That summer it was difficult, and therefore easily appeared impossible, for me to get to Italy either with my family or alone. Lawrence, finding Sicily too hot, went for a time with Frieda to Baden-Baden, to return alone to Florence. It was during his solitude of a fortnight there that he wrote Tortoises. He then went on to friends in Venice, where he was joined by Frieda, and together they went back in October to Taormina.
Till the end of the year he was writing hard - the introduction to Magnus's Memoirs, most of the poems for Birds, Beasts and Flowers and the second half of Aaron's Rod. I had very few letters from him, only an occasional greeting, or a book, or the announcement that he was 'unbearably tired of Europe'.
America seems to you looney? Well, I don't care, perhaps there's more sense in lunacy than in our national mechanism. God knows what one will do. I am thinking of next spring. I shan't stay in Taormina, I think - perhaps go to Germany for the summer, perhaps to Sardinia, he had written from Venice in October. And round about Christmas - when he was ill in bed with a cold - 'We really want to sail away to New Mexico in January or February.'
But in January, instead of going farther, he and Frieda made the trip to Sardinia, which he has described in Sea and Sardinia. He wrote that book rapidly in the early spring, when he worked further upon Birds, Beasts and Flowers, as well as upon a 'first vol. of a funny novel: but a tiny first vol. Quite a lot. Yet not much.' This refers to a light novel or novelette, that was never completed. It was about the Midlands, and was to be called Mr Noon.
At last that March the History had come out, and he sent me a copy - 'Some of the chapters I think are good: first worst. Don't read it if it bores you.' After a year of managing his own affairs, Lawrence had now taken Curtis Brown as his agent. But as usual, after a hard working spell, books had become comparatively unimportant to him, and the need to live was everything. 'If only I had money I should buy a Mediterranean sailing ship that was offered me: so beautiful. Then you'd cruise with me.'
In the gloomy and tearful picture of Lawrence given us in Son of Woman there is a singular omission. It is forgotten that after all Lawrence was an artist, and that he stood in need of the delight and the fresh interest, which, for his greater productiveness, it is the artist's nature to seek. Fury, as we know, was Lawrence's in plenty - that dark, coiled-up child in his 'bowels', begotten of the Midlands, to which he must give birth. But he needed also a careless joie de vivre, which was as native to him as his anger, and of which he was starved in England, though England found the means to feed his anger in abundance. The stimulus of anger, as Lawrence knew, can easily be overdone. It heads a man toward bitterness, and what is worse, solemnity. 'A man must keep his earnestness nimble to escape ridicule,' as he said of Baron Corvo. England had seemed to him 'worn on the nerves'. And though 'Sicily indeed is cross and swindles one . . . somehow it doesn't affect one: annoys and amuses one: which is different.' Besides there was the loveliness - 'the orange blossom is passing, northern trees, apple and pear and May blossom are out: the wood is tall and green, the mornings are fine. I feel I do not care a bit about the trials and troubles of the world. Suppose they'll be coming down on my head just now to make me care: but even so I cannot trouble beforehand.' This too was needed. And where another would have been held in one place by habit or fear or sloth, Lawrence followed his desire. In Touch and Go he makes the sculptress Anabel incapable of modelling more birds and animals, though she possesses genius, simply because she has lost that joy of life which had once enabled her to render in stone the thistledown lightness of a kitten. Until her joy returns, she will produce nothing lively. Lawrence knew so well what it was to feel inspired that he could not fail to recognise the lack of inspiration in himself or in others. England had inspired him, but England refused recognition of the fruits of her own inspiration; and though he had continued to produce under the hard pressure of poverty, neglect and obloquy, he was aware that pressure can be borne too long and all in vain. For the artist escape may become necessary for survival. Imperatively he must seek both fresh inspiration and the support given by recognition in the most natural way open to him - by moving away from places where these things have failed him. It is easy to call this a morbid restlessness, or to describe it as a symptom of illness. But may it not with quite as much justice be called sanity and courage? Both are certainly needed for it, and no artist ever needed or evinced more of these virtues than Lawrence. If the stages of his pilgrimage may be put down to the restlessness of failure, we must bear in mind that the pilgrimage itself was undertaken by deliberate and difficult choice. Ultimately it must be judged by results. Belonging to this period in Italy - a period of little more than two years - we find The Lost Girl, Aaron's Rod, the introduction to Magnus's Memoirs, Sea and Sardinia, Birds, Beasts and Flowers, Tortoises, and 'Evangelistic Beasts' - besides which the new novel already mentioned began its existence, and several long short stories or novelettes were given their final form for publication in America. Accompanying all this was continual letter-writing, always by hand, and travelling of the most economical kind, which was exhausting when not actually adventurous. It is not a bad record for an admittedly delicate man, of whom at home it was busily alleged that he suffered from 'decaying' gifts, disintegrating spirit, and general decline in creative power.
These expressions are taken from Murry's long review of Women in Love printed three months after the book's appearance in the Nation that August - 'The Nostalgia of Mr D. H. Lawrence' - 'nostalgia', be it understood, 'for the slime'. After its five-year wait the novel had appeared, not, as Murry says, a year, but only six months after The Lost Girl. This, if he had looked into the matter, might have thrown fight on the chronological order of the two books upon which he partly based his attack. As things are, he stretches in reminiscence the six months to a vague twelve; and, while refusing to regret the nature of the attack, offers the partial excuse that it was 'by the irony of fate' that he announced the end of Lawrence, just as Lawrence was engaged upon the books which Murry was later to announce as his finest. We all make mistakes, especially where Lawrence is concerned; and this review - with that other, 'The Decay of Mr D. H. Lawrence' - might be allowed to blush unseen, were it not that Murry has himself dragged it out to say that 'strangely enough' there is little in it he would withdraw today. It is, therefore, necessary to repeat his verdict therein, which is that Lawrence is no longer an artist, that he has sacrificed his art to a vain philosophy (i.e., not Murry's philosophy) and that he is a 'writhing' and 'obscene' and ridiculous failure, with no command over himself or his characters. Murry ignores the wonderful, the touching, the interesting and the new things in the book, which one thinks that a friend might wish to bring into prominence even while failing to understand or agree with the book's intention; and he displays unconvincing hilarity over passages that are most easily liable to misunderstanding by the vulgar. Certainly Murry allows that Lawrence believes in his own vision. But even Lockhart did not accuse Keats of dishonesty, merely of ineptitude. Nor had Lockhart ever been Keats's friend.
It would more truly seem to be 'by the irony of fate', that Keats himself once had a friend named George Felton Mathew, and that it has been left to Murry to tell us of this friendship, which in certain vital respects is the parallel to his own friendship with Lawrence. Mathew had been one of the very first to praise the immature Keats. But Mathew disliked and misprized the mature Keats, finding him 'in danger of becoming "a proud egotist of diseased feelings and perverted principles'"; and after thirty years he still tried to justify a review in which he feared that the poet might contaminate purity and inoculate degeneracy and corruption - a review which Murry recognises to have been actuated by 'ill-concealed antagonism'. It is difficult not to fancy that some Murry of the future - a critic of emotional gifts who can be trusted only in his dealings with writers who have been dead for fifty years or more - will discover and elucidate for us the Murry-Lawrence affair in a similar manner. Even today it is impossible to turn over the phrases of Murry's Lost Girl review - 'sub human', 'esoteric language', 'quack terminology', 'mysteriously degraded', 'corrupt mysticism', 'slime', 'loss of creative vigour', 'paralysis', and 'decline', without at least the suspicion (shared by him in the similar case of Mathew) that the writer of these 'simply insufferable terms' is 'resentful about something', and that here is 'ill-concealed antagonism'. As for the 'this hurts me more than it hurts you' assurance, which is provided as a sort of ground bass in Murry's reviews, every schoolboy knows the significance of that. How much more truly 'simple' had Murry summed up his 'great man' in the classic manner - 'I hate him, he's a liar, he can't dance, his feet stink, and he doesn't love Jesus.'
To return to Women in Love, what foundation Murry has for his up-to-date defence that Lawrence had 'abandoned the ground he had taken up' in this novel, 'even before the book was published', he does not tell us and it is hard to guess. Because quite certainly the novel remains a vital expression of much that its author held to the end of his life, even while it is not the novel he would have written at the end of his life. But nothing of this really matters. Poor criticism is merely poor criticism. What does matter about Murry's review is its demonstration of the horror that Lawrence believed to be inveterate in 'Christian love'. It was an effort to annihilate a man who, not yet being dead, dared to defy critical reduction to a formula. No different derivation can explain its particular flavour.
That October of 1921 Murry further used his position on the Nation to join the name of Lawrence with others of whom nothing might now be expected. In a long and favourable review of a novel by Mr Swinnerton, called Coquette, he seized the slender, gratuitous chance to praise at Lawrence's expense. And in passing his verdict upon a string of contemporaries, he refused to the author of The Rainbow a place anywhere on the same plane as the authors of Kipps, The Old Wives' Tale, and Lord Jim. In his judgement Lawrence was no longer even 'in the dusty rear'. He had fallen out of the race.