Burning man, p.10
Burning Man, page 10
Frieda had been leading a double life since 1904 when she had her first affair, with a forty-year-old lace-maker called Will Dowson who was married to a suffragette. Will Dowson owned a car and would drive Frieda to Newstead Abbey and Sherwood Forest, where she ran naked through the oak trees. Apart from these afternoon trysts, Frieda posed as a Nottingham housewife: the remains of the Sunday roast were eaten cold on Mondays, the washing was done on Tuesdays, the ironing on Wednesdays, she was ‘at home’ to visitors on Thursdays and the house was cleaned on Fridays. She shopped in the mornings because it was not done to shop in the afternoons; she made polite calls on other wives. But every Easter she returned to Germany to see her elder sister and here she was ‘reborn’, as she called it, into her ‘intrinsic self’.
There were three Richthofen girls, and Frieda was in the middle between Else and Johanna. Their father was a Prussian officer with a gambling problem, and they were raised in the German garrison town of Metz. In her novelised memoir, ‘And the Fullness Thereof…’, Frieda said that her parents hated each other with a ‘hatred’ that was ‘murderous’, which makes them sound like Arthur and Lydia Lawrence. Frieda, who felt ‘instinctively sorry for all men’, sided with her father; but Lawrence was fond of her mother, and his letters to Baroness von Richthofen are among his best.71
* * *
Her sisters were Frieda’s closest friends. Else was earnest and intelligent, Johanna was beautiful and superficial, and Frieda was elemental; her father called her Fritzl, short for Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war (the Baron had been reading Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico). Storing away Frieda’s stories, Lawrence returned to Huitzilopochtli in The Plumed Serpent. The first man she kissed was her cousin, Kurt von Richthofen: it was in the garden on Easter Sunday, and she ‘went off like a fire cracker’ – Frieda was not one of those women for whom passion exhausts itself at the mouth. The Germany of her childhood was under the grip of Prussia, the supreme patriarchal power, and because her family moved in court circles, Frieda was able to witness first-hand the foppery of Kaiser Wilhelm. Johanna married the aide-de-camp of the Crown Prince, but Else, who resisted Prussianism, carved for herself a different path altogether and it was she whom Frieda tried to emulate. Else’s career was not unlike that of Ernest Weekley: aged seventeen, she became a schoolteacher, after which she paid her way through a distinguished higher education, studying Economics at Heidelberg University under the brilliant Max Weber, philosopher, jurist, political economist and one of the founders of sociology. Following the completion of her doctoral thesis, on the attitude of German authoritarian political parties to worker-protector legislation, Else became the first female inspector of factories in the state of Baden-Württemberg. She was in love with Weber, but because he was married she chose one of his students instead, the decent and pedantic Edgar Jaffe who was a professor of Political Economy.
Frieda von Richthofen
The Jaffes believed in free love and during Easter 1907 Else became pregnant by the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, husband of her former schoolfriend Frieda Schloffer. This other Frieda, known as Friedel, was also pregnant by Gross; Friedel and Else, who remained close, would both call their newborn sons Peter. Friedel Gross was an unusual woman; determinedly anti-bourgeois she now signed a pact of perfect freedom from her increasingly manic spouse, who had given up washing, sleeping and changing his clothes. That same Easter, Frieda Weekley came to visit Friedel Gross in Munich and heard about the exciting new marital arrangement. Frieda was eating schnitzel in the Café Stefanie, in the bohemian Schwabing district of the city, when Gross appeared, looking like an eagle dressed as a mountaineer and smoking a rolled-up cigarette in a seven-inch holder. The Café Stefanie, where the countercultural community met to exchange ideas, was his headquarters and when Gross talked to Frieda about Sigmund Freud, she suggested that ‘The Lord can’t have been such a bad psychologist as not to have known that Eve would want the apple the minute it was forbidden.’72 Gross later recalled, in one of his ecstatic letters to her, how Frieda ‘chose’ him that day in her ‘great aristocratic way’;73 Lawrence had a similar experience of being chosen by Frieda in Private Road.
Frieda did not want Gross as a lover as much she wanted, momentarily, to enjoy the marital freedom of Else Jaffe. The affair between Frieda and Gross lasted ten days in total but was followed by an intense year-long correspondence which she treasured like gold bullion for the rest of her life, carting it up mountains, down canyons and across oceans. Gross’s love letters were the reference that guaranteed Frieda’s quality. They also provided the script for the relationship she felt she was born to have, and she straight away showed them to Lawrence in order that he might learn both parts of the score. Gross presented their love as the stuff of which revolutions were made: it was an attack on patriarchy, religion, monogamy, marriage, authority, the family unit, sexual repression, sexual possession and sexual jealousy. He and Frieda embraced a Paradise of lawless, unrestricted behaviour, a new erotic world order:
My Beloved,
I thank you that you exist – that I may know of you – I thank you for all the courage, all the hope, all the strength that has come into me from you. Only now, little by little, am I able fully to realize how all my powers have been revitalised through you … the woman of the future … I know now what people will be like who keep themselves unpolluted by all the things that I hate and fight against – I know it through you, the only human being who already, today, has remained free from the code of chastity, from Christianity, from democracy and all that accumulated filth – remained free through her own strength – how on earth have you brought this miracle about, you golden child – how with your laughter and your loving have you kept your soul free from the curse and the dirt of two gloomy millennia?74
The effect of Gross’s Frieda-worship on a woman whose Mondays were otherwise spent dealing with Sunday’s leftovers cannot be underestimated. From now on Frieda led a bifurcated existence: invisible in Mapperley, she was a genius in Munich. ‘Genius’ was the word she and Gross used to describe one another: Frieda had ‘a genius for living’, Gross told her and Gross, said Ernest Jones that same year, was ‘the nearest approach to the Romantic idea of genius I have ever met’.75
Ernest Weekley was easy enough prey for Lawrence, who knew all about married men who were admired at work and mocked at home. Lawrence knew it was the man who paid the price, and that Weekley’s pride would be destroyed by his wife’s adultery. But he also knew the consequences of being trapped in a loveless marriage, and that intellectual men like Weekley were anti-life. Otto Gross, however, was one hell of an act to follow. He was, as his name implied, vast and untamed; Gross was a deviant wrecking-ball, a cocaine-addicted sociopath whose father, like Lawrence’s father, was his natural enemy. But while Lawrence’s Oedipal battle was a kitchen-sink drama, Gross’s was of Dostoevskian ampleur. Otto Gross was the son of the great criminologist Hans Gross, author of a famous book called Criminal Investigation, and his surrogate father was Sigmund Freud, for whom Gross and Jung were his most talented disciples. Gross saw sickness as a sign of health; it was the world and not the individual that needed to change: ‘The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution,’ he proclaimed. ‘It is called upon to enable an inner freedom.’76 Fathers, Gross argued – Freud included – were responsible not only for repressing their sons but for the repressive structure of the family, and society, as a whole. The cure Gross suggested was anarchy, for which he was duly punished: Hans Gross disinherited his son, had him arrested and incarcerated in lunatic asylums, and Freud expelled him from the psychoanalytic community. It was Frieda, said Gross, who freed him from the ‘giant shadow of Freud’.77 The very fact of her being had defeated Freud’s masculine theorising: of all the laurels Gross crowned her with, this was the one Frieda treasured the most.
Otto Gross was a Nietzschean prophet, which is what Frieda needed Lawrence likewise to be. The weight of this burden is described in Mr Noon, where Johanna explains to an increasingly depressed Gilbert Noon that her previous lover, who had also been her sister’s lover, was ‘far, far more brilliant than Freud’.
He made me believe in love—in the sacredness of love. He made me see that marriage and all those things are based on fear. How can love be wrong? It is jealousy and grudging that is wrong. Love is so much greater than the individual.78
Gilbert mockingly suggests to Johanna that she and another of her lovers had whooshed around ‘in unison of pure love through the blue empyrean, as poor Paolo and Francesca were forced to whoosh on the black winds of hell’.79 It was clear that Lawrence and Gross were opposites: Lawrence, for one thing, believed deeply in the marriage contract. But in other respects they were marching to the same drum. Lawrence was also a mother-worshipper who would attack Christianity and democracy and rewrite Freudian psychoanalysis in his own image, and both men saw Frieda as the ultimate prize in their Oedipal battle.
At the same time that Gross was lavishing praise on Frieda, he was continuing his affair with Else, who gave birth to her Peter in December 1907. Gross wanted both sisters by his side, but Frieda, for once, shone the brightest. Else was a figure of high seriousness while Frieda was freedom itself. Friedel, who also worshipped Frieda, said that she only had to look at Frieda’s freedom for the world to seem brighter. Gross rhapsodised to Frieda about Else’s lack of sexual jealousy, but Else was very jealous indeed and found his affair with her sister hard to bear. When she complained to him about it, Gross wondered what the ‘cause’ of her ‘suffering’ could be: ‘I cannot understand it,’ he said, and when Else then exchanged him for another lover, Gross ranted about her ‘betrayal’ in a thirty-five-page letter to Frieda.80 Frieda, meanwhile, was simply happy to be back in a gang of three German sisters, and to celebrate their family unit she gave Gross a ring with an image of three female figures, representing herself, Else and Friedel. ‘You won’t find 3 people like the 3 of us on every street corner,’ she told him.81
She briefly considered leaving Ernest Weekley for Otto Gross and taking her children with her, but decided she did not ‘have the right to gamble with the existence of a good fellow’.82 It was Else who begged her sister not to take the risk: could Frieda not see that Gross had ‘almost destroyed’ his wife, Friedel? Weekley’s love, Else stressed, was ‘greater’ than Gross’s, as though Frieda was being auctioned to the highest bidder.83 As a lover, Else conceded, Gross was of course ‘incomparable’ but as a man he was ‘not able to constrain himself even for a quarter of an hour’. Frieda agreed. ‘He was a marvellous lover,’ Johanna explains to Gilbert Noon,
but I knew it was no good. He never let one sleep. He talked and talked. Oh he was so marvellous. I once went with him to a zoo place. And you know he could work up the animals, by merely looking at them, till they nearly went mad … And he talked to you while he was loving you. He was wonderful, but he was awful.—He would have sent me mad … He simply lives on drugs … The only thing I couldn’t quite stand, was that he would have two women, or more, going at the same time.84
Nor did Gross inhabit, as Frieda did, the material world. ‘He lived for his vision, and on visions alone you cannot live.’85 When, some years later, Kafka met Gross on a train with his new wife and child, he described the atmosphere as ‘reminiscent of the mood of the followers of Christ as they stood below him who was nailed to the cross’.86
The correspondence between Frieda and Gross ended in 1908, at the same time as Gross became a patient of Jung’s in the Burghölzli psychiatric asylum in Zurich, where Jung diagnosed him as schizophrenic and Gross then escaped by jumping over the wall. Three years later Frieda began another affair, this time with an anarchist-artist and former railway worker called Ernst Frick. Frick was attractive for a number of reasons: he was a disciple of Gross, he was on the run for detonating a bomb outside a police barracks in Zurich (in protest against the arrest of a fellow anarchist), and he was, inevitably, the current lover of Friedel. Frick and Friedel were part of a utopian community based on Monte Verità, or Mountain of Truth, above the lakeside resort of Ascona in the foothills of the Swiss Alps. The pulse of the European protest system, Ascona was a vegetarian, sun-worshipping, Pan-worshipping, women-worshipping, peasant-worshipping, sandal-wearing, naturist Paradise of the kind that Lawrence would try to replicate. It was established in 1900 as a commune where artists, writers, theosophers and dancers could build their own cabins and till the land. Isadora Duncan came here, as did Paul Klee, Carl Jung, Rudolph Steiner and Hermann Hesse. Insofar as he lived anywhere, Otto Gross lived on Monte Verità where in 1906 – the year before he met Frieda – he assisted his first suicide by providing his patient and lover, Lotte Hattemer, with the dose of cocaine she needed to kill herself. When Frieda met Ernst Frick in 1911, Gross, now back on the mountain, was organising orgies in barns. In March that same year he assisted the suicide of another patient and lover, Sophie Benz, after which he too went on the run and hid from the police in an asylum.
Life with Frick, reported Friedel, ‘was almost as difficult as with Otto – without the unheard of happiness Otto was able to live and give’.87 She was relieved to be sharing her burden with Frieda again and hoped that Frick and Frieda might go away together. In August 1911, Else lent Friedel the money to pay for Frick to visit England, where he arrived in late September. There is no record of his address, but it was probably in London where he was visited by Frieda when she could get away. On returning to Germany in late October 1911, Frick was arrested for the Zurich bomb of four years earlier and Frieda, who was secretly sending him money, planned to attend his trial. So when Frieda left Weekley in May 1912, Friedel assumed it was for Frick.
As fortune would have it, Frieda was expected to be at a party in Metz to celebrate her father’s fifty years of military service at the same time that Lawrence was planning his own trip to Germany. Telling no one that they were travelling together, they met outside the Ladies’ Room at Charing Cross station on 3 May 1912, caught the boat train from Dover and crossed the grey Channel to Ostend. Lawrence had in his luggage Paul Morel, which he was close to finishing, and in her own luggage Frieda had her letters from Gross.
This being the first of Lawrence’s many voyages, it is worth observing him as a traveller. Because he wrote, read and thought at breakneck speeds, he tends to describe his journeys as though they too took place at high velocity. He complained bitterly about most things, but never about the tedium of being at the mercy of public transport with its breakdowns and cancellations and discomforts. The fact of forward motion was enough for Lawrence, and being rarely in a hurry (despite the rapidity with which he lived), he liked the traveller’s lack of agency. The situationist Guy Debord would later philosophise the unplanned journey as ‘la dérive’, but Lawrence was the first modern drifter. He could write, read and think on boats, buses and trains just as well as anywhere else; he liked missed connections, altered plans, sudden and spontaneous diversions. Life, said Birkin in Women in Love, should be ‘a series of accidents – like a picaresque novel’, and it was the picaresque rather than the predictably shaped, pre-plotted life that Lawrence also wanted. What he experienced on the boat train to Dover and the passage to Ostend would become an addiction for him: the absolute necessity to move.
Having no home, mother or job to return to, Lawrence didn’t much mind where he blew so long as he was with Frieda, but when Frieda dropped her children with their grandparents on Well Walk that early May morning she had every intention of coming back for them. She was simply visiting her family in Germany, as she did every year, only this time with her new lover in tow. Pressurised by Lawrence, she had now told Weekley about Gross and Frick, but said nothing about leaving him for Lawrence – because she was not leaving him for Lawrence. How could she? What could Lawrence possibly offer Frieda and her three young children? He had no job or prospects, no money or intention of getting any, and no home or interest in ever having one. As far as Frieda was concerned, she was enjoying an affair with the type of man she enjoyed having affairs with. Lawrence was, she explained to Friedel, ‘like Gross and Frick’.88
‘I could stand on my head for joy,’ Lawrence exclaimed, ‘to think I have found her.’89 His great happiness over the next few months was equally to do with discovering ‘the vast patchwork of Europe’ with its ‘multiplicity of connections … magnetic and strange’.
There seemed to run gleams and shadows from the vast spaces of Russia, a yellow light seemed to struggle through the great Alp-knot from Italy, magical Italy … and from far-off Scandinavia one could feel a whiteness, a northern, sub-arctic whiteness.
From the ‘massive lands of Germany’ Lawrence could see England from the outside: ‘tiny she seemed, and tight, and so partial’.90 In Nottingham, Weekley received, on 10 May, a letter from Lawrence.
You will know by now the extent of the trouble. Don’t curse my impudence in writing to you. In this hour we are only simple men, and Mrs Weekley will have told you everything, but you do not suffer alone. It is really torture to me in this position. There are three of us, though I do not compare my sufferings to what yours must be, and I am here as a distant friend, and you can imagine the thousand baffling lies it all entails. Mrs Weekley hates it, but it has had to be. I love your wife and she loves me. I am not frivolous or impertinent. Mrs Weekley is afraid of being stunted and not allowed to grow, and so she must live her own life. All women in their natures are giantesses.91
