Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence

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To Ophelia Field

I always feel as if I stood naked for the fire of Almighty God to go through me … One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist. I often think of my dear Saint Lawrence on his gridiron, when he said ‘Turn me over, brothers, I am done enough on this side.’

D. H. Lawrence, Letters, 25 February 1913

Medieval Cosmology

ARGUMENT

Isn’t it remarkable how everyone who knew Lawrence felt compelled to write about him? Why, he’s had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!

Aldous Huxley, The Paris Review (1960)

Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

Everyone who knew him told tales about D. H. Lawrence, and D. H. Lawrence told tales about everyone he knew. The tales that Lawrence told about his friends, who consequently became his enemies, can be found in his fiction, and the tales that his friends – and enemies – told about Lawrence can be found in the numerous memoirs and portraits that appeared after his death, and the spate of novels which feature a thin and bearded prophet. He also, again and again, told tales about himself: no writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature, or held so fast to his native right to put everything he was into a book.

Burning Man is a triptych of self-contained biographical tales which take as their subject three versions of Lawrence. My focus is his middle years, the decade of superhuman energy and productivity between 1915 when The Rainbow was prosecuted, and 1925 when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. ‘Inferno’ is set largely in England, ‘Purgatory’ is set largely in Italy, and ‘Paradise’ takes place largely in the American Southwest. I say largely because after 1912 Lawrence, who was a different man in every place, was never in the same place for more than a few months; he and his wife Frieda roamed the world like gypsies and slept like foxes, in dens. Because Lawrence believed there was no progress without contraries, each of these tales sees him in battle, and because he was always in battle, I have selected those battles that have been granted the least attention. In doing so I give major roles to those figures otherwise assumed to be minor and minor roles to those figures generally considered major; episodes and experiences that earlier biographers have passed over in a paragraph are here placed centre stage. I look closely at the novels because they mattered to Lawrence and tell us who he was at the time of writing, but I do not consider them his major achievement. When F. R. Leavis placed The Rainbow and Women in Love on his Great Books List, he consigned the best of Lawrence to the periphery where it has remained ever since, so that readers today have no sense of either his range or the preternatural strangeness of his power. One aim of this book is to reveal a lesser-known Lawrence through introducing his lesser-known works.

Both censored and worshipped in his lifetime, Lawrence’s afterlife has been one of peaks and troughs. ‘If there was one person everybody wanted to be after the war, to the point of caricature,’ said Raymond Williams, ‘it was Lawrence.’ In 1960, after Penguin had been tried at the Old Bailey for issuing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence was hailed as the mascot of the sexual revolution, but when, in 1969, Kate Millet skewered him in Sexual Politics for his submissive heroines and bullying heroes, he became one of those figures whose name triggers a psychological lockdown.

Lawrence is still on trial. When I was growing up in the 1980s my mother wouldn’t have his novels in the house and my (female) tutor at university refused to teach him. Being loyal to Lawrence, especially as a woman, has always required some sort of explanation, so here is mine. Like many readers, I came to him as a teenager and knew him only as a writer of fiction. Not all of it was good and not all of it was sane, but there was still nothing to compare. He asked the same questions as I did and I liked his fierce certainties: his belief in the novel as ‘the one bright book of life’, his belief in himself as right and the rest of us as wrong, his insistence that the unconscious was an organ like the liver; I liked the fact that his women were physically alive and emotionally complex while his men were either megaphones or homoerotic fantasies, that he cared so much about the sickness of the world, that he saw in himself the whole of mankind; I liked his solidarity with the instincts, his willingness to cause offence, his rants, his earnestness, his identification with animals and birds, his forensic analyses of sexual jealousy, the rapidity of his thought, the heat of his sentences, and his enjoyment of brightly coloured stockings.

The Lawrence I have returned to in my own middle years, this time as a biographical subject, is composed of mysteries rather than certainties. Where I once found insight, I now find bewildering levels of naivety; for all his claims to prophetic vision, Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world. His fidelity as a writer was not to the truth but to his own contradictions, and reading him today is like tuning into a radio station whose frequency keeps changing. He was a modernist with an aching nostalgia for the past, a sexually repressed Priest of Love, a passionately religious non-believer, a critic of genius who invested in his own worst writing. Of all the Lawrentian paradoxes, however, the most arresting is that he was an intellectual who devalued the intellect, placing his faith in the wisdom of the very body that throughout his life was failing him. Dismantle his contradictions, however, and you take away the structure of his being: D. H. Lawrence, the enemy of Freud, impressively defies psychoanalysis.

How can biography do justice to Lawrence’s complexities? Just as writers of fiction might provide a disclaimer declaring that what follows is a work of imagination not based on real characters, and writers of non-fiction might provide a disclaimer declaring that what follows is not a work of imagination and very much based on real characters, I should similarly state that Burning Man is a work of non-fiction which is also a work of imagination. I should further declare that I am unable to distinguish between Lawrence’s art and Lawrence’s life, which was equally a work of imagination, and nor do I distinguish Lawrence’s fiction from his non-fiction. I read his novels, stories, letters, essays, poems and plays as exercises in autofiction, which genre he pioneered in order to get around the restrictions of genre. ‘Art for my sake,’ he quipped, but he was being entirely serious. Accordingly, his letters are stories, his stories are poems, his poems are dramas, his dramas are memoirs, his memoirs are travel books, his travel books are novels, his novels are sermons, his sermons are manifestos for the novel, and his manifestos for the novel, like his writings on history, his literary criticism and the tales in this book, are accounts of what it was like to be D. H. Lawrence.

ENGLAND, 1915–1919

Inferno

William Blake, The Lovers’ Whirlwind

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.

What happened in Keynes’s rooms was ‘one of the crises of my life. It made me mad with misery and hostility and rage … I could sit and howl in the corner like a child, I feel so bad about it all.’³⁶ The visit had been, Russell conceded to Ottoline, ‘rather dreadful’ and Lawrence left ‘disgusted with Cambridge’. But because Russell was equally upset by sodomy, he and Lawrence ‘made real progress towards intimacy. His intuitive perceptiveness is wonderful – it leaves me gasping in admiration.’³⁷

So what did happen in Keynes’s rooms? What did Lawrence actually see when suddenly the door opened ‘and K. was there’? His accounts of his various crises – sexual or otherwise – always hold something back. Was someone else in the bedroom? His description operates like the memory of a primal scene: the location, the time of day, the sunlight, the writing of the note, the opening door, the ‘knowledge’ passing into him followed by the ‘little madness’. Lawrence became conscious in that moment of something which, unconsciously, he had known all along.

Back home he went straight to bed with a cold, telling Russell that he was ‘struggling in the dark – very deep in the dark’. He saw evil everywhere, especially in himself, he wanted to love but also ‘to kill and murder’. He wrote to Russell with a special request: ‘I wanted to ask you please to be with me – in the underworld – or at any rate to wait for me … I feel there is something to go through – something very important. It may be that it is only in my own soul – but it seems to grow more and more looming.’³⁸ Lawrence told Ottoline that what he saw ‘plainly’ with Keynes in Cambridge made him ‘sick’ but that Shelley ‘believed in the principle of Evil, coeval with the Principle of Good. That is right … Do not tell me there is no Devil.’³⁹

His descent continued. On 17 April, David Garnett came to stay, bringing his friend Francis Birrell. The two men were, Lawrence realised, ‘like Keynes and Grant’ and he began to dream of beetles; his underworld was crawling with insects. Homosexuality, he told David Garnett, is ‘so wrong, it is unbearable. It makes a form of inward corruption which truly makes me scarce able to live.’⁴⁰ But he also acknowledged his need for male intimacy. ‘All my life I have wanted friendship with a man,’ he later wrote. ‘What is this sense? Do I want friendliness? I should like to see anybody being friendly with me. Intellectual equals? Or rather equals in being non-intellectual … Not something homosexual, surely?’ This was the question.⁴¹ What Lawrence saw in Cambridge, he told David Garnett, was ‘enough to drive one frantic’, so what kind of friendship had he been imagining when he included in his first novel, The White Peacock, the scene in which Cyril and George dry one another after a swim?

I left myself quite limply in his hands, and, to get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him, and the sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies against the other was superb. It satisfied in some measure the vague, indecipherable yearning of my soul; and it was the same with him. When he had rubbed me all warm, he let me go, and we looked at each other with eyes of still laughter, and our love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, for either man or woman.⁴²

This episode, said Forster, was the ‘the most beautiful’ in a novel which he privately thought ‘the queerest product of subconsciousness that I have yet struck’.⁴³ John Middleton Murry described Lawrence’s ideal of a Blutsbrüderschaft – a ‘blood brotherhood’ he proposed to Russell and also to Murry himself – as an ‘instinctive, infra-personal sense of solidarity with men … which he simultaneously desired and repudiated’. He desired it in his novels and repudiated it in his life, just as he admired it in Forster’s novels but repudiated it in his life. Self One and Self Two would never resolve their quarrel about homosexuality.

On 22 April the Germans fired poison gas into the trenches at Ypres. Wilfred Owen, in ‘Strange Meeting’, described the sleeping soldiers groaning in the ‘profound dull tunnel’; by the ‘dead smile’ of one, he knew ‘we stood in hell’. In letters, Lawrence now described himself as ‘dead’, but he was also preparing to go into battle for what he knew to be one of the great English novels. ‘I hope you are willing to fight for this novel,’ Lawrence wrote to his agent on 23 April. ‘It is nearly three years of hard work, and I am proud of it, and it must be stood up for.’

I’m afraid there are parts of it Methuen won’t want to publish. He must. I will take out sentences and phrases, but I won’t take out paragraphs or pages … You see a novel, after all this period of coming into being, has a definite organic form, just as a man has when he is grown. And we don’t ask a man to cut his nose off because the public won’t like it: because he must have a nose, and his own nose too.

Apart from a few sentences and phrases, Methuen let The Rainbow through with its nose intact. The book’s content was disguised behind a cover showing a girl in a barn wearing a pink dress fainting into the arms of a man in a frock coat. It looked like the illustration in a women’s magazine, and Lawrence hated it.

The Bible, Lawrence said, was a ‘great confused novel’, and The Rainbow was his version of the Old Testament. Rejecting traditional Christianity, Lawrence nonetheless hung his story on the fiery furnace, Noah’s Flood, God’s Covenant of the rainbow and the love between Jonathan and David. His Holy Family is composed of Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow (with the same given name as his mother), Tom Brangwen, a farmer with ‘inarticulate, powerful, religious impulses’, and Lydia’s daughter Anna, whom Tom Brangwen learns to love as his own. Tom loves easily and openly: at school, he had loved a ‘warm, clever boy who was frail in body, a consumptive type. The two had had an almost classic friendship, David and Jonathan, wherein Brangwen was the Jonathan, the server.’⁴⁴ Lawrence, whose first name was also David, returned all his life to the love between the two men. Theirs was the original Blutsbrüderschaft: his ‘love to me’, says David in The First Book of Samuel after Jonathan is slain, ‘was more wonderful than the love of women’.

Lydia (like Frieda) is older than her husband and her foreignness makes her unreachable, but the balance of her mysterious femininity and his mysterious masculinity makes their ‘long marital embrace’ a success. The Brangwen farm, The Marsh, is as eternal and unchanging as myth, and Lydia practises her own form of ‘fundamental religion’. Anna, who tries to drag her parents into consciousness, marries her cousin Will Brangwen, a lace-maker in Nottingham, who shares the Brangwen soul: ‘there was something subterranean about him, as if he had an underworld refuge’. Anna, with her own powerful religious impulses, dances naked in her bedroom, as David did before the Lord and as Frieda also liked to do.

Anna begets Ursula, the woman of the future. ‘Whither to go’ is Ursula’s great question, ‘how to become oneself?’ She falls in love with a soldier, decides not to marry him (wherein lay the novel’s anti-patriotism) and then discovers she is pregnant. In the novel’s climax Ursula finds herself in a fugue state, walking and walking ‘along the bottommost bed … there was nothing deeper … Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb? Why not stay below? Why force one’s way up the slope? Why force one’s way up and up when one is at the bottom?’ She goes up the slope to bed and is delirious for two weeks, during which time she loses her baby. When she recovers she sees from her window the ‘insentient triumph’ of life: a stream of people ‘in the streets below, colliers, women, children, walking each in the husk of an old fruition … They were all in prison, they were all going mad.’ The ‘stiffened bodies’ of the colliers:

seemed already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph … she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and amorphous … and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat.

Lawrence’s novel ended with an olive branch. The rainbow that bended and strengthened itself over the blackened hills on the book’s last page, like the rainbow that appeared after the flood in Genesis, symbolised fresh growth. The destroyed world would be born again. Ursula saw in the faint, vast gathering of form and colour ‘the earth’s new architecture’, the promise that the ‘old, brittle corruption of houses and factories’ would be ‘swept away’ and a ‘new clean, naked’ world would be born, built on a ‘living fabric of Truth’.

‘Now,’ Lawrence told his typist, Viola Meynell, when he posted the manuscript, ‘off and away to find the pots of gold at its feet’.⁴⁵ But he had set his rainbow in the sky too soon, he later concluded, ‘before, instead of after, the deluge’.⁴⁶

Cornwall, where the Lawrences arrived on 30 December 1915, was eight hours from London by train but the journey to Penzance took them further and further out of the known world. The house, on the north coast between Newquay and Padstow, had been loaned to them by the popular horror-fiction writer J. D. Beresford, and it came with a housekeeper who provided puddings and pies. This was ‘not England’, Lawrence stressed. In its ‘stark, bare, rocky directness of statement’ Cornwall was Lyonesse, the land of King Arthur and Tristan and Iseult, now sunk beneath the waves. For the next eighteen months the ‘strong and completely unsaddened’ Cornwall served as pathetic fallacy; the landscapes that Lawrence inhabited always also inhabited him.

‘This is the first move to Florida,’ he optimistically wrote on the night they arrived. ‘Here already one feels a good peace and a good silence, and a freedom to love and create a new life.’⁴⁷ But Cornwall was no replacement for the high skies of Florida, because Lawrence and Frieda had entered the wind tunnel. ‘Here the winds are so black and terrible,’ he told Ottoline. ‘They rush with such force that the house shudders.’⁴⁸ ‘I shall just go where the wind blows me,’ he told his Russian friend S. S. Koteliansky, known as Kot, ‘the wind of my own world’.⁴⁹ The winds were so great, Lawrence said, they make ‘one laugh with astonishment’. ‘I feel pushed to the brink of existence,’ he told Murry, and ‘might as well be blown over the cliffs here in the strong wind, into the rough white sea, as sit at this banquet of vomit, this England, this Europe’. The ‘twilight of all twilights’ was ‘drawing on, and one could only watch it and submit’. No sooner had Lawrence arrived than he fell ill with the chest infection that nearly killed him every winter. ‘I am absolutely run to earth,’ he told Murry, ‘like a fox they have chased till it can’t go any further.’⁵⁰ He no longer spoke to Russell on the grounds that the philosopher did not share his own sense of infinity, and his only real friends, Lawrence now said, were Murry himself, Murry’s girlfriend Katherine Mansfield, and the twenty-one-year-old Philip Heseltine, on the run from conscription. Heseltine was an Etonian music critic and composer with an interest in the Celtic revival; Lawrence thought him ‘empty and uncreated’, which qualities made him a good disciple, and Heseltine, who thought Lawrence ‘perhaps the one great literary genius of his generation’,⁵¹ joined him in the cliffside house, bringing his newly pregnant girlfriend, Minnie, known as Puma. Back in London Ottoline received letters from Lawrence complaining about the behaviour of Heseltine and Puma, and letters from Heseltine stirring up trouble between Ottoline and Frieda; each man was upset to discover the other’s disloyalty and Heseltine soon returned to London where he told his friends in the Café Royal that Lawrence was ‘a bloody bore determined to make me wholly his and as boring as he is’.⁵² Frieda, scared that Lawrence would die from misery, asked Russell to join him in the underworld but Russell refused.

Lawrence had devolved from the prophet of resurrection to a misanthrope preaching mass extermination. The Cornish men, he ranted, were ‘detestably small-eyed and mean – real cunning nosed peasants’ with the ‘souls of insects’.⁵³ If ‘squashed’, he imagined, ‘they would be a whitey mess, like when a black beetle is squashed’. Cornwall, he repeated, was cold, dark and eternal, but Lawrence was not afraid of the dark; he liked the ‘terrifying rocks, like solid lumps of the original darkness, quite impregnable: and then the ponderous cold light of the sea foaming up: it is marvellous’.⁵⁴ He binged on Dostoevsky who was currently all the rage, having been translated into English by Constance Garnett, the wife of Lawrence’s mentor, Edward Garnett, and the mother of David (who saw Lawrence as the plumber’s mate). Lawrence had watched Constance Garnett at work in her Surrey home, The Cearne, where he said ‘she would finish a page and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. The pile would be this high – really almost to her knees, and all magical.’⁵⁵ Ottoline sent Lawrence copies of The Possessed and The Idiot; he already knew Notes from the Underground and had read The Brothers Karamazov twice, first in 1913 and again in 1915.

He was, for the moment, Dostoevsky’s literary double. The two novelists arrived at the same time in the world of English letters, and Constance Garnett’s translation of Karamazov was reviewed in the Athenaeum in tandem with Lawrence’s second novel, The Trespasser. The Trespasser, the Athenaeum noted, recalled ‘the best Russian school’ and Lawrence’s ‘poetic realism’ was of ‘a Dostoevskian order’: Dostoevsky’s Russia shared with Lawrence’s England the same tightness in the air; ordinary life took on the intensity of hallucination; casual conversation was fervent argument, the characters – all informing on one another – lived on the verge of brain fever and waited for a prophet to lead them. Murry had asked Lawrence to collaborate with him on a book about Dostoevsky, but Lawrence’s admiration for the Russian kept turning to seething hate and so Murry was now writing the book by himself. Lawrence nonetheless shared his opinions about Dostoevsky in letters to Murry, and in his Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence, Murry cited these as the cause of the breakdown in their relationship: ‘It started with Dostoevsky. Lawrence was all against him for his humility and love.’

Lawrence channelled his nihilism into a theory of his philosophy called ‘Goats and Compasses’, written from his sickbed. The book was never published and the manuscript was lost, but Philip Heseltine’s friend Cecil Gray described it as ‘Lawrence at his very worst: a bombastic, pseudo-mystical, psycho-philosophical treatise dealing largely with homosexuality – a subject, by the way, in which Lawrence displayed a suspiciously lively interest at the time’.⁵⁶ Ottoline, who also read ‘Goats and Compasses’, thought the argument ‘deplorable tosh’. Baffled by how her gentle friend could ‘preach this doctrine of hate’, she blamed Frieda. Fighting with Frieda, Ottoline reasoned, required Lawrence to ‘suppress his human pity, his gentle and tender qualities … and this makes him raw and bitter inside’.⁵⁷ Lawrence’s friends all hated his wife.

Lawrence and Frieda left the shuddering house in early spring and moved further down the coast, into a whitewashed cottage called Higher Tregerthen, five miles from St Ives and one mile from the isolated village of Zennor. They had found, Lawrence thought, for £5 a year, the best place to live in England and he straight away painted the walls pale pink, the cupboards bright blue, hung daffodil-yellow curtains and a washing line, and dug a vegetable patch for carrots, beans, potatoes, onions, cabbages. A one-up, one-down with an outside privy and no cooker or running water, the cottage stood immediately adjacent to a row of three other cottages which had been knocked together, the third of which was fashioned as a mock-castellated tower. The conversion of the buildings had been done by the previous tenant, a writer called Guy Thorne whose bestselling 1902 novel When It Was Dark, about an attempt to disprove the Resurrection, bringing darkness and chaos to the world, was the Edwardian equivalent to The Da Vinci Code.

The gales in Zennor were just as severe as those in Newquay. ‘How the winds from that untamed Cornish sea rocked the solid little cottage, and howled at it,’ Frieda wrote of Higher Tregerthen, ‘and how the rain slashed it, sometimes forcing the door open and pouring into the room.’⁵⁸ When, in the dark, the door flew open, it seemed that ‘the ancient spirits and ghosts of the place blew into my cottage. In the loneliness I seemed to hear the voices of young men crying out to me from the battlefields: help us, help us, we are dying. Despair had blown in on the night.’⁵⁹ Higher Tregerthen lies in a lunar landscape of windswept, treeless, snake-filled fields shaped by Celtic farmers two millennia ago and strewn with Druid sun circles, granite pyramids, volcanic rock, megalithic burial chambers and the stone remains of prehistoric constructions. ‘Nowhere,’ Lawrence said, ‘can it be so black as