Croydon opened up a new range of experiences for Lawrence. In October 1908 it was a growing residential area: Lawrence found himself lodgings at 12 Colworth Road, in a very respectable block of new terraced villas on the east side of the town. Davidson Road School, nearby, had only opened the year before. His walk to work took him across open ground which was being built on: he reported to Louie Burrows that the school was ‘a great big new red-brick imposing handsome place, with a fair amount of open space – looking across in front over great stacks of timber, over two railways to Norwood where the music-hall folk live in big houses among the trees, and to Sydenham, where the round blue curves of the Crystal Palace swell out into view on fairly clear days’ (1L 83).
Lawrence initially felt like ‘a stranger in a strange land’ (1L 82). On his second day he wrote a letter home to Jessie which read like ‘a howl of terror.’1 However, he soon began to establish new connections, bonds and intimacies. There were many cultural events to attend in the local area, and it was only a short journey to London (the motor-bus cost fourpence).2 He lodged with a young family: John Jones (a Superintendent School Attendance Officer), his wife Marie (a former teacher), and their two daughters, Winnie (aged five) and Hilda Mary, a baby who had been born in March. His rent, 18 shillings per week, swallowed up almost half his salary, but it included ample food and he declared himself satisfied with his room. He sought out his cousin Ellen Inwood, who lived in central London, close to Piccadilly. He also swiftly began to attract the confidences of both his landlord and landlady, becoming party to their marital dissatisfactions, which occasionally broke out into open conflict. It was perhaps inevitable that he warmed more easily to Marie, since he had always relied heavily on companionship with women, but he also went drinking and played chess and billiards with Jones; the two men even came to paint together on weekends.3 Then there were the children. Lawrence played with Winnie around the house; by the beginning of December he had become close enough to her to take her to London to visit ‘the Real Father Christmas’ (1L 97). He was happy to care for Hilda, too, on occasion, which freed up her parents to go out in the evenings. After only a month, he started to explore Surrey, biking out into Epsom, Dorking, Reigate and Barnet, and sending postcards back to friends in Eastwood. He wrote to Louie, the Cooper sisters, May Holbrook (Jessie’s sister, now married) and Mabel Limb, whom he had known since childhood, telling them that Surrey was ‘a lovely county’: ‘something like Derbyshire but … softer, sweeter’ (1L 91). He was soon discovering new parts of the city and arranging visits to Hampton Court, Alexandra Palace, Richmond Park, Wimbledon Common and the Dulwich Art Gallery.
His attitude to school also changed as he settled down and adjusted himself to the particular challenges presented by the difficult – because mixed – catchment area. His Standard IV class of around 50 boys included six orphans of actors and actresses from the local Charitable Trust home: Lawrence described them as ‘delightful boys, refined, manly, and aimiable [sic].’ On the other hand, there were ‘eight lads from the Gordon Home; waifs and strays living by charity’: these were ‘of insolent, resentful disposition.’ Several of the boys would soon leave to attend a fee-paying Grammar School, while others took free meals and had holes in their clothes and shoes. After his experience as a pupil-teacher under George Holderness, teaching the sons of colliers, he thought it ‘a strange, incoherent school’ (1L 97). Initially he found it difficult to control the class; he blamed the headmaster, Philip Smith, for shifting responsibility for punishment onto his staff and forcing them to use a regulation cane and to ‘enter the minutest details of the punishment in the Pun. Book.’ Smith struck him as a ‘weak kneed windy fool’ (1L 84). It took him a couple of months to improve discipline by means of the cane. Afterwards he started to appreciate the freedom he was given to teach in his own way: his ‘boss’ was now a ‘delightful man (a bit of a fathead sometimes, but kind as an angel)’ (1L 97).
Lawrence’s commitment to his profession was clear. He had, after all, been teaching since 1902 and had studied for over four years with the aim of acquiring his teacher’s certificate. On taking up the post in Croydon he duly became a member of the National Union of Teachers.4 The Whitmanesque poems about his teaching experiences which he wrote during 1909 and entered into one of his old College notebooks certainly dwell on the psychological consequences of having to motivate and punish recalcitrant pupils, but they also describe the sense of joy he felt at nurturing his pupils’ creativity. In ‘Discipline’, for instance, the speaker tells the addressee how ‘quivering with the contest, I have bound and beaten my fifty boys. / The fight was so cruel, my love; I have torn the deep strings from my soul.’ However, in ‘School’ the boys’ faces ‘Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars / Like strange, full-blown flowers, dimly shaken in the night’; their eyes are ‘Twin bubbles shadow-full of mystery and challenge.’5 Available evidence suggests that Lawrence firmly believed in avoiding dull classroom routines and learning by rote. He encouraged free expression in art classes and arranged for pupils to submit short compositions written in English lessons to schoolboy periodicals; he contributed to school drama productions; and he took charge of the school library. Where the teaching of literature was concerned, he refused to adopt a reverent or moralising approach to texts, selecting poems on the grounds of their rhythm and use of language, and he allowed the boys to perform scenes from Shakespeare at the front of the class, emphasising the dramatic delivery of lines. He hushed a visiting school inspector who entered unannounced as the pupils read out the sea chorus from The Tempest, and in a history lesson he got his boys to act out the Battle of Agincourt by the division of the classroom into two halves.6
Establishing and consolidating relationships within and outside the school took time, but by the end of his first year he had begun to cultivate a new range of interesting friends and contacts. Several of Lawrence’s colleagues were at first suspicious of his reserve and lack of interest in sport, but two of the teachers who had moved to Davidson Road with Philip Smith from the nearby Dering Place Mixed School immediately warmed to him and took an interest in his welfare. Arthur McLeod, a studious man of the same age as Lawrence, shared his interest in books; the two would become close friends and allies. Agnes Mason, an older member of the staff, also did her best to make him feel welcome. She had a wide circle of acquaintances among teachers in Croydon. It may have been through her that Lawrence was introduced to Lilian (Lil) Reynolds and to Agnes Holt, a strikingly attractive and independent-minded woman with whom he could talk and flirt. It was at Mason’s house, too, in spring 1909 that Lawrence first met Helen Corke, a teacher at Mason’s former school with whom she had had a long and close relationship.7 Smith, her former headmaster, described Helen as ‘a very well favoured and extremely attractive and accomplished young lady.’8 At the time she was emotionally involved with her violin teacher, a married man in his forties named Herbert Baldwin Macartney: she had strong feelings for him, but felt unable to respond to his advances (he had asked her to accompany him to the Isle of Wight in August). Lawrence knew nothing about it at the time, but the disastrous outcome of this relationship would help to bring Helen and Lawrence together during the winter of 1909–1910.
Lawrence’s adaptation to his new life in Croydon is striking: it gives some indication of how energetic and resourceful he could be, and how easily he could adjust to moving in different social circles. Taking control of Standard IV required the expenditure of much nervous energy, but he soon came to see it as a positive achievement and a further step in his movement towards independence. If his disillusionment with College had made him more assertive and self-reliant by putting paid to his ‘sincere boyish reverence for men in position’ (1L 49), then by January 1909 he could also reflect that he had needed to move down to Croydon to ‘toughen me off a bit’ (1L 106).
As ever, Lawrence’s new attitude was reflected in (and shaped by) his choice of reading. He immersed himself in decidedly modern writing in Croydon. In a letter of 28 February 1909 he mentions reading Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Tolstoy, and the Norwegian poet, novelist and dramatist Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.9 We know that he also read works by Dostoyevsky and J. M. Synge; in letters he alludes to George Gissing and requests novels by George Moore.10 He sent a volume of Ibsen’s plays to Louie Burrows for her twenty-first birthday; Arthur McLeod recalls that he read the poetry of Emile Verhaeren; and he read Nietzsche for the first time, perhaps early in 1910.11 In December 1908 he bought the first number of a new monthly journal, the English Review, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer. It published the very best contemporary writing, including work by established names like Hardy, Henry James, Conrad and Tolstoy; it was also open to including new writing. Lawrence took it to the Chambers family at Haggs Farm on his return to Eastwood at Christmas: Jessie described how ‘the coming of the English Review into our lives was an event, one of the few really first-rate things that happen now and again in a lifetime.’12 For Lawrence, the journal offered ‘the best possible way to get into touch with the new young school of realism’ (1L 139).
Realist writing rapidly began to displace his earlier commitment to romance. When Blanche Jennings returned the manuscript of ‘Laetitia’ to him in early November 1908 he read it through again with fresh eyes and found that it bored him ‘mightily in parts’ (1L 92). He felt that the novel was ‘maudlin’, the work of ‘a fearful, sickly sentimentalist’ (1L 106). His new admiration for Balzac, and especially for Eugénie Grandet (1833), allowed him to see more clearly for himself its formal and stylistic shortcomings. He discovered in ‘Eugénie’ a ‘level-headed, fair, unrelenting realism’ without ‘sentimentality … melodrama, or caricature, or flippancy.’ It was now evident to him that Blanche and Alice Dax had failed to discover ‘one essence of its failure’: he realised that he must cut out much of the conversation, tone down its ‘metaphoric fancy,’ use ‘slight incidents’ to reveal character instead of speech, and – in terms of the plot – marry Lettie Beardsall to Leslie Tempest (1L 91–2). The last of these points is highly significant. The introduction of the gamekeeper Frank Annable into the second draft of the novel had added a darker, nihilistic keynote to what had started out as a sentimental romance about the rescue of a ‘fallen’ woman. Marrying Lettie to her seducer, and in the process separating her from the well-meaning but intellectually limited and ineffectual George, would effectively transform it into a full-blown tragedy about mismatched couples and thwarted love. Lawrence’s earlier interest in Schopenhauer would in due course combine with his reading of Nietzsche to create a novel which is acute in its attention to physical yearning, degeneration and the links between sex, power and cruelty. He settled down to ‘have another go at it’ (1L 92).13
The ‘unrelenting realism’ which Lawrence admired in Balzac and sought to emulate in his revision of ‘Laetitia’ also began to influence his interest in the visual arts. In Eastwood he had enjoyed copying both plain and romantic landscape paintings. At Christmas 1908 Blanche sent him a reproduction of Maurice Greiffenhagen’s 1891 painting ‘An Idyll’, the original of which she may have seen in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Its depiction of a skin-clad peasant lustily embracing and kissing a voluptuous woman against an idealised rural backdrop of red poppies and an orange sunset was bound to appeal to the author of ‘Laetitia’: he had referred in passing to its ‘passion’ in the revised version of ‘Art and the Individual’ back in August 1908.14 Now, however, he was more interested in the lovers’ bodies and what these reveal of their attitudes to love-making. He told Blanche that the woman is ‘enjoying the man’s demonstration, a wee bit frit – not active’; her willing show of submission to the man runs counter to Lawrence’s own preference for a ‘Carmen,’ ‘a little devil’ (1L 103). Lawrence was attempting to get behind the idyllic surface of the painting to access the romantic power-play between the figures.
His taste in art turned towards naturalist works. On 6 February 1909 he visited an exhibition at the Royal Academy devoted to the private collection of the late George McCulloch. Among the paintings which impressed him were three by the French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage and four by the Norwegian Frits Thaulow. Thaulow’s paintings struck him as ‘very much like Ibsen’ (1L 113); he would incorporate a reference to them in a poem entitled ‘A Snowy Day at School’.15 Bastien-Lepage’s ‘Pauvre Fauvette’ had a particular significance for Lawrence: he referred to this portrait of ‘a peasant girl wrapped in a lump of sacking’ as ‘terrible … you feel her face paint itself into your heart, and you turn away; the sorrow is too keen and real’ (1L 116). He speculated that ‘great sympathetic minds,’ like those of Bastien-Lepage or the H. G. Wells of Tono-Bungay (which he read in the English Review), are ‘all overwhelmed by the tragic waste, and pity, and suffering of it’ (1L 120).
Lawrence’s inclination had always been to transform the realities of working-class life in his art: drawing, painting and writing had provided a means of imaginative escape from Eastwood. ‘Laetitia’ and a story like ‘A Prelude’ had achieved this by taking his cherished experiences with the Chambers family at Haggs Farm and filtering them through the lens of romance: the realities of daily life and labour featured in them only marginally, or as decorative elements subservient to the primary focus on feeling. Around January 1909, however, as he worked intermittently at revising his novel, he wrote out in his College notebook an intriguing poem entitled ‘Violets for the Dead’. It was the first poem he had written using the Eastwood dialect; its simple realist style was unprecedented in his writing up to this date. It is presented in the form of a dialogue between a brother and sister in which the former describes an incident which took place at the funeral of their recently deceased, dissolute brother, Ted. A mysterious woman had waited until the mourners had left before approaching the graveside and throwing a bunch of violets onto his coffin. Her secrecy and the extent of her grief – ‘’er body fair shook again / Wi’ little sobs as you scarce could hear’16 – cause the brother to question the nature of her relationship to Ted. The poem shows Lawrence using a minor incident to provide a dramatic insight into part of the dead man’s life which had remained hidden from his strait-laced siblings; in its original and revised forms it demonstrates how Lawrence could use regionally inflected speech and dialect words (‘slive’, ‘scraightin’) to access those more subtle and illicit actions and feelings which standard English might miss or decorously pass over.
His revision of ‘Laetitia’, and its transformation into ‘Nethermere’, continued throughout 1909, but little evidence of its progress surfaces in surviving letters since Lawrence fell out of regular contact with Blanche Jennings and Jessie Chambers destroyed all the letters she received from him. We know that he added Part III in its entirety, opening with the immediate aftermath of Lettie’s marriage to Leslie and detailing George’s steady deterioration (and the sad course of his own subsequent marriage to his cousin, Meg). At some point he gave the manuscript to Arthur McLeod with the ‘anxious demand to let him know if it was good.’17 In the early summer he asked Jessie whether she would mind if Emily Saxton (the fictional character most closely related to her) married Tom Renshaw instead of the narrator, Cyril.18 Jessie had visited Croydon in May, staying at Lawrence’s lodgings. They must have spoken about his progress with the novel at the same time that they discussed his latest poetry; in any case, she welcomed his decision to introduce at least one happy marriage to offset the tragic theme.19
Lawrence had continued to send poems and sections of his novel to Jessie for her comments. She now encouraged him to submit some of his work to the English Review, since it was prepared to consider new writing. Lawrence initially refused; following the failure of G. K. Chesterton to respond to the sample of work he had sent to him, Lawrence felt disinclined to lay himself open to further rejection. Finally, though, he agreed that Jessie should choose several of his poems and submit them under a nom de plume, since he did not want people in Croydon to know that he wrote poetry.20 In June she transcribed a number of the poems he had sent her from Croydon – putting ‘Discipline’ first because she thought the unusual title might attract the editor’s attention – and forwarded them with a covering letter to the journal.21
Lawrence’s decision to let Jessie choose the poems and act on his behalf in sending them to the English Review enabled him to test the water while distancing himself from any rejection that might result. He had adopted the same strategy in 1907 when asking Jessie and Louie Burrows to join him in submitting his three stories to the Nottinghamshire Guardian competition. However, there is another reason why he might have preferred approaching potential publishers and a wider public through the intermediary of his closest female friends. His writing had always been importantly collaborative in the sense that he shared it with them and relied on them for critical comments and to produce fair copies. It would have seemed natural to Lawrence to involve them in its circulation to other readers. Later in June, in a letter detailing the arrangements for Louie’s impending visit, he asked her to send him some of her own short stories, suggesting that they should ‘collaborate’: he would ‘put a bit of surface on them and publish them for you’ (1L 130). He was proposing to do for Louie something akin to what Jessie was doing for him.
In July Lawrence duly began polishing up Louie’s stories. We know he revised two of her manuscripts – ‘Goose Fair’ and another story, ‘Cupid and the Puppy’ (which has now been lost) – and offered advice on others (including one entitled ‘The Chimney Sweeper’).22 His revision of ‘Goose Fair’ was thorough enough for him to refer to it as ‘your, my, story’ (1L 137). He arranged to send it, along with a five shillings fee, to the London and Provincial Press Agency, with a view to placing it with a magazine. The Agency responded very positively to the story, but the scheme fell through because they claimed not to have received the postal order.23 However, it is fascinating to see Lawrence taking a first tentative step towards the world of literary commerce; in a letter to Louie on 19 August he expressed his determination to send stories ‘direct to the mags’ (1L 136) from this point on.
That brave resolution was almost certainly shaped by some good news which he had just received from Jessie. Between 31 July and 14 August Lawrence went on his last family holiday, this time to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, accompanied by several Eastwood friends, including George Neville. They enjoyed a fortnight of blazing sunshine. On his return Jessie handed him a letter which had arrived in response to the poems she had sent to the English Review. In it, Ford Madox Hueffer expressed qualified interest in the poetry and told Jessie that if the author could ‘come and see me some time when he is in London perhaps something might be done.’24 This was a rare stroke of good fortune; it would certainly have made Lawrence’s return to Croydon for the beginning of the new term on 29 August seem more palatable.
He arranged to meet Hueffer at his home, 84 Holland Park Avenue in Kensington, which doubled as the journal’s office. According to Hueffer’s later account of the occasion, Lawrence initially hovered awkwardly in the doorway and declared: ‘This isn’t my idea, Sir, of an editor’s office.’25 He may have been masking his nervousness and fear of rejection by putting on an air of confidence and composure. The ensuing discussion, however, went well. Hueffer would have known that Lawrence was a schoolteacher because of Jessie’s covering letter and the poems she sent to him (at least two of which dealt with life at Davidson Road); he clearly learned a lot more in the course of their conversation about Eastwood and about Lawrence’s background. The prospect of discovering and nurturing a talented working-class writer was a genuine thrill for Hueffer. He immediately accepted five of the poems for publication (‘Discipline’, the two-part ‘Dreams Old and Nascent’, and the two ‘Baby-Movements’: ‘Running Barefoot’ and ‘Trailing Clouds’); crucially, he also agreed to read any more work which Lawrence sent to him. Lawrence reported to Jessie that the editor was ‘fairish, fat, about forty, and the kindest man on earth’ (1L 138). On 11 September, his twenty-fourth birthday, he wrote a letter to Louie Burrows in the course of which he announced the good news: ‘It is supposed to be a secret, but I guess I shall have to tell you. The editor of the English Review has accepted some of my Verses, and wants to put them into the English Review, the November issue’ (1L 137).
This was a major breakthrough for Lawrence. He had gained acceptance from one of the most significant and influential new literary journals, and in the process acquired a respected literary mentor who offered him the kind of guidance and encouragement that no agency could provide. As he settled down with renewed impetus to revise the poems and push on with ‘Nethermere’ and other new writing in the evenings after school, the London literary scene opened up before him. Under the watchful eye of Hueffer and his partner, Violet Hunt, he now began moving among ‘celebrities’, ‘R.A.s’ and ‘all the Swells’ (1L 138, 145). His letters reveal how hectic his social life became: he continued to go to the theatre and the opera (he saw Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Grand Theatre in Croydon on 15 October, and was disappointed),26 but he now dined out far more frequently. He also began seeing a lot more of Agnes Holt, to the extent that by mid-November he was thinking of marrying her.27 He told Blanche Jennings on 1 November: ‘Really, I am very busy: either I am writing stuff, or going out, alone or with Miss H[olt], or rarely, reading or painting’ (1L 141–2). A few weeks later he received a complaint from one of his sisters that he ‘went about too much and did not send money home’; his mother was anxious that he was changing beyond recognition.28
It is easy to see how Lawrence’s altered circumstances might have created such worries. On Sunday 14 November, for instance, he went to lunch with Hueffer and was taken to tea with the editor Ernest Rhys and his wife Grace (a novelist and author of children’s books); afterwards they called on H. G. Wells in Hampstead. Two days later he went to one of the regular evening gatherings arranged by Violet Hunt at the Reform Club, where he met Ezra Pound. He found Pound ‘jolly nice’ (1L 145): they had supper together, then went back to Pound’s attic room in Kensington. Pound introduced him to further ‘literary folk’ (1L 147) and to Grace Crawford, a 20-year-old woman born in Paris to American parents who had studied singing, ballet and piano (Lawrence was very struck by her singing: Scarlatti’s ‘O cessate di piagarmi’, which she often sang for him, became the signature tune of their friendship). In mid-December Lawrence went to Grace Rhys’ house to read some of his unpublished poems at one of her gatherings; he went again on 10 March 1910 (Ernest Rhys’ later, composite account of these occasions describes Lawrence reading in the company of Pound, Hueffer and W. B. Yeats: his anxiety is evident in the low tone of his voice as he starts to read, and in his failure to judge the right moment to stop).29
Adapting to the circles in which Hueffer and Violet Hunt moved, and learning to hold his own among the London literati, was bound to affect Lawrence’s outlook and influence his behaviour when he returned to his lodgings in Colworth Road. Jones noted how, after spending a weekend with the ‘London writers … he used to speak with a different accent.’30 Tensions were exposed at the end of November when Jessie visited and was taken to lunch with Hueffer at Violet Hunt’s house in Kensington.31 Amid the ‘spectacle of London’s opulence,’ Lawrence boasted that he would make ‘two thousand a year.’ Jessie’s account of this particular visit paints a vivid picture of a young man whose head is being turned.32 Jessie, however, had her own reasons for being hurt by the changes in his behaviour. After a very full first day in London, during which they ate at Selfridge’s, went to the National Gallery, and attended a play, he kept her up until two o’clock in the morning, looking at his latest writing and talking frankly about life; he even told Jessie of his desire to ‘ask some girl if she will give me … that … without marriage.’33 During the night, Jessie thought that she heard a knock at her door.34 Next day Lawrence introduced her to Agnes Holt, his ‘possible fiancée’, before they went to lunch in Kensington: she was inclined to see a ‘lack of conviction’ in Lawrence’s ‘curious air of bravado’ around Agnes.35 Jessie’s upset and confusion compelled her to see Lawrence as a displaced figure hiding his inner turmoil with a show of arrogance and insensitivity.36 A more objective observer might have discerned in him at that moment a mixture of pride and awkwardness, and been inclined to marvel at Lawrence’s ability to move between the very different worlds of his schoolteacher friends and the new literary set.
It seems extraordinary that he managed to fit any significant writing in around his teaching and all of his new social commitments. Yet these first months under Hueffer’s mentorship were extremely productive and formative ones in the shaping of Lawrence’s early career as a writer. During October he finished revising his poems; they were published in the English Review the following month. He also wrote a sequence of nine poems entitled ‘A Life History in Harmonies and Discords’, reflecting on the influences that shape a life and the role of the artist in discerning them.37 Around 1 November he sent the latest version of ‘Nethermere’ to Hueffer for his comments. Agnes Holt and Agnes Mason had helped him to prepare a manuscript by copying out and replacing sections rendered illegible by revision. On 20 November he was able to inform Louie Burrows that ‘Hueffer is reading my novel. He says it’s good, and is going to get it published for me’ (1L 144). Lawrence later reported that, during a shared trip on an omnibus, Hueffer told him: ‘It’s got every fault that the English novel can have … But … you’ve got GENIUS’ (LEA 178–9). With characteristic generosity, Hueffer talked Lawrence through some of the weaknesses in the novel during lengthy sessions on successive weekends at Holland Park Avenue. On 15 December he gave Lawrence a letter of recommendation and encouraged him to submit ‘Nethermere’ to William Heinemann. Lawrence immediately copied out Hueffer’s comments and forwarded them to the publisher with a covering letter; Violet Hunt delivered the manuscript by hand. In his supportive letter, Hueffer praises Lawrence’s ‘very remarkable and poetic gifts,’ predicting that if properly handled the novel might have ‘very considerable success.’ He notes the length and prolixity of ‘Nethermere’, and asserts that it is of the ‘school of Mr William de Morgan – or perhaps still more of the school of Lorna Doone’ (8L 2–3). De Morgan was a commercially successful novelist who published with Heinemann, so the comparison was shrewdly designed to arouse the firm’s interest. The reference to Lorna Doone is more interesting: it reveals just how aware Hueffer was of Lawrence’s early indebtedness to romance writing.38
In reading the manuscript of ‘Nethermere’, Hueffer would soon have realised that Lawrence was not actually the kind of working-class writer he might have hoped for. He came to see just how deeply Lawrence had immersed himself in literature, and how fully he had assimilated nineteenth-century writing. Violet Hunt admitted that Lawrence was ‘more conversant with decadent poetry than I or the editor, and that is saying a great deal’; Hueffer had ‘never known any young man of his age who was so well read in all the dullnesses that spread between Milton and George Eliot.’39 Here was someone who had actually read Carlyle and Ruskin.40 To counter Lawrence’s allusiveness and addiction to poetic excess, Hueffer encouraged him to draw directly on his working-class background in his fiction, and particularly on Eastwood and his knowledge of miners and the routines of a mining community.
Lawrence’s enthusiastic reading of realist writings since October 1908 had already predisposed him to explore the gritty portrayal of everyday life that Hueffer had in mind. His experiment in writing ‘Violets for the Dead’ had shown him the dramatic potential of using Eastwood speech and dialect in order to draw out the subtle emotional undercurrents of family interactions. Under Hueffer’s influence he wrote his first play, A Collier’s Friday Night. It was completed by late November, since he showed the manuscript to Jessie during her visit. She would have been keenly alert to the irony of him reproducing in such detail the life he was so familiar with in Eastwood at the very time when he seemed to be moving outside its sphere of influence: it troubled her ‘deeply’ in his Croydon lodgings to ‘see his home put before me in his vivid phrases.’41 The skill and ease with which he was able to present that world to a middle-class audience and readership demonstrated not only his intimacy with it, but also his capacity to detach himself and analyse his own early life, and the lives of his friends and family, with unflinching candour.
The other Eastwood text he wrote at this time was a short story entitled ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. Its plot drew directly on the accounts he had heard of the death of his paternal uncle James in a mining accident at Brinsley Colliery in February 1880. His uncle had been trapped underground by a fall of coal and asphyxiated: Lawrence could remember when he was seven years old hearing his paternal grandmother saying ‘Like a blessed smiling babe he looked – he did that’ (1L 199). He now challenged himself to see the event from the perspective of James’ young wife, Mary Ellen (‘Polly’) Lawrence, née Renshaw, who was left with two young children to raise and a third on the way. Re-creating Polly as Elizabeth Bates, but retaining original place-names, he probed her disillusionment with her marriage, relating it to the darkness and claustrophobia of her husband’s work in the pit and the family’s bitter life in a small cottage beside the railway line of the colliery company. In the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death, having washed his body with the help of her grieving mother-in-law, Elizabeth is inclined to feel contentment at his transformation from the ‘ugly, … befouled and disgusting’ man he had become under the influence of drink to his former ‘beauty and grandeur and tenderness.’ In the final sentence of the story, Elizabeth’s perspective is aligned with the maternal affection of her mother-in-law: ‘Poor dear, he was more helpless than a baby—and so beautiful’ (PO 205). In spite of its sentimental ending (which he would continually revise and re-write over the next five years), this story drew on Lawrence’s family’s history, and on the Eastwood area, in a serious and realistic manner quite different from anything he had attempted before. We can judge its newness by comparing it to the 1907 version of ‘The White Stocking’, which was based on a comical incident in his mother’s youth: the earlier story had explored conflict in relationships in a far more romantic and literary fashion.
Lawrence sent ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ to Hueffer on 9 December; he also enclosed ‘Goose Fair’ (the Louie Burrows tale which he had recently rewritten). His decision to forward these two stories together perhaps indicates a degree of uncertainty in Lawrence about the kind of writing Hueffer wanted to see: the stories both deal with working-class life in Nottinghamshire (focusing on coal mining and the lace industry respectively), but they showcase both the romantic style of his youth and his new attempt at tragic realism. Hueffer accepted both of them for the English Review. They would be among the last contributions Hueffer secured for the journal, since he was removed from his post as editor in December 1909 and replaced by Austin Harrison. ‘A Lesson on a Tortoise’ and ‘Lessford’s Rabbits’, two light-hearted fictional sketches based on Lawrence’s school experiences, and ‘Two Schools’ (an unfinished fragment drawing on his earlier time working under George Holderness at the British School in Eastwood) may also have been written with a view to publication in the English Review; they remained unpublished during Lawrence’s lifetime.
Lawrence’s life had been completely transformed in the few months between the start of term at the end of August and his return to Eastwood for Christmas on 23 December. He had now had a sequence of poems published in the English Review and his first novel was safely in the hands of a reputable publisher who was reading it with the backing of an influential London editor. Although he remained largely ignorant of the details of literary commerce, he was beginning (under Hueffer’s guidance) to experiment with writing the kind of short fiction that might interest a sophisticated metropolitan readership.
However, while his writing life flourished, the frenetic pace of these weeks placed some real strain on his relationships. Back in the late summer his frustration and depression over his divided feelings for Jessie had surfaced with a renewed intensity. During a day he spent with her in Nottingham on his return from holiday, he had bought some postcards of Greek statuary from a shop close to the Castle: he sent several of them to Arthur McLeod and Alice Dax,42 but he gave one (of ‘Amor et Psyche’) directly to Jessie, telling her: ‘You are Psyche, you are the soul, and I leave you, as I must.’43 The following day, during their final conversation before his return to Croydon, he apparently expressed a desire to marry: ‘I’d marry tomorrow, if I could only find someone I could marry. I’d marry you if only I could. As I am at present I shall go from woman to woman until I am satisfied.’44 If we trust this, it casts a suspicious light over his hastiness to commit to Agnes Holt in the autumn. He informed Blanche Jennings that Agnes was ‘very nice’: ‘a girl to whom I gas.’ She was evidently rather striking in appearance, ‘tall, with grey eyes and auburn hair.’45 Lawrence initially thought her ‘a person of great capacity, being alert, prompt, smart with her tongue, and independent in her manner’ (1L 153). This in itself would have been sufficient to account for the ‘air of bravado’ which Jessie sensed in Lawrence when he introduced her to Agnes during the visit to Croydon in November. When, on the previous evening, Lawrence had told Jessie that he was thinking of asking ‘some girl if she will give me … that … without marriage,’ he indicated that the girl would be Agnes.46 His arrangement to introduce the two women seems to have been calculated to show Jessie that he was moving on and resolving the impasse in his emotional life.
In reality, the relationship with Agnes merely exacerbated his problems. Even Jessie noted how Agnes ‘talked to Lawrence rather like an elder sister’;47 she took him seriously, which Lawrence considered ‘unwisdom’ (1L 141). Agnes became another articulate, supportive young woman with whom he could talk, and who shared in his new literary successes. For example, she wrote out into a new College notebook the first poems that he had published in the English Review;48 she also transcribed in neat handwriting the first 76 pages of the ‘Nethermere’ manuscript in preparation for its submission to Hueffer. He probably approached her about sex in early December and was bluntly rebuffed. By Christmas the relationship with Agnes had come to an abrupt end. In a vituperative mood in late January he would tell Blanche that Agnes was ‘utterly ignorant and old fashioned’: ‘She still judges by mid-Victorian standards, and covers herself with a woolly fluff of romance that the years will wear sickly.’ By this time he had decided that she was ‘frightened’: a ‘timid duffer’ who ‘lapses into sickly sentimentality when it is a question of naked life’ (1L 153).
In an extraordinary volte-face, his hurt pride now pushed him back into the arms of Jessie. On Christmas Eve he went to Haggs Farm and asked her to become his mistress. Her commitment to him overcame the serious reservations she had. The two entered into a forced and largely unsatisfactory physical relationship at Whitsun; the new arrangement was finally broken off on 1 August. The mood in which Lawrence turned to Jessie is captured in a short story entitled ‘A Modern Lover’, written in January 1910. In this troublingly inconclusive tale, a nostalgic but also cynical and ironic character named Cyril Mersham returns to the Midlands after two years away to visit his former sweetheart, Muriel, only to find that in his absence she has taken another lover, Tom Vickers (an electrician at the local mine). Cyril manages to prise Muriel away from Tom, indecorously suggesting that she should come to him again ‘just naturally; as you used to come and go to church with me.’ In response to her objections, Cyril comments that they can take practical measures: they can ‘be wise … one need not blunder into calamities’ (LAH 47). He reacts impatiently to Muriel’s timidity, instructing her to write to him after his return to the ‘large city in the south’ (LAH 29). She is left alone to pick up the pieces of her life after he has left.
Lawrence’s prediction in August 1909 that he would ‘go from woman to woman’ was proving prescient. Another romantic interest emerged early in 1910 as he began to spend more time with Helen Corke. Her life had also undergone a major change since the summer. At the start of August she had spent five days on the Isle of Wight with Herbert Macartney, her married violin teacher. They had been on the island at the same time as Lawrence, but did not meet because Helen was in Freshwater and Lawrence and his family and friends were in Shanklin. The time she spent with Macartney was extraordinarily intense: they probably consummated their relationship, though Helen still felt deeply ambivalent about his advances and their physical intimacy. After their return on 5 August Helen went on to Cornwall for a second holiday with Agnes Mason and another friend, while Macartney returned home to his wife and children in Purley. Two days later he committed suicide by hanging himself from the back of his bedroom door. When Helen heard the news she was understandably devastated and traumatised; she was cared for by her parents and Agnes Mason, but her response to the event was so powerful that for many months she was unable to take possession of her feelings.
Lawrence learned about Macartney’s suicide from Agnes Mason. During the autumn he joined with Helen’s other friends in attempting to bring her out of her withdrawn state: the two exchanged books, and Lawrence showed her his writing (some poetry and A Collier’s Friday Night) and taught her a little German in order that they could discuss Wagner’s operas together. He also encouraged her to write about her experiences. On 5 September she started to write a diary in the form of a letter to Macartney, describing her feelings of grief, confusion and guilt in the immediate aftermath of his suicide (he appears in it as ‘Siegmund’, while she is ‘Sieglinde’, two characters from Wagner’s Die Walküre); in late November she turned her hand to writing ‘The Freshwater Diary’, a more internalised account of her feelings during their time together on the island.
Events after Christmas brought Lawrence and Helen even closer together. During a meeting with William Heinemann on 21 January 1910, ‘Nethermere’ was formally accepted for publication: Lawrence heard a reader’s criticisms of it and was asked to ‘alter a bit in parts’ (1L 152). He asked Helen to help him root out some of the prolixity that Hueffer had complained about; she also transcribed afresh some heavily revised passages.
This work took place between January and April. At some point between 9 January and 25 March Lawrence asked Helen whether he could see the ‘Freshwater Diary’; she finally lent him it as a mark of their friendship.49 Lawrence was so intrigued by the feelings articulated in the diary – and by the fictional and poetic mode of their expression – that he conceived the idea of working with the passages and using them ‘as basis for a more comprehensive rendering of the story.’50 It is likely that he first developed empathy with the characters by writing dramatic monologue poems; a version of ‘A Love-Passage’ dating from around March 1910 appears in a slightly re-worked version in Helen’s hand, in a music manuscript book belonging to her and containing exercises corrected by Macartney.51 Helen feared that the process of sharing her experiences and feelings with Lawrence would inevitably draw his life into her own, as he attempted to re-live her last days with Macartney and make sense of what had passed between the couple. However, Lawrence made her aware of the ‘wall’ that she had constructed around herself in the autumn and told her that she had ‘no authority for building the wall’ and that she needed people because she was ‘alive’: ‘You cannot cover yourself under the “snows of yesteryear”’ (1L 157). He agreed to bring the story to her as he wrote it, and made it clear that nothing would be allowed to stand without her agreement. It is likely that he began writing ‘The Saga of Siegmund’ in March, a few weeks before 11 April, when he submitted the revised manuscript of ‘Nethermere’ to Sydney Pawling, Heinemann’s partner. That his mind was now preoccupied with the new project is confirmed by the fact that he inserted the name ‘Siegmund’ by mistake three times in the final revisions of ‘Nethermere’.52
‘The Saga of Siegmund’ would be written in its entirety by 4 August, in a little over four months. The remarkable speed of its composition can be ascribed to the depth of Lawrence’s engagement with – and involvement in – its emotional content. In the spring he spoke extensively with Helen about her experiences in Freshwater during regular weekend walks on the Surrey downs.53 As he began imaginatively to inhabit their emotional worlds, trying in particular to think his way into Macartney’s inner life, so his feelings for Helen turned from friendship and concern to something stronger and more troubling. Helen recalled how one day, on a walk in ‘Kentish hill country,’ he challenged her to race him down a slope and then ran in front of her and caught her in his arms: she noted how he held her hand ‘fast, protectively and possessively.’54 In a letter of 11 May he told Helen of his ‘lethargy’ and ‘lack of volition’ when faced by the prospect of a visit from Jessie, but also admitted: ‘I feel often inclined, when I think of you, to put my thumbs on your throat’ (1L 160). Helen’s resistance to his advances created a tension in him which fuelled his writing even as it exacerbated the upset in his emotional life: writing, as ever, was a means for him to explore and bring meaning and shape to his feelings.
Lawrence’s fascination with Herbert Macartney was clearly conditioned in part by his perception of the other man’s capacity to surrender himself to experience. He understood the suicide to be in some sense symbolic of the transformation Macartney underwent during his five days of holiday with Helen: Macartney had already expunged his former self by immersing himself in his passion and love for Helen. Lawrence was aware that his own self-consciousness prevented him from experiencing anything similar, though he was attracted by the possibility of it. Back in December 1907 he had told the Reverend Robert Reid that he had failed to attain the experience of ‘surrender’ to conversion: ‘I was constantly endeavouring to give myself, but Sir, to this day I do not understand what this “giving” consists in, embodies, and includes’ (1L 39). In June 1908 he described to both Jessie and Blanche Jennings the extent of his emotional disturbance when watching Sarah Bernhardt in the role of Marguérite Gautier in a stage production of La Dame aux Camélias at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham. However, the terribly poised and dramatic nature of his language in these letters suggests that he was describing a desired response rather than an actual one. It seems significant that he directly imported the experience into his fictional writing.55 The same is true of the account he gave to Blanche of the impact that Greiffenhagen’s ‘An Idyll’ had on him in December 1908: he is using writing in a very conscious manner to describe the experience of losing control.56
This ability to create through his writing the impression of an unconscious immersion in experience would become one of the hallmarks of Lawrence’s later writing. In relationships, however, his skill in constructing a convincing fictional account of physical and emotional experience meant that he was particularly liable to mistake the true nature of his feelings, or to sense some detachment from his feelings as they arose. The sexual ‘experiment’ with Jessie in 1910 seems to have been characterised at the outset by a self-conscious determination to feel. In March, he wrote to tell Jessie that he had very nearly been unfaithful to her with Alice Dax, during a visit that Alice made to him in Croydon. He and Alice had gone together to see a performance of Richard Strauss’ Elektra. Afterwards, they appear to have taken separate rooms in a hotel. Lawrence told Jessie: ‘In the morning she came into my room, you know my morning sadness. I told her I was engaged to you. But it is all finished now with her – there is no more sitting on the doorstep’ (1L 157). Lawrence’s detachment here is striking – especially when we consider the destabilising effect that the encounter had on Alice.57 Although it is very unlikely that he experienced anything similar with Alice for some time, he certainly had not finished with her. She would become an important presence in his emotional life from the summer of 1911 (though the written evidence for their involvement is frustratingly limited).58