What was immediately urgent was that he should use his strength to go to Paris and make arrangements there in person for the private issue of The Escaped Cock, which he had completed that winter after eighteen months' interval, besides painting four more pictures for the postponed exhibition in London. So from early March - accompanied on the journey by Rhys Davies - Lawrence was in Paris on business for about a month. He stayed with the Huxleys, who were then living at Suresnes, and Maria Huxley, distracted by his looks, arranged for his examination by a specialist. Frieda tells me that Lawrence did not go to be examined. Whatever happened, or did not happen, a rumour reached England that he had only a few days, possibly only a few hours, to live. Several of his friends, including ourselves, were called up on the telephone by unknown editors - one could almost hear the rejoicing obituarist sharpening his quill. We could only hope that it was a scare and say so. I wrote at once to Frieda asking how Lawrence was.
Murry, too, had heard the rumour and had written, not to Frieda, but to Lawrence. It was his third letter since the estrangement. A second had followed Lawrence's 'sad and tired' response to the request about The Rainbow. Because, in that response, Lawrence had said that he might write again later but had not done so; and 'after a month or two' Murry had written making overtures of friendship and enclosing photographs of his children. But to this Lawrence had not replied. It was an omission so unusual as to be significant to any who knew him as well as Murry did.
The rumour that Lawrence was dying, however, gave Murry another chance, and he wrote his third unsolicited letter, which amounted to an appeal for a deathbed reconciliation. He offered to go out for this pious purpose.
This time Lawrence replied. His business being finished in Paris, he had gladly fled, and since the middle of April he and Frieda had been staying at the Hotel Royal, Palma de Mallorca.
I have often fancied that rage, coupled with a sort of bitter amusement, may have acted upon Lawrence like a strong tonic when he read Murry's missive. Deathbed reconciliations were not his line. He had 'no idea of passing out' just yet, but if he had, it would not willingly be with Murry's hand in his. Once and for all he wished never to see Murry again, in this world or the next. 'Even when we are immortal spirits' - he wrote - 'we shall dwell in different Hades.'
One might have thought that upon a heart capable of loving, no heavier sentence was ever passed by one who was once regarded as a dear friend. Not so Murry, however. He finds it 'not so poor an end to a friendship as it may appear to be'
My letter to Frieda brought an immediate reply from the Hotel Principe Alfonso, Palma de Mallorca, where they now were. 'No,' she wrote, 'I am thankful to say Lorenzo is better; in Paris he got worse again after a good winter on the Riviera. No, we are really enjoying this . . . This is just a line to let you know that we aren't on the downward slope!'
She begged me to go and see the picture-show when it should open, told me of the Mandrake Press book of the pictures which might be expected shortly, and said that before long she and Lawrence were going to find a house for themselves in one place or another. Ten days or so later Lawrence was writing to Ada in the same tone, dispelling the 'silly rumour that he was ill' and giving her his news. Pansies was about to appear, minus about a dozen censored items, but he hoped to issue a small unexpurgated edition as well. And the Mandrake people were expending two thousand pounds in the production of the picture book, including ten copies in vellum at fifty guineas, which last had already been ordered six times over. 'Seems to me a bit absurd, but there's this collecting craze nowadays,' was Lawrence's comment. When the proofs arrived he was not greatly pleased with them, finding them 'very dim, vague and disappointing', but, as he philosophically put it to Ada, 'Of course other people don't know them as I do.' As usual he had begun to set aside copies for his family, and for friends who might like to have them but could not afford to buy. The original pictures he was not anxious to sell. He therefore put high prices upon them, and most of them are still Frieda's property.
At midsummer the show opened. It had a mixed reception from the critics and from the public who flocked to see it. Towards the end of the run Frieda came to London, and we went to the party given for her at the Gallery. She wore a gay shawl, red shoes and a sheaf of lilies - the last to symbolise Lawrence's purity! Ada came from the Midlands, and other old friends of the Lawrence family travelled up to see 'Bert's pictures'. These were no more shocked than had been the peasants at the Mirenda, the postman at Kesselmatte or the proprietress of the hotel at Bandol. Ada, who had been shocked by Lady Chatterley, genuinely liked them. I too liked them. But undoubtedly, as Lawrence knew, 'people who called themselves his dear friends were not only shocked but mortally offended by them'. Millicent Beveridge was one friend who was shocked, though I think not mortally offended.
Unhappily for Frieda, there was something much worse than hostile critics or offended friends to be withstood.
Lawrence, who had returned to Italy, and had been in June at Forte again with the Huxleys, had gone on to Florence in July. There, staying with Orioli, he had fallen so alarmingly ill that Frieda was sent for by telegram.
When Frieda arrived, Lawrence, thanks to Orioli's devoted nursing and his own recuperative power, had pulled through the attack. To the astonishment of those who were with him he managed to greet her as if he had scarcely been ill. Huxley has told me how, at a later period, if Frieda was away, the mere expectation of her return would enable Lawrence to get up and dress himself, though before he knew she was coming he could not so much as lift his head. On this occasion he was joking and easy and interested in her eager news, and then he sent her off to an hotel, as there was not room for her in Orioli's flat. Probably she concluded (as he intended she should) that the telegram had been a matter of mere precaution or expediency. Really he was extremely feeble, and Orioli had feared the worst.
The police raid on the Warren Gallery, with the confiscation of all the pictures and the books of reproductions, came very soon after Frieda's return. It was a blow - especially a blow to a man in great physical weakness. But Lawrence did not noticeably blench. What he felt was chiefly disgust. Perhaps it had also a tonic effect. Anyhow, he wrote Nettles, and as soon as he could travel - early in August - got away from the intense heat of Italy to Baden-Baden.
'Yes,' he wrote to Ada, 'one feels very sick about the pictures. I suppose they won't let them burn them. Well, it's an unpleasant world - but I shan't let it worry me more than it need - and don't you either. The dirty swine would like to think they made you weep.'
After a few days at Baden itself, where it was still too hot for them, they moved with Frieda's mother to an hotel in the hills some 2,000 to 3,000 feet up. Here it first thundered and then rained so hard that they were obliged to hug themselves inside their greatcoats for warmth. After little over a week of this they fled back to Baden. Re-examined by the same German doctor who had seen him two years before, Lawrence was told that he was 'in several ways better', and that his lung was 'much healed up'.
But his condition was admittedly 'still bad', and he was plagued with asthma. Accordingly, even the altitude of 3,000 feet, prescribed earlier, was now said to be bad for him. He must go to the sea. Once more the Mediterranean was indicated. For the winter they must choose between the sea-coasts of Italy, Spain and the French Riviera.
In spite of his determination not to let the affair of the pictures disturb him unduly, the constant receipt of letters and telegrams and newspaper extracts with reference to the 'trial' at Marlborough Street Police Court, which was then proceeding, was undoubtedly prejudicial to health. He was bound to feel it and he did.
Disgusting how one is insulted! [he wrote to Ada], I shall not forgive it easily, to my white-livered lot! Thank God I needn't live among them, even to hear their beastly mingy British voices . . . However, the best will be to forget it as soon as possible.
And to me from Baden on August 12th:
- The police case business bores and disgusts me, and makes me feel I never want to send another inch of work to England, either paint or pen. Why are those morons and canaille allowed to insult one ad lib., while one is defenceless? England is a lily-livered country when it comes to purity.
And in the same letter:
These people are nastier than you imagine, and it only needs a little more to start them putting pressure on the French or Italian Govts to prosecute me for producing and issuing obscenity. I do not want to find myself in gaol, as a final insult - with a little vague sympathy in the far distance.
His post was again being tampered with, and I had suggested that it might be good if the police were tempted to seize as obscene some extracts from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in his handwriting, just as they had at first seized some of Blake's drawings at the Warren Gallery. But he would have none of it.
No, for God's sake leave my unfortunate name alone just now . . . No, the trouble is, once the police attack you, you are entirely at their mercy - so there it is.
Still - and though he was longing to be south again and to be in 'some sort of a place of our own' - it was 'really very nice here - an old inn with garden quiet and shady, where one can sit all day if one likes'.