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 form 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.
At the beginning of March Lawrence and Frieda, finding Cornwall congenial, went to Zennor thinking to look for a furnished house - 'lovely pale hills, all gorse and heather, and an immense peacock sea spreading all below.'
They stayed at the inn, the Tinners' Arms, for a fortnight, then moved amid snow blizzards to an unfurnished cottage not far off - at Higher Tregerthen on the St Ives road. Here 'under the moor and above the sea' they would 'live in poverty and quiet'. They started collecting their scattered bits of things from London. On leaving Byron Villas they had distributed for storage, among their friends, anything they wished to keep. One of these things was my mirror.
But the great attraction of the place to Lawrence was that there were really two cottages, the one behind on the seaward side being an annexe to the one fronting the road. Both were the same size - 'two good rooms and a scullery' - and cost the same, five pounds a year. Might not this be the nucleus of that which had been Lawrence's dream? The thought filled him with new health. And of course it was spring. 'I am beginning to feel strong again,' he wrote, 'life coming in at the unseen sources,' though he was also 'so tired, so tired, so tired of the world' that he could have died there and then were it not that 'one must not die without having known a real good life, and a fulfilment, a happiness that is born of a new world from a new centre.'
I believe, if we cannot discover a terrestrial America there are new continents of the soul for us to land upon. Virgin soil. Only one must get away from this foul old world, one must have the strength to depart...
In the same letter he speaks of the Murrys coming to live at Tregerthen. 'It is always my idea, that a few people by being together should bring to pass a new earth and a new heaven.' Poor Murry! But in the next letter, though still cheerfully engaged in furnishing -
I have made a dresser, which is painted royal blue, and the walls are pale pink! Also a biggish cupboard for the food, which looks like a rabbit hutch in the back place. Here, doing one's own things in this queer outlandish Celtic country I feel fundamentally happy and free, beyond.
- he already knows that there can be no abiding place for him in Cornwall:
It is queer, how almost everything has gone out of me, all the world I have known, and the people, gone out like candles. When I think of —, or —, even perhaps the —s who are here, it is with a kind of weariness, as of trying to remember a light which is blown out. Somehow it is all gone, both I and my friends have ceased to be, and there is another country, where there are no people, and even I myself am unknown, to myself as well.
He continued to take an interest in us, sending kindly messages to Donald, asking for our news and encouraging me to write. He thought me culpably lazy about writing and too strenuous in other ways. That spring he wrote:
I am very glad to hear of the novel. I firmly believe in it. I think you are the only woman I have met, who is so intrinsically unattached, so essentially separate and isolated, as to be a real writer or artist or recorder. Your relations with other people are only excursions from yourself. And to want children, and common human fulfilments, is rather a falsity for you, I think. You were never made to 'meet and mingle', but to remain intact, essentially, whatever your experiences may be. Therefore I believe your book will be a real book, and a woman's book: one of the very few.
He himself was busy helping to settle the Murrys in the annexe. Murry has told' how, in response to Lawrence's urgent invitation, he and Katherine had left the French Riviera, where they were snatching a brief happiness under the nose of the War, and what a failure the Cornish experiment was 'right from the beginning'. His account shows how they each suffered in their different ways. Lawrence, in his account to me, was brief and to the point as usual.
The Murrys have gone over to the South side, about thirty miles away. The North side was too rugged for them and Murry and I are not really associates. How I deceive myself. I am a liar to myself about people. I was angry when you ran over a list of my 'friends' - whom you did not think much of. But it is true, they are not much, any of them. I give up having intimate friends at all. It is a self-deception. But I do wish somebody produced some real work I am very anxious to see your book.
If I am not conscripted, and Carswell isn't, I think we shall furnish a nice room in the Murrys' house, and if you would like to come and stay in it, we should be glad. Barbara Low has an old invitation for part of her summer holiday - she is our only prospect in the visitor way. I like her enough.
It is very fine here, foxgloves now everywhere between the rocks and ferns. There is some magic in the country. It gives me a strange satisfaction.
Many greetings from us both to you and Carswell.
After a visit from Murry Lawrence was always well disposed toward Donald. He felt relief in thinking of someone who was unable to beat up emotions. 'I must say I quite frequently sympathise with his point of view,' he wrote to me much later. It was the same with the few men friends whom he met through us from time to time. These did not greatly interest him, and to some he was definitely hostile. But 'at least from Donald's friends one gets a real reaction, a true, human response,' he once said grimly. It is significant that although Murry lived for weeks in the same house, he neither saw nor heard anything of the novel upon which Lawrence was working at the time.
In the same letter he was anxious about my health. I had been overtired. Earlier he had written:
I think you have been exhausting yourself. . . One has to withdraw into a very real solitude, and he there, hidden, to recover. Then the world gradually ceases to exist, and a new world is discovered, where there are as yet no people ... I hope you will be better. Don't talk about me with those others.
Now in the later letter he went on:
. . . also you said how you alternate between a feeling of strength and productiveness, and a feeling of utter hopelessness and ash. I think that is fairly well bound to be, because I think your process of life is chiefly exhaustive, not accumulative at all. It is like a tree which, feeling the ivy tightening upon it, forces itself into bursts of utterance, bursts of flower and fruition, using up itself, not taking in any stores at all, till at last it is spent. I have seen elm trees do this - covered, covered with thick flowering, making scarcely any leaves, taking any food.
But one has to live according to one's own being, and if your method is productive and exhaustive, then it is so. Better that than mere mechanical activity, housework, etc. Tell me how the novel has got on. I think that is very important.