14
Writing for the Race: August 1924 –September 1925

(i) Setback

As summer started to slip away and Lawrence thought of returning to Mexico and finishing ‘Quetzalcoatl’, his health suffered a serious setback. Between 2 and 3 August, during Willard Johnson’s visit to the ranch, Lawrence grew ill and spat bright red arterial blood. After an initial refusal to seek medical assistance, he was persuaded to see a local Taos doctor who was driven up by a penitent Clarence Thompson. Following a rudimentary examination (which did not involve a sputum test) the verdict was that Lawrence was suffering from bronchial troubles. He took to gargling with Listerine and massaging ointment into his throat to ease it a little.¹ It was clear to Brett (who had witnessed Katherine Mansfield’s rapid decline in health) that Lawrence had suffered his first tubercular haemorrhage.²

The fragile state of Lawrence’s health did not, however, prevent him and Frieda from joining Mabel and Tony on a two-week excursion by motor car to Hotevilla in Arizona to witness the annual Snake Dance at the Hopi Reservation, in the course of which priests dance with live snakes between their teeth. They left on 13 August, attended the festival on 18 August, and also motored through the Navajo lands to see the sacred Cañon de Chelly before returning to New Mexico. It was a round journey of approximately 1000 miles, and it left Lawrence exhausted. In a Santa Fe hotel on 22 August, he wrote a short account of the trip entitled ‘Just Back from the Snake Dance’ on the back of a letter from Brett (who had stayed home at the ranch). In the piece, Lawrence dismissed the dance as a staged spectacle for tourists: ‘Just a show!’ (MM 187). Mabel was horrified by this account. When Lawrence re-wrote it back at the ranch a few days later, it was transformed: in ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’, he reflects on the pueblo Indians’ animistic religion, in which there is no ‘perfect God’ but ‘only the terrific, terrible, crude Source, the mystic Sun, the well-head of all things’ (MM 82). In describing the Snake Dance in great sensuous detail, Lawrence distinguishes the ‘crudity’ and ‘sensationalism’ of the crowd members from the religious mystery discernible in the event: he now stresses how ‘one cannot help pausing in reverence before the delicate, anointed bravery of the snake-priests (so-called) with the snakes’ (MM 92–3). Re-writing the essay offered Lawrence another opportunity to reflect on the need to shed a Western mindset if one is to escape the shallow cynicism and superficiality of modern life.

By 13 September, Lawrence had finished St. Mawr and given the manuscript to Brett for typing.³ On that day he received a cable from his sister Emily, informing him of their father’s death on 10 September. Lawrence wrote a letter to Emily asking for the details: he sent money and offered to pay half of the funeral costs. He told Emily that he hoped it did not rain at the funeral (vividly remembering the wet, squally day on which they had buried his mother).⁴ Thinking back to the cemetery on Church Street in Eastwood, he would also have had in mind his old friend Florrie Cooper, who had died on 28 July from tuberculosis.⁵ Much as he loved his Kiowa Ranch, it had recently become one of the places associated with illness. As the cold weather settled once again on Taos, Lawrence set his mind to travel south for the winter, back down to Mexico (with the money that Curtis Brown had been able to squeeze out of Seltzer); he was anxious to move to a warmer climate because his chest was still sore and his throat was not healing as he wished.⁶

September would be his last full month in New Mexico. During it, he wrote the introduction to McDonald’s Bibliography, plus two further short essays and a new story. The first essay was an opinionated ‘Epilogue’ for the proposed illustrated edition of Movements in European History which OUP now wished to publish under Lawrence’s own name. Lawrence noted rather pointedly that ‘they were afraid of my own name. Now they aren’t. Now they want it’ (5L 117): when they read the piece he wrote, with its characteristically acerbic account of the war (and his feeling that nobody had actually won it), they decided against publishing it. The other essay he wrote was entitled ‘Climbing Down Pisgah’ (which also remained unpublished until after his death). It starts by questioning the value of writing, referring to the mountain at the northern extremity of the Dead Sea from which Moses was afforded a vision of the Promised Land. Earlier generations of authors (including Whitman) aimed to give their readers a vision of wholeness and a view of the entire universe. The modern author, however, is climbing down Pisgah, overwhelmed by the minutiae of science and technology. Lawrence argues that the best he can do in this situation is to stress the ‘vast living incomprehensibility’ (RDP 229), breaking away from static laws by taking imaginative risks and becoming an adventurer.⁷

(ii) ‘The Princess’

Lawrence’s new short story, ‘The Princess’, was partly inspired by a trek he took on horseback with Brett to Columbine Lake, shortly after his return from Arizona. The lake’s isolation is used as the setting for a disturbing tale in which a combination of female sexual detachment and male insecurity brings madness and death. The ‘Princess’ of the title is a cossetted young woman named Dollie Urquhart who sets about discovering a new direction in life following the death of her beloved – and doting – father. She visits a dude ranch in New Mexico with a female companion, and once there arranges to go alone to the lake to see the wildlife with a handsome (but dispossessed) Mexican guide named Romero, in full knowledge of the fact that they will be forced to spend the night together in a nearby hut. In the cold dawn of the following day Dollie agrees to sleep with Romero, but her subsequent dismissal of the experience infuriates him. Romero seeks to win back his pride by keeping her hostage and forcing her to repeat the experience. He is finally shot by forest rangers; Dollie deals with the violence of the entire episode through denial, refusing to confront the deathly sexual impulse which caused her to take the trip in the first place. The denouement leaves one aware of both the self-divisions in Dollie’s nature and the sense of helplessness and humiliation in the dead Mexican.

Lawrence initially felt that ‘The Princess’ should be published in a single volume with ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and St. Mawr:⁸ all three fictions are centrally concerned with bored and spoilt Western women whose encounters with the elemental New or Old Mexican landscape brings about a permanent transformation in their consciousness, with devastating consequences (Dollie is responsible for a man’s death, the Woman is on the verge of losing her life, and Lou Carrington is utterly cut off from the social circles which had previously defined her identity). These texts are a testament to the strength of Lawrence’s work during his second stay in New Mexico, but they were destined never to appear together in the same volume, since Secker chose to publish St. Mawr together with ‘The Princess’ in May 1925, and in early June 1925 Alfred Knopf issued a stand-alone American edition of St. Mawr.

At the end of September, Lawrence and Frieda attended the San Geronimo Festival in Taos Pueblo, staying for two nights in the two-storey house in Mabeltown. While he was there, on 1 October, Secker published his edition of Memoirs of the Foreign Legion; the book’s black cloth boards and gold lettering reminded Lawrence of a ‘Church hymnal’ (5L 141). Back at the ranch, he arranged for shutters to be fitted to the windows; he and Frieda began packing up the more valuable items for storage in their old log cabin at the Del Monte Ranch. By 8 October he had finished writing ‘The Princess’. These days in early October were still bright and hot, but the nights were freezing and there were early flurries of snow. The attraction to Oaxaca was strong, as much for the warmth of the place as for its being in the heart of Old Mexico (Lawrence told his mother-in-law that it was the home of the Maya Indians and Zapotecs).⁹

(iii) Mexico City, Oaxaca, and the completion of ‘Quetzalcoatl’

Down in Santa Fe, the Lawrences took rooms at the Hotel De Vargas. Here they were able to say goodbye to Willard Johnson, Ida Rauh and Andrew Dasburg, and to meet a woman named Christine Hughes (who lived in the city with her daughter, Mary Christine). There was some hope that Bynner might travel down to join them in Mexico for the inauguration of the new Mexican President, Plutarcho Calles, on 1 December. On 19 October, they left with Brett for El Paso, where they stayed overnight and began their journey to Mexico City. The trip went smoothly enough, though delays meant that they arrived at their destination shortly after midnight on 23 October. They checked into the Hotel Regis (as Lawrence had done once before), but moved on to the preferred Hotel Monte Carlo the next day.

Lawrence sought out contacts in the city. He had heard that Somerset Maugham was there, but after making enquiries he received a telegram saying that Maugham had moved on to Cuernavaca ‘to work’ (5L 155). The statement irritated Lawrence, who was critical of the older man’s commercial success and wealth. A further contact also failed to materialise. Manuel Gamio, the Director of Archaeology in Mexico’s Department of Agriculture, had written to Lawrence during May and June; his knowledge of Mexican history would have made him a valuable person to meet with an eye to the completion of ‘Quetzalcoatl’, but sadly he was now away from Mexico City, overseeing excavations in Yucatán.¹⁰ These disappointments brought back Lawrence’s old feeling of animosity to the city, which was made worse when he and Frieda both came down with flu. Lawrence turned for support to his former contact, Zelia Nuttall. He had lunch with her on several occasions, and even arranged finally to meet Maugham at her house in Coyoacán on 5 November. The lunch-time meeting was not a success: Lawrence resented Maugham’s negative view of Mexico and found him ‘sehr unsympatisch’ (5L 162), while Maugham came away with an impression of Lawrence as sick, abnormally irritable and affected by poverty and jealousy.¹¹ Other occasions were more enjoyable. There were visits to the National Museum, and to the Virgin of Guadalupe church. On 26 October, after lunching with Nuttall, Lawrence dined again with Norman King, the British Consul-General whom he had previously met in the company of Kai Gøtzsche. King introduced Lawrence to the Vice-Consul, Constantine Rickards, who had been born in Oaxaca, and whose brother (Edward Arden Rickards) still lived there, working as a priest in the cathedral chapter. This was a connection which made their imminent move to Oaxaca seem all the more appealing.

One further connection also proved fruitful. Lawrence got in touch with the president of the PEN Club in Mexico City, who promptly organised a meal in his honour at a modest Asian restaurant named ‘Café Oriental’. Sixteen Mexican writers attended. Lawrence was seated next to Luis Quintanilla, a Mexican poet and minor official in the country’s Foreign Ministry who was at this time Professor of English at the University of Mexico. Afterwards, Quintanilla (and his American wife, Ruth) would spend a good deal of time with Lawrence; on 2 November, he took Lawrence to visit the distinguished American portrait photographer Edward Weston. Lawrence sat for Weston two days later; the two photographs which Weston subsequently sent to Lawrence did not please their creator, though Lawrence liked them ‘very much’ (5L 185). One is a relaxed profile shot in which Lawrence is smiling, looking downwards; the other (which Lawrence preferred) is a far more pensive and sombre shot (though the resentment and anxiety of the photographs taken by Nickolas Muray in New York are wholly absent).¹²

The Lawrences and Brett left for Oaxaca on 8 November. The distance was just 250 miles, but the journey took two days. They travelled first to Esperanza, where they caught a connecting train to Tehuacán (a two-hour journey on a wild stretch of railway).¹³ After spending the night here in the Hotel Mexico, they continued straight on to Oaxaca: an eight-and-a-half-hour journey at around 12 miles per hour through ‘wonderful scenery,’ including the steep gorge of the Tomellín Canyon. On arrival they checked into the Hotel Francia, which Lawrence thought ‘very pleasant’ (5L 163) and cheap. His initial response to their latest hometown was overwhelmingly positive. He told William Hawk back in Taos: ‘Oaxaca is a little town, about 30,000, alone in the south, with a perfect climate. The market is full of roses and violets, the gardens are all flowers. Every day is perfectly sunny, a bit hot at midday’. Emily was treated to a colourful description of the native Indians: ‘Zapotecas, small, but very erect and rather fierce. They weave blankets and make very jolly pottery, and come in wild from the hills to sell them’ (5L 166). Even his throat and chest seemed to heal in the ‘soft warm air’ (5L 164).

Father Edward Rickards introduced them to a lively expatriate community, whose members entertained the Lawrences and Brett at their homes and motored out with them to local places of interest. Brett took photographs of the Lawrences and of Oaxaca which Lawrence sent as postcards to friends and relations.¹⁴ The PEN president had written ahead to the Governor of the State of Oaxaca to alert him to Lawrence’s arrival; he soon received an invitation to meet Isaac Ibarra at the Governor’s palace. Yet this meeting only served to exacerbate Lawrence’s perception of the political instability in the country on the eve of its change of president. Ibarra was ‘an Indian from the hills’; Lawrence found him ‘nice’, but thought the organisation of the town ‘just crazy’ (5L 167). He began to worry about being cut off if violence should break out.¹⁵ His enthusiasm was checked: he once again felt ‘put out by the vibration of this rather malevolent continent’ (5L 170).

Shortly after their arrival in Oaxaca, Brett announced that she had lost her ear-trumpet. A local tin-smith had to be persuaded to make her a replacement: it looked like a gramophone horn and astonished the Indians.¹⁶ Before leaving Taos, Lawrence had told Catherine Carswell that in Mexico Brett would have to ‘take a little place of her own. Not be too close’ (5L 147). Accordingly, when the Lawrences arranged to rent a wing of Father Rickards’ residence at Avenida Pino Suarez it was decided that Brett would stay on in the hotel. They moved on 19 November, armed with furniture they had been given by various new friends in Oaxaca. The living quarters were spacious, comprising five rooms, a verandah with a table and rocking chairs, and a patio with enclosed garden. It was ‘very nice and peaceful’ (5L 176), and their closeness to Rickards meant that they benefited from the services of his ‘Mozo’ (or servant-boy) Rosalino, his elderly cook Natividad, and her daughters, Maria Jesus and Maria del Carmen.

Once Lawrence was safely installed in his new home he began to work again. He had now decided to break decisively with Seltzer and let Curtis Brown approach Knopf for book deals in America.¹⁷ Spurred on by the success of The Boy in the Bush in Australia, Secker had arranged for Lawrence’s books to be imported and sold there by a company in Melbourne.¹⁸ Ida Rauh had been encouraging him to write a play,¹⁹ but this was something for the future. He turned his attention instead to the urgent task of finishing ‘Quetzalcoatl’. Between 19 November and 2 February he re-wrote the novel, almost doubling its length and producing the version which would be published as The Plumed Serpent. It is fascinating that Lawrence chose to complete his novel not in Chapala (which he had drawn upon so closely in creating the fictional ‘Sayula’), but away in the south; in revision, he combined reactions to all three of his visits to provide a composite fictional portrait of the country. He incorporated some of his most recent experiences in Mexico City and Oaxaca into the novel, while also introducing new elements from his first visit (including his negative response to the revolutionary murals of Diego Rivera).²⁰ The key development in revision was alluded to earlier: Kate Leslie (the re-named central character) no longer resists Cipriano’s offer of marriage, but accedes to it on no fewer than three occasions, twice under her own name (in an impromptu ceremony conducted by Ramón, and in a conventional civil ceremony), and once as ‘Malintzi’ (during her initiation into the ranks of the gods). Yet, Lawrence also changed the details of Cipriano’s background, drawing upon things he had heard from his landlord. He enlarged his account of Mexican politics, introducing a character named ‘Montes’ (based on the incoming president, Calles), and he filled out (sometimes at exhaustive length) details of the hymns, costumes and ceremonial dances of the Quetzalcoatl religion.

(iv) Mexican essays

As he worked intensively on his novel, immersing himself in the hypnotic attraction of the Aztec gods and the revival of the old Mexican religion, he offset the imaginative work by gathering material for four vivid sketches of Mexican life. The spectacle of two parrots in the garden of the house repeatedly screeching ‘perro!’ (or ‘dog!’) to Rickard’s little white terrier (Corasmin) would provide the opening to ‘Corasmin and the Parrots’, with its reflection on the tides of conflict and revolution in Mexico.²¹ Lawrence’s sympathetic appreciation of Rosalino’s sensitivity and stubborn resistance to political persecution would form the main subject matter of ‘The Mozo’, and his growing experience of daily life in the town and its neighbouring areas would be drawn upon in ‘Market Day’ and ‘Walk to Huayapa’. Around Christmas time, he wrote a short essay inspired by his reading of Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), in which he argues that Christ was destroyed in the war and must now be reborn through the individual: ‘Who rises with the Risen Lord rises himself as a lord’ (RDP 235). The piece was clearly provoked by the contrast between his own novel on the re-embodiment of the old Mexican gods and Tolstoy’s tale of grotesque spiritual re-birth through an act of betrayal.

As the year came to an end, Lawrence had good cause to reflect on the upturn in his fortune and reputation as a professional writer. On 6 November, he had responded positively to the news that his works had found a new market in Australia, telling Curtis Brown: ‘Little by little the circle widens, and once it has opened, I don’t think it will contract again’ (5L 161). Later that month, T. S. Eliot wrote to Lawrence in his role as editor of the Criterion, praising Lawrence for his style and perceptions, and asking him to become a regular contributor: ‘one of the half dozen or so writers who contribute to such an extent as to form the character of the paper.’²² When Lawrence saw the October 1924 number of the journal he felt relieved that it had ‘got some guts, and isn’t another Adelphi or London Mercury’ (5L 181), but he found the January 1925 number a big disappointment: ‘all bits and bobs, like the rest of the literary magazines.’ He told T. S. Eliot that it was ‘literairy’: ‘If you’re a quarterly, damn it, you ought to be a lonely bird and a fighter.’²³ As Lawrence had already discovered with the Adelphi, his commitment to oppositional modes of thought made it impossible for him to become the settled ‘voice’ of a journal: his instinct was always to challenge and subvert the attitudes and expectations of his readers. He would soon tell Carlo Linati that he believed an author should be ‘in among the crowd, kicking their shins or cheering them on to some mischief or merriment’; a lively book should stir things up, like ‘a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd’ (5L 201). Lawrence used his growing influence to try to help friends like Mollie Skinner and Luis Quintanilla – writing an introduction to Skinner’s new novel, Black Swans, and re-writing an article by Quintanilla on American tourists in Mexico²⁴ – but he was temperamentally opposed to entering the establishment and cultivating a stable readership: he remained an outsider both by choice and conviction.

(v) Conflict with Brett

The Lawrences had managed to maintain some distance from Brett through the move to their new house. However, Brett came to see them on most days at around four o’clock. She continued to type things for Lawrence, helping him out by doing batches of The Plumed Serpent. There is little doubt that Lawrence enjoyed Brett’s company on occasion, and he almost certainly felt a degree of attraction to her. They spent time alone together in Oaxaca, and Lawrence went out with her on the road to Mitla, contributing figures and animals to a landscape painting she produced there.²⁵ However, her reverential attitude to Lawrence soon created friction with Frieda. They were all beginning to feel ‘queer’ living in such close proximity in the town: ‘hemmed in, and shut down’ (5L 191). Brett missed the freedom of the ranch in Taos; Frieda was longing to see her mother in Baden-Baden; and Lawrence was being pressed by Ada and Emily to return to England.²⁶

Lawrence initially responded to the tensions between Frieda and Brett by suggesting that the latter might travel back alone to Taos; in a letter to William Hawk, he asked whether Brett could stay in one of the houses on the Del Monte Ranch.²⁷ At some point during the next three days the situation grew worse, and Frieda told Lawrence that she wanted Brett to leave. On 9 January, Lawrence wrote a letter to Brett which Rosalino delivered to the hotel. It clearly stated: ‘You, Frieda and I don’t make a happy combination now. The best is that we should prepare to separate: that you should go your own way’ (5L 192). On 19 January, she duly left Oaxaca for Mexico City, en route to Taos. The Lawrences saw her off at the station. Lawrence deeply regretted that Brett was travelling alone. He wrote to Luis and Ruth Quintanilla and an American woman named Rosalind Hughes – whom he had met in Oaxaca – asking them to take care of her in Mexico City, and he told Ida Rauh to look out for her in Santa Fe.²⁸ He felt, however, that the break was necessary, and he was eager to finish his novel.

A week later, the decency and friendliness he had wished to maintain toward Brett gave way to forthright criticism. She wrote a letter to him about friendship, forwarding two letters from Murry in which he set out his recent arguments with Kot over the running of the Adelphi: the letters made Lawrence ‘sick in the pit of my stomach’ (5L 203). He replied to Brett by launching into a candid critique of the division in her nature between the spiritual and the sensual, telling her that she adopted a nun pose and then dragged sex into things.²⁹ It was the kind of criticism that he had levelled at Jessie Chambers many years before. He told Murry that the situation with the Adelphi was ‘an absolutely prize sewer-mess.’ In Lawrence’s eyes, Murry had ‘betrayed everything and everybody up to now’; remembering the Café Royal exchange, Lawrence wanted to make a clean break and ‘wipe off all that Judas-Jesus slime’ (5L 205). His dealings with Brett and Murry had brought home to him ‘all the indecencies of intimacies’ (5L 206).

(vi) Sickness and departure

At the end of January, on the same day that he finished The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence fell ill.³⁰ He told Brett that a recent bout of flu had ‘got tangled up with malaria’ (5L 210); in future, he would variously ascribe his illness to malaria, grippe, typhoid and tropical fever.³¹ Whatever its cause may have been, it is clear that his tubercular lungs became active again. He developed a temperature and suffered an inflammation of the bowels and terrible intestinal pains. The doctor gave him quinine injections to ease his suffering, but he felt sure that he would die; even Frieda (who attempted to shrug off his fears) was led to contemplate life without him.³²

Fortunately, his condition became stable. The English and Americans whom he had got to know in Oaxaca were extremely kind and supportive, but his illness permanently changed his attitude to Mexico and made him wish to leave at the earliest opportunity and return to England. The idea was to go to Mexico City and arrange tickets on a ship from Veracruz to Plymouth. On 14 February, he was stretchered out of his house and taken in a motor car to the Hotel Francia. It would be 25 February before he felt able to leave Oaxaca. He was ‘shaken sicker’ by the second leg of his Pullman journey, from Tehuacán to Mexico City; once there, the Lawrences checked into the Hotel Imperial, with ‘bathroom and electric heater,’ since Lawrence was ‘too feeble to rough it’ (5L 214). They hid themselves away to avoid interruptions, but Norman King came to visit, and Quintanilla dropped off a note and arranged to see Lawrence.³³

The doctors told him that he should recuperate somewhere at sea level. He booked tickets on the Rio Bravo, leaving Veracruz on 17 March. Frieda had wanted for some time to live in Devonshire: they now planned to stay in Salcombe for as long as it took for Lawrence to regain his strength.³⁴ Lawrence was still taking doses of quinine and suffering from fever, but he was getting stronger.³⁵ On 11 March, Frieda arranged for him to be examined by Dr Sidney Ulfelder of the American Hospital. Ulfelder did a blood test and took an X-ray of Lawrence’s chest; his verdict (communicated to both Frieda and Quintanilla) was that Lawrence was suffering from the advanced stages of tuberculosis and might only live ‘another year or so.’³⁶

Lawrence apparently heard the diagnosis, but they chose not to tell him the grim prognosis. He was instructed to go back to the ranch in New Mexico and not risk a sea voyage or the English climate, and he was told that he must have complete rest and not write.³⁷ Lawrence and Frieda arranged to return to the ranch for a time; Frieda asked Brett to move to the Danes’ cabin at Del Monte to eliminate any strain and complications.³⁸ Shortly after he received the diagnosis, Lawrence dictated the beginning of a new story to Frieda. ‘The Flying-Fish’ follows the feelings of its sick hero, Gethin Day, as he is called back from the ‘Greater Day’ of Mexico to his old life in Daybrook, in the ‘small and tight and over-furnished’ (SM 210) English Midlands. As the incomplete fragment breaks off, Day, who has expressed a sense of wonder at the marine life he spies from his position at the bow-sprit of a ship, is on the third day of his voyage back to Europe. He sees in the movement of the flying fish and porpoises ‘the wonder of this gulf of creation’: ‘a terror that was brilliant as joy, in a joy brilliant with terror’ (SM 220). The largesse of Mexico seems to shadow his passage home to a duller industrial England. Another unfinished piece which Lawrence wrote in mid-March (the play ‘Noah’s Flood’) explores a similar conflict between old and new worlds: it shows three men who represent modern democracy scheming to steal the secret of fire from Noah and his three sons, and to kill off these embodiments of the old order. Rational and materialistic modernity is set against a sustaining religious vision in these fragments: they suggest the extent of Lawrence’s lasting belief in the importance of his contact with an older form of life in Mexico, despite his recent illness and his longing to escape.

Lawrence was soon well enough to travel. During his final weeks in Mexico City he and Frieda became closely acquainted with George and Anna Conway, a Scottish couple with whom they discussed recent industrial unrest in the country (Conway was Managing Director of the Mexican Tramways Company, which was at this time affected by strikes). As Lawrence began to socialise again, he took to wearing rouge in order to mask his paleness and prevent people from staring at him in the street. On 25 March, the Lawrences finally left Mexico City. They had no problems securing new six-month visas from the American Consulate at Juarez on 27 March, but at the El Paso border Lawrence was subjected to a humiliating medical examination; the authorities here clearly suspected him of having tuberculosis. It was a ‘degrading insult’ (7L 144) reminiscent of the army medicals he had endured during the war. Luckily, this time he was given the all-clear and allowed to continue his onward journey on 28 March. He was glad to be out of Mexico. They arrived in Santa Fe on the afternoon of the following day, took rooms at the Hotel De Vargas, and on 1 April were motored up to the Del Monte Ranch by Ida Rauh and Andrew Dasburg.

(vii) Recuperating at the ranch

They stayed just five days with the Hawk family before going up to their own Kiowa Ranch. Lawrence was still very ill and might have struggled to cope with the cold weather if he had not received invaluable help from two of the pueblo Indians, Trinidad and Rufina Archuleta, who chopped firewood and fetched water for him. Frieda also rallied around him, making the place comfortable again and teaching herself to cook.³⁹ There was another tense exchange with Brett shortly after their arrival, but this was soon resolved when both Lawrence and Frieda forbade her from moving back to her old shed at Kiowa.⁴⁰ Brett was a hardy soul who sometimes seemed impervious to criticism: Lawrence would later refer to her ‘complete and destructive insentience round one-half of the circle – and her hideous persistency, no longer human, in the other half’ (7L 276); Frieda was blunter, calling her ‘unutterably dense.’⁴¹ In spite of the injunction to live away from the Kiowa Ranch, Brett would go on making regular visits and continue to type things for Lawrence. She would also design an attractive dust-jacket for Knopf’s edition of The Plumed Serpent.⁴² During the summer Frieda made a concerted effort to limit and regulate Brett’s visits: she permitted her to come three times per week (on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays) to bring the mail and stay for tea.⁴³

The comparative peace and isolation of life at the ranch would help Lawrence gradually to recuperate during the next two months. He did so with the dubious aid of a French patent medicine which he insisted on taking for his ‘bronchials’.⁴⁴ Against the doctor’s orders, however, he began writing again the moment he had the freedom to do so. It is likely that he showed ‘Noah’s Flood’ to Ida Rauh on his arrival in Santa Fe; perhaps under her influence, he decided to abandon it and begin another biblical play with a similar underlying theme but focusing on the figures of David and Saul. He would, amazingly, complete the sixteen scenes of David by 7 May.⁴⁵ In Lawrence’s play, Saul’s failure to carry out the prophet Samuel’s instruction to kill Agag and his cattle results in his being supplanted by David as King of Israel. Lawrence concentrates on Saul’s feelings of resentment and outright hostility towards his successor; Saul rescinds a promise to give David his daughter Mehab and is eventually forced to offer him his second daughter, Michal, instead. As in ‘Noah’s Flood’ and ‘The Flying-Fish’, Lawrence is concerned with exploring the displacement of an old world of feeling and instinct by a new one of reason and self-interest. Around 16 May, Lawrence read the play out loud to Ida Rauh at a gathering in Brett’s cabin at the Del Monte Ranch; he hoped that Ida could be persuaded to take the rather minor (though challenging) role of Michal in a production, but she seems not to have been very interested by it, citing her age as a reason for turning it down.⁴⁶ Curtis Brown was more enthusiastic, but he thought that it would be better published than performed (due mainly to the length of the speeches).⁴⁷ Lawrence ignored his agent’s views. He tried hard to get the play produced; through Ida he contacted the Theatre Guild in New York to gauge their response to it.⁴⁸ Unfortunately, his efforts came to nothing; the play was placed with Secker and Knopf, who published their editions in March and April 1926 respectively.

On 17 April, Lawrence responded to a letter from Harold Mason of the Centaur Press in Philadelphia, which would publish Edward McDonald’s Bibliography on 23 June. Mason had asked whether Lawrence would be interested in publishing ‘a little book of uncollected essays’ (5L 240). Lawrence agreed to do it, suggesting that he might include his Adelphi essays;⁴⁹ he would later tell Mason’s colleague David Jester that he was attempting to locate ‘The Crown’ for inclusion, too (since three of the six essays had not been published back in 1915).⁵⁰ In due course, he would decide to substantially revise these pieces and add new ones in order to make a coherent volume, rather than simply re-printing a random selection. Lawrence sent Jester the first of the new essays on 29 June, shortly after he had received a copy of the ‘very nice’ (5L 271) Bibliography: it was entitled ‘The Modern Novel’ (later re-titled ‘The Novel’), and it was the last of three pieces which he had written by that date on the nature and importance of long works of fiction (the others, entitled ‘Art and Morality’ and ‘Morality and the Novel’, would be published in consecutive numbers of the Calendar of Modern Letters in November and December 1925).

Although Lawrence was able to avoid unwanted interruptions at the ranch (leaving aside an unannounced, and unwelcome, visit from Tony Luhan and Nina Witt in mid-April), annoying distractions still arose. On arrival in Taos, he had been greeted by a pile of unopened correspondence. He described its contents in an essay entitled ‘Accumulated Mail’, which he sent to Blanche Knopf on 18 April for inclusion in the 1925 number of her almanac, The Borzoi. In addition to receiving an amusing note from an outraged mother in Lenton, Nottingham, who had caught her daughter reading Sons and Lovers, and imploring letters from his sisters wanting him to see their children (and their new houses), he had an enquiry from a man in New York asking about Lawrence’s recent disagreement with Norman Douglas over the publication of Memoirs of the Foreign Legion.

Douglas felt that Lawrence’s depiction of him and Magnus in the introduction to the volume was slanderous. Back in October 1924, Douglas asked Secker whether he might write his own introduction to be added to a second edition, but the book had already been re-printed.⁵¹ He proceeded to privately publish in Florence a pamphlet entitled D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners, which would be published in England in January 1925. It charged Lawrence with having insulted Magnus and with publishing the volume in order to make money, usurping Douglas’ own right to it as executor of Magnus’ literary estate. Lawrence took the opportunity to set the record straight in ‘Accumulated Mail’. He stressed that Douglas would have been free to assume his role as executor if he had been prepared to pay off Magnus’ debts. He made it clear that his sole intention in writing the introduction and arranging to publish the book was to pay back Magnus’ creditors (Michael Borg and Don Mauro Inguanez), and he asserted his own right to half of the money since he had written ‘practically half’ (RDP 240) of the volume. Lawrence briefly considered printing the contents of the letter he had received from Douglas which granted him permission to publish the memoir and to be as frank as he wished in his introductory essay, but he thought better of it.⁵² In letters to Edward McDonald and Curtis Brown, Lawrence stressed that his depictions of Magnus and Douglas were actually rather kinder than they might have been, and he rejected Douglas’ claim to having co-authored ‘Dregs’ with Magnus.⁵³ These things were not raked over in ‘Accumulated Mail’, but the essay at least offered Lawrence the chance to answer some of Douglas’ accusations in print, and to strike out against a man whom he now considered ‘frightfully hypocritical in his doddering degeneracy’ (5L 244).

By 21 April, Lawrence was feeling ‘a good deal better’ (5L 246); he was back on his feet again and able to ride out to the Gallina Canyon, around two miles away, to check on the progress of work to construct a dam and lay pipes in order to irrigate the fields around the ranch. The Lawrences renewed their acquaintance with Willa Cather (who was staying for a time at the ‘Big House’); Frieda in particular got on well with her, though her forthrightness alienated a good number of people in Taos.⁵⁴ On 19 May, Friedel Jaffe (Else’s eldest son) came to stay for two months in Brett’s shed, at the end of a year spent as an exchange student in the States. There was some talk of Kai Gøtzsche accompanying him, but Lawrence was wary of inviting friends to stay during a period when his own financial situation – affected by Seltzer’s bankruptcy – was so tenuous.⁵⁵

Friedel seems to have adapted very easily to life on the ranch with his aunt and uncle; his energies would certainly have been put to good use in the renovations and changes that were made by Lawrence from late May. The Lawrences had always regretted having to go to the Hawks for milk and butter. Now they purchased a black cow named Susan, plus sufficient chickens to keep them in eggs. They kept four horses and could ride out with two of them on a buggy to Arroyo Hondo (10 miles away), which made it far easier to fetch essential provisions.⁵⁶ Lawrence built a new corral for the horses, and a cowshed for Susan (whom he milked twice a day). The second cabin on the ranch was converted into a makeshift dairy. Working on and around the ranch became an essential part of Lawrence’s convalescence, providing the kind of vigorous occupation which he always enjoyed (though he received help with heavy jobs from Trinidad and Rufina, until they argued with Frieda in mid-June and were replaced by a Mexican boy named Alires).⁵⁷ There were pets, too, in the form of the cat (named Timsy, or ‘Miss Wemyss’) which they had previously looked after, and which they now re-claimed from the Hawks, and a wild rabbit which Trinidad caught, and which proved ‘very cheerful’ (5L 258).

Figure 12 D. H. Lawrence milking Susan, his cow.

(Photography Collection, D. H. Lawrence Literary File P-292N, Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.)

By the end of May, Lawrence was able to tell his sister Emily that he was ‘almost my normal self again’ (5L 257). It was only now that he felt able to look again at the manuscript of The Plumed Serpent; he had winced away from it while he still felt weak, since it carried the smell of Oaxaca and associations with his recent collapse.⁵⁸ Once he had summoned the courage, however, he worked on it with his usual speed. By 18 June, he had made corrections to the typescript of the novel and was planning to send it to the Curtis Brown offices in New York.⁵⁹ For the moment, Lawrence held it in high esteem: he considered it ‘my most important novel, so far’ (5L 271) and even regretted having to publish it. The change of title from ‘Quetzalcoatl’ to The Plumed Serpent had been forced upon him by Knopf, who was wary of placing an unpronounceable word on its cover; Lawrence joked that the new title sounded rather disreputable, like ‘a certain sort of “lady in a hat”’ (5L 256).

In early June, Lawrence replied to a letter he had received from the American psychoanalyst Trigant Burrow, whose work he had referred to in a positive way in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious.⁶⁰ Burrow had enclosed offprints of two articles he had recently published in psychoanalytic journals; Lawrence expressed a strong interest in them, stating his own belief in the inability of the modern image-driven consciousness to perceive the pristine nature of the cosmos (he would go on to review Burrow’s book, The Social Basis of Consciousness, soon after its publication in 1927).⁶¹

A few weeks later, Lawrence and Frieda were visited at the ranch by a young American journalist (and aspiring writer) named Kyle Crichton. He and his wife had been attempting to set up an interview with Lawrence for some time. They sought the help of Brett and the Hawks to arrange their trip to Kiowa Ranch. Lawrence was in an upbeat and talkative mood: he treated them to an impersonation of Ford Madox Ford, and to anecdotes about Edward Garnett and Compton Mackenzie. He expressed his long-held belief that Murry had exaggerated Katherine Mansfield’s achievements following her death, and in the course of their discussion shocked Crichton by telling him that his preferred reading at that time was the pulp magazine Adventure, due mainly to the accuracy of its writings about exotic foreign locations. In another very telling aside, he declared his admiration for the work of Émile Zola. From the very start, Lawrence’s fictional writings had combined elements of adventure and romance with graphic realism, so what may at first seem outlandish in this combination of references actually offers an intriguing insight into the nature of his imagination. When Crichton asked Lawrence what made an author write, his answer reflected his recent defence of the novel as a deeply moral form: he rejected Frieda’s jibe that writing is an egotistical act by asserting that ‘you rather write from a deep moral sense – for the race, as it were.’⁶²

(viii) Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine

After Friedel’s departure on 18 July, Lawrence settled down to work on the essays for his new volume, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine. He needed to finish these before September, when his visa expired and he would be forced to leave the country and head back to Europe. He revised ‘The Crown’, removing sections whose intense analysis of the war-time psyche was out of keeping with his current interests and beliefs. In particular, he omitted a long passage from the first of the three unpublished sections, ‘IV. Within the Sepulchre’, in which he had described homosexual activity with boys as a form of negative sensual reduction favoured by soldiers too sensitive to seek a coarser reduction through the rape or abuse of women.⁶³ In the revised version, the target of his critique was not pederasty but ‘alluring sentimentalism’ of the kind promulgated by movies, which Lawrence thought of as infantilising people, preventing them from ‘striving and growing and struggling towards blossoming full maturity’ (RDP 285).

His five new essays used details from life on the ranch to reflect on the unsentimental realities of the animal kingdom and the conflictual basis of love and power.⁶⁴ For example, in ‘Him With His Tail in His Mouth’ (which attacks the schematising tendencies of religion and philosophy), the pluralistic nature of the cosmos is demonstrated through an anecdote about the behaviour of a rooster and a hen who assume the roles of god and goddess in their own, alien world.⁶⁵ Likewise, in ‘……Love Was Once a Little Boy’ the relation between Lawrence and his flighty and lawless cow, Susan, is invoked to make a point about the irreducible otherness of species, races and sexes, and the need to recognise ‘the powerful resistance and cohesiveness of our individuality’ (RDP 343) within relationships in a modern world where democracy and sentimentalism decree that we should be equal in society and inseparable in love.⁶⁶ And in the title essay, ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’, the narrator’s uneasy conscience after killing a porcupine is set aside, since it is ‘part of the business of ranching,’ and no different in kind from Susan’s consumption of ‘little wild sunflowers’ (RDP 354), the chickens’ consumption of a black beetle, or the cat Timsy’s killing of a chipmunk. In a pluralistic cosmos, an individual creature or plant is unique and irreplaceable, but it exists in relation to other life forms: ‘Its existence impinges on other existences, and is itself impinged upon’ (RDP 358). Lawrence’s fleet-footed and aphoristic style in these pieces underscores his sense that morality should be predicated not on abstract principles, but on these shifting relations of power and love: what he termed elsewhere ‘the trembling instability of the balance’ (STH 172).

The new essays, and the revised versions of the old writings, were completed by 25 August, when he reported to Martin Secker that he had already sent the manuscript to the Centaur Press.⁶⁷ On 29 August, Lawrence wrote a letter to Mollie Skinner, consoling her on the death of her brother. He told Mollie that Jack (the model for Jack Grant in The Boy in the Bush) had never wanted to settle down, but ‘lived his life and had his mates wherever he went,’ and he drew parallels with his own refusal to put down roots: ‘There is deep inside one a revolt against the fixed thing, fixed society, fixed money, fixed homes, even fixed love.’ In place of such fixity, Lawrence extolled the value of creating a meaningful life through the act of writing: ‘one can live so intensely with one’s characters and the experience, one creates or records, it is a life in itself, far better than the vulgar thing people call life, jazzing and motoring and so on’ (5L 292–3). Lawrence had always used his writing to get a purchase on experience, reproducing and transforming it in order to bring out its potential meaning, or to impose some structure on it. Ever since the war years he had insisted that he could live in his writings as well as through them. Re-visiting ‘The Crown’ would have reminded him how schematic his imagination had become amid the unhappiness, isolation and upset of that period: goaded by war-time mass hysteria and official propaganda, he had constructed his own model of soldierly behaviour to make sense of the violence and war-mongering he deplored in his fellow countrymen. In contrast, his recent essays had been far more exploratory and provisional, responding to – and reflecting upon – surprising or unexpected events or feelings in his daily life precisely in order to dislodge preconceptions or long-cherished ideals.

The Lawrences left the Kiowa Ranch on 10 September. They went without Brett, who had decided to stay on at the Del Monte Ranch before making her way to Capri for the winter. Lawrence and Frieda had been invited to stay with Nina Witt in New York for a week or two while they secured tickets on a ship to England.⁶⁸ They travelled via Denver and Chicago, arriving in the early evening of 13 September. Lawrence’s hatred of the city had not gone away, though he again used his time there constructively. They met his new American publishers, Alfred and Blanche Knopf, in their plush offices on Fifth Avenue, and the two couples got along very well with one another.⁶⁹ The Knopfs gave him copies of three books which they had recently published; Lawrence would review them later in the year for New York Tribune Books and the Adelphi.⁷⁰ Their evident wealth, and the success of their publishing business, reassured him that they were ‘really sound and reliable.’ By contrast, when he and Frieda met the Seltzers, Adele told Frieda: ‘All I want is to pay OUR debts and DIE’ (5L 306). It cannot have been a very comfortable occasion, since Lawrence was still dependent upon squeezing what money he could from Seltzer via Curtis Brown and his American lawyer, Benjamin Stern.

On 18 September, Lawrence met Edward McDonald, his wife Marguerite, and the Masons at the Algonquin Hotel and went with them to eat at a nearby restaurant.⁷¹ He was glad that Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine would be published in America by the less commercial Centaur Press instead of by Knopf (it would appear on 7 December); he had long resented exposing his more philosophical works to public scrutiny and comment, so the idea of them remaining ‘half private’ (5L 284) seemed an attractive compromise. Lawrence later met Irene Lewisohn (the founder of the Neighbourhood Playhouse) and the actress Helen Freeman, with both of whom he would have discussed his desire to see David staged.⁷² He and Frieda were taken out by a Taos acquaintance named Betty Hare to her house on Long Island; in the evening, they were driven to the shore and ‘made a huge fire of driftwood, and toasted mutton chops, with nothing in sight but sand and the foam in the dark’ (5L 306).

(ix) ‘Still a European’

Finally, around midnight on 21 September, they sailed out of the Hudson River aboard SS Resolute, ‘past all the pier lights’ (5L 305), bound for Southampton. It was a momentous occasion, coming at the end of a period of three and a half years in which Lawrence had lived largely outside Europe. During this time, he had encountered (and written about) different forms of religion in Ceylon, New Mexico and Mexico; he had become imaginatively engaged in the various forms of political unrest he had witnessed in Australia and Mexico, writing novels which explored the relationship between the individual and the state, and politics and history; and he had realised versions of his old ‘Rananim’ ideal at the Del Monte and Kiowa ranches, firstly with Merrild and Gøtzsche, and then with Brett, and in Mexico with Bynner and Johnson. The challenging landscape of New Mexico, in particular, and the life of hard-working community and self-sufficiency he had established there, offered a vibrant alternative to the modern forms of life he had come to criticise in Australia and the American cities. Yet, in Mexico he had been diagnosed as suffering from tuberculosis; the difficulties he had faced in getting back into the USA in late March may have alerted him to the problems he would certainly have in returning. He found it as hard to leave Kiowa Ranch as he had to sail away from the Fontana Vecchia back in February 1922. However, as he sat on the ship, surrounded by Germans and Russians,⁷³ writing a postcard to his mother-in-law in a mixture of English, German, Spanish and French on the second full day of their journey, he admitted that he did not feel ‘very American: no, I am still a European’ (5L 304). His writing would continue to be the place in which he worked through the contradictions in his sense of identity and belonging.

Notes

1. See 5L 96 (10 August 1924).

2. See Brett 139–43.

3. See 5L 121.

4. See 5L 124 and 126 (14 September 1924).

5. See 5L 115 (31 August 1924).

6. See 5L 124–5 (14 September 1924).

7. In a review published in the Nation on 14 April 1926, Lawrence would praise William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain (1925) because the ‘book contains his adventure; and therefore, for me, has a fascination.’ IR 258–9. ‘Homo sum! the adventurer’ is the inscription emblazoned on the commemorative slab to Lawrence in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

8. See 5L 136 (30 September 1924).

9. See 5L 139 (2 October 1924).

10. See 5L 155 (25 October 1924).

11. See Ellis 205.

12. The profile photograph is reproduced as the frontispiece to Harry T. Moore and Warren Roberts, D. H. Lawrence and His World (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966); the second shot is in Ellis (image 17). A third photograph from the sitting is used as the frontispiece to Letters to Thomas and Adele Seltzer, ed. Gerald M. Lacy (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1976).

13. See 5L 162 (11 November 1924).

14. See 5L 179 (29 November 1924).

15. See 5L 169 (15 November 1924).

16. See 5L 172 (17 November 1924).

17. See 5L 161 (6 November 1924) and 165 (14 November 1924).

18. See 5L 161 fn. 2.

19. See 5L 174 (17 November 1924).

20. See PS 52.

21. See 5L 176–8 (22 November 1924).

22. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. II, eds Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 544.

23. John Worthen and Andrew Harrison, ‘Further Letters of D. H. Lawrence,’ JDHLS, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2010), 13.

24. See ‘Preface to Black Swans’ and ‘See Mexico After, by Luis Q.,’ in BB 375–9 and MM 167–72. Neither piece was published during Lawrence’s lifetime.

25. See Brett 194.

26. See 5L 193 (10 January 1925).

27. See 5L 191 (6 January 1925).

28. See 5L 196 (12 January 1925), 199 (16 January 1925) and 200 (20 January 1925).

29. See 5L 203–5 (26 January 1925).

30. See 5L 230 (6 April 1925).

31. See 5L 229 (6 April 1925) and 269 (20 June 1925).

32. See Frieda 165.

33. See 5L 220 (3 March 1925).

34. See 5L 216 (1 March 1925).

35. See 5L 220 (3 March 1925).

36. Letter from Frieda Lawrence to Dorothy Brett, 12 August 1930. Peter L. Irvine and Anne Kiley, eds, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley: Letters to Dorothy Brett,’ DHLR, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Spring 1976), 1–116: 101. See also Frieda 166–7 and Nehls, Vol. II, 396.

37. See 5L 222 (11 March 1925) and fn. 1.

38. See Peter L. Irvine and Anne Kiley, eds, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley: Letters to Dorothy Brett’, 46–7.

39. See 5L 233 (7 April 1925).

40. See 5L 234 (11 April 1925) and 234–5 fn. 2.

41. Peter L. Irvine and Anne Kiley, eds, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley: Letters to Dorothy Brett’, 100.

42. See 5L 250 (4 May 1925).

43. Peter L. Irvine and Anne Kiley, eds, ‘D. H. Lawrence and Frieda Weekley: Letters to Dorothy Brett’, 49.

44. See 5L 236 (14 April 1925) and fn. 4.

45. See 5L 250 (7 May 1925).

46. See 5L 282 (26 July 1925).

47. See 5L 274–5 (1 and 2 July 1925).

48. See 5L 285 (13 August 1925) and 286 (14 August 1925).

49. See 5L 240–1 (17 April 1925).

50. See 5L 255 (23 May 1925).

51. See 5L 184–5 fn. 2.

52. See 5L 256–7 (26 May 1925).

53. See 5L 231 (6 April 1925) and 240 (15 April 1925).

54. See 5L 277 (13 July 1925).

55. D. H. Lawrence to Kai Gøtzsche, 2 May 1925 (unpublished).

56. See 5L 283 (31 July 1925).

57. See 5L 269 (20 June 1925).

58. See 5L 254 (21 May 1925).

59. See 5L 267.

60. See PFU 206.

61. See 5L 261–2 (6 June 1925).

62. Nehls, Vol. II, 414.

63. See RDP 472–5.

64. The new essays were ‘Him With His Tail in His Mouth’, ‘Blessed Are the Powerful’, ‘……Love Was Once a Little Boy’, ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’ and ‘Aristocracy’.

65. See RDP, 309–17.

66. See RDP, 331–46.

67. See 5L 290.

68. See 5L 296 (8 September 1925).

69. See 5L 303 (21 September 1925) and fn. 1.

70. The books were John A. Krout, The Origins of Prohibition (1925); Marmaduke Pickthall, Saïd the Fisherman (1903, re-issued 1925); and Frederick Baron Corvo, Hadrian the Seventh (1904, first American publication 1925). Lawrence’s reviews of the first two books were published in New York Tribune Books on 21 January 1926 and 27 December 1925 respectively; his review of the final book was published in the Adelphi in December 1925.

71. See Marguerite Bartelle McDonald, ‘An Evening with the Lawrences,’ DHLR, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1972), 63–6.

72. See 5L 303 (21 September 1925) and 309 (28 September 1925).

73. See 5L 305 (27 September 1925).