The prospect of leaving Irschenhausen and returning for a time to England was deeply troubling for both Lawrence and Frieda, though Frieda longed to see her children again, and Lawrence needed to renew his literary contacts and attend Ada’s marriage to Eddie Clarke on 4 August. On a financial level, they were living rent-free in ‘Villa Jaffe’ and England promised to be expensive, but Lawrence also felt ‘cut off from my past life – like re-incarnation’ (2L 21); going back would mean confronting a society and a past which he had determinedly cast off and come sharply to criticise. Although he only planned to stay for a brief time, taking refuge at the Cearne before heading to the coast for a holiday, he would have to go to Eastwood for the wedding, and this would necessitate a painful compromise: he would not be able to take Frieda with him because his father and elder sister Emily still knew nothing about his situation. Being in England would bring Frieda closer to her children, but with the divorce proceedings pending it would also – inevitably – mean more tension and upset, as she attempted to gain access to them against the wishes of Ernest and his sister Maude.
Fearful anticipation of the move gave rise to conflict. In the first weeks of June, Frieda quarrelled violently with Lawrence, breaking a plate over his head and retreating to Else’s house in Wolfratshausen for two days.1 The primary reason for their argument was almost certainly Frieda’s longing to see the children, but there may have been a further contributing factor. It is possible that Frieda read at this time one of Lawrence’s poems of 1910 entitled ‘My Love, My Mother’, which Louie Burrows had copied into a College notebook:2 her angry annotations in the margin express her hatred of his old bond with his mother and link his recent depression back to his immersion in ‘a sad, old woman’s misery.’ Lawrence’s continuing refusal (as she saw it) to fully understand the extent of Frieda’s grief at the loss of her children would have roused her antipathy toward this expression of his own love for his mother. Frieda vowed to leave him ‘for some days and … see if being alone will help you to see me as I am’.3 They were both still drawn to the past in painful ways and sometimes struggled to accept each other’s failure to detach and move on. Lawrence told Garnett: ‘You have no idea what an awful soul-effort it means – this coming to England’ (2L 19).
Lawrence arranged for copies of Sons and Lovers to be sent to Ada and George in Eastwood and Nottingham, Emily in Glasgow (where she had now moved with her husband), and Arthur McLeod and Marie Jones in Croydon. Everything seemed to rest on the reception of this novel, so he was very anxious to receive early reviews. The first piece of good news was perhaps the most significant: Lawrence heard that the circulating libraries had ‘refused it at first – then consented’ (2L 22). Garnett’s editorial efforts had proved effective in that respect. The first notice he read, by an anonymous reviewer in the Standard for 30 May, was so encouraging – ‘With his third novel Mr. D. H. Lawrence has come to full maturity as a writer’ – that Lawrence initially thought it might have been written by Garnett himself.4
Lawrence was quite able to keep writing through all the stresses of Irschenhausen; in fact, it was precisely through his writing that he was beginning to explore and make sense of the conflict with Frieda. The first complete draft of ‘The Sisters’ was finished around 4 June, when the final batch of the manuscript – now around 300 pages in total – was sent to Garnett.5 Only a short fragment survives,6 but evidence in the letters allows us to speculate in an informed way about its depiction of the two central characters, Ella and Gudrun Brangwen. Lawrence told Garnett that the novel depicted ‘Friedas God Almightiness in all its glory’; its treatment of her wilfulness (and the freedom and power of the other von Richthofen daughters) obviously mixed admiration with sardonic critique. Frieda recognised that Lawrence’s creation of these ‘beastly, superior arrogant females’ (1L 549) was his way of getting back at her over the children. He told Garnett that writing it allowed him to ‘theorise myself out’; re-working it would ‘make it into art’ (1L 550).
After he had dispatched the last part of the novel, Lawrence turned his attention to writing or completing three new short stories which signal a genuine breakthrough in his writing about conflict within relationships. ‘New Eve and Old Adam’ is an autobiographical story about a young married couple, Peter and Paula Moest, caught up in a ceaseless battle in which neither partner is prepared to compromise: the ‘New Eve’ (Paula) is a free spirit who flirts with other men and uses her sexuality as a weapon to arouse the jealousy of her husband, while the ‘Old Adam’ (Peter) uses his wife to uphold his ego and has the maddening habit of immersing himself in his work. The story shifts between the perspectives of the two characters to reveal their mutual incomprehension and sexual dependency; it shows how the intimacy of the two characters enables them to inhabit one another’s perspectives, even while they are unable to fully grasp the other’s feelings. The repetitive structure of the story follows the emotional dynamics of the couple’s relationship (argument, reconciliation, separation; argument, reconciliation, separation), while the language strains to articulate the characters’ frustration and devastation. Lawrence develops a new vocabulary and symbolism for unconscious feelings: ‘They were both rendered elemental, like impersonal forces, by the battle and the suffering’; ‘The hot waves of blood flushed over his body, and his heart seemed to dissolve under her caresses’; ‘It was as if she were sucked out of herself by some non-human force’ (LAH 162, 166, 170).
The other new stories, ‘Honour and Arms’ and ‘Vin Ordinaire’ (later revised as ‘The Prussian Officer’ and ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’), focus on young German soldiers who rebel against Prussian military discipline. In ‘Honour and Arms’, which Lawrence described as ‘the best short story I have ever done’ (2L 21), an orderly is brutalised by his commanding officer, who wishes to crush his physical ease and love for his ‘sweetheart, a girl from the mountains’ (PO 5). The orderly, physically intimidated and pushed beyond the limits of endurance, attacks and kills the officer before himself dying. In ‘Vin Ordinaire’, a young soldier with vertigo wets himself during an army exercise in which he is forced to scale the ramparts of a castle; he pushes an officer from the ramparts into the moat, and runs away to the house where his sweetheart, Emilie, is in service. The soldier is finally discovered hiding in her bedroom and led out to face the military authorities. Emilie claims no responsibility for harbouring him as a deserter; a cock crows symbolically in the background to emphasise her betrayal of him.7 In this first version of the story, the perverse repressions and punishments of male military life take precedence over the young soldier’s urgent desire for the freedom to be himself, and for physical self-realisation.
Prior to his departure for England on 17 June, Lawrence focused on getting together a body of short stories to send out to magazines. He and Frieda travelled to England by ship from the Hook of Holland, arriving at Harwich before travelling on to the Cearne. Garnett was away, but his wife Constance (the famous translator of Russian literature) and son Bunny were there to keep them company (Constance’s sister Katharine Clayton would also come to visit in due course). Lawrence felt glad to be back in Garnett’s ‘beautiful’ (2L 26) house. During the year that he had been away, England seemed to have changed: he perceived that there had been ‘such a dissolving down of barriers and prejudices’ (2L 47). However, he still disliked it, in spite of its ‘gentleness’. He wrote to Else’s eldest son, the 10-year-old Friedrich (or ‘Friedel’) Jaffe, in Munich: ‘ich möchte nicht lange Zeit in diesem England bleiben, das macht man so schwersinnig’ (2L 25) (‘I shouldn’t like to stay long in this England, that makes one so melancholy’).
Grim and challenging though it was to return to England, it did offer Lawrence and Frieda the chance to mix with people after the isolation of Gargnano and the ‘queer feel of shut-inness’ they had experienced during the final few weeks in Irschenhausen. Lawrence’s attention soon turned to literary affairs, and to revising and placing his stories. He was relieved to receive a cheque for £50 from Duckworth for Sons and Lovers (the second half of his advance), together with a letter from the novelist and journalist W. L. George congratulating him on its publication. He sent off a brief biography to Mitchell Kennerley, the American firm which had published The Trespasser in May 1912 and which was now planning the autumn publication of Sons and Lovers.8 He heard from Ezra Pound, who requested some stories from Lawrence in his role as agent in England for the American magazine Smart Set,9 and Austin Harrison also enquired after stories for the English Review, though Lawrence considered it ‘piffling’ and ‘rotten’ (2L 21, 22) under his editorship.
At the end of June, Lawrence and Frieda met Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry for the first time; the two couples took a bus together to have lunch in Soho, and they bonded straight away. Lawrence and Frieda sympathised with the financial plight of Murry and Mansfield (they had been left with heavy debts following the demise of Rhythm, and the Blue Review was about to cease publication after its third number). In turn, Mansfield (in particular) was responsive to Frieda’s forthcoming divorce hearing and her plight with the children (Mansfield had married a man, George Bowden, to attain respectability after falling pregnant by somebody else, but had decamped on their wedding night and her baby had miscarried: she was well positioned to pity Frieda without patronising or judging her). Frieda – perhaps ignoring the advice of Garnett’s brother, Robert, a solicitor – now made plans to see her children without Ernest knowing. On 26 June Lawrence was in London, visiting Garnett (who was staying at his Hampstead flat); he had an appointment that day with a tailor, and also visited the photographer W. G. Parker, who took a portrait picture of him (it was used to accompany an article on Lawrence by W. L. George in the Bookman for February 1914). Frieda saw Bunny Garnett while Lawrence was busy; they hung around outside her son’s (Monty’s) preparatory school, Colet Court, at the end of the school day, in the hope that she might see him. According to Bunny, they did this on several afternoons.10 On 30 June, Lawrence – against his inclinations – went with Frieda to the school, where she managed to speak with Monty, and arranged for him to bring his two sisters to see her the next day.
By 8 July, Lawrence had worked hard revising several of his stories (including ‘The Christening’, ‘The Fly in the Ointment’, ‘Her Turn’, ‘Strike-Pay’ and ‘The Old Adam’). Through Garnett he arranged for Douglas Clayton (Katharine’s 19-year-old son) to type up the manuscripts so that he could submit them to magazines. They were sent in stages: ‘Intimacy’, for instance, could not be found and was only recovered and revised in mid-July (Lawrence changed its title to ‘The White Woman’ ‘in order to get it out’ [2L 36]); he asked for ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ to be typed on 20 July; ‘Love Among the Haystacks’ and ‘The Primrose Path’ (another new story) were also revised and sent later. Lawrence would attempt to place his work in several magazines (including Smart Set, the English Review, and the New Statesman); he would also send two stories to the Northern Newspaper Syndicate, and Garnett forwarded ‘Honour and Arms’ on his behalf to J. B. Pinker. Three ‘futuristic’ poems were sent to Harold Monro with a view to publication in his journal Poetry and Drama.11
Having given the first batch of manuscripts to Douglas Clayton, Lawrence and Frieda went away for their three-week holiday. They travelled from the Cearne on 9 July, stopping off in London for the day and staying in Hampstead overnight. They met Garnett, Duckworth and Norman Douglas (Assistant Editor of the English Review) and saw Mansfield and Murry again. Afterwards they headed to the coast. Lawrence had rented a ‘delightful flat’ (2L 31) in Broadstairs, Kent, close to Margate; they had a ‘tent in a little bay on the foreshore’ (2L 45–6) for bathing.
They found the coast pleasant enough, but Lawrence felt slightly out of place, so he invited new contacts to visit. Henry Savage, who had first come to Lawrence’s attention after writing a supportive review of The White Peacock, came on 16 July. The two men had recently resumed their correspondence: Savage had copied out and sent Lawrence some of his own unpublished poems, together with two books of poetry and a volume of short stories by Richard Middleton, whose work he had edited for T. Fisher Unwin (Middleton had committed suicide in 1911 at the age of 29). Another new contact was Edward Marsh. On 12 July, Lawrence received £3 in royalties from Marsh for the inclusion of ‘Snap-Dragon’ in his anthology of Georgian poetry: it was an unexpected surprise, like ‘manna’ dropping out of ‘the sweet heavens!’ (2L 35). They subsequently met on two occasions: on 20 July, Marsh took Lawrence and Frieda to tea with Herbert (‘Beb’) Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, and his wife, Lady Cynthia Asquith. On 22 July he saw Sir Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and on 30 July Marsh introduced Lawrence to the poet W. H. Davies. Frieda enjoyed ‘this contact with the aristocracy’ (2L 51). She told Else: ‘L, nachdem er recht elend war die Tage hier, erholt sich – Man macht viel Getu um ihn’ (2L 49) (‘L, after being thoroughly miserable the days here, is recovering – Much to-do is being made over him’).
A letter of 21 July from Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield shows how Lawrence was now actively involved in arranging for Katherine to pass messages to Monty Weekley. She and Murry had recently moved to a new address in West Kensington, close to Monty’s school: Lawrence gives her details on how best to approach Monty, and asks whether she could get the boy to her home in order that Frieda might meet him in private. He intended to include in the letter a half sovereign to pass on to Monty, but had not got it, so he forwarded a sovereign to Murry the next day (half to be given to Frieda’s son, the rest to be spent on train fares to allow the couple to visit Lawrence and Frieda at Broadstairs).12 Mansfield and Murry came on Saturday 26 July, bringing with them their friend Gordon Campbell, an Irish barrister (whom Lawrence liked). They all bathed ‘naked in the half-light’, then ate together; Mansfield and Murry read Sons and Lovers on the train journey home.13
Unfortunately, Frieda’s attempts to see and get messages to her children caused more trouble for her. Ernest’s sister Maude had grown suspicious; she questioned the children and found a letter from Frieda in Monty’s bedroom. She told Ernest, who sent a furious letter to Frieda’s mother, in which he referred to Frieda as being dead to her children (a ‘verfaulte Leiche’, or decomposed corpse);14 he then applied for a court order against her. The order was granted on 28 July: he was given custody of the children and Frieda was forbidden from attempting to see them. On this day Lawrence told Garnett about Ernest’s ‘hideous’ letter to the Frau Baronin; Frieda was upset because Monty had sent word to Katherine Mansfield via another boy ‘that he was not to talk to people who came to the school to see him’ (2L 51).
Lawrence and Frieda left Broadstairs on 29 July, spending two nights in London (at Gordon Campbell’s house in south Kensington) before Frieda left for Germany and Lawrence travelled on to the Cearne. Between 2 and 6 August Lawrence was in Eastwood for Ada’s wedding: he stayed with Willie and Sallie Hopkin at Devonshire Drive. Then he returned to London, staying for one night in Garnett’s Hampstead flat (there was just time to arrange for some poems to be typed by Douglas Clayton and forwarded to Ezra Pound for inclusion in Harriet Monroe’s journal Poetry).15 On the evening of 7 August, Lawrence travelled back to Germany, to be reunited with Frieda at the ‘Villa Jaffe’ in Irschenhausen.
The brief stay in Eastwood evidently caused Lawrence to think again about possible outlets for writings based in, and reflecting on, his former home. A few days after his return to Germany, he told Willie Hopkin that he had written a sketch about Eastwood; further pieces were planned on ‘the Artists of Eastwood’ and ‘the Primitive Methodist Chapel’ (2L 57); it seems as if he tried (unsuccessfully) to get these now-lost articles published in the Daily Mail.16 He also started to revise his play The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, which he had not touched for around two years (Garnett had persuaded Duckworth to publish it, and had also managed to place it with Mitchell Kennerley in America).
His feelings about Eastwood must have been intensified by his stay with Willie and Sallie: their offer to put him up seems to have greatly eased Lawrence’s potentially difficult interactions with his father and siblings at Ada’s wedding. However, it was wonderful to get away and return to living with Frieda. In Irschenhausen he felt that he could ‘breathe again’: everything seemed ‘so living: so quick’ after the ‘dark and woolly’ England (2L 58). Life here was far more sociable than it had been before. On Frieda’s birthday, 11 August, Else’s children came dressed in white, carrying flowers and fruit. Edgar Jaffe came to stay with them; he talked with Lawrence about economics and capitalism. Lawrence went shopping in Wolfratshausen and in early September attended the big international art exhibition at the Glaspalast in Munich: ‘a great Exhibition of pictures and sculpture – German Spanish Italian Russian Swedish and so on’ (2L 69).
The only problem was the incessant rain; with winter on the way, Lawrence’s thoughts soon turned to the trip south, back to ‘my beloved Italy.’ He and Frieda planned to move to Lerici at the end of September, where Edgar Jaffe would be. The intervening weeks in Germany were filled with work: Lawrence told Garnett that he was ‘working hard at clearing things up’ (2L 58). He was hearing back from the publishers to whom he had sent his writing while in England. Their responses were mixed, but Lawrence was particularly pleased that Austin Harrison had accepted his three sketches about life on the Lago di Garda for the English Review for the splendid sum of £25.17 Harrison also agreed to publish ‘Vin Ordinaire’, one of the two new German military stories. Such successes helped to offset his disappointment over the poor sales of Sons and Lovers; the novel had been very favourably reviewed, but it had been a commercial failure.18
Lawrence was starting to feel that a new form and tone might be emerging in his writing. He wrote to Edward Marsh explaining that the rhythm of his verse was now ‘smoother’ than before because he was ‘no longer so criss-crossy in myself’ (2L 61): he compared his attempts to get his emotion into poetic form to the work of Walt Whitman and the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi. When Marsh expressed the opinion that Lawrence’s verse was ‘often strained and mal-formed’ (2L 84), Lawrence arranged for Douglas Clayton to send on copies of some of his more recent poems (including ‘Illicit’ and ‘Green’).19 In Irschenhausen he also began to work on the second version of ‘The Sisters’. By 24 August he had suffered two false starts, but in early September he was really underway, and was quite happy with the ‘new beginning’, which was ‘not so damned flippant’ (2L 68) as the first version. One hundred pages had been completed by 15 September: it was now a ‘weird novel … but perfectly proper. The libraries will put it in their Sunday School prize list’ (2L 75).
The hard work in placing stories, sketches and poems was beginning to pay off: money started to trickle in from various sources. However, Lawrence still felt constrained to exercise caution where money was concerned. Frieda insisted upon seeing her family in Baden-Baden before heading south, so Lawrence decided to minimise his own expenses by walking through Switzerland and meeting her in Italy. He started out on 17 September, with the manuscript of ‘The Sisters’ in his rucksack. He went by train from Munich to Überlingen, then by steamer to Constance and down the Rhine to Schaffhausen. He then went on foot (and by tram) to Zürich and trekked over the Rigi Pass to Lucerne. Switzerland was ‘beautiful’, but ‘too touristy’ (2L 79): ‘The only excitement in it is that you can throw a stone a frightfully long way down – and that is forbidden by law’ (2L 88). The final leg of his journey was ‘over the Gotthard to Cirolo, Bellinzona, Lugano, Como’ (2L 79). He met Frieda in Milan on 26 September.
They arrived in Lerici on 28 September. From there they could look across the bay to the house where Shelley had once lived; it was only a short distance to ‘Shelley’s San Terenzo’ (2L 86). With the help of Edgar Jaffe, they soon found a perfect place to stay in the village of Fiascherino: ‘the villino of Ettore Gambrosier, a four-roomed pink cottage among a vine garden, just over the water, and under the olive woods.’ They had to wait until 4 October to move in, so spent a few days in ‘a delicious hotel – 6 francs a day pension, jolly good food, wine and all included’ (2L 78). The weather was ‘wonderful … like midsummer’ (2L 79). Lawrence hired a maid, Felice Fiori: ‘a rum creature – about sixty, and wizened, and barefoot’ (2L 82). She and her daughter Elide helped out with housework, though Lawrence was forced to scrub the filthy floors himself, since he felt sure that Elide had ‘never seen a scrubbing brush used’ (2L 87). He and Frieda soon became friendly with the contadini (Luigi and Gentile Azzarini, Felice’s nephews by marriage) in the neighbouring cottage: he found them ‘very jolly – they come and play with us, and sing to the guitar at evening’ (2L 124). They could live cheaply and were greeted as ‘signoria’ (2L 112) when out together. They purchased 25 litres of red wine, and borrowed a rowing boat from the locals. Frieda insisted on hiring a piano; the process of getting it safely delivered by boat and transported to the house was a cause of considerable mirth.20 Lawrence was able to get a steamer from Lerici to visit the bank in Spezia. The only practical frustration in Fiascherino was with the mail: Lawrence had to walk two kilometres to Tellaro to collect letters and buy stamps, and he was often infuriated by delays in receiving items sent to him from England and elsewhere.
Two pieces of good news greeted him soon after his arrival. He received proofs of The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd from Garnett on 4 October; the next day Mitchell Kennerley wrote to say that these would be corrected on his behalf by Edwin August Björkman, the series editor. Kennerley sent on Björkman’s flattering introduction to the play, together with a laudatory review of Sons and Lovers published in the New York Times, and a copy of his American edition of the novel. The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd would be published by Kennerley on 1 April 1914; Duckworth published it in England a few weeks later, on 17 April. The second piece of good news came from Austin Harrison, who wrote to say that he wished to publish both ‘Vin Ordinaire’ and ‘Honour and Arms’ in the English Review; he offered £15 for each story, and stated that he would be interested in publishing two more military tales, if Lawrence could supply them. Lawrence thought of sending ‘Once—!’, and he set to work writing ‘The Mortal Coil’, a story based on an incident in the early life of Frieda’s father (though neither of the latter two stories would appear in the journal).21
Lawrence’s literary dealings with journals and magazines were becoming complicated. He was still relying heavily on Garnett’s advice about whom to approach and where to publish, but he was also acting on his own initiative and depending on friends and contacts like Edward Marsh and Ezra Pound to help place his writings. ‘Honour and Arms’ had been sent to Harrison via the literary agent J. B. Pinker: Harrison felt that Pinker would be unlikely to accept £15 for each story, so Lawrence had to write to Pinker to express his desire to accept Harrison’s offer.22 Lawrence’s itinerant lifestyle meant that cheques and manuscripts were always likely to go astray (he had temporarily lost the two ‘Tyrol’ sketches originally sent to the Saturday Westminster Gazette, and a £4 cheque sent to him by the New Statesman for ‘The Fly in the Ointment’ had disappeared in transit). When Garnett suggested that Lawrence might approach Mitchell Kennerley about the possibility of bringing out another book of poetry in America, Lawrence had to ask Ada to send on the College notebook containing his earliest verse; handwritten copies were all he had of some of the poems.23 The need was obviously there for him to take on an agent to manage his affairs and finances. Both Curtis Brown and Pinker continued to express interest in his work, but he reassured Garnett that he would not ‘be trafficking with agents – I shan’t do anything without telling you’ (2L 99).
Plentiful reading matter was sent to Fiascherino by Arthur McLeod and Henry Savage. Lawrence enjoyed reading Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) in late October, but he took particular pleasure in Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual (1913): ‘It just fascinates me to see art coming out of religious yearning’ (2L 90). Richard Middleton’s Monologues (1913), sent by Savage around the same time, included several essays on women, which roused both Lawrence and Frieda to oppose what they saw as Middleton’s self-lacerating hatred of his own body. Lawrence told Savage: ‘it is so much more difficult to live with one’s body than with one’s soul. One’s body is so much more exacting’ (2L 95). This sounds very much like the sentiment he had expressed to Ernest Collings back in January: ‘My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true’ (1L 503). Lawrence was still troubling himself about Middleton’s suicide weeks later, in mid-November, when he told Savage that he should read ‘Baudelaire Verlaine and Flaubert’ in order to understand it: ‘They’ve all … got about them, the feeling that their own flesh is unclean – corrupt.’ He felt that ‘to understand Middleton you must understand the whole suicidal tendency that has overspread Europe since 1880’ (2L 101).
Lawrence had referred to his need to ‘theorise myself out’ (1L 550) by writing the first draft of ‘The Sisters’; the long letters he wrote to Savage, Edward Marsh and John Middleton Murry from late October through to mid-December seem to serve the same purpose. Lawrence is exploring his own convictions in both life and art, so that at times his comments seem directed at himself as much as at the recipient. For example, his advice to Murry in late November, that he should stop worrying about providing for Katherine and choose freedom over duty, seems to reflect his new sense of certainty over Frieda’s commitment to him: ‘A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board’ (2L 111). On 2 December, his observation to Savage (concerning Middleton) that ‘nearly every man that approaches greatness tends to homosexuality, whether he admits it or not’ (2L 115), arguably reveals Lawrence’s implicit belief that most people are intrinsically bisexual and experience a range of different desires across their lifetimes. Lawrence admitted to Marsh: ‘I find it frightfully easy to theorise and say all the things I don’t mean, and frightfully difficult to find out even for myself, what I do mean’ (2L 105). People responded differently to his theorising: Frieda bluntly told him that he was ‘always stupid when I’m didactic’ (2L 95); Murry, on the other hand, brooded and felt rather resentful about Lawrence’s forthrightness.24
Sadly, ‘The Sisters’ (where Lawrence was exploring his new attitude to relationships and self-realisation) had stalled since he left Irschenhausen. By 31 October he had worked on it only intermittently, so he told Garnett that it was unlikely he could finish it by Christmas.25 By 2 November he had started it again and made steady, but slow, progress. He had felt the need to settle into a new rhythm of life in Fiascherino. He and Frieda had also needed to adjust themselves to the news of the divorce hearing (and the pronouncement of the decree nisi on grounds of Frieda’s adultery) in London on 18 October. Weekley had attested to Frieda’s infidelity and Maria Samuelli in Gargnano had written a formal deposition on Frieda’s behalf.26 Frieda had not been represented in court; Weekley was again awarded legal custody of the children. Public exposure was now unavoidable: Lawrence’s letter to Weekley was cited in the News of the World on 19 October and quoted at greater length the following day in the Nottingham Guardian.27
He was finally forced to tell his older siblings, Emily and George, about his situation: they rode ‘like very Walküre on their broomstick indignation’ (2L 109). Recent contacts in polite society (like Edward Marsh and Beb Asquith) were also bound to find out; Lawrence worried that they might take offence. He directly referred to the court proceedings in a letter to Marsh of 28 October: in it, he said that he now felt he had enjoyed a ‘false entry’ into society at Broadstairs, and he gave Marsh the option to break off the correspondence. These latest developments seemed to confirm that, in spite of the life of comparative freedom they were enjoying outside England, Lawrence and Frieda were ‘really scapegoats still’ (2L 93).
Life in Fiascherino, though, was less isolated than in Gargnano. On 29 November, Lawrence was invited to be a witness and guest of honour at the wedding of Ezzechiele Raffaele Azzarini, one of the brothers of Luigi and Gentile, in Tellaro and nearby Ameglia.28 During the feast which followed he was surprised by the visit of a party of ‘Georgian’ poets. Wilfrid Gibson, Lascelles and Catherine Abercrombie, and R. C. Trevelyan had dropped by at Edward Marsh’s instigation; they were accompanied by the painter Aubrey Waterfield, who lived with his wife Lina at nearby Aulla, in a ‘fine old castle about 10 miles inland’ (2L 126). Meeting English poets at an Italian peasant wedding made Lawrence feel ‘queer’: ‘they seemed so shadowy and funny, after the crude, strong, rather passionate men at the wedding’ (2L 116). He instinctively warmed to them, though (and especially to Gibson and Abercrombie). He would visit the Waterfields in mid-December; during one of his visits he confided in Lina, telling her that he and his sister Ada had administered an overdose of sleeping draught to their mother the night before she died (just as Paul and Annie Morel do in Sons and Lovers).29 Through the Waterfields, Lawrence and Frieda were introduced to a small coterie of other wealthy ex-pats in the area, including the Huntingdons, Pearses and Cochranes. Invitations were accepted and reciprocated: he felt that they were ‘always having visits or visiting here’ (2L 135).
Christmas 1913 was a far happier affair than it had been the previous year, in Gargnano. On Christmas Eve, 16 of the peasants came into Lawrence’s house and together they sang the Pastorella at midnight.30 The next day, Lawrence and Frieda attended an English service at the Cochranes’ private chapel; they went on to have a meal with the Huntingdons. On Boxing Day they lunched with the Pearses. Both the Pearses and the Huntingdons expressed admiration for Sons and Lovers. Ezra Pound got in touch to say that he was nominating Lawrence for the Polignac Prize for Love Poems and Others; Lawrence felt that the ‘Hueffer-Pound faction seems inclined to lead me round a little as one of their show-dogs’ (2L 132–3), but, like the letter of praise he received from J. M. Barrie, and the recommendation from Arnold Bennett to The Stage Society, it was an important vote of confidence.31
On 6 January 1914, in an optimistic mood at the start of the new year, Lawrence sent the first half of the rewritten ‘Sisters’ to Garnett, ‘re-christened – provisionally – The Wedding Ring’ (2L 134). He expressed a hope that Garnett would like it, but he also referred (again) to the agents who had written encouragingly to console him about the commercial fate of Sons and Lovers; Lawrence was preparing himself to take an agent if Garnett raised objections to the new novel. In the meantime, he embraced the expansive social aspects of his new life. He went with the Cochranes’ chaplain, the Reverend John Wood, onto the English collier ships in Spezia harbour; he felt a curious nostalgia among the colliers, even finding them ‘brotherly’ (2L 137). He also helped the peasants to harvest olives. In due course he would take Italian lessons from a local schoolmistress – Eoa Rainusso – who happened to have fallen in love with Luigi Azzarini.32 And there were further visits from friends. Edward Marsh (obviously unperturbed by news of Frieda’s divorce) and his friend Jim Barnes dropped by for a day in mid-January, and on 25 January Constance Garnett arrived with Vera Volkhovsky to spend a month at the Albergo delle Palme (the hotel in Lerici which Lawrence and Frieda had themselves used on their arrival back in September). Their company was enjoyable, though Frieda took to pouring out her woes to Constance, so that Lawrence eventually grew weary.33
Garnett’s response to ‘The Wedding Ring’ – when it came, in late January – was predictably critical. He objected to the handling of a failed romantic episode between Ella Brangwen and a character named Ben Templeman. He also felt that the character of Ella was ‘incoherent’; Lawrence agreed with this objection, putting it down to the way he had drawn upon both Louie Burrows and Frieda as models for his heroine. Lawrence was more disturbed by Garnett’s wider objection to the ‘artistic side’ of the book. He sent 150 pages of the second half of the novel to Garnett the next day, asking for his frank opinion of it. He also, however, insisted that he was going through a ‘transition phase’: ‘I have no longer the joy in creating vivid scenes, that I had in Sons and Lovers. I don’t care much more about accumulating objects in the powerful light of emotion, and making a scene of them. I have to write differently’ (2L 142–3). By the following evening he had decided to abandon the second draft and start again. He told Arthur McLeod that ‘it just missed being itself’: ‘the perfect statue is in the marble, the kernel of it. But the thing is the getting it out clean’ (2L 146). Lawrence had been reading Gilbert Murray’s translations of Greek tragedy again, and he had also read a volume by Pater which Savage had sent to him (probably The Renaissance).34 He felt that his work was now less violent and sensational than Sons and Lovers, ‘much quieter’ (2L 136), and he used his reading to help define what he thought was the real achievement of his new novel: ‘There is something in the Greek sculpture that my soul is hungry for – something of the eternal stillness that lies under all movement, under all life, like a source, incorruptible and inexhaustible’ (2L 138).
Garnett’s second letter, written in response to what he had been sent of the abandoned second half of the novel, was far more hurtful. He evidently told Lawrence that it was a failure: worse than the first version. Garnett criticised the novel’s ‘cockneyism and commonness’ (2L 165). It seems likely that he denounced the direction that Lawrence’s writing had taken since he finished Sons and Lovers. Frieda was offended by what she took to be Garnett’s attack on her for failing to support Lawrence in his work: she responded first, telling him that she was ‘cross’ (2L 150). Lawrence went on working on the new version, ‘The Wedding Ring’, only informing Garnett that it was being typed by the Consul in Spezia (Thomas Dunlop); it is telling that he now began to contact Mitchell Kennerley directly, and thought of Edward Marsh as his ‘poetic adviser’ (2L 154). Friends and supporters became all the more important to him as he struggled with the novel. He was particularly touched when Ernest Collings sent him a book of his drawings entitled Outlines, which he had privately published and dedicated to Lawrence.35
The impact of Garnett’s letter was so great that Lawrence only replied properly on 22 April. He was deeply troubled by his mentor’s failure to value the ambition of the writing. He told Garnett: ‘you should understand, and help me to the new thing, not get angry and say it is common.’ He defended his attitude as ‘passionately religious’ and argued that the novel’s theme was now clear to him: ‘woman becoming individual, self-responsible, taking her own initiative’ (2L 165). He and Frieda stood squarely behind the latest version of the novel: ‘Now you will find her and me in the novel, I think, and the work is of both of us’ (2L 164). Significantly, Lawrence used the recent news that Duckworth had lost money on Sons and Lovers to suggest that it might be better all round if a more commercial publisher were to take him on. He sent to Garnett all the typed pages of ‘The Wedding Ring’ that he had to hand, but he also stated that if Duckworth did not wish to proceed with it, then he would give the novel to J. B. Pinker. The same day he wrote to Pinker to thank him for placing ‘The White Stocking’ in the Smart Set for £18. America was proving to be a lucrative market for his writing, and he was discovering other new outlets for his work: Pound had managed to place five of his poems in the Egoist.36
He and Frieda were eagerly anticipating the announcement of the decree absolute, and they were planning to travel to England to marry in June (though Lawrence was also relying on a swift return to Italy, having received an invitation to visit the Abruzzi region).37 When Else came to visit in early April, she brought further news of Weekley’s strong resistance to Frieda’s being given access to the children, though a lawyer told them that Monty would be free to elect his own guardian once he reached the age of 14 (in July). After the decree absolute was finally granted on 27 April, Lawrence expressed some hope that the emotional upset would finally abate. On 9 May he informed Garnett that Weekley had sent Frieda a ‘much milder’ letter: ‘He will come round in the end. The divorce is a load off him, I suppose’ (2L 174).
Arrangements could now be made for the wedding in England. Lawrence organised for them to stay at Gordon Campbell’s house in south Kensington; they would visit a registrar there, since the marriage would be ‘a mere legal contract’ (2L 179). The final weeks in Fiascherino were devoted to finishing his novel, though he and Frieda continued to welcome visitors. The Irish-born poet and playwright Herbert Trench saw them at the beginning of May: he invited Lawrence to stay with him during the autumn at his new home in Florence.38 A young novelist named Ivy Low came to stay shortly afterwards: she had written Lawrence a fan letter in the spring, declaring him the most significant novelist for the new generation. Lawrence and Frieda initially found her agreeable and sympathetic, though her six-week stay became trying. In early March Lawrence had visited the Russian novelist and playwright Aleksander Amfiteatrov at his house in Levanto: he was taken aback by the chaos that reigned over lunch with 26 people, but he ‘loved them – for their absolute carelessness about everything but just what interested them’ (2L 155). Amfiteatrov’s friends now made regular trips to Fiascherino.
Despite all the company, finishing his novel without the support and sympathy of his mentor exposed Lawrence to a new feeling of isolation. He told Henry Savage: ‘I believe folk won’t want to accept it at all … I feel miserable sending it out into the world, because somehow I feel as if it would be rejected’ (2L 169). It was a case of ‘slowly putting words together in this remoteness’ (2L 179). On 9 May, he told Garnett that he was days away from finishing the novel: Frieda had suggested that he retitle it The Rainbow.39 This version of the novel was very different from the published text: elements of it would later form part of Women in Love.40 The draft was complete by 16 May; the typescript (courtesy of Thomas Dunlop and his wife, Margaret) was sent to Garnett the following day. The danger of its being criticised and rejected by Garnett was offset by a letter he had received from Pinker, offering him £300 for English rights.41
Having sent it off, Lawrence felt ‘queer and loose at the roots, in prospect of leaving our Fiascherino’ (2L 175). He thought that he ought to write some sketches about Liguria, but he was not in the mood. Instead, he and Frieda visited the Waterfields in Aulla for a few days at the end of May.
It was during several ‘very lazy’ (2L 179) days at the start of June that Lawrence read two books by the Italian futurists and wrote to Arthur McLeod and Garnett, reflecting on his interest in their manifestos, essays and art works.42 He had come into contact with the editor of an Italian futurist magazine, plus two or three of its staff members, during a visit with Frieda and Ivy Low to the Amfiteatrovs at Levanto in May;43 it was almost certainly they who passed on the books and encouraged him to write an essay on futurism for an English paper. The futurists’ brash attacks on tradition helped Lawrence to identify and defend his own ambition in ‘The Wedding Ring’. Like them, he wanted ‘the purging of the old forms and sentimentalities,’ and to ‘revolt against beastly sentiment and slavish adherence to tradition and the dead mind.’ F. T. Marinetti, Ardengo Soffici and Paolo Buzzi could be drawn upon as allies with a similar interest in attacking the accepted moral forms of art, and in breaking apart ‘the old stable ego of the character.’ In its iconoclasm Lawrence felt that his novel, too, was ‘a bit futuristic – quite unconsciously so,’ but he also insisted on his difference from the futurists, responding to their misogyny by asserting that new expression can only be achieved through a marriage of the male and female: art must be ‘the joint work of man and woman’ (2L 180–3).
Lawrence and Frieda left Fiascherino on 8 June. They first travelled together to Turin. Frieda then went by train to stay with her family in Baden-Baden, while Lawrence walked through Switzerland with a local engineer named A. P. Lewis, crossing the Great St Bernard Pass to Martigny, Interlaken and Bern, before visiting Alfred Weber in Heidelberg from 18 to 22 June; he then met up with Frieda and they travelled together on the last leg of their journey, to England. They arrived on 24 June, and went straight to London, taking up residence at Campbell’s house. As he had done on his last visit to England the year before, Lawrence immersed himself in literary business, meeting new contacts and hastily arranging his affairs.
Within days, he made a major decision which would have far-reaching consequences for his career. Having met Duckworth and received confirmation of his lukewarm reception of ‘The Wedding Ring’, Lawrence decided to take Pinker’s advice and sign a three-novel contract with Methuen for its publication. The £300 advance they offered him proved too much of a temptation. In contracting himself to Methuen, Lawrence also took on Pinker as his agent. It seems likely that Pinker gave Lawrence an advance payment of £100 ahead of Methuen’s first £50 payment; a further £150 would be paid on publication. Lawrence wrote an apologetic letter to Garnett, pointing out that he had intended to visit his mentor before going to see Pinker, but found that he was out.44
As a conciliatory gesture, Lawrence offered Duckworth a collection of stories instead; he contacted Douglas Clayton to gather together the various typescripts. He would discuss the revision of his stories with Garnett during his stay at the Cearne between 4 and 7 July. The revised texts represent a significant advance in his writing: in ‘forging them up’ (2L 198) he removed earlier elements of melodrama and sentimentality, employing free-indirect discourse more centrally to bring the reader closer to the characters and to trace the various kinds of psychological transformation they undergo.45 For example, he completely altered the ending to ‘Vin Ordinaire’ (now retitled ‘The Thorn in the Flesh’): in the new version, the emphasis is shifted from Emilie’s betrayal of the young soldier (Bachmann) to the indissoluble bond established between the couple during their night together. The connection between Emilie and Bachmann engenders a form of equanimity in them – a ‘curious silence, a blankness, like something eternal’ (PO 38) – that the military authorities are powerless to destroy.46
By 8 July Lawrence had been approached by Bertram Christian to write a short (15,000-word) study of Thomas Hardy for the ‘Writers of the Day’ series published by James Nisbet and Co. He accepted, on the grounds that the £15 advance and the royalties would be easily earned. Literary London was opening up to Lawrence in a way it had not done before. He went to lunch at the ‘Moulin d’Or’ with Edward Marsh and Rupert Brooke; on 1 July he met Wyndham Lewis, who had just published the first number of his Vorticist magazine, Blast;47 and on 30 July he was invited by Amy Lowell to a dinner in her suite at the Berkeley Hotel, where he met H. D. (the poet Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington (Lawrence would go on to be a regular contributor to the annual Some Imagist Poets volumes which Lowell edited from 1915). He and Frieda renewed their friendship with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, and with Lady Cynthia Asquith. Through Bunny Garnett he met a range of new contacts, including the novelist Gilbert Cannan and his wife Mary, who introduced him to Lady Ottoline Morrell and Compton Mackenzie, and through Ivy Low he met Catherine Jackson (soon to become Catherine Carswell after her second marriage in 1915) and Viola Meynell, daughter of the poet Alice Meynell. Catherine had studied art at Glasgow Art School; when her first marriage ended acrimoniously, she had had an affair with one of her tutors, Maurice Greiffenhagen (whose painting, ‘An Idyll’, had been so important for Lawrence). She was now a literary critic with the Glasgow Herald and had written a novel, which Lawrence read and advised her on (it would eventually be published in 1920 as Open the Door!).48 She would go on to become one of Lawrence’s closest and most loyal friends. Ivy also introduced him to her aunt, the pioneering psychoanalyst Barbara Low, and to the English Freudian Dr David Eder, who was married to Barbara’s sister, Edith.
Lawrence and Frieda married at the Kensington Registry Office at 10.30 a.m. on Monday 13 July; Murry and Gordon Campbell were the witnesses. Frieda had a brand new wedding ring and gave her old one to Katherine Mansfield.49 Lawrence told Sallie Hopkin that it was ‘a very decent and dignified performance. I don’t feel a changed man, but I suppose I am one’ (2L 196). Edward Marsh sent him the complete works of Thomas Hardy as a wedding present, to help him when he came to write his short book for Nisbet. Marriage may have altered the legal status of their relationship, but it did not resolve the conflict over Frieda’s access to the children. Frieda could not accept the fact that Weekley’s legal custody meant that she could only see the children with his permission: his sister Maude prevented her from seeing them outside the school,50 and when Frieda identified Weekleys’ new home in Chiswick and burst in on the children, she was castigated by Maude, by Weekley’s mother, and by the children themselves (who had become accustomed to hearing her discussed in an unflattering light).51 Even the intervention of Frieda’s mother failed to alter the damage that she had done to her chances of establishing an understanding with the Weekleys.
Between 18 and 23 July, Lawrence visited Ada in Ripley. On his return he made further (unsuccessful) efforts to get The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd staged (he met up with Lena Ashwell, manager of the Kingsway Theatre, to discuss his play).52 Then, on 31 July, he went away on a short walking tour of the Lake District, joining three other men: A. P. Lewis (who was now working in Barrow-in-Furness), S. S. Koteliansky (‘Kot’, a Ukrainian translator working at the Russian Law Bureau in London, who would go on to form a strong and lasting friendship with Lawrence), and William K. Horne (a barrister and Kot’s colleague at the Law Bureau).53 Together they had a good time walking in Westmorland, despite some awful weather, but when they moved on to Lewis’ house in Barrow (after spending a little time in Rampside), they heard the devastating news that war had been declared with Germany on 4 August. At the railway station Lawrence saw soldiers leaving for the Front: he would remember a woman shouting to her sweetheart: ‘When you get at ’em, Clem, let ’em have it’ (2L 268). Lewis was called back to work and Kot returned to London, so the party disbanded and Lawrence was forced to spend the rest of the week by himself. The reality of the war, when it sank in, made him ‘very miserable’ (2L 205): travelling back to rejoin Frieda on 8 August, he realised that their world had been turned upside-down at a stroke. It was a terrible setback at the very moment when his literary reputation and financial situation seemed to be in the ascendancy. On 9 August he wrote to Amy Lowell: ‘My wife is German, so you may imagine … Everything seems gone to pieces’ (2L 206).