PART ONE
Dante belonged to the close of the great medieval period, called the Age of Faith. His chief work, the ‘Divine Comedy’, tells of his visionary visit to Hell, where the violent, passionate men of the old world of pride and lust are kept in torment; then on to Purgatory, where there is hope; then at last he is conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. It is the vision of the passing away of the old, proud, arrogant violence of the barbaric world, into the hopeful culture such as the Romans knew, on to the spiritual peace and equality of a new Christian world. This new Christian world was beyond Dante’s grasp. Paradise is much less vivid to him than the Inferno. What he knew best was the tumultuous, violent passion of the past, that which was punished in Hell. The spiritual happiness is not his. He belongs to the old world.
Lawrence H. Davison, Movements in Modern European History (1921)
D. H. Lawrence’s nightmare began in 1915, the year the old world ended,1 sliding in horror, as he put it, down into the bottomless pit.2 He was thirty years old – the notional middle of his life – and lost in a dark wood. The wood was on the slopes of Hampstead Heath, an ancient commons in North London which rises 499 feet above sea level and covers 790 acres, forty of them oak and beech copses. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, were living in an enclave of the Heath called the Vale of Health; as hidden as a nest at the top of a tree, the Vale of Health is one of the weirdest parts of the city, and hardest to find. It is reached from Highgate village by crossing through North wood and Springett’s wood, and from Hampstead village by following the Georgian terraces on Well Walk to the long incline of East Heath Road, which tapers the rim of the wilderness. As the road enters woodland, a dense, narrow path – easy to miss – opens to the right. Cutting through the trees, the path is bordered by a thicket of brambles and holly, and just when it seems to be leading nowhere, it ends at a mishmash of Regency and neo-Gothic cottages which included, when Lawrence was there, a fairground tucked behind the fishing pond. North of the Vale, by the Spaniards Inn where the highwayman Dick Turpin’s father had once been landlord, wounded soldiers in their hospital colours of blue and red sat in rows on benches, and lower down on Parliament Hill, recruits in khaki practised their drills. Lawrence described autumn leaves burning in heaps and ‘smouldering’ in a ‘funeral wind’: ‘and the leaves are like soldiers’.3 His image echoes Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’:
the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes.
At night, searchlights in great straight bars fingered their way over the sky, ‘feeling the clouds, feeling the body of the dark overhead’,4 and once when Lawrence and Frieda were walking home a Zeppelin hovered above them like a ‘long oval world, high up’. It was as if, Lawrence told his new friend Lady Ottoline Morrell, the cosmos had ‘burst at last’,
the stars and moon blown away, the envelope of the sky burst out, and a new cosmos appeared, with a long-ovate gleaming central luminary, calm and drifting in a glow of light, like a new moon, with its light bursting in flashes on the earth, to burst away the earth also.5
The falling flakes of flame reminded Lawrence of Milton’s war in heaven, but when Frieda, who was German, looked at the Zeppelin she saw the men she had danced with as a girl now come to kill her.
The names of his many homes were often symbolic and Lawrence, who was tubercular, would spend his life in pursuit of vales of health. But there was nothing essentially healthy about this particular vale which, 200 years earlier, had been a malarial swamp known as Gangmoor. The first workman’s cottage to be built when the swamp was drained in 1720 was called Hatchett’s Bottom and at the turn of the nineteenth century, when there were nine more cottages and four houses, a resident was still able to describe the Vale as ‘a pit in the heath’.6 Number 1 Byron Villas, whose ground-floor rooms Lawrence rented, was a bay-windowed, red-brick Edwardian terrace backing on to a large ditch filled with nettles and berries. The topography was like that of his birthplace: the mining village of Eastwood, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, was also surrounded by pits, down which Lawrence’s father, a collier, had been lowered every day since he was seven years old.
Lord Byron was as embedded in the Nottinghamshire landscape as the mines. Newstead Abbey, the Byron family’s ancestral seat, was ten miles from Lawrence’s home and the myth of the wicked milord who quarrelled with his wife and turned his back on his country was part of local heritage. After his exile, Byron evolved from a fashionable poet into an incendiary device, and it was in Byron Villas that Lawrence also became a Romantic outlaw. Byron knew the Vale of Health because, exactly 100 years before the Lawrences discovered it, his friend Leigh Hunt, released from a two-year prison sentence for libelling the Prince Regent, had moved with his growing family into a spindly white house overlooking the precise spot where Byron Villas was later built.
The inspiration for the unworldly Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, who reminds his friends that ‘I am a child, you know!’, Hunt was a poet, critic, journalist and translator of Dante. In prison, after painting the walls and ceiling of his cell with flowers and clouds, he began his long poem The Story of Rimini, about Paolo and Francesca, the lovers glued in an eternal embrace in the wind tunnel that is the second circle of hell. The poem was completed in the Vale of Health, where Hunt also wrote the article on ‘Young Poets’ which launched the careers of Shelley and Keats. His Hampstead home thus became the centre of the Romantic circle in London: Shelley, Keats, Byron and Charles and Mary Lamb all made their way up the hill for musical evenings with Hunt and his family.
The Lawrences moved to the Vale of Health on 4 August 1915, the first anniversary of the war. Two months later Lawrence’s fourth novel, The Rainbow, was published and one month after that, on 13 November, the book was brought before the bench at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and sentenced to death, the 1,011 remaining copies burned by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. Sir Herbert Muskett, speaking for the prosecution, concluded that it was ‘a disgusting, detestable and pernicious work’, a ‘mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action’, and his judgement was supported by the novel’s critics, whose reviews were read out as evidence.7 ‘The wind of war,’ wrote one reviewer, ‘is sweeping over our life. A thing like The Rainbow has no right to exist in the wind of war.’ Another reviewer described Lawrence’s characters as ‘lower than the lowest animal in the zoo’, and a third condemned the book as ‘a monotonous wilderness of phallicism’.8 Twenty years earlier, the same magistrates’ court had charged Oscar Wilde with gross indecency; in 1907, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were sent from here to serve three months in prison; and in 1910 Dr Crippen stood before the Bow Street bench charged with murdering his wife.
The Rainbow is a mythico-historico-biblical account of the sexual awakening of three generations of women in the Brangwen family, who live quiet lives on the Nottingham–Derbyshire borders. Beginning in 1840, a late Romantic moment where men are still in wordless communication with nature and women, the book closes in 1905 when railway lines, mineshafts and a rash of red houses have corrupted the local landscape and the lives of its inhabitants. Lawrence makes no mention of the war but his letters, in which he thundered and roared like the Old Testament God, were about little else. ‘The war is just hell for me,’ he repeated, ‘like one of those nightmares where you can’t move.’ The Underground was ‘a tube full of spectral, decayed people’, the Battersea Recruiting Office, where he submitted the medical certificate exempting him from military service, was ‘the underworld of spectral submission’, and London itself ‘seems to me like some hoary massive underworld, a hoary ponderous inferno. The traffic flows through the rigid grey streets like the rivers of hell through their banks of dry, rocky ash.’9 Lawrence’s rage and despair went beyond, by many miles, that felt by his anti-war friends like Bertrand Russell, who served six months in Brixton prison for his opposition to militarism, E. M. Forster, who volunteered in the Red Cross in Alexandria, and David Garnett, who avoided conscription by joining the Friend’s War Victims Relief Mission.
Not that Lawrence was a pacifist. On the contrary, the suppression of his ‘big and beautiful work’, as he called The Rainbow, confirmed his conviction that ‘one must retire out of the herd and then fire bombs into it’.10 He believed deeply in conflict and thought incessantly about killing people – he would like, he said, ‘to kill a million Germans – two million’ – but he did not believe in crowd mentality, machinery or the wholesale destruction of civilisation.11 Had the war been conducted by noble savages shooting tufted arrows to defend their own land rather than by mud-caked soldiers firing machine guns for reasons they did not fully understand, he would have protested less. Given his commitment to the necessity of opposition, it is odd that Lawrence’s biographers take at face value his triumph at avoiding conscription, and evade the suggestion that his nervous collapse during 1915 might relate to his sense of having failed as a man. Lawrence’s response to the war was further complicated by the fact that, at the same time as hating herds, he insisted that the word ‘man’ had ‘no meaning’ in the singular; it was in unison – as colliers, soldiers, brothers-in-arms – that men had ‘all their significance’.12 Lawrence had therefore, by his own lights, become a man without meaning.
Because the relevant correspondence has disappeared from the archive of his agent, J. B Pinker, it is not possible to know precisely what the prosecutors objected to in The Rainbow. The novel’s obscenity, even they admitted, was hard to locate: ‘although there might not be an obscene word to be found in the book,’ Herbert Muskett declared, ‘it was in fact a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action’.13 The brief affair between Ursula Brangwen and her teacher, Winifred Inger, singled out for criticism, was certainly not phallic and nor was it a crime. Five years later, the Lord Chancellor would oppose a bill criminalising lesbianism on the grounds that ‘of every thousand women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices’. The problem with The Rainbow was the author himself: a bearded upstart whose lack of patriotism was proven by his marriage to a German aristocrat who had left her husband and children to be with him, whose sister was the book’s dedicatee, whose father was a Prussian officer, and whose cousin, Manfred von Richthofen, was an ace fighter pilot known as the Red Baron; Baron von Richthofen was the only German name known to every British soldier. Lawrence’s so-called friend Richard Aldington said he ‘knew in his bones’ that the reason for the book’s prosecution was not its ‘filth’ but the author’s anti-militarism.
Lytton Strachey, who ran into Lawrence at a party during this time, reported that he had ‘rarely seen anyone so pathetic, miserable, ill, and obviously devoured by internal distresses’.14 Methuen, The Rainbow’s publisher, did nothing however to defend their author, his masterpiece or his reputation. Instead, as Lawrence later put it in ‘The Bad Side of Books’, his editor ‘almost wept before the magistrate’, claiming to have not read the vile book himself and to have been wrongly advised by the reader who had.15 Nor did the Society of Authors, to whom Lawrence now turned in the hope that they would help reverse the court’s decision, offer any support: there was nothing, they regretted, that they could do in the current circumstances.16 Apart from his friend Catherine Carswell, who was sacked by the Glasgow Herald for her positive review of The Rainbow, not a single writer spoke up for Lawrence in the press, ‘lest’, as he put it, ‘a bit of the tar might stick to them’. For the rest of his life he submitted to publication ‘as souls are said to submit to the necessary evil of being born into the flesh’.17
Lawrence’s immediate response to the conviction of The Rainbow was to consign the magistrate and the prosecutor and the reviewers and the editors to the circle of hell reserved for cowards and philistines: ‘I curse them all, body and soul, root, branch and leaf, to eternal damnation.’ England having become enemy territory, he arranged an immediate passage to New York, sailing on the Adriatic on 24 November.18 He would transfer all his life to America, a world beyond the rainbow where, Lawrence explained, ‘life comes up from the roots, crude but vital. Here the whole tree of life is dying. It is like being dead: the underworld.’19 From New York, he and Frieda planned to continue down to Florida so that, beneath a perpetual sun, he could be reborn. ‘There must be a resurrection,’ Lawrence insisted, explaining his departure.20 His doctor advised against a winter sea passage, but Lawrence never listened to doctors: he postponed his departure, he said, because he wanted to fight for his novel.
In late December he and Frieda left Byron Villas and spent Christmas with Lawrence’s sister Ada in the Midlands, where he received a present from Ottoline. ‘Your letter and parcel came this morning,’ Lawrence told her on 27 December, ‘but why did you give me the book, the Shelley, you must value it. It is gay and pretty. I shall keep it safe.’ The Shelley was a first edition of Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems; the other poems included ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘To a Skylark’, and the theme of the volume was rebirth. Prometheus Unbound is a verse drama about the Titan’s release from the rock to which he was chained by the gods for giving fire to mankind, and the poem’s unrepresentable topography replicates that of Dante’s Paradise. The imagery of Prometheus Unbound, Shelley explained in his preface, was drawn from the operations of the human mind, a procedure ‘unusual in modern poetry, although Dante and Shakespeare are full of it, and Dante more than any other poet and with greater success’. Shelley, more than any other poet, was filled with Dante. Lawrence’s thank-you letter to Ottoline ended with a postscript telling her that they would be leaving for Cornwall the following Thursday, the penultimate day of the old year. This is the nearest he could get to self-exile, and he packed Ottoline’s present in his luggage.
Ottoline knew that Lawrence liked Shelley because that April he had enjoyed a book called Shelley, Godwin and their Circle by H. N. Brailsford, which described the impact of William Godwin’s anti-marriage, anti-ownership, free-love treatise Political Justice on the Romantic poets. ‘To these young men,’ Brailsford wrote, ‘the excitement was in his picture of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated, and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of human benevolence.’ This free community was how Lawrence wanted to live as well. ‘Very good,’ he reported to Ottoline. ‘I like Brailsford. Can I meet him?’ Brailsford was a friend of Bertrand Russell, and Lawrence, Russell told Ottoline, was ‘very like’ Shelley, ‘– just as fine, but with a similar impatience of fact. The revolution he hopes for is just like Shelley’s prophecy of banded anarchs fleeing while the people celebrate a feast of love.’21 Hectic, pale, combative and combustible with a high voice and a shrill laugh, Lawrence was compared by his circle to Shelley, while Shelley’s circle thought that Shelley – described by Hazlitt as a fanatic who ‘put his friends into hell’ – was like Dante.22
Lawrence resembled Shelley in temperament and physique only. In other respects they were opposites, Shelley being sexually unrestrained and politically radical, and Lawrence being uxorious and largely conservative. Mad Shelley, as the poet was known at school, was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism after which he eloped, aged seventeen, with a fifteen-year-old girl called Harriet Westbrook. Three years later, in 1814, he abandoned Harriet – who was pregnant with their second child – and ran away with the teenage Mary Godwin, daughter of William Godwin. In late 1815 Harriet drowned herself, and Mary’s half-sister, Fanny (also in love with Shelley), took an overdose of laudanum. Implicated in both suicides and considered ‘an outcast’, as he put it, from human society, Shelley found refuge, in the autumn of 1815, with the Hunts in Hampstead and it was here that he and Mary began their married lives in early 1816 before, later that spring, exiling themselves to Italy. It was serendipitous that Lawrence shared for a moment the same piece of earth as the man he considered ‘our greatest poet’, but then, as he put it in 1913, he was ‘always trying to follow the starry Shelley’.23
* * *
Everyone who saw Lawrence in 1915 commented on how unhinged he had become, and the sightings were legion. In early January, when the war was in its infancy, he decided to form his own free community based on Godwinian lines. ‘About twenty souls,’ Lawrence suggested, could ‘sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony where there shall be no money but a sort of communism as far as necessaries of life go’.24 He called his colony Rananim and gave it a heraldic emblem of ‘a phoenix argent, rising from a flaming nest of scarlet, on a black background’. The search for recruits now on, Lawrence invited more or less everyone he met, often within moments of meeting them, to join him. In letters to friends he drew sketches of his phoenix emblem, and in The Rainbow Will Brangwen carves a similar phoenix into a butter stamper. The phoenix rising soon came to represent not Rananim but Lawrence himself. ‘It gives me a real thrill,’ he confessed to Ottoline Morrell, when he sent her his ‘new badge and sign’. ‘Does that seem absurd?’25 It does seem a little absurd to give oneself a personal logo, but then Lawrence thought in symbols.
On 21 January he was introduced to E. M. Forster at a lunch party hosted by Ottoline in her Bloomsbury home, and the following day Duncan Grant invited Forster, David Garnett and the Lawrences to tea in his studio. It was not a success. Upset by the evident attraction between Grant and David Garnett (who were beginning an affair), Lawrence focused his distress on the paintings themselves. Garnett recalled that he held his head ‘on one side, as though in pain’ and looked more ‘at the floor than at the pictures’. Embarrassed by his behaviour, Forster slunk away, muttering something about his mother and a train, while Frieda tried to save the day by exclaiming heroically, ‘Ah, Lorenzo! I like this one so much better! It is beautiful!’26 By the time the Lawrences left, Grant was rocking silently, apparently nursing a toothache. Grant’s canvases, Lawrence reported to Ottoline, were ‘silly experiments in the futuristic line’. Art, he believed, should aim to represent an entire cosmos. It should contain an image of the ‘Absolute … a statement of the whole scheme – the issue, the progress through Time – and the return – making unchangeable eternity’. Resurrection, the Absolute and Sodomy were Lawrence’s themes of the year.27 His crisis was religious, emotional, philosophical, sexual and ethical; it involved everything and is written into every page of The Rainbow, because, as he said, ‘one sheds one’s sicknesses in books’.28
Two days after Duncan Grant’s tea party, Lawrence and Frieda moved into a cottage in Greatham near Pulborough in Sussex, with panoramic views of the South Downs. Lawrence thought the house, which belonged to friends, monastic and he loved the calm curvaceous landscape. From here he wrote to Forster that ‘It is time for us now to look all round, round the whole ring of the horizon – not just out of a room with a view.’29 He was speaking metaphorically (and referring to Forster’s novel), but this panoramic perspective was precisely what Lawrence asked for in a view and he tested the character of his friends on their response to the one from the Downs to the sea. Forster agreed to visit Lawrence for three days and in February the two men walked to the viewing point, Lawrence pointing out the snowdrops and early signs of spring. He was finishing The Rainbow and Forster had just completed Maurice, his tale of homosexual love that would remain unpublished until 1971. They will have talked about their books and Forster very probably showed Lawrence his manuscript; the evidence that Lawrence knew Maurice can be found in the pages of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a closely observed heterosexual retelling of Forster’s story, and it was after Forster’s visit that Lawrence added to The Rainbow the affair between Ursula Brangwen and Winifred Inger.
Lawrence had admired Howards End, whose Anglo-German, mind-body union between the mental Margaret Schlegel and the physical Henry Wilcox recalled his own marriage, but Forster found impossible what he called the ‘team spirit’ of the Lawrences. The two men had been, Lawrence reported to Bertrand Russell, ‘on the edge of a fierce quarrel all the time’. The quarrel concerned Forster’s homosexuality – of which Lawrence only now became aware – and he veiled his abhorrence behind an attack on his guest’s celibacy: why could Forster not act on his instincts and ‘fight clear to his own basic, primal being?’ He was all mind-consciousness and thus ‘dead’. After one particularly gruelling session in which he was attacked on all fronts, Forster took himself to bed ‘muttering’, Lawrence reported, ‘that he was not sure we – my wife and I – weren’t just playing round his knees’.30 In his thank-you letter, Forster explained to Lawrence why he wouldn’t be taking up their offer to come again:
I like the Lawrence who talks to Hilda [the maid] and sees birds and is physically restful and wrote The White Peacock, he doesn’t know why; but I do not like the deaf impercipient fanatic who has nosed over his own little sexual round until he believes that there is no other path for others to take: he sometimes interests and sometimes frightens and angers me, but in the end he will bore [me] merely, I know.31
The difference between the Lawrence who was physically at peace and the ‘deaf impercipient fanatic’ had long been recognised by Lawrence himself. ‘The trouble is, you see,’ he had told his first love, Jessie Chambers, ‘I’m not one man, but two.’32 Jung, also split, called his extroverted false self No. 1 and his submerged true self No. 2; I will similarly refer to Lawrence’s opposing personalities as Self One and Self Two.
He delivered The Rainbow to his typist on 2 March, and three days later went to stay with Bertrand Russell at Trinity College. Lawrence and Russell had been introduced by Ottoline the previous month and Russell was electrified, as everyone was, by the erudition and energy of the collier’s son. When Lawrence later wrote in ‘A Rise in the World’ that ‘I rose up in the world ’Ooray! / rose very high, for me. / An earl once asked me down to stay / and a duchess came for tea’, he was referring to Russell (whose brother was an earl). ‘I feel frightfully important coming to Cambridge,’ he told Russell at the time, ‘– quite momentous the occasion is to me. I don’t want to be horribly impressed and intimidated, but am afraid I may be.’33 Having pined for a cloistered world of medieval men, Lawrence cannot have failed to be ‘horribly impressed’ by Cambridge, but he left no record of the impact of its monastic splendour. He sat at high table between Russell and the philosopher G. E. Moore, and over coffee the professors walked around the room with their hands behind their backs, discussing the Balkans about which, Lawrence thought, they knew nothing. He later impersonated their after-dinner strutting. Lawrence, however, went down as well as Russell hoped he would: the mathematician G. H. Hardy ‘was immensely impressed’ by the outsider and felt he had at last met ‘a real man’.34
There is a snobbery attached to this remark because Lawrence, thin as a wire with a high-pitched voice, was nothing like a ‘real man’. He was euphemistically described by his friends as ethereal, the vagueness of which elides the fact that Lawrence was not One of Us; what G. H. Hardy meant by ‘real’ man is that he was not a gentleman. Lawrence told Forster that he had become ‘classless’, but this was neither how he was seen by others nor how he really saw himself. Only David Garnett told the truth about how Lawrence was perceived among the upper-class literati: he was ‘a mongrel terrier among a crowd of Pomeranians and Alsatians’, he looked ‘underbred’, his ‘nose was short and lumpy’, his chin ‘too large and round like a hairpin’, and his ‘bright mud-coloured’ hair was ‘incredibly plebeian’. He was ‘the type of plumber’s mate who goes back to fetch the tools’,
the weedy runt you find in every gang of workmen, the one who keeps the other men laughing all the time, who makes trouble with the boss and is saucy to the foreman, who gets the sack, who is ‘victimised’, the cause of a strike, the man for whom trades unions exist, who lives on the dole, who hangs round the pubs, whose wife supports him, who bets on football and is always cheeky, cocky and in trouble. He was the type who provokes the most violent class-hatred in this country: the impotent hatred of the upper classes for the lower.35
It is important to hold this description in mind as Lawrence rises in the world.
The next morning Russell took him to meet Maynard Keynes, and Lawrence made his own discovery about ‘real men’ in Cambridge. ‘We went into his rooms at midday,’ he recalled, ‘and it was very sunny.’
He was not there, so Russell was writing a note. Then suddenly a door opened and K. was there, blinking from sleep, standing in his pyjamas. And as he stood there gradually a knowledge passed into me, which has been like a little madness to me ever since. And it was carried along with the most dreadful sense of repulsiveness – something like carrion – a vulture gives me the same feeling. I begin to feel mad as I think of it – insane.
Copyright © 2021 by Frances Wilson