Frieda,
1912
FRIEDA VON RICHTHOFEN WEEKLEY came from an aristocratic German family that no longer possessed vast estates or great wealth. The family included a distinguished explorer of Asia and a Prussian foreign secretary, as well as Frieda’s cousin the “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen, the greatest German flier in World War I, who was finally shot down in April 1918 after eighty victories in the air. Another cousin, Wolfram von Richthofen, chief of staff under General Hugo von Sperrle when the Nazis bombed the Basque capital of Guernica in 1937, later commanded the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War.
The family had once owned twenty thousand acres of wheat, barley and sugar beet near Breslau in Upper Silesia (now Poland), where Frieda’s father, Baron Friedrich, was born in 1845. He had fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, been wounded in the right hand, which remained crippled, and been taken prisoner. His father’s risky speculations and financial failure had deprived Friedrich of his ancestral inheritance, and his wound had suddenly ended his military career. Discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant and an Iron Cross, he trained as an engineer, joined the civil administration of Metz—a garrison town in Lorraine, which Germany captured from France in 1871 and lost in 1918—and was responsible for the canals around the city. He married Anna Marquier (born 1851), the daughter of a lawyer from Donaueschingen in the Black Forest. But when his wife discovered that the self-assertive but essentially weak man was a compulsive gambler and womanizer, she came to despise him, and their marriage soon deteriorated into an armed truce.
Friedrich and Anna had three exceptionally beautiful daughters. Else, born in 1874, was a pupil of the economist Max Weber and the mistress of his brother Alfred. She was one of the first women to earn a doctorate at Heidelberg, had been an inspector of factories in Karlsruhe and became professor of social economics at the university. In 1902 she married Edgar Jaffe, who in 1918–19 was finance minister in the short-lived revolutionary government of Bavaria. Else (like her mother) corresponded frequently with Lawrence and translated “The Fox” and The Boy in the Bush into German. Lawrence dedicated The Rainbow to her. Frieda, six years older than Lawrence, was born in Metz on August 11, 1879. Her younger sister, Johanna, born in 1882, was married to an officer on the German General Staff. She later divorced him and married a Berlin banker.1 Frieda’s family, though not wealthy or powerful, had made distinguished contributions to geography, diplomacy, military service, education and government. Frieda and her sisters were well-born, attractive and intelligent. And, like their father, they had unconventional sex lives.
Frieda was a German daughter of the regiment who attended balls at the Prussian court in Berlin in the late 1890s, the wife of an English university professor in Nottingham from 1899 to 1912, a wandering impoverished bohemian with Lawrence from 1912 to 1930 and a famous widow living with an Italian soldier in the Rockies from 1930 to 1956.
Her first husband, Ernest Weekley, fourteen years older than Frieda, had come from humble origins and had made his way in the world through hard work and intellectual ability. His father was a poorly paid official who distributed alms to the poor for the Hampstead Board of Guardians. Born in London, the second of nine children, Ernest became a schoolmaster at seventeen; he took a B.A. and an M.A. in French and German at London University and then a first-class degree in medieval and modern languages at Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied at Bern, Paris and Freiburg, where he was Lektor in English during 1897–98. In 1898 he became professor of French at University College, Nottingham. He met Frieda during a holiday in the Black Forest and married her in Freiburg, when she was just twenty, on August 29, 1899.2
According to Frieda, her wedding night with Weekley was a disaster. She was impulsive and playful; he was repressed and humorless. And she was shocked by the contrast between her idealistic expectations and the harsh reality of her first sexual experience. While he waited outside their hotel room in Lucerne, she undressed and impulsively climbed on top of a huge carved oak cupboard, with “the frills of her knickers flapping from her climbing legs. Triumphantly she reached the top, and sat there, wondering what he would do if he couldn’t find her. . . . Two hours later, [after sleeping with Weekley] . . . she was in an unspeakable torment of soul. It had been so horrible, more than horrible. . . . She had expected unspeakable bliss and now she felt a degraded wretch.”3 Though they had three children (Montague, born 1900; Elsa, born 1902; Barbara, born 1904) and lived together for thirteen years, Frieda and Ernest could never resolve the essential differences in their temperaments, outlooks and expectations.
Her sister Else and daughter Barbara have explained Frieda’s motives for marrying this conventional, cowardly and somewhat comical man, whom Aldous Huxley called “possibly the dullest Professor in the Western hemisphere.” Else suggested that since she and her sisters had no fortune, they could not marry army officers. And since in Metz, the second-biggest garrison in Germany, they met almost no one but officers, their choice was extremely limited. Weekley seemed more profound, moral and earnest than Frieda’s military suitors. She was genuinely fond of him and felt he would give her access to the academic world in England (of which she knew nothing).
Barbara believed that Frieda was impressed by “Ernst” (as she called him, for they spoke German at home). She thought him solemn but steady; he fell madly in love and worshipped her. She wanted to escape from a weak father who was a gambler, and from a silly mother who wished to get rid of her daughters and encouraged Weekley’s courtship. Frieda’s title impressed Nottingham, but she was too unconventional to help Weekley in his career. Frieda had considered marriage “a step somewhere,” but she did not know what she was getting into and was in fact bored to death in Nottingham. “Ernst” always tried to repress her intellectually. When she offered to give French lessons, he said: “but the student is advanced.”4
Weekley, a fanatical worker, wrote many textbooks and volumes on etymology, including the popular The Romance of Words (1912), The Romance of Names (1914) and An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (1922). Stirred by his endless energy, even the indolent Frieda joined the cottage industry and edited Schiller’s Ballads (1902) and Ludwig Bechstein’s Märchen (1906) for Blackie’s series of Little German Classics. But Frieda, a creature of emotion and impulse, soon wearied of provincial academic life. Her son, Montague, retrospectively observed that “it was a most incompatible marriage, hopeless from the start. Looking back on it now, I see there was no prospect of its lasting. . . . My father had a crushing schoolmasterly manner and not much tact; he couldn’t resist putting her in her place.”5
Frieda’s first affair was with Will Dowson, a wealthy, married lace manufacturer who owned one of the first private cars in Nottingham and used it for their assignations. While visiting her family in Germany in 1907, Frieda became the mistress of Freud’s brilliant pupil Otto Gross, and then of Gross’ disciple, the painter Ernst Frick. (Else also had an affair with Otto Gross, and bore him a son in 1907.) Gross, who wanted Frieda to leave Weekley and remain with him, later became a cocaine addict and in 1920 died of undernourishment and exposure in a Berlin sanatorium. In Mr. Noon, Johanna (Frieda) describes the virile Eberhard (Gross) as a liberator and a Lawrencean precursor who taught her about freedom and love: “He was a genius—a genius at love. He understood so much. And then he made one feel so free. He was almost the first psychoanalyst, you know—he was Viennese, too, and far, far more brilliant than Freud. They were all friends. But Eberhard was spiritual—he may have been demoniacal, but he was spiritual. . . . He made me believe in love—in the sacredness of love. He made me see that marriage and all those things are based on fear.”6 Gross taught Frieda the elements of psychoanalysis and the principle of sexual freedom; he taught her to recognize her desires and to have love affairs without feeling guilty. Because of Gross’ ideas, Frieda felt restricted by Weekley. Yet Weekley remained naively unaware of Gross’ influence and of Frieda’s infidelities, and was fond of calling her his “pure white lily.” When Lawrence became angry he would torment Frieda about this and quote Shakespeare’s sonnet to remind her: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
A Teutonic goddess, Frieda was a tall, strikingly handsome, golden-haired woman with a magnificent figure. Picturesque and arty, she favored peasant skirts and embroidered blouses. She had a deep, throaty voice, rolled her r’s and spoke with a distinct German accent. David Garnett, who accompanied the Lawrences on their honeymoon and walked across the Alps with them to Italy, described Frieda’s forthright personality and luxurious catlike trances: “Her head and the whole carriage of her body were noble. Her eyes were green, with a lot of tawny yellow in them, the nose straight. She looked one dead in the eyes, fearlessly judging one and, at that moment, she was extraordinarily like a lioness: eyes and colouring, and the swift power of her lazy leap up from the hammock where she had been lying.” Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose friendship with Lawrence aroused Frieda’s jealousy, found her childish, violent and overwhelming:
Frieda was indeed an extraordinary woman, very vital, robust and virile, a Prussian Brunhilde, who had educated herself on Nietzsche. She was clever in a way but too violent and had no wisdom. She combined timidity with violence, like a great, spoilt, self-willed ungovernable child, who, if she cannot get her own way, will sulk in peevish spiteful temper or steal round and get it another way and then be triumphant. . . .
Frieda is devilish, and she really is a wild beast, quite uncontrolled, cruel to Lawrence, and madly jealous if she thinks anyone esteems Lawrence more than her.7
Aldous Huxley met Frieda and Lawrence at Garsington, Ottoline’s country house, became one of their closest friends during the last five years of Lawrence’s life and portrayed Frieda as Katy Maartens in The Genius and the Goddess (1955). Unlike Ottoline, he stressed Frieda’s unconventionality, self-assurance and tranquillity: “She had the most sovereign disregard for what people might think or say about her—a disregard based upon a certain native aristocracy, on the confidence of a very rich personality in its own essential rightness and excellence. This meant that she was never anxious, never apologetic, never tense or nervous.” The aristocratic painter Dorothy Brett, who adored Lawrence and followed him to New Mexico in 1924, quarreled with Frieda and was banned from their household. But she recognized Frieda’s best qualities and generously portrayed her rival as vital, responsive and robust: “she is a big, warm, bounding creature, eyes blue and free, mouth a broad grin, bodice and skirt colorful and glowing: rough, hearty, and undoubtedly handsome. . . . [Frieda’s] immense, jolly, warm earthiness was so disarming. . . . [Her] laugh, her sparkling blue eyes, her zest for life were irresistible.”8 And Mabel Luhan, who also struggled with Frieda for possession of Lawrence in New Mexico, admitted that Frieda was excellent company, had a gift of immediate intimacy and was the freest woman she had ever known.
Frieda was an attractive mixture of good and bad qualities. Spontaneous, generous and passionate, she was also indolent, selfish and amoral. Lawrence’s acquaintances (who split into opposing camps over Frieda) admired her beauty, vitality, self-confidence and belief in Lawrence’s genius, but condemned her aristocratic superiority, German chauvinism, infidelity and inability to care for her invalid husband. Lawrence admired Frieda’s character and tried to accept, modify or balance the faults that seemed to derive from her nationality, background and class.
In March 1912, when Lawrence first met Frieda, he was twenty-six and she was thirty-two (a year younger than Alice Dax and nine years older than Louie Burrows). The descriptions of his appearance vary, according to the friend’s point of view and relation to Lawrence, from the satiric to the idealistic. But they agree about essentials. According to the factual notations on his passport, Lawrence was five feet nine inches tall, had blue-grey eyes and light-brown hair. A Croydon acquaintance stressed the poor health of the spectral figure—his pale face, stooping shoulders, narrow chest, febrile hands and hollow cough—which led to pneumonia in November 1911.
David Garnett, whose description was biased by his quarrel with Lawrence in 1915, found him unattractive and emphasized his proletarian aspect:
Lawrence was slight in build, with a weak, narrow chest and shoulders, but he was a fair height and very light in his movements. This lightness gave him a sort of grace. His hair was of a colour, and grew in a particular way, which I have never seen except in English working men. It was bright mud-colour, with a streak of red in it, a thick mat, parted on one side. Somehow, it was incredibly plebeian, mongrel and underbred. His forehead was broad, but not high, his nose too short and lumpy, his face colourless, like a red-haired man’s, his chin (he had not then grown a beard) altogether too large, and round like a hairpin . . . and the lower lip, rather red and moist, under a scrubby toothbrush moustache.
John Middleton Murry, Lawrence’s closest male friend, agreed that he had an “irremediably plebeian nose, as if deficient in bone or cartilage.” But Catherine Carswell, a loyal and adoring disciple, idealized his “deep-set jewel-like eyes, thick dust-coloured hair, pointed underlip of notable sweetness, fine hands, and rapid but never restless movements.”9
Lawrence wore conventional clothes before the war. But in 1915 (influenced, no doubt, by Frieda) he adopted bohemian dress, parted his hair in the middle and grew a red beard—“behind which I shall take as much cover as I can”—in imitation of his father. Helen Thomas, widow of the poet Edward Thomas, who met Lawrence after his attack of influenza in 1919, found him tall and emaciated, delicate and deathly pale. Jonathan Chambers, Jessie’s brother, noted that Lawrence, who loved to sing hymns and ballads, had a poor, squeaky voice. Frieda’s daughter Barbara agreed that “he had a high-pitched voice, a slight Midlands accent, and a mocking but spirited and brilliant manner.” (Barbara’s brother said he had a strong accent; Lawrence’s niece called it an educated Midlands accent.) And Rhys Davies, a Welsh writer who met Lawrence in Bandol in 1928, confirmed: “His voice became shrill as he was roused—and how easily he was roused to an extreme of intensity!”10
Earl Brewster, who met Lawrence in Capri in 1921 and became one of his closest companions during the last decade of his life, emphasized (like Catherine Carswell) his perception and vitality: “His face was pale; his hands long, narrow, capable; his eyes clear-seeing and blue; his brown hair and red beard glowing like flames from the intensity of his life; his voice was flexible, generally of medium pitch, with often a curious, plaintive note, sometimes in excitement rising high in key. He always appeared to be carelessly dressed.”11 The Danish painter Knud Merrild spent the winter of 1922 with Lawrence on the ranch above Taos and had ample opportunity to observe him closely. “We knew he wasn’t so very strong,” Merrild said, “but he didn’t particularly strike us as a sick person.” Yet the American author Carleton Beals, who met Lawrence in Mexico the following year, retrospectively described him as a sickly, post—Lady Chatterley satyr: “He was a thin man with a body that seemed about to fall to pieces; his face was pasty, expressionless, but his greenish eyes glared from out his pale beard with a curious satyr-like luster.”12
Lawrence’s fictional self-portraits are also perceptive. In Sons and Lovers he acknowledges his plebeian aspect but notes the vital, clear-seeing eyes: Paul Morel’s “face was rough, with rough-hewn features, like the common people’s; but his eyes under the deep brows were so full of life that they fascinated” Clara. And Hepburn’s eyes, in “The Captain’s Doll,” had “that curious, bright, unseeing look that was more like second sight than direct human vision.”13
Lawrence had abandoned his position in Croydon and was still recovering from pneumonia. On about March 16, 1912, he went to the home of his favorite university teacher, Professor Ernest Weekley, to inquire about a job teaching English in Germany, where his intellectual uncle, Fritz Krenkow, was then living. Frieda remembered that Lawrence was very ill when she first met him, pale and thin but with a strange eagerness and intensity. He fiercely denounced the split between body and spirit in women (as he had done in his first two novels) and talked appropriately enough about Oedipus. Afterward he wrote to her: “You are the most wonderful woman in all England”—a rather cheeky thing for a coal miner’s son to say to an older, married, aristocratic woman with three children.
Lawrence immediately and intuitively understood Frieda, penetrated her cheerful pose and perceived that she was unhappy in her marriage. A few days after their first meeting, they went for a walk in the country and he became absorbed in floating paper boats on a stream for Monty, Elsa and Barbie. Frieda vividly recalled: “crouched by the brook, playing there with the children, Lawrence forgot about me completely. Suddenly I knew I loved him.” Moved by his tenderness, she boldly proposed they become lovers. Lawrence—who had waited in vain for such a warm response from Jessie, Agnes, Helen and Louie—wanted to begin properly and restrained himself with Frieda. He refused her offer on moral grounds, declared his love and insisted they elope: “No, I will not stay in your husband’s house when he is away, but you must tell him the truth and we will go away together, because I love you.”14 Frieda wanted a love affair; Lawrence wanted marriage.
He was instantly enchanted by Frieda. The following month, before their elopement, he revealed his passion to Edward Garnett, a sympathetic and worldly bohemian, who understood Lawrence’s feelings and behavior as well as his novels and poems. Lawrence praised Frieda’s noble lineage and her intrinsic though nonconformist morality: “she is the daughter of Baron von Richthofen, of the ancient and famous house of Richthofen—but she’s splendid, she is really. . . . Mrs. Weekley is perfectly unconventional, but really good—in the best sense. . . . She is the woman of a lifetime.” Six weeks later, while living with Frieda in Germany, he added more personal details: “She’s got a figure like a fine Rubens woman, but her face is almost Greek.”15
Lawrence described, in two of his fictional works, his instant attraction to her sensuality and her difference from other women. In “Love Among the Haystacks,” the German governess “was strange, foreign, different from the ordinary girls: the rousing, feminine quality seemed in her concentrated, brighter, more fascinating than in anyone he had known.” And when Tom Brangwen first sees the foreign widow, Lydia Lensky, in The Rainbow, he reacts irrationally, impulsively: “ ‘That’s her,’ he said involuntarily. . . . His eyes met hers. He looked quickly away, pressing back his head, a pain of joy running through him. He could not bear to think of anything.”16
Unlike Lawrence’s previous girlfriends, Frieda was not an English, virginal, intellectual, well-educated, professional teacher. The other women were red- or dark-haired; Frieda was blond. And with Frieda he did not need a secure job and a comfortable nest egg. When they left England for Germany in early May he had only £11. Agnes, Helen and Louie had refused to sleep with Lawrence; Jessie had unwillingly submitted; but Frieda responded with an unrestrained and exciting passion. Lawrence had told Louie: “my mother has been passionately fond of me, and fiercely jealous. She hated [Jessie]—and would have risen from the grave to prevent my marrying her.”
Only Frieda was strong enough to conquer his mother—and then only after her death. “If my mother had lived I could never have loved you, she wouldn’t have let me go,” he confessed to Frieda. And she shrewdly perceived that “in his heart of hearts I think he always dreaded women, felt that they were in the end more powerful than men.” Frieda was Lawrencean before Lawrence. She led him to Europe, to an expatriate existence, and to a defiant opposition to society. She satisfied his emotional and sexual needs and liberated him from the puritanism he had inherited from his mother. “One sits so tight on the crater of one’s passions and emotions,” Lawrence wrote, with a volcanic metaphor. “I am just learning—thanks to Frieda—to let go a bit.”17
It is scarcely surprising that Lawrence fell in love with the beautiful baroness. But it is rather more difficult to understand why Frieda eloped with a penniless miner’s son who had no job and few prospects. Ironically, she must have been influenced by Weekley’s high opinion of one of his most promising students. Her son, Monty, remembered Frieda lying in bed (a characteristic Molly Bloom–like position) and devouring the early drafts of Sons and Lovers. And—like Jessie, Ford and Pound—she was struck by Lawrence’s astonishing talent. Like Lawrence, she was attracted to the strangeness of someone from an entirely different background, and gave in to his imperious demands—even though it meant abandoning her children. She later ignored her initial indecision and suggested that she had always been committed to him: “That he came of the common people was a thrill to me. It gave him his candour, the wholesomeness of generations of hard work and hard living behind him, nothing sloppy, and lots of guts. . . . I had to be his wife if the skies fell, and they nearly did. The price I had to pay was almost more than I could afford, with all my strength.”
Then there was Lawrence’s respect for her, his insistent claim to her love, his absolute commitment, his life-and-death need for her as a wife. As Frieda wrote in her fictionalized third-person account: “In a sovereign way he took her for himself; she was his and he would never let her go again while he lived; he would kill her rather. She liked it. He wanted her, he needed her, and that was bliss. Nothing else mattered; all the misery of loneliness, of unconnectedness was gone.” Finally, like Lawrence, she justified their behavior by a sentient morality that transcended all conventions. As she told Edward Garnett, who became her confidant as well as Lawrence’s during the Sturm und Drang that followed their elopement: “He has taught me the feel and the understanding of things and people, that is morality, I think.”18 They had set each other free, and there were sufficient differences between them to provide endless dialogue and stimulation. But she was declassée and outcast from the moment she left with him.
Though Lawrence boasted of his sexual performance in Mr. Noon, his first night with Frieda—like Weekley’s debut—was unsuccessful. In the bravely honest poem “First Morning,” Lawrence admits his own sexual repression and sexual failure. He was plagued by thoughts of his past loves and his dead mother, and Frieda, overcome with guilt about her children, seemed—for all her eagerness—to reject him:
In the darkness
with the pale dawn seething at the window
through the black frame
I could not be free,
not free myself from the past, those others—
and our love was a confusion,
there was a horror,
you recoiled away from me.19
Lawrence’s scandalous elopement with Frieda on May 3, 1912, scarcely six weeks after they first met, was the most radical decision of his entire life. He permanently abandoned his teaching career and all hope of a regular income, decided to live an expatriate life and planned to support himself entirely as a writer. It was also a momentous step for Frieda. Like Nora Barnacle, who had eloped with James Joyce in 1904, she rejected received ideas about religion and morality and, soon after the death of the writer’s mother and their first meeting, ran away to the Continent with this impoverished but confident young genius, who had not yet become her husband.
Frieda often took trips from Nottingham to visit her family in Germany. The children, well cared for by their devoted nurse, Ida, were always ecstatic when she returned. One day Frieda casually said: “Come and say goodbye to me, Monty,” and he failed to realize that this was her final farewell. She took the two girls to their grandparents’ house, at 40 Well Walk in Hampstead, and ran off with Lawrence. They thought she had gone alone to Metz. After a few weeks, when they asked, “Where is Mama?” Weekley turned pale and left the room. The grandparents said: “don’t disturb Father now, he’s worried,” and the children remained bewildered by her absence. The Weekleys taught them to be bitter about Frieda. Like “She-who-was-Cynthia” in The Virgin and the Gipsy (1926), Frieda became an unperson; like the water closet, she was never mentioned. She had never expected to lose all contact with her children and hoped to have them and Lawrence as well.
After conversations in 1925 with Barbara Weekley, the model for the heroine in The Virgin and the Gipsy, Lawrence satirically portrayed the desolate atmosphere of the Weekley household after Frieda had left, right down to the addiction to crossword puzzles and the horribly obese grandmother:
The rector was now forty-seven years old; he had displayed an intense and not very dignified grief after the flight of his wife. Sympathetic ladies had stayed him from suicide. His hair was almost white, and he had a wild-eyed, tragic look. You had only to look at him, to know how dreadful it all was, and how he had been wronged. . . .
Out in the evil world, at the same time, there wandered a disreputable woman who had betrayed the rector and abandoned his little children. She was now yoked to a young and despicable man, who no doubt would bring her the degradation she deserved.20
If Lawrence had seemed the dominant partner in Nottingham, the balance of power shifted to Frieda when they left for Metz. During their first trip to Germany, Frieda was entirely at ease while visiting her family, speaking her own language, returning to her country and culture. Lawrence, traveling abroad for the first time, was an outsider and a foreigner, unfamiliar with the surroundings and barely articulate in German. He was completely committed to Frieda, much more in love with her than she was with him. He had very little money, was dependent on the goodwill of her family, submitted himself to their judgment and hoped to be accepted. He had to wait—first in Metz and then alone in the Rhineland—while Frieda made up her mind about whether to accept or reject him, whether to take a German lover (which she did) or to return to her family in England.
The first test occurred when Frieda, greeted at the Metz railroad station by her intellectual sister, Else, whispered to her: “ ‘I have brought someone with me. You must help me.’ [Else then] met her with Lawrence in a little café on the Esplanade, with a fine view of the Moselle valley. He was a very young, sensitive, gentlemanly Englishman, quiet but not shy, who gave an impression of self-reliance.” Lawrence passed the next test when he met Frieda and her elegant younger sister, Johanna, at a fair. When he suddenly appeared, looking odd in a cap and raincoat, Frieda was apprehensive about what her sister would think. But Johanna—as intuitive and impulsive as Frieda herself—surprised her by exclaiming: “You can go with him. You can trust him.”21
Lawrence’s presence in Metz became known to the old baron and baroness when, on his fifth day in the town and while dallying with Frieda on the fortifications, he was suspected of espionage and detained by the authorities: “I had to quit Metz because the damn fools wanted to arrest me as a spy. Mrs. Weekley and I were lying on the grass near some water—talking—and I was moving round an old emerald ring on her finger, when we heard a faint murmur in the rear—a German policeman. There was such a to-do. It needed all the fiery little Baron von Richthofen’s influence—and he is rather influential in Metz—to rescue me. They vow I am an English officer.”
Frieda’s father was at that time celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his entrance into the German army, and the family had gathered to honor him. Her contribution to the festivities was to tell the old soldier that she had left her respectable professor and three small children to run off with a younger, sickly, poor, unemployed, little-known English writer (the son of an illiterate coal miner), who had just been arrested as a spy.
The parents were naturally less enthusiastic about Lawrence than the sisters. The father, trying to boss but being rather nice, begged Frieda to come to her senses and resume her old life. The mother (who later became a great friend) thought Frieda was not suited to be Lawrence’s wife and not unreasonably demanded: “Who was I, did I think, that a Baronesse should clean my boots and empty my slops: she, the daughter of a high-born and highly-cultured gentleman.”22 Nothing had been resolved when the police forced Lawrence to leave Metz.
Lawrence, the greatest letter writer in English since Byron and Keats, wrote some of his best letters during his two-week separation from Frieda in mid-May 1912 and throughout the crisis with Weekley that year. They are marked by sympathy, energy, intellectual audacity and imaginative intensity. Though Lawrence and Frieda had committed adultery, they justified their behavior by the transcendent morality of love. Lawrence, who had refused to sleep with Frieda in Weekley’s house, was determined to act honestly and openly, and contrasted his own forthright behavior with Weekley’s desperate and disgraceful tantrums: “No more dishonour, no more lies,” he declared, while still in Metz. “Let them do their—silliest—but no more subterfuge, lying, dirt, fear. I feel as if it would strangle me.”
A week later, writing from his uncle Fritz’s house in Waldbröl and bewildered by Frieda’s uncertainty about whether to stay with Lawrence or return to her children, he shot off a series of questions about her plans (she was, at this point, holding the cards), tried to fortify her commitment and concluded with a nautical metaphor that stressed their precarious state:
Quakiness and uncertainty are the death of us. See, tell me exactly what you are going to do. Is the divorce coming off?—Are you going to England at all? Are we going finally to pitch our camp in Munich? Are we going to have enough money to get along with? Have you settled anything definitely with Ernst?—One must be detached, impersonal, cold, and logical, when one is arranging affairs. We do not want another fleet of horrors attacking us when we are on a rather flimsy raft—lodging in a borrowed flat on borrowed money.
The following day his mood changed and he was calmer. In a letter that implicitly contrasted his real love for Frieda with his transient desire for previous girls, he compared himself to a medieval knight in a spiritual retreat. He emphasized the tremendous significance of their love and marriage (the fundamental basis of his thought and art) which had transcended passion and achieved tranquillity:
Like the old knights, I seem to want a certain time to prepare myself—a sort of vigil with myself. Because it is a great thing for me to marry you, not a quick, passionate coming together. I know in my heart “here’s my marriage.”. . .
It’s a funny thing, to feel one’s passion—sex desire—no longer a sort of wandering thing, but steady, and calm. I think, when one loves, one’s very sex passion becomes calm, a steady sort of force, instead of a storm. Passion, that nearly drives one mad, is far away from real love.23
Lawrence, who had slept only with Alice and Jessie and would sleep with no other woman after he met Frieda, believed that “the instinct of fidelity is perhaps the deepest instinct in the great complex we call sex.” Frieda, who was a virgin at her wedding but had had several affairs when she was married to Weekley, believed in the authority of impulse and in unrestrained sexual freedom. She took three lovers in her first four months with Lawrence (Udo von Henning, an anonymous woodcutter and Harold Hobson) and three others during their various marital crises (Cecil Gray in 1917, Middleton Murry in 1923 and Angelo Rav-agli in 1926). In fact, Frieda had more lovers when she was with Lawrence than she had had when married to Weekley.
Immediately after his last quoted letter, on May 16 and 17, Lawrence responded to Frieda’s challenge by mocking his current rival, von Henning (a German officer in Metz, later killed in Belgium in the first week of the war). He then, quite sincerely and with admirable disinterestedness, perceived her need to test her love and conceded her right to the same sexual freedom as a man. Weekley had wanted to tame her reckless spirit. Lawrence was willing to set it free and tolerate her infidelity until she was sure of his love and could commit herself completely to him:
You fling Henning in my teeth. . . . I think you’re rather horrid to Henning. You make him more . . . baby-fled. Or shall you leave him more manly? . . . Where is the [sexually hungry] Henning to get his next feed?
If you want Henning, or anybody, have him. But I don’t want anybody, till I see you. . . . I don’t believe even you are at your best, when you are using Henning as a dose of morphia—he’s not much else to you. . . . Only, my dear, because I love you, don’t be sick, do will to be well and sane.24
According to David Garnett, when Frieda and Lawrence were living in Icking, near Munich, in the early summer of 1912, and after they had quarreled, Frieda, submitting to a sudden impulse, had gone down to the Isar River, “swum over to where a woodcutter was working, had made love to him and had swum back—just to show Lawrence she was free to do what she liked.” This no doubt made the woodcutter’s day. And Lawrence, who told Garnett about it, seems to have accepted the incident with reasonably good grace. Aldous Huxley, who added some Italian peasants to Frieda’s list of lovers, commented with characteristic acuity on this aspect of their marriage. He suggested that Frieda’s casual dalliances did not diminish her love for Lawrence and that he reluctantly accepted them because of his belief in her right to freedom and his great need of her: “Frieda and Lawrence had, undoubtedly, a profound and passionate love-life. But this did not prevent Frieda from having, every now and then, affairs with Prussian cavalry officers and Italian peasants, whom she loved for a season without in any way detracting from her love for Lawrence or from her intense devotion to his genius. Lawrence, for his part, was aware of these erotic excursions, got angry about them sometimes, but never made the least effort to break away from her; for he realized his own organic dependence upon her.”25
A potentially more serious affair took place with Harold Hobson—the son of J. A. Hobson (the author of Imperialism), a friend of David Garnett and a consulting engineer—en route to Italy in August 1912. Lawrence described it in Mr. Noon—which portrays the turbulent first months with Frieda (May–September 1912) and complements her memoir, Not I, But the Wind—and his fictional portrayal is the only account we have of this incident.
The greatest moment in the book, which shows Lawrence’s psychological penetration and artistic skill, occurs in the mountains when Johanna (Frieda) confesses that she has slept with one of the young Englishmen (based on Hobson) who had traveled with them for several days. This revelation is such a surprise for Noon (Lawrence) “that he did not know what to feel, or if he felt anything at all. It was such a complete and unexpected statement that it had not really any meaning for him.” They walk for a time, and he suddenly says: “Never mind, my love. . . . We do things we don’t know we are doing. And they don’t signify. . . . I love you—and so what does it matter!” Though Lawrence was sufficiently tolerant of Hobson to have him as a guest at Lake Garda in December 1912, Frieda, who felt guilty and thought he should be angry, disliked his unmanly and humiliating Christian forgiveness: “He seemed to have put her more in the wrong, and assumed a further innocent glory himself.”26
Apart from Frieda’s infidelity during their first months together, they were troubled by the possibility of having their own children and by Frieda’s attachment to the children she had left behind in England. Though he was nearly penniless, had an unstable relationship with Frieda and would not be able to marry her for some time, Lawrence did not believe in birth control. He was pleased at the idea of having a child and willing to undertake the responsibility. He told Frieda, who was alarmed by the prospect of pregnancy, that he was prepared to be a father and would regret not having children: “Never mind about the infant. If it should come, we will be glad, and stir ourselves to provide for it—and if it should not come, ever—I shall be sorry. I do not believe, when people love each other, in interfering there. It is wicked, according to my feeling. I want you to have children to me—I don’t care how soon. I never thought I should have that definite desire.” The unwanted child wanted children of his own.
But the children never came. In his destructive hagiography, Son of Woman, Middleton Murry called Lawrence a man incapable of begetting children and claimed that this caused Lawrence deep distress. Willie Hopkin noted that after his attack of pneumonia in 1901—which Lawrence said had “damaged his health for life”—“his voice grew high-pitched and light, almost like a girl’s.” Barbara Weekley confirmed Murry’s statement, clarified Hopkin’s implication and explained this crucial issue. When Lawrence was about sixteen (she said) he had a serious illness, rather like mumps. Though he and Frieda at first wanted to have children, they were unable to do so because the disease had made him sterile.27
Lawrence’s problems with the von Richthofen family and the German police, with Frieda’s indecision and infidelity, with his sexual failure on the first night, with lack of money, lack of housing and lack of plans, were exacerbated by Ernest Weekley’s behavior in Nottingham. The elegant and sarcastic philologist was a man of the world, who had studied at Cambridge and lived in Europe. But he adopted a tone of moral outrage and then disintegrated into nervous collapse. He behaved with wild inconsistency, veering from noble generosity to cruel vindictiveness, at one moment wondering what the neighbors would think and at another threatening pistols, murder and suicide. Finally, he hardened into self-destructive bitterness.
On May 7, 1912, Lawrence wrote Weekley about his love for Frieda and explained why they had gone away together. Weekley, then under control, recovering from the shock and still hoping that Frieda might change her mind, whined a little, did the decent thing and asked for a divorce: “I had a letter from Lawrence this morning. I bear him no ill-will and hope you will be happy with him. But have some pity on me. . . . Let me know at once that you agree to a divorce. . . . You have loved me once—help me now—but quickly.” Only a few days later, however, he appealed to Frieda’s mother, emphasizing his shredded nerves and pathetic suffering:
Dear Mama, please make her understand what a state I am in: I cannot see her hand-writing without trembling like an old cripple—to see her again would be my death. I would kill myself and the children too. . . . I have desperately to stretch every nerve in order not to cry out hysterically, and then I am weak as a child and can only lie there and think—if only for a quarter of an hour I could not think.
Lawrence fully understood Weekley’s anger at his public shame and humiliation (which continued, as Lawrence’s fame grew, until his death in 1954, at the age of ninety), as well as his passionate love for Frieda and his use of every means to get her back. On April 29, a few days before leaving for Germany, Lawrence had described Weekley’s strange mixture of qualities—well-bred and brutish, pleasant and bitter—and the ambivalent admiration and hatred the two men felt for each other: “He is a middle class, gentlemanly man, in whom the brute can leap up. He is forty six, and has been handsome, is usually ironic, pessimistic and cynical, nice. I like him. He will hate me, but really he likes me at the bottom. . . . He has had a bad illness a year or two back. He is getting elderly, and a bit tired.”28
In July, when they were living in a villa in Icking, lent by Frieda’s sister, the storm continued. Weekley, still madly in love with Frieda, was tormented by her betrayal. He implored her to renounce her insane ideas about free love and return, an obedient wife, to the bosom of her family. When she received his letters, Frieda would fall on the floor, beating her head and groaning with misery, angry at Lawrence for not begging her to stay for his sake. He insisted that she had to decide for herself whether she wanted to live with him and share his poor prospects (Sons and Lovers had just been rejected by Heinemann) or return to her family and security. A week later, after yet another sudden shift in mood, Lawrence praised Weekley’s love for Frieda and refusal to criticize her. Weekley now blamed Otto Gross for putting crazy ideas into her head. He even called Lawrence “honest” and conceded that he had a great literary future.
By December, when Lawrence and Frieda had moved to Lake Garda, in northern Italy, Weekley—betrayed, humiliated and wounded—had swung back to his violent and vindictive mood. When Lawrence wrote a letter to the children, Weekley threatened to come to Italy and kill them both. Then, playing his last and most potent card, he decided to punish Frieda through her children. He sent a photograph of them and said if she did not come home they would no longer have a mother and she would never see them again. Finally, he agreed that month to divorce Frieda if she promised to cut herself off completely from the family: “I have done with you, I want to forget you and you must be dead to the children. You know the law is on my side.”
All this, as Weekley had intended, had a devastating effect on Lawrence and Frieda, and almost destroyed their love. Overwhelmed by the misery he had caused, Lawrence felt helpless, could not cope with her grief and shut himself off from her agony. In 1915, after Lawrence and Frieda had returned to England and married, Ottoline Morrell asked Weekley to allow Frieda to see the children. Writing with gratitude to Ottoline, Frieda explained how miserable she had been in 1912 when everyone—her parents, her children and Lawrence—had turned against her:
It is so terrible to have hurt a man as I did, because after all he did his best according to his own lights, my first husband I mean and that everybody turned against me is only natural—but it has been so killing and desperate when I felt everybody against me, even Lawrence, who was always quite genuine, but could not bear it, when I was unhappy because of the children—Even they turned against me. . . . And now I am no longer alone in this battle, you have given me a generous helping hand and I am so grateful to you that I could sing.29
Frieda accepted the fact that Weekley hated her, but she could not forgive him for making the children suffer.
Weekley’s attitude toward Frieda’s desertion remained inflexible to the end. He sold his house, “Cowley,” on Private Road in Nottingham. From 1912 he lived with his children and parents in Chiswick (west London) and commuted to the university. He did not mention Frieda for three years, but one day, sitting on a tombstone in a country churchyard, he asked Barbie: “Would you like to see Mama?” Yet when Frieda attempted to see them, he tried to protect the children from her malign influence. Defying these impediments, Frieda crept through the back entrance of their Chiswick house, entered the nursery and found the children at supper with the dreadful Granny and the maiden aunt Maude. She was soon driven out and the law invoked to restrain her. On another occasion, she simply entered the house and took Weekley by surprise. Goaded into fury, he tried to wound her and lapsed into snobbery: “Aren’t you ashamed to show your face where you are known? Isn’t the commonest prostitute better than you? . . . Do you want to drive me off the face of the earth, Woman? Is there no place where I can have peace? . . . If you had to go away, why didn’t you go away with a gentleman?” The aristocratic lady attracted to an earthy, primitive, lower-class man would become one of the dominant themes in Lawrence’s fiction.
Monty and Elsa, the older children, sided with their father. When they met Frieda as adults they told her: “we don’t want to see you again.” She seemed to accept this but went away crying. Barbie believed that Frieda “was right to act as she did. . . . But underneath some nasty resentment remained. A poison had seeped into my roots, and I felt an antagonism towards her.”
Though Weekley had a few dalliances he was never serious about another woman. Once, when the children were grown up, Frieda came to the house, but they refused to let her meet him. He kept Frieda’s letters and photographs in his desk, where they were found after his death. Weekley’s obituary in the Guardian ignored Lawrence’s momentous visit to his house in 1912 and stated, with unintentional irony, “As an old man well over eighty, he wrote: ‘I find nothing more pleasantly stimulating than visits of old students.’ . . . Domestic misfortune, which might have embittered or broken a lesser man, he accepted with reticent dignity.”30 Barbara believed, on the contrary, that he was embittered and broken, and that domestic misfortune had ruined his chance of getting a chair at Oxford or Cambridge.
The children remained a constant, agonizing, insoluble problem for Lawrence and Frieda. He had endured his mother’s devouring love throughout his childhood and now had to suffer Frieda’s love for her brood. She did not quarrel about the children when she was happy with Lawrence, but they became a great issue when his love failed to satisfy her. Though Lawrence accepted her lovers, he was fiercely jealous of her children.
Frieda thought Lawrence was unsympathetic and unaware of her misery. He thought there was an element of insincerity in her suffering, that she exaggerated her devotion in order to assuage her guilt. When he heard Frieda cry out in her loud voice (magnified for dramatic effect) that her womb hungered for her children, he would console her by quoting Isaiah, and then enrage her by declaring that she would not have abandoned her children if she had really loved them. “ ‘Don’t be sad [he said]. I’ll make a new heaven and earth for them, don’t cry, you see if I don’t.’ I would be consoled yet he would be furious when I went on. ‘You don’t care a damn about those brats really and they don’t care about you.’ I cried and we quarrelled. . . . Over the children, I thought he was beastly; he hated me for being miserable, not a moment of misery did he put up with; he denied all the suffering and suffered all the more, like his mother before him; how we fought over this,” Frieda wrote.31
Lawrence responded by exposing the irrationality of her behavior and condemning her feminine perversity: “Isn’t it a funny thing, if a woman has got her children, she doesn’t care about them, and if she has a man, she doesn’t care about him, she only wants her children.”32 Lawrence refused to sympathize with Frieda’s feelings for a number of complex, emotional reasons. He had experienced the destructive power of maternal love and he could not have children of his own. Since he wanted Frieda’s undivided loyalty, he was unwilling to question her decision to leave her family or to confront the pain and suffering they had caused. He also found it difficult to justify her selfish behavior and to accept his own guilt-ridden responsibility.
Lawrence and Frieda came to terms with their adultery by identifying with and assuming the roles of Vronsky and Anna in Tolstoy’s great novel. “Frieda had carefully studied Anna Karenin in a sort of ‘How to be happy though livanted’ [stolen away] spirit,” he told Edward Garnett, and then ironically added: “She finds Anna very much like herself, only inferior—Vronsky not much like me—too much my superior.” In fact, the comparison went deeper than Lawrence suggested. Like Alexei Karenin, Weekley was cold, pompous, self-righteous, willing to forgive his wife and take her back, reluctant to grant a divorce, vindictive in alienating his children from the mother. Like Vronsky and Anna, Lawrence and Frieda caused a scandal, were disgraced in the eyes of their families, were tainted by immorality, lost their place in society, led a rootless life abroad and quarreled bitterly. When Lawrence wrote about Anna Karenina in his essay “The Novel,” he attacked Tolstoy’s moral condemnation of the lovers, which he felt ruined the book, and justified his own defiance of society: “Nobody in the world is anything but delighted when Vronsky gets Anna Karenin. Then what about the sin? — Why, when you look at it, all the tragedy comes from Vronsky’s and Anna’s fear of society. The monster was social, not phallic at all. They couldn’t live in the pride of their sincere passion, and spit in Mother Grundy’s eye. And that, that cowardice, was the real ‘sin.’ The novel makes it obvious, and knocks all old Leo’s teeth out.”33 Lawrence makes the lovers’ revolt a cornerstone of his attempt to change society. Tolstoy seeks redemption in Christianity; Lawrence seeks salvation in love.