Soon after the middle of June Lawrence and Frieda were at Chexbres-sur-Vevey. I had a postcard to say that he did not like it much but found it 'good for his bronchials', so they would stay awhile.
They stayed about a month, after which they went for two months to a peasant chalet up on the mountain-side at Kesselmatte. It was like a little, double-decked wooden ship that sailed high above the valley, and they had it entirely to themselves. Lawrence was unable to walk the mountains, but he began to paint again, and the intelligent young Swiss postman came and stared at his pictures, wondering at them, sometimes liking them very much, never at all shocked. The peasant proprietors of the chalet, who lived during the summer in their hay-hut across the valley, brought over baskets of bilberries and cranberries. Sometimes Lawrence and Frieda drove across the pass to revisit Les Diablerets, which in summer was quite a different place.
August came and went. England would have to be postponed, as Lawrence did not feel up to it.
For the first time he was frankly despondent about his health as surveyed over 'this last year', and found that it was 'useless thinking of going anywhere till his cough went'.
But in September they must move on. The signal came with the cowbells as the beasts moved down from the high Alps. Summer was over. Where next? There was some talk of trying the French Alps near Grenoble, this time with Brewster. But, as so often before when no definite step presented itself, they went to Baden-Baden. From there Frieda could visit England by herself, see the picture-show, now fixed for October, and bring back the reports. She was to have our studio.
Lawrence wrote to Ada advising her in good time not to visit the Warren Gallery. 'You won't like the things. Best leave 'em alone.'
The show, however, was put off, and Frieda did not come to England. After little more than a week at Baden Lawrence left her there, and with her elder daughter Eisa he went to where the Huxleys were at Le Lavandou, near Toulon. When Frieda had seen to things at the Mirenda she would follow them there.
The place and the sea agreed with Lawrence; and when Eisa and the Huxleys left, and Frieda arrived bringing old friends with her - Richard Aldington and others - they made a good company. Together they crossed the ten miles of sea to the Island of Port Cros, there to picnic in the little rooms of La Vigie, fortified and moated on the top of the highest hill. The only trouble was that Lawrence 'with his cold' could never make one of the daily bathing expeditions. La Vigie was an hour's climb from the sea - the wonder was that he had got there at all - and even had he been able to accompany the others he could not have bathed. The experience at Forte dei Marmi had been enough of a warning for that.
If I know anything of Lawrence, his disabilities in such a party must have been hard to bear, for he hated to be a mere onlooker, and alone with Frieda he was always very much the leader. Possibly this had something to do with the fact that the beauty of the green island, with its umbrella pines and 'the blue sea and the other isles', while he admitted it, did not much move him, and as the others disported themselves he kept thinking of the strikes that were forward in the Midlands. At the same time the notorious John Bull article on Lady Chatterley - 'Famous Novelist's Shameful Book' - 'A Landmark in Evil' (this time unsigned) appeared in London, together with a picture (unrecognisable) of the 'bearded satyr' and 'world-famous novelist, who has prostituted art to pornography'.
Still he would not let such a thing affect him deeply. The neighbourhood of Le Lavandou had seemed to suit his health. And when the weather broke, with such gales that no boat could bring bread, and the fortified walls proved no defence against the wet, and the holiday party had to pack up and at the first opportunity make for the mainland, the Lawrences thought they could not do better than try that coast for the winter. On November 14th they went to the Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol, where, as it chanced, Katherine Mansfield had stayed during an early stage in her illness.
In noticing this coincidence Murry appears to have made yet another mistake in his dates. According to his Reminiscences he had written through Curtis Brown in March after a silence of two years, to ask a trivial favour of Lawrence; and he gives us to understand that without undue delay Lawrence replied from the Beau Rivage. But as Lawrence in March was first in Switzerland and then in Florence, and did not reach Bandol till mid-November, Murry, if correct, must have waited eight months for any response, by which time the response would not be of the practical use he sought. Neither was it like Lawrence that if he were going to answer at all, he should have waited so long. What seems most likely is that Murry did not write until the following March (1929), which would make the silence between him and Lawrence longer by a year. It would also fit with the fact noted by Murry (as if in support of his 'pattern' of Lawrence's restlessness, though actually it deranges that pattern) that the Mirenda had already been given up. However these things may be, Lawrence remained at the Beau Rivage from November 28th till the first days of March, 1929. The poems in Pansies, which he designated as his 'rag-poems', were all written before Christmas.
At Christmas he had a visit from Ada. On the whole this brought sadness. As always, Lawrence was glad to see her; but he knew that now, save in his affections, he was out of touch with this dearest member of his family who was also the sole remaining link with his youth. Such a situation is always most sharply realised upon a face-to-face meeting.
And in this case it was no doubt aggravated by Ada's restrained sadness at the sight of her brother's increased fragility. Lawrence hated restrained sadness, and he disliked any sisterly attempts at treating him as an invalid. That winter he did not spend a single day in bed, and on Christmas Day he spoke hopefully of starting for the ranch in spring, if only for six months there. The hope persisted throughout January and February, until on March 2nd he confessed that it was 'no good', that though he was better and never needed to lie in bed, he was 'not well enough', and that it would be best to sell the ranch. It was then that he uttered one of his rare complaints before quoted: 'O why can't one make oneself tough}'
With Ada, as with most others who loved him, Lawrence had to stand up against the knowledge that, while she delighted in his gifts and himself, she wanted him to be the sort of 'great man' that she and the world were accustomed to. She wanted for him the acceptance and honour which she felt were his due. Again, she could not help resenting the awful discomfort of Lawrence's genius, which was brought about by just that 'demon' of his, to which obedience meant everything to him - that 'Balaam's ass in his belly', that would not let him move along the path of accredited success and loving ease. So he was obliged to break deep down with Ada, or rather to withdraw from her in essentials for the time being, causing a suspension of vital contact. At the same time the bond of affection would always hold between them. On her side there was the goodwill that can exist without understanding, eternally if need be, and on his a tenderness that could forgo understanding while it went on hoping. In human relations it was only where there was neither understanding nor natural warmth, but merely the jargon of love, that Lawrence could make an absolute break, as we shall see. Indeed what Murry called 'love' was that very thing that stank in Lawrence's nostrils as the festering of lilies - the emotional collapse due to the Christian ideals, which bore a noble name, but was false and death-dealing and the cause of the War. Because of it, said Lawrence, we must give up using the word. Tenderness would do for a change. In tenderness there was still a living test of a man's fidelity, while love was heavy with generations of betrayal.
As ever, with Ada as with myself, he was patient, hopeful, wise and extremely gentle. Almost immediately after she had left to go home, he wrote a letter as unconquerably kind as it was free from egotism. He faced the situation squarely and intimately, making none of the familiar excuses of self-pity decked in playful or touching phrases which are so often the last vanity and refuge of the consumptive. Neither by his illness nor by his gifts did he put her at a disadvantage. The phrases are light and quivering with real sweetness. It is among other things a final refutation of Murry's picture of Lawrence in his last phase. And as such, though it appears also in Ada's book, it may be reproduced at least in part here:
... But don't be miserable - or if you must be, at least realise that it's because of a change that is happening inside us, a change in feeling, a whole change in what we find worth while and not worth while. The things that seem to make up one's life die into insignificance, and the whole state is wretched. I've been through it these last three years - and suffered, I tell you. But now I feel I'm coming through, to some other kind of happiness. It's a different kind of happiness we've got to come through to - but while the old sort is dying, and nothing new has appeared, it's really torture. But be patient, and realise it's a process that has to be gone through - and it's taken me three years to get even so far. But we shall come through, and be really happy and in touch. You will see, the future will bring great changes - and I hope one day we may all live in touch with one another, away from business and all that sort of world, and really have a new sort of happiness together. You'll see - it will come - gradually - and before not so very many years. This is the slow winding up of an old way of life. Patience - and we'll begin another, somewhere in the sun.
Ada wrote to say that she was hurt because she felt that Lawrence was 'hiding some part of himself ' from her. He replied frankly and firmly:
You say you think I've hidden some part of myself from you. Not at all. I am always the same. But there is something you just refuse to see and refuse to accept in me. You insisted on a certain idealisation and there it was ...
Incidentally it was Frieda's supreme virtue that she did not refuse to see or accept, even if her acceptance was by way of open combat. Neither did she insist on 'a certain idealisation', so from her Lawrence never needed to withdraw himself, except in those moments of ultimate loneliness which are for every man and were for him in particular.
In March, though all thoughts of summering at the ranch had to be put aside, he felt well enough to think of prospecting for a real home.
He had not liked the French Riviera enough to wish to make his home there:
Somehow here there isn't enough to it to make one want to live - the country is a bit no-how, and the French mess up their seaside coast worse than anybody - fearful hotch-potch of villas almost as bad as a slum.
But he agreed he might have to do so, as it was 'good for him', which Italy was 'not just now'. There was much to be said for Bandol. Before committing himself to a villa there, however, he might have a look at Spain. He had wanted to make 'a little tour in Spain' as early as December, but had deferred it.