Mansfield and Murry,
1913–1916
LAWRENCE had a great deal in common with Katherine Mansfield, his most talented friend. Both were outsiders in English society: Lawrence because of his working-class background, Katherine because of her colonial origins. Though they left their birthplaces, they were strongly influenced by them and frequently re-created their native regions in their work. They spent many impoverished years on the Continent and maintained a European rather than an insular outlook, though Katherine was usually lonely and isolated abroad, while Lawrence—sustained by Frieda—traveled more widely and worked more productively. They experienced life with a feverish intensity, were passionately committed to their art and achieved a posthumous fame far greater than their contemporary reputations. Most important of all, they were physically sterile and seriously ill with tuberculosis for most of their adult lives, and wandered from country to country in search of a warm climate and good health. They were subject to sudden fits of rage, suffered the pain of disease and the threat of death.
Unlike his other friendships, Lawrence’s relations with Katherine and Middleton Murry were based on the complex connections of two couples. Katherine and Lawrence were the creative poles of their marriages, and their genius was acknowledged by their partners. Both couples had insoluble problems and frequent quarrels. But Katherine and Murry, who were unable to marry until she finally secured a divorce in 1919, had more serious conflicts, which sometimes led to extended separations when each took a lover. Frieda’s belief in Lawrence, which kept him alive, was greater than Murry’s belief in Katherine; and Murry’s weakness and betrayal led her to the mysticism of Gurdjieff and hastened her death.
Both Lawrence and Frieda felt the Murrys were their most intimate friends. They first corresponded about Lawrence’s magazine articles, then met and quickly established a friendship. Impelled by Lawrence’s desire for like-minded companions, they twice lived and worked in neighboring houses. Both couples had fierce attractions and antagonisms toward one another. Lawrence and Frieda were physically attracted to Murry—a handsome, dreamy, weak and undependable man. And Katherine and Murry were caught up in Lawrence’s bitter quarrels with Frieda.
Lawrence became more domineering as he became more alienated from traditional society, and he constantly tried to persuade his friends to conform to his ideals of sex and marriage. His temperamental extremism and his attempt to interfere with and manage his friends’ lives eventually forced Katherine and Murry to reject and withdraw from him, with harsh letters and bitter recriminations on both sides. Katherine, who lived at close quarters with Lawrence, was much more critical of him than were his other friends. She was attracted to his vitality but repelled by his passionate enthusiasms and dogmatic obsessions, which intensified her natural inclination to retreat into her private world. Because their temperaments were radically different, Katherine frequently appeared negative, cowardly and sickly to Lawrence, who blamed her for being ill; while to Katherine, Lawrence’s manic egoism seemed almost insane. But their bonds were strong and they were always drawn back to each other. When they did not meet, they read each other’s books and kept in touch through letters and news from their close mutual friends: Ottoline, Brett, Kot and Gertler. Katherine recognized that Lawrence was a greater writer. When his work was suppressed, he grew jealous of her success.
Katherine Mansfield (née Kathleen Beauchamp) was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, the daughter of a prosperous, philistine businessman who earned a knighthood as director and then chairman of the Bank of New Zealand. She was educated in Wellington and at Queen’s College, London, returned to New Zealand for a year and then left permanently for London in August 1908. Within ten months of her arrival in England she had an unhappy love affair with one man, conceived his child, married a second man and left him the next day (after an unconsummated wedding night), endured a period of drug addiction, suffered a miscarriage and contracted venereal disease. She was a sexual extremist who both craved and repudiated men.
Katherine had fine features, intense dark eyes, clear skin, even white teeth, bobbed hair, a boyish body; she was colorful in her dress and quiet in her movements. She had been an actress and was fond of role playing, projecting contradictory selves and assuming a defensive mask-like persona. Lawrence captured her attractive, elusive character in his portrait of Gudrun Brangwen in Women in Love: she was “so charming, so infinitely charming, in her softness and her fine, exquisite richness of texture and delicacy of line. There was a certain playfulness about her too, such a piquancy of ironic suggestion, such an untouched reserve.” And Dorothy Brett, who adored Katherine but was frequently the victim of her satire, mentioned her savage changes of mood and her cruel comments: “Her reputation of brilliancy, of a sort of ironic ruthlessness toward the small minds and less agile brains, simply terrified me. . . . She had daring, courage and a tremendous sense of humour. She was like a sparkling brook—like quicksilver. Her changes of mood were rapid and disconcerting; a laughing joyous moment would suddenly turn through some inadequate remark into biting anger. . . . Katherine had a tongue like a knife, she could cut the very heart out of one with it.”1
John Middleton Murry, eighteen months younger than Katherine, was born in London in 1889, the son of a poor copy clerk at the War Office and a petty tyrant at home. Murry’s biographer writes that his repressive childhood led to “an atrophy of the sensuous, a hypertrophy of the intellectual, from which he never recovered”; and Murry’s aunt told his son: “Your dad was never a real boy at all. He was just a little old man.” As late as 1919, when he was editor of the Athenaeum, Murry agreed with this diagnosis and rather pathetically confessed: “I wish to God I were a man. Somehow I seem to have grown up, gone bald even, without ever becoming a man; and I find it terribly hard to master a situation.” Lawrence, who had a complex love-hate relationship with Murry and was fond of diagnosing his weaknesses, agreed: “Spunk is what one wants, not introspective sentiment. The last is your vice. You rot your own manhood at the roots, with it.”2
Murry’s humble background and scholarly achievements resembled Ernest Weekley’s. His highly developed intellect won him scholarships to Christ’s Hospital and Brasenose College, Oxford, where he formed friendships with the novelist Joyce Cary and the critic Michael Sadler. Murry spent the Christmas vacation of 1910 in Paris, where he first encountered Left Bank bohemianism and Fauvism, conceived the plan for his avant-garde magazine, Rhythm, and had his first love affair, with a Parisian demi-mondaine, Marguéritte.
Brett described Murry as an attractive and dreamy young man who “rolls in with the gait of a sailor, his curly dark hair is getting a bit thin on top. He is nervous, shy, a small man. The eyes are large and hazel, with a strange unseeing look; the nose is curved one side and perfectly straight the other, due to its having been broken. His lips are finely cut, the mouth sensitive, the chin determined. A fine and beautiful head.” And Murry accurately characterized himself as “Part snob, part coward, part sentimentalist,”3 as if the confession justified the faults.
Murry’s fatal combination of indecision and self-deception, of intellectuality and sentimentality, weakened his rational thought and made him distrust his own feelings. This in turn led to a moral ambiguity, for his intellectualism allowed him to escape from emotional dilemmas. He was able to understand this flaw in himself and even condemn it, yet he was disingenuous enough to believe that he could dispose of his defects by acknowledging them and by attributing noble motives to selfish actions. He believed he could be a great writer, but was primarily an editor and a critic.
Katherine met Murry at a literary party in London in December 1911, when the “little Colonial” and the lower-middle-class undergraduate were both deraciné outsiders in London and Oxford. After living together in Gray’s Inn Road in 1911–12, Katherine and Murry began their itinerant life of poverty and squalor, and had nearly a dozen addresses—in London, Bucks., Kent, Cornwall and Paris—during their first two years together. Like Lawrence and Frieda, they suffered from poverty, illness and domestic discord; and began their life together without the conventional foundations of marriage, a supportive family, a secure home or a steady income. As Murry observed: we were “prey to a subtle sense of our own unreality, as though we were only a kind of dream-children.”
Katherine’s character was an odd mixture of the ethereal and the earthy; Murry was afraid of life and tended to withdraw from people. She was brave, he was cowardly; she was reserved, he wore his heart on his sleeve; and from the beginning she took the active role and he the passive one. Though Murry recognized that Katherine was his moral, artistic and intellectual superior, he was egotistic and self-absorbed. He constantly praised her genius, but she had to support him for many years, do the domestic chores and then write her stories with the little time that remained. Ottoline Morrell justly attributed Katherine’s irritation to Murry’s egoism and selfishness: “She seemed often as if she would like to shake him. She called him ‘a little mole hung out on a string to dry.’ ”4
Virginia Woolf also treated her friends to a savage but accurate dissection of his character, which, she said, was “full of spite and backbiting and gush and highmindedness”: “Middleton M[urry] is a posturing Byronic little man; pale; penetrating; with bad teeth; histrionic; an egoist; not, I think, very honest; but a good journalist, and works like a horse, and writes the poetry a very old hack might write. . . . He has a mania for confession. I suppose his instinct is to absolve himself in these bleatings and so get permission for more sins.” Gerald Brenan spoke for most of Bloomsbury when he said: “Everyone detested Middleton Murry,” and Bertrand Russell also “thought Murry beastly.”5 People disliked Murry because he was a pretentious and ambitious self-made man who, though shy and diffident, conveyed an impression of condescension and learned superiority. He lived in a world of ideas rather than of people, and often adopted and then abandoned untenable beliefs.
In December 1912, after Lawrence (who was three years older than Katherine) had published The White Peacock and The Trespasser, and Katherine In a German Pension (1911), he responded to Murry’s request and asked Edward Garnett’s advice about publishing his stories in Rhythm. The following month Katherine sent him a copy of Rhythm and again asked for a contribution. Lawrence replied from Gargnano on January 29, offering several stories, and in February he told a friend: “You should find some of my stuff in March Rhythm. It’s a daft paper, but the folk seem rather nice.” When the Lawrences returned to England in June 1913, they looked up Katherine and Murry and liked them immediately. The two men were extremely conscious of their humble origins, and when they discovered that neither couple was married and both women were waiting for a divorce, it seemed they were made for each other. Frieda felt “theirs was the only spontaneous and jolly friendship that we had. . . . Yes I like Katherine, there is something exquisite about her mind and body. . . . I fell for Katherine and Murry when I saw them quite unexpectedly on the top of a bus, making faces at each other and putting their tongues out.” This was a charming but characteristically childish aspect of their relationship. Frieda was still estranged from her young children, and Katherine was far more understanding than Lawrence about Frieda’s maternal feelings. Katherine visited the children and took them letters, and Frieda “loved her like a younger sister.”6 Later in the summer the two couples bathed on the deserted sands of Broadstairs, and Lawrence gave Katherine and Murry a copy of Sons and Lovers.
The Lawrences returned to Italy in September 1913, described their lonely life in Fiascherino as one long enchantment and urged Katherine and Murry to join them. Keenly interested in his friends’ lives, Lawrence craved the stimulus he had enjoyed in London and was eager to establish his own intimate society. The great problem was lack of money. Murry’s small income derived from reviewing in London. He did not want to give that up, nor did he want to live on Katherine’s allowance of £100 a year (which was then being paid to the printers of their “daft paper” because a friend had gone into bankruptcy, leaving Murry responsible for his debts). Lawrence compared Murry’s situation to his own, rightly seeing through some of Murry’s excuses yet refusing to see that Murry was not a creative artist (despite his ambitions) but a man of letters in London: “When you say you won’t take Katherine’s money, it means you don’t trust her love for you. When you say she needs little luxuries, and you couldn’t bear to deprive her of them, it means you don’t respect either yourself or her sufficiently to do it. . . . She must say, ‘Could I live in a little place in Italy with Jack, and be lonely, have a rather bare life, but be happy.’ If she could, then take her money. If she doesn’t want to, don’t try. But don’t beat about the bush. In the way you go on, you are inevitably coming apart. She is perhaps beginning to be unsatisfied with you.”7
Using his own marriage as a model, Lawrence discussed and dismissed this financial problem in a long letter to Murry written in November 1913. He also analyzed the essential defect in Murry’s marriage and, unlike his later letters, was both shrewd and reasonable about how to improve relations with Katherine:
It looks to me as if you two, far from growing nearer, are snapping the bonds that hold you together, one after another. I suppose you must both of you consult your own hearts, honestly. . . .
You must rest, and you and Katherine must heal, and come together, before you do any serious work of any sort. It is the split in love that drains you. . . .
If you want things to come right—if you are ill, and exhausted, then take her money to the last penny and let her do her own housework. Then she’ll know you love her. You can’t blame her if she’s not satisfied with you. . . . But you fool, you squander yourself, not for her, but to provide her with petty luxuries she doesn’t really want. You insult her. A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board. . . .
You’ve tried to satisfy Katherine with what you could earn for her, give her: and she will only be satisfied with what you are.
Lawrence saw that trust and love could overcome Murry’s scruples about money, and that Katherine’s “need” for luxuries was merely an excuse. Like Katherine, he also understood that a true marriage would strengthen her art. “I believe in marriage,” she told a friend. “It seems to me the only possible relation that is really satisfying. And how else is one to have peace of mind to enjoy life and to do one’s work?”8
Lawrence was clearly alluding to Frieda’s sacrifice when he stated that “a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board.” Murry, who could never satisfy Katherine’s material or emotional needs, knew that she was not satisfied with what he was. But Murry’s career was just as important to him as Katherine’s. He did not love her enough to make this sacrifice, or have sufficient faith in his own talent to believe that he could write while living abroad and start afresh in London later on. Murry had a wife whom he had to support emotionally and intellectually. But since he was self-absorbed and had high, if unrealistic, literary ambitions, he was particularly unsuited to this sacrificial role.
Murry’s weak character made it impossible for him to comply with Lawrence’s commands. He had an endless capacity for self-deception and disguised his egocentricity as mock saintliness. Like Lawrence, Katherine had cruel insight and cutting humor; she loathed Murry’s self-pity and accused him of being “just like a little dog whining outside a door.” She impatiently exclaimed: “When you know you are a voice crying in the wilderness, cry, but don’t say ‘I am a voice crying in the wilderness.’ ” Katherine also condemned his high moral tone and pretentious philosophy, called him “a monk without a monastery” and said he “couldn’t fry a sausage without thinking about God.”9
Murry must have resented the invidious comparison between Lawrence’s marriage and his own, as well as the attempt to direct his life, and he rejected Lawrence’s argument as graciously as possible. Though Lawrence could rarely refrain from giving good, if tactless, advice, he understood Murry’s feelings, was grateful for his forbearance and (echoing Women in Love) wrote rather apologetically in April 1914: “I thought that you and Katherine held me an interfering Sunday-school Superintendent sort of person who went too far in his superintending and became impossible:—stepped just too far, which is the crime of crimes. And I felt guilty. And I suppose I am guilty. But thanks be to God, one is often guilty without being damned.”10 But his impossible interference in their lives frequently did go too far and was a major cause of their most serious quarrels.
On July 13, 1914, when Lawrence and Frieda were married in London, with Murry and Katherine as witnesses, Frieda impulsively gave her friend her old wedding ring, which Katherine took to the grave. In one of their wedding photographs, Frieda and Murry are smiling, wearing light-colored clothing and looking quite smart. Lawrence, scowling, dressed in black and looking rather rough, appears much younger than Frieda and seems quite out of it—as if Frieda had just married Murry.
In October 1914, Katherine and Murry stayed with the Lawrences in Buckinghamshire for two weeks while they prepared Rose Tree Cottage, an hour’s walk away, where they lived until February 1915. During this stay, Lawrence introduced them to Koteliansky and began to expound his plans for a Utopian community of like-minded friends, which he called Rananim. But Katherine proceeded to deflate his idealistic dreams. Catherine Carswell reported that “when Katherine, not without realistic mischief, went and obtained a mass of detailed, difficult information about suitable islands, Lawrence fell sadly silent. . . . Hiding her fun behind a solemn face, [Katherine] proved by time-tables and guidebooks that Rananim was impossible.” Katherine could not “prove” that Rananim was impossible. But, unlike the passive and dependent Murry, she was too sceptical and individualistic to become a disciple of Lawrence. As Murry remarked, she had “a lightly mocking but ruthless way of summing up various people over whom [Lawrence] was temporarily enthusiastic, which made him smile rather crookedly. At such a moment, he was a little afraid of her.”11
Lawrence and Murry discussed their most intimate sexual problems while living near each other in the fall of 1914. An entry from Murry’s November journal suggests that he sympathized with Lawrence’s sexual difficulties and found Frieda extremely irritating:
There is no high degree of physical satisfaction for him. That is all wrong between them. F. accuses him of taking her “as a dog does a bitch,” and last night he explained his belief that even now we have to undergo a dual “mortification” by saying that very often when he wants F. she does not want him at all. . . . And the idea that she should have been allowed to tyrannize over him with her damnably false “love” for her children is utterly repulsive to me. I have all my work cut out to prevent myself from being actively insolent to her. She is stupid in any case, and stupid assertiveness is hard enough to bear.12
Lawrence inevitably had his turn analyzing the defects of Murry’s rather rudimentary sexual performance, of which his biographer has said: “There were no caresses, no preliminaries, their love-making (such as it was) was a climax without crescendo.” In March 1915, after Lawrence had pondered and then criticized some of Murry’s intimate revelations, Murry naively told Katherine—alluding more to his own ineptitude than to any imaginative perversions—Lawrence “says that it gave him quite a shock to discover how crude I was physically, apparently as between you and me. . . . I haven’t the least idea of what he was driving at.”13
Lawrence and Frieda, who helped them clean and paint Rose Tree Cottage, saw Katherine and Murry every day. They sang folk songs, talked of Rananim and exposed the Murrys to their ferocious quarrels. Katherine and Murry, caught up in the Lawrences’ emotions, tried to find a way to make peace without taking sides or expressing their horror. Katherine’s Journal entries for January 1915 in Buckinghamshire suggest the difficulties of living close to the exciting yet exasperating Lawrences, and the extreme variation of her attitude toward them:
In the evening Lawrence and Koteliansky. They talked plans; but I felt very antagonistic to the whole affair. (January 9)
In the morning, Frieda suddenly. She had had a row with Lawrence. She tired me to death. . . . [At night: ] L. was nice, very nice, sitting with a piece of string in his hand, on true sex. (January 10)
In the evening we went to the Lawrences’. Frieda was rather nice. (January 15)
Walked to the Lawrences’! They were horrible and witless and dull. (January 16)
Lawrence arrived cross, but he gradually worked round to me. (January 19)
After a quarrel about her children, a few months after their marriage, Frieda sent Katherine to threaten Lawrence that she would not come back. “ ‘Damn the woman,’ ” shouted Lawrence in a fury, “ ‘tell her I never want to see her again.’ ”14
Katherine’s relations with Murry were exacerbated by their living near the Lawrences. In February 1915 she left him for her more sophisticated lover Francis Carco, a French writer whom she had met through Murry in Paris. Warm, high-spirited and self-confident, Carco was then in the French army near Besançon, behind enemy lines.
Katherine’s absence allowed Lawrence to establish a new intimacy with Murry. The abandoned husband came to see Lawrence, who had moved to Greatham in Sussex, and during the long walk from the station his cold turned to influenza. Lawrence devoted himself to nursing Murry and enjoyed the opportunity to give strength and comfort to his ailing friend, an episode that inspired the passage in Aaron’s Rod when Lilly nurses the sickly Aaron back to health. Murry’s letters to Katherine about his visit to Lawrence were extremely dull, and unless he was trying to hide his feelings, the experience apparently meant much more to Lawrence than to Murry. Lawrence’s new bond of intimacy with Murry alienated him from Katherine, who spent most of that spring in France, disillusioned with and wounded by the selfishness of Carco (who had not met her expectations) and the indifference of Murry. In May, after Katherine had stayed briefly with the Lawrences at Greatham, Lawrence wrote to Kot: “Does Katherine depress you. Her letters are as jarring as the sound of a saw.”15
In September, when Lawrence was living in Hampstead and Katherine and Murry in nearby St. John’s Wood, the three writers started a new little magazine, Signature, which had a brown cover and octavo format. They published Lawrence’s “The Crown,” Katherine’s “The Wind Blows” and “The Little Governess” and a story by Murry. Lawrence recalled that the group held weekly meetings near Red Lion Square “up a narrow stair-case over a green-grocer’s shop. . . . We scrubbed the room and colour-washed the walls and got a long table and some windsor chairs from the Caledonian market. And we used to make a good warm fire: it was dark autumn, in that unknown bit of London. Then on Thursday nights, we had meetings: about a dozen people,” during October and November 1915.16 Signature was printed in the East End by I. Narodiczky, who had a Hebrew sign on his shop front in the Mile End Road and had printed Isaac Rosenberg’s first book of poems in 1912. But no one had much time for or interest in the little magazine during those momentous days of the war, and Signature died after only three issues.
Lawrence and Katherine were drawn together in the autumn of 1915 by a tragic event. Her younger brother, Leslie, had come from New Zealand to England for training en route to the battlefields of France, and they had spent some happy days together recollecting and idealizing their childhood. In October, a week after Leslie reached the front, he was killed. “Do not be sad,” Lawrence wrote with an optimistic compassion that anticipates his poem “The Ship of Death”: “It is one life which is passing away from us, one ‘I’ is dying; but there is another coming into being, which is the happy, creative you. I knew you would have to die with your brother; you also, go down into death and be extinguished. But for us there is a rising from the grave, there is a resurrection, and a clean life to begin from the start, new, and happy. Don’t be afraid, don’t doubt it, it is so. . . . Get better soon, and come back, and let us all try to be happy together, in unanimity, not in hostility, creating, not destroying.”17 Lawrence believed that a community of idealistic artists was really possible, and that his friendship and understanding could help Katherine over her grief.
After Leslie’s death Katherine and Murry moved to Bandol, near Marseilles. By this time, her illness made it impossible for her to spend the winter in London. Murry saw Lawrence on a brief trip to England, when Lawrence took the opportunity to give him some good but gratuitous advice. Lawrence emphasized the psychological basis of Katherine’s illness and insisted that if the Murrys achieved happiness, she would get well. “Lawrence went for me, about you, terribly,” Murry wrote to Katherine. “He said that it was all my fault, that I was a coward, that I never offered you a new life, that I would not break with my past, that your illness was all due to your misery and that I had made you miserable, by always whining & never making a decision; that I should never have left you there.” By December, Lawrence had revived his plans for Rananim and wrote about his hopes for a harmonious and purposeful life: “My dear Katherine, you know that in this we are your sincere friends, and what we want is to create a new, good, common life, the germ of a new social life together.”18
In February 1916, after Lawrence had moved from London to Cornwall, he intensified his campaign, begun in Fiascherino, to persuade his friends to live with him. Writing to them in the guise of a courting lover, he said: “I’ve waited for you for two years now, and am far more constant to you than ever you are to me—or ever will be.” And in March he pleaded: “Really, you must have the other place. I keep looking at it. I call it already Katherine’s house, Katherine’s tower. There is something very attractive about it. It is very old, native to the earth.” Though Katherine was strongly opposed to Cornwall and distrusted the very idea of a community, she and Murry allowed themselves to be seduced by Lawrence’s desperate pleas: “No good trying to run away from the fact that we are fond of each other. We count on you two as our only two tried friends, real and permanent and truly blood kin.” Lawrence had great faith in his own curative powers: he believed that Katherine would get well and the Murrys would achieve happiness, as he had achieved it with Frieda, if they lived close to him and allowed him to guide their lives.
Dubious about the plan to rejoin the Lawrences after the débâcle in Buckinghamshire, Katherine wrote an ironic letter to Ottoline Morrell and accurately predicted that their stay would be short: “We are going to stay with the Lawrences for ever and ever as perhaps you know; I daresay eternity will last the whole of the summer.”19 The relations of the two couples in Cornwall were described in minute detail in many letters from Lawrence and Katherine to their mutual friends: Kot and Beatrice Campbell as well as Ottoline.
The Lawrences were overjoyed at their arrival in April. “I see Katherine Mansfield and Murry arriving sitting on a cart,” Frieda later remembered, “high up on all the goods and chattels, coming down the lane to Tregerthen.” And Lawrence, who loved to do manual work, wrote enthusiastically to Ottoline: “The Murrys have come and we are very busy getting their cottage ready: colouring the walls and painting and working furiously. I like it, and we all enjoy ourselves. The Murrys are happy with each other now. But they neither of them seem very well in health.”20 Though the couples were irresistibly drawn to each other, they could not live together; their second communal experience, like the first, ended in failure.
Though Lawrence yearned for a starlike “equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings,” Frieda recognized that what he really wanted was a satellite, a woman submissive to his absolute will. Frieda always fought this, and the conflict was invigorating to both of them. As he later explained to Katherine: “I do think a woman must yield some sort of precedence to a man, and he must take this precedence. I do think men must go ahead absolutely in front of their women, without turning round to ask for permission or approval from their women. Consequently the women must follow as it were unquestioning. I can’t help it, I believe this. Frieda doesn’t. Hence our fight.” Another problem, as Katherine caustically explained to Beatrice Campbell, was Lawrence’s obsession with man’s animal nature and with sexual symbolism: “I cannot discuss blood affinity to beasts for instance if I have to keep ducking to avoid the flat irons and the saucepans. And I shall never see sex in trees, sex in the running brooks, sex in stones & sex in everything. The number of things that are really phallic from fountain pen fillers onwards! . . . I suggested to Lawrence that he should call his cottage The Phallus & Frieda thought it was a very good idea.”21
Though Lawrence was struggling—and failing—to dominate Frieda, their marriage was basically secure. Katherine and Murry’s relationship, though outwardly calm, was more vulnerable and insecure. Though more creative than Murry, Katherine tried to fulfill the conventional wifely role. But Murry was too narcissistic to respond to her needs. Lawrence saw the weakness in their marriage and wanted to help them. At the same time, Lawrence himself was attracted to Murry.
Lawrence devised a plan that would revive his friends’ marriage and give him a new and closer connection to Murry. As Murry wrote in Between Two Worlds:
Lawrence believed, or tried to believe, that the relation between Katherine and me was false and deadly; and that the relation between Frieda and himself was real and life-giving; but that his relation with Frieda needed to be completed by a new relation between himself and me, which I evaded. . . . By virtue of this “mystical” relation with Lawrence, I participate in this pre-mental reality, the “dark sources” of my being come alive. From this changed personality, I, in turn, enter a new relation with Katherine. . . .
He appeared to think that we, simply because we had nothing to correspond with his intense and agonizing sexual experiences, were flippant about sex. . . . It struck us as quite exorbitant that Katherine should be regarded as a butterfly and I as a child, merely because our sex-relation was exempt from agony.
The emotional yet abstract language does not explain precisely why Lawrence needed a completion he could not get from Frieda nor how Katherine and Murry could recharge themselves on Lawrence’s marital battery. But it is not difficult to see how Lawrence’s attempt to make Murry more like himself (though he never equated sexual pleasure with agony) offended Katherine, who naturally resented Lawrence’s assaults on Murry. Their friendship inevitably degenerated as Katherine reacted against Lawrence’s powerful influence on Murry and his attempt to revitalize their existence through a passionate attachment to her lover. When Murry turned toward Lawrence, Katherine felt completely isolated. “I am very much alone here,” she wrote to Kot in May 1916, after a few gloomy weeks in Cornwall. “It is not a really nice place. It is so full of huge stones. . . . I don’t belong to anybody here. In fact, I have no being, but I am making preparations for changing everything.”22
Katherine’s phrase “ducking to avoid the flat irons and the saucepans” alluded to Lawrence’s violent battles with Frieda and his humiliating dependence upon her, which astounded and repelled the rather reserved Katherine far more than the bleak and rocky landscape, and soon drove her away. She described her reaction in a letter to Kot: “I don’t know which disgusts one worse—when they are loving and playing with each other, or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda’s hair and saying ‘I’ll cut your bloody throat, you bitch.’ ” She gave a vivid and dramatic account of one explosion that took place in Cornwall in May 1916.
Frieda said Shelley’s Ode to a Skylark was false. Lawrence said: “you are showing off; you don’t know anything about it.” Then she began. “Now I have had enough. Out of my house—you little God Almighty you. I’ve had enough of you. Are you going to keep your mouth shut or aren’t you.” Said Lawrence: “I’ll give you a dab on the cheek to quiet you, you dirty hussy.” Etc. Etc. So I left the house. At dinner time Frieda appeared. “I have finally done with him. It’s all over for ever.” She then went out of the kitchen & began to walk round and round the house in the dark. Suddenly Lawrence appeared and made a kind of horrible blind rush at her and they began to scream and scuffle. He beat her—he beat her to death—her head and face and breast and pulled out her hair. All the while she screamed for Murry to help her. Finally they dashed into the kitchen and round and round the table. I shall never forget how L. looked. He was so white—almost green and he just hit—thumped the big soft woman. Then he fell into one chair and she into another. No one said a word. A silence fell except for Frieda’s sobs and sniffs. In a way I felt almost glad that the tension between them was over for ever—and that they had made an end of their “intimacy.” L. sat staring at the floor, biting his nails. Frieda sobbed. . . . And the next day, whipped himself, and far more thoroughly than he had ever beaten Frieda, he was running about taking her up her breakfast to her bed and trimming her a hat.23
Despite the passion and violence, their operatic playlet contains an element of slapstick and self-parody. The first act begins with Lawrence’s destruction of Frieda’s aesthetic judgment, leads to her verbal abuse of his assumed omniscience, and ends with his colloquial threat of punishment and Katherine’s exit. The second act opens with Frieda’s absolute pronouncement (“It’s all over for ever”), which is absolutely unconvincing, and leads to her exit and Lawrence’s sudden reappearance as an avenging Fury. But the brutality of his attack is alleviated by the burlesque chase around the table and softened by the description of a green Lawrence thumping a pillow-like Frieda. The curtain falls on this act as both protagonists collapse with physical exhaustion, sobbing and biting nails, and as Katherine, acting as Chorus, makes another absolute pronouncement (“the tension . . . was over for ever”). The third act reveals a comic reversal of sexual roles, with the defeated male aggressor serving and wooing his lady love.
In May, Katherine gave Beatrice Campbell another precise and lively description of Lawrence’s rages, which excited her emotions, exhausted her and made it impossible to concentrate and to work: “Once you start talking I cannot describe the frenzy that comes over him. He simply raves, roars, beats the table, abuses everybody.—But that’s not such great matter. What makes these attacks insupportable is the feeling one has at the back of one’s mind that he is completely out of control—swallowed up in an acute insane irritation. After one of these attacks he’s ill with fever, haggard and broken. It is impossible to be anything to him but a kind of playful acquaintance.”
And in a letter to Ottoline, Katherine emphasized Lawrence’s madness, which could only be controlled by friends or cured by laughter, and (like Ottoline and Kot) blamed Frieda, who had him “completely in her power,” for his irrational behavior: “Left to himself Lawrence goes mad. When he is with people he expands to the warmth and the light in them, he is a darling and often very wonderful, but left to himself he is [like Cornwall] cold and dark and desolate. Of course Frieda is at the bottom of it. He has chosen Frieda and when he is with real people he knows how fatal that choice is. . . . I am sure there is only one way to answer him. It is very cruel, but it’s the only weapon to prick his sensitive pride. It is to laugh at him—to make fun of him—to make him realise that he has made a fool of himself.” In other letters to Ottoline, Katherine continued to condemn Frieda as a malign influence who weakened Lawrence by provoking his rages. She believed Frieda deified—without understanding—the Nietzschean influence on Lawrence’s ideas24 and claimed that she had defeated him. Frieda tried to brutalize and bury Lawrence, and then took masochistic pleasure in being beaten:
Sooner or later all Frieda’s friends are bound to pop their heads out of the window and see her grinding it before their door—smoking a cigarette with one hand on her hip and a coloured picture of Lorenzo and Nietzsche dancing together “symbolically” on the front of the barrel organ. . . .
It is really over for now—our relationship with L. The “dear man” in him whom we all loved is hidden away, absorbed, completely lost, like a little gold ring in that immense German Christmas pudding which is Frieda. . . .
Though I was dreadfully sorry for L. I didn’t feel an atom of sympathy for Frieda. . . .
I think it’s horribly tragic, for they had degraded each other and brutalized each other beyond Words, but—all the same—I never did imagine anyone so thrive upon a beating as Frieda seemed to thrive. I shall never be persuaded that she did not take some Awful Relish in it. . . . Lawrence has definitely chosen to sin against himself and Frieda is triumphant.
Katherine was frightened by the insane quality of Lawrence’s outbursts, and felt that she had to humor him if she wanted to avoid the rages that had such a disastrous effect on his health. Though these eruptions were embarrassing and unpleasant, Katherine was most disturbed by the fact that they closely resembled the kind of behavior she hated and feared in herself:
A funny feature about this sort of illness is one’s temper. I get so irritable, so nervous that I want to scream, & if many people start talking I just lose my puff and feel my blood getting black. . . . My fits of temper are really terrifying. I had one this . . . morning and tore up a page of the book I was reading—and absolutely lost my head. Very significant. When it was over J[ack] came in and stared. “What is the matter? What have you done?” “Why?” “You look all dark.” He drew back the curtains and called it an effect of light, but when I came into my studio to dress I saw it was not that. I was a deep earthy colour, with pinched eyes. I was green. Strangely enough these fits are Lawrence and Frieda all over again. I am more like L. than anybody. We are unthinkably alike, in fact.25
In a few brief weeks, Lawrence’s dream of a new, harmonious colony was ended. Frieda refused to be dominated, Katherine was aloof and unhappy, Murry could not respond to Lawrence’s overtures. When, in a fit of rage, Lawrence screamed at Murry: “I hate your love, I hate it. You’re an obscene bug, sucking my life away,” the break between the couples was inevitable. A man with a horse and cart carried away the Murrys’ possessions, and Murry, who felt this separation was final, wrote: “It would have been unlike Lawrence, even at such a moment, not to have lent a hand: and he did. But our hearts were sore. When the last rope was tied, I said good-bye and hoped they would come over to see us. Frieda, who took such incidents lightly, said they would; but Lawrence did not answer. I wheeled my bicycle to the road and pedalled off, with the feeling that I had said good-bye to him forever.”26
After Katherine and Murry had left in mid-June, Lawrence wrote defensively to Ottoline, blamed the barrenness of Cornwall for the failure with his friends and ironically suggested the proper setting for their unrealistic child-love: “Unfortunately the Murrys do not like the country—it is too rocky and bleak for them. They should have a soft valley, with leaves and the ring-dove cooing.” Soon after, Lawrence visited them in Mylor, on the south coast of Cornwall, and Katherine wrote of him affectionately to Ottoline: “Lawrence has gone home again. We walked with him as far as the ferry and away he sailed in a little open boat pulled by an old, old man. Lawrence wore a broad white linen hat and he carried a ruck sack on his back.” But in July, after having subjected the Murrys to his intense scrutiny, Lawrence sent Kot his usual depressing diagnosis: “I think—well, she and Jack are not very happy—they make some sort of contract whereby each of them is free. . . . Really, I think she and Jack have worn out anything that was between them.—I like her better than him. He was rather horrid when he was here.”27
Lawrence re-created his intimate relations with Katherine and Murry in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall in his greatest novel, Women in Love. Murry said that when he read and reviewed the novel in 1921 he did not see any biographical similarities and “was really astonished when, one day, Frieda told me that I was Gerald Crich.” Katherine, who shared Murry’s hostility and is supposed to have called it a “filthy rotten book,” criticized the egoistic exaggeration in the novel and denied the biographical resemblances. As she wrote to Ottoline, another angry victim of Lawrence’s fiction: “It is so absurd that one can’t say anything; it is after all almost purely pathological, as they say. But it’s sad to think what might have been. Wasn’t it Santayana who said: Every artist holds a lunatic in leash. That explains L. to me. You know I am Gudrun? Oh, what rubbish it all is.”28
In Women in Love, which he was writing while living with Katherine and Murry in 1916, Lawrence uses Katherine as an inspiration rather than as a precise model for Gudrun, expresses his resentment about the failure of their friendship and triumphs over his friends in the novel in a way that he never did in actual life. Gudrun and Gerald’s intense struggle of wills reflects the extreme violence of Lawrence’s own marriage, and represents his very subjective conception of Katherine’s mistress-love relationship with Murry: the violent, destructive and disintegrating “union of ecstasy and death” which provides a powerful contrast to the healthy and vital marriage of Ursula and Birkin.
Gudrun really represents Lawrence’s gross exaggeration of the negative aspects of Katherine’s character: her self-destructive quest for experience and the bitterness of her early work, for she had published only the satiric In a German Pension before Lawrence completed his novel in 1916. In Women in Love, Lawrence transforms Katherine’s delicate art into attenuated preciosity, her satire into corrosion, her reserve into negation, her resistance to his demands into arrogance and insolence, her insecurity and loneliness into infantile dependence, her quest for love into destructive sterility, her restless search for health into a rootless outcast life, her illness into evil.