Burning man, p.8
Burning Man, page 8
that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.
The Romantics turned the second circle of sad hell into a desirable address, and this was where Lawrence now lived too. Paolo and Francesca symbolised his union with Frieda, but then he had always seen storms as a symbol of marriage.
* * *
Back in Cornwall, in the spring of 1916, Lawrence and Frieda pressed Murry and Katherine Mansfield to take over the empty cottages; Katherine could use the tower as her study, and Philip Heseltine, Lawrence suggested, could rent a room from them. This was the perfect place to set up Rananim: they could pool their resources, live off the land, share books and ideas and eat together in the evenings. But the Murrys did not much want to be with Lawrence in the darkness: they disliked Philip Heseltine, an eccentric who rode his motorbike naked, and were anyway going through an unusual period of happiness together in the South of France. When Heseltine also turned down the invitation, the Murrys were inundated with so many appeals from Lawrence that they reluctantly broke their resolve, arriving in Cornwall on 4 April 1916. ‘We’ll all be happy together,’ Lawrence ordered.17 Murry agreed, telling the ever curious Ottoline that they felt serene about the future. Katherine Mansfield, meanwhile, provided a weather report:
Today I can’t see a yard, thick mist and rain and a tearing wind with it. Everything is faintly damp. The floor of the tower is studded with Cornish pitchers catching the drops … It’s very quiet in the house except for the wind and the rain & the fire that roars very hoarse and fierce.18
Lawrence thought Mansfield as a writer ‘false’ because she was, like Turgenev, too critical and detached. It was Murry, his most important – and most treacherous – friend, who absorbed Lawrence’s attention, and Murry’s blend of mediocrity and ambition (he was Salieri to Lawrence’s Mozart) earned him the title of best-hated man of letters. Leonard Woolf called him ‘Pecksniffian’ and Virginia Woolf claimed he was ‘the one vile man I have ever known’.19 Born to play a supporting role, Murry, the son of a South London civil servant, described his young self as ‘a bundle of antennae, feeling out for a new social persona’ which never came fully into focus.20 He won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital in Horsham, the alma mater of Coleridge, Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb, where he shed his lower-middle-class roots, nurtured a Romantic sensibility and refashioned himself as a gentleman. His critical style was confessional, and Lawrence described Still Life, the first of Murry’s Russian-inspired novels, as ‘the kind of wriggling self-abuse I can’t make head or tail of’.21 After studying Classics at Oxford, Murry founded, aged twenty-one, an avant-garde quarterly of the arts called Rhythm and he and Lawrence would later start a short-lived magazine called The Signature. It was his making and his misfortune that Murry spent his formative years with D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield, and he carved a career from his intimacy with both. Among his sixty publications are three sour books about Lawrence; the first, D. H. Lawrence: Two Essays appeared months after his friend’s death, the second, Son of Woman: The Story of D. H. Lawrence, was published a year later, and two years after that, in 1933, he produced his Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence and also his biography of Katherine Mansfield. Further reminiscences of both were shared in 1935 in Murry’s autobiography Between Two Worlds.
Murry was an innocent when he met Katherine Mansfield, but the wily Mansfield, born into a prominent family in New Zealand, had already accumulated a complicated back story. Two affairs with women; a pregnancy which was covered up by marrying a man called George Bowden whom she left two hours later; a miscarriage. She settled in London in 1910 and was introduced to Murry when she submitted a story to Rhythm; her first collection, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911. The relationship between Mansfield and Murry was largely unhappy; they infantilised one another and spoke in baby talk. Mansfield complained that Murry was ‘not warm, ardent, eager, full of quick response, careless, spendthrift of himself, vividly alive’ or ‘high spirited’, and soon after befriending Lawrence and Frieda she began a relationship with the writer Francis Carco, who was all of those things. She then returned to Murry again and then left him again, and so the wheel turned.22
Katherine Mansfield
We know what happened in Higher Tregerthen because Mansfield and Murry wrote regular letters, and Lawrence devoted a chapter (called ‘The Nightmare’) of Kangaroo to his recollections. Mansfield’s accounts of Lawrence describe Self One quietly enjoying his painting and sewing while Self Two ‘simply raves, roars, beats the table, abuses everybody’.23 In ‘The Nightmare’ Lawrence described his mouthpiece, Richard Lovell Somers, as having lived in Cornwall in ‘semi-fear’ during the war. Everything he and his German wife did was watched by the coastguards, the police or the locals. Because their letters were opened and read, the couple censored what they wrote. It was a cack-handed form of surveillance and the more sinister for being so.
A chimney of his house was tarred to keep out the damp, that was a signal to the Germans. He and his wife carried food to supply German submarines. They had secret stores of petrol in the cliff. They were watched and listened to, spied on, by men lying behind the low stone fences. It is a job the Cornish loved. They didn’t even mind being caught at it: lying behind a fence with field-glasses, watching through a hole in the drystone wall a man with a lass, on the edge of the moors … A whole intense life of spying going on all the time.24
The Lawrences were being spied on by the Murrys as well, on orders from Ottoline, spymaster general. Otherwise known as Lady Utterly Immoral or Lady Omega Muddle, Ottoline Morrell was a six-feet-tall redhead with the face of a handsome horse. The daughter of Lieutenant-General Arthur Cavendish-Bentinck, sister of the 5th Duke of Portland and great-great-niece of the Duke of Wellington, her husband Philip Morrell was a Liberal politician and her current lover was Bertrand Russell. Lawrence, who thought the upper classes superior to the common folk, especially liked titled women, but what mattered most to him about Ottoline Morrell – apart from the fact that, phonetically, she shared the same name as Paul Morel – is that she had been raised in Welbeck Abbey, twenty miles from Eastwood, and her family owned parts of the coalfields his father had worked. Beneath the Abbey was a network of underground tunnels built by Ottoline’s dotty uncle so that he might visit the gardens and stables without having to encounter another human being. As a child Lawrence had known servants who worked in this eccentric house and now he knew Ottoline herself: he was rising in the world, ’Ooray. Lawrence had what Ottoline called a ‘romantic feeling’ for her grand family and Ottoline had a romantic feeling for Lawrence’s miners: ‘how I wished I could talk to those men,’ she recalled, ‘or share their good solid tea, and so bridge the gulf that lay between us’.25
During the brief period of their friendship, Ottoline got the very best of Lawrence. She was his ‘Sybil’ and he was her trophy. Katherine Mansfield described him as ‘perceptibly over-eager in aristocratic company’,26 and Lawrence’s letters to Ottoline are certainly keen to please; Frieda, who was jealous, destroyed at least one of them before he had a chance to send it. But equally eager were the letters that Ottoline received from Mansfield (whom she had yet to meet) and Murry: her daily postbag was bursting with missives from mortals currying favour. The chief subject of the Murrys’ letters was Frieda, who had been battling with Ottoline for months and now accused her, in a letter of her own, of wanting ‘some sort of unwholesome relationship’ with Lawrence – which was probably true.27 The two women were rivals for his attention, but Ottoline had the upper hand because she owned a grand house in the country, Garsington Manor, and a grand house in Bloomsbury, and could afford to be generous, while Frieda, also well born, had nothing to offer but the genius of which no one but herself was convinced. Frieda’s principal complaint was that Ottoline did not treat her as Lawrence’s equal.
Amused by Frieda’s accusation, Ottoline forwarded her letter to the Murrys who shared the same address as the Lawrences. Frieda, assuming that an envelope addressed to her home in Ottoline’s hand was surely meant for herself, duly unsealed it and out fell the contents. All hell was let loose, and Murry, Ottoline’s loyal informant, sent his mistress a report of the damage:
Lawrence is at present completely on F’s side in the quarrel (which isn’t a quarrel but an indecent attack), and he spent a long while trying to convince us that for us to remain friendly with you was black treachery to him … I don’t quite know how to diagnose the condition of them both for you. In many ways L seems to me to be so much happier, much younger than I have known him for the last two years. On the other hand he has bought this at a price. I feel he has quite definitely lost something … I feel he will not create anything very much in the future.
F is monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens. Really, we are frightened of her … We have tried to like her for three years now and we haven’t got any further towards the end. There is in her an ultimate vulgarity which does appal us both. And that is the reason why she turned so against you, I think.
His letter ended by reminding Ottoline ‘how much we both love you’. By the autumn, he had dropped the plural.28
Ottoline Morrell
Murry had been introduced to Lady Utterly Immoral in 1915, during a February weekend spent with Lawrence in Greatham. Lawrence had forewarned her that Murry, whom he had met two years earlier, was ‘one of the men of the future’, and ‘my partner – the only man who quite simply is with me’, but his partner was unable to live up to the praise. When Lawrence tested their characters with the view from the top of the Downs, Murry sloped behind in a sulk. In his diary, he admitted that he had been ‘jealous and sad’, ‘painfully aware that L was the centre of attraction’. Unable to compete with L as a writer or a personality, Murry felt left out when he and Ottoline talked about Forster and Russell (whom he did not yet know), and to gain their attention he told ‘strangely exaggerated stories’ about his own past and then ‘resented L’s laughter’.29
Frieda had no idea that their friends found her monstrum and horrendum. She thought Katherine ‘exquisite’ and enjoyed the way she gave ‘small events a funny twist’. The two women made potpourri together and painted wooden boxes and had what Frieda called ‘those delicious female walks and talks’. Katherine, tired of being told how exquisite she was, described Frieda as ‘evil hearted’ and sex-obsessed. The Lawrences saw everything as a sexual symbol: the babbling brook, the granite boulders, the grass and leaves and trees. Higher Tregerthen might better be called The Phallus, Katherine suggested, and Frieda enthusiastically agreed.30
By the middle of May, relations between the two couples had irretrievably broken down. ‘The heights,’ Murry told Ottoline, ‘were always wuthering,’ and Lawrence had become Heathcliff, ‘a man possessed, now by an angel, now by a devil … it was painful to see him so transformed and transfigured by the paroxysms of murderous hatred, of his wife, of us, of all mankind, that swept over him’. He seemed ‘dangerously ill’ and ‘expects something of Katherine and me which we can’t give – a certain intimacy … which being demanded is utterly impossible to give’. The letter ends with Murry’s refrain: ‘I hope for our sakes that you love us as much as we do you.’31 The intimacy Lawrence demanded was the Blutsbrüderschaft which he saw as the male equivalent to marriage; worried that this might involve a pagan bloodletting ceremony, Murry played his hand in his usual fashion, both encouraging and resisting his friend’s demands.
It is little wonder, given the failure rate of his friendships, that Lawrence required commitment. Nor is it surprising, when we compare the seediness of his current social circle to the wholesomeness of the Haggites, that he began to suffer from what he called ‘androphobia’. He wanted to shoot everyone he saw ‘with invisible arrows of death’ and shake insect powder over all fat men in white flannel trousers.32 In his own letters to Ottoline, Lawrence ranted about humanity’s ‘insect-like stupidity’,33 which included the leech-like Allies hanging on to England’s rotten body. Insects were everywhere; both Murry and Frieda became ‘bugs who have fed on my life’. When Lawrence lost his temper, which happened every time he was contradicted, he got into a ‘frenzy’ so exhausting that he then had to go to bed, from where he would cry into the night that ‘Jack is killing me.’ Murry (‘Jack’) believed, however, that Lawrence was killing him, and everyone thought that Frieda was killing Lawrence. The man they had once loved, Mansfield told Ottoline, ‘is completely lost, like a little gold ring in that immense German Christmas pudding’.34
Lawrence was in a frenzy because he evidently suffered from claustrophobia, which is unsurprising given his father’s job. It is striking that he was only ever angry inside a house; outside, Lawrence became a different person, and he spent as much time outside as he could. He rarely wrote, for example, in a closed room, preferring to sit beneath an open sky with his pad of paper on his knees. He described himself between 1916 and 1918 as ‘trapped’ inside ‘the black walls of the war’, and compared his trap to the one in Edgar Alan Poe’s story ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘where the walls come in, in, in, till the prisoner is almost squeezed’.35 The very idea of houses now horrified him. ‘A real panic comes over me,’ he said, ‘when I feel I am on the brink of taking another house. I truly wish I were a fox or a bird – but my ideal now is to have a caravan and a horse, and move on for ever.’36 The only time during his eighteen months in Higher Tregerthen that Lawrence left the area of St Ives was when he was escorted sixty miles to the barracks at Bodmin for a medical examination, and had his naked body prodded by doctors.
Women in Love was begun on 24 April 1916, the onset of the Easter Rising in Ireland. Lawrence went at the novel with breakneck speed, which was the speed he always employed for writing. Murry claimed not to know that his friend had begun a new book, which rings true; he had thought him incapable of creating ‘anything very much in the future’, and Lawrence never made a fuss about writing. Producing a book or a story or an essay or a poem was simply another act of living which demanded to be done well, and he considered his production of sentences to be no more important than those other daily tasks of cleaning, cooking, hemming curtains and painting furniture. We have an idea of Lawrence’s writing routine from the advice he gave to a fellow novelist, which was to sit down with a pen for an hour a day – ‘the same hour – that’s very important’ – and ‘write bit by bit of the scenes you have witnessed, the people you know, describing their reactions as you know they react, not as you imagine they should’. Then, ‘when you’ve done 80,000 words, throw down your pen’.37 So bit by bit Lawrence’s impressions of Cornwall and his companions found their way into his neatly written pages. He never suffered from writer’s block; his novels might grind to a halt while he worked out what a protagonist would do next (which depended on what Lawrence himself did next), but he was rarely stuck for words. Words came out of him like a running flame; Women in Love, he said, wrote itself.
Those who noticed that Lawrence was ‘dangerously ill’ did nothing to alert any medical authorities; instead, they filed their reports on the lunatic from the safety of their tower. ‘Frieda and I do not even speak to each other at present,’ Mansfield informed Kot, who was also a loyal friend of Lawrence’s.
Lawrence is about one million miles away, although he lives next door. He and I still speak but his voice is very faint like a voice coming over a telephone wire. It is all because I cannot stand the situation between those two, for one thing. It is degrading – it offends ones soul beyond words. I don’t know which disgusts one worse – when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda’s hair and saying ‘I’ll cut your throat, you bitch’ and Frieda is running up and down the road screaming for ‘Jack’ to save her!!38
Lawrence has been judged for his treatment of women, and Frieda’s brand of womanhood has been judged as harshly. Constance Garnett found her slow-witted and excessively sexual, Ottoline thought her egotistical, Huxley considered her ‘incurably and incredibly stupid – the most maddening woman I think I ever came across’,39 and Diana Trilling describes her as ‘a swamp’.40 Lawrence’s friends, with the exception of H.D., all loathed her but none more than Kot, whom Frieda at least knew to be her enemy. ‘It hurts me very much when you think I do not count as a human being,’ she told him, ‘– but then you do not think much of women, they are not human beings in your eyes.’41 While the case for Frieda’s defence notes that she was a liberated woman avant la lettre, the prosecution adduce the facts that she left three children to run off with a man she barely knew, that she was tasteless and irresponsible, that she had no evident talents apart from sex, that she sat with her legs apart, that she smoked in the face of her tubercular husband while he scrubbed the floors and cooked her breakfasts, that she got fatter while he got thinner, got stronger while he got weaker and slept with anyone she felt like sleeping with. In their summing up, they argue that Frieda ruined Lawrence’s writing and shortened his life.
