16
Writing and Painting: April 1926–March 1927
(i) Florence and the Villa Mirenda
On 20 April, the Lawrences left the Villa Bernarda and travelled with Barby and Elsa to Florence, staying at the Pensione Lucchesi on the Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia. The idea was for Frieda to travel on from there with her daughters to see her mother in Baden-Baden before they returned to England. Lawrence would be able to go to Perugia to work on his book on the Etruscans. The weather in Florence was ‘perfectly vile’ (5L 435): the incessant rain made Lawrence think again of getting a little ship and going to ‘the Isles of Greece and Smyrna’ (5L 436). In the end, Frieda decided to stay in Italy (perhaps mindful of the fact that she would be in Baden-Baden for the family’s celebration of her mother’s seventy-fifth birthday on 14 July). The girls departed by themselves on 28 April.
The urgent question now arose of where Lawrence and Frieda should settle. Lawrence was able to re-establish contact with old acquaintances in Florence. He enjoyed the company of Reggie Turner, for instance, and he mixed with other members of Norman Douglas’ old circle, too (though Douglas himself was away when Lawrence arrived in the city, and when Lawrence saw him in a café some weeks later he chose to avoid him).1 One of the people he met was the artist and musician Collingwood Gee. On 26 April, Gee introduced Lawrence to the Wilkinson family: the landscape painter Arthur Gair Wilkinson, his wife Lilian (or Diddy), and their two children (Frances and William).2 They lived at the Villa Poggi in San Polo Mosciano, near Scandicci, on the outskirts of the city; the owner of the neighbouring villa (Raul Mirenda) had rooms to let, and Gee thought that Lawrence might be able to secure them. The Wilkinsons were middle-class bohemians committed to living a free life in the spirit of William Morris: Frieda would describe them as ‘vegetarian, anti-vivisection, conscientious objector, socialism, etc.’ (5L 568). In a previous life Arthur Gair Wilkinson and his brother Walter had made wooden puppets and toured English sea-side resorts with a puppet theatre. Lawrence appreciated Arthur’s eccentricities.
On 29 April, Lawrence and Frieda went by themselves to look at the Villa Mirenda, with a view to renting its top floor. Three days later, they met Raul Mirenda in the company of the Wilkinsons and negotiated to take it for a year for the equivalent of £25 (the same amount it had cost them to rent the Villa Bernarda for four months). The Mirenda was ‘an old square sort of farm villa’ standing ‘just by the Church of San Polo Mosciano’ (5L 443), with ‘two gardens, and lovely slopes of vines and olives’ (5L 447); there were pine woods nearby, ‘open and free, and beautiful’ (5L 618), and it benefited not only from the closeness of the Wilkinsons, but from the service of three families of local peasants (the Lawrences would be looked after by the 15-year-old Giulia Pini and by the slightly older Pietro Degli Innocenti, who had been taken in by the Pini family).3 The flat also contained a stove, since silk worms had been kept there before the war and needed the warmth in order to survive.4
They moved in on 6 May. The move came around a week after the beginning of a miners’ strike in England, and almost coincided with the beginning of the General Strike on 5 May, which Lawrence feared might represent the onset of a dangerous class war.5 Although he was living far away from the trouble, he followed it closely in the Italian papers and wrote to his sisters about it (their husbands’ shops were situated in mining areas badly affected by the unrest).6 Lawrence knew that he would be returning to England to visit them after he had accompanied Frieda to Germany; his native country was never far from his thoughts during the early summer.
Figure 14 Lawrence and Frieda posing by the well at the Villa Mirenda, San Polo Mosciano, Florence. (Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham, La Phot 1/27.)
Lawrence’s first task was to liven up his new home, with its ‘bare and comfortless’ rooms. He and Frieda bought furniture, plus ‘linen and kitchen things’ (5L 448), and he began painting the doors and window frames (the stair rails would follow in due course).7 The Villa was ideally situated to maintain that healthy balance of privacy and company which he and Frieda had decided was essential for them. Throughout May and June social invitations were freely given and received. Reggie Turner brought Pino Orioli with him to Sunday lunch with the Lawrences in mid-May; Orioli would soon go from being a contact to a good friend. New connections were established, too. On 2 June, the Lawrences were invited out to the castle belonging to Sir George Sitwell and his wife, Lady Ida Sitwell (the parents of the writers Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith); Lawrence found their large collection of antique beds at once amusing and rather strange, though he was pleased to gain an invitation to their Derbyshire family seat, Renishaw Hall, in August.8 He lunched with a champion fencer, and he invited the composer, novelist and landscape gardener Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (the 14th Baron Berners) up to tea, describing him as ‘RollsRoycey’ (5L 491).
Amid all this social activity the Wilkinsons proved to be ideal neighbours: ‘quite nice, and not at all intrusive’ (5L 453). The Lawrences enjoyed singing French songs and English folk songs with them, and there were fairly regular visits between the houses and trips out together.9 It is possible that the family’s artistic interests proved stimulating for Lawrence, re-igniting his interest in painting and perhaps inspiring him to begin work with Frieda on a piece of embroidery based on an Etruscan design.10 The book on the Etruscans was put on hold for a time, but Lawrence did finish ‘Two Blue Birds’ during the first weeks in his new home (he sent it to Nancy Pearn, manager of the Magazines Department at Curtis Brown, on 13 May); he also wrote the brief ‘Introduction’ to Max Havelaar which Knopf insisted on having.11 Later in May he would take over from Elsa the task of typing Frieda’s translation of David. It was hard work, and he only finished it on 14 June.12 Just as he had felt that Else Jaffe managed to capture the rhythm of his writing in her translation of The Boy in the Bush,13 so he now felt that Frieda’s German made his play ‘so much simpler and more direct’ (5L 464), less packed with meaning but more suggestive (though this did not prevent him from extensively altering her translation as he typed).
In June he wrote a few short travel sketches for immediate sale, inspired by a request from Vogue for ‘little articles’ (5L 482). ‘The Nightingale’ (written on 23 June) drew on Lawrence’s experience of hearing the birds singing in the neighbouring woods, where he would sit beneath an olive tree to write; ‘Fireworks’ was based on his attendance at the Feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist in Florence on 24 June. Neither piece would be published in Vogue, but they were soon accepted by Forum and the Nation and Athenaeum. These small sketches were easy to write and comparatively lucrative; they were an attractive option for Lawrence at this time, since The Plumed Serpent had not proved popular, and he had no desire yet to write another novel.
(ii) ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’
In mid-June, Lawrence was relieved to learn that Brett had settled at the Kiowa Ranch with Rachel Hawk and her two children. He had been concerned that Brett should avoid the isolation of living there by herself, and he was glad that Rachel could oversee her expenditure on the maintenance of the cabins.
The danger of isolation was the key theme in a short story which Lawrence began writing in June. The central protagonist (or anti-hero) of ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ is Cathcart, a wealthy individual who purchases and populates a small island with the vaguely philanthropic purpose of establishing an harmonious community set apart from the messiness and corruption of mainstream society. Unfortunately, his enterprise fails due to a combination of the hostile spirit of the place and the obdurate nature of the humans and animals he takes with him: he is cheated by the humans, beset by bad weather, and shocked by the propensity of all living things to suffer accidents or succumb to disease. Disillusioned by the setbacks and faced by rising debts, he decamps to a smaller second island, taking with him only one old couple, a widow and her daughter to keep house for him, and an orphan boy. To his dismay, however, his financial woes continue here; worse still, he compromises his communitarian ideals by getting the widow’s daughter pregnant. He agrees to marry her, but then effectively pays her off after the birth of the child and moves by himself (with his cat) to a smaller island still, inhabiting a simple hut on a rocky outcrop containing only sheep. Here, in the absence of any human company, he becomes thoroughly misanthropic, giving up any kind of work and refusing to read. He even rounds up the sheep and sends them back to the mainland with the two delivery men, and he is relieved when the cat goes missing. In the impressive final pages, the island is obliterated by a fall of snow and Cathcart’s reason deserts him in line with the emptying out of the meaning from the words in his head. He falls in the snow, but somehow manages to creep back to his house, stupefied by the whiteness, cold and silence: the story ends as he looks out over his unrecognisable island, speaking to himself of summer and ‘the time of leaves’ (WWRA 173).
Lawrence clearly drew on Compton Mackenzie in sketching out the character of Cathcart. Mackenzie had been the tenant of Herm in the Channel Islands until 1923, when he moved to a second island (Jethou); he had recently purchased a cluster of islands called the Shiants in the Outer Hebrides (between the isles of Lewis and Skye), and had invited Lawrence to visit him there.14 However, Lawrence would later insist that the story was ‘no portrait’ (6L 69); he told Secker that Mackenzie only suggested the idea of Cathcart, and that he should feel ‘flattered’ by the comparison and his inclusion in a tale with a ‘philosophy’ and ‘real significance’ (6L 205, 218). The power of the story emerges not from personal satire, but from the ability of the narrator sympathetically to inhabit and relay the desperate nature of Cathcart’s idealism and his horror and madness as the desire for integrity and control brings him into conflict with Nature itself. Lawrence’s own persistent fantasies of communal living are an integral part of Cathcart’s character, as are his intermittent feelings of misanthropy and the desperation he experienced during his separations from Frieda. The story’s greatest achievement is to expose Cathcart’s naivety and egotism while retaining a compassionate sense of his frailty and his longing for something finer from life.
‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ was sent to Nancy Pearn on 10 July. Two days later, the Lawrences left for Baden-Baden. The entire family was gathering to celebrate his mother-in-law’s birthday. Lawrence enjoyed being back in the Black Forest; it was warmer than Florence, and he felt that the atmosphere was less tense (the fascists were tightening their grip on power in Italy). He began to visit the Kurhaus, drinking the hot spring water. Life in Baden-Baden was a matter of ‘tea-parties with old baronesses and Excellencies and by-gone grandeurs’ (5L 501), though he found time to write another short sketch entitled ‘Mercury’, loosely based on a trip he made with Frieda to the top of the Merkur (a hill situated a few miles outside the town, at the summit of which was a restaurant and a derelict Roman altar to Mercury).15
(iii) Last visit to England
Lawrence and Frieda travelled on to England on 29 July, arriving in London on the evening of the following day. With the help of Millicent Beveridge, Lawrence had rented a top-floor flat in Rossetti Garden Mansions, Chelsea, for the whole of August; it was close enough to the Victoria and Albert Museum for Frieda to spend time with her son, Monty. During their first days in the flat, Lawrence was properly introduced to him for the first time: Monty was struck by the persistence of a strong Midlands accent in Lawrence’s voice (‘Sargent, sooch a bad pe&c.macr;ynter’).16
Lawrence went to the Curtis Brown offices and arranged to meet Nancy Pearn for tea; he also saw Kot, Rolf Gardiner and Aldous Huxley, whose travel book, Along the Road (1925), he had read and enjoyed in December 1925.17 On 7 August, he and Frieda visited Richard Aldington and Arabella Yorke at their cottage in the hamlet of Padworth in Berkshire. Aldington was still married to H. D., who refused to divorce him; Lawrence felt that her behaviour was unacceptable, given the way she had acted with Cecil Gray in Cornwall back in Spring 1918.18
They returned together to London, but on the morning of 9 August Lawrence took the train alone to Edinburgh to visit Millicent Beveridge in her house, ‘Bailabhadan’, in the village of Newtonmore in Inverness-shire. It was his first time in Scotland and he seems to have found the Highlands appealing, though he was dismayed by the dampness of the place, and by the numbers of cars and tourists. He told Brett that ‘For these countries, one should be amphibian,’ and he described the beginning of the grouse shooting season as ‘an event for those that shoot, and a still bigger one for those that get shot’ (5L 509). From 16 to 18 August, he and Millicent went on an excursion west to Fort William and Mallaig, where they took a steamer to the Isle of Skye. They enjoyed a radiant day there, which made Lawrence feel that he was ‘outside the made world’ (5L 513). He wrote quite beautifully of it to Else Jaffe when back in Newtonmore: ‘There is still something of an Odyssey up there, in among the islands and the silent lochs: like the twilight morning of the world, the herons fishing undisturbed by the water, and the sea running far in, for miles, between the wet, trickling hills, where the cottages are low and almost invisible, built into the earth’ (5L 512).
Lawrence told Brett that he was writing nothing,19 but on 20 August he sent a sharply negative review of the first volume of H. G. Wells’ The World of William Clissold (1926) to Nancy Pearn; it would be placed in the Calendar and published in October. The next day he travelled to Nottingham, and on 22 August Eddie Clarke drove the family to Mablethorpe, where Ada had hired a holiday cottage. The ‘great sweeping sands’ and ‘green sandhills’ of the Lincolnshire coastline reminded him of a much earlier family holiday, in August 1906.20 Writing to Brett, he noted that the ranch seemed so far away from the Midlands that it was ‘like the Moon’ (5L 514). Part of him had dreaded being here with his family,21 but his health was good and he actually enjoyed being back and found himself joining in the fun.
Figure 15 A family photograph taken outside St Peter’s Church, Markby, Lincolnshire, week of 22–26 August 1926. Back row: D. H. Lawrence, Emily King, Maude Beardsall, Ada Clarke, Gertie Cooper. Front row: Joan King, Jack Clarke, Bert Clarke. (Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham, La Pc 2/8/26.)
He explained to Else that the continuing industrial unrest in the country went on troubling the English underneath the ‘careless and carefree and indifferent’ (5L 515) surface of daily life. This time he sensed a power for change in the English: there was ‘a queer, odd sort of potentiality in the people, especially the common people. One feels in them some odd, unaccustomed sort of plasm twinkling and nascent’ (5L 520). Lawrence was well enough in himself to take a particular interest in the health of Gertie Cooper, the old family friend who lived with Ada (and had joined them in Mablethorpe). He subsequently went out of his way to arrange for Gertie to be X-rayed and to receive a sputum test to determine whether she had tuberculosis, and to secure her a place at the Mundesley Sanatorium in Norfolk (where Mark Gertler had been treated).
Ada left on 27 August. On the same day Frieda (evidently keen to avoid Lawrence’s family as best she could) travelled up from London and they rented a bungalow in Sutton-on-Sea, two miles south of Mablethorpe. Lawrence had heard some time before that the ‘Three Hundred Club and Stage Society’ in London was planning to put on a performance of David, and he was keen to attend the first rehearsals, so he was unsure when he might need to leave. In the meantime, he and Frieda enjoyed the good weather.
In the first weeks of September the late summer crowds on the beach began to dwindle and the skies became overcast. The Lawrences gave up the bungalow on 13 September: Frieda went straight back to London, to rooms in a house in Hampstead which they had secured with the help of Gertler and Kot, while Lawrence travelled to Nottingham to see Emily, before staying with Ada in Ripley. It would be his last visit to his home region. During his brief time with Emily in Nottingham, Lawrence expressed a desire to see a solicitor to make a will; this shows how much he had reflected on the seriousness of the recent breakdowns in his health.22
On 14 September he walked around all the familiar haunts in Eastwood with Willie Hopkin. The next day, the Clarkes drove him out into Derbyshire, past a number of stately homes (including Hardwicke Hall and Renishaw Hall – though he was too late to take advantage of the Sitwells’ invitation to their family home).23 Lawrence would draw upon the landscape very closely in his writing in the coming months. What struck him most, however, were the terrible effects of the miners’ strike; he witnessed the ill-feeling which four and a half months of strikes had created, with whole families becoming radicalised and militant, attacking those men who had been driven back to work by their circumstances. He told Kot: ‘This strike has done a lot of damage – and there is a lot of misery – families living on bread and margarine and potatoes – nothing more’ (5L 536). In an untitled essay which he wrote the following month, now commonly known as ‘Return to Bestwood’, Lawrence noted how the behaviour of the men and women in his hometown had changed. Miners were reduced to picking blackberries in the hedges, where in earlier times it would have been the job of women or children; their wives showed little regard for authority, or for social propriety. In Ripley he had seen two women who had been abusing strike-breakers on their way home from work being ‘taken off to court to be tried for insulting and obstructing the police’ (LEA 17).24
Lawrence travelled down to Hampstead on 16 September. His remaining days in England were filled with social engagements. He met Monty again, and he saw old friends, including Kot, Gertler and Catherine Carswell. He also became re-acquainted with Brigit Patmore, a member of the London circle during his time in Mecklenburgh Square during the war; she came to tea at the Lawrences’ lodgings with Dorothy Richardson and the latter’s husband, Alan Odle.25 Gertler introduced him to Bonamy Dobrée, a lecturer in English at the University of London, and he also arranged a meeting with Willie Hopkin’s daughter, Enid Hilton. On his final day in London he had lunch with Robert Atkins, who was due to be producer for the forthcoming performances of David; Lawrence left feeling rather uncertain about the whole enterprise, though he still held out a hope of returning to see his play on the stage at Christmas time.26
(iv) New pursuits, fresh perspectives
He and Frieda left England on 28 September. They spent a few enjoyable days in Paris with Mabel Harrison before travelling back to the Villa Mirenda. They got home on 4 October. It was still warm in Florence: the grape harvest was in progress, and the locals were out shooting migrating wild birds for the table. Lawrence poked fun at the seriousness of their endeavours in his essay ‘Man is a Hunter’. On 6 October, Richard Aldington and Arabella Yorke arrived for a five-day visit. Lawrence enjoyed their stay; in the course of it, he wrote (and then re-drafted) an introduction to Memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun, one of the volumes which Aldington was editing for ‘The Broadway Library of Eighteenth-Century French Literature’, but the piece was never used.27 Soon after they had left, Lawrence began putting together some music to accompany the performance of David: it was ‘very simple,’ requiring only ‘a pipe, tambourines, and a tom-tom drum,’ but he thought that it might help to ‘get that feeling of primitive religious passion across to a London audience’ (5L 557). He went next door to the Villa Poggi to use the piano, and showed his work to Wilkinson, who helped him to correct mistakes in it; the finished score was sent to Robert Atkins on 16 October.28
On 18 October, Aldous Huxley telegraphed to invite the Lawrences to lunch. He and his wife, Maria (née Nys, who had lived – rather unhappily – at Garsington under Ottoline Morrell’s guardianship during the war), were living in Cortina d’Ampezzo but had previously stayed in Florence and he had come to receive dental treatment there. They would meet the Lawrences several times during their stay. On one visit, Maria gave Lawrence four or five old stretched canvases which had belonged to her brother: this kind gesture would inaugurate a new phase in Lawrence’s love of painting.29 The Huxleys became important friends and supporters of Lawrence; they stayed loyal to him to the end of his life.
In the final weeks of October, Lawrence and Frieda began decorating the large south-facing sitting-room (or salotto) of the Villa Mirenda. The local peasants came in to whitewash the walls, and Lawrence bought matting for the floor, painted the furniture, and ordered in some firewood. Frieda would eventually hire a piano for the room.30 Lawrence fell back into the rhythm of writing outdoors in the wood, under a tree and next to a small cave (where he would take cover if it rained). Here he wrote a humorous short story entitled ‘In Love’, inspired by Elsa Weekley’s recent engagement to a man named Edward (‘Teddy’) Seaman, exposing the gap between the serious and sombre business of feeling genuine love and affection for someone and the absurd compulsion to display that affection in public.31
During his recent visit to the Midlands, it seems likely that Lawrence spoke at length with his sisters about their mother. One anecdote in particular stuck in his mind. At the beginning of Lawrence’s career as an author, Austin Harrison had written to Lydia Lawrence to inform her that her youngest son would be riding in his own carriage by the time he was 40; she is said to have responded in a cynical fashion, ‘Ay, if he lives to be forty!’ (LEA 18). Lawrence recounted his mother’s response to Harrison’s letter twice in print, in ‘Return to Bestwood’ and in a later essay entitled ‘Getting On’ (written in early January 1927); it provided evidence of the condescension which he now sensed in his mother’s attitude to the entire family. At the age of 41 Lawrence felt able to defy his mother’s dismissive attitude to his younger self; in ‘Return to Bestwood’, he reflects on his own ‘adventure’ (LEA 32) in life, noting how far he had travelled from the world his mother knew, the values she had instilled in her children, and the kind of life she would have wanted him to lead. To bring out the contrast, he refers to the buggy which he had used during his last period at the Kiowa Ranch, contrasting the dream of a carriage with the reality of a contraption ridden erratically over rocky ground.32
(v) The First Lady Chatterley
Then, around 22 October, Lawrence began writing another story. He felt that it would be ‘shortish’, since he did not ‘feel like a long effort’ (5L 563). On 18 October, he had told Else Jaffe: ‘I feel I’ll never write another novel’ (5L 559). Yet, this time the writing came quickly. He would work on it in the morning and read his work back to Frieda at lunchtime. After five days of writing he had filled 41 manuscript pages. By 31 October, Frieda was able to tell Monty that Lawrence was at work on ‘a short long story’ about ‘the curious class feeling this time or rather the soul against the body, no I dont explain it well, the animal part’ (5L 569). He had made a start on the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Lawrence’s recent experience of class conflict in England had touched him very deeply indeed; in the new novel, he sought to address this situation and – quite characteristically – to explore ways in which it might be overcome. The story of Constance Chatterley, whose aristocratic husband (Sir Clifford) has been paralysed from the waist down in the war, and who turns for her sexual and emotional fulfilment to the gamekeeper (Oliver Parkin), picks up the theme of love across class boundaries that Lawrence had already touched upon in The Virgin and the Gipsy. Yet, where the earlier story had been content to use the gipsy as a largely symbolic figure whose life offers a stark contrast to the stifling propriety of Yvette’s experience at the Vicarage, the new novel probed the nature of Connie’s attraction to Parkin and the practical basis of their continuing relationship. The novel stakes a great deal on the warmth of the physical attraction which Connie and Parkin feel for one another in the face of strong social and cultural barriers, yet it does not ignore the problems which they must confront in looking to the future and establishing a life together. Both are haunted by unfulfilling marriages. Parkin is forced to give up his position at Wragby Hall (the ancestral home of the Chatterleys) owing to the scandal caused by a fight he has with the new partner of his vindictive estranged wife, who wants to claim him back; while Connie is on holiday in France, Parkin arranges to take a job at a steelworks factory in Sheffield, where he becomes Secretary of the Communist League.33 He is radicalised by his experience of class conflict; Connie’s visit to Sheffield to see him at the home of his landlords (the Tewsons) leaves her in no doubt about the difficulties involved in creating a new life with Parkin, who is shown to be ‘a little man of the people, merely of the people’ (7L 391). Connie becomes pregnant with Parkin’s child and is determined to escape from Wragby, but in spite of the efforts of her friend, Duncan Forbes, to establish common ground between her and the gamekeeper, the feeling of hope for the future at the end of the novel masks a good deal of upset and despair.
The first version of the novel took just six weeks to complete. As soon as it was finished (late in November) Lawrence began to re-write it, perhaps feeling dissatisfied by the tentativeness of its ending. He knew that the novel was ‘very improper’ (5L 581), not simply because it dealt with adultery and a sexual relationship between an upper-class lady and a member of the working class with strong Bolshevist sympathies, making some use of the proscribed words ‘cunt’ and ‘fuck’, but because it showed the adulterous couple in a positive light, striking out against class prejudice and the financial and materialistic basis of English society.
Lawrence’s sympathy with Connie’s need for sexual fulfilment outside marriage is remarkable when we consider the extent to which he was fictionalising Frieda’s ongoing affair with Ravagli. Shortly after the Lawrences had left Spotorno, Ravagli was transferred from Savona to Porto Maurizio, on the Italian Riviera, and then made a Captain and given a post in Gradisca, in the north-east corner of Italy (close to Trieste). He contrived to visit Lawrence and Frieda on two separate occasions during a period he spent in Florence on military business; on the second of these two occasions Lawrence was suspicious of his intentions and asked to see his military travel documents.34 Frieda soon sensed Lawrence’s identification with both Parkin and Clifford Chatterley, the working-class man who believes in the life of the body and the sick husband who can no longer satisfy his wife’s sexual needs.35 Writing the novel and bringing it to Frieda was Lawrence’s way of commemorating the former intensity of their physical attraction to one another at a time when his sickness had put paid to an active sex life.
Lawrence was committed to writing it in full knowledge of the fact that both Secker and Knopf would refuse to publish it without some cuts being made. He was aware, however, that there were other routes which he might use to get his work into print. He had recently allowed Glad Ghosts and Sun to be published by Ernest Benn and Charles Lahr in small private editions of 500 and 100 copies respectively,36 and on 23 November he had suggested to Mabel Dodge Luhan that she should print a limited edition of her memoirs and distribute copies by subscription.37 It seems likely that Lawrence had private publication in mind at an early stage of his work on the novel.
Lawrence averaged 2000 words per day over the six weeks it took him to complete the first draft. This left little time for other writing, though he did produce a review of H. M. Tomlinson’s Gifts of Fortune (1926) for T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly. The Three Hundred Club and Stage Society had decided to delay the production of David until the spring and put on The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd in December instead.38 Lawrence felt that Robert Atkins had ‘funked David’ (5L 576). When he was sent photographs and press-cuttings for the performances of The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, Lawrence wrote to thank the producer, Esmé Percy, and took responsibility for criticism of the play’s ending, offering to ‘re-model’ (5L 604) it in response to feedback from Percy and the actors. He feared that it had been poorly received,39 though he and Frieda were glad to hear from Rolf Gardiner that George Bernard Shaw considered the dialect ‘magnificent’ (5L 605). On a more positive note, he corresponded with Martin Secker about the idea of putting together a new collection of essays, deciding to publish his travel sketches on Mexico alongside the three pieces he had written on the Indian dances in New Mexico (‘Indians and Entertainment’, ‘The Dance of the Sprouting Corn’ and ‘The Hopi Snake Dance’).40 The volume would finally be published under the misleading title Mornings in Mexico.
(vi) Paintings
Another significant development was Lawrence’s new interest in oil painting. By 11 November he had finished the first of his paintings on the canvases which Maria Huxley had given to him. ‘Unholy Family’ (later re-titled ‘A Holy Family’) depicted a young child with its parents: ‘the bambino – with a nimbus – is just watching anxiously to see the young man give the semi-nude young woman un gros baiser’ (5L 574).41 Lawrence considered it very modern in its subject matter and was amused when the Wilkinsons shied away from it as being too ‘suggestive’ (5L 576). Lawrence would work on several more paintings before the end of the year, including ‘Men Bathing’, ‘Boccaccio Story’ and ‘Fight with an Amazon’. He was particularly pleased with the second of these efforts, which illustrated a scene from a story in The Decameron in which a young peasant acquires a position as a gardener in a nunnery by pretending to be deaf and dumb, and then proceeds to have sex with each of the nuns in turn. The painting shows a group of nuns spying the exhausted gardener asleep beneath a tree in a dishevelled and undressed state. Lawrence did not shy away from detail in his painting: he depicted the gardener with ‘penis and all’ (5L 597). When he showed it to the Wilkinsons, their reaction was predictable: they thought it ‘not exactly nice!’ (5L 614). Lilian felt that this and the other paintings were deliberately lewd,42 but Lawrence maintained that his intention in foregrounding the penis was to ‘shock people’s castrated social spirituality’ (5L 648).
He found it ‘rather fun, discovering one can paint one’s own ideas and one’s own feelings – and a change from writing’ (5L 585). He borrowed an easel from the Wilkinsons and planned to go to Scandicci to get further canvases stretched.43 Working on the paintings helped Lawrence to overcome the feeling of isolation when the Wilkinsons left the Villa Poggi and moved to Florence for a few months in mid-November.44 It was easy to paint in the large rooms of the Villa Mirenda, and the canvases went straight up on the walls. Painting was an important accompaniment to writing for Lawrence. In the process of re-writing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he became increasingly critical of words and their tendency to make physical experience abstract, and to trivialise and vulgarise sex. Painting offered a means of approaching the subject more directly; the paintings of this period must be understood as part of Lawrence’s concerted effort to get around the clichés and abstractions of language. Using paints he could access the same kinds of physical awareness of the body that he was attempting to invoke in the novel through a strategic use of what we might call ‘embodied language’, in the form of shifting imagery, rhythmic prose, dialect and the four-letter words.
The restless formal qualities of Lawrence’s writing had long served to upset readers’ expectations and to challenge and dislodge their perceptions and beliefs, but throughout the 1920s Lawrence developed a more aggressively self-reflexive, sardonic style in his prose fiction in order to directly attack the ossified sensibilities of his English readers. He had gained a reputation as an erotic writer, and had become known for his acute and perceptive responses to other cultures in his novels and travel essays, yet he was constantly alert to the potential for complacency in both areas of his work. In early December, as he began re-writing his novel, he produced a review of R. B. Cunninghame Graham’s Pedro de Valdivia, Conqueror of Chile (1926) for the Calendar in which he strongly criticised what he saw as its author’s acceptance of the Spanish conquistador’s actions and his blindness to ‘other people’s sufferings’ (5L 590). In late December, in a note thanking Trigant Burrow for sending him an essay entitled ‘Psychoanalysis in Theory and in Life’, Lawrence highlighted readers’ tendency to misunderstand the central ambition of his own work through their wish to pigeonhole it: ‘I who loathe sexuality so deeply am considered a lurid sexuality specialist’ (5L 611). Lawrence is at pains here to distinguish his own concern with the unconscious life of the body and sex from the more pervasive cultural obsession with conscious projections of sexuality. The author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was aware of the difficulties involved in getting the prurient English to stop sniggering or protesting long enough to confront the realities of sex and to think differently about the body.
There were enjoyable distractions over the Christmas period. On Christmas Eve, Lawrence and Frieda invited all the local peasants – the Orsini, Bandelli and Pini families, and their children – round to the Villa Mirenda. They decorated a pine tree (stolen from a nearby wood) with ‘lots of candles and some Christmas glittery things’ (5L 616) and gave out little wooden toys they had bought in Florence, plus sweets and dates.45 The adults drank Marsala, while several of the older teenage girls sang and danced.46 The salotto was filled with 27 people, who came up in relays.47 Lawrence compared the scene to ‘Ripley fair’ (5L 610): it was exhausting but fun. On Boxing Day, the Wilkinsons visited, bringing panettone, sweets and cigarettes; Lawrence re-lit the candles on the tree, gave Arthur a signed copy of the proofs of David as a gift, and they had a jolly time feasting and singing.48
Work on the second version of Lawrence’s novel proceeded in ‘sudden intense whacks’ (5L 628), which seemed quite different from the way he had written novels in the past.49 This was partly because his new fascination with painting left him feeling that he was losing his ‘will-to-write altogether’ (5L 621). During December he considered exhibiting his work in London and even fantasised about giving up writing and making his living solely by painting.50 By 3 January he had taken possession of his own easel (an exact replica of one he had borrowed from Arthur Wilkinson).51 In January and February he would work on several more paintings: ‘Red Willows’ (a landscape painting indebted to Cézanne, showing three nude male figures bathing in or standing beside a river), ‘a little picture of a negro wedding’ (5L 623) (now lost, but apparently inspired by a photograph he had recently seen in a copy of the Illustrated London News, sent to him by Martin Secker),52 and ‘Flight Back into Paradise’ (a subversive religious painting showing ‘Eve dodging back into Paradise, between Adam and the Angel at the Gate, who are having a fight about it’ [5L 639], which Lawrence initially planned to be part of a triptych).53 A fourth painting, ‘Resurrection’, was begun in late February or early March.54
Florence was a good place in which to immerse oneself in art, and Lawrence embraced opportunities to discuss his work with friends in a spirit of openness and co-operation. The Wilkinsons (who returned to the Villa Poggi on 15 January) may not have appreciated his paintings, but other artist-friends were more receptive and encouraging. He wrote to Dorothy Brett about his work, and when Earl Brewster – just back from India – came to visit for a few days from 16 January, Lawrence was keen to take advice on painting from his more experienced friend. Brewster took Lawrence to visit the Florentine painter Alberto Magnelli (a friend of Giorgio De Chirico who had moved in Italian Futurist circles); Lawrence was unimpressed by the modernity of Magnelli’s work, and exhibited the same strong negative reaction to its experimental formal qualities that he had expressed over a decade earlier when visiting Duncan Grant’s studio.55 Two other artist-friends with whom he could discuss his work (Millicent Beveridge and Mabel Harrison) moved to the nearby Villa La Massa in late February, too, bringing with them Millicent’s sister Mary. Lawrence took walks out into the surrounding countryside with Millicent; their shared observations on the local flora inspired him to begin writing the long essay ‘Flowery Tuscany’. Aldous and Maria Huxley would also have been interested in his paintings; in early March they brought their friend, Mary Hutchinson, the cousin of Lytton Strachey and mistress of Clive Bell, to visit the Lawrences at the Villa Mirenda.56
(vii) The Second Lady Chatterley
By contrast, writing the novel was a private and solitary business which involved Lawrence in an ongoing re-evaluation of his past, and in the exploration of his current feelings about his marriage. The reflections on Eastwood which had given rise to the novel continued as he worked on the second version. During January, the terrible news of Gertie Cooper’s deteriorating health, and her need to have an operation to remove part of her left lung, brought back tender memories of their youth together, and of trips to the Congregational Chapel with the Cooper girls, Dicky Pogmore and the Chambers family.57 Thinking of his old friend suffering from tuberculosis in this way gave Lawrence ‘the shudders’ (5L 643). In early January, Ada informed Lawrence of the death of Henry Saxton, the former Sunday School superintendent in Eastwood who had run the grocer’s shop next to Lawrence’s birthplace in Victoria Street. Lydia Lawrence had admired Saxton as an upstanding member of the community, but Lawrence told Ada that he would ‘shed no tear in his memory’ because he had ‘never liked him’ (5L 631). He immediately wrote another autobiographical essay which Nancy Pearn entitled ‘On Becoming a Success’ (now known as ‘Getting On’), in which he cast a critical eye on his mother’s attraction to figures like Saxton and her desire for middle-class respectability. He also reflected ruefully on his own liminal social position and failure to attain the kind of wealth which he had recently read about in a biography of Voltaire,58 and witnessed in Aldous Huxley, who drove around in a ‘fine new car’ (5L 566).
Lawrence was now certain ‘from many little things I remember, and from things my sisters tell me she said,’ that his mother had ‘despised’ him as ‘the delicate brat with a chest catarrh and an abnormal love for her’ (LEA 29). That recognition brought some belated understanding of the way that she and the whole family had wronged Arthur Lawrence by trying to make him into a Saxton figure rather than recognising his innate ‘charm’ and ‘warm, uncurbed vitality’ (LEA 28). Through the character of Oliver Parkin Lawrence was making some reparation for the negative depiction of his father as Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers.
The second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finished around 25 February.59 It was significantly longer than the first version and more complex in its structure and characterisation. Lawrence introduced chapter breaks into the novel. He also anticipated the debates staged around modern attitudes to sex and sexuality in the final version of the novel by greatly enlarging the Christmas party scene at Wragby. In the new Chapter V, Lady Eva is joined by Jack and Olive Strangeways, Tommy Dukes and Harry Winterslow, and their conversation dwells on the possibility of social revolution and the kinds of nightmarish Wellsian developments in future attitudes to sex that Connie and Parkin will go on to fiercely denigrate.
The most important development in the second version, however, is the greater degree of imaginative engagement with Parkin. In the first version, Parkin had been a representative working man embittered by industrial unrest and class conflict. In the new version, his social position is more ambivalent and he is shown to be a vulnerable figure with the courage and potential to reach out to Connie. Parkin may have been raised in a working-class household, but his biological father is now a professional cricketer.60 Although he still has no intellectual pretensions, Parkin is able to adapt his speech patterns to the class of the person he is addressing; he is now inclined to disavow Bill Tewson’s invective against the ruling classes, retreating from the pitched battle of politics and cash values into a personal relationship which offers a genuine chance of emotional fulfilment. The sexual scenes between Connie and Parkin are more carefully and far more explicitly described, since physical tenderness between isolated lovers offers the only real alternative to industrial relations and the desperation of both the workers and a dying aristocracy. At the end of the novel, Parkin willingly leaves his employment in Sheffield and – shrugging off the masculine pride of his earlier incarnation – seems happy to let Connie use her money to set them up with a farm once he has secured a divorce from Bertha Coutts. A good deal of uncertainty still surrounds the practical basis of their future life together (since Connie has not yet informed Clifford of her intention to leave him), but Parkin’s ability to step outside the prejudices of his own class helps to redress at least some of the hopelessness and despair felt at the end of the first version.
On the same day that Lawrence finished work on the second version of his novel, he sent to Nancy Pearn a long review he had written of four American books for the Calendar.61 He disliked Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926) and Walter White’s Flight (1926), but said positive things about the innovative depictions of modern American life in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer (1925) and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925). He compared the method of Dos Passos’ novel to the modern arts of cinema and sound recording, and referred to Hemingway’s sketches as ‘short, sharp, vivid,’ describing ‘most of them’ as ‘excellent’ (IR 309, 311–12). The other commission he had undertaken for Edgell Rickword, one of the editors of the Calendar, was to write a piece on the work of John Galsworthy for a regular series entitled ‘Scrutinies’, in which younger writers responded to the work of the older generation. Reading Dos Passos and Hemingway at the same time that he re-read Galsworthy would only have emphasised the conventional qualities of the latter’s writing. In the essay Lawrence wrote (which was published in a volume of Scrutinies on the demise of the journal) he was highly critical of the restrictive social vision of The Forsyte Saga (1906–1921), arguing that the characters are so concerned with money and status that the novels afford us no outside vision of human life or psychology which might form a critique of commercial or aristocratic small-mindedness.
(viii) ‘The Lovely Lady’
It was becoming imperative for Lawrence to ‘earn a bit of money’ (5L 653). Accordingly, in late February he started work on a short story entitled ‘The Lovely Lady’, which he produced especially for Cynthia Asquith’s latest volume of tales, The Black Cap: New Stories of Murder and Mystery. The story is fascinating for the light it sheds on Lawrence’s recent re-evaluation of his mother and her influence on the family. The eponymous ‘Lovely Lady’ is Pauline Attenborough, a wealthy and wilful 72-year-old matriarch who has effectively killed one of her two sons (Henry) by opposing his marriage to a woman whom she considered unsuitable. As the story opens, she seems set to blight the life of her other son, Robert, who lives – together with his cousin Cecilia – in her house (‘Old Brinsley’, named after the village neighbouring Eastwood). Robert is a 32-year-old barrister whose reliance on his mother has left him emotionally ineffectual and quite unable to recognise or act on his feelings for Cecilia.
The story hinges on an occasion during which Pauline’s dismissive feelings for Robert are made clear to her niece. Pauline and Cecilia are both sunbathing, Pauline in an enclosed garden at the back of the stables, and Cecilia on the roof of the stable block itself. Pauline speaks to herself in an unguarded fashion, and her comments travel up the rain pipe to Cecilia. It is, as the narrator notes, a case of ‘eaves-dropping in the literal sense of the word’ (WWRA 259). In a comical turn of events, on a later occasion Cecilia pretends to be the spirit of the dead son and speaks to her aunt down the same pipe, blaming her for Henry’s death and instructing her to stop dominating Robert’s life. The incident has a devastating effect on Pauline, who ages almost overnight, showing her true nature. In a moment of brutal honesty, she reveals that Robert was the illegitimate son of an Italian priest, which leaves the way clear for him to marry Cecilia. The story ends with an insight into Pauline’s unrelenting spitefulness, as before her death she cuts Cecilia out of her will and leaves Robert only the house and £2000, setting aside the rest of the money for the founding of a Pauline Attenborough Museum.
‘The Lovely Lady’ is hardly a conventional murder story. It focuses instead on the familiar theme in Lawrence’s writing of the damaging effects of a mother’s wilfulness on her sons, and it reveals how maternal care and support can mask disdain and contempt. Robert’s ability to break from his mother is initiated by the rebellious spirit and quick-thinking actions of Cecilia, who also presses him to recognise his feelings and to decide whether he wants to marry her. The deaths of Henry and Pauline are only murders in the sense that they are felt to have been brought about by forms of psychic interference within the family. The story reflects Lawrence’s belief in the damage we can do to one another by psychic means, and the role that women can play in rescuing sons from their mothers.
Lawrence finished the story by 11 March. A few days later, Frieda travelled alone to visit her mother in Baden-Baden; she may have taken the opportunity to visit Ravagli en route to Germany. Lawrence, meanwhile, secured an invitation to visit the Brewsters at their new temporary home in Ravello; he asked Earl to accompany him on a tour of the nearby Etruscan tombs in Veii, Cività Castellana, Cerveteri, Tarquinia and Volterra.62 He had been interested in Etruscan civilisation for some time, and had already undertaken a good deal of background reading in preparation for writing about it, so the coincidence of Earl’s availability to travel with him and an invitation to write articles on the Etruscans for the American magazine Travel (which had already published two of his Mexican essays) was too good to overlook.63 He left Florence on 19 March, spending two nights in Rome at the flat of Christine Hughes and her daughter (whom he had got to know in Santa Fe) before travelling on to Ravello.64