This was in October and November. Early in October I reviewed The Rainbow for the Glasgow Herald. I lacked Murry's advantages in that Lawrence had given me no exposition of the book beforehand. After Sons and Lovers it puzzled and disappointed me. I had been expecting a masterpiece of fiction, and this did not correspond to my notions of such a thing. Neither did I understand the book. But the processional beauty, the strangeness, the magnificence of the descriptive passages, which passed far beyond anything in the earlier novels, gave me enough to admire and praise whole-heartedly. No other writer could have risen to such heights or plumbed such depths, and I said so as well as I could at considerable length. But I had no grasp, and I found it a hard review to write.
Other critics praised in varying degrees; but many were offended, notably Mr James Douglas, whose coarse and copious abuse was the efficient cause of the police proceedings. The review by Mr de la Mare written for The Times Literary Supplement was, I believe, both long and largely favourable; but it was still in proof when the prosecution took place, and so was never published. Murry, when it came to the bit, did not review the book. This omission was natural, perhaps even friendly. He 'simply', as he would say - which seems to mean 'complicatedly' - disliked The Rainbow. But he ought not to give us to understand that the prosecution precluded a review.
Lawrence was given no official notice of the prosecution, but he heard of it as early as November 5th through the late W. L. George. Noticing that the book was suddenly omitted from the publishers' advertisements, Mr George had rung up Methuens, learned that legal action was being taken, and immediately informed Lawrence.
The affair kept Lawrence in London, hanging on to see if any remedy was to be found, till he was caught by December and really frightened by the severity of his colds. For his health he knew he ought to have gone earlier. Now he was divided in mind whether to face it out in the hope of some concerted action in his favour, or to let the whole thing drop, and fly. Believing that ultimately his books must fight for themselves, he greatly preferred the latter course. The English did not like him. Why not stop writing for England and change his public? But from many quarters he was urged and encouraged to stay. He felt his publisher had behaved badly ('What a snake in his boiled shirt bosom!' exclaimed Lawrence), but the Society of Authors might help. Murry has said accusingly that no established writer came forward in the matter. Lawrence himself, however, has given some credit to Arnold Bennett, May Sinclair and others. And he received many encouraging letters and calls. Sir Oliver Lodge came, and Mr Drinkwater. The failure was in the matter of an organised protest. And this, no doubt, was because, like Murry, men such as Mr Galsworthy and Mr Wells did not like 'The Rainbow'. They were shocked by some of its details and, perhaps unconsciously, they felt its essential repudiation of all they stood for.
Lawrence, through Pinker, tried to sound his confrères - what did Henry James think of it, what Bennett, what E. M. Forster? - and the cautious or candid replies he received alike convinced him of the deep contention between him and all the rest. They would allow that he had 'genius', but how they hated the manifestations of that genius! This was really what he had to accept. And he knew it. No protest would alter it. Besides he was incensed by literary strictures. 'When they have as good a work to show, they may make their pronouncements ... till then let them learn decent respect.' So he wrote when he heard that a brother novelist had criticised his 'construction'.
At the same time Philip Morrell asked questions in Parliament; the favourable reviews (mine among them) were collected as evidence; and several schemes - one of them by Prince Antoine Bibesco - were set afoot for producing the book by private subscription. As Lawrence truly said, an energetic man could have done this and made it pay. But more than mere energy was needed. Even in those who would promote the scheme there was scarcely any real enthusiasm for the book. Most people, like Murry, were paralysed by distaste. The mere justice of a cause is seldom enough to carry it through. So it dragged. And Lawrence saw behind it well enough. He had to content himself with glowing praise in an American magazine (the Metropolitan) and with the prospect of the novel appearing shortly in the United States.
One way and another I saw a good deal of Lawrence when he was in Hampstead; but there was a thin veil between us and this, I think, he resented, though he was also grateful for it. It was of my making. Lawrence did not draw veils. He scoffed a little, though in the most friendly way, when he said that I made him think of that title of an old novel, The Guarded Flame, or reminded him of the bunched up, bell-clustered flower of the wild nettle. Himself he was a blown and dancing flame, and his flower emblem was the open-faced wild rose or the luminous outspread blossom of the campion, which he loved one of the best of wild flowers.
From beginning to end I had for Lawrence, as he well knew, a special kind of love and admiration which I never had for any other human being. It was impossible not to pay him the profoundest tributes and at the same time to rejoice in his companionship in ordinary ways. But I felt also the need to save myself, even to save myself up - for what I knew not, but for something that would come. For my age and experience I was still very immature. But there are wounds in life to which one does not twice expose oneself, and I had known such wounds. Yet again, where giving is demanded there must be the ability to take. Lawrence had the capacities of giving, taking and demanding in a marvellous if terrifying degree. But he was past the time of spending and being spent, and he had married a woman who would see to it that he did not return in his tracks. Lawrence was one thing, the combination of Lawrence and Frieda quite another. I have a cowardly dread of a mess. It was necessary, I believe, for Lawrence to create a great deal of mess in his human contacts - necessary to his work. His marriage with Frieda was a step which inevitably created a morass about the paths of friendship. I saw one person after another flounder in that morass. For me, I preferred to signal across it. My recent marriage was another barrier. Lawrence knew perfectly what marriage meant to me. And though there was an enduring respect between him and the man I had married there was no particular gush of sympathy.
I had not only a wholesome fear of Lawrence. I was shy, and even suspicious of most of the friends by whom he was now surrounded. I did not fit well with them, and there was something in their relation with him that saddened me. If he needed them, then he did, and it was his affair. But I got the feeling that he did not think much of them, and was using them for what he needed, not so much willingly as malgré lui.
It was from his experience with these friends, and their interrelations through Frieda, that he wrote Women in have. Later, when he gave me the manuscript of that novel to read, I asked him why must he write of people who were so far removed from the general run, people so sophisticated and 'artistic' and spoiled, that it could hardly matter what they did or said? To which he replied that it was only through such people that one could discover whither the general run of mankind, the great unconscious mass, was tending. There, at the uttermost tips of the flower of an epoch's achievement, one could already see the beginning of the flower of putrefaction which must take place before the seed of the new was ready to fall clear. I gathered too that in the nature of the putrefaction the peculiar nature of an epoch was revealed. And the more quickly we recognised and accepted the nature of the failure, the more speedily would the new unknown seed find a condition for its germination. Achievement carried to its furthest limits coincided with putrefaction. Those who sought the new must take their stand right in the flux.
I am not now reporting Lawrence's actual words, which I cannot remember, but I use remembered phrases to give the impression he conveyed - an impression familiar to all his readers. I found his answer as I have described it, satisfactory from his point of view and illuminating to mine. But it left my practical position unchanged. I gave it as my opinion that, whatever the value of the putrefying petals to him as a writer, he would not find the human beings representing them much use either as friends or in the formation of a gr
oup for the furthering of new life.
Even as I spoke, I felt that my obvious little truth did not matter nearly so much as his difficult big one. Yet beneath what I said there was lurking a deeper truth - my still unformulated belief that Lawrence was meant to be understanded of the common people and that they would eventually be the ones to profit by what he would bring forth. I had always noticed that he took for granted the common virtues, and even many of what we call the Christian virtues. He built on a solid foundation. So I persisted.
He was a little offended at my disparagement of his friends. 'Whom then would you suggest? What kind of people?' At his look sadness overcame me. It was something like having to break the secret of suffering to a child, and in my own helplessness in the face of this man's clear destiny I would have been glad to eat my words. But now it was started I had to go on. How stupid it was of me not to have seen from the first that Lawrence must work for those who could not understand him till long afterwards, and that those who could give - or seem to give - immediate understanding, were absolutely needful to him, though they must soon prove to be humanly detestable. Failing to see this clearly at the time, I could only blunder on with the thought that came nearest. 'You will have to be alone, I am afraid,' I said, 'all through and in the end, alone.' It was dragged out of me unwillingly, while I hoped with all my heart that I was talking bosh. Who was I that I should condemn a man like Lawrence to loneliness? But it sounded horribly like the truth.
Lawrence dropped his head. He admitted that it might perhaps be so. But I saw he could not quite accept it. Not yet. One thing was clear to me. The only way for me to help Lawrence in the slightest degree, or for Lawrence to help me, was for me to keep my hands off him. He knew this, with so much more besides. It couldn't be helped. The surprising thing was how much it meant just to have met and to know him.
He brought his sister Ada to see me one day. I had been baking oatcakes. We sat chatting and nibbling happily at the crisp warm oatmeal. He loved Ada. He told me afterwards that he and she had felt constrained together in all other London company except mine.
In small ways Lawrence could often be, as he has confessed in one of his Assorted Articles, 'a bit false'. He could not bear being unpleasant to anybody's face. Once when I was at Byron Villas and he was in bed with a cold, a woman called. He heard her voice in the hall, grimaced viciously and in a whispered yell to Frieda said, 'Don't let that woman come into my room!' But Frieda, not hearing or not caring or not contriving, ushered the visitor in. And Lawrence welcomed her quite charmingly. She could not possibly have guessed how he had looked and spoken a moment before.
4
Till well on in December we were looking out ships for Lawrence to sail to Florida. But he was too ill, and the War made it all too difficult. So he gave it up. He spent Christmas week with his sisters at Ripley.
We got here with a struggle. How terrible it is to return into the past like this - with the future quivering far off forsaken - to turn back to the past.
No wonder Lawrence hated Proust! For a poet born in the mining Midlands there can be no récherche du temps perdu behind soundproof walls while the present goes by to muffled drums outside. The mining Midlands see to that. And I, from Glasgow, understood it, just as Katherine Mansfield from the sweeter home in New Zealand, could not. Being herself able to be playful, affectionate, whimsical about 'home', she felt a shade reproachful and superior towards those who could not. For Lawrence, the more deeply touched he had been, the more he had suffered and been outraged. The past had been no 'very perfect nest' for him. But the scenes of childhood and youth, of course, have a clutching hold on the heart, and on Lawrence's more than on most.
Christmas over, he accepted most gratefully an invitation from the J. D. Beresfords to use their house at Padstow in Cornwall. Never would he forget this kindness. He began there by being two weeks in bed, but did not cease working. In February Amores was returned by a publisher, together with 'instructions as to how to write poetry'. Which elicited from Lawrence a letter calling his critic 'impertinent and foolish and presumptuous'.
My review of The Rainbow (to which the angry attention of my editor was drawn only after the prosecution) had lost me my reviewing of ten years' standing on the Glasgow Herald. Lawrence did not hear of this till he was in Cornwall. He wrote to me 'I am sorry about your reviewing because I believe you enjoyed the bit you had. And one does not want to be martyred.' Somehow from this I understood that he thought it a good thing for me, if I could take it so, that I was cut off from that sort of newspaper work. I now think he was right in this.
Chiefly to keep in touch with him, and because I knew he liked it, I kept sending him poems of mine. There was only one - a Hardyesque poem about a graveyard - that he thought good. But he found fault with it for being 'verse which in spirit bursts all the old world, and yet goes corseted in rhymed scansion', though immediately afterwards he apologised for his 'scribblings on it' as 'only impertinent suggestions'. He need not have apologised. It was not a very good poem, though it had merit. The chief thing for me was that he recognised in it that bit of merit. Of another he wrote:
There is a really good conception of a poem: but you have not given yourself with sufficient passion to the creating, to bring it forth. I'm not sure that I want you to - there is something tragic and displeasing about a woman who writes - but I suppose Sapho [sic] is as inevitable and as right as Shelley - but you must burn, to be a Sapho - burn at the stake. And Sapho is the only woman poet.
Or:
The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and unlovely actualities is a stark directness, without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything can go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry, today.
Or he told how he liked Cornwall, which for him was a true land's end.
... It is not England. It is bare and dark and elemental, Tristan's land. I lie looking down at a cove where the waves come white under a low, black headland, which slopes up in bare green-brown, bare and sad under a level sky. It is old, Celtic, pre-Christian. Tristan and his boat, and his horn.
Again:
I love being here: such a calm, old, slightly deserted house - a farmhouse; and the country remote and desolate and unconnected; it belongs to the days before Christianity, the days of the Druids, or of desolate Celtic magic and conjuring and the sea is so grey and shaggy, and the wind so restless, as if it had never found a home since the days of Iseult. Here I think my life begins again - one is free. Here the autumn is gone by, it is pure winter of forgetfulness. I love it. Soon I shall begin to write a story - a midwinter story of oblivion.
He was writing 'erratically', being several times down with his 'wintry inflammation' and 'so seedy he thought he was dead' - 'so ill that nearly everything has gone out of me but a sort of abstract strength.' But he was hopeful - 'this is the last turn -I shall be solid again in a week.'
Philip Heseltine (the late 'Peter Warlock') had stayed with them for eight weeks and - other plans for it having fallen through - he and Heseltine had a scheme by which The Rainbow would be published for subscribers at 7s. 6d.
I possess what may well be the only surviving copy of the prospectus, a printed slip with a subscription form attached. I reproduce the text here.
The Rainbow Books and Music Either there exists a sufficient number of people to buy books because of their reverence for truth, or else books must die. In its books lie a nation's vision; and where there is no vision the people perish.
The present system of production depends entirely upon the popular esteem: and this means gradual degradation. Inevitably, more and more, the published books are dragged down to the level of the lowest reader.
It is monstrous that the herd should lord it over the uttered word. The swine has only to grunt disapprobation, and the very angels of heaven will be compelled to silence.
It is time that enough people of courage and passionate soul should rise up to fo
rm a nucleus of the living truth; since there must be those among us who care more for the truth than for any advantage.
For this purpose it is proposed to attempt to issue privately such books and musical works as are found living and clear in truth; such books as would either be rejected by the publisher, or else overlooked when flung into the trough before the public.
This method of private printing and circulation would also unseal those sources of truth and beauty which are now sterile in the heart, and real works would again be produced.
It is proposed to print first The Rainbow, the novel by Mr D. H. Lawrence, which has been so unjustly suppressed. If sufficient money is forthcoming, a second book will be announced; either Mr Lawrence's philosophical work, Goats and Compasses, or a new book by some other writer.
All who wish to support the scheme should sign the accompanying form and send it at once to the Secretary, PHILIP HESELTINE, Cefn Bryntalch, Abermule, Montgomeryshire.
Murry has attributed the Signature and this second scheme to a single motive. Did they not follow upon each other with an interval of only a few months? This is plausible at first sight. But it omits a major circumstance - namely, that it was just within this interval that The Rainbow was prosecuted. At the date of the Signature such an event was not to be foreseen, and it made all the difference to Lawrence as a writer. It was one thing to know that editors could not be expected to accept difficult contributions like 'The Crown'; quite another thing to realise that publishers, hitherto amenable, would fight shy of future novels by the author of The Rainbow. One must recall that the now familiar private presses did not then exist, anyhow, not so far as Lawrence's need was concerned. It was out of this particular need that the second project arose. Though I could not believe that it would come to anything more than a possible reissue of The Rainbow, this was enough to make me a hopeful subscriber. Support, however, was lacking. The project fell through. That summer Twilight in Italy and Amores would be 'flung into the trough' in the ordinary way.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1119
