November saw them back at the Mirenda and Lawrence writing his third draft of Lady Chatterley.
Just then, after having spent some time on getting up the subject, I was starting to write a life of Robert Burns. Lawrence applauded the project. He wrote to Donald (whose book Brother Scots he had just read, enjoyed and helpfully criticised):
Cath's idea of a Burns book I like very much: I always wanted to do one myself, but am not Scotchy enough. I read just now Lockhart's bit of a life of Burns. Made me spit! ... If Cath is condescending to Burns, I disown her. He was quite right, a man's a man for a' that, and it's not a bad poem. He means what he says. My word, you can't know Burns unless you can hate the Lockharts and all the estimable bourgeois and upper classes as he really did - the narrow-gutted pigeons. Don't, for God's sake, be mealy mouthed like them. I'd like to write a Burns life. Oh, why doesn't Burns come to life again, and really salt them! . . . don't be on the side of the angels, it's too lowering.
Not long afterwards, liking very much Burns's letter to Ainslie, which I had sent to him, he suggested that somebody might like to reissue The Merry Muses (of which I had told him but which he had never seen) with an introduction - 'a little essay on being bawdy' - by himself.
For that Christmas a German friend had offered us her little house in the Harz Mountains, and we managed to get together our fares and go there. My friend was a Doctor of Philosophy, and her husband a medical doctor, the head of a Klinik at Frankfurt-on-Oder which specialised in lung cases.
Like so many other cultured Germans, our friends were keenly interested in Lawrence and his work, and they questioned us eagerly about him. Hearing of his delicacy, they assured me of what I could well believe, that the air of the Harz possessed in their experience a quality which often rendered it more healing than the air of Switzerland to troubled lungs and bronchials. Very gladly, they said, they would treat Lawrence for nothing, or for what he could afford without a strain. I felt that this doctor, a man who had come through the horrors of the Russo-German front and was quiet and sensitive and gentle, would have known better than most how to deal with a patient to whom the word sanatorium was almost synonymous with suicide. I even elicited from him his opinion that, in a case such as Lawrence's, the prescription of sanatorium treatment in a sanatorium was usually a mistake.
But it came at the wrong moment. Lawrence, though greatly attracted by our descriptions of the place and of the doctor, wrote that it was 'too far, too far'. He was supposed, he said, to be going 'up to the snow in January' but was 'shirking it' and would see when January came. He hated the chopping and changing about. He would prefer to wait where he was, if that were possible, till the spring, and then perhaps, having saved his energy, try another summer season at the ranch before deciding to sell it. The doctor who had examined his lungs at Baden had not been against altitudes. There was a chance that the high dry American mountain air might set him up again. Anyhow he was tired to death of crawling about and being driven to consult new doctors whose prescriptions varied strangely. Money was not exactly pouring in. On what he did earn there was his agent's tax of ten per cent besides the new foreign commission on visitors of twenty per cent.
I still have the unhappy feeling that with more pressure on my part or with very slightly altered circumstances on his, and if we could have outstayed the holiday period there, Lawrence might have joined us; and Dr Dege and the dry, not too high air of the Harz might have helped toward healing him. But such are vain imaginings. As it was, Lawrence stayed at the Mirenda, provided a second jollification for the peasants, in which he joined on Christmas Eve, and for Christmas Day he allowed the Huxleys to motor him to friends of theirs in Florence.
It has been said that since their meeting in the summer of 1926 a dependable and fruitful friendship had sprung up between Lawrence and Huxley. One day this friendship will no doubt be enlarged upon as one of the most remarkable of our time. I can give no more here than my own reading of it, as formed from my very limited knowledge and observation.
As early as 1916, when he was in Cornwall, Lawrence said to me, 'Young men ought to wish to come to me of themselves, I ought not to need to ask them to come.' Already he was sure of himself, and sure that he could make young men surer of themselves by what he could tell them. And even then young men were drawn to Lawrence after a fashion. They were attracted, and some of them came. But they came timidly, half unwillingly, and most of them withdrew in a strange fear - a strange but quite comprehensible fear - and a grave misunderstanding. At the same time these young men - Koteliansky, Murry, Gerder, Cannan, Heseltine, Gray, Aldington, and others - were without exception sensitive and gifted persons, unusual men who were potentially or actually capable of contributing a creative share to their epoch. While they were still as yet untried and unknown, Lawrence divined this of them. It was also this in them that made them find in their first contacts with Lawrence a stimulant as well as an irresistible charm. And although in turn they were repelled by his entire refusal to adapt himself, and discovered in his intention something at once uncompromising and hard to understand, each one went his way marked for life. Their conversation with Lawrence might result in nothing better than a lasting dissatisfaction, a feeling of guilt or a frantic spite. It never lacked results.
Lawrence on his side remained wholly untouched in the sense of being influenced. If he was incomparably more innocent than any of them, he was also of incomparably superior attainments as an artist and as a man of vital experience in life. Already 'never to adapt himself to humanity was a first requirement and proved his certainty. But he loved these friends as long as he might, bore with them, debated with them patiently and passionately, went to endless trouble over them, and gave them handsomely of his best. It must be borne in mind that of the established men of the day, even those who had stated early admiration or accorded practical help, held themselves at a cautious distance from the author of The Rainbow. Either they did not care, or did not know how to approach him, and in the peculiar circumstances the approach would have to come from them. Patronage, frigid, monitory or uncomprehending, of the kind that urged him to write another Sons and Lovers, was useless. He needed a grown man's hand stretched out in warm equality and comradeship. There was no such hand.
Not until Aldous Huxley arrived at the Mirenda with his sensitive goodwill and his second-hand car to sell. But then it came - better late than never!
In Huxley, taking first the externals, Lawrence was offered a man still young, who was yet of established reputation, with nothing in the worldly sense to gain or lose by seeking a friendship. As regarded the practical aspects of life, which must always count, Lawrence and he met on an equality.
Less externally, Huxley came before Lawrence as a writer of exquisite perceptiveness who was both perfectly honest and perfectly sceptical. He was indeed so sceptical as to be almost without opinions, certainly without what can be called religious opinions. If Lawrence was our Eager Heart, Huxley was our Scandalised Spectator. He was so perfectly open-minded that intellectually he stood for nothing. But he had looked at life and his heart was appalled. For he had a heart to be appalled.
This is the inmost point. Huxley could suffer cleanly and warmly, without self-seeking or shrieking, but none the less acutely. Unlike Murry, he could feel simply and with the heart. And what he had not been able to get over was that suffering was one of the major facts of life. 'Be brave!', 'bear it!', 'endure!', 'swallow it!' - so we are obliged to address the baby boy from birth as the terrible equivalent of 'be a man!' Why?
The Japanese, the Chinese, the Red Indians and other peoples take full cognisance of this fact in their education. The boy must learn to bear pain without flinching, perhaps in the process to come by a species of useful self-hypnosis. If less pain falls to him than he may expect, this will be a bonus to his life. If it falls in its plenitude he will deal with it unsurprised. There is much to be said in practice for some such imposition of ardours and endurances. But the true inwardness of the imposition is that it is religious in its origin. The initiation ceremonies enacted by the savage on the threshold of virility are not mere cruelties; they are inspired by the sacredness of manhood and by the recognition in the soul that suffering is something irremediable which must be met without repining.
That is to say, at a certain stage in life they are conventionally inflicted, first in recognition of what man may expect from a live, unknowable, partly malicious cosmos, and second, to endow each individual with the power to defy the cosmos, when need be, in his own sacred person. The conception is profoundly religious and it meets one of the deepest of human needs.
The modern European, however, has no such vitalising way out. He combats pain with science, denies it with Christian Science, bears it with intellectual stoicism, or accepts with regard to it the Christian ideal.
Concerning the first, non-religious ways - stoicism and modern science go badly together, and in spite of our many pain-destroying inventions it is, I suppose, a debatable question as to whether suffering - taking things all round and including mental suffering - has not rather increased than decreased in a nerve-ridden modern world.
By the Jewish-Christian ideal, again, we suffer either as a punishment for sin or in furtherance of our spiritual purification, this being undertaken by a loving God for his own inscrutable ends. In either case we are victims. As it works out in practice, we can become godlike only by welcoming suffering, not by resisting it. The more a victim, the nearer to the divine. When pushed to this extremity the flesh will get some of its own back by such means as flagellation. But the whole of the ascetic practice is an exact antithesis to the hardships undergone in the non-Christian initiation to adult life. The first seeks to weaken the flesh which already it has ideally degraded: the second seeks to strengthen an ideally potent flesh in the conflict between man and the unseen. Both would have man partake of the divine, but submission is the secret communion of the one, while the other communicates by way of a challenge which is none the less worship.
Once I told Lawrence a story I had thought of writing. A bishop, as I fancied, was obliged to preach in a district that had been ravaged by some awful plague. As he sat in his chair preparing a sermon full of adjurations to the faithful, bidding them endure gladly that their souls might be refined in the fires of suffering and so be fitted to glorify their Maker, he dropped asleep. And in his sleep he dreamed that the Lord, clad in a mantle of pure and sumptuous fur, came and asked him to have a walk through the universe. The bishop went, and he found that the universe was a vast stockyard for fine-skinned animals, such as foxes, hares, ermines, and the rest. In each section the beasts - which were the souls of men - were progressively tortured, plagued and beaten, in such a manner as to refine to the utmost the gloss and quality of their pelts. Only the finest, which incidentally suffered more excruciatingly than the rest, were fitted to adorn at last this God who rubbed His hands over the crucifixion.
Lawrence shuddered over this tale. 'You can't write that,' he said. 'It's too horrible. Yet, oh, yes; it is what thousands of us were brought up to believe. The flagellation of the Christian saint. Yes, you'd better write it, if you can bear to.'
On the other hand, when I was shocked by the old Japanese play Bushido, in which the adoring parents of a talented and beautiful only boy, tell him that they must cut off his head to save that of his Emperor, and the boy, like his parents, purifies himself and is willing for the sacrifice, Lawrence told me I was wrong to be offended. 'It is the only way to happiness,' he said, 'the only way for life to be rich, for people to have something apart from their own little individual souls that is worth the sacrifice of life itself.'
Again, though in Lawrence's phrase we were 'between the hammer and the anvil' and life was 'full of wonder and surprise and mostly pain', pain with him was always magnificently balanced by wonder and surprise. In spite of accounts to the contrary, accounts marred by the hidden hysteria of their writers, he was the least hysterical of men. He was sensitive less in an extreme than in a special degree, maintaining his responses to life at every point, yet accepting his own share of suffering in a manner that in practice had almost the appearance of stoicism. This was because his sensitiveness was so far removed from self-importance. During the War it was not primarily the physical or mental agony, or even the wastage of humanity, that engaged his passion. It was the initial outrage on manhood inflicted by a mechanised conflict for something deeply felt to be not worth fighting for. What he entered into, as perhaps did no other man at the time, was the smothered horror of soldiers who feared neither death nor wounds. Thus he never fell into that self-persecuting and impotent 'suffering-with' which only too often begins as a form of masochism and ends as an excuse for lack of life in ourselves. No one I ever met responded more spontaneously or acted more gently in case of illness or pain. But he never worked himself up by imagining the sufferings of another, nor of the world as a whole. Once when we heard of an acquaintance who had lain exposed and wounded for three days in a shell-hole in Flanders, Lawrence checked my horrified fancy.
'He didn't suffer as, sitting here, we think,' he said. 'He wasn't there as you and I are here. In an experience like that, the being, the man, is almost gone, is at one remove. Bad enough, of course, but not the kind of sharpness you are imagining.' That this was true was proved when the same man, in hospital later, was cheerfully vague in recounting his sensations. Lawrence indeed exposed for me the wastefulness and the spiritual conceit that for so long have racked the nerves of our northern world in the guise of 'Christian sympathy'.
To return. In Huxley we get a man whose awareness of suffering had led him to pillory in his books each form of cruelty in turn. But this awareness was no neurosis with him - as with so many writers of today, who wallow in horrors - but a real heart wound that made him aloof and gentle. He was therefore immediately attracted to Lawrence, both because Lawrence admitted suffering and because Lawrence in some way had freed himself from its trammels. The effect is apparent in everything written by the younger man since the two became acquainted. It has been so deep that, at this date and in his last book, Huxley finds that a painless life might well be intolerable.
As for Lawrence, he was in certain respects past the stage when he could give himself in friendship. But he was glad and grateful to find an Englishman to whom he could talk and a heart on which he could rely. For the time that remained Huxley was simply and charmingly devoted to him, and proved dependable to the last.