The two weeks spent on board the Osterley proved most enjoyable. The ship was not overcrowded, and second-class travel was little different from first: days were structured around four hearty meals; there were plenty of occasions to socialise; and the stewards and stewardesses were always polite and attentive. To pass the time, Lawrence chatted with a number of the Australian passengers, including Anna Jenkins from Perth, a keen musician with an interest in the arts who happened to have brought a copy of Sons and Lovers with her on the voyage.1 He was also able to make progress with the second half of his translation of Mastro-don Gesualdo (at one point spilling a bottle of ink on the deck).2
It helped that the voyage was short enough to prevent the luxury from grating. There were plenty of things to see and do. Twelve hours into the journey, on the morning of 27 February, the ship passed through the Straits of Messina, and the Lawrences saw Etna seeming to call them back to Sicily.3 From there they sailed on past Crete to Port Said. Here, on the morning of 2 March, the ship docked and they were able to spend three hours ashore. Lawrence told Kot that it was ‘just like Arabian Nights’: there were ‘water-sellers and scribes in the street, and Koran readers and a yelling crowd.’ From Port Said the ship took 18 hours to pass through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, with Mount Sinai looming above them ‘like a vengeful dagger that was dipped in blood many ages ago, so sharp and defined and old pink-red in colour’ (4L 208). The passage seemed deeply symbolic to Lawrence: he felt that he was leaving behind the known and past worlds of ‘Jerusalem, Greece, Rome and Europe’ (4L 212) and pressing on into unfamiliar forms of civilisation. The ship plotted a course through the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, passing Aden on 7 March and arriving in Colombo on the morning of Monday 13 March.
Earl Brewster met the Lawrences on the wharf and they spent the day in Colombo before setting out the following afternoon for Kandy. Lawrence’s first impression of Ceylon was positive: he told Mountsier that he thought he would ‘love these tropics’ (4L 214). The Brewsters had four servants and their bungalow (‘Ardnaree’) was comfortable and spacious, located ‘uphill among a sort of half wild estate – cocoa-nut palms and cocoa – and jungle trees – almost like the jungle.’ They could sit out on the surrounding verandahs and watch ‘chipmunks and chameleons and lizards and tropical birds among the trees and bamboos’ (4L 215). In fact, it was built in a small clearing ‘isolated from neighbours in the midst of 60 acres of forest,’4 and at night-time the noises from outside and the clear view from the skylights made it feel as if one were literally immersed in the local wildlife.
It was in many respects tailor-made for Lawrence as a vantage-point for viewing another ecology, and an utterly different culture. Yet within 10 days of arriving he had already begun to doubt whether he would stay, and he had planned out his onward journey to Sydney and San Francisco.5 The main problem was the extraordinary heat and humidity. The Lawrences arrived during the hottest time of the year; there was ‘terrific heat from 10.0 till 4.0’ (4L 216). Lawrence found it ‘monstrous’ (4L 220); he would later explain to Cynthia Asquith that it almost changed one’s physical constitution, because of ‘the chemical decomposition of ones blood by the ultra-violet rays of the sun’ (4L 234). Lawrence became ill and lost weight.6 The wildlife also proved challenging: he hated ‘the thick, choky feel of tropical forest, and the metallic sound of palms and the horrid noises of the birds and creatures, who hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day, and run little machines all the livelong night’ (4L 225).
On the evening of 23 March, the Lawrences joined Earl Brewster to witness a special ‘perahera’ which was organised to commemorate the Prince of Wales’ state visit to Kandy. Lawrence saw a staged version of the two-week-long religious ceremony which takes place annually in August. He found the spectacle ‘wonderful’, with the coconut torches blazing, ‘the great elephants in their trappings, about a hundred, and the dancers with tomtoms and bagpipes, and half naked and jewelled, then the Kandyan chiefs in their costumes’ (4L 215–16). The so-called ‘devil-dancers’ left a particularly strong impression on him. Yet he was also struck by the nervousness of the Prince (the future King Edward VIII), who seemed ‘worn out and disheartened’ (4L 215); Lawrence sympathised with him, and felt that the people were secretly jeering at this representative of the British Empire.7
Although the perahera was impressive in itself, as a spectacle it unsettled Lawrence so soon after his arrival in Kandy. He initially struggled to work out whether Ceylon was a place in which one felt ‘at home – sort of root race home’ (4L 217) or radically ‘other’ (i.e. not ‘oneself’).8 Lawrence was clearly responding to the challenge of orientating himself in such a distant outpost of the British Empire. As he came to feel less and less comfortable in Ceylon, so he fell back on the idea of his racial and national difference to account for it. Buddhism became anathema to him: ‘a very conceited, selfish show, a vulgar temple of serenity built over an empty hole in space’ (4L 226). He began to think of moving back to England in the summer, and he re-evaluated his relationship with the British ex-pats in Sicily. He wrote to Robert Pratt Barlow to tell him that they were making ‘a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life’ (4L 219). Such retrenchment in the face of an intransigent ‘native’ culture was, of course, deeply ironic in Lawrence’s case, given his embattled relationship to England and the English authorities. When Lawrence asserted his Englishness, he did so ‘in the teeth of all the world, even in the teeth of England.’ Once he had left Ceylon he told Cynthia Asquith (one of the British ruling class): ‘Those natives are back of us – in the living sense lower than we are’ (4L 234). The tenuousness of the inclusive pronoun here exposes the statement for what it is: an unpleasant attempt to act out a sense of entitlement in order to exorcise an underlying feeling of vulnerability and powerlessness.
Lawrence was, after all, painfully aware of his dwindling finances in Kandy, and (worse still) he soon found that he was unable to work amid the heat and noise. By sitting in the comparative cool of the verandah in the mornings, he managed to finish Mastro-don Gesualdo (he sent the second half off to Mountsier on 2 April).9 He also began translating the short stories from Verga’s Novelle Rusticane, but the only creative work he did (either during his stay or shortly afterwards) was to write a short skit on Earl’s commitment to Buddhism, and the poem ‘Elephant’, based on his experiences at the perahera.10 Just a fortnight after his arrival, on 28 March, he wrote to Anna Jenkins, asking whether she thought he might like ‘the apple-growing regions, south from Perth’ (4L 218), since he was keen to move on to Australia. Being in Ceylon made managing his literary affairs almost impossible: he received letters from Mountsier and Curtis Brown, but proofs of ‘The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter’ from Austin Harrison, forwarded from Taormina, arrived too late to be checked and returned (the story was published in the English Review in April).11 Before hearing back from Perth, he made enquiries after the timetable of the RMS Orsova, which travelled from Colombo to Fremantle. By 16 April, he had booked tickets for himself and Frieda, paying an extra fee for passage to Sydney. They ultimately planned to travel onward from Sydney to San Francisco, and so to Taos.12 They would sail on 24 April, giving Anna Jenkins’ home in Strawberry Hill, Perth, as a forwarding address.
By this time the rains had started in Kandy and the days were much cooler. On 15 April, the Lawrences went on an excursion to the hill station of Nuwara Eliya, 6000 feet above sea level; the air was pleasant there, but the spectacle of so many white people deliberately enjoying themselves was distasteful to Lawrence, who detested simple tourism. Although he and Frieda enjoyed shopping in the bazaars for jewellery and ornaments,13 he felt that he might easily sink ‘into a kind of apathy’ (4L 228) in Ceylon. On 22 April, he posted the first half of his new translation of Novelle Rusticane to Mountsier,14 then bade farewell to the Brewsters and travelled with Frieda to Colombo, staying with Judge George Ennis and his wife Ethel for two nights before boarding the Orsova on the afternoon of 24 April.
At sea again, he was able to watch ‘flying fishes sprinting out of the waves like winged drops’ (4L 233). Among his fellow passengers was the socialist and theosophist Annie Besant (who was travelling to attend a theosophical convention in Sydney), though Lawrence does not appear to have spoken to her.15 As on the Osterley, he occupied his time by translating Verga. Mid-voyage, on 30 April, he and Frieda were feeling ‘a bit dazed and indifferent – reckless’ (4L 234) after their six weeks in Ceylon. They were heading towards Australia with little sense of what they would find there or what they would do when they arrived.16
They docked at Fremantle on 4 May and checked into the Savoy Hotel. It was the most expensive place Lawrence had ever stayed in. Australia immediately struck him as ‘a queer godforsaken place: not so much new as non-existent’ (4L 235). This was a verdict which would only intensify in the course of his three-month stay. Later he would refer to it as a ‘strange, vast, empty country’ (4L 239), ‘strange and empty and unready.’ The democratic nature of the country and its society upset him, and he was inclined to quote the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie to account for the atmosphere of this ‘new’ country: ‘a colony is no younger than its mother-country. In many ways it is older: more nerve-worn’ (4L 240).17
On 5 May, Lawrence and Frieda were taken by Anna Jenkins to the Booklovers’ Library, a meeting place for the Perth literati, where they were introduced to the Dutch-born author and civil servant William Siebenhaar. He recommended that the Lawrences stay at ‘Leithdale’, a guesthouse-cum-convalescent home in Darlington (16 miles east of Fremantle) run by the nurse and author Mary Louisa (‘Mollie’) Skinner and her friend, Ellen (‘Nellie’) Beakbane. Arrangements were duly made through Anna Jenkins (who knew Mollie Skinner) and the Lawrences travelled out there the next day.
Here they found themselves on the edge of the ‘bush’ and in the company of a fiercely independent, intelligent and sympathetic woman who could discuss Australia with Lawrence and show him the local flora and fauna. Mollie Skinner was born in Perth in 1876 but had moved with her family to England at the age of two (her father having been recalled as a captain in the 18th Royal Irish Regiment). They lived for a short period in Ireland, but Mollie was educated in Edinburgh and at various places in England, finally training as a nurse at the Royal Hospital for Women and Children in London before her family moved back to Australia in 1900. She had then worked as a journalist and a nurse in Perth, Wagin and Katanning before travelling back to London to train as a midwife. During the war she had served as a nurse in India.18 By the time Lawrence met her she had published a guide to midwifery and an epistolary novel based on her experiences in (among other places) Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Delhi;19 she was working on a second novel entitled ‘Lettie’ (later Black Swans).
Lawrence soon warmed to Mollie. He read and commented on her writing, suggesting that she should put aside her work-in-progress and provide instead a fictional account of the lives of the first settlers in Western Australia; he also encouraged her (as Jessie Chambers had earlier encouraged him) to draw more fully on her own family history, and especially on the life of her brother Jack (a war veteran who had been injured at Gallipoli and had also settled in Darlington, exchanging a small farm given to him under the Returned Soldiers’ Settlement Scheme for ‘an unstocked three acres’ by a brook).20 Lawrence’s broader advice to her on writing was refreshingly pragmatic, and clearly intended to draw out her talent for direct observation. He told her to set aside time for writing each morning or evening (‘an hour – the same hour – that’s very important’) and not to worry about storylines, formal considerations, style or the feelings of people used as models for the characters. She was to stay close to experience, writing of ‘the people you know, describing their reactions as you know they do react, not as you imagine they should’; above all, he emphasised the need to avoid ‘sentiment’ and to be analytical and even ‘spiteful’. He offered to help her publish the book when it was written.21 His supportive comments were well received, since they inspired Mollie to write her novel ‘The House of Ellis’ during the next fourteen months.
Lawrence enjoyed his time in Darlington. He found the people and the place ‘kindly and quite lovely’ (4L 240). He liked his hosts and he appreciated the plain-speaking style of his new Australian acquaintances. Shortly after landing in Fremantle, he had explained to a friend of Anna Jenkins his desire to visit remote islands and ‘recreate himself anew’: the friend declared him ‘a restless, dissatisfied-with-yourself wanderer’ and ‘a fool.’22 In a similar vein, a fellow guest at ‘Leithdale’ told him that she ‘didn’t think much’ of The White Peacock and recommended that he read Mollie’s Letters of a V.A.D., since it was ‘just as good.’23 He found these doses of Australian bluntness a ‘tonic’.24 The first glimpses that he got of the Australian bush were also captivating; in time they would prove very helpful for his writing. For now he struggled to articulate the strength of his reaction to it: he described it in German as ‘ein Wald, ein Vor-wald: nicht ein Uhrwald: etwas wie ein Traum, ein Dämmerungwald das noch nicht einen Tag gesehen hat’ (4L 237) (‘a forest, a pre-forest: not a primeval forest: somewhat like a dream, a twilight-forest that has not yet seen a day’).
Yet he was soon eager to travel on to Sydney, using the onward tickets he had purchased in Ceylon. Just a week after his arrival, he visited Fremantle and booked berths on the P&O ship Malwa; he and Frieda would be leaving on the afternoon of 18 May. It may have been during this excursion that he saw copies of The Rainbow in the Perth Literary Institute (and purchased one of them for five shillings).25 On the morning of their departure, the Lawrences met Anna Jenkins in Fremantle; they had lunch with the Siebenhaars and Mrs Zabel (the owner of the Booklovers’ Library). Anna Jenkins gave them a letter of introduction to a journalist working on the Sydney Bulletin (though they chose not to use it);26 Siebenhaar gave Lawrence two volumes of his verse (which would shortly be thrown overboard),27 a copy of the Western Australian Yearbook for 1902–1904 (containing a potted history of Western Australia), plus an essay which he had written on the Dutch author E. D. Dekker – and Dekker’s best-known novel Max Havelaar (1860) – to commemorate the centenary of the author’s birth in 1820.
The Malwa stopped at Adelaide and Melbourne on the nine-day journey to Sydney. Lawrence visited art galleries on both occasions. In Melbourne, he was particularly struck by the French artist Puvis de Chavannes’ painting entitled ‘L’Hiver’, which he felt captured something of the spirit of the Australian landscape, in spite of its wintry subject-matter and affectation:28 ‘the pale, pure silver dead trees with vivid limbs: then the extraordinary delicacy of the air and the blue sky, the weird bits of creek and marsh, dead trees, sand, and very blue hills’ (4L 265). The delicacy, beauty and weirdness he detected in the antipodes caused Lawrence to think of his estranged friend Katherine Mansfield: Lawrence told Kot that if he were in Australia he too would ‘understand Katherine so much better. She is very Australian – or New Zealand’ (4L 241).
The ship docked on the east side of Circular Quay at Sydney on the morning of 27 May. As in Fremantle, the Lawrences seem initially to have taken a room in a nearby hotel (perhaps in the Macquarie Street area). Lawrence thought Sydney ‘a great fine town, half like London, half like America’; the harbour was ‘wonderful’ (4L 249), too, ‘quite one of the sights of the world’ (4L 250). However, the city was very expensive, so after one or two days, having made some enquiries about houses on the north shore of Sydney, they travelled 40 miles south to the township of Thirroul on the New South Wales coast, where they rented a furnished bungalow with the droll name ‘Wyewurk’: an ‘Australian humorism’ (4L 279). It was ‘a lovely little house on the edge of the low cliff just above the Pacific Ocean’ (4L 249). They set about cleaning it and decorating it with the items they had bought (and been given) in Ceylon.
Frieda had been particularly keen to settle down; though she and Lawrence remained uncertain about the ‘new and raw’ local area (with its wood and tin houses, lack of street paving, and delivery of newspapers and post on horseback), they soon came to appreciate ‘the room to be alone’ (4L 252) and – in spite of the season – they took full advantage of the opportunity to bathe.29 Lawrence initially ‘got a Heimweh for Europe: Sicily, England, Germany’ (4L 249), but once his habitual upset in a new place subsided, the place came to seem uncannily familiar. There were coal-mines nearby, and the people were ‘all English by origin. It is rather like the Midlands of England, the life, very familiar and rough’ (4L 253). On the ship from Fremantle he had met two couples from Nottingham who had emigrated to Australia, drawn by work in the knitting mills of Sydney.30 In one sense, he was ‘quite at home’ (4L 263), in spite of often feeling ‘awfully foreign’ (4L 253).
Lawrence was finally able to settle to work in Thirroul. By 3 June he had started writing an Australian novel, Kangaroo, and was determined to stay until it was finished.31 In a letter written on board the Malwa, he told Amy Lowell that he had sent his muse to a nunnery and was letting it repent of its ways: he was evidently determined to avoid exacerbating the reputation for eroticism which Amy feared he was gaining in America.32 A few days later he was considering writing a romance.33 When the novel came, however, it had ‘no love interest at all’ and ‘no sex either’ (4L 258). It focused instead on two couples – British settlers Richard Lovatt Somers and his wife Harriett, and their Australian neighbours, Jack and Victoria Callcott – describing in great detail the Somers’ dreadful experiences in England during the war, and their involvement in the political intrigue and in-fighting between opposed left- and right-wing factions in Sydney, led by the trade unionist Willie Struthers and the charismatic leader of the reactionary ‘Digger’ movement, Benjamin Cooley (or ‘Kangaroo’). Lawrence incorporated sections from the Sydney Daily Telegraph and the Sydney Bulletin into his novel as he wrote.34 The extent of his knowledge of Australian politics, and of communist sympathisers and anti-Bolshevist organisations in the Sydney area, has been the subject of considerable debate and controversy.35 There is no evidence of direct contact with specific individuals or groups, though Lawrence almost certainly heard about and vigorously discussed local politics with people in Fremantle, Darlington and Sydney; it was not simply a case (as Richard Aldington assumed)36 of his transposing the Italian political scene onto Australia. The egalitarian spirit of Australia and its ‘democratic conceit’ (4L 247) had interested and disgusted Lawrence in equal measure since his arrival in Perth, so he was deeply drawn to expose the egoistic power games which underpinned them. His rapid progress with the novel in the coming weeks was comparable to the work he did on Aaron’s Rod in Ebersteinburg the year before. He had completed more than half of the novel by 21 June, and it was finished by 15 July; he had averaged 3500 words per day between those dates. The novel was sent to Mountsier on 20 July.37
The intensity of Lawrence’s writing commitment during the six weeks it took him to finish Kangaroo is one of the factors which tells against his active engagement with political groups or individuals in Sydney. Lawrence would have needed to spend a good deal of time working on the novel at his home in Thirroul; his letters reveal a desire for separation and solitude,38 and twice in July he stated that they ‘don’t know one single soul’ (4L 275) and ‘don’t want to – prefer it alone’ (4L 278). The only people we know he had contact with were the two couples from Nottingham – the Forresters and the Marchbanks – whom he and Frieda met on board the Malwa; he renewed contact with them in Sydney (borrowing a small sum of money from the Marchbanks) and invited them to spend a weekend at Wyewurk in late July.39 He was certainly not unduly bothered with literary business. Aaron’s Rod had been published by Seltzer on 14 April; copies arrived in Thirroul on 11 June. Lawrence told Seltzer that they looked ‘so nice’, though it took him some time to pluck up the courage to ‘look out the cut parts’ (4L 260). He sent copies to Earl Brewster, Mabel Dodge Sterne and Catherine Carswell.40 Around the same time he wrote to his mother-in-law to acknowledge the upset occasioned by Johanna’s decision to leave Max von Schreibershofen and marry Emil von Krug.41 Once he had finished writing Kangaroo, he also sent a letter to William Siebenhaar, acknowledging the kindness he had extended to the Lawrences in Perth. Although Lawrence had found Siebenhaar’s poetry ‘too classical,’ he was far more interested in the essay on Max Havelaar and in Siebenhaar’s skills as a translator.42 Lawrence suggested that if Siebenhaar began a translation of the novel, then he would help to arrange publication by submitting it to ‘the best publishers in New York’ (4L 270).
At an early stage of working on Kangaroo, Lawrence had settled on 10 August as the date when he and Frieda would leave Sydney for San Francisco. He had decided to get a cabin on the Union Line ship RMS Tahiti, stopping at Wellington, Rarotonga and Papeete and arriving into San Francisco on 4 September.43 By 7 July he had visited the Consul in Sydney and received assurance that visas would be no problem.44 He booked berths but did not purchase the tickets until later in the month because he had to wait for Mountsier to cable him some money. His remaining weeks in Thirroul were spent ‘learning Spanish, ready for the Mexicans’ (4L 280). Mabel Dodge Sterne sent him notes on Taos and some photos. He looked forward to reading the ‘famous Ulysses’ on his arrival in the USA, though he suspected that Joyce might prove ‘a trickster’.45 Lawrence instinctively disliked impersonal and coolly ironic writing; his own recent writing had been restlessly self-reflexive, contingent and exploratory, incorporating direct attacks on his critics, and flippant or sardonic asides to his readers. He feared that the formal experimentalism of Kangaroo would anger his readers, telling Kot that even the ‘Ulysseans will spit at it’ (4L 275). Seltzer had sold around 3000 copies of Aaron’s Rod; he had managed to sell just 685 copies of Sea and Sardinia.46 The figures were depressing, but Lawrence went on believing that he would have his day.47 He was already thinking of writing ‘an American novel with Indians in it’ (4L 277).
After he left Perth, Lawrence had received an invitation to dinner from Hugo Throssell, son of the former Premier of Western Australia, and his wife Katharine Susannah Prichard. He had sent his apologies from Sydney.48 Katharine subsequently contacted him to say how much she enjoyed reading Sons and Lovers; she sent him a copy of her own novel, The Black Opal (1920), plus some Australian poems, plays and music.49 On 6 August, shortly before his departure from Thirroul, he wrote to thank her, telling her that the poems and plays had made him feel Australia was ‘a dark country, a sad country, underneath – like an abyss,’ but with a marvellous landscape and atmosphere, and an ‘unget-at-able glamour’ (4L 282).