To return to Women in Love, what foundation Murry has for his up-to-date defence that Lawrence had 'abandoned the ground he had taken up' in this novel, 'even before the book was published', he does not tell us and it is hard to guess. Because quite certainly the novel remains a vital expression of much that its author held to the end of his life, even while it is not the novel he would have written at the end of his life. But nothing of this really matters. Poor criticism is merely poor criticism. What does matter about Murry's review is its demonstration of the horror that Lawrence believed to be inveterate in 'Christian love'. It was an effort to annihilate a man who, not yet being dead, dared to defy critical reduction to a formula. No different derivation can explain its particular flavour.
That October of 1921 Murry further used his position on the Nation to join the name of Lawrence with others of whom nothing might now be expected. In a long and favourable review of a novel by Mr Swinnerton, called Coquette, he seized the slender, gratuitous chance to praise at Lawrence's expense. And in passing his verdict upon a string of contemporaries, he refused to the author of The Rainbow a place anywhere on the same plane as the authors of Kipps, The Old Wives' Tale, and Lord Jim. In his judgement Lawrence was no longer even 'in the dusty rear'. He had fallen out of the race.
5
In March Frieda had been summoned to Baden-Baden by the serious illness of her mother. Lawrence, left alone, went to Rome and Florence (this being the occasion described by Rebecca West) and in June he joined Frieda in Germany. The old Baroness was better, though still weak, he wrote, when sending us a box of the tiny Black Forest toys 'for the boy'. They stayed for two months, living mostly at a place three miles from Baden, near the end of the Forest 'with the Rhine Valley and the Vosges beyond', where they were 'very well done' for three shillings a day. But though there was plenty of food and friendliness, and 'a great sense of magnificent, spacious country', there was also a sense of depression - 'sort of stupefied or numbed rather than anything else', and Lawrence felt a stranger. As he put it, 'I feel a stranger everywhere and nowhere.'
That summer we had arranged to leave the boy at home, and to meet the Lawrences either in Tirol or in Italy. At first it was to be the former. By the middle of July they were at Constance on their way to Lake Zell, near Salzburg. Frieda's younger sister Johanna (it was the older sister Else to whom Lawrence had dedicated The Rainbow) had taken a house at Tumersbach and was there with her husband and children. But lovely as this was, Lawrence soon wearied to be gone. 'I have been waiting,' he wrote on August 3rd, 'to see whether I could really stay on here ... the villa is on the edge of the lake, we bathe and boat and go on excursions into the mountains. The snow isn't far. And the Schreibershofens are really very nice with us. And yet, I feel I can't breathe. Everything is free and perfectly easy. And still I feel I can't breathe. Perhaps it is one can't live with people any more - en menage. Anyhow there it is. Frieda loves it and is quite bitter that I say I want to go away. But there it is - I do.' He did not want to live again at Taormina, but Germany made him homesick for Italy. We were bringing him various things, including signed passport forms, as their passports were almost expired and they did not know how to have them renewed in either Germany or Italy. Though he sent us all the needful information and was ready to engage a room in the neighbouring peasant hotel, we could feel that he was restless. Also the weather broke at Tumersbach. We therefore made our own plans to walk from Innsbruck independently, and to reach Florence when he should be there in September.
After crossing, mainly on foot, in hot but stormy weather from Innsbruck to Meran we turned up the Brenner again and wandered through the battle-area to Cortina d'Ampezzo, where we got on the train for Venice. We did not stay there long. What with bad weather and bugs - 1921 was a great bug year in Italy and Austria - after a day or two we were glad to leave for Florence.
The Lawrences, whom we had advised of our train, were to meet us. But something not anybody's fault went wrong, and Lawrence spent a large part of the morning meeting trains in which we were not. When we did arrive there was nobody about for us, but just as we left the station we caught sight of Frieda hastening away. She had seen the train come in, but somehow had missed us. Such missings are a fatality in my family. Our joyful greeting on the road outside has quite obliterated what followed immediately upon it. I know we appointed to meet later for lunch all four together.
Lawrence and Frieda were in a furnished upper flat on the other side of the Arno, 32, Via dei Bardi, the house that is traditionally pointed out as Romola's. Lawrence had recommended a pension on the other side of the river where he had lived himself; but we found it too grand for us, and going farther on took a room in the Rigatti, a pleasant bell-haunted remnant of the Palazzo Alberti, at which Donald had stayed on a former visit.
Of our daily meetings for the week we were there, our meals together, our walks and our talks, Lawrence wrote to me soon afterwards - 'it seems only a moment we saw you - but the sympathy is there'. Both these remarks ring true to me today. Looking back now the week presents itself as rather less than a moment - a hazy moment at that, and we seem to have said and done nothing in particular, nor to have been particularly happy. Though I never felt more drawn to Lawrence, there was about him something resdess, remote and even impatient, which blurred the approach and made me doubt sadly once or twice if my own sympathy found any response. I therefore did my best to conceal it. Sometimes I was relieved to get out of his presence.
To use his own phrase, he was now 'done with Italy', and with Europe. It might turn out to be only for the time - it did in fact so turn out - but that made it none the less urgent. Even Sicily, which he had so loved, had ceased to hold him, and he was willing to return to it only that he might pack up and be off. He knew that we could not or would not go with him and he was bound to identify us in some degree with what he longed to leave. As companion adventurers we had failed him. But we were still acknowledged friends, more deeply acknowledged perhaps than ever before, as he needed friends, if only to leave behind. Even if we were only pillars of salt we stood for something. Lawrence was like the young son in the fairy tale who would one day come and touch his stony brethren with the far-fetched herb, and turn them once more into brethren of flesh. Meanwhile we were safe in our surroundings, and he was of that threatened frailty of flesh that needs all its wits about it.
Lawrence had loved Italy as much as any English poet ever did, and he got from it more than most. He was grateful till the end of his life for that carelessness of the South which dispelled like an unconscious benison the harsh and petty carefulness of his Northern upbringing. Travelling north would always make him feel ill and resentful. Turning south would always offer ease and healing. 'It cures one of caring, and a good thing too!' He felt this at the beginning and returned to it at the end, but, bask as he might now for a time in the essential tolerance of southern Italy, with its classical mentality and its good-humoured physicalness, it could not assuage for ever his northern thirst for 'something beyond'. He must seek further for that other world that is within and behind the real world. The easy and eminently workable Latin compromise with life had gone a little stale, a little rancid in his mouth. It, or something like it, might yet prove to be a practical solution. But there was much to be looked into before this could be accepted.
Lawrence's friends, the Brewsters, who were Buddhists and were shortly leaving Sicily for the East, were urging him to follow them to Ceylon where he could see the working out of Buddhism. At the end of the week he was going to see them off. He was in a resdess state of waiting. He knew that he must move soon himself, but was still undecided as to whether the move should be East or West.
As always, there were several stray people who whirled for the time in Lawrence's orbit. I vaguely remember a large American woman who was studying singing, and who had brought with her a stout son of fourteen who carried a cudgel in Fascist fashion, and Lawrence introduced us to at least one of the well-known residents am
ong his acquaintance in Florence. I seem to remember a smallish clean-shaven face that managed to be at once red and dried up. Even this picture, as of something both parched and glowing, may be mistaken. A casual introduction will often thus afflict me with blindness and deafness as well as aphasia.
Again I remember a young woman whom I cannot place, and of whom I have only a single recollection. We were all on the roof of the Lawrences' house. A camera is a thing I scarcely ever use, but I had brought a Brownie with me for our walk across the Dolomites, and when I saw Lawrence standing laughing near the parapet I had the sudden desire to take a snapshot of him. I don't think he was more than faintly irritated. Anyhow he went on laughing and did not say anything to stop me. But the young woman thought she divined in Lawrence some serious distaste and tried to prevent the photograph from being taken. At any other time I believe I might have submitted. But feeling certain that Lawrence did not really mind, and longing to have a picture of him in his present light and gay mood, I persisted. I am very glad to have the picture now. It is, I think, a misfortune that by far the most of the photographs and portraits of Lawrence show him as thoughtful - either fiercely or sufferingly so. His usual expression was a kind of sparkling awareness, almost an 'I am ready for anything' look which was invigorating to behold.
The Lawrences' flat was second from the top. In the small top floor was Mary Cannan. Once at least we all went to her room for a meal, which was more sumptuous and varied than the meals we shared with the Lawrences. White-haired and with exquisitely pretty features, Mary was always the elegant one of the company. One day when Mary was out, Frieda displayed to me a cupboard full of her enviable clothes. While the rest of us were still content with knitted wool or silk of the common kind, Mary had several hand-knitted dresses of silk bouclé - then the very latest thing from Paris. Passing it appreciatively through her hands, Frieda, who prided herself on a 'feeling for textures', assured me with solemn emphasis that it was 'enormously expensive'. It was perhaps a certain lack of response in me on this occasion that led Frieda to the conclusion that 'Catherine had taste but no feeling for textures'. I admired the bouclé frigidly and without desiring to handle it.
I was jealous of Mary. That summer Donald and I had been roughing it - drenched by storms, devoured by bugs, several nights bedless in the mountains - which was all very well in the mountains, but now in civilised surroundings, tired out from over-walking, I was obliged to appear on every occasion in a faded garment of flowered cotton which had originally been intended as a garden overall. When it fell to me, as it often seemed to do, to walk behind Lawrence and Mary, Lawrence attired with impressive suitability in natural coloured silk (a sort of Palm Beach suit) and Mary all that was urbane and charming, I almost hated Mary. Frieda had advised me to apply to her for the secret of a particular face-bleaching lotion which she used and, I understood, had received directly from Sarah Bernhardt. This I never did, but I have often wondered about it since. I saw that Lawrence liked to walk with a fashionably dressed woman, and though he could and did make fun of Mary behind her back (as indeed he could and did of any of us) and was sometimes clearly bored before her face, he was fond of her and took a lot of trouble over her, largely because she looked always so nice. She had written a book, still in manuscript, about all the dogs she had ever had as pets. Lawrence, at her request, went over it most carefully, suggesting alterations and improvements. Remembering my experience with my own novel, I found this distressing.
Though not in the least rich, Lawrence just then, owing to the placing of short stories in the United States through Mountsier, had become distinctly more prosperous than he had been when I last saw him. This was reflected in his and Frieda's clothes. He would never be a dandy, but he liked to appear in the unmistakable role of ill signore. I felt we Carswells were foiling to keep pace. It was unfortunate, too, for me that I had Anglo-Italian cousins in Florence to whom I introduced Lawrence without good effect. My cousins had the right to consider themselves of the Italian aristocracy. But they showed themselves blind alike to Lawrence's genius and his charm, and he disliked what he saw of them. Like so many well-bred Italians they knew nothing of English Literature later than Oscar Wilde, except for modern rumours of Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, and possibly Mr Galsworthy. As they had been associated with some of the romantic passages of my childhood, this state of matters made me feel absurdly jangled, especially in view of several unlucky contacts which I brought about. I suppose most lives contain similar 'pockets', in which a fetish of youth has remained so long undisturbed that the turning out demands a certain resolution.
One specially unlucky incident distressed me out of measure. One of my cousins lived in an old villa, really a little castle, some way out of Florence. This existed in its own world, with some hundreds of peasants living on the estate under the mezzadria system. Everything, from the wine and the bread to the restored panelling of the rooms, was home-grown and home-made. Having boasted to Lawrence and Frieda of the beauties of this place, at which Donald and I were going to spend a weekend, I arranged that an invitation should be given. The Lawrences - and, I think, Mary Cannan - were to take the tram from Florence to the nearest hamlet that was some two or three miles from the villa, and a carriage ordered by my cousins was to bring them out to spend the Sunday and meet Professor Guglielmo Ferrero.
Sunday came, but no Lawrence party arrived, and only at the hour they were expected did I learn that my cousin had forgotten, or had anyhow omitted, to order the carriage which should have been done beforehand in the hamlet as she had not one of her own. In desperation I set out to meet them on foot; but when, after traversing about a mile, I saw no signs of them, I knew it was useless to go on. By the time I reached the village, if as it appeared - they had failed to find a carriage for themselves, they would have gone home. It was a frightfully hot day.
On the Monday in Florence we found, as I had feared, that they had come as far as the hamlet by a wearisome tram, had found no further means of transport, and had gone back. Lawrence treated the matter lightly and said it was of no consequence. The worst thing was that my cousin didn't think it of any consequence either. She regarded Lawrence as nothing more than an obscure English bohemian friend of ours. The lapse was a nightmare of abasement to me, all the more that so little was said on either side. So I could not help rejoicing in my cousin's humiliation when, to his undisguised and very vocal rage, she inadvertently introduced the great Ferrero under the name of his father-in-law, Lombroso.
On Lawrence's thirty-seventh birthday, which fell during our week, we supped alone with Frieda and him at his flat and were gay in a quiet sort of way. I cannot remember much that was said, except that we discussed the break with Pinker, and I recall much praise of the Italian newspapers at the expense of the English ones. How much better than The Times was the Corriere della Sera! How much less 'base'! When reading the English newspapers in Italy he felt ashamed to be an Englishman, and that was a thing he hated. His John Bullishness was able to raise its head again, however, and its voice, in acute disgust of the use to which the shingle on the other side of the Arno was put by the Florentine giovinezza. If anybody should find an inconsistency or a discrepancy between this disgusted Lawrence and the Lawrence who painted certain of his pictures, that person must think again, and think hard.
Another day the Lawrences ate with us at a little downstairs restaurant off the Via dei Calzaioli. I remember only one thing vividly. Shortly before we met for our meal I had been nagging at Donald for what I took to be some small breach of manners on his part with regard to the same cousin who failed to send the carriage for Lawrence. In certain ways, I had argued, the Italians are formal, and in not observing their formalities we give them the opening to despise us and our friends. Smarting under her lack of courtesy to Lawrence, I was annoyed by any possible lapse on our part So I had been scolding, and Donald at dinner had complained of this, good-naturedly, to Lawrence. 'You ought to hit her!' said Lawrence fiercely - 'Hit her hard. Do
n't let her scold and nag. You mustn't allow it, whatever it is you have done!' We all laughed and felt refreshed. When, the other day, I recalled this to Donald he had no recollection of it. But I have never forgotten.
I have said that the stout son of the American lady singer carried a cudgel in the Fascist fashion. During that summer of 1921, the Fascist order had not yet been established in Italy, but it was coming on fast and there were constant street fights in Florence. Though I witnessed several rushes of a street crowd, I never saw any actual shooting. Lawrence, however, had, and his descriptions were so lively that I had to think twice before saying just now that I was not present myself. He told us how, on the sound of a shot, the crowded street was an empty one before you could wink. The people, he declared, ran up the fronts of the houses like flies and down into the earth like mice. One moment they were there, strolling slowly and thickly after the manner of a Florentine crowd. The next moment not a soul in sight. When Lawrence had seen anything like this that excited him, he was able by word and voice and gesture to make you share perfectly in his bygone excitement. As in his description of the bullfight at the opening of The Plumed Serpent, he made a point of avoiding all the more familiar forms of exaggeration. But when, especially in talking, a single, carefully selected enlargement was necessary to convey the force of his own emotion to the listener, he chose his point infallibly. I never once heard him exaggerate the wrong point or fail to convey the strict emotional truth by means of the exaggeration he had chosen. He would have made a great descriptive reporter.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1129
