Lawrence and Frieda arrived at Beresford’s cottage in Porthcothan on 30 December. It was ‘quite a big house looking down on a cove of the sea,’ and it came with the services of an efficient housekeeper. Its isolation was a relief to them: Lawrence felt that it belonged to ‘the days before Christianity, the days of Druids, or of desolate Celtic magic and conjuring’ (2L 493). It was as close to America, and as far from the capital and the war, as Lawrence could get. He could even convince himself that it was ‘not England’ (2L 494).
Early in the new year, the Lawrences were joined by Philip Heseltine. He paid his way and proved to be good company; his music, knowledge of Celtic mythology, and interest in African and Tibetan sculpture would have generated much good discussion. Even the difficulties in Heseltine’s private life provided rich material for a co-written comic play (he had just discovered that his mistress, Minnie Lucie – or ‘Puma’ – Channing, was pregnant, at the very time when he felt drawn to Ottoline Morrell’s Swiss governess, Juliette Baillot).1 ‘Puma’ would come down to join them on 26 January. Lawrence found the atmosphere in the cottage conducive to writing: he conceived the idea for ‘a mid-winter story of oblivion’ (2L 493) (probably ‘The Miracle’, an early version of ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’) and around 5 January he started work on the latest incarnation of his ‘philosophy’ (a now-lost essay entitled ‘Goats and Compasses’).
However, the nervous tension of the past few months inevitably took its toll. The change of air brought on a cold, which grew progressively worse. Dikran Kouyoumdjian arrived for a visit on 10 January, at the very worst moment: he proved to be far less agreeable than Heseltine (he was eventually asked to leave, and carried out his threat to publish a skit on Lawrence in the New Age).2 Lawrence took to his bed, but even then he reached out to Catherine Carswell and Mark Gertler, offering them advice and support (Carswell sent him her poetry; Gertler was working on his great painting ‘The Merry-Go-Round’, but was very poor and suffering through his love for Dora Carrington).3 Dollie Radford arranged for her son – Dr Maitland Radford – to travel to Cornwall and examine Lawrence. He diagnosed bronchitis brought on by nervous exhaustion.4
Once he began to feel a little better, Lawrence turned his attention to another new project. Back in December, he had written to Thomas Dunlop asking him to help retrieve some poetry notebooks which had been left in Fiascherino;5 these duly arrived in January, and Lawrence transcribed and sent some of the poems to Amy Lowell for the next (1916) volume of Some Imagist Poets.6 He now gathered together and revised the notebook poetry in a new notebook headed ‘Accounts at Porthcothan’ (which he briefly used to keep track of his expenses);7 42 of the 48 poems in it would go to make another volume of verse, telling ‘a sort of inner history of my life, from 20 to 26’ (2L 521). He saw the poems as records of the ‘pain and hope’ of those early years.8 Heseltine helped Lawrence to type them out: they would be published as Amores, with a dedication ‘To Ottoline Morrell’, in July. In the meantime Lawrence settled to correct the proofs of his Italian sketches: he had decided to call them ‘Italian Days’, but the title would be changed to Twilight in Italy prior to the publication of the book on 1 June.
Within weeks of his arrival at Porthcothan, Lawrence told Ottoline: ‘I withdraw, I am an outsider’ (2L 504). He styled himself as the willing exile, giving up on humanity and caring little for his poor financial situation and future prospects. If the Cornish were instinctively ‘wreckers and smugglers and all antisocial things’ (2L 505), then he himself longed to be ‘a pirate or a brigand … an outlaw’ (2L 537) or a ‘highwayman’ (2L 540). His imagination embraced rebellion and resistance to the dominant culture. His extensive reading in Cornwall of ‘Greek Translations and Ethnology’ (2L 591) was deliberately intended to help him move beyond his Christian mindset and comprehend the spirit of place. Petronius was preferred to Dostoyevsky, and E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) supplemented (and displaced) his earlier reading of Frazer.9 Works like H. R. Hall’s The Ancient History of the Near East (1913), Romain Rolland’s Life of Michael Angelo (1912), and Niccolao Manucci’s Storia do Mogor; or, Mogul India, 1653–1708 (1907–1908) proved more attractive to him than fiction.10 In February, hearing that Russell considered his anti-war lectures at Caxton Hall in Westminster a financial success but unlikely to change public opinion, Lawrence declared: ‘One must be an outlaw these days, not a teacher or preacher. One must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it’ (2L 546).
Yet Lawrence’s expressions of indifference and violent opposition to his countrymen, and to humanity at large, should not be taken at face value. Letters allowed him to expend his immediate feelings of frustration and anger: his misanthropic declarations belie the fact that he continued to collaborate and correspond and draw people to him. During February alone he wrote to Murry and Katherine Mansfield (now living happily together in Bandol, southern France) and made arrangements for them to move to Cornwall in the spring; he worked with Heseltine on a private publishing scheme (Heseltine paid for the printing of flyers advertising ‘The Rainbow Books and Music’, hoping to publish Lawrence’s novel and other books and music by private subscription); and he carried on a regular and attentive correspondence with Pinker, and with friends and contacts, exchanging books and making plans for the future. The South Pacific became the latest choice of venue for his colony idea.
Lawrence was committed to articulating what he thought and felt, and to doing it in extreme and risk-taking forms. When, at the end of February, he took practical steps to move from Porthcothan and was surprised by the rental prices in Cornwall, his outrage and helplessness were expressed in a comically outrageous letter to Beresford in which he accused the Cornish of having ‘the souls of insects.’ He wrote that the ‘only thing to do is to use them strictly as servants, inferiors: for they have the souls of slaves; like Aesop’; he wished that his landlord could ‘exterminate all the natives and we could possess the land’ (2L 552). Four days later, in a conciliatory mood, he told Beresford’s wife, Beatrice, that he had written ‘in a fit of irritation,’ and that the Cornish really possessed ‘a very beautiful softness and gentleness, quite missing in English people nowadays’ (2L 559). Correspondents were required to accept his letters as written to the moment, and not to take offence at hasty judgements or scathing criticisms.
Around 27 February, Lawrence sent Ottoline the first half of ‘Goats and Compasses’.11 A few days later he and Frieda left Beresford’s cottage and moved to the Tinner’s Arms in Zennor, St Ives; they began to search for a suitable house to rent. Lawrence had initially discovered a house in Zennor at ‘Gurnards Head for 25/- a week’ (2L 556), but by 5 March they had found a much cheaper place close by, at Higher Tregerthen. Lawrence wrote to Murry and Katherine Mansfield explaining that he and Frieda would take a basic unfurnished cottage with two rooms and a ‘scullery-kitchen’ (2L 591) for £5 per year, while they could take the adjacent house for £16: the latter comprised ‘three cottages that have been knocked into one,’ with a ‘tower room’ (2L 564). Katherine was reluctant to leave Bandol, and not particularly enthusiastic about Cornwall, but Lawrence was insistent, so she agreed and Murry accepted the offer, arranging to take up the tenancy in early April. Lawrence told them that there would be ‘a Blutbruderschaft between us all’ (2L 570) (he had said the same thing to Russell the previous July).12
The Lawrences moved to Higher Tregerthen on 17 March; they spent the intervening time making it habitable and re-claiming the furniture and furnishings which they had left at Byron Villas. Lawrence made a dresser and shelves, and painted the walls pale pink and royal blue. The upstairs bedroom was light and welcoming, with windows on either side looking out on the sea and a grassy hill-slope. This would become his writing room. He and Frieda met members of the Hocking family at nearby Higher Tregerthen Farm and found them ‘very nice people’ (2L 624); they also got to know their landlord, Captain John Short, and his daughter and son-in-law, Irene and Percy Whittley, plus Katie Berryman (who kept a small store in Zennor) and her brother Tom, who drove them in his trap to Penzance and St Ives. It was a small but supportive circle.
A new set of contacts was exactly what he wanted. During his weeks at the Tinner’s Arms, Ottoline had sent him a letter telling him that she did not like ‘Goats and Compasses’.13 Privately, she thought that it was ‘deplorable tosh, a volume of words, reiteration, perverted and self-contradictory. A gospel of hate and of violent individualism.’14 She passed the manuscript on to Philip Heseltine. Unfortunately, Heseltine and Lawrence parted on bad terms at the end of March. It seems likely that Lawrence strongly encouraged Heseltine to stay with ‘Puma’ and give up Juliette Baillot; Heseltine went to London with his pregnant mistress to advertise the ‘Rainbow Books and Music’ scheme, feeling that Lawrence was too autocratic and interested in him only as ‘a potential convert to his own reactionary creed.’ Only 30 subscriptions materialised from the 600 circulars he printed. Heseltine decided not to return to Cornwall, and he reacted angrily when he learnt that Lawrence had informed Ottoline of his desire for Juliette, and also passed on compromising personal information about him.15 There was a bitter rift between them, in the midst of which Heseltine denounced ‘Goats and Compasses’ and probably destroyed his copy of it.16
Murry and Mansfield finally arrived in Cornwall during the first week of April, staying at the Tinner’s Arms while Murry joined Lawrence in renovating their house. They all drove out together to find furniture in Penzance. Katherine immediately took against the place; she withdrew into herself so completely that Murry painted their kitchen chairs black (a stark contrast to the bright and cheery colours that Lawrence had chosen).17 Lawrence’s letters show that he initially tried to see their coolness as a simple consequence of the new situation: ‘we are as yet rather strange and unaccustomed to each other’ (2L 594). It did not help that on 18 April a policeman called by to check Murry’s military exemption; Murry produced a rejection form from the Officer Training Corps, but was unsure of its long-term validity.18 General conscription was imminent (it would be introduced on 24 June 1916); even Lawrence began to reflect on the civilian work he might be compelled to undertake, either clerking or in munitions manufacture.19
Over time Lawrence accounted for the other couple’s failure to settle in terms of their poor health: on 26 April he told Mark Gertler that they were ‘not very well in health’ and ‘not acclimatised here yet’ (2L 599). Although they shared some good times together, enjoying the improving weather and going out in a boat or walking to Zennor, the tensions only grew worse. The walls of the larger cottage were discovered to be damp. In contrast to the happy and creative time she had spent with Murry in Bandol, Katherine now found herself unable to write: her satirical skills found an alternative outlet in colourful descriptions of the Lawrences’ violent quarrels which she sent to Kot on 11 May.20 She and Murry also managed to stir up Frieda’s old feelings of anger at Ottoline by reporting back the things which Ottoline had said about her. Katherine would have been conscious that Lawrence’s writing (unlike her own) was thriving amid all the upset. In anticipation of his move to Higher Tregerthen, Lawrence had tried (unsuccessfully) to retrieve the incomplete manuscript of ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton’ from Germany in order to work on it.21 By 26 April he had begun writing ‘the second half of the Rainbow’ (2L 602) instead; it progressed quickly against the backdrop of the war and its ‘danse macabre’ (2L 600). Just a few days later, on 1 May, Lawrence told Barbara Low that it was already ‘beyond all hope of ever being published’ (2L 602). In the ‘Prologue’, he was delving into the unspoken attraction between two men (Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich), describing the ‘strange, unacknowledged, inflammable intimacy between them’ (WL 490); the outrage created when he had explored a similar bond between two women in the ‘Shame’ chapter of The Rainbow would have been fresh in his mind. This time, however, he was offering a searing critique of a culture immersed in sadism and violence: a culture in which ‘constructive activity was a fiction, a lie, to hide the great process of decomposition, which had set in’ (WL 496).
Although it was a sequel, the new book was ‘quite different’ (2L 612) from The Rainbow: the brittle optimism of the earlier work had given way to an analysis of disintegration and destruction. He worked away at his apocalyptic novel at the very moment when he saw the world, and his community ideal, collapsing around him. Like Michelangelo, in the book he had recently read, he went on producing his art as an act of faith, addressing it ‘to the unseen witnesses’ (2L 602). He had written two thirds of it by 30 May.22 In the meantime he had corrected the proofs of Amores.23 He wanted these poems to be published, but he had never been less sure of his readership. He did not even believe in America now, or in writing for America (though he enjoyed reading works by Dana and Melville).24 The wrecking of a Spanish ship on the rocks off St Ives on 20 May seemed rich with symbolism,25 as did the Lawrences’ loss of the pendulum for their clock, which had been sent on from London: ‘one’s soul gets tired, like a clock that won’t go’ (2L 616). By 24 May, Murry and Mansfield had informed the Lawrences of their decision to leave. They looked for a place in southern Cornwall and eventually discovered one in Mylor. They had left by 17 June.
On that very day, papers arrived instructing Lawrence and Murry to join the colours on 28 and 30 June respectively. Lawrence had become increasingly outspoken in his resistance to King and country since he had moved to Higher Tregerthen. In a letter to Ottoline Morrell on 18 April he had bluntly written: ‘Curse my King and country: and big lumps of society altogether’ (2L 597). On 5 May, Lawrence responded to news of the aftermath of the Easter Rising in Ireland with dismay, feeling ‘misery and shame’ for his nation: he immediately started reading ‘Mrs O’Shea’s life of Parnell’ and found it ‘very poignant’ (2L 604). It was a dangerous attitude to strike in a small Cornish community. Frieda’s presence was always likely to arouse suspicions, and it would not have helped that ‘several copies of the Berliner Tageblatt’ (2L 609) were delivered to their cottage in late May (sent on by Frieda’s family, via Switzerland). When Lawrence reported to Penzance on 28 June, then, he felt wholly resistant to serving his nation, though he was certainly no conscientious objector.26 He was taken with a group of 30 men to an army barracks in Bodmin, over 50 miles away, where he was examined and given a complete exemption on medical grounds. He informed the authorities that ‘the doctors said I had had consumption’ (2L 623), though he stopped short of producing Ernest Jones’ certificate. He explained to Dollie Radford just how humiliating it had been to be marched through the streets ‘like a criminal’ (2L 618); he was forced to spend the night in the barracks before getting away the next morning.
Lawrence had completed everything except the final chapter of his novel before he left for Penzance.27 At the beginning of July, fearing intrusion from outsiders, he arranged with his landlord to take over the Murrys’ vacant house. He also spent time haymaking with the Hockings. It would have reminded him of doing similar work at Haggs Farm with Alan Chambers, though Lawrence’s closest companion in the family, William Henry Hocking (the eldest son), was less obviously intellectual than Alan and his desire for mental stimulation, attractive at first, came to seem a little too insistent and somewhat onerous.28
By 4 July Lawrence had decided to type out his novel by himself. This is a clear indication that he intended to publish it straight away, in spite of his earlier declarations. It also shows how desperate he was to save money and to sell his work. On 30 June, Lawrence had asked Pinker if it might be possible to negotiate a deal with Duckworth which would provide him with a stable annual income; Pinker appears to have responded by offering encouragement to Lawrence about his future prospects, and by sending him £50 to tide him over.29 In the coming months, very few outlets for his work opened up: he merely sent a few poems to H. D. for inclusion in Some Imagist Poets (1917), and forwarded to Pinker a letter he had received from an editor of Seven Arts, a little magazine in New York which would go on to publish ‘The Thimble’ and ‘The Mortal Coil’ in March and July 1917 respectively.30
Lawrence moved his typewriter into the tower room of the large cottage and began work on the novel around 12 July. He asked Pinker whether he should change its title to Women in Love.31 Some current reading was significantly referenced in the novel he was typing out. Thucydides’ analysis of the collapse of the golden age of ancient Greece in The History of the Peloponnesian War allowed Lawrence to see how his own Christian culture, by ‘adhering to traditions,’ might ‘fling itself down the abyss of the past, and disappear’ (2L 634); in the novel, Rupert Birkin protects his head from Hermione Roddice’s deathly blows by using a ‘thick volume of Thucydides’ (FWL 94). Since Hermione is a ‘Kulturträger’ (FWL 12) (or patron of the arts, like Ottoline Morrell), and attacks Birkin with a lapis lazuli paperweight in her boudoir, the allusion may be said to comically underscore the novel’s analysis of a culture caught up in a process of violent dissolution.
By 21 July, Lawrence had come down with another cold: he complained that the typing had ‘got on my nerves and knocked me up’ (2L 637), but still he persevered. He told Amy Lowell that the machine she had given him was his ‘true confrère’: ‘I and the type writer have sworn a Blutbruderschaft’ (2L 645). There was some grim humour in this which Amy could not have recognised, since Lawrence had visited the Murrys in Mylor on 23 and 24 July; the recent separation had made it awkward, and his subsequent letters to them had produced a sharp reply from Katherine, who declared ‘I shall not dream of coming to Higher Tregerthen’ (2L 641). Relations between the two couples were volatile. A bond with a typewriter must have seemed rather more dependable, though it was proving to be equally trying, after its own fashion. The typing would go on for months, and become ‘one of the labours of Hercules’ (2L 665); Lawrence finally abandoned it on 13 October, with two thirds completed and relied on Pinker to arrange for the remainder of the manuscript (minus the final chapter or ‘epilogue’) to be typed.32
He went through times of great depression during the period from July to October 1916, as he worked to produce this typescript of the novel we now know as The First ‘Women in Love’. His misanthropy came to seem like full-blown ‘androphobia’ (2L 650); he developed an aversion to travelling far outside Tregerthen, and he had a distinct fear of London. In August he responded to invitations to visit the capital by stating that he would ‘rather venture among lions and tigers, than amongst my abhorred fellow men, who fill me with untold horror and disgust’ (2L 641). In early September, he felt that entering London would be ‘like walking into some horrible gas, which tears one’s lungs’ (2L 650) – a very emotive war-time image. Lawrence’s thirty-first birthday on 11 September offered some slight relief (clothes and food supplies were sent by his sisters and Barbara Low, together with volumes by Swinburne and Herodotus), but when – shortly afterwards – Frieda returned from a brief stay with Dollie Radford in London (to see her children), she found Lawrence ill and depressed in bed and had to nurse him through it.33
Frieda had finally established an understanding with Weekley which would allow her occasional access to the children, but this was a rare piece of good news. The war was closing in around all those whom Lawrence knew and cared for. His brother George had become ‘an engineer, in the munitions’ (2L 662); Murry was working for the War Office collecting together intelligence from the foreign press; and on 26 September, Lawrence told Ottoline how sad he was to hear of Bertrand Russell’s situation (he had been stripped of his lectureship at Trinity College and, as a known pacifist and agitator against conscription, he was forbidden by the military authorities from entering prohibited areas, effectively preventing him from lecturing to the public). Lawrence compared the hounding of Russell by the British authorities to the prosecution (for high treason) of the British Consular agent and Irish patriot Roger Casement, who had been executed on 3 August.34
He thought that the primary role of art, amid such coercion and persecution, was to tell the truth. He told Ottoline: ‘It seems to me, the stark truth is all that matters, whether it is paint or books or life: the truth one has inside one’ (2L 657). When Barbara Low sent him Alfred Booth Kuttner’s long ‘Freudian Appreciation’ of Sons and Lovers in a recent copy of the Psychoanalytic Review, Lawrence felt that it only used his novel to illustrate a theory in which he did not believe: ‘My poor book: it was, as art, a fairly complete truth: so they carve a half lie out of it, and say ‘Voilà’. Swine!’ (2L 655). For Lawrence, the truth of art resided not in its tangible content or ‘message’, but in the irreducible, complex reality it communicated. When he was finally sent a photograph of Gertler’s ‘The Merry-Go-Round’ on 9 October, he saw in it a truthful expression of war-time mindlessness and sensationalism which defied his descriptive capabilities. He told Gertler that ‘language is no medium between us,’ but he also explained how: ‘I do think that in this combination of blaze, and violent mechanical rotation and complex involution, and ghastly, utterly mindless human intensity of sensational extremity, you have made a real and ultimate revelation’ (2L 660).
His own novel had been doing something similar by identifying a destructive spirit and an attraction to violence, hatred and degeneracy in the wider culture, so that during October Lawrence would suggest that it might be called ‘The Latter Days’ (Frieda preferred ‘Dies Irae’, the Latin term for ‘Day of Wrath’).35 Events and experiences were drawn into the novel and made to serve as bitter allegories. On 1 September, Kot, Gertler and Katherine Mansfield had been together in the Café Royal in London, and had overheard two Indian men with Oxford accents (one of them Suhrawardy) reading out and mocking several poems from Amores. Katherine asked to see the book and then walked out with it.36 Lawrence incorporated the incident into his novel: in the fictional version, Julius Halliday (a character based on Philip Heseltine) reads out one of Birkin’s letters in a mocking and malicious manner to his licentious mistress ‘Pussum’ and a group of London bohemians in the Café Impérial.37 Although Heseltine was not involved in the original incident, his denunciation of ‘Goats and Compasses’ made him seem part of the general tendency towards irreverent hatred and violence; the novel drew such incidents together in order to isolate an underlying pattern. It was not a simple case of presenting incidents from life in fictional form (as Lawrence thought Gilbert Cannan did with Gertler’s life in Mendel [1916]);38 the important thing was to discover the hidden reality behind phenomena.
Lawrence sent Pinker the remaining, untyped manuscript sections of his novel on 25 and 31 October. Once these were in his agent’s hands, he turned his attention to producing ‘saleable short stories’ (3L 22) and ‘a batch of poems’ (3L 29), with the intention of placing them in American magazines. He wrote ‘The Prodigal Husband’ (later re-titled ‘Samson and Delilah’), which would be published in the March 1917 number of the English Review, and he worked again on ‘The Miracle’ (‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’) and revised ‘The Mortal Coil’. He also returned to the Egyptian ‘Fellaheen’ songs which he had begun to translate from German for Louie Burrows a full six years earlier, in December 1910. He now translated a number of these into English in a notebook, to produce a short collection of war poems entitled ‘All of Us’, focusing on the experiences and feelings of soldiers fighting along the Eastern Front (in Turkey and modern-day Iraq) in order to mount a critique of British imperial policy.39
Around 7 November the Lawrences were visited by an American couple, Robert Mountsier and Esther Andrews (who were staying nearby, in Penzance and St Ives). Mountsier was a journalist who had first heard about Lawrence through Richard Aldington and H. D.; his partner was a former actress, artist and part-time journalist. Lawrence found them ‘really nice, gentle’; after they had gone, he wrote to his London friends to see if they could meet the couple, and he contacted Cynthia Asquith to try to arrange an interview for Mountsier with Lady Diana Manners, daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland.40 Befriending these Americans convinced Lawrence that he wanted to leave England forever, and go ‘ultimately to a country of which I have hope, in which I feel the new unknown’. He wanted to transfer his life to America because he felt that it was a stage ahead of England in terms of its materialism and idealism, and was therefore closer to the brink of collapse and ‘nearer to freedom’ (3L 25). He had found Amy Lowell’s latest volume of poetry, Men, Women and Ghosts (1916), quite futuristic in its attention to the ‘physico-mechanical world’ (3L 32). He sensed, for the first time, that American writers were more advanced than the avant-garde Europeans. His other reading at this time reflected his travel plans: he asked Kot to send him books by Melville, Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Marryat, and to seek out cheap copies of Italian works by D’Annunzio, Matilde Serrao or Grazia Deledda at a shop on the Charing Cross Road.41 He enjoyed reading Giovanni Verga’s Cavalleria Rusticana (1880), though he thought it comically overwrought and portentous.42
Lawrence’s constant financial worries were relieved somewhat by a gift of £60 from Amy Lowell (who responded to Frieda’s direct request for money) and a £50 advance from Pinker in anticipation of future earnings from Women in Love and the recent clutch of short stories. Pinker sent back the final batches of the two typescripts of the novel on 6 and 13 November, after which Lawrence revised them. He returned one revised typescript to Pinker on 20 November and sent the other to Catherine Carswell the next day, at the same time asking Catherine to check with Donald to see whether he thought any parts might be found libellous. Lawrence admitted that Halliday and Pussum were based on Heseltine and ‘Puma’, but added: ‘nobody else at all lifelike’ (3L 36). Within days, Ottoline Morrell sent a distressed letter to Lawrence complaining that she had heard she was ‘the villainess of the new book’ (3L 41). Lawrence reacted by reluctantly asking whether Ottoline would like to read the novel. After he had sent separate typescripts of ‘All of Us’, his new poetry collection, to Cynthia Asquith and Pinker on 11 December, he began to think again about securing the publication of his novel. He explored Kot’s suggestion that it might be published in Russia,43 and he even considered dedicating it ‘with a proper inscription, in the 18th century fashion, to some patron whose name would be likely to save it from the yelping of the small newspaper curs’ (3L 58).
On 20 December, Lawrence received the predictable news that Methuen had rejected Women in Love and decided to cancel the agreement to publish his next novel. In one sense it came as a relief that his works would not ‘be thrown any more under the snout of that particular swine’ (3L 58), but it was not a good sign. The poor prospects for his novel, combined with the recent news that David Lloyd George had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister, made the idea of Christmas celebrations seem an ‘ugly farce’ (3L 57). Lawrence had thought Asquith the last bastion of ‘old, stable, measured, decent England’ (3L 47); he denounced Lloyd George as ‘a clever little Welsh rat, absolutely dead at the core, sterile, barren, mechanical, capable only of rapid and acute mechanical movements’ (3L 48). Lawrence told Kot that they would have to wait until the next Christmas to be ‘really doing something and happy’ (3L 62), but he and Frieda still managed to have a pleasant enough time. Mountsier and Esther Andrews came to stay on Christmas Eve. Soon after their arrival a policeman called by to inspect Mountsier’s papers, but it seemed a routine enough intrusion and passed without note. On Christmas Day they were joined by the Hockings for supper in the tower; William Henry brought his accordion, and they all sang a mixture of English and German songs and had a ‘jolly’ (3L 64) time together.44
Esther stayed on with the Lawrences until around 12 January. Mountsier left before New Year; unfortunately, shortly after his return to London, he was arrested and taken to Scotland Yard, where he was strip-searched and held overnight. His journalistic activities and movements while in England had led the authorities to suspect that he was part of a circle of American spies they had uncovered, who were acting on behalf of the German military.45 Mountsier was subsequently released without charge, but news of the arrest infuriated Lawrence. The Lawrences’ association with Mountsier would lead to heightened suspicions about their own activities, and to the interception of their mail during the coming year. It was not a good start to 1917.
This latest outrage gave rise to further thoughts of ‘Rananim’: Lawrence now harboured fantasies of turning his back on the world and setting out for the Pacific and the South Seas, to Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands to inhabit an imaginary ‘Typee’.46 He thought to write a study of classic American literature and asked Mountsier to send him works by Melville, Fenimore Cooper, Whitman, Crèvecœur, Hawthorne, Lincoln, Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Poe.47 The Lawrences hoped to travel to New York with Mountsier and Esther Andrews at the beginning of March, but Lawrence’s efforts in early February to get the passports which had been issued to them in October 1915 re-endorsed failed ‘in the interests of National Service’, despite the support and advice of Pinker, Edward Marsh and Gordon Campbell.
Lawrence’s situation as a professional writer was becoming dire. He published just three poems during January and February 1917: ‘Street Lamps’ and ‘Autumn Rain’ both appeared in the Egoist, and ‘Grief’ was included in The New Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson.48 He sent the short story ‘The Miracle’ to Pinker on 12 January and Austin Harrison accepted ‘Samson and Delilah’ for the English Review a week or so later. Apart from that, the outlook was bleak. After Methuen’s refusal of Women in Love, Pinker sent the typescript out to various publishers, but it was rejected by Duckworth, Secker and Constable. The latter company commissioned reports from two readers, but concluded that the book could not be published in war-time because of ‘the writer’s expressions of antipathy to England and the forms of English civilisation,’ and its ‘destructive philosophy’ (FWL xxxvii). An all-time low was reached when Gordon Campbell, perhaps misled by the novel’s title, suggested that Lawrence might attempt to publish it with Mills and Boon.49 The duplicate typescript had been circulating among Lawrence’s friends: Catherine Carswell had passed it on to Esther Andrews, and it was subsequently read by Barbara Low and H. D., before being sent on to Garsington. Ottoline’s subsequent anguish at her portrayal as Hermione Roddice caused her husband Philip (who had earlier acted on Lawrence’s behalf in raising questions about the prosecution of The Rainbow in the House of Commons) to threaten Pinker with a libel action if he proceeded to publication.50 Lawrence’s book of poems, ‘All of Us’, fared little better. Pinker felt that there would be little public interest in it, in spite of Lawrence’s optimistic prediction that it ‘might have a real popular success’ (3L 51).
Lawrence continued to believe in his work, however. He told Pinker that it was ‘true and unlying, and will last out all the other stuff’ (3L 73); he still held that Women in Love was ‘a masterpiece and a great book’ (3L 76). On 29 January, he informed Edward Marsh that he was putting together another book of poems from the notebooks he had retrieved from Italy; he considered these his ‘chief poems, and best’. The resulting collection, Look! We Have Come Through!, which Lawrence initially entitled ‘Poems of a Married Man’ (3L 86) and ‘Man and Woman’ (3L 93), carried on the spiritual history of his life where Amores had left off, providing an account of his life before meeting Frieda, his escape with Frieda to a new life together, and their struggles with Weekley, and with one another up to 1917. It collected poems which had been written in 1912–1913, but Lawrence heavily revised the vast majority of these and added later poems, so that the narrative sequence re-conceives the events and feelings captured in the original poems by importing later insights to create a complex mythical re-imagining of the past and present.
The manuscript of the poems (which included a love letter to Frieda) was sent to Catherine Carswell on 18 February, with instructions to pass it on to H. D., whose verse Lawrence had come to greatly admire.51 It would also be read by Esther Andrews.52 Lawrence wanted to gauge his friends’ responses to the collection before letting Pinker see it, perhaps because he shrank from submitting such intimate material for likely rejection by publishers. In response to his friends’ comments, in late February Lawrence removed the love letter and replaced it with the more impersonal ‘Craving for Spring’, which ended the volume and extended its narrative to the time of writing.
Once he had sent the manuscript off to Catherine on 18 February, Lawrence turned his attention to writing another series of short philosophical essays (seven in total), which he called ‘The Reality of Peace’. They were all completed by 7 March. Again a copy went to Catherine (and thence to Dollie Radford), but this time he sent the second copy straight to Pinker with a view to possible book publication, and to serialisation in the English Review and the Yale Review in America.53 Lawrence believed that these spring-time essays were ‘very beautiful’ and ‘very important’ because they pointed to a ‘new beginning’ (3L 100) after the deathliness of war. They directly address the crucial issue of how individuals can turn from war to peace, and the painful healing process that must take place. He was writing not only about the maimed and injured soldiers, and the dead (two merchant ships had been sunk by German submarines off the Cornish coast on 6 February),54 but also about friends like Gertler and Gilbert Cannan, whose emotional lives seemed catastrophically bound up in the conflict and dissolution (Gertler was grieving over Dora Carrington’s new relationship with Lytton Strachey, while Cannan had suffered a nervous breakdown, with his marriage in ruins).55
Lawrence’s imagination was preoccupied with how one might come through death and despair to discover a new sense of value in life. His short story ‘The Miracle’ had shown Mabel Pervin attempting to commit suicide by drowning, but discovering new courage in the aftermath, setting aside her habitual sullen reserve and reaching out for love and fulfilment with her rescuer, the doctor, Jack Fergusson.56 It is her quality of honesty in acknowledging her deathly feelings, and in recognising new types of emotion afterwards, that sets her apart. When, in late February, Ernest Collings wrote to say that he was lying injured in hospital having seen brief service with the Artists’ Rifles, Lawrence told him: ‘We must live through, for the hope of the new summer of the world’ (3L 100). On hearing, a few days later, that Dollie Radford’s dear friend Herbert Watson had died of war-wounds in France, he admitted to having ‘no tears to weep, only a dry aching heart that aches harder,’ but he also encouraged Dollie to recognise how it was their duty to ‘begin, with our deepest souls, to bring peace and life into the world’ (3L 101).57 Although Lawrence was angered by the new Military Service Act, which allowed individuals with military exemptions (like himself) to be re-examined, and plunged into despair by America’s entry into the war on 6 April, he was heartened by news of spreading peace demonstrations.
He expressed an interest in the recent stirrings of revolution in Russia (March saw the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II and the setting up of a provisional government under Prince George Lvoff). The new range of Russian contacts he met through Kot (including Fanny Stepniak, the widow of a prominent revolutionary, and Sonia Issayevna, the wife of a journalist) gave him access to insider views on the latest developments. Russia would soon replace America as Lawrence’s ‘land of the future’ (3L 124): he told Kot that he felt a new atmosphere of resistance in England too, stating (somewhat quixotically) that the Parliament – ‘such a grunting Schweinerei’ – ‘must be kicked out’ and replaced by a ‘living representative government’ (3L 108).
Catherine Carswell was not particularly impressed with the ‘Reality of Peace’ essays,58 but Austin Harrison found them ‘extraordinarily suggestive – and new’ (3L 107); he offered to publish the final three essays in the English Review, and eventually took four of the seven (they were published in consecutive monthly numbers of the journal between May and August). Pinker sent a typescript of Women in Love to Kot, with a view to publishing it in Russia; this copy (to Lawrence’s consternation) was given to Dora Carrington. Lawrence was happy for Gertler and Campbell to read it, but he did not want it to go any further.59 After Ottoline’s threat of legal action, he felt that ‘these people, all the Ott. crowd, are full of malice against me’ (3L 112). On 3 April, he sent two typescript copies of Look! We Have Come Through! to Pinker, though he was still reluctant to let the poems go; he believed that the publication of his essays was a more pressing and timely concern.60
With the essays and poems safely dispatched, Lawrence departed on 14 April to spend five days with Ada in Ripley (his elder sister Emily had moved back from Glasgow and was staying with her family in Ada’s house). It was the first time he had travelled outside Cornwall in over 16 months (Esther Andrews arrived for an extended visit around this time, so Frieda was not left by herself). After seeing his sisters and Sallie Hopkin in the Midlands, he visited Kot in London, meeting several friends plus Pinker and Austin Harrison, who expressed an interest in his new volume of verse (he would agree to publish three poems – ‘The Sea’, ‘Constancy of a Sort’ and ‘Frost Flowers’ – in the English Review). He was back in Cornwall on 27 April, breaking his journey by spending two nights at Dollie Radford’s new house, Chapel Farm Cottage, in Hermitage, Berkshire. He returned to find Frieda very ill with food poisoning which had developed into colitis. The time Lawrence spent with Esther while Frieda was bed-ridden gave rise to considerable jealousy. Frieda’s feelings were based on Esther’s beauty and great admiration for Lawrence, and not on any grounded suspicion of infidelity;61 nevertheless, only on 11 May – once Esther had returned to London – could Lawrence tell Kot that Frieda was ‘a good deal better’ (3L 124).
At the beginning of May, Lawrence spent a lot of time outdoors at Higher Tregerthen, preparing his three patches of garden and planting them with flowers and vegetables (cutting branches of blackthorn and gorse to make a fence to keep out straying lambs).62 He may have been helped in this work by William Henry Hocking; the developing closeness between the two men during the spring and summer was conditioned at first by a reaction against Frieda’s possessiveness. Lawrence spoke openly to William Henry about his beliefs, and he may have discussed the nature of his bisexual feelings, too, but their spiritual and physical intimacy was not sexual in any straightforward sense (despite one biographer’s desire to posit a secret homosexual relationship between them).63 William Henry married the following year and had two children by 1920; he may have been troubled or embarrassed by Lawrence’s honest admission of his bisexual nature, but there is no evidence that he felt personally implicated in it or in any way threatened.
Lawrence expressed more interest in philosophy than fiction at this time. During April and May he began to re-conceive some of the ideas expressed in his ‘Reality of Peace’ essays. In April he wrote a short piece entitled ‘Love’, which took its bearing from the final essay in that series (entitled ‘The Orbit’). On 10 May, he decided to type out the ‘Reality’ essays, so that he would have another copy, but (characteristically) he could not resist ‘recasting the second one’ (3L 125) to produce another new piece entitled ‘Life’. The two essays would be sent to Pinker later in the year, on 3 October, and would eventually be accepted by Austin Harrison and published in the January and February 1918 numbers of the English Review.
By 5 May, Lawrence had learnt that Philip Heseltine was back in the area, renting a bungalow just two miles away;64 his initial feeling of resentment and coolness towards his former friend would soon relent. Within a month, he had been introduced (through Heseltine) to two new contacts. At the end of May, the composer and music critic Cecil Gray had come to visit Cornwall with a view to renting a property: he settled upon Bosigran Castle at Morvah, near Pendeen, just four miles west of Higher Tregerthen,65 and Lawrence helped him buy furniture (Gray did not take up residence until late June). Lawrence also met Meredith Starr, the eccentric husband of the daughter of the 8th Earl of Stamford, who lived in Treveal, St Ives; though Starr was a comical figure for Lawrence, his fascination with theosophical matters and the occult would soon stimulate a fresh area of interest.
By 9 June, Lawrence had received papers informing him that he must report to Bodmin to be re-examined on 23 June. He responded by sending back a certificate from Dr John Rice (the St Ives doctor who had recently examined Frieda) declaring him unfit for medical service. When he heard back that this was not acceptable and the re-examination would be enforced, he arranged to go to London to see a specialist, staying with Dollie Radford. He saw David Eder, who may have referred him to a chest specialist. Although the meetings with the doctors did not resolve anything, they put him in a better frame of mind on his return, and the examination in Bodmin proved less troubling this time round (though it was still a ‘loathsome performance’ [3L 136]). No full exemptions were given under the new Military Service Act, but Lawrence was graded as C3: unfit for military service, but liable to be called up for light non-military duties. In Zennor it was the equivalent of full exemption, since he was unlikely to be called on.
On 10 June, Lawrence had started writing another new philosophical work entitled ‘At the Gates’. It progressed slowly at first: he felt as if it had to be beaten out of him amid all the upset around the impending medical,66 and afterwards work on it would have been affected by his latest acute financial worries. His dealings with the literary world over fiction and poetry had never been more depressing and problematic than in the summer of 1917; working on his philosophy was fulfilling on its own terms, but it was also a means of withdrawing from the hostile and unresponsive world of publishers.
Lawrence responded to his feelings of rejection and powerlessness with cruel verbal outbursts, which he always found cathartic. Pinker’s lateness in answering a request for money occasioned a particularly nasty comment: ‘My relations with that little parvenu snob of a procureur of books were always strained, best have them broken’ (3L 136). Barbara Low’s failure to appreciate his ‘Reality of Peace’ essays caused him to claim that she ‘does not want to understand – her sort never does’ (3L 138). He did, however, take seriously Ernest Collings’ suggestion that Cecil Palmer might be interested in publishing Women in Love. On 9 July, Lawrence told Palmer that he wanted to look over the new typescript of Women in Love that he had received from Pinker before he sent it on; over the next few weeks, he revised the novel extensively. He felt that his recent reading of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) and J. M. Pryse’s The Apocalypse Unsealed (1910) had enlarged his understanding; he told David Eder that they had helped him to appreciate areas of myth upon which his own psychoanalytic theory relied.67 Lawrence incorporated his new interest in theosophical writings into the novel, introducing a mystical language into it with little or no concession to the understanding of a readership. If his country refused to publish his work, then he would refuse to pay heed to the needs or sensibilities of the English people, and would develop his own train of thought regardless.
The troubled self-reflexiveness of the novel of 1916, which tries so hard to imagine a new form of expression which a resistant culture might comprehend, gave way to a self-serving and, in places, over-insistent rhetorical tendency. The 1916 version of the novel had been written to critique war-time Britain during the catastrophes of the Somme; the revisions and additions which he sent to Palmer represented a turning away from the terrible deathliness of Passchendaele and a form of civilisation in which Lawrence had lost all faith. He told Waldo Frank, the American novelist and essayist (founding editor of Seven Arts), that he believed ‘the deluge of iron rain will destroy the world here, utterly: no Ararat will rise above the subsiding iron waters.’ He denied that he was a theosophist, but admitted to finding ‘esoteric doctrines … marvellously illuminating, historically,’ and he asserted the need to create ‘a body of esoteric doctrine, defended from the herd.’ Where The Rainbow had been ‘destructive-consummating,’ Women in Love was now ‘purely destructive’ (3L 142–3), in keeping with the times.
However, just as Lawrence was telling Frank that he disbelieved ‘utterly in the public, in humanity, in the mass’ (3L 143), he received some good news. On 28 July, Pinker informed him that Chatto and Windus had agreed to publish Look! We Have Come Through! in the autumn, subject to a few revisions. They insisted that two poems should be cut (‘Meeting Among the Mountains’ and ‘Song of a Man Who is Loved’) in order to reduce ‘the continuously sexual tone of the volume’ (3L 148 fn. 1). Lawrence was disappointed by the omission of the second of these two poems, but pleased to secure the advance of 20 guineas. The volume would be published on 26 November. It was the ‘one bright beam in my publishing sky,’ though (as Lawrence admitted) he was still forced to ‘look for daylight with a lantern’ (3L 156). By 21 August, Palmer had returned the revised typescript of Women in Love regretting that he was not wealthy enough to publish it. Lawrence briefly considered approaching ‘Blackwell of Oxford’ (3L 149), but nothing came of it. August had proved to be another dreadful month. Frieda spent most of it in bed with neuritis in her leg, and the weather had been awful, the wind and rain destroying his beloved garden (which he had worked so hard on in the spring).68
His philosophy also proved unpublishable. ‘At the Gates’ was finished by 27 August. Lawrence was proud of it: he told Kot that it was the ‘final form’ (3L 163) of the line of works that had begun with the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’ back in late 1914 and continued through ‘The Crown’, ‘Goats and Compasses’ and ‘The Reality of Peace’. He struggled to say what category his latest ‘philosophicalish’ writing fell into: ‘mysticism or metaphysic’ seemed relevant, but inadequate, terms. One copy circulated among his friends (it was read by the Eders, Barbara Low and Catherine Carswell),69 but Lawrence also sent a copy to Pinker on 30 August with a view to publication. He told him that it would make a book of ‘about 140 pp.’ (3L 152). Pinker forwarded it first to Cecil Palmer, then (on 23 September) to Chatto and Windus. Two of the company’s readers (Frank Swinnerton and Geoffrey Whitworth) wrote reports on it and were marginally inclined to recommend publication, but the senior partner, Percy Spalding, was deterred by its lack of intelligibility, its use of ‘copulative metaphors,’ and its inculcation of ‘unnatural love as a kind of supreme initiation of the soul’.70 It was rejected and returned to Pinker on 8 October.
However, as autumn drew on Lawrence was determined to find better times. On the back of securing the advance for his poetry book, he purchased an old piano with a ‘musty old twang’ (3L 153) for five guineas. Cecil Gray had introduced him to Hebridean songs (some of them in Gaelic), and they would sing these and German lieder when they got together, either at Bosigran Castle or – now – in Higher Tregerthen. Once the bad weather abated, Lawrence helped the Hockings with the harvest, binding corn: he told Cynthia Asquith that he did it ‘apocalyptically’ (3L 158), recognising the distance he had put between himself and England.
That impression of distance from the country of his birth would have been reinforced by the reading and writing he was doing in early September. On 25 August Lawrence had started in on another – long planned – book project: he began to write the essays on American literature which he had set his mind on eight months earlier. The book was provisionally entitled ‘The Transcendental Element in American (Classic) Literature’: the essays were to identify an underlying symbolism in American writing, and to explore what that symbolism revealed about the modern conflict between destructive idealism and sensuous awareness in the American nation and the modern psyche. Lawrence sought support from Amy Lowell, but warned her that he was writing ‘very keen essays in criticism – cut your fingers if you don’t handle them carefully’ (3L 156). The slightly arch and satirical tone he was adopting was calculated to puncture or circumvent the self-aggrandising ‘twaddle’ which he associated with the ‘Yankee’, and with ‘Uncle Sam’ (3L 139).
This new spirit of optimism and productivity was soon quashed. Recent submarine activity in the Atlantic convoy route off the north Cornwall coastline had made the authorities particularly wary and vigilant. On the evening of Wednesday 19 September, the Lawrences were enjoying singing folk songs at Cecil Gray’s house when the party was interrupted by the Deputy Coast Watch Officer, N. E. Cooke, and two of his colleagues. Cooke had received complaints that lights had been seen in Gray’s window on several previous occasions; investigating that evening he saw a light pass three times across an upper window. The curtain used to block the upstairs passage window was held in place by drawing pins, one of which had worked loose; Gray’s new housekeeper had carried a candle past it on the way to bed. Gray was summoned to appear before the West Penwith Petty Sessions at Penzance and given a very heavy fine of £20.71
It is impossible to say how much the Lawrences’ presence in the house that evening – and especially Frieda’s presence, as a German – affected the authorities’ attitude to Gray’s actions and influenced the severity of the penalty. It would certainly have deepened official concerns. It is likely that the Lawrences had been kept under surveillance since the suspicions aroused by Robert Mountsier in late December 1916. Lawrence felt that he was being watched: it is likely that on one occasion Frieda’s bag was checked by policemen who suspected that she was concealing a camera; Lawrence was aware of local gossip that he and Frieda were signalling to submarines, and taking petrol and food supplies to the enemy.72 Local suspicions finally led to action being taken. On 11 October, the house at Higher Tregerthen was entered and searched by men in uniform, who took away some papers, including the text of a Hebridean song, an address book, and a few letters in German. Lawrence was in Penzance with William Henry, and Frieda was visiting Gray, so they only heard about the visit from the Hockings, on their return. The next day the authorities came back: they presented a search warrant and read out an official expulsion order. The Lawrences were ordered to leave the area by 15 October; henceforth, under the Defence of the Realm Act, they were prohibited from entering zones of military significance (including coastal places) and ordered to report to the police within 24 hours of their arrival in any new place.
Lawrence and Frieda were driven to the railway station by William Henry on the day of their forced departure. Lawrence had to borrow money from Gray to pay for the train fare; fortunately, they were able to stay at Dollie Radford’s house in Hampstead (which had regularly provided refuge for Frieda when visiting her children). Friends rallied around them. On 20 October they moved into H. D.’s small flat in Mecklenburgh Square. Catherine Carswell very kindly met with Cecil Gray’s mother and cleared the way for the Lawrences to occupy her ‘glisteningly clean flat’ in Earl’s Court Square when the need arose.73 Cynthia Asquith invited them to share her box at the opera in Drury Lane (Lawrence took his sister Ada to see Madame Butterfly; he and Frieda also attended performances of Mussorgsky’s Khovantchina, and of The Magic Flute, The Abduction from the Seraglio, and Aida).74 The kindness of friends was a great support, but the combination of homelessness, poverty and the sense of persecution meant that it was like being ‘slowly suffocated in mud’ (3L 170).
The ties that bound Lawrence to Cornwall were sufficiently strong by the autumn of 1917 to make the uprooting very painful. His first instinct was to contest the decision to expel them in order that he and Frieda could return. He made enquiries about the process with Cynthia Asquith (though her sympathies were very much on the side of the authorities in this matter); he also pursued legal redress through Gordon Campbell and Campbell’s friend Montague Shearman, another barrister currently working in the Foreign Office. Eventually, in early November, Lawrence wrote directly to the War Office; the reply informed him in no uncertain terms that he would not be allowed to return to Cornwall.75
Lawrence responded to being thrown out of the place that he had come to call home by immersing himself once again in fantasies of community and escape. This time he planned to move to ‘the east slope of the Andes, back of Paraguay or Colombia’ (3L 173) with Frieda, the Eders, William Henry, Gray, H. D., Kot and Dorothy (‘Arabella’) Yorke (a new friend he made at Mecklenburgh Square). David Eder would provide local knowledge and contacts,76 while Gray would ‘find £1000’ (3L 173) to finance the scheme. Many years later, in a volume of his memoirs, Gray would express considerable surprise at Lawrence’s confidence in his finances (since he was living at the time on an annual allowance of £200); he would also admit to having felt ‘horror’ at the ‘idea of spending the rest of my life in the Andes in the company of Lawrence and Frieda’.77
The group of individuals which Lawrence imagined taking with him to the Andes was already riven by personal tensions. H. D. and Richard Aldington were married, but the still-birth of their child in 1915 had left H. D. traumatised and their relationship sexless. During Lawrence’s time in London, H. D. became deeply drawn to him, while Aldington – back on leave from the army – was having an affair with Arabella Yorke. Frieda may have sensed the growing intimacy between Lawrence and H. D. and written to Cecil Gray, complaining that Lawrence had once more found a woman (like Esther Andrews) to act as his disciple. Gray wrote to Lawrence, suggesting that the title of his new collection of poems was an impertinent lie, since he had not come through with Frieda at all, but was committed to immersing himself in a series of messy personal relationships with female disciples. Lawrence denied Gray’s accusation that he inhabited a grubby ‘underworld’ of mental intimacy with H. D.;78 he insisted on the purity of their shared poetic interest. He asserted that he and Frieda had come through (whether Gray could see it or not), and he stated that it was Gray and Frieda who were committed to a ‘suggestive underworld’ (3L 180). Lawrence’s two letters to Gray turn the tables on his accuser by alluding to the established intimacy (mental and, perhaps, sexual) that had developed between Gray and Frieda.79
In London, Lawrence was still doggedly pursuing avenues for the private publication of his work, encouraged by the Eders. Pinker arranged for Lawrence to have lunch with John Galsworthy (one of his most successful and established clients) on 16 November, with a view to gaining Galsworthy’s support for the publication of Women in Love. The idea was to publish the novel ‘by subscription, under the auspices of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy.’ Unfortunately, their mutual animosity was immediately evident: Lawrence considered Galsworthy a ‘sawdust bore’ (3L 183) and was astute in assuming that he would not want his name to be associated with the novel.80 He next considered sending it (on the advice of Campbell and Kot) to a Dublin publishing house, Maunsel and Co.81 Fisher Unwin also seemed like a good possibility, but they turned it down.82 Maunsel said that it did not want to publish any English books during the war, but was eager to see ‘At the Gates’. Philip Heseltine, who was in Dublin, and had read a copy of the philosophy, was extremely enthusiastic about it. Pinker, who had just received the typescript back from Secker (with another rejection), sent it on to Joseph Hone (the company’s literary editor). He was ‘very smitten’ (3L 191) with it, and suggested that with a letter of backing for it he might be able to get Maunsel to publish it. Sadly, Bertrand Russell could not now be called upon to write such a letter on Lawrence’s behalf. Although Heseltine managed to acquire some supporting letters, including one from Robert Nichols, the scheme came to nothing. ‘At the Gates’ was never published and (like ‘Goats and Compasses’) it is now lost; according to Hone, Heseltine (who had been so impressed with it, and tried so hard to get it published) put the typescript to ‘the base uses of the water-closet’ (3L 196 fn. 2) as a form of reprisal for Lawrence’s presentation of him as Julius Halliday in Women in Love. It is not the only Lawrence text in this period that we have lost. A long essay entitled ‘The Limit to the British Novelist’, written by 5 November at the invitation of Wilbur Cross as a response to an article on contemporary English novelists in the Yale Review, arrived too late for inclusion in the journal and has also disappeared.83
Despite the inevitable tension of being embroiled in shifting relationships, Lawrence enjoyed his association with Aldington and H. D. in Mecklenburgh Square. Through their circle of friends and contacts he was introduced to the American writer and journalist John Cournos (Arabella Yorke’s former lover), and to the poet John Gould Fletcher. He began to learn Greek, perhaps under H. D.’s influence.84 He may also have begun writing Aaron’s Rod at this time.
When Aldington and H. D. needed to use the room in late November it proved a real wrench to move to the ‘bourgeois little flat’ (3L 186) in Earl’s Court, belonging to Gray’s mother. Lawrence and Frieda only stayed there for the first two weeks of December. On 11 December Gray, visiting them, was quizzed about the Lawrences by plain-clothed detectives from CID; Aldington was also questioned. Lawrence became convinced that somebody in Cornwall (perhaps the vicar, the Reverend David Rechab Vaughan) was writing letters intended to prolong his persecution.85 Eventually, looking for a place to settle in outside of London, the Lawrences took up Dollie Radford’s offer to live at Chapel Farm Cottage in Hermitage, near Newbury (where Lawrence had stayed for two nights back in late April). They moved there on 18 December, following a farewell party at Mecklenburgh Square; they arrived to find ‘snow everywhere, and sharp frost’ (3L 191). The cottage was ‘cold, and a little comfortless’ (3L 195): moving in felt a little like being buried alive.86 Margaret Radford, Dollie’s daughter, paid the Lawrences a brief visit, but they spent a very quiet Christmas together, before travelling on 28 December to see in the New Year with Ada in Ripley. While they were there, they decided to find a cottage in Derbyshire in order to pass the winter close to Lawrence’s family; Ada offered to pay their rent.
Back in Hermitage, Lawrence felt more and more disconnected from his past, and from old friendships. He told Cecil Gray that he had ‘left Cornwall, as an abiding place, for ever, I am sure’ (3L 197). William Henry had failed to respond to letters since the Lawrences’ departure. Lawrence clung to his old cottage at Higher Tregerthen throughout 1918, attempting (via Kot) to sublet it to Virginia and Leonard Woolf in January,87 then coming to an agreement with the landlord to keep an interest in it while it was rented out to third parties. Faith in individuals and the future was sorely tested by recent events, and the disillusionment showed no signs of abating. Aldington irritated Lawrence by sending him a rather melodramatic and self-serving letter in which he declared that he would soon ‘be sent to France, to that great holocaust of atonement for the wrongs of mankind.’ It seemed ‘a bit thick’ (3L 197). The police continued to make enquiries about the Lawrences, too.88 And in mid-January, Lawrence heard that George Moore had expressed some admiration for his novels, but when he wrote to Moore seeking support for his writing he received a patronising and critical response advising him to avoid ‘vague animal abstractions,’ and to ‘keep the classes separate’ in his fiction (3L 196 fn. 4). The previous January he had sensed an intimation of spring in the air: this year he felt only ‘a kind of wintering’ (3L 197).
Financial matters grew so desperate that on 16 February Lawrence told Pinker: ‘I am afraid in another fortnight I shall not have a penny to buy bread and margarine’ (3L 211). Arnold Bennett offered to give him an allowance of ‘£1 per week for at least a year’ (3L 205 fn. 1) if others would join him, and he secretly gave £25 to Pinker as a crisis fund, but Lawrence found the notion of ongoing charity unacceptable. He only staved off poverty through the generosity of a select few (Kot gave him £10, as did Monty Shearman, and he received £5 from Cynthia Asquith and nine guineas – through Pinker – that he was owed by the English Review).89
Lawrence did no writing during the first weeks of January, choosing instead to learn 20 or 30 songs from The Oxford Songbook.90 Only at the end of the month did he return to working on his American essays, which soon became quite ‘philosophic’ (3L 216); he would be in a position to send the first half to Kot for typing on 25 February.91 He had picked up work on Aaron’s Rod by late February, though the constant need to move house was not conducive to writing a full-length novel. Lawrence and Frieda had temporarily to move out of their new home into the neighbouring cottage at the end of February, since Dollie Radford and her husband Ernest wanted it. He had written 150 pages of Aaron’s Rod by 17 March; he told Cynthia Asquith that it was ‘as blameless as Cranford’ and ‘funny’ (3L 227). Part of the comedy may just have come from the fictionalising of a surprise visit from Captain James (‘Jack’) White, a Mecklenburgh Square contact who descended on the Lawrences shortly after 6 March: White’s attack on Lawrence during a heated conversation provided material for Jim Bricknell’s attack on Rawdon Lilly in the chapter entitled ‘A Punch in the Wind’.92 However, the novel had been written around other things and was not the main focus of Lawrence’s attention in the spring of 1918.
Essays could be produced sporadically, in spite of uprootings and interruptions, as could poetry. On 31 January, he sent two new poems (‘Labour Battalion’ and ‘No News’) to Michael Sadleir, for inclusion in New Paths: Verse, Prose, Pictures, 1917–1918, which Sadleir was co-editing with the publisher Cyril Beaumont.93 Lawrence subsequently explored the idea of Beaumont privately publishing Women in Love by subscription, and let him see the novel. He met Beaumont during a brief visit to London in early March, and was given a detailed breakdown of the financial arrangements which would need to be in place for it to work. It would cost £375 for printing and binding, with a down payment of around £150, and the volume would be priced at one guinea.94 However, Beaumont did not want his name associated with the book in any way, and two of its main backers (Cynthia Asquith and Prince Antoine Bibesco) were equally reluctant. Lawrence embarrassed Mark Gertler by asking him to see whether Ottoline Morrell remained hostile to the novel. Gertler had avoided conscription on the grounds of his Austrian parentage and agreed to do farm work at Garsington instead; he must have approached Ottoline with considerable trepidation. He reported back that she was still committed to pursuing legal action if the novel were published.
On 18 March Lawrence informed Beaumont that he had heard no more news about Women in Love from potential backers, so the idea of private publication was dropped.95 He turned his attention instead to poetry, since Beaumont specialised in publishing small-format volumes of verse. On 8 March, Lawrence had sent Cynthia Asquith the typescript of ‘All of Us’, saying that Beaumont had asked him for a book of that length; he offered to dedicate it to Cynthia if she had no objections.96 She took it straight to Beaumont, but he considered the poems rather too outspoken in their attack on the Empire.97 Undeterred, Lawrence decided to put together further collections ‘from the old books – and make a trifle of money’ (3L 229). On 21 March he asked Cecil Gray to send on two of his poetry notebooks from Cornwall (including the brown ‘Tagebuch’ which Thomas Dunlop had forwarded from Fiascherino).98 He set to work compiling a tailor-made collection of 18 ‘Impeccable’ (3L 234) war poems for Beaumont, entitled Bay. Only seven were taken from the notebooks; 11 were recent and new work. He sent these to Beaumont on 21 April;99 they were accepted shortly afterwards. During March he tried to recover the typescript of ‘All of Us’ from Beaumont, but Beaumont claimed that he had sent it on to Pinker; Lawrence turned instead to the original notebook sequence and reworked it before sending it to Harriet Monroe under the new title ‘Bits’; 12 of the poems were published together in the July 1919 number of Poetry, re-titled ‘War Films’.100 Around the same time, Lawrence planned another collection of poems, this time concentrating on the female experience of war-time devastation. It would be compiled during the summer and would comprise 42 poems, only one of which (‘Seven Seals’) was written in 1918. The poems were initially placed into two separate books, one entitled ‘In London’, the other ‘Choir of Women’ (3L 255).
The plan to move to Derbyshire became more pressing once the Lawrences learned that the Radfords would need their cottage back again in May. They had warmed a little to the area around Hermitage: it was ‘Hardy country – like Woodlanders – all woods and hazel-copses, and tiny little villages that will sleep forever’ (3L 223). They had enjoyed the company of Bessie Lowe, from whom they rented a cottage in late February, and they took to her young daughter, Hilda. They also got on well with the two young women (Cecily Lambert and her cousin, Violet Monk) who were attempting to run the nearby Grimsbury Farm. Lawrence would draw on them, and their situation, when he wrote his novella ‘The Fox’ later in the year. Yet, unlike Frieda, he was not sorry to move away. There had been some talk in mid-March of their taking a house at Bole Hill, near Derby. Frieda had urged Lawrence to forget the Midlands and rent a place close to Hermitage: she had been tempted by a cottage in the neighbouring village of Hampstead Norris, but Lawrence panicked at the prospect of staying put, eulogising the itinerant life of the gipsies he spied in a nearby camp.101 From 5 to 12 April Lawrence stayed with Ada in Ripley, and they set about finding a suitable house. They discovered Mountain Cottage in Middleton-by-Wirksworth, near Cromford, ‘a bungalow, on the brow of the steep valley at Via Gellia’ (3L 232); he told Kot that it boasted ‘a croquet lawn: we can play croquet’ (3L 235). The undulating Derbyshire landscape reminded Lawrence of Westmorland, where he and Kot had first met, so to go there would be like turning back the clock to happier times. By 19 April Ada had secured the cottage for her brother. He would be able to move in from 1 May; the annual rent, paid by Ada, was £65.102
Lawrence made arrangements with Cecil Gray to have some essential possessions sent on from Cornwall: he wanted his desk, a rug, linen, his typewriter and a few books (classical and other dictionaries, atlases and a Bible).103 Gray was back in Cornwall, living with H. D., though Lawrence – who disapproved – diplomatically omitted making reference to their relationship and living arrangements (Aldington had returned to the Front). Lawrence was hardly able to work, with the upset of the move: he did ‘a few bits of poetry’ and looked over his American essays, but his main energy went in reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1789) and Leo Frobenius’ The Voice of Africa (1913).104 On the eve of another uprooting, he told Mark Gertler: ‘One seems to go through all the Ypres and Mount Kemmels and God knows what.’ Kemmel Hill, to the south-west of Ypres, had been taken by the German forces on 25 April; Lawrence had doubtless discussed it with Frieda, who was full of ‘impertinent happiness’ while he suffered a black mood of ‘suspended fury’ (3L 239). They may have been far away from the fighting line, but the conflict was felt in their relationship on a daily basis.