All this is to say that when I came to meet him Lawrence was at the end of that adventure which three years later he was to confide with some reluctance to the world in the cycle of poems called Look! We Have Come Through! Besides The Rainbow, most of these astonishing, perfectly original poems were already in existence. Of course I did not know this. With Lawrence one was usually in the dusty rear in literary as well as other matters. His sister has told how in their youthful expeditions he always ranged ahead. He continued all his life to do so.
I have read that to Richard Aldington in those days Lawrence looked like a soldier, and that to David Garnett he suggested a plumber's mate or the kind of workman that makes trouble with the boss. But to me, on that day in June, 1914, when I first set eyes on him, the immediately distinguishing thing was his swift and flamelike quality, which was quite unlike anything suggested by even the most fascinating type of British soldier or workman. I was sensible of a fine, rare beauty in Lawrence, with his deep-set jewel-like eyes, thick dust-coloured hair, pointed underlip of notable sweetness, fine hands, and rapid but never restless movements. The stiff, the slow or the unreal had as little part in that frame as had any mechanically imposed control, but he was beautifully disciplined. In any kind of paid manual or even mechanical labour, if he had undertaken it, I should have said that Lawrence would have risen quickly to a position of authority and would have been in favour because of his good workmanship. This is not the kind that 'makes trouble' in the accepted sense of the phrase, anyhow not so long as he is employed on a definite understanding. I have seen Lawrence under many circumstances but I never once saw him heavy or lounging, and he was never idle, just as a bird is never idle. At the same time I never saw a trace of strain or resentment in him when engaged in any of his manifold activities. In these two ways - never being idle, yet never seeming to labour - he was unlike anybody else I ever met. He was without human dreariness.
On this first meeting I was disappointed in Frieda, whose beauty I had heard impressively described. I had lived in Germany, and she struck me as being a typical German Frau of the blonde, gushing type. She wore a tight coat and skirt of horse-cloth check that positively obscured her finely-cut, rather angry Prussian features. To discover how magnificent she could look, I had to see her marching about a cottage hatless and in an overall or, still better, in peasant costume. After that her handsomeness never escaped me, and I admired her greatly.
Nothing memorable was said over tea. But afterwards, when we all walked down to the Finchley Road together to see the Lawrences into their bus, he and I walked in front; and as we passed the churchyard where my child was buried and I had paid for a grave for myself, I found that I was talking to him as if I had known him all my life. It was not that Lawrence encouraged confidences. He had none of the traits, still less the tricks of what is usually understood to be the 'sympathetic' man. There were no 'intimacies', either physical or mental. But he gave an immediate sense of freedom, and his responses were so perfectly fresh, while they were puzzling, that it seemed a waste of time to talk about anything with him except one's real concerns.
I forget now how many times we had met before Lawrence undertook to read the manuscript of my first attempt at a novel, but it was still June when I received his first letter, which was all about it.
And for a postscript, 'You must be willing to put much real work, hard work into this, and you'll have a genuine creative piece of work. It's like Jane Austen at a deeper level.'
Lawrence would always read anything that anybody tried to write; but, though he was a valuable and astute literary critic, his critical point of view was not 'literary', as the word is usually understood. He read that he might find out what the writer would be at, and, having found out, that he might expound it to the writer who, as often as not, is only half conscious of the character of the impulses underlying all literary effort.
It was this, with his astonishing patience, his delighted recognition of any sign of vitality and his infectious insistence upon the hardest work, that made him unique among critics. Even if you were incapable of carrying out in the work itself what you learned from his comments upon it, you could hardly refrain from coming, in some degree at least, to distinguish in yourself between what was native and impulsive and what was affected or imposed and in consequence confused. If the writing under consideration was by an acknowledged master it was just the same. Himself an accomplished artist, Lawrence never underrated accomplishment. But he was no more deterred by skilled than by unskilled expression from divining and revealing the underlying stream of life. He could neither be put off nor carried away by talent, a quality which, among others, makes his Studies in Classic American Literature a book of rare critical value. His second letter followed next day - it seem natural that the author of any serious effort should be on his own footing, and soon one accepted it almost too easily. To encourage me he told me how many years and how despairingly he had worked over The White Peacock and how often rewritten Sons and Lovers.
At that moment he was very busy trying to get his own affairs into working order, and though I was not aware of it he had acute anxieties. Murry has said that Lawrence's agent had obtained an advance of three hundred pounds for the new novel on the strength of the notable reception of Sons and Lovers. It is true that such was the agreement. But Murry's assumption that in the summer of 1914 there was 'three hundred pounds, solid, all in the bank, and a brand-new banking account' is unhappily not in accordance with the facts. The sum mentioned was to be paid on publication. What with discussions and drastic revisions the manuscript was not ready for the printer until over a year later. Actually by October, 1915, when the book was out, Methuen was still owing fifty pounds, of which seventeen pounds would be retained for proof correction and five pounds by the agent for his fee. In all, Lawrence could not count on receiving more than two hundred and fifty-three pounds over a period of nearly eighteen months after his first submission of the novel. And by July he was at the end of all other resources. He had not till then realised the discrepancy between a contract for 'three hundred pounds in advance' and the slow, abbreviated payments of actuality. Pinker came to the rescue by advancing forty-five pounds out of his own pocket (i.e., fifty pounds on the strength of the contract for The Rainbow less five pounds commission) and a little later the Royal Literary Fund made a grant of fifty pounds. Otherwise Lawrence could hardly have carried on.
He never worried unduly, however, and prospects were not bad. He was seeing Lena Ashwell, who was hopeful of producing Mrs Holroyd. A book of short stories was almost ready, and he had been personally approached by another publisher, who wanted from him 'an interpretative essay on Hardy'. It was to run to fifteen thousand words, and Lawrence would receive fifteen pounds in advance on delivery, with royalties afterwards at r 'Ad. a copy in England and 'Ad. in America. He thought he might throw this off without difficulty.
But Frieda and he got married without any of this new money, and when Pinker's forty-five pounds arrived a fortnight later, small accumulated debts asked to be settled and were settled. Lawrence never left loose ends.
His third letter to me, dated July 13th, told of the marriage.
I am awfully sorry we couldn't come tonight. I, poor devil am seedy with neuralgia in my left eye and my heart is in my boots.
Domani sono i nostri matrimonii - allé
Povero me, mi sento poco bene.
And I was to see them within a day or two. That morning I left a bunch of anemones at Selwood Terrace, where they were staying with Gordon and Beatrice Campbell. Long afterwards Frieda, laughing, told me how that day Lawrence's infectious insistence on the importance of fidelity, and so of marriage, had given Katherine Mansfield the desire to wear a wedding-ring herself. But such trifles cost something, and money with the Murrys, too, was scarce. So Frieda lent Katherine her discarded ring to wear till Murry could give her one of her own. Frieda had looked to have it back. But Katherine misunderstood and nothing more was ever said. On the 30th July, leaving Frieda in the South, Lawrence went for the weekend to his sisters in the Midlands. He then set off on a short walking tour in the Westmorland hills with three other men. Two of these were acquaintances to whom he had felt casually drawn. They were neither intimate nor literary friends. The fourth, who joined the party at the last moment, was S. S. Koteliansky. He knew nothing of Lawrence save what he had heard from one of the other two who had described him as a 'writer chap with ideas about love', with the usual implication that Lawrence was an apostle of 'free love'. And though not particularly attracted by the description, Koteliansky agreed to make a fourth for the few days' tour.
Lawrence, slender, vivacious and friendly, in his corduroy jacket, was entirely different from the companion he had pictured. The second night of the walk they had to put up in a cottage where there was only one bed, so that two of the quartette had to lie on the floor. Lawrence, as the delicate one, was made to sleep in the bed, and Koteliansky as the visitor was urged to share it. He was very unwilling. Never in his life had such a thing befallen him. But Lawrence was so gay and easy that all shyness vanished. Above all, this foreign stranger was captivated by a kind of sensitive innocence in Lawrence which he had never before seen in an Englishman. It roused a jealously protective tenderness. Lawrence spoke lightly, as was his way, and without being in any degree confidential, of his recent marriage. He had a wife, he said, who was a German lady of high degree. His lack of sophistication made the boast somehow delightful. Kot must visit them in the English countryside when they had found a home there. Lawrence would have liked to return immediately to Italy, but he did not see how he could afford to do so.
Lawrence was still in Westmorland when war was declared. So far as I can discover, his first feeling about it, which lasted for nearly six months, was not unmixed with sober hopefulness. He did not think it would last long, and it might 'shake people into a live seriousness' and 'set a slump on trifling'.
After a few days back in London at the Campbells' flat, he and Frieda went to a cottage near Chesham in Bucks. Gilbert and Mary Cannan inhabited a windmill not far off, full of the most wonderful nicknacks, and the Murrys took a cottage two miles across the fields. There were ten days or so of picnicking together and the work of settling in, of which Lawrence always took both the direction and the lion's share. When they were settled, Koteliansky came down, met Frieda for the first time and became acquainted with the Murrys. On one of his weekend visits he rebuked Frieda for what he considered her too great self-importance by the side of her husband, with such effect that Katherine had to act as mediator.
It fell also, I believe, to Katherine to put a laughing extinguisher on the great Rananim idea when that had run its course as a pleasant dream but was still harped upon by Lawrence as something he wished to realise.
Ranani zadikim I'Adonoi. Koteliansky had sung the Hebrew chant to them in Bucks as the war horror arose and increased, and it intensified the longing Lawrence had always felt to live remote with a group of kindred spirits. He and Frieda, Koteliansky and Katherine and Murry must get away to an island and be happy and busy. Others would follow. The Murrys took it up at first like a lovely game; but it was no game to Lawrence, and when Katherine, not without realistic mischief, went and obtained a mass of detailed, difficult information about suitable islands, Lawrence, says Koteliansky, fell sadly silent. He really cared. Though from that day Rananim was off, he still went on caring and hoping and planning.
The events of 1914-1919 all went to strengthen his strong and simple belief that the only thing to be done was for a few people to go together of their own desire to some distant refuge and breeding place of newness. Lawrence was not a 'conscientious objector'. He was not in principle opposed to war - far from it. But he quickly divined the dire significance of this war, which we now appreciate after the event. He could see no true way of ameliorating the horror. He believed that attempts at amelioration (such as war-work), like attempts at defiance (such as conscientious objection), equally involved identification with the horror. Springing from 'the nervous fire of opposition', these were secretly part of the evil and by opposing fomented it. He could but say that he would have no part in it, not even a protesting part. Nothing could have been harder for him than the inaction thus imposed. While he accorded a qualified sympathy to the conscientious objector, his real sympathy was for the soldier. But the latter he could not and the former, in the Quakerish sense, he would not be. We must, he said, 'be done with half-truths'. We must not 'adapt ourselves', but rather go apart.
There are sane minds today inclined to the belief that only by some such proceeding as Lawrence urged, mystical in its import but active in its immediate bearing, can we save ourselves and the world. It is a proceeding as old as sin and as simple as goodness. There was Noah and there was Lot. Civilisation itself was saved by the monastic retreat provided by the Christian genius. Lawrence felt the old need of severance and departure, but he felt it in a new way, and he would have nothing to do with catchwords or with the tricks that accompany earthly leadership. He had the genius of direction enough to have exploited his 'personality' and founded an order or an institution. He knew, however, that 'personality', orders and institutions could no longer be employed without the creeping in of bogus principles. The time had passed for any such attempt. But the time could never pass for obedience to a profound and simple impulse. If several men and women felt the same impulse, even in differing degrees, surely they should make the movement of severance and departure in company?
In the War he came to believe fully in the putrescence - worse because it was denied - of the Christian era. The only thing to do was to get out and away, if possible to some place where a newer growth or an older decay would save us from using up our energies in protestation, reaction or mere self-preservation.
In October I wrote telling Lawrence that I was going to be married. He was surprised. He wrote from Bucks:
How exciting your letter is! We are glad to hear you are going to marry Donald Carswell. Your life will run on a staple pivot then, and you will be much happier. After all, one has a complete right to be happy. I only want to know people who have the courage to live. The dying resigned sort only bore me now. We are glad to have your news - soon we'll come and see you.
They were to come one day in the following week and put up for the night at my house. Lawrence was in straits for money, having nothing but the grant from the Royal Literary Fund. (He and Frieda were actually trying to find a market for their painted boxes and embroideries, and we got as far as nervously taking some of these to a Hampstead shop, that was dubiously interested.) I have another letter of the same October in which he writes:
I have got about seventy pounds in the world now. Of this I owe a hundred and forty-five pounds to the divorce lawyers, for costs claimed against me. This I am never going to pay. I also owe about twenty pounds otherwise. So I have got some fifty pounds. If you think the other fund would give me any more - benissimo, I'll take it like a shot.
Oh, by the way [he adds in a postscript], I was seedy and have grown a beard. I think I look hideous, but it is so warm and complete, and such a clothing to one's nakedness, that I like it and shall keep it. So when you see me don't laugh.
I never quite believed and do not now, that Lawrence found his beard hideous. His saying so was one of the small and transparent affectations which - in the absence of all profounder deceits - made him so easy to approach and so impossible not to love. At the same time his warning was necessary, as it was something of a shock to see this new Lawrence with a beard quite different from the hair of his head, of a deep glowing red in the sun, and in the shade the colour of strong tea. And it marked a stage. The Lawrence with the moustache, the Lawrence of Sons and Lovers and tramps from Germany to Italy, had given place to the bearded, married Lawrence, the Lawrence of The Rainbow, and the War, and the long struggle with the woman and with the world that was begun and ended in solitude.
Donald was at this time on the staff of The Times, working in the same department with Mr F. S. Lowndes, husband of Mrs Belloc-Lowndes. Finding that Donald was acquainted with Lawrence, Mr Lowndes, a kindly man, expressed great interest and, on learning also that Lawrence was very hard up, great sympathy. He hinted that something further might be done out of a fund in which his wife had some say, and added that Mrs Belloc-Lowndes would be very glad to have an opportunity of meeting this remarkable young man. On hearing all this from Donald I at once invited Mrs Belloc-Lowndes to come to my house and meet Mr and Mrs D. H. Lawrence.
Mrs Belloc-Lowndes, whom none of us had ever set eyes on before, duly turned up. I remember how silent Lawrence sat as she told us (a) that she didn't know how on earth she was going to afford a necessary operation for one of her children, and (b) what splendid large sums she always got on account for her books, naming the amounts. Also, just as we were showing her out, we managed to disabuse her of her firm impression that Lawrence had eloped with the wife of the local butcher of his village, i.e., Frieda geb. von Richthofen, whom we had just left upstairs! But the literary fund which she was supposed to represent had melted in an explanatory haze. When we were left alone Lawrence indulged in some pithead language.
That night we talked - especially Lawrence. I was only beginning to know him. Often I disagreed with what he said or declared it to be exaggerated. But from the first I was sure that he was worth more than the lot of us. Also with Lawrence there was something that begot in the listener a kind of inward ear.
'Thank you so much for having us down. I like to stay with you - you are a perfect hostess. Please don't think me a fool or conceited for my tirade,' he wrote, enclosing a cheque for one pound which I must have lent him, with two shillings extra 'for the maid'. I was to go down soon to see them. He had pleased me very much by saying that mine was the only town-house in which he had ever felt it might be possible for him to live. I think, however, that this was chiefly because, though it was old, there was an unpretentious air of impermanency about it, so that we always expected it to fall down when the anti-aircraft gun went off. Lawrence disliked an air of everlastingness about a home. For him it must have something of the tent about it, though he liked everything to be seemly and clean, and he approved of a few household gods.