In the new year, Lawrence decided to ‘make a little dash to Sardinia to see if I should like to live there’ (3L 646). On 4 January, he and Frieda duly left Taormina, travelling to this other, colder island by steamer ‘from Palermo via Trapani to Cagliari’ (3L 656). They visited Mandas, Nuoro and Terranova, returning to Sicily via Rome (where they met Jan Juta and Alan Insole). They got back on 13 January. Lawrence loved Sardinia, but the climate and the poverty they encountered meant that it was not ‘a place to live in’ (3L 649). They decided to take the Fontana Vecchia for another year. Shortly after his return, Lawrence began to write about Sardinia, producing ‘a little Diary of the trip’ (3L 650). By 25 January he was already close to finishing his ‘Sardinian Snaps’ (3L 653), which would go on to be published as Sea and Sardinia.1 Lawrence was justifiably pleased with his work: he thought the volume was ‘pretty vivid as a flash-light travel-book’ (4L 58–9).
At the end of January, Juta and Insole came to Taormina. It was during this brief visit that Juta produced his famous oil painting of Lawrence (based on his earlier charcoal sketch), apparently in a single sitting.2 On 28 January, Lawrence sent Mountsier four more poems which would eventually be included in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (‘Snake’, ‘Almond Blossom’, ‘Bare Fig-Trees’ and ‘Bare Almond Trees’).3 They would be followed on 1 February by ‘Hibiscus and Salvia Flowers’, which Lawrence said he liked ‘immensely’ (3L 659), and four days later by ‘Purple Anemones’.4
Lawrence was now preoccupied with his travel plans. Sicily was becoming increasingly expensive with changes in the exchange rate, and anti-English feeling was growing as a result of widespread dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles and the refusal of the British and French to give Italy the land it had been promised at the Treaty of London in 1915. The political situation, too, was fragile, though Lawrence was assured that there would be no revolution, as in Russia, but ‘continual faction fights between socialists and fascisti’ (3L 677). His sisters wanted him to return to England, but he was reluctant to go back.5 Instead he explored the possibility of visiting Herm, having received three postcards from Compton Mackenzie.6 When that prospect receded, Lawrence renewed his interest in Carlota Thrasher’s farm in Connecticut. She agreed to give him a 30-year lease on the land, rent-free, but warned him that the house was ‘dilapidated’ and the whole place ‘ruinous’ (3L 664, 668). This did not deter Lawrence. He wrote to Mary Cannan to secure a loan of £200 to cover some of the expense of moving to the USA. Robert Mountsier was tasked with checking the farm out, and Lawrence earmarked his Sicilian landlord’s young daughter, Ciccia, and her new husband, Vincenzo, to emigrate with him in order to help out.7 They would ‘have a cow, goats, fowls, pigs, and raise some fruit’ (3L 661), and frame houses would be erected for anyone who cared to join them. Even Mary Cannan was encouraged to sign up and be in charge of ‘strawberries and bees and jam’ (3L 669).
Lawrence’s essays on Sardinia were finished by 22 February. He tried to get hold of photographs of Sardinia to accompany his words. In mid-February he asked Barbara Low whether she would be prepared to help place his work in London, on the same non-official basis as Mountsier in New York. She appears to have agreed on a temporary basis, and with some trepidation, though by the end of March Lawrence had decided – on Douglas Goldring’s recommendation – to go with a professional agent and employ Curtis Brown instead.8 Lawrence’s contractual agreements in America were still his main source of anxiety and irritation, though Secker had also proved difficult to deal with, and he wanted to make sure in future that somebody had oversight of payments and royalties from British and American publishers for both articles and books.
Lawrence’s idea of escaping to Connecticut was effectively scuppered by a telegram he and Frieda received from Else on 3 March: ‘Mama sehr schlecht Alfred sehr krank Komm’ (3L 678 fn. 3) (‘Mother unwell Alfred very ill come’). Frieda’s mother was suffering from heart problems, so Frieda was forced to return to Baden-Baden. Lawrence travelled with her to Palermo on 11 March, seeing her off on the boat to Naples and returning three days later. Once back, a Scottish artist, Millicent Beveridge (a former friend of Catherine Carswell at the Glasgow School of Art), began a portrait of Lawrence, which he sat for in Marie Hubrecht’s studio.9 The publishing world seemed full of enemies: he told Mountsier to be careful with his manuscripts, since publishing was ‘a devil’s game in which we must not be losers any more’ (3L 684). Amy Lowell had upset him by failing to acknowledge being sent a typescript of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (as it then stood): in Lawrence’s eyes she was ‘trying to keep afloat on the gas of her own importance: hard work, considering her bulk’ (3L 677). Secker continued to irritate him, too, and even Seltzer became the subject of anti-semitic abuse for tying Lawrence in to a multi-book deal in the contract for The Lost Girl (though he had re-printed The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd in February, and was preparing to publish Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious in May).10
By 22 March, America was ‘dead off’ and Lawrence felt ‘absolutely at an end with the civilised world’ (3L 688–9). He could not decide what to do next: it became a ‘sort of crisis’ (3L 693) for him. In a ‘good-Friday tirade’ on 26 March he told Evelyn Scott how hard it was to ‘burst the tomb’: ‘it needs some hard shoving: harder even than death’ (3L 694). Yet his irresolution and despondency did not extend to business matters. He was now hopeful that literary contacts – Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, Arnold Bennett, May Sinclair, and even Wells, Conrad and Galsworthy – would stand up for Secker’s forthcoming edition of Women in Love, if Seltzer let them see his American text of the novel.11 On 29 March Lawrence sent the manuscript of Sea and Sardinia to Mountsier, followed two days later by two copies of Movements in European History, which had been published in February. Mountsier was given strict instructions to discover what Humphrey Milford wanted to do with the history textbook in America.12
There was some talk of Lawrence commandeering a boat for a trip around the Mediterranean. Mountsier still wanted to ‘go shares with him in a little ship’ (3L 698); Captain Short was consulted, and Ruth Wheelock was involved in searching out a suitable vessel, but to Mountsier’s annoyance it all came to nothing.13 Instead, Lawrence left Taormina on 9 April and headed for Palermo, en route to Capri. Here he saw old friends and made important new contacts. Nellie Morrison took him to meet the American painters Earl and Achsah Brewster, two Buddhists who (it transpired) had honeymooned at the Fontana Vecchia. Lawrence got on well with them, and with their eight-year-old daughter, Harwood. His subsequent letters to them show how easily they struck up a friendship, based partly on the Brewsters’ willingness to hear his criticisms of Buddha and Nirvana, and partly on their facility for responding with energy and spirit, questioning Lawrence’s own beliefs and utterances.14 The Brewsters were planning to travel to Ceylon in the autumn so that Earl could study Buddhism and Pali (the language of its earliest scriptures). Lawrence spoke of his own desire ‘for an environment where his contact with people would be more vital,’ though he criticised idealism and stressed the difficulties involved in ‘entering into the thoughts and feelings of another race.’ Brewster was impressed by his ‘conviviality’ and lack of condescension: ‘Never was there the slightest sign in him of the self-conscious author.’15
On 19 April Lawrence departed for Rome, where he met Jan Juta and Juta’s latest love interest, Elizabeth Humes; Lawrence and Juta had made preliminary plans earlier in the year to go together to Sardinia, but – since Lawrence had failed to acquire any photographs – Juta promised to go alone and produce illustrations to accompany the book of essays. On 21 April, Lawrence travelled to Florence, where he met Norman Douglas and Reggie Turner, and was introduced to Rebecca West. He and Douglas were finally able to talk properly about Maurice Magnus. West noted that the men spoke of Magnus with the ‘grave and brotherly pitifulness that men who have found it difficult to accommodate themselves to their fellow-men feel for those who have found it impossible.’16
From Florence, Lawrence went directly to Baden-Baden: it was the first time he had been in Germany since before the war. He had missed the worst of the post-war suffering and found the country friendly, clean and orderly after his hectic days of travelling and socialising in Rome and Florence. In contrast to Italy, there were no beggars, the exchange rate made the cost of living very reasonable, and Lawrence felt no animosity expressed towards him as an Englishman. He chose to stay a short distance outside the town, and away from his mother-in-law’s accommodation in the Ludwig-Wilhelmstift, at the Gasthaus Krone in the village of Ebersteinburg.
Frieda was happy to be with her family again, especially now that her mother’s health had begun to improve. Johanna visited with her new lover and future husband (the Berlin banker, Emil von Krug). Else was preoccupied, since Edgar Jaffe – broken by the loss of his political career – had collapsed with pneumonia and died on 29 April, but Frieda was at least able to go to Munich to help her out. The only real problem for Lawrence lay in his mother-in-law’s over-reliance on Frieda; they were pressed to stay on until the end of the summer, which made Lawrence angry.
However, the countryside around Ebersteinburg was a delight. They had settled ‘among the hills, just on the edge of the Black Forest’ (3L 720). Lawrence soon felt comfortable enough to start writing. By 2 May he had set to work once again on Aaron’s Rod, uncertain whether he would be able to bring it to completion.17 He made remarkable progress during the following weeks, so that by 16 May he was ‘well under weigh’ (3L 722) and the end was in sight. On 27 May he reported to Kot that only the final chapter was missing. He had written the vast majority of it outdoors, ‘sitting away in the woods’ (3L 728). By 1 June it was finished.
It is difficult to say why a novel which he had started writing in Mecklenburgh Square back in October 1917, and which had stalled on two separate occasions, now came so easily to him. Being able to reflect on (and think through) his earlier separations from Frieda, and the animosity he had felt towards her, in the context of the renewed harmony between them, would certainly have helped. The novel’s unresolved and often sardonic explorations of love and power, the mutual dependence and isolated singleness of Aaron Sisson and Rawdon Lilly, plus Aaron’s self-betrayals, treat topics which had preoccupied Lawrence since he first started work on ‘The Sisters’ in March 1913, but they do so in a restless and outspoken way which holds both romantic love and Nietzschean self-assertion at an ironic distance. It is no surprise to find him asking Kot for a copy of ‘Einstein’s Relativity’ (4L 23) in this period, and appreciating its author for ‘taking out the pin which fixed down our fluttering little physical universe’ (4L 37). Like The Lost Girl and Mr Noon before it, Aaron’s Rod was a novel in which Lawrence was upping sticks, ‘victualling’ his ship to sail away from a known world; these books enabled him to ‘get some sort of wings loose, before I get my feet out of Europe’ (3L 522). He would come to see Aaron’s Rod as the last of his ‘serious English novels – the end of The Rainbow, Women in Love line’ (4L 92).
Other new projects emerged during May and June. In early May, while he was working on the novel, Lawrence responded enthusiastically to a proposal from Oxford University Press for him to write ‘a Medici Society book of Art Pictures for Children’ (3L 714). He negotiated terms for it through Curtis Brown, and considered moving to Florence in order to write it, limiting the scope to Italian art, but the idea was eventually dropped.18 He had learnt that both Curtis Brown and Secker liked the first part of Mr Noon, and Seltzer and Secker seriously considered publishing it as a single volume, but it was finally agreed that it would be more prudent to proceed with Aaron’s Rod first; the more autobiographical second part of Mr Noon remained unfinished and Secker preferred to concentrate on the ‘full length novel’ (4L 26). Then, in early June, Kot contacted Lawrence about a short story by Ivan Bunin, set in Capri, which he had recently translated as ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’; Lawrence agreed to ‘English’ (4L 24) it, as he had done with All Things Are Possible. He found the story ‘screamingly good of Naples and Capri,’ but ‘just a trifle too earnest about it’ (4L 37).
An advance copy of Secker’s edition of Women in Love arrived on 27 May; Lawrence was unimpressed, noting that it was printed on ‘dirty paper’ (3L 728). It was published on 10 June. The condescending and critical reviews it received in England contrasted with the serious interest shown by reviewers of Seltzer’s edition in America. Lawrence’s new poems were beginning to appear in American magazines: ‘Humming Bird’ was published in the New Republic in June, and ‘Snake’ would appear in the Dial during July. This merely confirmed America’s role as Lawrence’s preferred marketplace for his writings from this point on: England was ‘sterilising’ and ‘stupid’ (4L 33, 40). After Seltzer’s edition of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious arrived on 3 June, Lawrence set to work on a sequel, this time on ‘Psychoanalysis and the Incest Motive’ (3L 732). He had finished it by the end of the month. Secker had turned down Psychoanalysis, so Lawrence was happy to write this book solely for Seltzer. It would be published in October 1922 as Fantasia of the Unconscious (Secker actually chose to publish an English edition the following September). Lawrence also reserved Sea and Sardinia for the American market, since he thought Secker ‘useless, save for novels or literary books’ (4L 27); he received Jan Juta’s illustrations for the volume on 23 June and immediately sent them to a printer in Stuttgart to see how much it would cost to reproduce them in colour (since printing would be a lot cheaper in Germany than in America).19 He subsequently obtained a quotation for 2000 copies and wrote to Seltzer expressing his desire to include the illustrations in the book.20
Lawrence told Marie Hubrecht that he would ‘always remember Ebersteinburg gratefully’: ‘Nobody swindles, the little children never beg, and it is not sordid.’ It made him feel that ‘Sicily is humanly too degraded and degrading’ (4L 51). Nevertheless, by 4 July he was ‘in rags of impatience’ to leave the hotel. His mother-in-law had come to stay for a few days, but had returned to the Stift feeling ill. Else was visiting from Munich with her two younger children, Hans and Marianne; they were ‘nice’, but Lawrence felt a little stifled. He told Mary Cannan that ‘relatives are a mistake, and that’s the end of it. One should never see one’s relations – or anybody else’s’ (4L 48–9). He and Frieda had, however, made plans to stay for a month with Johanna, her current husband Max von Schreibershofen, and their children Anita and Hadubrand, in the summer house they occupied at Zell-am-See, near Salzburg. Lawrence arranged to travel there with Robert Mountsier, who was in Europe and had been visiting Ireland and the Aran Isles. Mountsier arrived on 5 July, and on 10 July they left on the first stage of the journey: a five-day walk to Constance (Frieda may have travelled by train and met them there). During their time together it became obvious that Mountsier did not appreciate Lawrence’s recent work. He disliked the first half of Aaron’s Rod, and apparently lectured Lawrence on those qualities which were likely to make it unpopular. Mountsier also hated the idea of Lawrence developing his ideas on the unconscious (though Lawrence took no notice, and even expressed to Seltzer his desire to write a third book on the subject).21 Worse still, Mountsier tactlessly informed Lawrence how difficult Curtis Brown had found it to place his work in England, overstating the reality of the situation and so provoking a testy letter from Lawrence to Curtis Brown in which the agent was asked to avoid hawking Lawrence’s wares around to ‘a lot of little people’ (4L 55). Lawrence would soon discover that some of his work had recently been accepted by both the Nation and Athenaeum and the English Review.22
The men arrived in Constance on 14 July; they were forced to stay put for a few days while their passports were validated in Berlin. Together with Frieda they crossed the lake by steamer to Bregenz on 18 July, in the midst of a thunderstorm; at the border there was ‘a lot of bother with passports’ (4L 53). They took an overnight train to Innsbruck and arrived at their destination (the village of Thumersbach) on 20 July. Mountsier stayed for a few days in a hotel before departing for Vienna and Budapest. Lawrence was not sorry to see the back of a man he now found ‘rather overbearing’ (4L 61). Their exchanges left him with a ‘strong distaste for Yankees’ (4L 67).
The ‘Villa Alpensee’ proved very welcoming. Although the marriage between Johanna and Max was in ruins, it seems to have had no effect on their high spirits during the Lawrences’ stay; everything was ‘free and perfectly easy’ (4L 63), and there was even one evening when they got tipsy on peach punch and sent a barely coherent joint letter to the ‘Schwiegermutter’ (Lawrence’s mother-in-law) back in Baden-Baden.23 The house, too, was ‘quite lovely, on a small lake, with snow mountains opposite’ (4L 54). It was ‘very pleasant to see the snow looking fierce, and to hear the water roaring once more savage and unquenched’ (4L 56). There was a boathouse with four boats, and Lawrence took to bathing twice a day in order to cope with the heat (though it was much cooler here than in Baden-Baden).24 Before the end of July, Lawrence and Frieda had taken a trip to Bad Fusch, and gone from there on foot to Ferleiten to see the glacier.25
Lawrence would remember the place as beautiful, but his time there was marred by depression and he found it impossible to settle to work.26 On 21 July he sent the second half of Aaron’s Rod to Curtis Brown for typing (the first half had already been typed by Violet Monk),27 and he forwarded a copy of ‘Wintry Peacock’ to Michael Sadleir for inclusion in his short story collection The New Decameron, making some required changes to the typescript, but this was as much as he could do.28 Much to Frieda’s annoyance, he had begun to feel that he could not breathe with the family around him; he plotted an escape to Nellie Morrison’s quiet flat in Florence (on the Via dei Bardi).29 Mountsier returned for a brief visit around 14 August, before departing again for Innsbruck, Lucerne and Interlaken, on his way to Paris.30 During his stay, on 15 August, Lawrence sent Seltzer a ‘little Foreword’ to Aaron’s Rod, probably answering the kinds of criticism that Mountsier had levelled at it. It was never printed and has now been lost; its significance lies in the impulse Lawrence now felt to answer back to his critics in print. He would do the same thing in October, when he wrote an offhand foreword to Fantasia of the Unconscious, subtitled ‘An Answer to Some Critics’, satirising and blithely dismissing negative American press reviews of Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.31 It satisfied his desire for ‘kicking somebody’ (4L 82), but it was also an integral part of his drive to question, dislodge and destabilise the moral and aesthetic values of his post-war readership.
The Lawrences’ departure from Austria was delayed by a visit on 20 August to the glacier at Mooserboden (a journey which Lawrence would later draw upon when writing his novella, ‘The Captain’s Doll’). On 25 August, he could report to Kot that Violet Monk had typed ‘The Gentleman from San Francisco’ and was sending a copy to Scofield Thayer at the Dial.32 That same day he and Frieda left for Florence. They arrived to find a letter from Kot explaining that Murry had written a strongly critical and potentially damaging review of Women in Love in the Nation and Athenaeum;33 here was one critic whom Lawrence found ‘too rotten to kick’ (4L 79). He was thankful to be alone again. In the comparative peace he decided he would write ‘six or seven Italian stories that would make a book by itself: two Venice, one Verona, one Florence, one Rome, one Anticoli, one Capri, one Sicily’ (4L 80). Progress had been made with the first story (based in Venice) when social commitments put paid to his work once again. Lawrence and Frieda would welcome a number of visitors to Florence during their one-month stay at the Via dei Bardi. Mary Cannan turned up on 30 August. Jan Juta came just three days later. Then the Carswells arrived on 10 September, and the Whittleys showed up on 12 September for their holiday.
By 9 September, Lawrence felt exasperated by his inability to work. He did manage to write three significant new poems to add to the ‘Evangelistic Beasts’ section of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (‘Fish’, ‘Bat’ and ‘Man and Bat’), which he had sent by 17 September to both Curtis Brown and Mountsier,34 but he was eager to settle down again to a solid period of writing. His mood would not have been lifted when he heard from Secker that an article in Horatio Bottomley’s newspaper John Bull had called for the police to act against Women in Love, and that Philip Heseltine had threatened legal action over his depiction as Julius Halliday.35 Lawrence was inclined to dismiss Heseltine’s threat as a form of blackmail, demonstrating his former friend’s self-importance, but he offered to consider making alterations in the English edition of the novel after his return to Taormina.36 Although Lawrence had left England behind in a literal sense, his memories of the war-time prosecution of The Rainbow and its consequences were not so easily exorcised: they cast a long shadow over the reception of his work. He had just asked Anton Kippenberg for a report on the progress of his German translation of The Rainbow; he would soon ask Huebsch to clarify the situation with regard to his recent re-print of the novel in America.37 The ominous news from England formed a stark contrast to the wild celebrations associated with the Dante Festival in Florence.38
On 21 September, the Lawrences travelled with the Whittleys to Siena and Rome before staying for a few days in Capri, where they renewed their friendship with the Brewsters. The couple were about to leave for Ceylon, to study Buddhism at the Temple of the Tooth (the site of a Buddhist monastery in Kandy). Their plans captivated Lawrence’s imagination. After an arduous journey back to Taormina, arriving on 28 September, Lawrence found a dispiriting jumble of mail waiting for him at the Fontana Vecchia. It contained ‘all things evil: a tremble from my publishers: a very cold letter from my agent, that Aaron’s Rod can’t be accepted: and a solicitors information about W. in Love, that a libel action is impending.’ A letter and book from Edward Garnett, renewing their friendship after many years, went unnoticed amid the upset.39 It caused Lawrence to write to the Brewsters suggesting that they should join forces: ‘Let us have the faith and courage to move together on this slippery ball of quick-silver of a dissolving world.’ He was now determined to leave Europe by travelling eastward first, ‘intending ultimately to go west,’ since he ‘would much rather approach America from the Pacific than from the Atlantic,’ with his final aim being to settle in ‘Mexico, New Mexico, Rocky Mountains, or British Columbia’ and to become ‘a bit of a hermit’ (4L 90, 95).
The expatriate community in Taormina was like a ‘Mad Hatters tea-party’ (4L 105) as winter drew on: Lawrence participated in the parties and gatherings, but his letters reveal the comic detachment he felt towards it all.40 By 8 October he had made the required alterations in Secker’s edition of Women in Love, changing Pussum’s name to ‘Minette’, and transforming the appearances of both Pussum and Halliday, the nationality of the manservant, and the address of Halliday’s flat in order to mask some of the more obvious parallels with Heseltine and Minnie Lucie (‘Puma’) Channing.41 Secker had withdrawn the book from sale in response to Heseltine’s threat; he would finally settle the situation by ‘payment of £50 damages and £10.10 costs’ (4L 113 fn. 2), without Lawrence’s knowledge and to his considerable irritation. Lawrence complained that ‘one should never give in to such filth’ (4L 129).
At the start of October, he briefly returned to his Venice story, which was set ‘in the Venetian lagoons: not pretty pretty – but no sex and no problems: no love, particularly’ (4L 93). Although Lawrence thought enough of this story to consider turning it into a novel, it was never completed and has now been lost.42 The rest of the month was spent ‘going over’ his new book on the unconscious (which he would send to Seltzer on 22 October), collecting together and revising stories for a new collection (later entitled England, My England and Other Stories), and writing ‘The Captain’s Doll’, drawing on his experiences in Austria. This novella was completed by 6 November. He had been thinking about Etruscan civilisation, and reading works by Giovanni Verga; he asked both Catherine Carswell and Edward Garnett to check whether Verga’s works had been translated into English, since he found the writer’s rendition of Sicilian Italian ‘so fascinating’ and thought it might be ‘fun’ (4L 106) to work on it. Seltzer had decided to publish Sea and Sardinia, and to include eight colour illustrations by Juta (printed in America owing to the sanctions placed on foreign trade in Germany);43 this was enough to offset the frustration of finding that the Dial had published garbled excerpts from it in its November number.44 The book would be published on 12 December, three days after Tortoises.
Then, on the afternoon of 5 November, a letter arrived from Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy American patron of the arts, inviting Lawrence to join her in the artists’ colony of Taos in New Mexico. She offered the Lawrences ‘an adobe cottage’ (4L 114) and promised to give them anything else they needed. She enclosed two Indian medicines in her letter (a dried leaf and a root) in order to tempt Lawrence with the scent of the American Southwest (a necklace she had sent for Frieda was lost in the post). Ironically enough, she had been so impressed with Lawrence’s description of the Sardinian peasants in the Dial excerpts that she wanted him to come to Taos in order to write in the same way about the New Mexican Indians. By 16 November, Lawrence had decided to take up her offer, apologising to Earl Brewster for his change of mind about Ceylon and acknowledging that the ‘Indian, the Aztec, old Mexico – all that fascinates me and has fascinated me for years’ (4L 125). He began to make travel enquiries, still wishing to avoid approaching America by its east coast, largely on account of his fear of ‘that awful New York’ (4L 123).
Lawrence was pleased with the German translation of The Rainbow when Kippenberg got round to sending him part of the proofs.45 Because of post-war hyperinflation in Germany, he allowed Insel-Verlag to pay him for the book rights in Marks, requesting that the money be sent directly to his mother-in-law in Baden-Baden; it was a touching gesture revealing his genuine affection for her.46 Lawrence painted two pictures in early November (one of them a copy of a Masaccio);47 he also wrote a long new ending to ‘The Fox’, effectively making the story three times longer than the version published in Hutchinson’s Story Magazine.48 He thought ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Captain’s Doll’ ‘so modern, so new: a new manner’ (4L 132). In early December he would produce a third long story, ‘The Ladybird’ (a transformative re-writing of his 1915 short story ‘The Thimble’); he asked Mountsier and Curtis Brown to arrange for these three ‘novelettes’ (4L 143) to be published together in a separate volume. On 1 December, Lawrence agreed to let Arnold Lunn have a story (‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’) for his new anthology, Georgian Stories, and he forwarded his novelettes and his revised stories to Mountsier and Curtis Brown in early December,49 taking an opportunity to extensively revise ‘England, My England’. ‘Fanny and Annie’ had been published in Hutchinson’s Story Magazine on 21 November; this was another of the stories which he would collect in the England, My England volume.50 His contractual agreement with Basil Blackwell for the publication of ‘Wintry Peacock’ in The New Decameron would prevent Secker from publishing England, My England in the UK until January 1924, but Lawrence did not mind, since he was still inclined to prioritise publication of his works in America.51
Lawrence was now very eager to leave Europe. He was growing tired of the ‘Taormina Corso’ (‘one long arcade of junk shops’) and wished that ‘Etna would send down 60,000,000,000 tons of boiling lava over the place and cauterise it away’ (4L 139). The cost of living in Sicily had roughly doubled since the spring of 1920, and this had resulted in a notable increase in violent crime.52 He continued to reassure Mabel Dodge Sterne that he was coming to Taos, in spite of the high cost of travel; he worked assiduously to straighten out his literary business, and he even had his old brown suit turned in anticipation of his departure.53 On 9 December he received some excellent news: the solicitor Robert Welsh wrote to say that The Lost Girl had been awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best novel of 1921. It had been selected by Herbert Grierson, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and the prize was to be a very welcome £100. Lawrence told Welsh that he was ‘especially pleased at having at last some spark of friendly recognition out of Britain. It has been mostly abuse’ (4L 146). However, he still resisted any idea of returning to England: he told Kot that he did not believe that his countrymen were ‘good simple people. – All Murrys etc’ (4L 149).
Lawrence’s other major concern throughout late November and December was with Magnus’ memoir, ‘Dregs’. Michael Borg and Don Mauro Inguanez had contacted Lawrence to ask him whether he could arrange to publish the book and use the proceeds to pay off Magnus’ debts. Magnus owed Borg £60; Borg did not trust Norman Douglas (as Magnus’ appointed literary executor) to recover the money. By 18 November, Lawrence was going through ‘Dregs’, making some changes to the text;54 he soon decided that the best way to interest publishers in this outspoken autobiographical narrative would be if he wrote a lengthy introduction to it, reflecting on Magnus’ character and his death. It is likely that Lawrence wrote a good deal of this introduction during December 1921. On 20 December he wrote to Douglas to obtain permission to sell the book and introduction outright to an American publisher; the money would be used to pay off the £60 debt to Borg, and to settle the £23 Magnus owed to Lawrence. Lawrence was given the go-ahead by Douglas on 26 December, though he would work on his introduction for another month before sending it to Mountsier. By the time he had finished it, he thought it ‘the best single piece of writing, as writing, that he had ever done’.55
Lawrence spent Christmas Day in bed with flu, but his irritation at Taormina society meant that he was not much bothered: illness saved him from ‘going out to a horrible Xmas dinner’ (4L 151). His New Year resolution was full of spirited defiance: he told Earl Brewster that eastern ‘meditation and the inner life are not my aim, but some sort of action and strenuousness and pain and frustration and struggling through.’ He wanted ‘to fight and to feel new gods in the flesh’ (4L 154). He was sure that his illness resulted from the process of ‘breaking loose’ from his old life: ‘I believe it is partly an organic change in one’s whole constitution’ (4L 174). Another chasm was opening up in his life, which made him at once strangely nostalgic for earlier days in England (and especially for Buckinghamshire at Christmas 1914)56 and sharply aware of how the intervening years had irreversibly changed him, making him ‘a thousand years more disconnected with everything, and more frustrated’ (4L 165).
Lawrence’s energies were wholly invested in his departure from Europe as he set about straightening out his literary affairs. The only new work he began during January was the translation of Verga’s novel Mastro-don Gesualdo, which he did purely for pleasure, though it confirmed his feeling that beneath the beautiful surface of Sicilian life there was ‘dirt and horror: and money’ (4L 162). Arrangements for publication were so complex in this period that Lawrence finally asked Curtis Brown to assume full control over his work in England.57 The sheer detail of the work was overwhelming. Lawrence had, for example, to oversee Secker’s decision to buy sheets of Sea and Sardinia from Seltzer for his English edition of the book, while also negotiating a higher royalty percentage for Secker’s signed limited edition of Women in Love (which again relied on his purchasing 50 sets of sheets of the American edition from Seltzer).58 Aaron’s Rod was equally problematic; like Mountsier and Curtis Brown before him, Secker disliked it.59 Fortunately, Seltzer had cabled Lawrence in November to say that he found it ‘wonderful, overwhelming’ (4L 121), though he requested some alterations to the text to make it suitable for the ‘general public’ (4L 177); he seems to have expressed specific concerns at the depiction of the Marchesa and James Argyle.60 Once Lawrence received the manuscript, he modified ‘bits’ of Argyle’s speech but found it impossible to alter ‘the essential scenes of Aaron and the Marchesa’; he sent it back and told Seltzer that he must make any further changes himself. He was ‘dead sick’ (4L 167) of literary business and eager to get away.
In mid-January, however, his travel plans suddenly changed. He decided that he could not travel straight to Taos, but would ‘rather go to Ceylon, and come to America later, from the east’ (4L 168). He arranged to stay with the Brewsters in their bungalow just outside Kandy, and wrote to book berths for himself and Frieda ‘on the Osterley – Orient Line – sailing from Naples on Feby 26th. – to Colombo’ before writing an apologetic letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne.61 The journey to Ceylon would take two weeks, and the tickets were expensive (£74 each), but he felt that here he might finally find ‘rest, peace’ (4L 180).
Lawrence cleared his desk for departure. He finished his long essay on Magnus, and on 26 January sent it to Mountsier together with the lightly revised text of ‘Dregs’, requesting that it be placed in America on the best possible terms, or else (if Mountsier refused to handle the manuscript) passed directly on to Seltzer.62 Some subsequent modifications which Lawrence asked Mountsier to make to the final paragraph of his introduction were ignored;63 the introduction and book were passed to Seltzer, who did not wish to publish them, but appears to have held on to them down to the winter of 1923.
In early February, an American journalist, H. J. Forman, sought out Lawrence in order to write an article he would later publish under the title ‘With D. H. Lawrence in Sicily’ in the New York Times Book Review and Magazine.64 Lawrence refused to do a straightforward interview with Forman, but he did help the man out by writing him a letter of introduction to Michael Borg, to facilitate a subsequent trip to Malta.65 Around this time, Lawrence sent the first half of his translation of Mastro-don Gesualdo to be typed in Florence.66 He then enquired after the copyright situation. Verga had died of a cerebral thrombosis at his home in Catania on 22 January at the age of 81, before Lawrence had a chance to meet him. Lawrence was informed by Verga’s Italian publisher that copyright in the works reverted to Verga’s heirs on the author’s death, but he was free to publish his own translation since there was ‘no definite copyright law between England and America – and Italy’ (4L 196).
The final piece of unfinished business concerned Studies in Classic American Literature, which still lay in the hands of Mountsier and Seltzer. Curtis Brown wanted to offer the book to Jonathan Cape; in asking Mountsier to send on to his English agent a copy of the essay on Moby-Dick, which was missing from Lawrence’s own copy, Lawrence took the opportunity to give Mountsier three pages from the amended (toned down) version of the Whitman essay first published in the Nation and Athenaeum in July 1921. It was important that the book contained ‘nothing censurable’ (4L 198). Lawrence felt that Seltzer was ‘delaying the publication of these Studies’ (4L 197); he hoped that talk of imminent publication in England might cause Seltzer to act.
Leaving the Fontana Vecchia proved to be a real wrench, despite all of Lawrence’s recent misgivings about Taormina, Sicily, and (indeed) Italy. He had always loved the house. Yet, on the eve of his departure he dreamt of elephants;67 he made a conscious effort to put aside his more tender feelings about the past two years and think instead of ‘palms and elephants and apes and peacocks’ (4L 199). Before leaving Taormina, Lawrence arranged for a copy of the Secker edition of Sea and Sardinia (once published) to be sent to Elsa Weekley, Frieda’s elder daughter;68 it was a way of reaching out to her before he and Frieda left Europe. Lawrence had been at pains to tell his mother-in-law, optimistically, that ‘America is no farther from Baden than Taormina’ (4L 161); he naturally wished to consolidate emotional bonds to counteract the queer feeling of isolation in moving away. His nostalgia must have been deepened when a letter arrived from Enid Hopkin, who had recently married Laurence Hilton and was planning to take a holiday in Italy. He wrote back with detailed and helpful travel advice, and sent his best wishes for her future.69
On the morning of 20 February, the Lawrences left for Palermo, staying with Ruth Wheelock at the Hotel Panormus for three nights to await the ship to Naples. After the night-time crossing, they stayed two nights in Naples at the Grande Albergo Santa Lucia. From here, Lawrence sent final letters to Curtis Brown, Mountsier and Seltzer, and farewell postcards to Kot, Ada, Catherine Carswell, Rosalind Baynes, and Mabel Dodge Sterne.70 Then, on the evening of Sunday 26 February, he and Frieda left Naples on board the RMS Osterley. They took with them not only their luggage, but (at Frieda’s insistence) ‘a piece of a Sicilian cart, very colourfully painted with two scenes from the life of Marco Visconte.’71 It caused a porter to shout after them ‘Ecco la Sicilia in viaggio per l’India’ (4L 206) (‘Here is Sicily on the way to India’).