Lawrence arrived in Ravello on the evening of 21 March. The Brewsters and their 14-year-old daughter Harwood were staying at the Palazzo Cimbrone, whose extensive gardens he had walked through with Brett the year before. The Palazzo itself was large and cold; Achsah later noted how they would gather to eat ‘at one end of the enormous refectory table’ and then run up the winding staircase to find their ‘special hearth corner’.1 Lawrence regaled them with stories of his relations and the miners in Eastwood, and of various colourful personalities he had met over the years; Harwood was particularly amused by his account of his attempts to catch Susan the cow at the Kiowa Ranch.2 They enjoyed singing opera arias and folk songs together, and Lawrence acted as a model for a painting Achsah had started, depicting Joseph and the wise men; Lawrence himself began the painting now known as ‘Fauns and Nymphs’.3 He arrived in poor health, suffering from what he described as a bout of flu, but he seemed to grow stronger over the course of the week with his friends.
On 28 March, Lawrence and Earl left on their walking tour. It was, as young Harwood predicted, an affair of ‘trains and motor cars’ (6L 23) as well as trekking. They travelled first along the coast, spending a weekend in Sorrento before walking to Termini at the end of the peninsula. Then they had a few days in Rome, where they probably met Christine Hughes and her daughter and went to a museum (the Villa Giulia) to see Etruscan items. On 6 April they visited Cerveteri, ‘a fascinating place of Etruscan tombs’ (6L 27). That evening they travelled to Tarquinia via Cività Vecchia (where Virginia Woolf glimpsed them from her train window, as they sat on a bench on the station platform).4 They spent 7 and 8 April looking at the painted tombs in Tarquinia. On 9 April they moved on to Vulci, where they saw the Etruscan bridge, the Ponte della Badia. Finally, they went to Volterra, where they visited the museum and saw some fascinating Etruscan funerary urns. The tour ended on 11 April, when they parted and Lawrence returned to the Villa Mirenda to find that Frieda had come back from Germany in low spirits.5
The days spent looking at Etruscan artefacts and sites left a lasting impression on Lawrence. He had always been intrigued by this lost civilisation, and his fascination had only been fuelled by the unsympathetic accounts of Etruscan life in the academic books he read. The mysteriousness of the Etruscans (the lack of knowledge of their language, social structure, customs or attitudes) made them an ideal subject for imaginative speculation; Lawrence felt committed to rescuing their culture from the opprobrium to which it had been consigned by most of the available accounts (just as he had celebrated the maligned culture of the early Teutonic tribes in Movements in European History). What struck him now was the stark difference between the sensitivity and gentleness he sensed in the Etruscans and the brutality of their Roman vanquishers. The tombs seemed to represent a vital alternative to the Romans’ insentient power and to the bullying ideology of the modern fascists whose painted slogans he and Brewster saw in Volterra: ‘Mussolini ha sempre ragione! Mussolini is always right!’ (SEP 159).
In the Etruscan remains Lawrence found evidence of a collective sensual awareness of nature, and appreciation of physical intimacy, which he had been exploring at a personal level in the first two versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In the tombs at Cerveteri, for instance, there was ‘a simplicity, combined with a most peculiar, free-breasted naturalness and spontaneity … that at once reassures the spirit’ (6L 19). In contrast, his interactions with two young women at this time caused him to reflect on the emptiness of modern values and desires. During his two recent visits to Rome, Lawrence had the opportunity to see Christine Hughes’ 20-year-old daughter, Mary Christine, who had come to Europe to study music but seemed far more interested in going out dancing. Shortly after his return to Florence he wrote a short essay entitled ‘Laura Philippine’, in which he beautifully mimicked the hedonistic effervescence of her lifestyle (Frieda later recalled the joy he had in writing it).6 Then, on 13 April – his second full day back at the Villa Mirenda – Frieda’s daughter Barby arrived for a three-week visit. She had travelled with Eileen Seaman, the mother of Elsa’s fiancé Edward, who had been sent by Ernest Weekley to act as a chaperone. This upset Lawrence, who arranged for the older lady to stay at an inn in Vingone.7 However, it was Barby’s attitude to things which was the main cause of irritation during her stay. In the past he and Barby had bonded through their shared interest in painting, but this time Lawrence found her troublingly bourgeois in her attitudes and language. Lawrence told his mother-in-law that Barby seemed keen to escape from the influence of her father, but was momentarily in thrall to his values: ‘Die Jungen können nicht lieben weder leben … Es ist auch traurig, sie so Zwecklos, lebenslos zu sehen’ (6L 33) (‘The young can neither love nor live … It is also sad to see her so aimless, lifeless’).
Lawrence was restless and unsettled back at the Villa Mirenda. He came to feel that he was undergoing a critical ‘change of life’ in his early 40s: ‘a queer sort of recoil, as if one’s whole soul were drawing back from connection with everything’ (6L 37). This was not helped by a degree of anxiety about his literary affairs and finances. Secker and Knopf were both eager to see Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as was his agent. Nancy Pearn even suggested that it might be serialised.8 Lawrence, however, refused to let anyone see it. He told Nancy Pearn that he wanted to ‘go over it again’; he was convinced that it was ‘utterly unfit for serialising’ (6L 21). He told Brett that he would not send her the novel to type in case the American authorities arrested her,9 though he continued to defend it as his strongest effort yet to ‘make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful’ (6L 29).
With no hope of publishing his novel, he would need to rely upon placing shorter pieces in magazines to make money and meet the rising cost of living in Italy. The proofs of Mornings in Mexico were waiting for him on his return to the Villa Mirenda; he soon dealt with these and sent them back to Secker.10 Then he worked on a number of other projects. He first wrote a short story inspired by a remark Earl Brewster had made to him as they passed a shop window in Volterra and saw ‘a toy white rooster escaping from an egg’: Brewster had commented that this Easter decoration suggested the title ‘The Escaped Cock – a story of the Resurrection’.11 The tale Lawrence produced (an early version of the first part of the novella The Escaped Cock) re-tells Christ’s resurrection, focusing not on his journey from flesh to Holy Spirit, but on his transformation from an earnest being with a divine mission to a suffering man newly awakened to the wonders of the physical world.12 It allowed Lawrence to explore his own experiences in having undergone several resurrections from ill health to recovery. The Etruscan tombs had convinced him that this earlier civilisation had viewed death as a ‘pleasant continuance of life’ (SEP 19) rather than something to be feared and resisted. He was consequently troubled by the news that Gertie Cooper had spent two months in a London hospital having surgery to lessen the effects of her tuberculosis: he thought that having her ‘left lung removed, six ribs removed’ was ‘too horrible’ and wished that people were ‘better at dying’ (6L 42).
His resurrection story was finished by 3 May.13 Around 26 April he produced an essay on the modern young woman’s desire for dance and abstract love-making entitled ‘Making Love to Music’ (which extended his reflections on Mary Christine Hughes’ addiction to dancing in ‘Laura Philippine’). Then he began work on the Etruscan essays. He intended to write them as impressionistic sketches, avoiding the stiff style of ‘scientific’ historians by focusing on his immediate perception of the relics and remains. After a few days of writing he broke off to concentrate on two shorter pieces. He wrote the fourth and final section of ‘Flowery Tuscany’, plus a review of V. V. Rozanov’s Solitaria (which Kot had recently translated and sent to him).14 The first three parts of ‘Flowery Tuscany’ were published in consecutive numbers of the New Criterion between October and December 1927 and the review was published in the Calendar in July 1927, but ‘Making Love to Music’ could not be placed, perhaps because of its outspokenness in discussing the modern aversion to ‘copulation’: Lawrence contrasted the frantic contemporary obsession with jazz, the tango and the Charleston – all of which he considered ‘distinctly anti-sexual’ (LEA 43) – to the revelation of an unself-conscious physical sexuality revealed in paintings of Etruscan dances on the tomb walls in Tarquinia.15
Barby went back to England on 3 May. A few days before she left, there was a party at the Villa Poggi which involved hastily rehearsed theatrical performances and comic turns. Barby ‘reddened her nose and sang a music-hall song,’ and Lilian did a ‘Wordsworth recitation,’ ‘a kind of ventriloquist act with a dummy she had made of a small, yellow-haired girl – the village child of “We are Seven”.’16 Towards the end of the evening, Lawrence reprised his favourite imitation (going back to 1909–1910) of Florence Farr intoning Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ while plucking at an imaginary harp, though Barby felt that the high-brow cultural allusion was rather lost on the Wilkinsons.17
In spite of his financial worries, Lawrence decided to renew the rental of the Villa Mirenda (which expired on 6 May) for another year. He felt compelled to return to England to attend rehearsals for the forthcoming production of David, which was due to be staged at the Regent Theatre on 22 and 23 May, but in the event ill health prevented him from travelling. He suffered a recurrence of tubercular symptoms. In spite of his illness, throughout May he continued to socialise with old friends (the Wilkinsons, Reggie Turner and Pino Orioli); he had lunch with Nellie Morrison and tea with Osbert and Edith Sitwell, and he found time to visit an exhibition of paintings by modern Florentine artists at the Accademia di Belle Arti.18 He also finished his painting, ‘Resurrection’, and he worked steadily on essays, reviews, introductions and short stories. He revised the fourth section of ‘Flowery Tuscany’ to introduce a broader reflection on innate differences between the Germans and the English for a volume of essays published by Insel-Verlag;19 he wrote an introduction to his translation of Mastro-don Gesualdo for a new edition which Jonathan Cape was publishing in its ‘Traveller’s Library’ series; he decided to finish the translation of Cavalleria Rusticana, which he had begun back in 1923;20 and he wrote a supportive but not uncritical review of Walter Wilkinson’s The Peep Show (the book which Arthur’s younger brother had written about the puppet show which he had taken around England).
In the review of The Peep Show, Lawrence was particularly scathing about the preponderance of pleasant clichés in descriptions of landscape and moods. He argued that ‘You have to have something vicious in you, to be a creative writer’ (IR 324). Two short stories he wrote during May bear out his point. ‘None of That!’ is a first-person narrative about a wilful and wealthy American woman named Ethel Cane who lives in Mexico and uses her influence to get her own way with the men around her, and to make them her servants. Her main tactic in achieving this is to establish a degree of intimacy with a man, while denying him sexual fulfilment, finally dismissing him with the nonchalant declaration that she wanted ‘none of that.’ The Mexican men, however, prove to be ‘a law to themselves’ (WWRA 217). In attempting to dominate and subdue a famed bull-fighter named Cuesta, Ethel is herself overcome by physical desire: she goes to visit him at night in his room, only to be turned over to his friends and gang-raped. She subsequently commits suicide, but not before leaving half of her estate to the man who had broken her.
‘None of That!’ is a brutal and disturbing tale. Ethel Cane is in some senses a portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan. Lawrence had recently helped Mabel to recover some books she had left in her former Florence residence, the Villa Curonia, and he had been irritated by the strength of her attempts to make him return to New Mexico.21 However, the impact of the story derives from its transformation of anecdotal realism into the outlines of a modern fable. The first-person narrator pieces together a plot which assumes the same structure as Lawrence’s earlier New Mexican stories, ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and ‘The Princess’, dramatising the wilful woman’s idealism, and her macabre encounter with a world of which she knows nothing.
A fabular structure is also discernible beneath the surface of ‘Things’, a far more light-hearted satire on cultural tourism and modern materialism which draws in part on Lawrence’s response to visiting the Brewsters at the Palazzo Cimbrone. The story’s central protagonists – Erasmus and Valerie Melville – are idealists from New England whose superficial commitment to Buddhism, philanthropic causes and European culture only masks the real nature of their desire for possessions and money. During their periods of residence in Paris and Florence, the Melvilles amass a houseful of antique furniture. However, they soon tire of life in both cities and return home, carrying their ‘things’ with them to put into storage. A subsequent stay in California, and a last desperate sojourn in France and Italy, prove equally unsatisfying, so Erasmus – at the pivotal age of 40 – decides that he must take the advice of his wife’s rich parents and find a lucrative job back home. The story’s real achievement rests on the manner in which the couple’s idealism is undermined: the Melvilles indict themselves through Lawrence’s seamless deployment of their naive and over-earnest voices. At the end of the story, Erasmus takes up a lecturing post in European literature at Cleveland University, wryly acknowledging that ‘Europe’s the mayonnaise all right, but America supplies the good old lobster’ (VG 87).
Lawrence’s tendency to satirise his friends and acquaintances in his fiction, mimicking their voices and actions, is matched by his continual efforts at self-mimicry. In an unfinished short story now known as ‘The Man Who Was Through with the World’ – produced around the same time as ‘None of That!’ and ‘Things’ – Lawrence employed the fable form to mock his own recent fit of restlessness and desire to retreat from the world and become a hermit. The eponymous ‘Man’ is a bearded Messianic type with no commitment to any established religion or creed; in the absence of a hermitage, he builds himself a cabin on a mountain and (like Lawrence at the Kiowa Ranch) only descends into the nearest village (four miles away) to fetch food. When he clips his beard, puts on ‘his decent suit of clothes’ and takes a post-omnibus and train to the city, the people stare at him and the police want to arrest him on sight: he buys ‘his necessities with disgust, hurrying to get it over’ (VG 239). The fragment ends with a description of the Man’s unhappiness at needing to wear clothes in the winter, when he would rather go naked. There is a wonderful comic self-awareness in the piece which demonstrates Lawrence’s ability to send up his own grumpiness, and to view perceptions of him as a latter-day saint or eager primitivist with a healthy dose of irony. When Lawrence read a recently published pamphlet on his work by Richard Aldington in late May, he was amused by its beneficent tone and encouraged Aldington to give up his high-mindedness and be ‘good and commercial’ (6L 65) instead.22 He preferred to be the subject of honest criticism rather than proprietary praise: ‘Caro mio, I don’t want bouquets. Think what my stage bow would be like’ (6L 44).23
This did not mean, however, that he easily accepted flippant reviews of his work: he continued to abhor attacks on his writing which overlooked its ambition and insight. Kot provided a largely positive account of the 23 May performance of David in London; he had gone along to the Regent Theatre with Mark Gertler.24 The newspaper reviews, in contrast, proved to be utterly dismissive. Lawrence told Cynthia Asquith that the reviewers ‘should be made waitresses in Lyons’ Cafés’ because it was ‘all they’ve got the spunk for’ (6L 71). It almost made him want to return to America to wage war on the Europeans: he wished to ‘kick the backsides of the ball-less’ (6L 72). However, two visitors he received in early June once more dampened his enthusiasm for the USA. Christine Hughes and her daughter spent a week in Florence before returning to New Mexico. A visit together to the Uffizi Gallery exposed his guests’ philistinism in spectacular fashion. In the streets outside the Gallery they failed to recognise Michelangelo’s David, and they had ‘never even heard of Botticelli.’ Lawrence found them ‘stone blind, culturally’; he deplored the young girl’s lack of interest in anything ‘except herself, other girls, clothes and shops.’ By the end of the day he felt that he would ‘rather go and live in a hyaena house than go to live in America’ (6L 79).
Only in the second half of May did Lawrence turn back to the Etruscan essays. He had finished six by the end of June: ‘Cerveteri’, ‘Tarquinia’, ‘The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia’ (Parts I and II), ‘Vulci’ and ‘Volterra’. To help himself along he borrowed a copy of Fritz Weege’s Etruskische Malerei (1921), and he sought out photographs of the tombs and other remains which he thought might make the essays – and the finished book – more popular. A further, incomplete tailpiece essay entitled ‘The Florence Museum’ was written slightly later (at some point between July and October).
The Huxleys continued to provide support and companionship. Maria visited the Villa Mirenda on 12 June, bringing along some friends; they may have been shown his latest painting, ‘Finding of Moses’, which he had begun a few days earlier.25 On 15 June Lawrence and Frieda went to visit the Huxleys for a few days at the little villa they were renting in the fashionable coastal resort of Forte dei Marmi, close to Lucca, north of Pisa (100 miles away). It was warm enough for Lawrence to bathe, but though the company was good he found the sea ‘dead and lifeless and enervating’ (6L 87) and the place itself ‘beastly’, packed with ‘millions of villas.’
By the end of June, Lawrence was considering taking a trip to the remaining Etruscan sites – ‘Veii, Civita Castellana, Norchia, Vetulonia, Cosa, Populonia, Bieda’ (6L 89) – in order to write further essays and bring the total number up to a dozen or 14. His plans were halted by a devastating relapse in his health. One hot afternoon in early July, while he was picking peaches in the garden, he suffered another tubercular haemorrhage. Frieda heard him calling for her from his room in a ‘strange, gurgling voice’: blood was trickling from his mouth.26
He was confined to bed for most of the month. Pino Orioli arranged for him to be visited by Dr Giglioli, ‘the best doctor in Florence,’ who put the relapse down to the ‘sea-bathing at Forte’ and prescribed coagulin. He recommended that Lawrence should get away to somewhere at higher altitude. Lawrence made arrangements to travel with Frieda to Villach in Austria, with a view to spending time with Johanna and her new husband, Emil von Krug, who were staying nearby at Annenheim, on the Ossiachersee. Afterwards they would travel to Irschenhausen, where they were invited to take Edgar Jaffe’s wooden villa, which they had last occupied on two occasions back in 1913.
Lawrence hoped to get away in about two weeks, but a further series of haemorrhages depressed both his health and his spirits. He was able to get up by 15 July, and on 18 July he even walked out to the woods, but the following day he was ill again. The extremely hot weather in Florence did not help. He told his sister Emily that ‘midday and afternoon is fierce, and the earth is so dry, it is splitting in huge cracks’ (6L 106); it made him long for the cooler mountains. Fortunately, his friends proved to be extremely supportive. The Wilkinsons were especially kind and attentive, visiting him regularly, playing cards with him, and running errands for the Lawrences in Florence; Lilian typed the Etruscan essays for him, and Arthur photographed Lawrence’s paintings, though they thought the essays ‘queer stuff’ and still found the pictures ‘abominable’.27
Lawrence believed the cause of his low health to be psychosomatic: he blamed it on ‘chagrin’ (6L 103).28 To Trigant Burrow, who sent a copy of his new book The Social Basis of Consciousness: A Study in Organic Psychology (1927) at the end of July, he wrote: ‘What ails me is the absolute frustration of my primeval societal instinct’ (6L 99). His recent writings – ‘None of That!’ and ‘Things’ – had cruelly exposed fundamental differences between Lawrence and some of his closest friends and contacts, and ‘The Man Who Was Through with the World’ revealed his sense of himself as isolated, absurd and powerless to act on the world. Although he could enjoy and appreciate the attention of his friends in Florence, it did not compensate him for the lack of values shared with the people around him.
Lawrence decided to put his plans for further Etruscan essays on hold and take time properly to recover and convalesce. Huxley brought him some reading matter, including volumes by Proust and André Gide. Lawrence still found Proust unsympathetic – ‘too much water-jelly’ – but he thought Les Faux-Monnayeurs (1925) ‘interesting as a revelation of the modern state of mind’ (6L 100). He was far more positive about Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), which the author had sent to him; he wrote back praising it as ‘a splendid novel of fact’ (6L 102). At the end of July he resumed translating the stories from Cavalleria Rusticana, and shortly after 3 August he wrote a detailed and enthusiastic review of Burrow’s recent book, which would be published in the Bookman in November.
By early August he was well enough to travel, though he was still weak, uncertain on his feet, and afflicted by a cough. On the morning of 4 August, Arthur Wilkinson went to Florence to buy train tickets for the Lawrences. After supper the Wilkinsons helped him into a motor car. He rested at Pino Orioli’s flat in the Lungarno Corsini on the way to the station. They had paid for a sleeper compartment, and fortunately no changes were required on the journey, so they arrived in Villach on 5 August rested and relaxed. Lawrence was relieved to breathe the cool mountain air. They checked into the Hotel Fischer in Villach, a modest inn close to the town, which was more convenient and congenial for Lawrence than the more impressive hotel which Johanna and Emil had chosen six miles away, by the lake. Lawrence and Frieda took a motor boat ride the day after their arrival. They enjoyed spending time with Johanna and Emil, but it was soon clear that Johanna was getting bored by her second marriage.
Lawrence felt his health gradually improving in Villach. He had sufficient energy while there to make enquiries about exhibiting his paintings. He sent five photographs of his pictures to Brett, and to Frieda’s younger daughter Barby; Barby in turn showed them to Dorothy Warren, an art dealer who ran a private gallery in London, where Barby herself had exhibited and sold some of her work. Lawrence had met Dorothy Warren at Garsington late in 1915;29 she now asked Lawrence to let her see more of his pictures, though he remained ‘diffident’ (6L 127) about showing them. He also contacted Martin Secker to make sure he had received the Etruscan essays from Nancy Pearn, and he encouraged Secker to proceed with a volume of stories, mentioning ‘The Woman Who Rode Away’ and ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (which had recently appeared in the London Mercury) as texts he particularly wished to include.30 The two men would soon discuss putting together an edition of Lawrence’s collected poems (though Lawrence wanted to offer a selection, leaving some out and putting some in).
Lawrence and Frieda left for Munich on 30 August; they met Else at the railway station and the next day travelled with her to Irschenhausen. They were delighted to return to Edgar Jaffe’s ‘cosy wooden house in the Isartal’ (6L 138); Lawrence felt that almost nothing had changed since 1913. In one of the cupboards he even discovered a copy of Love Poems and Others left in the house 14 years earlier. He found the open landscape inspiring, and Frieda was glad to spend time with Else. When Johanna dropped by for a brief stay on her journey from Austria to Baden-Baden, the three sisters took full advantage of the opportunity to be together. Lawrence was able to relax, sleep and recover from his illness. Edgar’s old servant Anna was still there to cook for him: she brought ‘trout and partridge and venison’ (6L 154) from Munich, and Lawrence drank goat’s milk to get back some of his strength. He realised how much better off he was than Gertie Cooper, who was now longing to leave the Mundesley Sanatorium. He suggested to Ada that they could team up to offer Gertie financial support.31 The upturn in his mood by early September was such that he took a philosophical view of the British government’s decision to introduce 20% taxes on the income of British citizens living overseas. Although it was awful to find one-fifth of his income taken away at a stroke, he was inclined to count himself lucky for having avoided taxes for so long.32
By 13 September his health had turned a corner; on that day, he walked three miles without becoming exhausted. As his health improved they began to welcome visitors. Barby arrived on the evening of 17 September to spend three days with them; she had been staying in Cologne with one of her father’s friends and was able to tell them about the upset caused by the death of Weekley’s mother, Agnes, on 29 August. They saw Walburga Leitner and her husband Josef, the owners of the shop situated beneath Edgar Jaffe’s old flat in Icking (where Lawrence and Frieda had lived together for the first time in 1912).33 New acquaintances also visited from around Munich, including Max Mohr, a dramatist who thought Lawrence ‘the greatest living novelist’ (6L 157), Elizabeth Mayer (a German translator married to a psychiatrist), and Franz Schoenberner, editor of the satirical journal Jugend. Lawrence promised to find Schoenberner a short piece of prose to publish in the journal; he would finally give him ‘Rex’, which appeared in the October 1928 number (translated by Else Jaffe). Schoenberner also arranged for Lawrence to be medically examined by his friend, Hans Carossa, a doctor specialising in tuberculosis who happened also to be a poet. Lawrence was to have seen the two men in Munich, but a cold prevented him from travelling, so they came to Irschenhausen at the end of September. Carossa’s prognosis was optimistic: he merely confirmed Lawrence’s belief that the problem was bronchial, and encouraged him to avoid hot-air inhalations in case the bleeding returned.34 In private, however, he told Schoenberner that Lawrence’s condition was beyond medical treatment.35 His encouraging words to Lawrence were intended to lift his spirits, since sheer force of will and an extended period of remission were now the only sources of hope.
By 25 September, in the midst of various visits, Lawrence managed to finish his translation of Verga’s stories. Three days later he sent the last parts of the book to Curtis Brown, together with a lengthy ‘Translator’s Preface’ presenting Verga as an innovative realist writer whose superficial commitment to the logical form of Flaubert could not mask a deeper preoccupation with the erratic imaginative transitions of ‘the unsophisticated mind’ (IR 172). It was Verga’s subordination of aesthetic form to the demands of his imaginative preoccupation with his characters which was so attractive to Lawrence. Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories would be published by Jonathan Cape in February 1928.
On 4 October, the Lawrences travelled to Baden-Baden to spend a fortnight with Frieda’s mother. They stayed once more at the Hotel Eden; the time passed pleasantly enough in playing games of whist, attending outdoor concerts and visiting the marionette theatre.36 Lawrence arranged to be examined by a doctor at the baths, who found his health slightly better than the previous year but noted that he had catarrh on his lungs and recommended that he should spend two months at a sanatorium, ‘just to build up’ (6L 177). He firmly resisted the idea of a sanatorium; instead, he underwent a 10-day course of cold-air inhalation, which entailed spending an hour each morning breathing in air containing particles of radium. He supplemented this with patent and herbal medicines of the kind he had first used in 1925 at the Kiowa Ranch.37
Illness made Lawrence restless and irritable. He declared himself ‘sick of books and all things literary’; he was depressed by the ‘stark materialism’ of Germany and felt ‘a bit shut in in Europe’ (6L 183, 170, 175). He again expressed a desire to return to New Mexico, and he was sorely tempted by the Dobrées’ offer to put him up at their home in Gizeh, just outside Cairo, though the cost of travel to Egypt and the thought of the journey put him off.38 The 20% taxation of his future income, when combined with the 10% that went to Curtis Brown, made him feel that the effort to finish Etruscan Places, or to write any more books, was futile. He decided instead to live off shorter pieces. Travel magazine was about to start publishing a sequence of four of his Etruscan essays in consecutive numbers (World Today would publish the same essays in England), and he was pleased (and surprised) to learn from Nancy Pearn that the Forum had bought The Escaped Cock.
They left Baden-Baden on 18 October. When they arrived in Florence in the late afternoon of the following day, they were greeted at the station by the Wilkinsons and a hired car. They were returning to a supportive home with a number of friends nearby, yet Lawrence felt curiously displaced and eager to leave. His feeling of coming ‘unstuck’ (6L 213) from the Villa Mirenda may have resulted from the link which he now made between the house and his recent illness, but he also told friends that he was growing tired of Europe and ‘bored by Italy’ (6L 208).
Home, displacement and belonging were the central themes in an unfinished fictional fragment which he wrote shortly after returning to Italy. In early October Kot had contacted Lawrence to seek his help in revising the translation of two Jewish stories recorded by Kot’s mother; Lawrence began re-writing one of them as ‘The Undying Man’, but did not finish it.39 Shortly afterwards Kot approached Lawrence again to ask for his guidance in setting up a small press to publish expensive limited editions. Lawrence (who was pessimistic about the scheme’s chances of success) recommended that he ask prominent authors to contribute ‘a confession or an apologia’ (6L 174) of a kind which they would not wish to publish in another way. Lawrence attempted to interest Huxley and Norman Douglas in the project, to no avail.
However, in the first weeks at the Villa Mirenda he began writing a piece for Kot which would be at once intimate and speculative. The fragment (which Keith Sagar entitled ‘A Dream of Life’)40 begins in the autobiographical mode as a first-person account of the depression he experienced on returning to his home region the year before, but it is then abruptly transformed into a visionary work of fantasy combining plot elements from Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ (1819) and William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890). The narrator describes himself entering a quarry and falling asleep in a cavity in a rock only to awake 1000 years later, in 2927, to find Eastwood transformed into a beautiful place shaped by the needs and desires of the religious people who live there. The dress of these people is reminiscent of the ancient Egyptians, while their dances are similar to the Indian dances Lawrence had so loved in New Mexico, giving ‘the most marvellous impression of soft, slow flight of two many-pinioned wings, lifting and sinking like the slow drift of an owl’ (LEA 65). The fragment breaks off at the point where the narrator is being berated for worrying himself about clock time instead of seeing life as a cycle. This is another story about death and resurrection, but it is also a fantasy about discovering a place where one can be entirely at home, recognising one’s own values reflected in other people, and in the architecture and layout of the streets.
Lawrence felt that anger at his essential isolation had brought on the deterioration in his health back in the summer. The other projects he now set his mind to returned him to that earlier state in which satire and mockery were his only outlets. He immediately began another subversive religious painting on a theme which had occurred to him during his time in Baden-Baden: this was ‘Throwing Back the Apple’, a watercolour showing ‘Adam and Eve pelting the Old Lord-God with apples, and driving him out of paradise’ (6L 196). He worked again on his old painting entitled ‘Finding of Moses’; during the following month he would paint a picture of a jaguar attacking a native. He also began compiling the edition of Collected Poems which Secker was eager to publish. He sorted his published volumes of verse into two books of rhyming and unrhyming verse and began the process of typing them out, taking the opportunity to revise them as he went along. Looking through his early poems about Jessie Chambers, Louie Burrows and Helen Corke brought back vivid memories: ‘My word, what ghosts come rising up! But I just tidy their clothes for them and refuse to be drawn’ (6L 223).
Some of this tidying was intended to correct the style of his earlier work. Other alterations clarified an insight that the younger author had articulated differently, but several deliberately made the poems over into his current preoccupations. An example of the latter variety can be found in the section which he now added to the end of the dialect poem ‘Whether or Not’, first published in Love Poems and Others. The poem had dealt rather dramatically with a situation which Lawrence had explored at greater length in his play The Daughter-in-Law: a young man has an affair with a woman (in this case an older landlady) and gets her pregnant, only for the young woman in his life to accept him back, arranging for him to pay off his debts to the other woman and make a fresh start. In its 1913 form the poem ended with the young woman taking charge of the situation, leaving her fiancé (Timmy) sheepish, cowed and repentant. In the added section, Lawrence redressed the balance of power by having Timmy decide to separate from both of the women, rejecting the bullying pragmatism of the young woman and refusing to renounce his physical experiences with his landlady: ‘What bit o’ cunt I had wi’ ’er / ’s all I got out of it’ (Poems 51). Timmy’s outspokenness here foretells the coming shift in Lawrence’s final revision of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Lawrence was still unwell during his first weeks back in Italy; he had a persistent cough and was confined to home for the best part of a month, during which his social round was limited to visits from the Wilkinsons and his friends in Florence. On 14 November, Reggie Turner and Orioli brought Charles Scott-Moncrieff and Harold Acton to tea with the Lawrences; Lawrence could enjoy their witty repartee up to a point, but on further acquaintance he felt that Scott-Moncrieff had ‘an obscene mind like a lavatory’ (6L 220). A short story entitled Rawdon’s Roof, which he posted to Nancy Pearn a few days later, may have been inspired by their gossip; this rather anecdotal tale of one man’s determination to keep his affair with a married woman secret from everyone, and his resolution that no woman shall sleep under his roof, has long fascinated biographers and resisted their attempts to trace its origins in the lives of Lawrence’s acquaintances.41
On the same day that Lawrence posted Rawdon’s Roof, 17 November, he went to Florence for the first time since his return, to have lunch with Reggie Turner. It would turn out to be a momentous visit. While he was walking through the city he met Dikran Kouyoumdjian. Lawrence had got to know the Armenian back in 1915 when he was part of the Bloomsbury circle at Garsington; in the intervening years he had become fabulously wealthy through the success of his novel, The Green Hat (1924), which he had published under his adopted name, Michael Arlen (the novel had been turned into a popular play and a film). He was now 31 and on his thirty-fifth birthday he would have access to a trust fund which Lawrence heard might allow him up to £100,000 per year.42 Yet, in spite of this he struck Lawrence as ‘quite a sad dog, trying to be rakish’ (6L 223). Lawrence learned that Arlen had been treated for a ‘tubercular tumour’ (6L 220); he had gone for a cure in Davos and was living in Florence in a state of anxiety about catching a cold or otherwise lowering his health. Lawrence sympathised with Arlen’s poor health, and with the way he had been shunned by polite society in England.
It is likely that Orioli and Norman Douglas joined Lawrence for lunch at Reggie Turner’s house. At some point during their conversation, Lawrence was urged to privately publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Florence, in the same way that Douglas was about to publish In the Beginning: 700 copies of Douglas’ novel were to be printed and sold at two guineas each. They informed Lawrence that the production costs for his own book would be low and he would not be liable to pay tax on money accruing from sales; he would be paying 10% to Orioli instead of to his agent. He stood to make around £800 from the venture.43
The meeting with Arlen must have strengthened Lawrence’s resentment at the state of his own finances, especially given the money he had recently spent in travelling to Austria and Germany. He grasped at the idea of privately printing his novel, and told Curtis Brown that he would prefer to issue it unabridged in this manner rather than ‘cutting myself down to fit the world’s shoddy cloth’ (6L 222); by not sending out review copies he felt that he could avoid doing any damage to his important magazine sales. He eventually settled upon producing 1000 copies; order leaflets were to be sent out to friends and contacts advertising copies at two guineas, or $2 for American subscribers. In mid-December, when Charles Lahr approached Curtis Brown to ask whether he could publish a limited edition of 100 copies of The Escaped Cock Lawrence was happy for him to proceed;44 he remembered Lahr’s efficiency in publishing a similar edition of Sun back in September 1926, and he no longer had any reservations about issuing his work in small limited editions.
The scheme to privately publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover concentrated Lawrence’s mind, so that in late November he began working on a final version of the novel. During the next six weeks (by 8 January) he re-wrote it in its entirety. It proved to be his most polemical work of fiction on the relations between the sexes. In making the gamekeeper Parkin into Mellors, Lawrence created a character whose social mobility (through his education and a period of army service in India) and ability to speak both Derbyshire dialect and received pronunciation brought him far closer to the author’s own experience. Mellors becomes a vehicle for exploring much more than class conflict and the radicalisation of the miners; through him, Lawrence expresses his broader dissatisfaction with modern life, and especially with the Americanisation of European culture and the internalisation of cash values. He found little worth in the cultivation of alternative movements to reinstate the outdoor life and naturecrafts: he told Rolf Gardiner that the ‘Kibbo Kift’ was largely a matter of ‘holiday camping and mummery.’ It was not, either, a simple case of attacking the system of capitalism; in a brief note which he sent to the Durham miners via Charles Wilson (secretary of the local branch of the Workers’ Educational Association) he stated that the key thing was not to change the world, but to develop ‘a satisfactory system of values inside oneself’ (6L 267). The stress now fell on the warmth of the physical bond between men and women: ‘the spark of warmth that alone can kindle a little fire today’ (6L 268).
The novel thus became decidedly more outspoken: the full, conscious realisation of sex in the relationship between Connie and Mellors assumes an urgent role in counteracting wider cultural trends towards prurience and hypocrisy, so the language of sex is employed to stem the flow of linguistic abstraction and (if possible) to cleanse the Anglo-Saxon words of their dirty associations. The successful Irish playwright Michaelis (a character based on Michael Arlen) is introduced to give Connie a first, unsatisfactory experience of an affair before she meets Mellors, and two new characters, Hammond and Charlie May (the former based on Huxley), join an enlarged debate about sex at Wragby in which the differences between conviction and action are openly dramatised. Lawrence considered the novel ‘very pure and very tender’ (6L 239), but he was acutely and joyously aware of the extent to which it would offend the sensibilities of all his readers (even his closest friends).
On 18 December, Lawrence told Max Mohr that it was already half finished: ‘It is so “shocking”, the most improper novel in the world!’ (6L 238). In late December he arranged for Nellie Morrison to start typing it; he was afraid that a hired typist would refuse to take on the job, and he even had misgivings about asking a friend to do it. His reservations were justified. Nellie gave up the typing after five chapters, on the same day that he finished writing the novel; she refused to do any more because she considered it ‘too indecent’ (6L 260). Lawrence was forced to ask Catherine Carswell to help out with typing the second manuscript notebook, and he arranged for Maria Huxley to type out the most controversial third and final one.
Amid all this work, he passed a quiet Christmas in Florence. Although he initially resisted the idea of having a Christmas tree, he felt that it would be wrong to deny the peasants the pleasure of seeing it, so Pietro once again stole a pine tree from the nearby wood and helped Giulia decorate it. It rained on Christmas Eve, so only 17 people came round to celebrate, but Lawrence enjoyed the occasion rather more than he had anticipated. The next day the Huxleys motored Lawrence and Frieda out to the house in Florence where they were staying with friends; they ‘ate turkey and pulled crackers, quite the regular thing’ (6L 250), and on 27 December the Lawrences returned the favour, entertaining the Huxleys at the Villa Mirenda. The Huxleys were now encouraging Lawrence and Frieda to join them in Les Diablerets, in Switzerland, where they were going for a skiing holiday in the new year; they thought that the altitude (around 3500 feet) would be perfect for Lawrence’s health.
Lawrence was reluctant to uproot to Switzerland, but in due course he agreed that he might benefit from the ‘tonicky air and sun’ (6L 263). He set about clearing his desk in order to travel. As he put the finishing touches to Lady Chatterley’s Lover (which he now wanted to call ‘Tenderness’ or ‘My Lady’s Keeper’),45 he also wrote an introduction to a translation of Grazia Deledda’s novel La madre (1920), which Jonathan Cape was publishing in his ‘Travellers’ Library’ series, and he produced another oil painting, entitled ‘The Mango Tree’: a provocative image of a naked man cupping the left breast of an equally naked woman who is perched on his right knee. The painting shows how committed Lawrence now was to openly celebrating sexuality, paying little heed to the sensitivities of a potential audience.
In the event, his low health kept him at home longer than he had intended and he did not travel to Switzerland until 20 January. The extra days allowed him to do further work on the Collected Poems volumes, and to start correcting proofs of The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories for Secker (though he was irritated that Secker had decided to leave out ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ at Compton Mackenzie’s request, and perplexed to find the ending to ‘The Border-Line’ truncated).46 Plans for the publication of his poems, his new novel and the collection of short stories helped to buoy up his flagging spirits, so that he even optimistically suggested to Secker that the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, might write an introduction to the poetry.47
The journey to Les Diablerets went smoothly. The Lawrences rented a cosy and warm four-roomed flat in the Chalet Beau Site; the Huxleys stayed nearby in the Chalet des Aroles. Aldous, Maria, their son Matthew and his governess had travelled with Huxley’s brother, Julian, his wife Juliette (née Baillot) and their two children and nurse; other members of the family (including Juliette’s mother) would join them for a short time too.48 Lawrence was unable to go skiing with Aldous and Julian, but he and Frieda did go out with a toboggan, and the whole party gathered daily for lunch and tea. They all met for a memorable picnic on the Pillon Pass, ‘very high, very sparkling and bright and sort of marvellous’ (6L 290). Lawrence discussed Lady Chatterley’s Lover with Aldous, and they spoke about setting up an ‘Authors’ Publishing Society’ co-operative to publish more controversial (or less popular) writing.49 Aldous, Maria and Juliette evidently read some or all of the novel over the following weeks: Aldous and Maria both claimed to like it, but Juliette initially went into ‘a moral rage’ (6L 308) over it (she sardonically suggested that Lawrence should re-title it ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which he seriously considered taking up).50
Lawrence’s main intention was to focus on his health during the seven weeks he spent in Switzerland, but he still managed to get a lot of work done. It helped that Aldous and Julian were both very busy with their own projects (Aldous was working on his novel Point Counter Point and Julian was writing a three-volume book entitled The Science of Life with H. G. Wells and his son, G. P. Wells). They enjoyed heated debates on the subject of modern science, in the course of which Lawrence made quite clear his opposition to evolutionary theory.51 By the end of January he had re-written the ending to ‘The Border-Line’ for The Woman Who Rode Away and completed the work on his early poems; he told Secker that he intended to publish the poems from Look! We Have Come Through! and Birds, Beasts and Flowers in Volume II much as they stood, though he did want to ‘add a poem or two’ (6L 280) to the narrative sequence of the former collection, restoring ‘Song of a Man Who is Loved’ (which Chatto and Windus had asked him to omit in 1917), and including ‘Bei Hennef’ from Love Poems and Others, and ‘Everlasting Flowers’ and ‘Coming Awake’ from New Poems. During February he went over the typescript of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as it was returned to him by Catherine Carswell and Maria, trying to expurgate it for Secker and Knopf, but Catherine irritated him by hanging on to her section longer than he anticipated, and Maria made ‘a simple chicken-pox of mistakes’ (6L 293) in her typing. His work was interrupted by short visits from Rolf Gardiner and Max Mohr, but after Frieda left on 27 February to pay a brief visit to her mother in Baden-Baden, he made a concerted effort to collect together the final pages of the typescript and complete the revision. Unfortunately, he found it difficult to censor himself; he told both Secker and Knopf that the process of deciding what needed to be cut and what could be left in sent him ‘colour-blind’ (6L 308). He finally gave in and on 5 March sent the altered typescript to Laurence Pollinger (a member of staff at Curtis Brown who was assuming a greater responsibility for Lawrence’s work).
He left Les Diablerets the following day; despite his early reservations, his time in Switzerland had been beneficial and made him feel ‘a good bit better’ (6L 318). Aldous and Maria had left a few days before, so he was accompanied to Aigle by Juliette Huxley, who had overcome her outrage at the novel and (under Lawrence’s influence, and with his help) begun to embroider a strikingly frank image of Adam and Eve in Paradise which shocked the other travellers who saw it on the platform of the railway station.52 Lawrence met Frieda in Milan, arriving back at the Villa Mirenda on the evening of 7 March. He immediately started work on a series of watercolour paintings, inspired in part by the nude photographic studies which he had asked Earl Brewster to send to him:53 during March he would produce ‘Fire-Dance’, ‘Yawning’, ‘The Lizard’, ‘Under the Haystack’ and ‘Dandelions’. The last of these paintings depicted a man urinating against a wall and into a bed of wild flowers; it was apparently inspired by a mischievously literal reading of passages in the Bible (I Samuel xxv, verses 22 and 34).54 It reflected the opinion expressed in his novel by Mellors that pissing and shitting should be openly accepted as natural – even beautiful – bodily functions.
Lawrence was eager to leave Italy at the earliest opportunity, but knew that he would need to stay in order to oversee the production of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He met Orioli on 9 March and took the novel to the printer (Tipografia Giuntina). It pleased him that nobody working at the printer’s office spoke a word of English, since it ensured that they would not take offence at the book. However, he came to regret their lack of English when the proofs were found to contain a catalogue of errors even worse than Maria’s typing mistakes: ‘He writes dind’t did’nt, dnid’t, dind’t, din’dt, didn’t like a Bach fugue. The word is his blind spot’ (6L 353). In the interim, Lawrence designed a phoenix emblem for the front cover, similar to the ones he had drawn in letters to Kot and Murry back in January 1915 and December 1923 respectively. They made a printer’s block of it, which Lawrence used to create bookplates. They also printed 1500 subscription forms, which Lawrence began circulating to friends and contacts in Britain and America. He had paid for the printing, paper and binding, so he needed to ensure that the 1000 copies sold out.
His determination to see through the private publication of the novel was remarkable given the degree of resistance he met from professional contacts and friends alike. In mid-March Secker wrote to tell him in no uncertain terms that the novel could not be expurgated for public sale; in America, Blanche Knopf liked the novel, but her husband could not risk publishing it.55 Curtis Brown failed to place it with either Jonathan Cape or Chatto and Windus; the agency was angry that Lawrence had chosen to privately publish the unexpurgated text and told him that he might jeopardise his sales elsewhere if he went ahead (Lawrence was sent a comment from Jonathan Cape which underscored the danger to his literary career).56
Lawrence knew that publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover would set him apart ‘even more definitely than I am already set apart,’ but he accepted it as a simple matter of ‘destiny’ (6L 332). He dismissed Secker as ‘an expurgated edition of a man’ (6L 344); the only thing he worried about was that he might lose control of copyright if the novel was not published in the usual way.57 He was typically defiant about his writing: he defended his novel and looked to give the public more of the material that they found so offensive. Frieda believed that conflict was good for him: she would tell Orioli that it ‘does his soul good!’ (6L 487). He conceived the idea of writing a ‘phallic second half’ (6L 326) to The Escaped Cock even though the publication of the story in its existing form had provoked a storm of protest from the American readers of the Forum magazine, and he made plans to exhibit his paintings in Dorothy Warren’s gallery in London, and to publish a colour edition of them, despite the sharp criticism they continued to attract among even his close friends (like Millicent Beveridge).58
Fortunately, he could still depend on support from some quarters. Else Jaffe and Alfred Weber stopped by on 10 March, before leaving the next day for Rome and Capri. A week later, on 16 March, Frieda’s daughter Barby came to stay for 12 days, travelling from her temporary base in Alassio, near Spotorno. It was Barby who had put Lawrence back in touch with Dorothy Warren, and her visit would have provided an opportunity for him to discuss his latest watercolours in a positive spirit. Lawrence’s sister Ada continued to offer important support, too, arranging to send medicine for his chest from England.59 New contacts also offered to help him out. The publisher Crosby Gaige expressed interest in publishing The Escaped Cock and John Rodker enquired after Lady Chatterley’s Lover.60 Towards the end of his stay in Les Diablerets Lawrence had also received a letter from a wealthy young American poet and limited edition publisher named Harry Crosby, who enclosed a copy of his recent poetry collection Chariot of the Sun (1928) and asked Lawrence if he would sell him one of his manuscripts. In late March Crosby would send $100 to Lawrence in the form of five gold pieces. Crosby’s generosity would soon be checked by Lawrence when further gifts were sent without good cause,61 but for now he was pleased to hear from somebody who was interested in his work. Lawrence sent him some subscription forms for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and agreed to write a short introduction to Chariot of the Sun, which was published as ‘Chaos in Poetry’ in the Paris magazine Echanges in December 1929. He also sent Crosby a bound volume of several manuscripts, including the short story Sun, which Crosby had specifically requested. Lawrence had written out Sun afresh and took the opportunity to provide a wholly new and more outspoken ending, which Crosby ended up publishing in a deluxe edition (complete with a frontispiece illustration by Lawrence) in October 1928.
On 27 March, the Wilkinsons left the Villa Poggi and returned to live in England. Lawrence waved them off; it was one more reminder that he was coming towards the end of his own time in Florence. The first proofs of his novel were sent to him on 1 April, and he worked steadily at correcting them. He was thoroughly engaged in the business of securing sales of the book: by 18 April he had received 150 orders (the vast majority from Britain) and decided to offer a 15% trade discount to booksellers in England (rather than the customary 25%);62 by 25 April, he could report that subscriptions were coming in ‘pretty well’ (6L 383) and his expenses had been covered. His concentration on the novel gave him a renewed sense of purpose: he told the Huxleys that it did him good to feel furious about the reactions of his agent and publishers.63 He turned back to oil painting, with a view to sending work to London: he produced two new paintings – a piece entitled ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’, which he sardonically subtitled ‘a Study in Arses’ (6L 353), and ‘Family on a Verandah’ – and he continued to work on ‘Fauns and Nymphs’. He may also have painted ‘Close-Up’ in this period: a small oil painting showing a grotesque couple engaged in the act of kissing which was probably intended to satirise the kinds of romantic cinema stills used on advertising posters.64
Lawrence’s industry was helpful in focusing his mind and counteracting the depression he had felt before the stay in Les Diablerets. It may also have compensated him in some way for the change he now began to perceive in Frieda as her affair with Ravagli gained momentum. On 2 April, Else Jaffe came to stay with the Lawrences on her way back to Heidelberg from Capri. Nine days later, as Lawrence prepared for a short visit from Margaret Gardiner (the sister of Rolf Gardiner), Frieda left with Else to spend five days with Barby in Alassio. She took the opportunity whilst there to see the Capalleros, but she also went off alone to see Ravagli. Lawrence was aware that she had spent time with him: in a letter to Secker on 24 April he referred to her seeing ‘the tenente’ (6L 377). Barby later reported that Lawrence did not reproach Frieda for her infidelity; he simply told her one evening after her return that ‘Every heart has a right to its own secrets.’ It was Lawrence’s way of informing Frieda that he knew about her affair at the same time that he insisted on her continued right to sexual freedom; it was also, however, a means of securing their marriage by making explicit the terms of their long-standing modus vivendi. In private, it probably affected Lawrence more than he outwardly admitted; he seems to have perceived a change in Frieda after she returned from the visit to Barby.65
Everyday life remained unaffected. On 23 April, the Lawrences renewed their acquaintance with Aubrey and Lina Waterfield, whom they had got to know during their time in Fiascherino. They visited them at Poggio Gherardo, the medieval fortress-dwelling near Settignano which Lina had inherited from her aunt, dining there with Lady Sybil Carfax (a friend of the Huxleys who had come to tea at the Villa Mirenda a few days earlier). Lawrence would have been interested to hear that Boccaccio was said to have written part of The Decameron in this very building; three weeks later he told T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly that he thought ‘the best story in the world’ was ‘a certain one of Boccaccio’s improper but charming tales from the Decameron’ (6L 401), and he offered to translate it for them free of charge if they agreed to publish it.
Early in May Lawrence was on the point of leaving the Villa Mirenda. The rent expired on 6 May, and he had taken down the paintings and begun to pack, but Frieda became so gloomy at the prospect that the pictures went back up and they agreed to take it for a further six months.66 The decision to stay was also influenced by delays in printing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The printer was waiting to receive paper from the supplier, who did not provide it until around 16 May. In the intervening period, Lawrence decided to publish 200 copies on normal paper, to supplement the 1000 copies on hand-made paper (in due course this would effectively form the second issue of the novel). A shortage of type meant that only half of the novel could be printed before the text block had to be dismantled to set up the second half. As a consequence, Lawrence had only received half of the proofs by early May; he could not envisage getting the first finished copies back from the binder until June.