15
Understanding: September 1925–April 1926

(i) ‘The body of my past’

The SS Resolute docked in Southampton on 30 September, and the Lawrences travelled straight to London and Garland’s Hotel in Pall Mall. Lawrence’s first reaction to England was not as negative as it had been in the winter of 1923–1924: he felt ‘queer and foreign’ in his home country, but it brought a sense of ‘wonder instead of exasperation, this time.’ The impression did not last long. Lawrence found the weather ‘not very cheering’ (5L 311), and he was struck by how depressed people seemed. By the end of October he would write back to Edward McDonald in the States to warn him off coming to England, since it was ‘too depressing: rain, bad trade, general gloom’ (5L 323).

Lawrence and Frieda stayed in the hotel for a week, meeting a number of old friends, including David and Edith Eder, the Carswells (whom Lawrence visited by himself at their new cottage near High Wycombe),¹ and Compton Mackenzie and his wife, Faith. Other contacts were out of town. Murry was now living on the Dorset coast with his wife and their baby daughter (working on his new book project, The Life of Jesus), and Mark Gertler was in a sanatorium in Norfolk. Lawrence chose not to contact Kot (perhaps because of Frieda’s continuing animosity towards him).² The Lawrences went together to visit Martin Secker, his Italian wife Caterina Maria (‘Rina’), and their baby son Adrian at their home in Buckinghamshire. During the visit Secker informed Lawrence that he had 16 acres of hay in his fields, but could find nobody to cut it because the unemployed men in the area were unwilling to give up their dole money for paid work.³ It was probably at this time that Rina suggested they should all spend the winter together in Spotorno, the town to the west of Genoa, on the Italian Riviera, where her parents lived (and where her father, Luigi Capallero, owned a hotel). Lawrence grasped at the suggestion, since it promised the sunshine he craved amid the dampness and fog and despair of England.

As miserable as it was, however, London offered Frieda another opportunity to see her children. Monty was now 25 and working at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Elsa was 23 and doing secretarial work in London; and Barbara was 21 and had just finished her studies at the Slade School of Art. Barby, in particular, would grow close to her mother, and to Lawrence, in the coming months. On 8 October, Lawrence and Frieda left to visit his sisters in the Midlands; they spent a few days in Sneinton Hill with Emily before moving on to Ada in Ripley. Here, Lawrence corrected proofs of The Plumed Serpent, and was driven out into Derbyshire, visiting familiar places.⁴ It still struck him as ‘one of the most interesting counties in England,’ but the weather was awful and he felt that he could not look with any pleasure at ‘the body of my past, the spirit seems to have flown’ (5L 319).⁵ During their second week there, Barby (who was staying in Nottingham with one of her father’s university colleagues and his wife) visited Ada’s house and had dinner with them. However, when it was suggested that she should stay the night, a telephone call to her hosts produced a degree of alarm at the potential impact on Ernest Weekley of the news that his youngest daughter had slept under the same roof as Lawrence and Frieda. Barby felt compelled to leave, which deeply angered Lawrence.⁶ His resentment at Weekley’s attitude made itself felt in his initial hostility to the children. He told Brett: ‘Privately, I can’t stand Frieda’s children’ (5L 332).

When they returned to London, on 22 October, the Lawrences rented a flat in Gower Street belonging to Catherine Carswell’s younger brother, Gordon MacFarlane, whose war novel, The Natural Man (1924), Lawrence had recently read and enjoyed.⁷ It was not very comfortable, but for the week they stayed there it allowed them to meet people, and to catch up with friends and contacts. Lawrence was visited by several writers, including Rose Macaulay and William Gerhardie (who told him that he was ‘the only one we younger men can now look up to’).⁸ On 25 October, he had lunch with Cynthia and Beb Asquith, who were both now living off literary earnings. They struck him as being ‘rather sad – and a feeling of failure’ (5L 324). Lawrence would meet Cynthia again on 28 October. At some point she asked him to contribute a story to a volume she was editing, entitled The Ghost-Book. On 26 October, he visited Humphrey Milford at the OUP offices, and was given a copy of the new illustrated edition of Movements in European History which had been marked up in blue pencil by Patrick O’Daly, a director of the Educational Company of Ireland, who was tasked with censoring references to Martin Luther and the Pope deemed unsuitable for schools in the Irish Free State. Lawrence was ‘half infuriated, and half amused’; he sent the book back to Vere Collins, but asked him to return it in due course, since he felt it would serve ‘to remind me of the glory of the human race’ (5L 336). One of their last visitors was Murry: he was ‘very quiet, and quite nice’ (5L 332), but Lawrence sensed that there was nothing more between them.

He and Frieda left London on 29 October to visit Frieda’s mother in Baden-Baden. Lawrence travelled with a new suit which Eddie Clarke had arranged to have made.⁹ They took a boat from Dover, travelling through Ostend and Brussels to Strasbourg, where they found that the travel agent had made a mistake with connections and they were forced to go the rest of the way by motor car. They stayed at the Hotel Eden. Lawrence spent his fortnight there playing whist with ‘old Baronesses, Countesses and Excellencies’ (5L 331) at the Ludwig-Wilhelmstift. He escaped its unreal atmosphere for walks into the hills and the Black Forest.¹⁰ The sunshine and sense of open space were very welcome after the darkness and claustrophobia of London.

(ii) ‘Smile’

During his time in Baden-Baden, Lawrence may have begun writing a short story entitled ‘Smile’, which reveals the extent to which he dwelt on his recent meeting with Murry. The story allowed Lawrence to exploit the satirical potential of Murry’s recent interest in Christ by probing the nature of his mourning for Katherine in the light of his re-marriage, and his new role as a father. In it, a character named Matthew rushes to Italy to visit his wife, Ophelia, at the ‘Blue Sisters’ nunnery where she has gone into retreat, suffering from a critical illness. He has received a telegram summoning him to her bedside, and he travels with a sense of gloomy foreboding: he sits up all night on his train through France ‘as a kind of penitence,’ and his ‘clean-shaven face would have done for Christ on the cross’ (WWRA 72). On his arrival he is ushered in to see the Mother Superior and told that Ophelia has died that afternoon. However, when he is taken to see the body his seriousness gives way to an irreverent smile. In life he had felt little for her, and involuntary mirth is his instinctive response to realising the nothingness of their childless marriage. The nuns notice a ‘faint ironical curl at the corners of Ophelia’s mouth’ (WWRA 75): she smiles too because he has finally been driven to confess the true nature of his relationship with her. He leaves the room, but his shattering recognition of the blankness of his feelings is revealed in the final line, as he returns to retrieve his hat: ‘He made a desperate, moving sweep with his arm, and never was man more utterly smileless’ (WWRA 76).

(iii) Spotorno

The Lawrences travelled on to Spotorno on 12 November. They broke their journey in Switzerland, staying in Kastanienbaum near Lucerne with a literary critic named Carl Seeling who had expressed an interest in the recent German translations of Lawrence’s writings.¹¹ Seelig and his wife, Maria, drove them out to local places of interest, but it was so cold and icy that Lawrence ‘hated it, and got a cold’ (5L 337). They arrived in Spotorno on 15 November, taking a room in the hotel (the Miramare) belonging to Rina’s father. Here, at Secker’s request, Lawrence wrote a letter defending his behaviour in publishing Memoirs of the Foreign Legion against Norman Douglas’ accusations in D. H. Lawrence and Maurice Magnus: A Plea for Better Manners, which Douglas had recently re-printed in a volume entitled Experiments (1925). Lawrence’s response was written for the Times Literary Supplement, but it would finally be published in the New Statesman on 20 February 1926.¹²

He and Frieda stayed for just one week in the Miramare, since Rina had discovered a suitable property for them to rent: it was the Villa Bernarda, a three-storey house which they took until the end of March for £25.¹³ It was situated ‘just under the Castle, in a big vineyard garden, with terrace over the roofs of the village, the sea beyond’ (5L 357). They did the housework themselves, but a contadino named Giovanni Rossi lived on the basement level of the building, and helped with fetching and carrying things, went shopping for them, and pumped the water. The building actually belonged to the wife of Angelo Ravagli, a lieutenant in the Bersaglieri, who immediately caught Frieda’s eye when she saw him for the first time in his army uniform on the occasion of the Queen of Italy’s birthday. She told Brett (who was now with the Brewsters and Faith Mackenzie in Capri) that she was ‘thrilled by his cockfeathers he is almost as nice as his feathers’ (5L 350).

Shortly after moving into the Villa Bernarda, Lawrence wrote two short sketches for the special April 1926 number of Laughing Horse devoted solely to his work; Willard Johnson would publish them alongside the poems ‘Mediterranean in January’ and ‘Beyond the Rockies’. The sketches – ‘A Little Moonshine with Lemon’ and ‘Europe Versus America’ – both reflect on the differences between life in Spotorno and life in New Mexico. In the former piece, written on 25 November, Lawrence juxtaposes the view from the upper storey of his new Villa and the very different outlook from Kiowa Ranch, with the tall pine tree outside his cabin and the alfalfa slope below. He describes how in Spotorno he has the choice of drinking ‘vermouth, Marsala, red wine or white’ to celebrate St Catherine’s Day, while at the ranch he would be enjoying a warming glass of moonshine ‘with hot water and lemon, and sugar, and a bit of cinnamon’ (MM 99). ‘Europe Versus America’ is more opinionated, attacking the American tourist mentality and the feeling of tension in the USA, and celebrating the awareness of history and the resulting spirit of insouciance in Europe. Lawrence admits to having been wrong in saying ‘Europe is finished for me’: he senses in the indifference of the Italians ‘a sort of bubbling-in of life’ (SEP 200).

Although he appreciated re-discovering these qualities in Italy (and in the Italians), Lawrence did not enjoy the same feeling of freedom and independence in Spotorno that he had experienced during his final period in New Mexico. He was soon expressing irritation at the prospect of visits from Frieda’s daughters. Barby had come out and taken up residence 25 miles away, in Alassio; Elsa was planning to join her in the new year. However, anticipated disruptions did not stop him from getting straight down to writing.

(iv) A new language for the feelings

At some point during November, Lawrence wrote two more essays on the novel to add to the three he had written in the summer. ‘Why the Novel Matters’ and ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ mount a similar defence of the novel as a pre-eminent artistic form, celebrating its unparalleled attention to the affective contexts of our lives and the complex relativism of its moral vision. However, Lawrence also points up the need for novelists to develop a language for the feelings which can avoid cliché and challenge readers to grasp the serious nature of their inner lives rather than indulging in fixed (and false) images of themselves. ‘Smile’ had attempted just this in the way it cut through the sanctified language of loss and mourning to reveal the emptiness of Matthew’s real feelings for his dead wife.

A similarly sardonic story entitled Glad Ghosts, which Lawrence wrote between 19 November and 29 December for Cynthia Asquith’s anthology of ghost stories, also attempts to get behind characters’ social personae in order to expose their true feelings. This first-person story hinges upon the absence of feeling between two respectable couples: Carlotta Fell and her husband Luke Lathkill, and Colonel Hale and his young second wife. The intervention of Luke’s mother, the spiritualist Lady Lathkill, during a gathering at the Lathkills’ Derbyshire home, unwittingly restores the characters to their true feelings (and their desired partners): Colonel Hale pairs off with the spirit of his deceased wife, while Luke steps in and takes the young Mrs Hale, leaving the narrator (Mark Morier) free to begin an affair with Carlotta. Unfortunately the wife-swapping plotline made the story quite unsuitable for The Ghost-Book; it certainly did not help, either, that Carlotta was partly based on its editor and Morier on Lawrence himself.¹⁴

Marital incompatibility and the prospect of liberation through an affair was clearly a subject that occupied Lawrence’s thoughts quite closely during his first weeks with Frieda in Spotorno. Perhaps through conversations with Rina, he had become very aware of recent tensions between the Seckers. The short story Sun focuses on a young woman named Juliet who has escaped to Italy with her child to recover from the nervous exhaustion of her marriage; she recuperates by bathing naked in the restorative sunshine, attracting the attention of a local peasant. Lawrence completed the story and sent it to Brett for typing on 12 December (the very day on which Martin Secker arrived to join his wife in Spotorno). It concludes with the husband, Maurice, arriving to stay with her, wearing a ‘dark-grey city suit’ (WWRA 32) and feeling completely out of place with ‘his grey city face, his glued, grey-black hair, his very precise table manners, and his extreme moderation in eating and drinking’ (WWRA 36). That the story only uses the Seckers as part-models for its central characters is clear from the fact that they are returning to Europe from New York. The story exploits the contrast between the tension of America and the insouciance of Europe which Lawrence had recently spelt out in ‘Europe Versus America’.¹⁵

Lawrence actually found Martin Secker ‘gentle and nice’ (5L 351). As the weather grew colder, Secker and Rina took to visiting the Lawrences most days for afternoon tea; both couples would warm themselves by the stove on the top floor of the Villa Bernarda.¹⁶ The absence of a fireplace in the Italian houses was trying; by mid-December Lawrence had become ‘a bit chesty’ (5L 348) and was forced to take to his bed for a few days.

At Christmas, Barby arrived for a short visit. It was probably the second time that she had stayed with the Lawrences in the Villa Bernarda; Lawrence began to warm to her, appreciating the rebellious and independent spirit which had got her expelled from school for drawing male nudes in a textbook.¹⁷ He told Brett that she was ‘nicer this time – she’s busy painting, has faint hopes of one day selling something.’ Brett had enjoyed the same formal training as Barby at the Slade, though Lawrence thought that in Barby’s case it ‘took all the life out of her work’ (5L 364). He seems to have contributed something to Barby’s paintings – or wanted to, at least – in order to liven them up, just as he had done with Brett.

For her part, Barby obviously enjoyed the liberating atmosphere of the Villa;¹⁸ she responded to it by offering Lawrence an account of her life in the Weekley household, and her upbringing by Weekley, his unmarried sister Maude, and his mother. Lawrence put this information to good use in the novella The Virgin and the Gipsy, which he began writing at Christmas time and finished by late January. Its account of the rebellious Yvette and her stifling life in Papplewick Vicarage, raised by her embittered rector father, Arthur Saywell (who has been left by his wife Cynthia), the craven-hearted Aunt Cissie, and her overbearing paternal grandmother (the domineering ‘Mater’) is full of satire and caricature. Yvette’s life with the Saywells is offset firstly by her friendship with the Eastwoods, a wealthy couple who are living together while they wait for the woman’s divorce to be finalised, and then by her attraction to a gipsy, who saves her from drowning when the banks of the nearby river break and a good deal of the house is symbolically carried away. The Mater is killed, ‘her face purple, her blind eyes bolting, spume hissing from her mouth’ (VG 71).

Martin Secker returned to London in the second week of January. Lawrence sent The Virgin and the Gipsy to him on 26 January, but he (Lawrence) soon decided not to publish it (probably out of consideration for Frieda’s other children). Early in the new year, Lawrence was busy correcting proofs of David; Frieda resumed work on a German translation of the play.¹⁹ He had a strong yearning throughout this period to sail a yacht or small boat with friends around the Greek islands, but he also renewed his interest in visiting Russia; he read and enjoyed Michael Farbman’s After Lenin: The New Phase in Russia (1924) and began learning the language using grammar books sent to him by Kot.²⁰ He was keen to embrace new experiences as a way of counteracting the feeling of growing old which came with this new year and the sombre realisation that he was now 40 years old.

Some experiences at the beginning of 1926, however, seemed wearily familiar. Murry reneged on a plan to visit Spotorno, on the grounds that his wife was pregnant with their second child. After his break with Kot, Murry was looking for someone to help run the Adelphi, but his offer to involve Lawrence in it again was dismissed outright: Lawrence told Murry that ‘people don’t want the one-man show of you alone, nor the Punch and Judy show of you and me’ (5L 368). Lawrence encouraged Murry to let the Adelphi ‘die’ (5L 372). This exchange appears to have put an end to the major phase of their troubled friendship. Murry wrote back criticising the essays in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, but then asked whether he could print one of them for free in the Adelphi. Lawrence responded by saying that he felt it would be an act of self-betrayal for him to publish in Murry’s journal: ‘Say your say, Caro! – and let me say mine. But for heavens sake, dont let us pretend to mix them’ (5L 380).

Lawrence’s first attempt to work with Murry on the Adelphi in the winter of 1923–1924 had failed in large part because Murry had professed a desire to use the journal to disseminate Lawrence’s views, but then refused to include his more outspoken writing. By the winter of 1925–1926, Lawrence had consolidated his reputation as a radical writer. As if to underscore this point, he had been invited to read a paper at a meeting of the Cambridge ‘Heretics’.²¹ His recent short fiction had been strikingly satirical and candid, targeting (among other things) religion, middle-class life and marriage, so he rightly viewed the suggestion of collaborating again with Murry as absurd.

On 1 February, he began work on another ghost story for Cynthia Asquith. This time he produced ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’, a satire on middle-class greed, materialism and lovelessness in which a boy named Paul, the son of a rapacious mother and ineffectual father, struggles to silence the haunting voices in his bourgeois home which call for more and more money. Paul rides his rocking-horse to gain knowledge of the winners in horse races, placing bets in a syndicate run by his wealthy maternal uncle and the family gardener, Bassett. Through a lawyer, Paul arranges to give the winnings to his mother – perhaps hoping that she will love him when financially secure – but the extra money only intensifies her spending. Paul’s riding becomes more and more frenzied, until he falls fatally ill after correctly predicting the winner of the Derby, leaving his mother with a dead son and around £80,000. The ending to the story exposes the grotesqueness of a world in which the desire for cash impedes our capacity to love.

(v) ‘Dismal as Hades’

February turned out to be a month blighted by illness and conflict with Frieda. On 10 February, Ada arrived for a two-week holiday with her friend, Lizzie Booth. They stayed at the Villa Bernarda. The next day Elsa arrived and moved with Barby to the Hotel Ligure in Spotorno (since their father did not want them to stay with the Lawrences). Unfortunately, shortly before these arrivals Lawrence fell seriously ill and was confined to bed; he described himself to Brett as suffering from ‘bronchial haemorrhage like at the ranch, only worse’ (5L 390). Ada seems to have been outraged by Frieda’s lack of interest in nursing Lawrence. She took charge of her brother, as she had during his illness at Mountain Cottage, but this time Frieda reacted against Ada’s possessiveness and went to stay with her daughters in the hotel.²² The situation was far from ideal. Lawrence told Earl Brewster: ‘My sister is here with a friend, in this fireless house – and it pours with rain, is cold, and dismal as Hades: self in bed and Frieda cross’ (5L 391).

The conflict did not go away. On 22 February, he was well enough to accompany his sister and her friend to Monte Carlo, where they stayed for three days at the Hotel Beau-Séjour. He left Spotorno feeling deeply angry with Frieda for upsetting his sister’s holiday. It would have been a relief to escape from the Villa and all the tensions, though Monaco proved to be ‘boring’ and the author of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ felt ‘no temptation at all to gamble’ (5L 399). The only consolation was that he found William Siebenhaar and his wife holidaying here, which allowed Lawrence to relay in person the good news that Knopf had agreed to publish his translation of Max Havelaar in the Blue Jade Library series.²³ On 25 February, Lawrence accompanied Ada and Lizzie to Nice on the first stage of their journey back to England. The next day he decided to travel on to Capri rather than returning to Spotorno. From 27 February to 10 March he stayed with the Brewsters at the Villa Torre dei Quattro Venti, the spacious house they had rented on their return from Ceylon.

Figure 13 Back row: Harwood Brewster, Earl Brewster. Front row: Dorothy Brett, Achsah Brewster and D. H. Lawrence. Capri, 27 February–c.10 March 1926.

(Press Photograph. Source – Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, 31 March 1926, p. 625.)

Lawrence’s decision not to return to Frieda after seeing his sister off at Nice reveals the extent of his irritation at recent events. He still did not feel ‘up to F. and her two daughters’ (5L 392). In the autumn of 1923, their angry separation had led Frieda to attempt some kind of affair with Murry; it is likely that in Lawrence’s absence she now did the same thing with Angelo Ravagli. Lawrence, for his part, was retreating to spend time with Brett, the Brewsters, and his other friends in Capri. Brett was planning to return to New Mexico as part of the quota of annual emigrants from the UK, so she would have wanted to see Lawrence. During the first days, the two visited local beauty spots together; Lawrence took the opportunity to catch up with the Brett Youngs, John Ellingham Brooks, Anna di Chiara, and Mary Cannan. He met Faith Mackenzie on two separate occasions; she confided details of her marriage which confirmed Lawrence’s view that she was ‘an unhappy soul, trying to pretend to be gay.’ Lawrence’s sympathy with her situation is clear in his description of her as ‘another who loves her husband but can’t live with him’ (5L 403). His reflections on Faith’s marriage, and on her husband’s life as a rich author with an interest in purchasing islands, would soon find expression in the writing of two new stories: ‘Two Blue Birds’ and ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’.

(vi) Ravello and Brett

The Brewsters left Capri for India on 10 March. Lawrence and Brett departed together shortly afterwards, travelling on to Ravello, on the Amalfi coastline, south of Naples, to join Lawrence’s painter-friends Millicent Beveridge and Mabel Harrison, who had taken rooms there in the Hotel Palumbo. Unfortunately, the hotel and its annexe were both full on their arrival, so Lawrence and Brett were instead given adjoining rooms in a converted stone cottage.²⁴ They found themselves in good company, since Millicent and Mabel introduced them to an interesting American couple: Elfie Rosebery, a talented amateur painter, and her husband, Joseph.²⁵ Lawrence and Brett went for walks in Ravello and took to painting together again.

After a few days, however, a crisis arose in their relationship. They were living unusually close to one another in the cottage; Lawrence’s temporary separation from Frieda and Brett’s imminent departure to America affected their moods and altered the terms of their friendship. In an account Brett probably wrote around 1970,²⁶ she claims that one evening Lawrence came into her bedroom in his dressing gown and declared: ‘I do not believe in a relationship unless there is a physical relationship as well.’ She describes how he got into bed with her and kissed her, but shortly after left in despair, saying ‘It’s no good.’ She states that the next night he wanted to try again, but it was ‘a hopeless horrible failure.’

On the second morning, Brett found Lawrence ‘in a towering rage,’ packing his bags to leave. She persuaded him that it would be better if she left instead, since she needed to visit the American Consulate in Naples to secure her travel documents for the return to New Mexico. Lawrence accompanied her in a carriage to Amalfi, where she boarded the boat to Capri: ‘As he drove away to Ravello, he waved and waved to me, and I waved back.’²⁷ She left on or about 15 March. Her departure was so sudden that Lawrence had to send her laundry on after her.²⁸

There is some reason to doubt specific details in Brett’s account of what happened on these two occasions, but corroborating evidence suggests that they did indeed try sleeping together on the two consecutive nights.²⁹ The most compelling evidence is the letter that Lawrence wrote to Brett three days later, on 18 March, in which he states: ‘One has just to forget, and to accept what is good. We can’t help being more or less damaged. What we have to do is to stick to the good part of ourselves, and of each other, and continue an understanding on that. I don’t see why we shouldn’t be better friends, instead of worse’ (5L 406).

Lawrence’s reasons for sleeping with Brett in Ravello must necessarily remain complex and opaque. He had come to know her very well indeed during their time together in America; she was uniquely placed to hear his complaints against Frieda in spring 1926, and to offer sympathy and advice. She was also utterly devoted to Lawrence, and convinced that she must look after him; she had seen sleeping with Murry as part of her duty of care to him after the death of Katherine Mansfield in January 1923. A strong element of physical affection on her part would have contributed to the coming together. Lawrence felt a degree of attraction to – and affection for – Brett, too. If Lawrence did indeed come to Brett’s room on the first of the two nights – and not she to his – it would probably have been because of his need to clarify the terms of their friendship and avoid a situation in which friendly sympathy was mixed with flirtation. In Oaxaca, Frieda had actually encouraged them to be decisive and sleep together rather than going around ‘like a curate and a spinster.’³⁰ While Lawrence was likely to have been impotent as a result of his illness, and this may have compounded the awfulness of the experience for both parties, it is just as likely that they came up against the lack of ‘sensual correspondence’ (5L 203) which Lawrence had identified between them 14 months earlier.

There is no reason to give any credit to Brett’s later conviction that Lawrence was testing out his physical feelings for her with a view to leaving Frieda.³¹ Frieda certainly felt no sense of threat from Brett in this respect: she would shortly write to her, ‘if you are fond of Lawrence why the dickens should I mind? I dont a bit!’³² In the same letter of 18 March in which Lawrence conceded that he and Brett were more or less damaged individuals, he made reference to a letter he had received from Frieda in which she had adopted a quieter tone, putting their recent dispute down to their isolation and the exclusivity of their relationship. Incorporating other people into their married life together would prevent them from falling out and seeking consolation elsewhere. This was a modus vivendi which would shortly issue in Lawrence’s tacit acceptance of Frieda’s affair with Angelo Ravagli, and her desire for a physical relationship with this other man.

Lawrence stayed in Ravello until 22 March, when he left for Rome with Millicent Beveridge and Mabel Harrison. They stayed here for three nights before travelling to Florence via Assisi and Perugia (where Lawrence found himself fascinated by the Etruscan items in the university museum).³³ On 3 April, he returned alone to Spotorno. He had been gone for almost six weeks.

(vii) Reconciliation

Lawrence was greeted at the station by Frieda, Barby and Elsa. He found Frieda ‘very quiet and welcoming’ (5L 410). In the coming days he would be amused to realise how the ‘long legged daughters’ (5L 436) had checked their mother’s wilfulness and made her much more tolerant and humble. The impression was probably reinforced by the fact that she had come down with a bad cold, while he was back to full health again after his illness (though it took a while for his anger about Ada’s visit to wear off).³⁴ Lawrence’s mood would also be lifted by news from Curtis Brown that some of his recent short stories had been profitably placed on both sides of the Atlantic. Cynthia Asquith had agreed to pay £15 for the inclusion of ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ in her anthology of ghost stories, and Harper’s Bazaar had paid $50 for the same story in the States; Glad Ghosts had been accepted by the Dial; and ‘Smile’ would be published in June by the Nation and Athenaeum in London and New Masses in New York.

Martin Secker had been urging Lawrence to write another travel book.³⁵ He now conceived the idea of doing ‘a book, half travel and half study, on Umbria and the Etruscans’ (5L 415). He had already read George Dennis’ The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848), but he actively sought out other volumes to gauge the extent of knowledge about this lost civilisation. In time, he would be struck by Theodor Mommsen’s dismissal of the Etruscan race as ‘the germ of all degeneracy’ in his study, The History of Rome (1854–1856), and by the dry, scholarly nature of other volumes in German, Italian and English by Fritz Weege, Pericle Ducati and R. A. L. Fell, which he found ‘very dreary’ and full of ‘repetition and surmise.’ One of the real strengths of Movements in European History had been Lawrence’s ability to enliven the information he collected from works by historians and scholars; the challenge of writing in this way about the Etruscans was made all the more appealing by Lawrence’s growing interest in the few surviving remnants of their culture. He told Else Jaffe: ‘the bronzes and terra cottas are fascinating, so alive with physical life, with a powerful physicality which surely is as great, or sacred, ultimately, as the ideal of the Greeks and Germans’ (5L 465).

Significantly, within days of his return to Spotorno, Lawrence wrote to tell Brett that he did not think it would be ‘any use’ for them to meet again so soon after their recent separation: ‘Better get a fresh start on all round: we need it badly’ (5L 417). It was a very clear statement of his wish to draw a line under their intimacy in Ravello. He would never meet Brett again, though they stayed in regular contact after she returned to New Mexico and the Kiowa Ranch. In the coming days he did, however, resume his correspondence with two other female friends, offering practical advice on literary matters. He wrote to Mollie Skinner, admitting to his disappointment with the superficiality of Black Swans, but enquiring after her latest work, and he advised Mabel Dodge Luhan on her frank memoir, ‘Intimate Memories’, urging her to remove the real names from her account and to consider publishing it through Sylvia Beach.³⁶

Notes

1. See Carswell 227–9.

2. See 5L 347 (6 December 1925).

3. See 5L 312 (7 October 1925).

4. See 5L 318 (16 October 1925).

5. On his return to London, Lawrence told Catherine Carswell that during this penultimate visit to the Midlands ‘the horrors of his childhood had come up over him like a smothering flood’; he wished that the area ‘were puffed off the face of the earth.’ Nehls, Vol. III, 10.

6. Nehls, Vol. III, 8.

7. See 5L 315–16 (13 October 1925).

8. See 5L 322 (26 October 1925); Nehls, Vol. III, 10.

9. See 5L 324 (26 October 1925).

10. See 5L 331 (2 November 1925).

11. See 5L 314 (9 October 1925).

12. See 5L 340 (20 November 1925). The letter is 5L 395–7 (ante 20 February 1926).

13. See 5L 338 (19 November 1925).

14. See WWRA xxxiii–xxxiv.

15. See SEP 199–200.

16. See 5L 353 (15 December 1925).

17. See Ellis 284 and 668 fn. 48.

18. See Nehls, Vol. III, 22.

19. See 5L 379 (18 January 1926).

20. See 5L 343 (25 November 1925), 367 (4 January 1926) and 372 (9 January 1926); 5L 366 (4 January 1926) and 376–7 (15 January 1926).

21. See 5L 382 (22 January 1926). Lawrence had to turn down the invitation because he did not know when he would next be in England.

22. See 5L 392 (16 February 1926).

23. See 5L 393 (16 February 1926) and 420 (10 April 1926).

24. See Brett, Epilogue, ii.

25. See 5L 414–15 (4 April 1926).

26. Brett’s account was first published in 1974 in the epilogue to the revised edition of her memoir, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (London: Secker, 1933).

27. See Brett, Epilogue, iii–iv.

28. See 5L 405 (17 March 1926).

29. In two separate written accounts she provided of the events at Ravello, Brett ascribes different words to Lawrence after he left her room on the second night. In one version, he told her ‘your pubes are wrong’; in another ‘your boobs are all wrong.’ Neither expression seems entirely plausible. See Sean Hignett, Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico, A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984), 191–2 and Brett, Epilogue, iii. However, the claim that she and Lawrence attempted to sleep together on two consecutive nights is supported by a letter she wrote to Alfred Stieglitz on 2 June 1931 (Yale University) in which she makes reference to ‘one week of intense living, two nights of tragedy.’ See Outsider 342 and 483 fn. 55.

30. Brett 208.

31. See Brett, Epilogue, v.

32. 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: 69.

33. See 5L 420 (11 April 1926).

34. See 5L 414 (4 April 1926).

35. See 5L 448 (3 May 1926).

36. See 5L 419–20 (10 April 1926); 5L 422–4 (12 April 1926) and 456–8 (17 May 1926).