2
At Villach, Karnten, in Austria, he was at first hardly able to walk. But though the weather was variable, he rejoiced in the coolness after the gruelling heat of that July in Florence, and he grew quickly stronger. In September he went with Frieda to Germany, returning to the place from which he and she had started on their perilous mating more than fifteen years earlier - Irschenhausen in the Isarthal, near Munich. Here, in the very same little wooden house at the corner of the forest, and even attended by the very same servant as before, they stayed the month out quietly. Frieda's sister Else (of The Rainbow) visited them. The forest was behind, the open country in front, with the mountains beyond, all still unspoiled. Lawrence drank goat's milk and rested. They were both happy, hut I think it was Frieda's hour.
Sadly for me I missed seeing them at Baden-Baden, where I was able to call one day that September. In circumstances wholly unforeseen I had been dispatched by my brother-in-law by aeroplane to be with my sister who was having heart treatment at Nauheim. I did not know of the Lawrences' whereabouts, and - taking my chance - missed seeing even Frieda's mother. In October I should have caught all three, but by then I was back at home. A letter from Frieda at Baden told me that Lawrence was doing some more inhaling there, and that he was very 'mild and tame', the utmost of excitement being a game of whist in the evenings with the 'old excellencies' at the Stift, whose darling he was.
When Lawrence wrote soon after, it was to assure us that it was only 'a question now of putting on weight and getting the general condition up again'. He had been badly shaken by this last bout, and even while he felt better he could not eat. Still he believed that all would yet come right. 'We really must all chirp up, and have one of the jolly old times,' he wrote. 'We must chirp up, all of us. Sempre! D. H. L.' Incredible as it now seems I was not seriously anxious about Lawrence at this time. I had always known that he was 'delicate'. Equally I knew that he recovered from every upset and was never very long knocked out. I am sure that most of us felt the same - more anxious to hear of his expected restoration to his normal state than we were afraid of not hearing of it.
He enclosed a number of photographs, taken at the Mirenda, of the pictures he had been painting during the past two years. In the back of each was a pencil note of the dimensions and colours. One of these days, he said, he might think of exhibiting them.
There was a shy but eager note in every mention by Lawrence of his pictures which I never found in any reference to his novels, though there was something like it in the case of certain poems. In painting he was at once more playful and more exposed than in the writing of prose. He had tremendously enjoyed the making of his pictures, and at the same time he felt that he was expressing by means of them something both personal and fundamental to himself. But he had kept very quiet about it, regarding it for long as little more than an amusement. He had, in fact, begun through having by chance at the same time both a number of canvases left by somebody at the villa and a collection of oddments of ordinary house-paints left over from redecorations.
By then the larger and more memorable of his pictures - the 'Holy Family', the 'Expulsion from Eden', the Boccaccio illustration and the men bathing by the willows - were all in existence, besides most of the smaller ones.
I am no judge of paintings, especially not of paintings by Lawrence. Some who are said to be good judges have told me they are worthless. Others again, whose judgement is equally estimable, have contradicted this verdict. I certainly liked the look of those in the photographs, as I did when I later saw them at the Warren Gallery. They seemed to me work that could have been done by nobody but Lawrence, and, like everything by Lawrence, they opened windows and let in fresh air. Simply as compositions I found the Boccaccio piece and the willows landscape lovely. And I was delighted by the true believer's touch of mockery in the rendering of the Eternal Triangle of Father, Mother and Child posed in front of their cottage crocks - that cheeky, clever little Jesus who was going to upset everybody's apple-cart, that mindless, smiling, big-breasted mother Eve, and that moustachioed Father and Husband who was so clearly the master in his own house! Who but Lawrence would have seen them just so?
3
November saw them back at the Mirenda and Lawrence writing his third draft of Lady Chatterley.
Just then, after having spent some time on getting up the subject, I was starting to write a life of Robert Burns. Lawrence applauded the project. He wrote to Donald (whose book Brother Scots he had just read, enjoyed and helpfully criticised):
Cath's idea of a Burns book I like very much: I always wanted to do one myself, but am not Scotchy enough. I read just now Lockhart's bit of a life of Burns. Made me spit! ... If Cath is condescending to Burns, I disown her. He was quite right, a man's a man for a' that, and it's not a bad poem. He means what he says. My word, you can't know Burns unless you can hate the Lockharts and all the estimable bourgeois and upper classes as he really did - the narrow-gutted pigeons. Don't, for God's sake, be mealy mouthed like them. I'd like to write a Burns life. Oh, why doesn't Burns come to life again, and really salt them! . . . don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
Not long afterwards, liking very much Burns's letter to Ainslie, which I had sent to him, he suggested that somebody might like to reissue The Merry Muses (of which I had told him but which he had never seen) with an introduction - 'a little essay on being bawdy' - by himself.
For that Christmas a German friend had offered us her little house in the Harz Mountains, and we managed to get together our fares and go there. My friend was a Doctor of Philosophy, and her husband a medical doctor, the head of a Klinik at Frankfurt-on-Oder which specialised in lung cases.
Like so many other cultured Germans, our friends were keenly interested in Lawrence and his work, and they questioned us eagerly about him. Hearing of his delicacy, they assured me of what I could well believe, that the air of the Harz possessed in their experience a quality which often rendered it more healing than the air of Switzerland to troubled lungs and bronchials. Very gladly, they said, they would treat Lawrence for nothing, or for what he could afford without a strain. I felt that this doctor, a man who had come through the horrors of the Russo-German front and was quiet and sensitive and gentle, would have known better than most how to deal with a patient to whom the word sanatorium was almost synonymous with suicide. I even elicited from him his opinion that, in a case such as Lawrence's, the prescription of sanatorium treatment in a sanatorium was usually a mistake.
But it came at the wrong moment. Lawrence, though greatly attracted by our descriptions of the place and of the doctor, wrote that it was 'too far, too far'. He was supposed, he said, to be going 'up to the snow in January' but was 'shirking it' and would see when January came. He hated the chopping and changing about. He would prefer to wait where he was, if that were possible, till the spring, and then perhaps, having saved his energy, try another summer season at the ranch before deciding to sell it. The doctor who had examined his lungs at Baden had not been against altitudes. There was a chance that the high dry American mountain air might set him up again. Anyhow he was tired to death of crawling about and being driven to consult new doctors whose prescriptions varied strangely. Money was not exactly pouring in. On what he did earn there was his agent's tax of ten per cent besides the new foreign commission on visitors of twenty per cent.
I still have the unhappy feeling that with more pressure on my part or with very slightly altered circumstances on his, and if we could have outstayed the holiday period there, Lawrence might have joined us; and Dr Dege and the dry, not too high air of the Harz might have helped toward healing him. But such are vain imaginings. As it was, Lawrence stayed at the Mirenda, provided a second jollification for the peasants, in which he joined on Christmas Eve, and for Christmas Day he allowed the Huxleys to motor him to friends of theirs in Florence.
It has been said that since their meeting in the summer of 1926 a dependable and fruitful friendship had sprung up be
tween Lawrence and Huxley. One day this friendship will no doubt be enlarged upon as one of the most remarkable of our time. I can give no more here than my own reading of it, as formed from my very limited knowledge and observation.
As early as 1916, when he was in Cornwall, Lawrence said to me, 'Young men ought to wish to come to me of themselves, I ought not to need to ask them to come.' Already he was sure of himself, and sure that he could make young men surer of themselves by what he could tell them. And even then young men were drawn to Lawrence after a fashion. They were attracted, and some of them came. But they came timidly, half unwillingly, and most of them withdrew in a strange fear - a strange but quite comprehensible fear - and a grave misunderstanding. At the same time these young men - Koteliansky, Murry, Gerder, Cannan, Heseltine, Gray, Aldington, and others - were without exception sensitive and gifted persons, unusual men who were potentially or actually capable of contributing a creative share to their epoch. While they were still as yet untried and unknown, Lawrence divined this of them. It was also this in them that made them find in their first contacts with Lawrence a stimulant as well as an irresistible charm. And although in turn they were repelled by his entire refusal to adapt himself, and discovered in his intention something at once uncompromising and hard to understand, each one went his way marked for life. Their conversation with Lawrence might result in nothing better than a lasting dissatisfaction, a feeling of guilt or a frantic spite. It never lacked results.
Lawrence on his side remained wholly untouched in the sense of being influenced. If he was incomparably more innocent than any of them, he was also of incomparably superior attainments as an artist and as a man of vital experience in life. Already 'never to adapt himself to humanity was a first requirement and proved his certainty. But he loved these friends as long as he might, bore with them, debated with them patiently and passionately, went to endless trouble over them, and gave them handsomely of his best. It must be borne in mind that of the established men of the day, even those who had stated early admiration or accorded practical help, held themselves at a cautious distance from the author of The Rainbow. Either they did not care, or did not know how to approach him, and in the peculiar circumstances the approach would have to come from them. Patronage, frigid, monitory or uncomprehending, of the kind that urged him to write another Sons and Lovers, was useless. He needed a grown man's hand stretched out in warm equality and comradeship. There was no such hand.
Not until Aldous Huxley arrived at the Mirenda with his sensitive goodwill and his second-hand car to sell. But then it came - better late than never!
In Huxley, taking first the externals, Lawrence was offered a man still young, who was yet of established reputation, with nothing in the worldly sense to gain or lose by seeking a friendship. As regarded the practical aspects of life, which must always count, Lawrence and he met on an equality.
Less externally, Huxley came before Lawrence as a writer of exquisite perceptiveness who was both perfectly honest and perfectly sceptical. He was indeed so sceptical as to be almost without opinions, certainly without what can be called religious opinions. If Lawrence was our Eager Heart, Huxley was our Scandalised Spectator. He was so perfectly open-minded that intellectually he stood for nothing. But he had looked at life and his heart was appalled. For he had a heart to be appalled.
This is the inmost point. Huxley could suffer cleanly and warmly, without self-seeking or shrieking, but none the less acutely. Unlike Murry, he could feel simply and with the heart. And what he had not been able to get over was that suffering was one of the major facts of life. 'Be brave!', 'bear it!', 'endure!', 'swallow it!' - so we are obliged to address the baby boy from birth as the terrible equivalent of 'be a man!' Why?
The Japanese, the Chinese, the Red Indians and other peoples take full cognisance of this fact in their education. The boy must learn to bear pain without flinching, perhaps in the process to come by a species of useful self-hypnosis. If less pain falls to him than he may expect, this will be a bonus to his life. If it falls in its plenitude he will deal with it unsurprised. There is much to be said in practice for some such imposition of ardours and endurances. But the true inwardness of the imposition is that it is religious in its origin. The initiation ceremonies enacted by the savage on the threshold of virility are not mere cruelties; they are inspired by the sacredness of manhood and by the recognition in the soul that suffering is something irremediable which must be met without repining.
That is to say, at a certain stage in life they are conventionally inflicted, first in recognition of what man may expect from a live, unknowable, partly malicious cosmos, and second, to endow each individual with the power to defy the cosmos, when need be, in his own sacred person. The conception is profoundly religious and it meets one of the deepest of human needs.
The modern European, however, has no such vitalising way out. He combats pain with science, denies it with Christian Science, bears it with intellectual stoicism, or accepts with regard to it the Christian ideal.
Concerning the first, non-religious ways - stoicism and modern science go badly together, and in spite of our many pain-destroying inventions it is, I suppose, a debatable question as to whether suffering - taking things all round and including mental suffering - has not rather increased than decreased in a nerve-ridden modern world.
By the Jewish-Christian ideal, again, we suffer either as a punishment for sin or in furtherance of our spiritual purification, this being undertaken by a loving God for his own inscrutable ends. In either case we are victims. As it works out in practice, we can become godlike only by welcoming suffering, not by resisting it. The more a victim, the nearer to the divine. When pushed to this extremity the flesh will get some of its own back by such means as flagellation. But the whole of the ascetic practice is an exact antithesis to the hardships undergone in the non-Christian initiation to adult life. The first seeks to weaken the flesh which already it has ideally degraded: the second seeks to strengthen an ideally potent flesh in the conflict between man and the unseen. Both would have man partake of the divine, but submission is the secret communion of the one, while the other communicates by way of a challenge which is none the less worship.
Once I told Lawrence a story I had thought of writing. A bishop, as I fancied, was obliged to preach in a district that had been ravaged by some awful plague. As he sat in his chair preparing a sermon full of adjurations to the faithful, bidding them endure gladly that their souls might be refined in the fires of suffering and so be fitted to glorify their Maker, he dropped asleep. And in his sleep he dreamed that the Lord, clad in a mantle of pure and sumptuous fur, came and asked him to have a walk through the universe. The bishop went, and he found that the universe was a vast stockyard for fine-skinned animals, such as foxes, hares, ermines, and the rest. In each section the beasts - which were the souls of men - were progressively tortured, plagued and beaten, in such a manner as to refine to the utmost the gloss and quality of their pelts. Only the finest, which incidentally suffered more excruciatingly than the rest, were fitted to adorn at last this God who rubbed His hands over the crucifixion.
Lawrence shuddered over this tale. 'You can't write that,' he said. 'It's too horrible. Yet, oh, yes; it is what thousands of us were brought up to believe. The flagellation of the Christian saint. Yes, you'd better write it, if you can bear to.'
On the other hand, when I was shocked by the old Japanese play Bushido, in which the adoring parents of a talented and beautiful only boy, tell him that they must cut off his head to save that of his Emperor, and the boy, like his parents, purifies himself and is willing for the sacrifice, Lawrence told me I was wrong to be offended. 'It is the only way to happiness,' he said, 'the only way for life to be rich, for people to have something apart from their own little individual souls that is worth the sacrifice of life itself.'
Again, though in Lawrence's phrase we were 'between the hammer and the anvil' and life was 'full of wonder and surprise and mostly pain', pain w
ith him was always magnificently balanced by wonder and surprise. In spite of accounts to the contrary, accounts marred by the hidden hysteria of their writers, he was the least hysterical of men. He was sensitive less in an extreme than in a special degree, maintaining his responses to life at every point, yet accepting his own share of suffering in a manner that in practice had almost the appearance of stoicism. This was because his sensitiveness was so far removed from self-importance. During the War it was not primarily the physical or mental agony, or even the wastage of humanity, that engaged his passion. It was the initial outrage on manhood inflicted by a mechanised conflict for something deeply felt to be not worth fighting for. What he entered into, as perhaps did no other man at the time, was the smothered horror of soldiers who feared neither death nor wounds. Thus he never fell into that self-persecuting and impotent 'suffering-with' which only too often begins as a form of masochism and ends as an excuse for lack of life in ourselves. No one I ever met responded more spontaneously or acted more gently in case of illness or pain. But he never worked himself up by imagining the sufferings of another, nor of the world as a whole. Once when we heard of an acquaintance who had lain exposed and wounded for three days in a shell-hole in Flanders, Lawrence checked my horrified fancy.
'He didn't suffer as, sitting here, we think,' he said. 'He wasn't there as you and I are here. In an experience like that, the being, the man, is almost gone, is at one remove. Bad enough, of course, but not the kind of sharpness you are imagining.' That this was true was proved when the same man, in hospital later, was cheerfully vague in recounting his sensations. Lawrence indeed exposed for me the wastefulness and the spiritual conceit that for so long have racked the nerves of our northern world in the guise of 'Christian sympathy'.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 1139
