While the Lawrences were still at Mecklenburgh Square we returned from Edinburgh and took two furnished rooms in Hampstead. Our own house was let until Easter, as also now the tiny rooms over the garage. (So we eked out our living.) Upon being discharged from hospital Donald was also discharged from the army. I was expecting a baby in the spring. Lawrence came by himself to see us. That same afternoon it happened we had another visitor, a young man who was anxious to meet Lawrence, but still more anxious to convince us that he had produced a literary masterpiece. Lawrence, therefore, sat silent, leaning his head on his hand and looking as if affected with sea-sickness. The last thing he was interested in was literary masterpieces as such, and anyhow he did not believe that this was one. When the young man had left, he uttered some expletives and became apparently cheerful. True, he hardly knew which way to turn next, or how to get the money to turn at all. But as usual he was full of plans, and did not give the effect of being distressed. Would we join the party in the spring and go to the eastern slopes of the Andes? He liked the idea of a baby in the party, but as this baby was not to arrive till the end of May, we did not see ourselves as possible starters. It was decided that he would let us know what the eastern slopes were like, and that we should follow if we could. Meanwhile he rather surprised us by wanting to return to the Cornish cottage for Christmas. His idea was apparently to face the thing out, and he was trying to get the Asquiths to help him with the authorities. But sympathetic as the Asquiths were, they were powerless in this and told him so. Were they not themselves the object of active popular suspicion? One just had to grin and bear it. Everybody declared that the War would end that winter.
It was about this time that George Moore read the manuscript of Women in Love, and 'says it is a great book and that I am a better writer than himself, as Lawrence wrote to me later, admitting that this was 'really astounding'. Who sent George Moore the manuscript I do not know. I am sure it was not Lawrence, though it was possibly Pinker at Lawrence's instigation. Nor do I know how the pleasing verdict was conveyed. It was certainly received and must, one thinks, have been given. But that it came direct from Ebury Street seems unlikely. Almost at the same time there was a suggestion that Bertrand Russell, 'who used to be a fairly intimate friend of mine, but whom I don't agree with', might be asked to write a letter recommending the novel to an Irish publisher.
Nothing came of either of these things, and the immediate situation remained very difficult. How was Lawrence to be helped? The only way we could think of was that he might write for The Times Educational Supplement. Donald knew the editor, Mr G. S. Freeman, to whom he made the most urgent representations, with the result that an interview took place, and Lawrence promised that he would do his best to turn out articles such as were wanted. Having heard his account of what was wanted, I had my doubts, but held my peace. He set to work, however, willingly and without delay.
Of one thing Lawrence was sure, he could not remain longer in London. Shortly before Christmas he arranged to pay Dolly Radford a small rent for her cottage at Hermitage in Berkshire. It was bitterly cold with a half-thaw. 'God knows,' he wrote, 'I am not in a good mood in any way whatsoever.' From there he went for New Year to the Midlands. To his sisters, at least, the War had brought added material prosperity.
It was not Lawrence's private friends, nearly all of them poor people, and like himself harried by the War, who failed him in practical matters. (That they failed in understanding was not to be wondered at.) Today, however, when one can view the question dispassionately, it is hard to forgive the literary leaders for their determined aloofness. Admitted that he was a difficult man to help, he was eminently eligible, and one thinks that with goodwill some way might have been found to ode over a rough passage that was largely due to the exigencies of the War. One is forced to the conclusion that the goodwill was lacking. He himself felt that he was deserving of the temporary financial support he so greatly needed. Though Murry has declared that the demand was merely for intellectual support by way of 'recognition', Lawrence's own letters show that he made a frank appeal for funds. He understood perfectly the futility of requiring understanding. But he felt justified, on the strength of his known achievement, in asking his fellow-writers to take his honesty and potency as an artist on trust. Early that February (1918), when he was ill with a severe sore throat which knocked him out for three weeks, he urged Pinker to tempt some money for him out of 'some rich good-natured author'. And he suggested that Arnold Bennett might give him some 'to get along with' till his day came, as he was certain it would.
Could anything be simpler or more direct? Lawrence drew the line only at going himself hat in hand. He would make the demand through his agent as his due. There was no use, he pointed out, in deluding himself that he could make a living under present conditions in England. But engaged as he was at that very moment on the final revision of his Studies in Classic American Literature, he was confident both in his future and in his immediate worth as a financial investment.
In an article written shortly after Lawrence's death Arnold Bennett has given his own account of this appeal. As Bennett was a very exact man there is no reason to doubt that his account, in its reserved way, is substantially correct. He saw the sense of the appeal. He was ready to contribute if others would join. But all the others refused. They asked themselves and each other why they need give a hand to Lawrence and they found no answer; which most certainly was what Lawrence expected and even, I surmise, desired to elicit. Exceptions there were. I know of two. Mr Alfred Sutro, hearing that the author of Sans and Lovers was in need, sent ten pounds, which later Lawrence repaid. Mr Montagu Shearman also sent ten pounds.
Bennett, I have no doubt, saw through the whole thing more clearly than would appear on the surface, and made a like surmise. Of all the outstanding writers of the rime, he, one fancies, had the most lively appreciation of Lawrence both as man and as writer. Lawrence himself, never mistaken in such things, had an inkling of it, and more than once through Pinker he suggested that a personal meeting might be brought about. Yet Bennett, for some deeply felt reason, shrank from this. Evidently he could not believe that good would come of it. What he does not tell in his brief narrative is that he himself sent twenty-five pounds to Pinker for Lawrence. It would seem that he sent it in such a way as to have it conveyed merely as a business advance by Pinker for work in hand. We must give Bennett the credit for perceiving that, in sharp contrast to the typical beggar or borrower, the author of The Rainbow would find it far harder to accept than to demand money; that indeed the demand was for Lawrence a proud and permissible gesture, but the acceptance, should occasion arise, very difficult.
Though Lawrence remained in ignorance of this twenty-five pounds, he seems throughout the summer of 1918 to have felt friendly towards Bennett, while he was frankly scornful of the other literary leaders. Something truly human, as well as sweetly reasonable, emanated from Bennett. And to this, Lawrence responded. But he would push the affair to the utmost. Bennett should not so easily escape. That autumn, in yet more desperate need, he asked Bennett to find him a suitable London job. 'Bennett has publicly said that I have genius,' was the substance of his message. 'Then let me tell him that though men of talent are flourishing, this particular possessor of genius is forced to contemplate the fact that in a fortnight's time he will not have enough money to buy "bread and marge" - and this in spite of a pile of manuscript that will certainly be saleable at a day not far distant. Till that day comes, will Bennett use his influence to supply the said man of genius with a suitable means of livelihood other than the risky one of literature?'
Bennett, as is well known, was at the time in control of an important department created by the War. But he refused point-blank to find Lawrence a place in it. The fact that Lawrence had genius, he replied only too truly, was no recommendation that he would be useful in any job he might have at his disposal. Rather the reverse!
Though it is easy to guess the anger with which Lawrence, and more especially Lawrence's wife, would receive such a message, Lawrence must have realised its truth. It is even presumable that in it he had obtained the answer he sought, and that Bennett understood this quite as clearly as he did. Because, though Lawrence might ask for, and might even see himself in some imaginary job, what discoverable job in England at this time would he have taken, or having taken would he have kept? The most suitable post for him, as being unconnected with War propaganda yet having the benefit of his experience, was indubitably schoolmastering. And what school would open its doors to a man whose book had suffered public prosecution for obscenity? Not Bennett himself could have got Lawrence installed as a teacher, nor do I see Lawrence returning to the dominie's desk. Lawrence has illumined for me many dark Biblical sayings and incidents. This was a case of 'it must needs be that offences come'. But, now as always, there is 'woe to him by whom the offence cometh'. Little more need be said. Lawrence, in asking for money or for work, fulfilled his destiny by acting as a touchstone. The condemnation for his failure falls on the world he was there to indict. Also, I think, in the painful necessary task of cutting himself loose from that world, he needed all the outside drive he could come by. The utmost he was to get from official England was a second grant from the Royal Literary Fund. This was applied for and granted during that summer.
The months between February and the Armistice in November were spent by the Lawrences chiefly between the cottage in Berkshire and Mountain Cottage at Middleton-by-Wirksworth in Derbyshire, which his sisters, in great anxiety, took for him at Easter. The Radfords needed their own small retreat for the Easter and summer holidays.
In Derbyshire he much enjoyed a longish visit from his sisters' children - a nephew aged three and a niece aged seven - and he enjoyed the flowers which were unusually rich that spring. But he was 'sick and surfeited', he suffered from the recurrent horror of the Midlands, and laboured under 'poverty and incertitude'.
'I know exactly how it feels,' he wrote to me, sympathising with my different state of waiting.
I feel as if I had a child of black fury curled up inside my bowels. I am sure I can feel exactly what it is to be pregnant, because of the weary burden of a kind of contained murder which I can't bring forth. We will both pray to be safely delivered.
When, so far as I was concerned, his prayer was answered - in London just a week after the last of the air raids - he sent me the very exquisite present of a shoe-box containing perhaps twenty different kinds of wild flowers, carefully packed in damp moss, many of them having their roots attached. Here were yellow rock-roses - 'pure flowers of light', milkworts, wood-avens, mountain violets, aconites, woodruff and forget-me-nots. Lawrence knew all about wild flowers and could name most of them. His friend Millicent Beveridge, whom he met later in Sicily, has told me how she went walking with him once in the hills near Florence at the height of the Tuscan spring, and how as they went he named and discoursed upon at least thirty varieties. It was out of that walk that he wrote the three fragrant, categorical and joyous essays on 'Flowers in Tuscany' which appeared in the Criterion.
With my box of Derbyshire flowers there was a small floral guide, tinily written by Lawrence, describing each plant and making me see how they had been before he picked them for me, in what sorts of places and manner and profusion they had grown, and even how they varied in the different countrysides.
We were all three invited to come immediately to Mountain Cottage, but instead we asked them to visit us later in the summer when we were to have, of all unlikely things, a whole vicarage to ourselves in the Forest of Dean. My monthly nurse, a splendid woman of the old English type, was sister to the vicar who wanted to have his house inhabited for a nominal rent during the latter part of August. So it was arranged. By August Lawrence would have his grant from the Royal Literary Fund. At the moment he was counting chiefly on fifty pounds from the Oxford University Press so soon as his Movements in European History should be finished. He was also getting ten pounds from a small publisher for the little book of poems called Bay (selling it outright for this amount) and there was hope of placing Look! We Have Come Through! in America. Things were hard, and money continually threatened to 'come to a dead end', but Lawrence would never let himself run absolutely dry. His might be a bourgeois boast (as Norman Douglas has said) when he announced his determination always to keep a few pounds between himself and the world. It was at least never an idle boast. It was one of Lawrence's austerities that luck, and therefore anything founded on luck, was a vulgarity. Spiritually he would take all risks adventuring into the unknown. But to leave material things to chance was culpable folly. In all practical matters he looked and planned ahead. And he never became either penniless or gravely in debt.
To celebrate the birth of our boy, he not only wrote 'War Baby', but embroidered a little cotton frock in red and black cross-stitch, while Frieda crocheted a cot cover of the gayest rainbow-coloured stripes in wool. It became known as 'Frieda's Rainbow', and went everywhere with us, until with rough outdoor usage it fell to pieces.
Shortly before they came to us Lawrence was re-examined for the second time that year on account of the new Military Service Act. He was then definitely put in 'Grade 3'. There can be no doubt that his horror at the mere possibility of being called up for some kind of distasteful work under military orders was the chief cause of his last appeal to Arnold Bennett. Yet I do not believe he seriously thought he would be called up. It was rather that he would take no more chances than he could possibly help. Immediately after the examination he wrote me the following letter. Though it is easily subject to misconstruction, it voices something which needs to be understood in Lawrence, something upon which Murry's misunderstanding in Son of Woman is largely based. I therefore quote the relevant passages here:
MY DEAR CATHERINE, I have been examined - am put in Grade 3 - and from this day I take a new line. I've done with society and humanity - Labour and Military can alike go to hell. Henceforth it is for myself, my own life, I live: a good jolly personal life, with a few people who are friends, and the rest can do what they like. I am going to try to get a job: quick, before the military attempt to paw me again - for they shall never touch me again. I shall go to London next week. We shall meet again soon. Then we can talk.
About the essays, I crossed out the 'Children' passages. Who am I to dictate when hope lies or doesn't lie? Let it lie when it likes.
Tell Don I shall see him again soon. No more of the social passion and social insistence from me. I can understand I've been a nuisance and a fool.
Love from both to you all.
He was coming to London alone, he said, with Frieda following in a week or so.