My stay at Tregerthen was short - inside of a week - shorter than I had intended or than Lawrence wished. Donald, lonely at home, sent a telegram that fetched me back. Lawrence mocked at it all a little, but he had a way, not hurtful at all, of mocking gently at one. I remember our driving to the station at St Ives and saying goodbye with the sense that my visit had been broken in half. Better that, anyhow, than to have overstayed my welcome.
Lawrence, though his eyes were troubling him and he wanted to see an oculist, shook his head over any suggestion that he might run up to London. He remained, in fact, at Tregerthen till the following April; and then again, after a short break, till October, 1917.
It was to be a harsh fourteen months for him and Frieda. Women in Love was not to see print until November, 1920 and then only by private subscription in New York. It really looked as if no further book of his would ever see the light, with the possible exception of books of poems.
Lawrence, however, went on producing with unshaken faith. He was angry but dauntless. He was practical also, setting himself to get his poems, at least, printed in book form, and writing essays and stories for the few magazines (none of them able to pay well) which were interested. He kept his name before the public. Single correspondents were easily led to believe that he had ceased producing. In fact, however, a couple of weeks was a long enough cessation to make him declare that he was doing nothing. He would tell this when he would not tell that he was at work. As a rule his first mention of a book was when he had written a substantial part or was revising the whole.
At the same time there the War was. And so long as it was, Lawrence might as well stop writing novels. The novel needs for its creation an atmosphere, and for its reception a public. So Thomas Hardy found even in peace time and ceased to write novels after Jude the Obscure. But poems and essays are made of sterner stuff; and short stories can slip by. Lawrence fell back upon these. Novels could wait. He must not.
But the existence of Women in Love, even in unpublished manuscript, was a fermenting element in the life of those remaining months at Cornwall. It went the round and evoked the most violent feelings. If Lawrence was the Eager Heart of our day he was also the enfant terrible. His innocence was not less disturbing than his insight. And he was far too completely dedicated to have much compunction in the matter of material for the expression of his vision.
In November he sent me a copy of the typescript to read - complete but for the epilogue. It made a painful but powerful impression on me. I did not know what to think of it, and, in fact, said little. Except for the interest which is maintained throughout, the great descriptive passages, and the queer sense of Lawrence's voice talking all the time; except, too, for a few details, chiefly in the matter of women's wear, which struck me as unnecessary and a little ridiculous, I found mainly suffering in the perusal. And I resented the infliction of an almost physical suffering and malaise by what purported to be a novel. All the same here was something. It made one pause. The usual critical outfit had to be discarded. Wait a bit! I must think about this! Anyhow, what a strange, new daring kind of richness of apprehension! ''Touché!'' cries the heart of the reader at every turn.
It was first rejected by Duckworth. I think it must have lain on the table at one time or another of every leading publisher in London. As Lawrence touchingly remarked to his agent, 'I do admire it, but I am not everybody.'
In December there was some word of Koteliansky placing the book in Russia (translated, of course). But private as well as public readers in England were mostly united in hatred.
An exception among the public readers was Mr Cecil Palmer, who, though he returned the novel, expressed a wish that he were rich enough to issue it privately at his own expense for his own pleasure.
The notable exception among the private readers was Mr George Moore. He was to 'praise it highly'. But this was not yet, and anyhow it was praise of a nature only too strictly private. Lawrence's fellow-writers, even when they admired him, fought very shy of saying so except in the most general terms. It became the fashion to remark of him, 'Of course he has genius, but . . .' Among those who saw the manuscript was Mr Galsworthy, and Lawrence wrote to Pinker asking to be told 'what dear old out-of-date Galsworthy had said'. One imagines Lawrence's face if he ever read the reply. But it would appear that Pinker had the discretion to draw a veil.
Lawrence sat perfectly tight. This, he declared, was a book 'that would laugh last'. It was 'true and unlying and will last out all the other stuff'. Again he inveighed against the world. It 'has got such a violent rabies that that makes it turn on anything true with frenzy'. But he remained entirely confident, and not at all repentant.
Though he continued to produce, however (his Studies in Classic American Literature had their beginnings early in 1917) he felt more and more hopeless of selling any kind of work in England to the extent of making a living. Could he even go on much longer producing in England? No, he would suffocate if he had to stay.
I wanted him to write to Thomas Hardy. And it seemed that the idea had also occurred to him. Hardy, especially in Jude the Obscure, had meant much to Lawrence. And it was to be thought that the reception accorded to Jude the Obscure would ensure sympathy for the author of The Rainbow. But after a moment's thought he shook his head. 'No,' he said, 'old age is a queer thing. It would be no use. There's something gone dead, I feel, in Hardy these days. He's given way somewhere - gone. Nothing there you can appeal to any more.'
As things were, it could not be denied that the only active encouragement to Lawrence as a writer came from America. In that direction was the only chance of escape. He felt himself' awfully like a fox that is cornered by a pack of hounds and boors who don't perhaps know he's there, but are closing in unconsciously'. Increasingly he believed that his country was 'capable of not seeing anything but badness in him for ever and ever' and that its 'vital atmosphere was poisonous to him to an incredible degree'. Even in Cornwall he had begun to feel 'smothered and weary' and 'buried alive'. Early in the year he applied for passports to America. He must transfer both himself and his public. If England would not have him, he would seek his 'virgin soil' elsewhere. And where else was there but America?
Not that Lawrence had any pleasant, puerile illusions about America. 'The people and the life are monstrous.' He felt sure of this beforehand. But he felt that America 'being so much worse, falser, further gone than England', was 'nearer to freedom'. England in his view had 'a long and awful process of corruption and death to go through', whereas America had 'dry-rotted to a point where the final seed of the new' was 'almost left ready to sprout'.
The Americans are not younger than we, but older; a second childhood. But being so old in senile decay and second childishness, perhaps they are nearer to the end, and the new beginning.
At the same time, in America 'the skies are not so old, the air is newer, the earth is not so tired'. And, of course, to see how life was in other countries was necessary to Lawrence - part of his destiny, as he later recognised. As he lost hope after hope of making a real life for himself in England, he became ever surer that his early Florida idea had been right in its essence - right, he admitted, 'all save the people. It is wrong to seek adherents. One must be single.'
But Lawrence had grown up in a tough school, and was a sage believer in 'waiting for circumstance'. 'There is a difference,' he warned me once, 'between "you never can tell what will happen", and "you never can tell how it will happen". One can tell what will happen more or less. Some things one knows inwardly and infallibly. But the how and the why are left to the conjunction of circumstances.'
So he went on working, and all the while was 'hammering out' his philosophy. During January he had recomposed the first part of Women in Love. At the same time he was rewriting and putting into order the cycle of poems at first called Man and Woman, which 'might as well', he said, 'have been called And Now Farewell', as it marked 'a sort of conclusion of the old life' in him.
Just because of this, the severance with his old life being still fresh, he felt 'most passionately and bitterly tender' about these poems - so much so that he could not bear either to keep them longer in the house or to send them to Pinker. 'It has meant a great deal to me, and I feel more inclined to burst into tears than anything.' On February 18th, the day he completed them, he posted them to me to read and hand on to Hilda Aldington. He would see what she and I felt. 'Essentially,' he had said in an earlier letter, 'I don't want to see a soul in London except you two, and perhaps Hilda Aldington and Robert Mountsier, who has gone back.' Thus Lawrence kept handing his past to us. And even as one sat trying to catch up with his past, one had the certainty, not without a kind of sadness, that already he was making a new flight into the unknown.
Over every one of his books and every period of his life Lawrence would thus read the funeral service. He was a great discarder of the burden of living death which most of us drag about with us to the impediment of each new vital effort, even while we label them stepping-stones of our dead selves. But he never omitted from his funeral oration the passage about a glorious resurrection. In all Lawrence's graves - and he had many - there was a phoenix.
I shall never forget reading those poems in the author's neat handwriting in the tiny room over a garage to which we had moved upon Donald's being called up. We had let our house, had found these two rooms farther up the Grove at six shillings a week, and ourselves carried along enough of our furniture after nightfall to make them habitable. We should at least have this for a pied à terre so long as we could use it.
By the light of a candle I read the poems through. I confess that no other poet except Hardy (and Shakespeare in his sonnets) has so deeply conveyed to me the wistfulness of humanity as distilled in a noble heart - a heart the nobler for its perfect admission of imperfections. It is as if the lost and naked but indomitable human heart has come to murmur its adventures in your ear. And what rare, what original adventures! With Lawrence, as with Hardy, the very imperfections in the telling are to me a beauty. They are of a piece with the nature of the adventure, giving a live pang of delight or sorrow, where 'the perfect poem', because of its very crystalline perfection, will often divert the pang of feeling into one of sheer admiration of a miracle. Not but what this kind of imperfection may be a special, most difficult and conscious art. I believe that it may, and that Lawrence's peculiar imperfections will prove to be preservatives of his thought. He will remain, as he meant to do, a man, as well as a voice speaking. In the case of Man and Woman I advised him to expunge a love-letter - beautiful and interesting, but a real, sent letter, in prose, which he had included with the poems. He did not at first agree about this, but came round later.
The title of Man and Woman was changed to Poems of a Married Man, and then again to Look! We Have Come Through! But as usual, and in this case more than usually Lawrence shrank from the idea of public print.
Already there was a small book of poems travelling round and meeting with rebuffs. The more important book could wait. It was April before he could bring himself to release this dove out of his ark to a world that 'was not ready'. After some rejections the book was accepted in August, with a brace of reservations, by Messrs Chatto and Windus. Lawrence was puzzled by the reservations. They included the omission of a poem which had already appeared in an anthology. But he submitted with a curse. No use in making a fuss! And he found in this publishing firm such 'nice old-flavoured people'. He was pleased with the format of the book when it appeared. He asked for twelve instead of six author's copies, and got them.
He had been busy throughout the spring with essays begun some time earlier on 'The Reality of Peace'. These he hoped to publish quickly - as applicable to the moment - in the magazines, and without too much delay in a little book to be called At the Gates. Some at least of the essays appeared in the English Review throughout the summer of 1917. But neither in that form, nor rewritten into something more metaphysical, did they find a publisher for their more permanent collection during his lifetime.