under the mountains. We had a log house, and the Hawks lived at the big house and in the lower log cabin lived two Danish painters who had come to stay with us; they had come from New York in the most trying old Lizzie that ever went along the road.
She coughed and trembled at the tiniest hill, she stuck and had to be shoved: she was a trial.
It was a real mountain winter. So sharp, knifey cold at night; snow and ice, and the Danes and Lawrence had to chop lots of wood.
We rode into the Lobo Canyon over the logs under the trees and one had to look out for one’s head and knees when the horses tore along under the trees. Lawrence would say later on: ‘If you were only as nice with me as you are with Azul.’
The friendship and fight with Mabel went on, off and on. She was so admirable in her terrific energy, in her resources and intelligence, but e couldn’t get on, somehow.
I remember riding along in the car, when Lawrence said to her: ‘Frieda is the freest human being I know.’ And I said to him, afterwards: ‘You needn’t say nice things about me, just to make other people mad.’
Tony would sing his Indian songs when driving. I had told him: ‘In our country, Tony, one crow means bad luck and two good luck.’ So he would watch for crows and say: Two crows, Frieda.’
In the spring we went to Mexico with Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson. After the hard winter, I clamoured for a known. We neither of us wanted to stunt about it, but we were very happy. Tony went for two days with Lawrence to the Navajo country. I spent the days with Mabel and her friend Alice Corbin.
They asked me many questions, which I answered truthfully, giving the show away completely as usual. Then Mabel, with her great energy, took us all over the country: j we saw the pueblo, we bathed in a hot radium spring by the Rio Grande. Mabel and Lawrence wanted to write a book together: about Mabel, it was going to be. I did not want this. I had always regarded Lawrence’s genius as given to me. I felt deeply responsible for what he wrote. And there was a fight between us, Mabel and myself: I think it was a fair fight. One day Mabel came over and told me she didn’t think I was the right woman for Lawrence and other things equally upsetting and I was thoroughly roused and said: ‘Try it then yourself, living with a genius, see what it is like and how easy it is, take him if you can.’
And I was miserable thinking that Lawrence had given her a right to talk like this to me. When Lawrence came in, | he saw that I was unhappy, and somebody had told him! that Mabel’s son John Evans had said: ‘My mother is tired of those Lawrences who sponge on her.’ This may have j been pure malice, but Lawrence was in a fury too; not for j nothing was his beard red, and he said: ‘I will pay the rent of the house and I’ll leave as soon as I can.’
And then he would draw me in a flood of tenderness and love and we would be washed clean of all our apartness and be together again. And Lawrence would rave against Mabel as only he could rave. When I wanted to stick up for her I would get it: ‘All women are alike, bossy, without any decency; it’s your business to see that other women don’t come too close to me.’
That’s what he said. It was all very well, but I didn’t know how to do it.
We had learned to ride: a long thin Don Quixote of a Mexican had taught us how in a few rides across the open desert. I was terribly happy, feeling the live horse under me. Later on, Azul, my horse, would go like the wind with me and he seemed always aware of me when I was a bit scared.
So we left Mabel’s ambient and went to live at the Del Monte Ranch, under the mountains. We had a log house, and the Hawks lived at the big house and in the lower log cabin lived two Danish painters who had come to stay with us; they had come from New York in the most trying old Lizzie that ever went along the road.
She coughed and trembled at the tiniest hill, she stuck and had to be shoved: she was a trial.
It was a real mountain winter. So sharp, knifey cold at night; snow and ice, and the Danes and Lawrence had to chop lots of wood.
We rode into the Lobo Canyon over the logs under the trees and one had to look out for one’s head and knees when the horses tore along under the trees. Lawrence would say later on: ‘If you were only as nice with me as you are with Azul.’
The friendship and fight with Mabel went on, off and on. She was so admirable in her terrific energy, in her resources and intelligence, but we couldn’t get on, somehow.
I remember riding along in the car, when Lawrence said to her: ‘Frieda is the freest human being I know.’ And I said to him, afterwards: ‘You needn’t say nice things about me, Just to make other people mad.’
Tony would sing his Indian songs when driving. I had told him: ‘In our country, Tony, one crow means bad luck and two good luck.’ So he would watch for crows and say: Two crows, Frieda.’
In the spring we went to Mexico with Witter Bynner and Spud Johnson. After the hard winter, I clamoured for a first-rate hotel in Mexico City. But it wasn’t a success, the first-rate hotel, after all, it seemed dull and a bit unclean; the ladies were so very painted and the men not attractive.
The journey across the lonely desert had been strange. The stations were only a few miserable houses and a big water tank and fine dust blew in at the window of the car, filling one’s eyes and ears and nose, all one’s pores with very fine sand.
Mexico City seemed like a would-be smart and grand lady to me, but she hadn’t quite brought it off. The shabby parts were the most interesting. The Volador Market and all the fascinating baskets and ropes and saddles and belts, pots and dishes and leather jackets.
One day we were in the cathedral plaza of Mexico City, Bynner and Spud and I, when on the top of the church we saw a red flag being hoisted. A crowd collected, soldiers appeared. Bynner and Spud had dashed into the dark hole of the door of the church tower. It was crowding with people. I stayed in the plaza, watching the tower on which were Bynner and Spud, fearing for their fate. My relief when they appeared after an hour was great.
In the Museum we saw among the Aztec relics coiled snakes and other terrifying stone carvings, Maximilian’s state carriage. That took me back to my childhood. One of the impressive figures of my childhood had been a Graf Geldern, long, lean, sad, and loosely built like a Mexican, in the uniform of a colonel of the ‘Totenkopfhusaren.’ He had been to Mexico with Maximilian. How he afterwards took Prussian service I don’t know. When they shot Maximilian, they played ‘La Paloma.’ He had asked for it.
Lawrence went to Guadalajara and found a house with a patio on the Lake of Chapala. There Lawrence began to write his ‘Plumed Serpent.’ He sat by the lake under a pepper tree writing it. The lake was curious’ with its white water. My enthusiasm for bathing in it faded considerably when one morning a huge snake rose yards high, it seemed to me, only a few feet away. At the end of the patio we had the family that Lawrence describes in the ‘Plumed Serpent,’ and all the life of Chapala. I tried my one attempt at civilizing those Mexican children, but when they asked me one day: ‘Do you have lice too, Nina,’ I had enough and gave up in a rage. At night I was frightened of bandits and we had one of the sons of the cook sleeping outside our bedroom door with a loaded revolver, but he snored so fiercely that I wasn’t sure whether the fear of bandits wasn’t preferable. We quite sank into the patio life. Bynner and Spud came every afternoon, and I remember Bynner saying to me one day, while he was mixing a cocktail: ‘If you and Lawrence quarrel, why don’t you hit first?’ I took the advice and the next time Lawrence was cross, I rose to the occasion and got out of my Mexican indifference and flew at him.
All that time in Mexico seems to me, now, as if I had dreamt it, dreamt it intensely.
We went across the pale Lake of Chapala to a native village where they made serapes; they dyed the wool and wove them on simple looms. Lawrence made some designs and had them woven, as in the ‘Plumed Serpent.’
Lawrence could only write in places where one’s imagination could have space and free play, where the door was not closed to the future, where one’s vision could people it with new souls to be born, who would live a new life.
I remember the Pyramids at Teotihuacan, that we saw with Spud and Bynner, I hanging around behind. It was getting dusky and suddenly I came on a huge stone snake, coiling green with great turquoise eyes, round the foot of a temple. I ran after the others for all I was worth.? I got a glimpse of old Mexico then, the old sacrifices, hearts still quivering held up to the sun, for the sun to drink the blood: there it had all happened, on the pyramid of the Sun.
And that awful goddess, who, instead of a Raphael bambino, brings forth an obsidian knife. Fear of these people who don’t mind killing and don’t mind dying. And I had seen a huge black Christ, in a church, with a black beard and long woman’s hair and he wore little white, frilly knickers. Death and sacrifice and cruel gods seemed to reign in Mexico under its sunshine and splendour of flowers and lots of birds and fruit and white volcano peaks.
We went into a huge old Noah’s Ark of a boat, called ‘Esmeralda,’ on the Lake of Chapala, with two other friends and Spud. Three Mexicans looked after the boat. They had guitars and sang their melancholy or fierce songs at the end of the boat. In the evening we slowly drifted along the large lake, that was more like a white sea, and, one day, we had no more to eat. So we landed on the island of the scorpions, still crowned by a Mexican empty prison, and only fit for scorpions. There Lawrence bought a live goat, but when we had seen our Mexican boatmen practically tearing the poor beast to pieces, our appetites vanished and we did not want to eat any more.
Lawrence’s visions which he wrote in the ‘Plumed Serpent’ seem so interwoven with everyday life. The everyday and the vision running on together day by day. That autumn we returned to America and spent some time in New Jersey. Lawrence remained in America and went again to Mexico. I went to Europe.
So I went to England alone and had a little flat in Hampstead to see something of my children. It was winter and I wasn’t a bit happy alone there and Lawrence was always cross when I had this longing for the children upon me; but there it was, though now I know he was right: they didn’t want me any more, they were living their own lives. I felt lost without him. Finally he came and wrote this cross and unjust letter to my mother:
Hotel Garcia Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico 10 November, 1923
My dear Mother-in-Law:
I had the two letters from Frieda at Baden, with the billet-doux from you. Yes, mother-in-law, I believe one has to be seventy before one is full of courage. The young are always half-hearted. Frieda also makes a long, sad nose and says she is writing to the moon - Guadalajara is no moon-town, and I am completely on the earth, with solid feet.
But I am coming back, am only waiting for a ship. I shall be in England in December. And in the spring, when the primroses are out, I shall be in Baden. Time goes by faster and faster. Frieda sent me Hartmann von Richthofen’s letter. It was nice. But the women have more courage these days than the men - also a letter from Nusch, a little sad but lively. I hope to see her also in the spring. One must spit on one’s hands and take firm hold. Don’t you think so?
I was at the Barranca, a big, big ravine, and bathed in the hot springs - came home and found the whole of Germany in my room.
I like it here. I don’t know how, but it gives me strength, this black country. It is full of man’s strength, perhaps not woman’s strength, but it is good, like the old German beer-for-the-heroes, for me. Oh, mother-in-law, you are nice and old, and understand, as the first maiden understood, that a man must be more than nice and good, and that heroes are worth more than saints. Frieda doesn’t understand thai a man must be a hero these days and not only a husband: husband also but more. I must go up and down through the world, I must balance Germany against Mexico and Mexico against Germany. I do not come for peace. The devil, the holy devil, has peace round his neck. I know it well, the courageous old one understands me better than the young one, or at least something in me she understands better. Frieda must always think and write and say and ponder how she loves me. It is stupid. I am no Jesus that lies on his mother’s lap. I go my way through the world, and if Frieda finds it such hard work to love me, then, dear God, let her love rest, give it holidays. Oh, mother-in-law, you understand, as my mother finally understood, that a man doesn’t want, doesn’t ask for love from his wife, but for strength, strength, strength. To fight, to fight, to fight, and to fight again. And one needs courage and strength and weapons. And the stupid woman keeps on saying love, love, love, and writes of love. To the devil with love! Give me strength, battle-strength, weapon-strength, fighting-strength, give me this, you woman!
England is so quiet: writes Frieda. Shame on you that you ask for peace today. I don’t want peace. I go around the world fighting. Pfui! Pfui! In the grave I find my peace. First let me fight and win through. Yes, yes, mother-in-law, make me an oak-wreath and bring the town music under the window, when the half-hero returns.
D.H.L.
(Translated from the German)
But I think he was right; I should have gone to meet him in Mexico, he should not have come to Europe; these are the mistakes we make, sometimes irreparable.
Finally he came and I was glad. Just before Christmas he came and we had some parties and saw some friends, but we wanted to go back to America in the spring and live at the ranch that Mabel Luhan had given me. She had taken me to the little ranch near Taos and I said: ‘This is the loveliest place I have ever seen.’ And she told me: ‘I give it you.’ But Lawrence said: ‘We can’t accept such a present from anybody.’ I had a letter from my sister that very morning telling me she had sent the manuscript of ‘Sons and Lovers,’ so I told Lawrence: ‘I will give Mabel the MS. for the ranch.’ So I did.
Murry was coming to America too. First we went to Paris, where we stayed as in our own home at the Hôtel de Versailles.
Lawrence wanted me to have some new clothes. Mabel Harrison, who had a large studio opposite the hotel, told us of a good tailor nearby. Lawrence went with me. The stout little tailor draped himself with the cape we bought to show me how to wear it. ‘Voyez-vous, la ligne, Madame.’ He made me some other clothes and Lawrence remarked with wonder: ‘How is it possible that a man can throw all his enthusiasm into clothes for women?’
We went to Strassburg and Baden-Baden, a strange journey for me, going through French territory that had been German just a few years ago.
In the spring we went to America again and Dorothy Brett came with us. We only stayed a few days in New York and went on to Taos. We stayed with Mabel Luhan but, somehow, we didn’t get on. I was longing to go to the ranch and live there. Lawrence was a bit afraid to tackle the forlorn little ranch. We had some ten or a dozen Indians to build up the tumble-down houses and corrals and everything. Then he loved it. We had to mend the irrigation ditch and we were impressed by the way Mr Murry dragged huge pipes through the woods, just over no road, to the mouth of the Gallina Canyon of which we had the water rights. And I cooked huge meals for everybody. We all worked so hard. Brett, as everybody called her, straight from her studio life, was amazing for the hard work she would do. One day we cleaned our spring and carried huge stones until we nearly dropped. The spring is in a hollow, and I loved watching the horses play when they came to drink there, shoving each other’s noses away from the water level and then tearing up the bank. We did it all ourselves for very little money for we didn’t have much. We got a cow and had four horses: Azul, Aaron, and two others; and then we got chickens, all white ones, Leghorns. The beautiful cockerel was called Moses and Susan was the cow’s name.
Lawrence got up at five o’clock each morning. With the opera glasses my mother had given him, he looked for Susan, who was an independent creature and loved to hide in the woods. There he would stand, when at last he had found her, and shake his forefinger at her - to my delight - and scold her, the black cow.
I made our own butter in a little glass churn and the chickens flourished on the buttermilk, and so did we in this healthy life. We made our own bread in the Indian oven outside, black bread and white and cakes, and Lawrence was terribly fussy about the bread, which had to be perfect. He made cupboards and chairs and painted doors and windows. He wrote and irrigated and it seems amazing that one single man got so much done. We rode and people stayed with us, and he was always there for everybody as if he did nothing at all. He helped Brett with her pictures and me with my poor attempts.
It was a wonderful summer; there were wild strawberries, that year, and back in the canyon raspberries as big as garden ones, but I was afraid to get them because I had heard that bears love raspberries. Bears won’t do you any harm except when they have young. There were bears in the canyon - that seemed indeed the end of the world! The Brett had a tiny shanty in which she lived. She adored Lawrence and slaved for him.
In the autumn we went again to Mexico City. It was fun and we saw several people. In Mexico you could still feel a little lordly and an individual; Mexico has not yet been made ‘safe for democracy.’
An amusing thing happened: Lawrence had become a member of the PEN Club and they gave an evening in his honour. It was a men’s affair and he put on his black clothes and set off in the evening, and I, knowing how unused he was to public functions and how he really shrank from being a public figure, wondered in the hotel room how the evening would go off. Soon after ten o’clock he appeared.
‘How was it?’
‘Well, they read to me bits of “The Plumed Serpent” in Spanish and I had to sit and listen and then they made a speech and I had to answer.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said: here we are together, some of us English, some Mexicans and Americans, writers and painters and business men and so on, but before all and above all we are men together tonight. That was about what I said. But a young Mexican jumped up: “It’s all very well for an Englishman to say I am a man first and foremost, but a Mexican cannot say so, he must be a Mexican above everything.”’
So we laughed, the only speech that Lawrence ever made falling so completely flat. They had missed the whole point, as so often.
Just as it was said of him that he wasn’t patriotic; he who seemed to me England itself, a flower sprung out of its most delicate, courageous tradition, not the little bourgeois England but the old England of Palmerston, whom he admired when men were still men and not mere social beings.
One day William Somerset Maugham was expected in Mexico City; so Lawrence wrote to him if they could meet. But Maugham’s secretary answered for him, saying: ‘I hear we are going out to a friend’s to lunch together who lives rather far out; let’s share a taxi.’
Lawrence was angry that Maugham had answered through his secretary and wrote back: ‘No, I won’t share a car.’
Brett came with us and she had a story from her sister, the Ranee of Sarawak, where Maugham had stayed and he and his secretary had nearly got drowned, shooting some rapids, I think. So there had been feeling there. And our hostess had a grudge against the secretary. Maugham sat next to me and I asked how he liked it here. He answered crossly: ‘Do you want me to admire men in big hats?’
I said: ‘I don’t care what you admire.’ And then the lunch was drowned in acidity all round. But after lunch I felt sorry for Maugham: he seemed to me an unhappy and acid man, who got no fun out of living. He seemed to me to have fallen between two stools as so many writers do. He wanted to have his cake and eat it. He could not accept the narrow social world and yet he didn’t believe in a wider human one. Commentators and critics of life and nothing more.
When I met other writers, then I knew without knowing how different altogether Lawrence was. They may have been good writers, but Lawrence was a genius.
The inevitability of what he elementally was and had to say at any price, his knowledge and vision, came to him from deeper secret sources than it is given to others to draw from. When I read Aeschylus and Sophocles, then I know Lawrence is great, he is like these - greatest in his work, where human passions heave and sink and mingle and clash. The background of death is always there and the span of life is felt as fierce action. Life is life only when death is part of it. Not like the Christian conception that shuts death away from life and says death comes after: death is always there. I think the great gain of the war is a new reincorporation of death into our lives.
Then we went down to Oaxaca. We had again a house with a patio. There Lawrence wrote ‘Mornings in Mexico,’ with the parrots and Corasmin, the white dog, and the mozo. He rewrote and finished the ‘Plumed Serpent’ there. There was malaria in Oaxaca, it had come with the soldiers, and the climate didn’t suit him.
I went to the market with the mozo and one day he showed me in the square, in one of the bookshops, an undeniable caricature of Lawrence, and he watched my face to see how I would take it. I was thrilled! To find in this wild place, with its Zapotec and undiluted Mexican tribes, anything so civilized as a caricature of Lawrence was fun. I loved the market and it was only distressing to see the boy with his basket so utterly miserable at my paying without bargaining: it was real pain to him. But the lovely flowers and everything seemed so cheap.
Meanwhile Lawrence wrote at home and got run down. The Brett came every day and I thought she was becoming too much part of our lives and I resented it. So I told Lawrence: ‘I want the Brett to go away,’ and he raved at me, said I was a jealous fool. But I insisted and so Brett went up to Mexico City. Then Lawrence finished ‘The Plumed Serpent,’ already very ill, and later on he told me he wished he had finished it differently. Then he was very ill. I had a local native doctor who was scared at having anything to do with a foreigner and he didn’t come. Lawrence was very ill, much more ill than I knew, fortunately. I can never say enough of the handful of English and Americans there: how good they were to us. Helping in every way. I thought these mine-owners and engineers led plucky and terrible lives. Always fever, typhoid, malaria, danger from bandits, never feeling a bit safe with their lives. And so I was amazed at the ‘Selbstverstàndlichkeit’ with which they helped us. It was so much more than Christian, just natural: a fellow-Englishman in distress: let’s help him. Lawrence himself thought he would die.
‘You’ll bury me in this cemetery here,’ he would say, grimly.
‘No, no,’ I laughed, ‘it’s such an ugly cemetery, don’t you think of it.’
And that night he said to me: ‘But if I die, nothing has mattered but you, nothing at all.’ I was almost scared to hear him say it, that, with all his genius, I should have mattered so much. It seemed incredible.
I got him better by putting hot sandbags on him, that seemed to comfort his tortured inside.
One day we had met a missionary and his wife, who lived right in the hills with the most uncivilized tribe of Indians. He didn’t look like a missionary but like a soldier. He told me he had been an airman, and there far away in Oaxaca he told me how he was there when Manfred Richthofen was brought down behind the trenches and in the evening at mess one of the officers rose and said: ‘Let’s drink to our noble and generous enemy.’
For me to be told of this noble gesture made in that awful war was a great thing.
Then I remember the wife appeared with a very good bowl of soup when Lawrence was at his worst, and then prayed for him by his bedside in that big bare room. I was half afraid and wondered how Lawrence would feel. But he took it gently and I was half laughing, half crying over the soup and the prayer.
While he was so ill an earthquake happened into the bargain, a thunderstorm first, and the air made you gasp. I felt ill and feverish and Lawrence so ill in the next room - dogs howled and asses and horses and cats were scared in the night - and to my horror I saw the beams of my roof move in and out of their sheaves.
‘Let’s get under the bed if the roof falls!’ I cried.
At last, slowly, slowly, he got a little better. I packed up to go to Mexico City. This was a crucifixion of a journey for me. We travelled through the tropics. Lawrence in the heat so weak and ill and then the night we stayed half-way to Mexico City in a hotel. There, after the great strain of his illness, something broke in me. ‘He will never be quite well again, he is ill, he is doomed. All my love, all my strength, will never make him whole again.’ I cried like a maniac the whole night. And he disliked me for it. But we arrived in Mexico City. I had Dr Uhlfelder come and see him. One morning I had gone out and when I came back the analyst doctor was there and said, rather brutally, when I came into Lawrence’s room: ‘Mr Lawrence has tuberculosis.’ And Lawrence looked at me with such unforgettable eyes.
‘What will she say and feel?’ And I said: ‘Now we know, we can tackle it. That’s nothing. Lots of people have that.’ And he got slowly better and could go to lunch with friends. But they, the doctors, told me:
‘Take him to the ranch; it’s his only chance. He has T.B. in the third degree. A year or two at the most.’
With this bitter knowledge in my heart I had to be cheerful and strong. Then we travelled back to the ranch and were tortured by immigration officials, who made all the difficulties in the ugliest fashion to prevent us from entering the States. If the American Embassy in Mexico hadn’t helped we would not have been able to go to the ranch that was going to do Lawrence so much good.
Slowly at the ranch he got better. The high clear air, short sunbaths, our watching and care, and the spring brought life back into him. As he got better he began writing his play ‘David,’ lying outside his little room on the porch in the sun.
I think in that play he worked off his struggle for life. Old Saul and the young David — old Samuel’s prayer is peculiarly moving in its hopeless love for Saul - so many different motifs, giant motifs, in that play.
Mabel took us to a cave along the road near Arroyo Seco and he used it for his story ‘The Woman Who Rode Away.’
Brett was always with us. I liked her in many ways; she was so much her own self.
I said to her: ‘Brett, I’ll give you half a crown if you contradict Lawrence,’ but she never did. Her blind adoration for him, her hero-worship for him was touching, but naturally it was balanced by a preconceived critical attitude towards me. He was perfect and I always wrong, in her eyes.
When the Brett came with us Lawrence said to me: ‘You know, it will be good for us to have the Brett with us, she will stand between us and people and the world.’ I did not really want her with us, and had a suspicion that she might not want to stand between us and the world, but between him and me. But no, I thought, I won’t be so narrow-gutted, one of Lawrence’s words, I will try.
So I looked after Brett and was grateful for her actual help. She did her share of the work. I yelled down her ear-trumpet, her Toby, when people were there, that she should not feel out of it. But as time went on she seemed always to be there, my privacy that I cherished so much was gone. Like the eye of the Lord, she was; when I washed, when I lay under a bush with a book, her eyes seemed to be there, only I hope the eye of the Lord looks on me more kindly. Then I detested her, poor Brett, when she seemed deaf and dumb and blind to everything quick and alive. Her adoration for Lawrence seemed a silly old habit. ‘Brett,’ I said, ‘I detest your adoration for Lawrence, only one thing I would detest more, and that is if you adored me.’
When I finally told Lawrence in Oaxaca: ‘I don’t want Brett such a part of our life, I just don’t want her,’ he was cross at first, but then greatly relieved.
How thrilling it was to feel the inrush of new vitality in him; it was like a living miracle. A wonder before one’s eyes. How grateful he was inside him! ‘I can do things again. I can live and do as I like, no longer held down by the devouring illness.’ How he loved every minute of life at the ranch. The morning, the squirrels, every flower that came in its turn, the big trees, chopping the wood, the chickens, making bread, all our hard work, and the people and all assumed the radiance of new life.
He worked hard as a relaxation and wrote for hard work.
Palace Hotel San Francisco, U.S.A. 5 September 1922
Dear Mother-in-Law:
We arrived yesterday, the journey good all the way. Now we sit in the Palace Hotel, the first hotel of San Francisco. It was first a hut with a corrugated iron roof, where the ox-wagons unhitched. Now a big building, with post and shops in it, like a small town in itself: is expensive, but for a day or two it doesn’t matter. We were twenty-five days at sea and are still landsick - the floor ought to go up and down, the room ought to tremble from the engines, the water ought to swish around but doesn’t, so one is landsick. The solid ground almost hurts. We have many ship’s friends here, are still a jolly company.
I think we shall go to Taos Tuesday or Friday: two days by train, a thousand miles by car. We have such nice letters and telegrams from Mabel Dodge and Mountsier. Mabel says: ‘From San Francisco you are my guests, so I send you the railway tickets’ - so American! Everybody is very nice. All is comfortable, comfortable, comfortable - I really hate this mechanical comfort.
I send you thirty dollars -1 have no English cheques - till I arrive in Taos. I will send you English money, with the rise of the valuta. Does Else need any money? I don’t know how much I’ve got, but our life in Taos will cost little - rent free and wood free. Keep well, mother-in-law. I wait for news from you.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
Taos New Mexico U.S.A.
27 September 1922
My dear Else:
Well, here we are in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. But both freedom and bravery need defining. The Eros book came, and I shall read it as soon as we get breathing space. Even though we are in the desert, in the sleepy land of the Mexican, we gasp on the breath of hurry.
We have got a very charming adobe house on the edge of the Indian Reservation - very smartly famished with Indian village-made furniture and Mexican and Navajo rugs, and old European pottery. Behind runs a brook - in front the desert, a level little plain all grey, white-grey sage brush, in yellow flower-and from this plain rise the first Rocky Mountains, heavy and solid. We are seven thousand feet above the sea -in a light, clear air.
The sun by day is hot, night is chilly. At the foot of the sacred Taos Mountain, three miles off, the Indians have their pueblo, like a pile of earth-coloured cube-boxes in a heap; two piles rather, one on one side of the stream, one on the other. The stream waters the little valley, and they grow corn and maize, by irrigation. This pueblo owns four square miles of land. They are nearer the Aztec type of Indian - not like Apaches whom I motored last week to see - far over these high, sage-brush deserts and through canyons.
These Indians are soft-spoken, pleasant enough - the young ones come to dance to the drum - very funny and strange. They are Catholics but still keep the old religion, making the weather and shaping the year: all very secret and important to them. They are Rurally secretive, and have their backs set against our form of civilization. Yet it rises against them. In the pueblo they have mowing machines and threshing machines, and American schools, and the young men no longer care so much for the sacred dances.
And after all, if we have to go ahead, we must ourselves go ahead. We can go back and pick up some threads - but these Indians are up against a dead wall, even more than we are: but a different wall.
Mabel Sterne is very nice to us - though I hate living on somebody else’s property and accepting their kindnesses. She very much wants me to write about here. I don’t know if I ever shall. Because though it is so open, so big, free, empty, and even aboriginal - still it has a sort of shutting-out quality, obstinate.
Everything in America goes by will. A great negative will seems to be turned against all spontaneous life - there seems to be no feeling at all - no genuine bowels of compassion and sympathy: all this gripped, iron, benevolent will, which in the end is diabolic. How can one write about it, save analytically?
Frieda, like you, always secretly hankered after America and its freedom: It’s very freedom not to feel. But now she is just beginning-to taste the iron ugliness of what it means, to live by will against the spontaneous inner life, superimposing the individual, egoistic will open the real genuine sacred life. Of course I know you will jeer when I say there is any such thing as sacred spontaneous life, with its pride and its sacred power. I know you too believe in the screwed-up human will dominating life. But I don’t. And that’s why I think America is neither free nor brave, but a land of tight, iron-clanking little wills, everybody trying to put it over everybody else, and a land of men absolutely devoid of the real courage of trust, trust in life’s sacred spontaneity. They can’t trust life until they can control it. So much for them - cowards! You can have the Land of the Free - as much as I know of it. In the spring I want to come back to Europe.
I send you ten pounds to spend for the children - since you suffer from the exchange. I hope in this little trifle you can profit by it. F- sends her love.
P. S. If you want winter clothing, or underclothing, for the children or yourself or Alfred, write to my sister, Mrs L. A. Clarke, Grosvenor Rd., Ripley near Derby - tell her just what you want, and she will send it. I shall pay her - I have told her you will write - so don’t hesitate.
Del Monte Ranch Questa, New Mexico 5 December 1922
My dear Mother-in-Law:
You see, we have flown again, but not far - only twenty-jive kilometres, and here we are in an old log-house with five rooms, very primitive, on this big ranch. Behind, the Rocky Mountains, pines and snow-peaks; around us the hills - pine trees, cedars, greasewood, and a small grey bush of the desert. Below, the desert, great and flat like a shadowy lake, very wide. And in the distance more mountains, with small patches of snow - and the sunsets! Now you see the picture.
The Hawk family live five minutes from here, then no houses for four kilometres. Behind, no house for three hundred kilometres or more. Few people, an empty, very beautiful country.
We have hewn down a great balsam pine and cut it to pieces - like a quarry - the gold wood.
We have for companions two young Danes, painters: they will go into a little three-room cabin nearby. Our nearest neighbour, Hawk, is a young man, thirty years old, has a hundred and fifty half-wild animals, a young wife, is nice, not rich.
You have asked about Mabel Dodge: American, rich, only child, from Buffalo on Lake Erie, bankers, forty-two years old, has had three husbands - one Evans (dead), one Dodge (divorced), and one Maurice Sterne (a few, Russian, painter, young, also divorced). Now she has an Indian, Tony, a stout chap. She has lived much in Europe - Paris, Nice, Florence - is a little famous in New York and little loved, very intelligent as a woman, another ‘culture-carrier, likes to play the patroness, hates the white world and loves the Indian out of hate, is very ‘generous,’ wants to be ‘good’ and is very wicked, has a terrible will-to-power, you know - she wants to be a witch and at the same time a Mary of Bethany at Jesus’s feet - a big, whit crow, a cooing raven of ill-omen, a little buffalo.
The people in America all want power, but a small, personal base power: bullying. They are all bullies.
Listen, Germany, America is the greatest bully the world has ever seen. Power is proud. But bullying is democratic and base.
Bas ta, we are still ‘friends’ with Mabel. But do not take this snake to our bosom. You know, these people have only money, nothing else but money, and because all the world wants money, all the money, America has become strong, proud and over-powerful.
If one would only say: America, your money is sh...’ go and sh... more’- then America would be a nothing.
(Translated from the German)
Hotel Monte Carlo Uruguay, Mexico
27 April 1923
My dear Mother-in-Law:
We are still here, still making excursions. We can’t make up our minds to go away. Tomorrow I go to Guadalajara and the Chapala Lake. There you have the Pacific breeze again, straight from the Pacific. One doesn’t want to come back to Europe. All is stupid, evilly stupid and no end to it. You must be terribly tired of this German tragedy - all without meaning, without direction, idea, or spirit. Only money-greed and impudence. One can’t do anything, nothing at all, except get bored and wicked. Here in Mexico there’s also Bolshevism and Fascism and revolutions and all the rest of it. But I don’t care. I don’t listen. And the Indians remain outside. Revolutions come and revolutions go but they remain the same. They haven’t the machinery of our consciousness, they are like black water, over which go our dirty motorboats, with stink and noise - the water gets a little dirty but does not really change.
I send you ten pounds and five for Else. I hope it arrives soon. A Hamburg-America boat goes every month from Vera Cruz to Hamburg. It must be lovely spring in Germany. If only men were not so stupid and evil, I would so love to be in Ebersteinburg when the chestnuts are in bloom. Have you seen ‘The Captain’s Doll’? It ought to amuse you.
A thousand greetings.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
Zaragoza 4 Chapala, Jalisco Mexico 31 May, Corpus Christi Day
My dear Mother-in-Law:
You will think we are never coming back to Europe. But it isn’t so.
But I always had the idea of writing a novel here in America. In the US I could do nothing. But I think here it will go well. I have already written ten chapters and if the Lord helps me I shall have finished the first full sketch by the end of June. And then we will come home at once.
I must go by way of New York because of business and because it is shorter and cheaper. But in July New York is very hot and the nastiest heat, they say. Still, we won’t stay more than a fortnight, from there to England and from England to Germany - very likely in September: my birthday month that I like so much.
Today is Corpus Christi and they have a procession. But there are no lovely birches as in Ebersteinburg two years ago. They only carry little palms into the churches, and palms aren’t beautiful like our trees, and this eternal sun is not as joyous as our sun. It is always shining and is a little mechanical.
But Mexico is very interesting: a foreign people. They are mostly pure Indians, dark like the people in Ceylon but much stronger. The men have the strongest backbones in the world, I believe. They are half civilized, half wild. If they only had a new faith they might be a new, young, beautiful people. But as Christians they don’t get any further, are melancholy inside, live without hope, are suddenly wicked, and don’t like to work. But they are also good, can be gentle and honest, are very quiet, and are not at all greedy for money, and to me that is marvellous, they care so little for possessions, here in America where the whites care for nothing else. But not the peon. He has not this fever to possess that is a real ‘ Weltschmerz ‘ with us.
And now you know where we are and how it is with us. I’ll send you a beautiful serape - blanket -for your birthday.
Auf Wiedersehen.
D. H. Lawrence (Translated from the German,
Care of Seltzer 5 West 50th Street New York City 7 August 1923
My dear Mother-in-Law:
We are still here in America - I find my soul doesn’t want to come to Europe, it is like Balaam’s ass and can’t come any further. I am not coming, but Frieda is. Very likely she will come by the S.S. ‘Orbita,’ on the eighteenth, from New York, for Southampton, England. She will be in London on the twenty-fifth, stays there a fortnight, then to Baden. I remain on this side: go to California, Los Angeles, where we have friends, and if it is nice there, Frieda can come there in October. I don’t know why I can’t go to England. Such a deadness comes over me, if I only think of it, that I think it is better if I stay here, till my feeling has changed.
I don’t like New York - a big, stupid town, without background, without a voice. But here in the country it is green and still. But I like Mexico better. With my heart I’d like to come - also with my feet and eyes. But my soul can’t. Farewell. Later on, the ass will be able to come.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
110 Heath Street Hampstead, London, N.W.3 14 December 1923
My dear Mother-in-Law:
Here I am back again. Frieda is nice but England is ugly. I am like a wild beast in a cage - it is so dark and closed-in here and you can’t breathe freely. But the people are friendly. Frieda has a nice apartment but I go about like an imprisoned coyote - can’t rest. I think we’ll go to Paris at the end of the month and then Baden. Do you hear me howl?
D. H. L. (Translated from the German)
Paris Hôtel de Versailles 60 Boulevard Montparnasse Saturday Dearest Mutchen:
We are sitting in bed, have had our coffee, the clock says 8:30, and we see the people and the carriages pass on the boulevard outside in the morning sun. The old men and women shake their carpets on their balconies in the tall house opposite, cleaning hard. Paris is still Paris.
We went to Versailles yesterday. It is stupid, so very big and flat, much too big for the landscape. No, such hugeness is merely blown up frog, that wants to make himself larger than nature and naturally he goes pop! Le Roi Soleil was like that - a very artificial light. Frieda was terribly disappointed in Le Petit Trianon of Marie Antoinette - a doll’s palace and a doll’s Swiss village from the stage. Poor Marie Antoinette, she wanted to be so simple and become a peasant, with her toy Swiss village and her nice, a little ordinary, Austrian, blond face. Finally she became too simple, without a head.
On the great canal a few people skated, a very few people, little and cold and without fun, between those well-combed trees that stand there like hair with an elegant parting. And these are the great. Man is stupid. Naturally the frog goes pop!
Frieda has bought two hats and is proud of them.
Tomorrow we go to Chartres to see the cathedral. And that is our last outing. Tuesday we go to London.
Now, mother-in-law, you know all we are doing and can travel along with us. Such is life. We can go together in spite of separation and you can travel, travel in spite of old age.
Salutations, Madame, D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
Del Monte Ranch Questa, New Mexico 28 June 1924
Dearest Mother-in-Law:
It’s so long since I wrote you, but we had much to do here and my desire for writing is weak. I don’t know why, but words and speech bore me a little. We know so well without saying anything. I know you, you know me, so I need no longer speak on paper.
You know, Frieda is quite proud of her ranch and her horse Azul, that’s the one with two wives-my Poppy, who is very shy but beautiful, sorrel and quick, and then old Bessy, Brett’s horse. Bessy is also red, or sorrel.
Every evening we go down to Del Monte, only three and a half kilometres, through woods and over the Lobo brook. You know, this place is called Lobo, which means ‘wolf in Spanish.
Frieda is always talking to her Azul. ‘Yes, Azul, you ‘re a good boy! Yes, my Azul, go on, go on, then! Yes! Are you afraid, silly horse! It’s only a stone, a great white stone, why are you afraid then?’ That’s how she is always talking to him, because she is a little afraid herself There is always something to do here. I’ve written two stories. Right now we’re building a roof over the little veranda before the kitchen door, with eight small pillars of pinewood and boards on top-very nice. It’s nearly finished. You know, we’ve also got an Indian oven made of adobe. It stands outside, not far from the kitchen door, built like a beehive.
Last week came Francisco, the Indian servant at Del Monte. We baked bread and roasted chickens in the oven - very good. We can bake twenty loaves of bread in half an hour in it.
Five minutes’ walk from here are the tents and beds of the Indians, still standing. Frieda and I slept there once, under the big stars that hang low on the mountains here. Morning comes and a beautiful grey squirrel runs up the balsam pine and scolds us. No one else in the world, only the great desert below, to the west. We don’t go much to Taos and Mabel does not come often. We have our own life. The Brett is a little simple but harmless, and likes to help. Else writes Friedel is coming to America. He will likely come here. I think Else may also come, she has a desire for America. All right, but life in America is empty and stupid, more empty and stupid than with us. I mean the city and village life. But here, where one is alone with trees and mountains and chipmunks and desert, one gets something out of the air, something wild and untamed, cruel and proud, beautiful and sometimes evil - that is really America. But not the America of the whites.
Here comes your birthday again, you old Valkyrie, so you leap on the horse of your spirit from one year’s peak to the next, and look always further into the future. I send you a cheque. How gladly would I be with you, to drink your health in good Moselle. Here there is no wine and the ‘prosit’ cannot sound through the pines. But next year we will drink together to your birthday.
Auf Wiedersehen.
D. H. L.
P.S. I forgot, we have two small Bibble’s-sons, two little dogs from our Pips. They are six weeks old, named Roland and Oliver, and are gay, small, and fat, and lift their paws like Chinese lions.
(Translated from the German)
Santa Fe 14 August 1924
[To Else]
We are motoring with Mabel Luhan to the Hopi country - hotter down here.
Curtis Brown wrote they were arranging with you for ‘Boy in the Bush’-hope everything is satisfactory, and what a pity Baltimore is so far.
Del Monte Ranch Questa, New Mexico 26 October 1924
Dear Mother-in-Law:
We are home again, thank God. When one has been for three days with people one has had enough, quite enough. But next week we are going away, to stay a few days in Taos, then on to Mexico. Write to me care of British Consulate, 1 Avenida Madero, Mexico, DF, until I give you a new address.
The Brett will go with us: we do not know what else she could do, and she cannot remain here alone.
I am glad to go to Mexico. I don’t know why, but I always want to travel south. It if already cold here, especially at night. The sun doesn’t come over the hills till seven-thirty, then it turns warm and the horses stand stone-still, numbed by the cold, in the middle of the alfalfa field soaking themselves in the sun’s heat. For the most the sun is hot like July but today there are clouds.
I hope you will get your parcel, with blanket and picture. You will like them, I’m sure. I send you ten pounds for wood, you must keep nice and warm.
Here we shut everything up. The better things - silverware, rugs, beds, pictures, we take down on the wagon to good William and Rachel. Del Monte belongs to Mr Hawk, William’s father. The parents have a biggish house but go to California a lot. The young ones, William and Rachel, are in the log-cabin where we stayed two years ago. They make butter there and look after the cows and chickens.
Every evening we ride down to get the milk and the post from William. He always brings the letters up from the post box. Rachel and William will take good care of our things. Monday, Mr Murray, a workman, comes to put up the shutters. We shall leave the horses here till December when the snow comes. Then William will take them to Del Monte, only two and a half kilometres away, and feed them every day with alfalfa till spring when we come back again.
I don’t know how long we want to stay in Mexico City. I want to go southward to Oaxaca where the Mayas and Zapotec Indians live. It is always warm there, even hot. There I would like to finish my novel, ‘The Plumed Serpent.’
Here the hills are golden with aspen and cottonwoods and red with scrub-oak, wonderful. The pines and firs are nearly black. A lovely moment, a beautiful moment, but it will not last.
Auf Wiedersehen, mother-in-law. Winter comes again for old ladies, too bad.
D. H. L.
(Translated from the German)
[A letter to Lawrence from his mother-in-law] BADEN
Sunday 9 November 1924
My dear Fritzl:
Else has vanished in beautiful winter sunshine and I sit alone in my lonely wintry room. So far I got yesterday when the charwoman came and today, 0 jubilee, 0 triumph, came the cheque and the parcel. Like a demon I rushed to the station, number 2 brought the parcel, too heavy for me, and what came forth! Moved, admiring and happy, I sit and look. How you have painted! No, how adorable is the ranch! Here the stones speak! I understand that you love being there. I see it all - 0 dear son-in-law, how happy you have made me! I would like to pack up and come. If I were only younger! No, those horses and the lovely tree! But I think the winter is too cold - and I can smell those flowers, almost, so charming and gay and colourful. I called all the ladies in my tempestuous joy and all admired with me. What treasures - the blanket is just what I needed. The little original cover I put on my cane chair - My room looks quite Mexican! At once I will have the two pictures framed and hang them where I can see them - Now I know how you live, oh, the wonderful tree!
The tablecloth Else shall have for Christmas; the bag is ideal. All is spread out on the table before me and I do nothing but look and enjoy it all day! So much love in it all! I feel it so deeply and gratefully. May it shine into your own lives your thoughts of the old mother. I am looking forward to Else’s coming back - how she will open her eyes.
I hope you are really comfortable somewhere and have good news of the horses and the ranch. The parcel has taken five weeks but all arrived safely. I hope you found my letters in Mexico. I can’t thank you enough. I have not enjoyed anything so much for a long time and must always have another look at the cabin.
All luck to you - keep well.
With all my heart, your happy Mother
(Translated from the German)
Pel Monte Ranch Questa, New Mexico 15 April 1925
My dear Mother-in-Law:
Today came your two letters. So you went up the Merkur. Yes, you are younger than I am.
We have been at the ranch a week already. We found all well and safe, nothing broken, nothing destroyed. Only the mice found Mabel’s chair and ate the wool.
In the second house we have two young Indians, Trinidad and Rufina, husband and wife. Rufina is short and fat, waddles like a duck in high, white Indian boots - Trinidad is like a girl, with his two plaits. Both are nice, don’t sweat over their work, but do what we want. We still have the three horses but they are down with the Hawks, till the alfalfa and the grass have grown a bit.
We had three cold days - the wind can come ice-cold. I had a cold again. But now the weather is mild and warm, very beautiful, and spring in the air. All was washed very clean on the land, coming out of a yard of snow. Now the first anemones have come, built like crocuses but bigger and prouder, hairy on the brown-red earth under the pines. But everything is very dry again, the grass has hardly appeared, and yet it won’t grow any higher. We hoped for rain or snow again.
Brett stays down on Del Monte, in a little house by herself, near the old Hawks. She wanted to come up here but Frieda said no. And so we are only two whites and two reds, or rather yellow-browns, on the ranch. Trinidad fetches milk and butter and eggs from Del Monte. I lie in the sun. Frieda is happy to be on her ranch. Friedel comes in May - writes very happily, very likely he will return to the Fatherland at the end of the summer. For September we also think to come to England and Germany. But the Lord’s will be done. We bought a buggy and Trinidad will be coachman. I don’t work this year, am cross that I was so ill. Mabel is still in New York, but Friday Tony came.
Tomorrow Frieda goes to Taos by car. We are nice and warm here and have all one needs.
Well that you have friends with you. I send you a little pin-money. Auf Wiedersehen.
D. H. L. (Translated from the German)
S.S. ‘Resolute’ 25 September 1925
Meine liebe Schwiegermutter:
This is the second day at sea - very nice, with blue running water and a fresh wind. I am quite glad to be out of that America for a time: it’s so tough and wearing, with the iron springs poking out through the padding.
We shall be in England in five more days - I think we shall take a house by the sea for a while, so Frieda can have her children to stay with her. And I must go to my sisters and see their new house. And then we must hurry off to Baden-Baden, before winter sets in.
I don’t feel myself very American: no, I am still European. It seems a long time since we heard from you -1 hope it’s a nice autumn. In New York it was horrid, hot and sticky.
e Save me a few good Schwarzwald apples, and a bottle of Kirschwasser, and a few leaves on the trees, and a few alten Damen in the Stift to call me Herr Doktor when I’m not one, and a hand at whist with you and my kurzrockige Schwàgerin, and a Jubilaum in the Stiftskôniginkammer. The prodigal children come home, vom Schwein gibt’s kein mehr, nur vom Kalb. à bientôt!
auf baldige Wiedersehen! hasta luego! till I see you!
D. H. L.